Agamben K—BEFJR
Explanation
The rough version of the argument is that rights and liberties are proscriptive of
identity, bringing individuals into the folds of goverenance rather than liberating them
from a central power. Think of the gay marriage decision – it didn’t just “remove a
barrier,” it enacted a legal regime constructed around a new subject entitled with
particular rights, a rights bearer.
Fundamental in all rights is either a particularized identity or a universal description of
‘human nature’ that constructs the body or life to be lived. The production of identity
is a biopolitical act in which a bare life is made through the functioning of sovereign
power, the power to decide and define forms of life.
How do you deal with “negative state action?” That description of the aff is
fundamentally at odds with assumptions of liberalism in the aff that portray rights as
protections against the exercise of power. This method of management facilitates
hierarchies between forms of life that are at the heart of all violence.
Instead, we should accept whatever being, a form of life that is indivisible, meaning it
lacks the ability to be made into an identity and is always in a state of potentiality
never culminating in a final and determinate form. This allows it to refuse the
imposition of a particular end and opens up a space for politics that are not confined
to the management of forms of life. **note – this is just one of many alternatives
It calls into question the tradition of Western politics rather than reconfiguring the
same power structures that foreclose liberation.
File Construction
There are a variety of link, impact and alternative arguments to construct a variety of
1NCs.
Knowledge is power (the good kind of power) –
Link Section—Top
Neg State Axn L
Writing protection from the state into the law isn’t a neutral act—it actively produces
a sovereign subject through the guise of rights and reinforces state power
Tamas ’02 (G.M. – Director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,
“From subjectivity to privacy and back again - Part V: Democratic Process and Nonpublic Politics,” Social
Research, Spring, online:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_1_69/ai_88584147/pg_3)
The legal person or legal subject is a iunctim positioning of a biopolitical hypothesis and the social
facts of ownership and privilege ("privilege" here meaning simply an entitlement specified for people or
groups that is not necessarily unfair). "The Idiot"--the private person cut off from his or her civic aspect
or dimension--partakes of the immortality of society by law adjudicating his or her continuity or even
identity with his or her forebears: what had belonged to my dead father now belongs to me, since
legally I am he. The idea of an estate chooses to ignore death. The proof that I am legal heir proves my
excellence, my pure blood. People are born because sexual acts are taking place, but not any kind of
sexual acts: only those that happened between people in a specific legal position, legal spouses. For
those born out of wedlock or those unmentioned in wills, death (in this case, the death of parents or of
a parent) is absolute. Their link to their ancestors is biological and civic, but it is not legal, social, or
economic. Bastards are not Idiots. Traditionally, inheritance law had also established the immutability of
phallic power. The dominant male's seed constituted the main criterion for legitimate claims to
hereditary title (membership in a caste) and property. Social immortality is not a general trait of
humanity but a differential distinction defined by prevailing ideas of mastery, usually identified with
"purity." Some families, a notion mocked ad nauseam by Enlightenment pamphleteers, are "old
families." Those not well-born are homines novi, newcomers, as if only some people had ancestors, but
others not. Socially and legally, this is quite true. Property is not spontaneously and freely acquired and
enlarged (it never is, under no conceivable regime); however, it is not property that is legally
delineated and circumscribed but the kind of person who is allowed by the reigning social order to be
or to become a propertied individual. It is this distinct embodiment of social immortality to whom the
idea of "privacy" has referred (and up to a point, still does), granting him (much less her) the
protection of law and the political might drafted to uphold it. Empirically, "privacy" ensures that
propertied individuals, in legal possession of their fortified dwellings, live untroubled. Homeless
vagrants and the disenfranchised, heimatlos, apatride refugees, cannot possibly enjoy "privacy," since
aid and forcible social assistance are necessarily interfering, and that is of course the best case. Even
civic rights are associated with "Idiocy" (a permanent address, a social security number, for example),
indicating political recognition of a minimal social status such as "self-ownership." Mere citizenship, let
alone mere membership in the human race, will not do. Place of birth within a given state, ancestry that
is proof of entitlement (parents having been citizens of a given state) are still necessary to constitute a
legally recognizable person to whom liberty, dignity, and privacy pertain. Citizenship is still being
constructed from social immortality, a legally recognized private capability to own, to be settled, and to
claim entitlements and privileges. "The Idiot" is the fons et origo of the citizen whose quality as a citizen
is still determined by how he or she was born. If not born the proper way, your lot is social death. The
moral onus of legitimate possession of title and wealth is shifted from personal, individual virtue (like
plunder and territorial conquest in wartime, speculation on the stock exchange or the commodities
market) to a special version of the constitution of public personhood--that is, public recognition of your
title by law in virtue of succession or inheritance, within which the privilege that defines your social
standing is bequeathed to you by your forebears, primarily, your father. It is law that tells you who you
are, but it will do it in an orderly, uniform fashion, making private property and the necessarily
ensuing inequality and exploitation be (or seem to be) not at all a question of self-choice that could be
contested on grounds of justice or moral fairness, but a matter of natural selection and legal
protection. Thus the sphere of private affairs has been delimited. Interference with this legally fortified
area would appear both unnatural and illegal. You will succeed or inherit not by virtue of what you have
done, not as a function of your just deserts, but according to who the law establishes you are. If you are,
for example, legitimate issue, and the testator's last will and testament is in harmony with this definition
(so it cannot be challenged in court), then you can and will be lord and proprietor over whatever your
forebear's estate happens to be, including your legal privileges if such are stipulated. It is within these
boundaries that privacy develops. You are secure and safe from external interference (and this
noninterference is established and guaranteed by the state independent of anyone's wishes,
impartially, "objectively," anonymously) within this area from which the "public" is excluded by a
synthesis of law and nature (your father's "blood" or "seed"). Your claim to the inviolability of your
person and your possessions is always sustained by this synthesis. Law can even create artificial "blood"
or "seed" through the artifice of adoption. Your citizenship/nationality is dependent on the fact of
nature of whose daughter you are and where you have been born; even your civic rights (as opposed to
the much weaker "human" rights) are deduced from such facts (and not universal principles), which do
not appear as a matter of choice but are pre-existent states of affairs. The inviolability of your person
depends further on law's impersonal definition of normalcy, hence legal competence: to wit, are you
or are you not sane, healthy, and law-abiding? Madness, a natural, perhaps even physical condition, is
targeted by reigning ideas of rationality. If you fail to satisfy the criteria of rationality established by your
society (and other societies may have different criteria), your physical freedom and the limitless
enjoyment of your possessions may be impaired, a situation caused by factors beyond your control,
beyond your personal will (on the one hand, your state of health, on the other, society's prevalent
judgment on sanity and such; legally, you are above moral suspicion if you do not have a so called
criminal record--that is, the law will legitimize its implicit moral judgment by itself). The boundaries of
your privacy do not coincide with the boundaries of your person. If somebody is declared insane by
competent medical and legal authority, her privacy will be limited or suspended precisely because this
private person cannot pretend to partake of the public sphere in ways prescribed by the public. Privacy
is, of course, a public matter or a matter of public interest, an affair of the state that stands at an
Archimedic point; a third force, high above the natural fact and moral dispute from which it has
originated.
--A2 Aff x State
Their turn assumes biopolitics takes the form of one of two poles: either overt control
by institutions or regulation through production as individuals. The proper question
for modern politics is to ask how the process of individuation facilitates the control of
sovereign power. *gendered language under erasure
Agamben 98 (Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford UP, p.
5-6)
<One of the most persistent features of Foucault's work is its decisive abandonment of the traditional
approach to the problem of power, which is based on juridico-institutional models (the definition of
sovereignty, the theory of the State), in favor of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which
power penetrates subjects' very bodies and forms of life. As shown by a seminar held in 1982 at the
University of Vermont, in his final years Foucault seemed to orient this analysis according to two
distinct directives for research: on the one hand, the study of the political techniques (such as the
science of the police) with which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of
individuals into its very center; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self by
which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and
consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power. Clearly these two lines (which carry on two
tendencies present in Foucault's work from the very beginning) intersect in many points and refer back
to a common center. In one of his last writings, Foucault argues that the modern Western state has
integrated techniques of subjective individualization with procedures of objective totalization to an
unprecedented degree, and he speaks of a real "political `double bind,' constituted by
individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power" (bits et ecrits, 4:
229-32).
Yet the point at which these two faces of power converge remains strangely unclear in Foucault's work,
so much so that it has even been claimed that Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a
unitary theory of power. If Foucault contests the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is
exclusively based on juridical models ("What legitimates power?") or on institutional models ("What is
the State?"), and if he calls for a "liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty" in order to
construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code, then where, in the body of
power, is the zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of
individualization and totalizing procedures converge? And, more generally, is there a unitary center in
which the political "double bind" finds its raison d'etre? That there is a subjective aspect in the genesis
of power was already implicit in the concept of servitude volontaire in Etienne de La Boetie. But what is
the point at which the voluntary servitude of individuals comes into contact with objective power?
Can one be content, in such a delicate area, with psychological explanations such as the sujestive notion
of a parallelism between external and internal neuroses? Confronted with phenomena such as the
power of the society of the spectacle that is everywhere transforming the political realm today, is it
legitimate or even possible to hold subjective technologies and political techniques apart?
Although the existence of such a line of thinking seems to be logically implicit in Foucault's work, it
remains a blind spot to the eye of the researcher, or rather something like a vanishing point that the
different perspectival lines of Foucault's inquiry (and, more generally, of the entire Western reflection
on power) converge toward without reaching.
The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection between the juridicoinstitutional and the biopolitical models of power. What this work has had to record among its likely
conclusions is precisely that the two analyses cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in
the political realm constitutes the original-if concealed-nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be
said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense,
biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the center of its
calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting
power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond (derived from a tenacious correspondence between
the modern and the archaic which one encounters in the most diverse spheres) between modern power
and the most imme¬morial of the arcana imperii.>
Negative actions by the state do not resolve the state of exception—their attempt to
“solve” bare life by reigning in government only reentrenches sovereign power.
Prozorov, 2009 - Professor of Political Science at the University of Helenski (Sergie; “The
Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of Nature and the Political”; Article;
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313215_index.html; DOA: 7/16/15 ||
NDW)
On the other hand, neither
is it a question of returning to a pre-political state of nature, not yet contaminated
by the sovereign exception. If the state of nature were temporally antecedent to sovereignty, then it
could at least be envisioned, in a naturalist or essentialist gesture, as a site of possible redemption.
However, there is no passage back from bios to zoe and any attempt at such passage only throws us back
into the state of exception and the production of bare life, which, contrary to numerous misreadings, is not
identical to zoe but is rather a destroyed or degraded bios, from which all positive determinations have been subtracted (see Ziarek 2008; Ojakangas 2008; Mills
2004, 2005). ‘There
are not first life as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature and then
their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary, the very possibility of
distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical
machine.’ (Agamben 2005a, 88) Bare life has nothing natural about it; instead it is nothing but a degraded life, a life reduced to survival (Agamben 1999b, 13235). If bare life were identical to zoe qua natural life, then Agamben’s critical project would be reduced to
a banal affirmation of bios over zoe, political life vs. animal existence, which would simply reproduce the
constitutive opposition of the Western ontopolitical tradition rather than transcend it as Agamben
certainly attempts to do. In contrast to such simplifications, Agamben asserts that the human being is constitutively
separated from its natural or animal existence by virtue of its subjectification in language. In his early book
Infancy and History (2007a, 50-70), he argues, following Benveniste, that the entrance of the human being into language
necessarily traverses the stage of the ‘expropriation’ of all its pre-linguistic experience as a living being
so that any subjectification in language always correlates with a correlate desubjectification (see also 1999b,
115-123). Similarly, Agamben’s inquiry into the event of language in Language and Death (1991), which, as Mika Ojakangas (2008) aptly demonstrates, is structurally
homologous to the theory of the state of exception in Homo Sacer, treats human speech as conditioned by the ‘removal’ of natural or animal ‘voice’ (phone) that
makes possible the passage to logos. In
exactly the same manner, the political existence of humanity is from the
outset accompanied by the ‘removal’ or crossing out of zoe, whose inclusive exclusion as a negative
foundation of the political order makes impossible any ‘return to nature’, other than in the obscene and
degrading manner practiced in the concentration camps and other loci of the state of exception.
Rights L
Struggles for rights and liberties only situate the individual more deeply within the
folds of sovereign power—this dominance of biopower makes options within the
biopolitical horizon increasingly meaningless as power comes to operate through all
forms of management.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, Stanford UP, p. 120-123)
<1.2. Karl Lowith was the first to define the fundamental character of totalitarian states as a
"politicization of life" and, at the same time, to note the curious contiguity between democracy and
totalitarianism: Since the emancipation of the third estate, the formation of bourgeois democracy and
its transformation into mass industrial democracy, the neutralization of politically relevant differences
and postponement of a decision about them has developed to the point of turning into its opposite: a
total politicization [totale Politisierung] of everything, even of seemingly neutral domains of life. Thus in
Marxist Russia there emerged a worker-state that was "more intensively state-oriented than any
absolute monarchy"; in fascist Italy, a corporate state normatively regulating not only national work, but
also "after-work" [Dopolavoro] and all spiritual life; and, in National Socialist Germany, a wholly
integrated state, which, by means of racial laws and so forth, politicizes even the life that had until then
been private. (Der okkasionelle Dezianismus, p. 33) The contiguity between mass democracy and
totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden transformation (as Lowith, here
following in Schmitt's footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light in our century,
the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his (their) life runs its course in a hidden but continuous
fashion. It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were doublesided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers
always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state
order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which
they wanted to liberate themselves. "The `right' to life," writes Foucault, explaining the importance
assumed by sex as a political issue, "to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs
and, beyond all the oppressions or `alienation,' the `right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can
be, this 'right'-which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending-was the
political response to all these new procedures of power" (La volonte, p. 191). The fact is that one and
the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the
public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the
decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions. And only because
biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the
otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were
able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century's totalitarian states were able to be
converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both cases, these
transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics had already turned
into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be decided was which form of organization
would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once their
fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right
and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and
enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling classes' unexpected fall into the most
extreme racism (as in the Serbian program of "ethnic cleansing") and the rebirth of new forms of fascism
in Europe also have their roots here. Along with the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a
displacement and gradual expansion beyond the limits of the decision on bare life, in the state of
exception, in which sovereignty consisted. If there is a line in every modern state marking the point at
which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this
line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones. This line is now in
motion and gradually moving into areas other than that of political life, areas in which the sovereign is
entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the
scientist, the expert, and the priest. In the pages that follow, we shall try to show that certain events
that are fundamental for the political history of modernity (such as the declaration of rights), as well
as others that seem instead to represent an incomprehensible intrusion of biologico-scientific principles
into the political order (such as National Socialist eugenics and its elimination of "life that is unworthy of
being lived," or the contemporary debate on the normative determination of death criteria), acquire
their true sense only if they are brought back to the common biopolitical (or thanatopolitical) context
to which they belong. From this perspective, the camp-as the pure, absolute, and impassable
biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception)-will appear as the hidden
paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to
learn to recognize.> <120-123>
Resistance/K L
The 1AC fails to solve their harms with only mere resistance--- their “one stop shop”
liberation only serves to reproduce oppressive structures of identity politics- indentity
politics only serve to clearly define our relationship to the state
Frost, 15--Tom, Prof of Law, Politics and Sociology @ U of Sussex, "The Dispositif Between Foucault and
Agamben," https://www.academia.edu/9151315/The_Dispositif_Between_Foucault_and_Agamben
Despite this focus upon resistance, Foucault held reservations for the politics of what I term ‘mere’
resistance, and cautioned against the equating of resistance with liberation. Decisively, Foucault
distinguishes ‘freedom’ from ‘liberation’. Whilst admitting that liberation does exist, for example in the
colonial setting, Foucault makes clear that liberation is not sufficient to define the practices of freedom
needed for individuals to define “admissible and acceptable forms of existence or political society”.i
Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination that release a pre-existing identity from
an oppressive external force.ii Freedom bears essentially on relations of power and domination –
liberation from domination only gives way to new power relationships, which must be controlled by
practices of freedom.iii It is these practices of freedom which allows the subject to practice selfconstruction and in turn, resist and rework the dispositifs that constitute them. ‘Mere’ resistance to
power, like liberation, has the drawback of emerging in reaction to oppression and domination by
dispositifs of control.iv As such it is likely to create an attachment to an identity which is formed through
that oppression, and therefore will reinforce those self-same dominating biopolitical dispositifs.v More
fundamentally, due to the spectre of biopolitics and the latent role of dispositifs in ‘letting die’, such a
resistance and attempt to escape the dispositif will only, almost paradoxically, end up repeating its logic
of deciding and regulating life and death. This is why Foucault sees power, and the dispositif, as
imposing on the subject “a law of truth ... which he must recognise and which others have to recognise
in him”.vi Instead, the practice of freedom is a ‘limit-experience’: The idea of a limit-experience that
wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me ... however erudite my books may be, I’ve
always conceived of them as direct experiences aimed at pulling myself free of myself, at preventing me
from being the same.vii Following this theme, we can read Foucault in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ as
supporting the claim that this practice of freedom should be considered as a way of being: We must
obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of
what we are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of ourselves … This philosophical
ethos may be characterised as a limit-attitude … We have to move beyond the outside-inside
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.viii The politics of liberation is not enough to guarantee
freedom, as freedom is not mere resistance to power. Freedom is the careful and innovative
deployment of power, and by extension, dispositifs, in the effort to constitute the free self. In other
words, the dispositif is needed to constitute the ethos of freedom: I do not think that a society can exist
without power relations … The problem, then, is ... to acquire the rules of law, the management
techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these
games of power with as little domination as possible.ix This game of power is agonistic. There is no
‘essential freedom’ to be found, but a ‘permanent provocation’ between the self and the dispositifs of
power relations.x The key task is to “refuse what we are”, to “promote new forms of subjectivity
through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries”.xi
The creation of new forms of subjectivity involves freedom as a practice which requires the subject to
self-create themselves anew, taking into account the dispositifs which constrain and control, and
enabling the individual to discern the types of actions and interventions that are needed to effect
change and create new subjectivities. Freedom connects the dispositif and what is always beyond, the
‘outside’. It is here that the connection can be made to Foucault’s last essay, and his view of error as the
proper domain of life. When Foucault writes that life is that which is destined to err, we can conclude
that such a life contains the possibility to transcend dispositifs and break free of the logic of deciding
who should live and who should be left to die. Freedom is experienced at the limit of power relations
through their transgression, their erring, which is always-already a possibility, or destiny, for individuals
to enact: The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess:
a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and reciprocally, transgression would be
pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.xii The act of freedom
constitutes itself through acting at the limit of the dispositif, transgressing that limit, erring, calling out
to thought from the limit of the network of power relations, creating new subjectivities through the very
response of the dispositifs to those transgressive acts. The dispositif thus controls life, but also is
required for freedom in the form of self-creation. Crucially for this argument, this transgressive freedom
which brings about the self-creation of the new is a transcendent possibility, which the individual effects
and which power relations and dispositifs must react to in response to these creative acts. This is why
Deleuze spoke of this kind of self-relation as the ‘folding’ of power relations back upon themselves. It is
not possible to move ‘outside’ of the totalizing dispositif in terms of liberation. However, it is possible to
think from the outside, from the limit, in a manner which brings together both the ‘inside’ of the
dispositif and the ‘outside’, of which the dispositif is an operation. As Deleuze states: The outside is not
a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together
make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside
… The inside as an operation of the outside: in all his work Foucault seems haunted by this theme of an
inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea.xiii In acting on the
individual, dispositifs produce an ‘inside’ as an “interiorisation of the outside”.xiv This folding allows a
subject to differentiate itself from dispositifs and no longer has an internal dependence upon them – for
Deleuze reading Foucault, there will always be a relation to oneself that resists such dispositifs.xv The
individual has the potential to distance themselves from the dispositifs that create our identity. This
folding of power relations opens a space for the individual to transgress. The question remains as to
precisely how this transcendent transgressive freedom is effected. Foucault did write of the need to
bring about a “historical ontology of ourselves”,xvi such a questioning of current modes of existence
does, on a certain reading, suggest that if we discovered the reality about how power operates in this
world the individual can break free of its chains.xvii This view comes close to a Marxist view of ‘false
consciousness’, and ignores the agonistic element to this reading of Foucault.xviii Rather, following
Aurelia Armstrong, I draw upon comments suggesting that it is only under the pressure of an event
which makes our present identity and control problematic that we are forced to exercise our
freedom.xix Foucault suggests the following: [F]or a domain of action, a behaviour to enter the field of
thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose
its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These elements result from
social, economic, or political processes … their role is instigation.xx These transgressions or errors of life,
of action, and of existing, are the transcendent experience of events which force a questioning of the
current dispositifs controlling the reality we inhabit. These errors allow the individual to interiorize the
outside, and practice freedom as a transgressive limit-experience, agonistically questioning and forcing
dispositifs to react to new subjectivities. These events do not have to be epochal, or revolutionary.xxi As
Foucault states, different processes can instigate this process – the key is that it is the individual who
responds to such instigation and practices this freedom through their actions and errors, causing the
very conception of life to be changed through an “experimental mode of inquiry”.xxii
That project of liberal subject building is a nihilistic violent enterprise that destroys
value to life and causes endless warfare
Evans and Reid 13
[Brad, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Bristole, and Julian, “Dangerously exposed: the life and death of the
resilient subject,” Resilience, 2013, Vol. 1 (2), pp. 83-98]
Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or secure themselves from the
difficulties they are faced with but instead adapt to their enabling conditions. This renders them fully compliant
to the logics of complexity with its concomitant adaptive and emergent qualities. Resistance here is transformed from
being a political capacity aimed at the achievement of freedom from that which threatens and
endangers to a purely reactionary impulse aimed at increasing the capacities of the subject to adapt to
its dangers and simply reduce the degree to which it suffers. This conflation of resistance with resilience
is not incidental but indicative of the nihilism of the underlying ontology of vulnerability at work in
contemporary policies concerned with climate change and other supposedly catastrophic processes. What is nihilism, after all, if
it is not a will to nothingness drawn from a willing reactive enslavement to forces deemed to be
beyond our control as one merely lives out the catastrophic moment? It also alerts us to the fundamentally liberal
nature of such policies and framings of the phenomenon of climate change defined, as liberalism has
been since its origins, by a fundamental mistrust in the abilities of the human subject to secure itself in
the world.10 Liberalism, as we have both explored extensively elsewhere, is a security project.11 From its outset, it has been
concerned with seeking answers to the problem of how to secure itself as a regime of governance
through the provision of security to the life of populations subject to it.12 It will, however, always be an incomplete
project because its biopolitical foundations are flawed; life is not securable. It is a multiplicity of antagonisms and
for some life to be made to live, some other life has to be made to die.13 That is a fundamental law of life which is
biologically understood. This is the deep paradox that undercuts the entire liberal project while inciting it to govern
∂
ever more and ever better, becoming more inclusive and more assiduous at the provision of security to life, while learning how better to take
life and make die that which falls outside and threatens the boundaries of its territories. Liberal
regimes, in essence and from the outset,
thrive on the insecurities of life which their capacity to provide security to provides the source of their
legitimacy, becoming ever more adept at the taking of life which the provision of security to life
requires.14 It is no accident that the most advanced liberal democracy in the world today, the United States of America,
is also the most heavily armed state in the world. And not just the most heavily armed state today, but also the most heavily
armed in human history. Liberal regimes do not and cannot accept the realities of this paradox. Which is why, far
from being exhausted, the liberal project remains and has to be, in order for it to be true to its mission, distinctly
transformative. Not only of the world in general and hence its endless resorts to war and violence to weed out
those unruly lives that are the source of insecurity to the life that is the font of its security, but also, and yet
more fundamentally, of the human subject itself; for this is a paradox which plays out, not just territorially, socially or between individuals, but
within the diffuse and ultimately unknowable domain of human subjectivity itself. The
liberal subject is divided and has to be in
order to fulfil its mission, critically astute at discerning the distinctions within its own life between that
which accords with the demands made of it in order to accord with liberal ways of living and those which do not comply
with its biopolitical ambitions.15 Being divided means the liberal subject will always be incomplete, needing work,
critical, insecure and mistrustful of itself for the purpose of its own self-improvement. The liberal subject is a project;
one that renders life itself a project, subject to an endless task of critique and self-becoming, from cradle
to grave. Sadly, many still find the concept of life appealing and even utopian. We are taught to think that we ought to choose life over
emptiness or negation, Renton’s law.16 In fact, it is the source of the world’s greatest nihilisms. Liberalism too is and has always been a
nihilism. Perhaps it is the greatest of all nihilisms. In giving us over to life, it gives us no ends to live for but the
endless work on the self that contemporarily permeate our ways of living devoid of any meaning as
such. ∂
The alt is existential resistance—only by affirming life from an ontological standpoint
can we reveal our true individuality
Joronen 13 (Mikko, dept of geography and faculty of mathematics and natural sciences, genius,
U of Turku, http://www.mediafire.com/view/djj55v7gah3d9ms/Joronen.pdf>
As Giorgio Agamben has argued, by being self-consciously Heideggerian, Foucault’s understand- ing of
the historical regimes of power is grounded on a more original relation between the constituted (or
actualised) forms of power and the constituting power of potentiality. While the constituting power
works as a condition of possibility for the constituted modes of power to emerge, all histori- cal
actualisations of power intrinsically depend on the suspension of the potentialities of constituting
power, on their concealment. 44 In this sense, constituting power has a similar ontological structure
with Aristotle’s notion of potentiality: it maintains itself without ever fully passing into actuality, without
being exhausted into actualisations. 45 It is not my intention here to go into details of Agamben’s
complex and nuanced argument in Homo Sacer, but instead to emphasise, as Agamben’s re-reading of
the distinction between potentiality and actuality indicates, how the coalescence of state power with
neoliberal governmentality con- stitutes politics at the domain of ontology. The constituting power does
not merely refer to the ontological possibility for the constituted modes of con- stituted power, but also
to the fundamental possibility for the political action as such. Accordingly, also the question of
resistance needs to be explored and confronted at this proper level of ontology: as a question of
existential resistance. In order to scrutinise the ontological implications Agamben’s distinction has for
the question of existential resistance, it is essential to pay atten- tion to what Agamben calls in Homo
Sacer the ‘life of possibility’. It is life that opposes the operations of constituted power: it constitutes an
inex- haustible possibility, which can be never entirely corralled into constituted forms of political
power. The power of potentiality in life, thus, denotes a power to constitute, a possibility to ground new
modes of life, to be otherwise. Governmentalities of neoliberal enframing evidently close this possibility,
or to use Rancière’s words in Disagreement, 46 follow the “logic of the police”, the logic of designating
ontological positions and divisions of power rather than opening them up for the power of potential life.
The ontological resistance, hence, does not only liberate life from the grasp of ontological
monopolisations, such as neoliberal enframing, but from all coded and corralled forms of belonging,
including the state. Agamben’s thinking evidently resolves the question of politics by mov- ing it from
the sphere of actualised forms of political power to the realm of ontology. Agamben’s ontological
discussion concerning the power of life can be thus subordinated to what Heidegger defines as the
fundamental con- dition of possibility for the constitution of all ontologies: the appropriation of
revealing from the abyssal source (Ab-Grund) of open being. 47 Supported by the fact that Agamben
was heavily influenced by Heidegger’s seminars he participated in during the 1960s, 48 the eclectic
position of Agamben – with one foot in the realm of biopolitics, the politics over life, and the other in
the realm of ontology – can be re-thought from an explicitly Heideggerian perspective. Agamben,
however, accuses Heidegger precisely of ignoring what he thinks is the fundamental origin of all
revealing: the pure fact of liv- ing things. 49 Heidegger evidently goes through a great effort, at least in
his early major contribution Being and Time (1927), to separate his existential-ontological analysis of
Dasein from the analyses of life formu- lated, in particular, by the key representatives of the German
‘life-philosophy’ movement (Lebensphilosophie), Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. 50 For Heidegger,
the fundamental flaw of the Lebensphilosophie was that it never came to properly treat life in
ontological terms, that is, as a mode of being/revealing. Heidegger’s separation, however, remained
quite ambigu- ous: it is not clear whether Heidegger was able to truly recede his existential-ontological
analysis of being from the strains of life-philosophy, or whether Heidegger’s own thinking would have
evolved into its shape without the significant influence of life-philosophy in the early phase of his
thinking. 51 Moreover, the compulsive distancing of life from being may, in the end, afford nothing by a
cul-de-sac. First of all, by locating the potential, even necessary, linkages between questions of life and
being, we may find more proper ways to grasp some of the crucial contemporary forms of power and
government, such as the biopolitical techniques, which have taken life itself as the target of ontological
politics. Second, in order to grasp the onto- logical politics behind neoliberalism, and further, to enable
alternatives that have the potential to widen the scope of ontological imagination, we need to take into
account how constituted forms of life and power are framed through the different ontological
monopolisations of revealing.
Death Link
The aff’s catastrophic impacts are just another tool used by the government to create
a permanent state of exception
Agamben 13 [Giorgio, a leading continental philosopher best known for his work on the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life
and homo sacer, “From the State of Control to a Praxis of Destituent Power,” http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituent-powerdemocracy/, omak]
One possible way to sketch such a genealogy would be to inscribe its origin and history in the paradigm of the state of exception. In this
perspective, we could trace it back to the Roman principle Salus publica suprema lex – public safety is the highest law — and connect it with
Roman dictatorship, with the canonistic principle that necessity does not acknowledge any law, with the comités de salut publique during
French revolution and finally with article 48 of the Weimar republic, which was the juridical ground for the Nazi regime. Such a genealogy is
certainly correct, but I do not think that it could really explain the functioning of the security apparatuses and measures which are familiar to
us. While the
state of exception was originally conceived as a provisional measure, which was meant to cope with an
immediate danger in order to restore the normal situation, the security reasons constitute today a permanent
technology of government. When in 2003 I published a book in which I tried to show precisely how the state of exception was
becoming in Western democracies a normal system of government, I could not imagine that my diagnosis would prove so accurate. The only
clear precedent was the Nazi regime. When Hitler took power in February 1933, he immediately proclaimed a decree suspending the articles of
the Weimar constitution concerning personal liberties. The decree was never revoked, so that the entire Third Reich can be considered as a
state of exception which lasted twelve years. What is happening today is still different.
A formal state of exception is not
declared and we see instead that vague non-juridical notions — like the security reasons — are used to
install a stable state of creeping and fictitious emergency without any clearly identifiable danger. An
example of such non-juridical notions which are used as emergency producing factors is the concept of
crisis. Besides the juridical meaning of judgment in a trial, two semantic traditions converge in the history of this term
which, as is evident for you, comes from the Greek verb crino; a medical and a theological one. In the
medical tradition, crisis means the moment in which the doctor has to judge, to decide if the patient will die
or survive. The day or the days in which this decision is taken are called crisimoi, the decisive days. In
theology, crisis is the Last Judgment pronounced by Christ in the end of times. As you can see, what is essential in both traditions
is the connection with a certain moment in time. In the present usage of the term, it is precisely this
connection which is abolished. The crisis, the judgement, is split from its temporal index and coincides now
with the chronological course of time, so that — not only in economics and politics — but in every
aspect of social life, the crisis coincides with normality and becomes, in this way, just a tool of
government. Consequently, the capability to decide once for all disappears and the continuous decision-making process decides nothing.
To state it in paradoxical terms, we could say that, having to face a continuous state of exception, the government
tends to take the form of a perpetual coup d’état. By the way, this paradox would be an accurate description of what
happens here in Greece as well as in Italy, where to govern means to make a continuous series of small coups d’état.
Society has become thanatopolitical --- death is shamed and prevented at all costs --- the motivation
behind this is fundamentally biopolitical
Hall, 5/7/2007 – Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, “Death, Power, and the Body: A Bio-political
Analysis of Death and Dying”, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, p. 5)//roetlin
Agamben, on the other hand, addresses the intertwinement of medicine, death, and power through his analysis of the modern individual’s
exposure to death. According to Agamben, Western culture
has become thanatopolitical, which means that it is
dominated by a politics of death that leaves us more and more exposed to both death and operations of
power. For Agamben, death has become indistinct. It is both meaningful and meaningless, both individual and
anonymous, both visible and invisible. Moreover, because modern society increasingly exposes individuals to
death, liberal democracy becomes increasingly indistinguishable from totalitarian regimes, an issue I will
explore in more detail in Chapter Three. While the issues that I am addressing life sustaining technologies are merely one symptom of the
greater problem that Agamben is himself concerned with, I hope that shedding
more light on this particular space of power
can allow us to think about and eventually challenge the greater politics of death operating in modern
society. In this study I will focus specifically on reconsidering the relations of power surrounding the decision to stop preserving life in the
particular space of the hospital room. According to Foucaultís view, terminating life is nearly unthinkable in a bio- political
society. Thus, as Benjamin Noys elaborates, we try so hard to preserve life, even at the cost of terrible suffering,
because death is the limit to [bio-political] power (2005, 54). For Foucault, death has become shameful, it is
paramount to giving up, to letting go, or to admitting defeat (all things given a negative connotation in Western
society) (2003c, 247). In this study I would like to reconsider these claims through Giorgio Agamben’s argument that
death has become more political as the boundary between life and death has become blurred. Such a
state of being, he claims, exposes the body to death, and yet as I am primarily concerned with saturates the body with
power (Agamben 1995, 164).
Death functions as the end of biopolitical control --- allow yourself the right to die
Hall, 5/7/2007 – Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, “Death, Power, and the Body: A Bio-political
Analysis of Death and Dying”, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, p. 7)//roetlin
Throughout this chapter, I
have paid particular attention to the way that different mechanisms of power work
upon bodies. By making the body the focus of my examination of power more broadly, I intend to
establish a basis for my impending analysis of bio-power and its relationship to individuals and their “right to
die.” This chapter then concludes with a brief synopsis of Giorgio Agamben’s application and reinvention of Foucault’s concept of bio-power.
As I shall describe in this chapter, Foucault and Agamben both share similar concerns with modern power (though they view sovereignty
somewhat differently), however, they come to different conclusions with regards to an individualís experience of death in modernity. Though I
have used Foucault as the primary framework for this analysis, I will again return to Agamben in subsequent chapters in order to further rethink
Foucault’s conclusion that death
is the limit to modern power.
Fear of decreased longevity provides the basis for sovereign power
Hall, 5/7/2007 – Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, “Death, Power, and the Body: A Bio-political
Analysis of Death and Dying”, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, p. 13)//roetlin
The jurists of the seventeenth century, Foucault contended, were already asking questions about this right of life and death. “The jurists ask:
When we enter into a contract, what
constitute a sovereign, to
are individuals doing at the level of the social contract, when they come together to
delegate absolute power over them to a sovereign,” what do they give up, what do
they receive (Foucault 2003c, 241)? Thus, as Foucault claims, “the essential function of the technique and discourse of right was to dissolve
the element of domination in power and to replace that domination, which has to be reduced or masked, with two things: the legitimate rights
Social contract theory assumes that
as individuals we are all endowed with natural rights. However, as most manifestations of this theory argue, in order
to enter into society individuals must give up certain rights to a sovereign power. While Foucault ultimately critiques the
of the sovereign on the one hand, and the legal obligation to obey on the other” (2003a, 26).
view that individuals make this choice for rational reasons (or that they make a choice at all), he recognized that the articulation of this theory
was significant for the genealogy of power that he was attempting to piece together. Thomas Hobbes was the first modern philosopher to
clearly formulate a view of human nature that implied the necessity of a social contract. For
Hobbes, humans are essentially self
interested, and being that they are self interested, their highest priority is self preservation. Though,
according to Foucault, Hobbes laments the fact that life prior to society is “nasty” and “brutish,” it is ultimately the prospect of
leading a short life that, in Hobbes” mind, frightens individuals enough for them to enter into a social
contract at all (2003b, 95-6). It is “the will to prefer life to death” that ultimately serves as the foundation for
sovereignty. Thus for sovereignty to exist, there must be–and this is all there must be,” Foucault reasons, “a certain
radical will that makes us want to live, even though we cannot do so unless the other is willing to let us
live” (2003b, 95-6).
Link Section—Policy
Environment Link
Attempts to recover the damage of the environment renders all beings calculable
under a sovereign gaze. Calls of moderation and conservation serve to create zones of
distinction between useful and useless forms of life. This reterritorization of life
artificially constructs hierarchies of human domination that make collapse of
ecological redundancies possible.
Halsey, 2004 - School of Law at the Flinders University of South Australia (Mark; “Environmental
Visions: Deleuze and the Modalities of Nature”; Ethics & the Environment 9.2 (2004) 33-64; DOA:
7/16/15 || NDW)
A second monstrous becoming has to do with the declaration of the Errinundra National Park in 1988.
This may come as somewhat of a surprise since orthodoxy dictates that such parks must ipso facto be
beneficial to ecological processes and, therefore, reside at the opposite end of the spectrum to things terrible or monstrous. However,
national parks, special protection zones, conservation zones, heritage river corridors, and the like, are as much imbued and
troubled by the rhetorics of similitude and the representative as general management areas or logging
zones. The surveying and naming of Errinundra National Park has in no way guaranteed becomings conducive to the preservation
of bodies without organs. Rather, it has ushered in a different set of stratifications and binary oppositions for the
governing of Nature. Put another way, Nature is not any more ‘wild’ or ‘free’ in national parks so much as it is
captured (or envisioned) in a different way by other kinds of abstract machines (those of botany, law, conservation, aesthetics, and the like). Nature is
as intensively managed and surveyed within national parks (and indeed wilderness areas) as ‘outside’ such places.
The problems of fire, of disease, of litter, of sewage disposal, of road maintenance, of tourist facilities,
and the like, are problems constituted by a particular brand of conservation as much as they are
constituted by the pressures of industrialization.¶ This is a mode of conservation that insists, firstly, on
packaging Nature, and, secondly, of privileging certain of its parts (those within park boundaries) above all others
(those outside park boundaries). It is therefore the height of misconception to think of such places as devoid of, or divorced from, the monstrous. The
obvious retort here is that it is better to ‘save’ some ‘parts’ of the environment rather than let it ‘all’ be
given over to the ‘ravages’ of industry. However, one could also say that by naming (seeing) certain spaces
as rare, more precious, more vital than others, perpetuates the problems attending the hierarchization of earth. This
hierarchization provides the point of reterritorialization for those supporting clear-felling regimes and the lione nes which divide industrial zones from conservation
zones. The
form of the statements which effect such a reterritorialization are well known: ‘The best timber
has been locked up by (you) greenies,’ ‘Sixty percent of old-growth is in conservation reserves, what more do you want?’ and so forth. It is
a game of binaries (loggers/ protesters, industry/conservation) rather than flows (of species, income, votes, aesthetics, leisure). And as the history of forest struggle
in Australia and elsewhere has shown, it is incredibly difficult to imagine the landscape in terms of its immanence and interconnectedness where it has for over a
century been (re)written in a stochastic manner (in terms of its ‘significant’ and ‘expendable’ attributes). ¶ There are other monstrous categories lurking with respect
to Goolengook. A chief example is the division between old-growth, negligibly disturbed, and regrowth forest. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that
recent conflict over Goolengook has largely been concomitant with attempts to establish the threshold
at which old-growth status can be ‘legitimately’ and ‘popularly’ ascribed. These are monstrous
categories in the sense that those who impose them believe there is some kind of intrinsic and timeless
causal connection between word and object—between things uttered and things existing ‘independently’ and ‘objectively’ in the world.
They are also monstrous because, from the perspective of State/ Royal science, they perpetuate the idea that the
task of conserving ecological vitalities is complete when it has, in fact, only been reconfigured. The texts which
formally articulate the thresholds dividing the three aforementioned categories display, at first glance, an irrefutable logic. This runs something akin to: There are
forests. Forests exhibit various growth stages. Each growth stage has the potential to be impacted either by human or natural processes. Typically these are reduced
to the effects of industrial activities (logging, mining, grazing) or to those of fire and disease. The label ascribed to a given stand or section of forest will therefore
depend on two factors—age (denoted by the proportion of dead material in the upper most stratum) and known or surmised disturbance history. In all instances,
age will take precedent over disturbance history in deciding the ultimate applicability of categories. The critical point to glean from this
brand of logic is
that it only
holds together so long as one ignores the multiplicity of alternatives with which to think
through the vicissitudes of forest status. It is a logic which, although exhibiting all the classic traits of a
positivist vision of the world—objectivity, rigidity, lucidity—is nonetheless haunted by the volatile nature of the
forces it wishes to capture/represent. There is no good reason for coding the proportion of ‘dead’ matter within the forest crown as that which
necessarily separates old-growth from negligibly disturbed forest. Here, ‘time’ is the only element separating the imposition of one category as opposed to another.
Naming, therefore, both makes and interrupts time. It violates the becomings-other normally nascent within the
plane of consistency.¶ To be clear, this equates to a monumental violencing. And it is a violencing not of some eternal or
immutable natural world and its innate rhythms, but of the possibility of discovering and inventing new ways to facilitate
the widest possible array of bodies without organs. A clear-felled coupe—the projected result of
earmarking terrains in one fashion rather than another—draws forth no body without organs. It is a space
lacking in intensity. Of course one could, and indeed the Department of Natural Resources and Environment does, attempt
to conjure a monoculture of bodies in such places (all sharing the same age, disturbance history, height, density, etc.). These bodies are,
no doubt, easier to name, manage, count, monitor, and sort. But their existence is also concomitant with the destruction of a
diversity of life-forms and capacities still barely comprehensible to modern science and other ways of knowing / seeing..
¶
Courts Link
The court’s refusal to look behind the state’s use of sovereign violence makes a
democracy into a totalitarian state
Rogers, 2008 - PhD, a Lecturer in law at the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University
(Nicole; “Terrorist v Sovereign: Legal performances in a state of exception”; Law Text; DOA: 7/16/15;
Lexis || NDW)
The existence of legal black holes is apparent in two legal performances in which political activists
argued that the decision on the part of the United States and its allies to wage war on Iraq lacked
legitimacy. The courts made it clear that such decisions could not be reviewed by the judiciary. One of these
cases resulted in a statement of reasons as to [*165] why a law student could not bring a common informer suit against the Prime Minister of Australia in relation
to his role in the Iraq war; the other case was a House of Lords decision on whether the alleged illegitimacy of Britain's act of aggression in Iraq provided a defence
for activists accused of various criminal acts carried out at military and air bases in England. / In 2004, Eric
Bateman, a law student, attempted to
bring a common informer suit against the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, under the Common Informers
(Parliamentary Disqualifications) Act 1975 (Cth). In a statement of claim, which the High Court of Australia Registry ultimately rejected,
Bateman argued that Howard's actions, including, most importantly, his decision to follow the United
States into war in Iraq, amounted to an acknowledgment of allegiance to a foreign power. This, according to
Bateman, disqualifed the Prime Minister from continuing to sit as a member of the Australian Parliament under section 44 of the Australian Constitution. / In his
statement of reasons for refusing Eric's application to have a writ of summons issued, Gummow J stated that: / The
question which the
Constitution would present is not whether the Prime Minister has conducted himself in a particular way
but whether, as a matter of law, he is 'under' any acknowledgment of 'allegiance, obedience or
adherence to a foreign power' within the meaning of s 44(i) (In the matter of an application by Eric Bateman: 2-3). / Of course, the
Constitution does not 'present' a question so clearly. The High Court of Australia was expressing, rather, a clear reluctance to judge
the legal consequences of the political decision-making of the executive arm of government, a reluctance which is mirrored in the next case study. The 2006 House
of Lords decision in R v Jones also suggests that the courts are not prepared to support attempts by activists to challenge the decision of their government to engage
in war. / In February and March 2003 the appellants carried out various criminal acts on English military air bases including damaging fuel tankers and bomb trailers,
Although such acts involved
force and the perpetrators had political motives, they were not prosecuted for terrorist offences or
labelled 'terrorists'. The appellants argued that their actions were lawful 'because they were aimed at
preventing a greater evil, namely the war in Iraq and its probable consequences' (R v Jones: 43). The House of Lords
damaging a runway and aircraft, destroying a fence, trespassing and chaining themselves to tanks and vehicles. [*166]
dismissed this argument. Lord Hoffman expressed the strongest sentiments in response to the defendants' arguments. / Lord Hoffman acknowledged the
'theoretical difficulty in the Courts, as part of the State, holding
that the State has acted unlawfully' (R v Jones: 65). Furthermore,
'the decision to go to war, whether one thinks it was right or wrong, fell squarely within the
discretionary powers of the Crown to defend the realm and conduct its foreign affairs' (R v Jones: 66). / Lord
Hoffman commented that one of the defendants had portrayed herself as 'a lonely individual resisting the acts of a hostile and alien State to which she owes no
loyalty' (R v Jones: 75). He
found this puzzling given that the state in question had 'protected and sustained her'
and 'the legal system which had to judge the reasonableness of her actions was that of the United
Kingdom itself' (R v Jones: 75). Here the judge drew a distinction between the British state, which he
perceived as benevolent, and oppressive regimes such as the Nazi regime in World War II. This
distinction, according to Agamben, is illusory; he argues that in the age of biopolitics there is an 'inner
solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism' (1998: 10) and, in fact, democracies and totalitarian regimes
are indistinguishable and interchangeable (1998: 122). Given the judge's partial view of the state, it is
unsurprising that he and the other judges condemned the use of force by citizens in an attempt 'to see
the law enforced in the interests of the community at large' and stated that 'the law will not tolerate
vigilantes' (R v Jones: 83). / Lord Hoffman concluded his judgment with strong criticism of the strategy of
activists to use the courts as a forum for challenging the legitimacy of state acts, including acts of war;
he called this 'litigation as the continuation of protest by other means' (R v Jones: 90). The [*167] court's
refusal to look behind the state's use of force and interrogate the legitimacy of the decision to go to war
delineates a classic legal black hole: an area into which the rule of law does not extend.
Immigration L
Extending rights to immigrants strips them of their ability to fight the state of
exception – only a lack of identification leaves them invulnerable to expulsion
Ellerman, 2009 - Professor of Political Science at the University of British Colombia (Antje;
“Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State of Exception”; Presentation;
http://www.unc.edu/euce/eusa2009/papers/ellermann_02G.pdf; DOA: 7/16/15 ||
NDW)
The exercise of sovereignty over homo sacer is ultimately contingent on the state’s knowledge of the
individual’s identity. As John Torpey argued, “individuals who remain beyond the embrace of the state necessarily
represent a limit on its penetration” (1997, 224). In contemporary states, identity is the authoritative marker of
exclusion and inclusion, and, in the case of illegal migrants, a necessary condition for expulsion from the
national territory. Migrants whose name and nationality is unknown to the state cannot be issued the
identity and travel documents on which lawful deportation to another’s state’s territory hinges. In other
words, “unidentifiable migrants are constitutionally rather invulnerable to expulsion” (van der Leun 2003, 108). As
liberal states have stepped up their deportation efforts, migrants, in particular unsuccessful asylum
seekers, have sought to escape the state’s reach by destroying or hiding their identity documents. This
act of resistance is far from exceptional. While the following figures and illustrations all refer to immigration enforcement in Germany, they
could easily apply to control contexts elsewhere in the advanced democratic world. German interior officials estimate that, in the mid-1980s, immigration
authorities had to obtain travel documents for about 30 to 40 percent of all asylum seekers. By the year 2000, the population of “undocumented” asylum applicants
is estimated to have increased to 85 percent (Böhling 2001). The dilemma that an unknown identity poses to the state is aptly captured by a deportation officer’s
account of the resistance strategies of illegal migrants: “People
have started to realize, ‘if they don’t know who I am, they
can’t touch me.’1 What is important to note is that homo sacer’s ability to render herself unidentifiable is
ultimately contingent on bare life. The lives of illegal migrants and refugees in many ways exemplify the
condition of rightlessness that marks bare life. “The territorialization of life means that the refugee is
put in a position where she lacks apportioned rights but depends on the charity or goodwill of aid
workers or the police. The refugee is outside the law. Levels of innuendo and violence unthinkable to regular human beings, citizens,
are regularly perpetrated against the refugee or asylum seeker. The refugee as homo sacer describes the condition of exclusion
that those exempt from the normal sovereignty are subject to.” (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004, 41) While much has been
written on the dehumanizing consequences of the denial of membership, the absence of rights at the same time makes possible
acts of resistance such as identity-stripping. The vast majority of those who lead “politicized lives” have
entered into too many bureaucratic relationships with the state to have the choice to render themselves
unknowable. Liberal states infrastructurally penetrate their societies far too deeply (Mann 1984) to allow for a pervasive “creation of fog” (Broeders and
Engbersen 2007, 1593) by their citizens. Thus, it is the rightlessness of the illegal migrant that is the source of her
capacity for resistance by means of identity-stripping. These self-stripping strategies clearly exemplify
the possibility of resistance in the state of exception. In the words of Broeders and Engbersen, “[t]he strategy of noncooperation
shows that many immigrants are not docile persons who fully cooperate with the authorities. Many of them are difficult to manage by
state officials, and they are able to very effectively frustrate the administrative processing of return
programs.” (2007, 1603)
Reducing state immigration law increases xenophobic violence – Africa proves that
immigrants are pushed into the state of exception that makes them vulnerable and
despised
Gordon 10
(Steven L., 2010 “Migrants in a ‘State of Exception” Transience, Volume 1, Issue 1, http://www2.huberlin.de/transcience/Vol1_Issue1_2010_3_21_gordon.pdf\\EJH)
The transition from a regime based on racial oppression and authoritarianism to a multiracial democracy
has produced a multitude of new democratic and social rights for South Africa’s citizens. However, this
transition has at the same time created a deep conflict over the realisation of these rights. As the status
of citizenship becomes the key to economic and social resources, this status becomes the scene of
contestation. The shift in political power and status has produced a range of new discriminatory
practices as the struggle to realise social and economic rights becomes more intense. One of the most
prominent victims of this struggle is the foreign national, particularly the ‘black’ African foreign national.
Emergent as an especially vulnerable group in post-apartheid society, immigrants have become the
target of violence, exploitation and discrimination. As struggles to realise the social and economic
promises of the transition have deepened, incidences of antiimmigrant violence have intensified.
However, while local individuals and communities are themselves accountable for this trend, this
climate of xenophobia has been shaped in large part by South Africa’s own immigration policy.
For more than a decade, immigration policy has permeated an internal logic among state officials and
law enforcement personnel that foreigners, especially ‘black’ foreign nationals from Africa, are not
subject to the normal protections of constitutional democracy and human rights obligations. Instead,
migrants are treated as an exception, and as such, are relegated to a space outside the workings of the
law. In effect, the isolation and persecution implemented by the current immigration policy fuels the
xenophobia witnessed among the general public. Subsequently, the absence of constituted protection,
and the anti-immigrant sentiments of the law and policy provide the opportunity and justification for
xenophobic within post-apartheid South Africa.
This state of affairs produces a system that contributes to new economies of corruption and violence
existing either entirely outside the realm of state regulation or more alarmingly through legitimate
avenues. This study hopes to uncover and discuss the forces shaping the ‘state of exception’, and to
investigate the different ways in which xenophobia has been contextualised and understood in postapartheid South Africa. The focus is on how migrants exist within legal ‘spaces of exception’ and how
their extortion, exploitation and maltreatment are propagated by the post-apartheid state. These
‘spaces of exception’, will be examined through an analysis of the content and construction of relevant
immigration legislation, with reference to the logic of both contemporary immigration legislation and
the immigration regime by the different actors, notably the Department of Home Affairs and law
enforcement agencies. Finally, this ‘state of exception’ will be discussed in the light of the work of Carl
Schmidt and Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty centred on the notion of exception.
The affirmative plunges the immigrant into the state of exception – villigantes take
the place of border security absent the legal protection the state confers
Gordon 10
(Steven L., 2010 “Migrants in a ‘State of Exception” Transience, Volume 1, Issue 1, http://www2.huberlin.de/transcience/Vol1_Issue1_2010_3_21_gordon.pdf\\EJH)
In other words, immigrants pose a supposed challenge to the unity and realisation of the post-apartheid
project through their “criminality”. Through the image of the ‘illegal’, Peberdy advances the notion that
the migrant is depicted as a criminal, a threat to the body politic. In this lexicon, the foreigner becomes –
in the words of Giorgio Agamben –‘homo sacer12’, a figure who threatens the body politic and has
therefore forfeited her constitutional rights.
The ambiguities and contradictions that imbue the Immigration Act have spawned a legal vacuum
regarding immigrants. The regulation of migrants rests less with the law and lawmakers than with law
enforcers. Central figures in the implementation of immigration law are the legal authorities charged
with its execution, including police, border units, ad hoc special units, commandos and even vigilantestyle organisation13. The Immigration Act effectively justifies equipping many of these law enforcement
agencies with arbitrary powers to arrest, search, detain and deport suspected ‘illegal’ migrants without
reference to normal constitutional or legal protection14. The often contested legality of these migrants
locates them in ‘spaces of exception’ that exist outside the law. Misago et. al. (2009:15), in their study of
xenophobia immediately following the anti-immigrant violence in 2008, note that ‘foreignness’ has
come to be “seen as a crime in itself” by many local communities, “a perception that is not discouraged
by the constant scapegoating of foreign nationals in political rhetoric and the careless use of the label
‘illegal immigrant’ in the media”.
Agamben (1998:110) argues that within these spaces, ‘human beings … have been so completely
deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act against them would no
longer appear as a crime”. However, the ‘state of exception’ logic of contemporary legislation is
nowhere more evident than in the very principle of the national deportation system. Agamben (1998)
argues that the socalled ‘sacred and inalienable rights of man’ prove to be completely unprotected at
the very moment it is no longer possible to characterise them as rights of the citizens of a state.
Detention and deportation is classified as a preventative measure that allows individuals to be taken
into custody on the basis that their mere presence serves as a danger to the security and integrity of the
state. This can be witnessed in the series of anti-immigrant police campaigns that have been launched in
the first half of 2008. Landau and Segatti (2009:45), in their UNDP research paper on the human
development impacts of migration in South Africa, noted that the “heavy handed way in which police
have conducted immigration raids [particularly in recent years] has [...] led to a perception by
perpetrators of violence that they are assisting in removing ‘illegals’ from the country”. Reports of
excessive violence, sexual abuse, extortion and theft are commonplace, and police have even been
known to ignore or even destroy legal identity or refugee documents.
Perhaps most disturbing is that these notions of ‘exceptionism’ have justified shifting from externalising
immigration control and prevention towards internal immigration control with monitoring at the
community level. The Immigration Act allows for the transferring “administrative and policy emphasis
…from border control to community and workplace inspection with the participation of communities
and the cooperation of other branches and spheres of government” (DHA 1999:1). In other words,
detection of illegal migrants will take the form of community participation in residential areas,
workplaces, educational institutions and other places where migrants access services. In this new
system, the DHA’s responsibility for immigration law enforcement has been partly devolved, not only to
other law enforcement agencies but to civilians within the community. Such a strategy relies heavily the
cooperation of the public, leading some researchers to argue that this strategy condones xenophobic
practices among participant communities (see Crush and Williams 2001; Crush and Dobson 2007;
Misago et. al. 2009; and HSRC 2009). This 'state of exception' allows a culture of impunity to exist with
Landau and Segatti (2009:45) noting that "previous responses to xenophobic violence include arresting
and deporting the undocumented non-national victims of violence who had sought refuge at police
stations". Hence, this 'state of exception' has been viewed as providing a tacit condoning of antiimmigrant violence in that government action was/has assisted xenophobic citizens to forcibly remove
'illegal' immigrants. This system potentially contributes to new economies of corruption and violence
existing either within or entirely outside the realm of state regulation. New forms discrimination and
anti-immigrant policing fuel and legitimise the creation of spatially defined zones of exception. Within
these zones, extortion, corruption, and violence are becoming normalised in ways that ultimately
undermine the concept of universal rights articulated in South Africa’s commitment to constitutional,
regional and international conventions
The affirmative’s inclusion of immigrants is part of a system of contrast that utilizes
undocumented immigrants in an attempt to define what is and what is not a citizen of
the law. Such inclusion attempts always result in further violence
Astor, 2009 - PhD from the University of Michigan (Avi; “Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization and
the Making of Operation Wetback”; Palgrave Journals, Sociological Abstracts; DOA: 7/16/15 || NDW)
Bare life is life that is excluded from the political order. The relation of bare life to the political order,
however, is not purely a relation of exteriority. Rather, bare life is the "zone of indistinction" in which
political life and natural life "constitute each other in including and excluding each other" (p. 90).
Citizenship, the lynchpin of the modern political order, would be meaningless without the presence, whether real or
imaginary, of non-citizens. But the role played by non-citizens in constituting the political order is
contingent on their exclusion from this order. Agamben sees this exclusive logic as the fatal flaw of the
modern nation-state, and attributes the myriad abuses suffered by refugees and denaturalized subjects
during the last two centuries to its immanent unfolding. The utility of Agamben's insights derive from their uncanny ability to
highlight both the constitutive role that politically marginalized populations play in shaping the modern political order and the logic of their exclusion from this
order. They
are not excluded simply by virtue of being non-citizens, refugees or stateless persons, but by
virtue of being the embodiment of pure life itself, which has no place in the modern political order when
decoupled from political existence. Scholars must be cautious, however, not to lose sight of the fact that Agamben's analysis of bare life
emerged from his analysis of specific European events, most notably the Holocaust, and therefore may miss unique aspects of the experiences of racism and
exclusion in non-European contexts. Hesse (2004), for instance, argues that Agamben's conception of racism is "Eurocentric," as it defines racism as a "relation of
exception" and consequently overlooks the ways in which racism is built into social institutions. Taking the Holocaust as the ideal-typical case of biopolitical
exclusion, Hesse writes, obscures other experiences of racist exclusion that cannot be assimilated into this paradigm.
Human Rights L
Human rights enforce the authority of the sovereign by delineating citizenry
throughout humanity
Agamben, 1998 - Professor of philosophy at the University of Verona (Giorgio; “Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life”; pg. 75-77;
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/biopolitics/HomoSacer.pdf; DOA 7/19/15 || NDW)
A simple examination of the text of the Declaration of 1789 shows that it is precisely bare natural life – which is to say, the pure fact of birth – that appears here as
the source and bearer of rights. “Men,”
the first article declares, “are born and remain free and equal in rights” (from
this perspective, the strictest formulation of all is to be found in La Fayette’s project elaborated in July 1789: “Every man is born with inalienable and indefeasible
rights”). At
the same time, however, the very natural life that, inaugurating the biopolitics of modernity, is
placed at the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in whom rights are
“preserved” (according to the second article: “The goal of every political association is the preservation of the natural
and indefeasible rights of man”). And the Declaration can attribute sovereignty to the “nation” (according to the
third article: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation”) precisely because it has already inscribed this element
of birth in the very heart of the political community. The nation – the term derives etymologically from nascere (to be born) – thus
closes the open circle of mans birth. 2.2. Declarations of rights must therefore be viewed as the place in which the
passage from divinely authorized royal sovereignty to national sovereignty is accomplished. This passage
assures the exceptio of life in the new state order that will succeed the collapse of the ancien régime.
The fact that in this process the “subject” is, as has been noted, transformed into a “citizen” means that
birth – which is to say, bare natural life as such – here for the first time becomes (thanks to a transformation whose biopolitical consequences we
are only beginning to discern today) the immediate bearer of sovereignty. The principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty, which were
separated in the ancien régime (where birth marked only the emergence of a sujet, a subject), are now irrevocably united in the body of the “sovereign subject” so
that the foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted. It
is not possible to understand the “national” and biopolitical
development and vocation of the modern state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if one forgets
that what lies at its basis is not man as a free and conscious political subject but, above all, man’s bare
life, the simple birth that as such is, in the passage from subject to citizen, invested with the principle of
sovereignty. The fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation such that there can be no interval of separation [scarto] between the two
terms. Rights are attributed to man (or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately
vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such) of the citizen. Only if we understand this essential historical
function of the doctrine of rights can we grasp the development and Metamorphosis of declarations of
rights in our century. When the hidden difference [scarto] between birth and nation entered into a lasting crisis following the devastation of Europe’s
geopolitical order after the First World War, what appeared was Nazism and fascism, that is, two properly biopolitical movements that made of natural life the
exemplary place of the sovereign decision. We are used to condensing the essence of National Socialist ideology into the syntagm “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden).
When Alfred Rosenberg wanted to express his party’s vision of the world, it is precisely to this hendiadys that he turned. “The National Socialist vision of the world,”
he writes, “springs from the conviction that soil and blood constitute what is essential about Germanness, and that it is therefore in reference to these two givens
that a cultural and state politics must be directed” (Blut und Ehre, p. 242). Yet it has too often been forgotten that this formula, which is so highly determined
politically, has, in truth, an innocuous juridical origin. The formula is nothing other than the concise expression of the two criteria that, already in Roman law, served
to identify citizenship (that is, the primary inscription of life in the state order): ius soli (birth in a certain territory) and ius sanguinis (birth from citizen parents). In
the ancien régime, these two traditional juridical criteria had no essential meaning, since they expressed only a relation of subjugation. Yet with the French
Revolution they acquire a new and decisive importance. Citizenship
now does not simply identify a generic subjugation to
royal authority or a determinate system of laws, nor does it simply embody (as Chalier maintained when he suggested to
the convention on September 23,1792, that the title of citizen be substituted for the traditional title monsieur or sieur in every public act) the new
egalitarian principle; citizenship names the new status of life as origin and ground of sovereignty and,
therefore, literally identifies – to cite Jean-Denis Lanjuinais’s words to the convention – les membres du souverain, “the members of the
sovereign.” Hence the centrality (and the ambiguity) of the notion of “citizenship” in modern political thought,
which compels Rousseau to say, “No author in France... has understood the true meaning of the term
‘citizen.’ “ Hence too, however, the rapid growth in the course of the French Revolution of regulatory provisions specifying which man was a citizen and which
one not, and articulating and gradually restricting the area of the ius soli and the ius sanguinis. Until this time, the questions “What is French? What is German?”
had constituted not a political problem but only one theme among others discussed in philosophical anthropologies. Caught in a constant work of redefinition,
these questions now begin to become essentially political, to the point that, with National Socialism, the answer to the question “Who and what is German?” (and
also, therefore, “Who and what is not German?”) coincides immediately with the highest political task. Fascism
and Nazism are, above all,
Biopolitics and the Rights of Man 77 redefinitions of the relations between man and citizen, and become fully intelligible only
when situated – no matter how paradoxical it may seem – in the biopolitical context inaugurated by
national sovereignty and declarations of rights.
Human rights condition bare life producing the parameters of ideal citizenship in
which the subject of power is either abandoned by or violently brought within the
folds of the political order.
Agamben 2k
[Giorgio – prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ. Minnesota Press, p.
18-21]
<This is not the place to retrace the history of the various international organizations through which
single states, the League of Nations, and later, the United Nations have tried to face the refugee
problem, from the Nansen Bureau for the Russian and Armenian refugees (1921) to the High
Commission for Refugees from Germany (1936) to the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees
(1938) to the UN's International Refugee Organization (1946) to the present Office of the High
Commissioner for Refugees (1951), whose activity, according to its statute, does not have a political
character but rather only a "social and humanitarian" one. What is essential is that each and every
time refugees no longer represent individual cases but rather a mass phenomenon (as was the case
between the two world wars and is now once again), these organizations as well as the single states-all
the solemn evocations of the inalienable rights of human beings notwithstanding-have proved to be
absolutely incapable not only of solving the problem but also of facing it in an adequate manner. The
whole question, therefore, was handed over to humanitarian organizations and to the police.
#The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic
apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of
the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of
her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End
of the Rights of Man."2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the
fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the
latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure
that should have embodied human rights more than any other-namely, the refugee-marked instead
the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of
a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find
themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every
specific relation except for the pure fact of being human.3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called
sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no
longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the
ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Declaration des droits de 1'homme et du citoyen, in which it is
unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a
hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second.
That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the
pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status
of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to
naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of
the nation-state.
#It is time to cease to look at all the declarations of rights from 1789 to the present day as proclamations
of eternal metajuridical values aimed at binding the legislator to the respect of such values; it is time,
rather, to under-stand them according to their real function in the modern state. Human rights, in fact,
represent first of all the originary figure for the inscription of natural naked life in the politicaljuridical order of the nation-state. Naked life (the human being), which in antiquity belonged to God
and in the classical world was clearly distinct (as zoe) from political life (bios), comes to the forefront in
the management of the state and becomes, so to speak, its earthly foundation. Nation-state means a
state that makes nativity or birth [nascita] (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own
sovereignty. This is the meaning (and it is not even a hidden one) of the first three articles of the 1789
Declaration: it is only because this declaration inscribed (in articles 1 and 2) the native element in the
heart of any political organization that it can firmly bind (in article 3) the principle of sovereignty to the
nation (in conformity with its etymon, native [nano] originally meant simply "birth" [nascita]). The
fiction that is implicit here is that birth [nascita] comes into being immediately as nation, so that there
may not be any difference between the two moments. Rights, in other words, are attributed to the
human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately vanishing presupposition (and,
in fact, the presupposition that must never come to light as such) of the citizen.>
Terror L
Terrorism creates a diversion that the government uses to create a state of exception
to justify violent inteventionism
Aretxaga, 2001 – Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texis at Austin, visiting professor at
the University of Chicago, former professor at Harvard University (Begoña; “Terror as Thrill: First
Thoughts on the ‘War on Terrorism’” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 1, Winter 2001, , pp. 139150.; DOA: 7/18/15; JSTOR || NDW]
I cannot help but think now about Afghanistan and about the way the new disasters of war taking place
in that remote country are skillfully cut off from the thriller-like media images of the war against
terrorism. Among Goya's de- sastres, there is one entitled "Murio la Verdad" ("Truth Died"). The drawing shows a young woman as allegory of truth lying
down on the ground. A bish- op stands over her body, officiating, surrounded by a crowd held at bay by priests, while on the side Justice cries desperately. The
drawing conveys the per- verse ideological function of organized religion in the production of a version of reality in the service of sovereign power. Truth and Justice
are sacrificed to the official reality of church and sovereign. As in Goya's drawing, the
truth of the "War against Terrorism" is also
disappearing fast in the interest of national se- curity and patriotic unity. In its place, fantasies organize
reality as fear and thrill. The Scene of the War I watched the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) with the same sense of unreality as everyone I
know. In the Basque city of San Sebastian where I grew up and where I was visiting, it was 3:00 pm, prime time news. An annual in- ternational festival was about to
begin and small snippets of film were repeat- edly shown on televsion. For a moment, the attack on the WTC seemed like a film preview that had crawled
unannounced into the wrong place. The very fa- miliarity of the scene, already seen in popular Hollywood disaster movies made reality unreal and shocking. It was
not that a terrorist attack on the U.S. was unimaginable, it had in fact been imagined to satiety in films like "Independence Day." Not
only had the
imaginary of a disaster saturated pub- lic culture with apocalyptic anxieties during the last decade, but
so too had filled the imagination of the United States Department of State. After the end of the Cold
War, terrorism had become the object of obsessive publishing by the state department, replacing the
old figure of communism as the spectral enemy. The anxious scene of foreign terrorists attacking the
United States was not new but was in fact in place and ready to be occupied. Fantasy constitutes a scenario within which real action can take place and be interpreted. What was unimaginable was then not
the attack itself, but that the fantasy of the attack could materialize. If inside the United States there was trauma, outside the
country what followed the stunned moment of seeing the impossible materi- alized was fear, not of terrorism, but of a military intervention by the United States
and its consequences for the rest of the world. The
fear was made stronger by the mix of religious trascendentalism and
cowboy justice in which the response to the attack was initially cast. The President of the U.S., George W. Bush, spoke
about a monumental "crusade" of good against evil, while de- manding Osama bin Laden's body "dead
or alive." The attack was immediate- ly framed as an attack on American values which, under attack,
appeared all of the sudden obscurely pristine; then it was framed as an attack on Western val- ues, then
an attack on civilization. The "War against Terrorism" was presented as both inevitable and epic: "a war
to save the world" as George Bush said just before starting the bombing in Afganistan, a "just war."
Democracy Link
The functioning of the law relies simultaneously in the transformation of bare life into
good life while attempting to preserve bare life as such. This differentiation between
forms of life is responsible for the oppressive potential of democracy and precluding
new forms of emancipation. *gendered language under erasure.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, Stanford UP, p. 9-11)
<If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy, then, it is that modern
democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoe, and that it is
constantly trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find, so to speak, the bios of
zoe. Hence, too, modern democracy's specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of
men into play in the very place-"bare life"-that marked their subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden
process that leads to the recognition of rights and formal liberties stands once again the body of the
sacred man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be
killed. To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplishments of
democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in
which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved
itself incapable of saving zoe, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented
ruin. Modern democracy's decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states in postdemocratic spectacular societies (which begins to become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds
its final sanction in the analyses of Guy Debord) may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks the
beginning of modern democracy and forces it into complicity with its most implacable enemy. Today
politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the contradictions
that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism-which transformed the decision on bare life into
the supreme political principle-will remain stubbornly with us. According to the testimony of Robert
Antelme, in fact, what the camps taught those who lived there was precisely that "calling into question
the quality of man provokes an almost biological assertion of belonging to the human race" (L'esppce
hu¬maine, p. II). The idea of an inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism (which here
we must, with every caution, advance) is obviously not (like Leo Strauss's thesis concerning the secret
convergence of the final goals of liberalism and communism) a historiographical claim, which would
authorize the liquidation and leveling of the enormous differences that characterize their history and
their rivalry. Yet this idea must nevertheless be strongly maintained on a historico-philosophical level,
since it alone will allow us to orient ourselves in relation to the new realities and unforeseen
convergences of the end of the millennium. This idea alone will make it possible to clear the way for
the new politics, which remains largely to be invented.>
The affirmative’s gesture of democracy is a guise for modern totalitarianism, through
the insistence on rights that do nothing but write subjects into the letter of the law,
beholding them to the powers of the sovereign.
Agamben, 1998 - Professor of philosophy at the University of Verona (Giorgio; “Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life”; Book; Pg. 9-10; DOA: 7/16/15 || NDW)
If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to clas- sical democracy, then, it is that modern democracy
presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoe, and that it is constantly trying to
transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find, so to speak, the bios of zoe. Hence, too, modern
democracy's specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in rhe very place-"bare
life" -that marked their subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden process that leads to the recognition of
rights and formal liberties stands once again the body of the sacred man with his double sovereign, his
life that cannot be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed. To become conscious of this aporia is not to belirde the conquests
and accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very
moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached irs greatest
height, proved itself incapable of saving zoe, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin. Modern
democracy's decadence and gradual convergence w:rh totalitarian states in post-democratic spectacular
societies (which begins to become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds its final sanction in the analyses of Guy Debord) may well be rooted
in this aporia, which marks the beginning of modern democracy and forces it into complicity with its
most implacable enemy. Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until
the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism-which transformed rhe
decision on bare life into the supreme political principle-will remain stub- bornly with us. According to the
testimony of Robert Antelme, in fact, what the camps taught those who lived there was precisely that "calling into question the quality of man provokes an almost
biological assertion of belonging to the human race" (L'espece hu- maine, p. u).
The global consolidation of politics into democratic states effaces the possibility of
progressivism and empties institutions and identities of their liberatory potential.
Agamben 2K
[Giorgio – prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ. Minnesota Press, p. 109-110]
<THE FALL of the Soviet Communist Party and the unconcealed rule of the capitalist-democratic state
on a planetary scale have cleared the field of the two main ideological obstacles hindering the
resumption of a political philosophy worthy of our time: Stalinism on one side, and progressivism and
the constitutional state on the other. Thought thus finds itself, for the first time, facing its own task
without any illusion and without any possible alibi. The "great transformation" constituting the final
stage of the state-form is thus taking place before our very eyes: this is a transformation that is driving
the kingdoms of the Earth (republics and monarchies, tyrannies and democracies, federations and
national states) one after the other toward the state of the integrated spectacle (Guy Debord) and
toward "capitalist parliamentarianism" (Alain Badiou). In the same way in which the great
transformation of the first industrial revolution destroyed the social and political structures as well as
the legal categories of the ancien regime, terms such as sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy,
and general will by now refer to a reality that no longer has anything to do with what these concepts
used to designate-and those who continue to use these concepts uncritically literally do not know what
they are talking about. Consensus and public opinion have no more to do with the general will than
the "international police" that today fight wars have to do with the sovereignty of the jus publicum
Europaeum. Contemporary politics is this devastating experiment that disarticulates and empties
institutions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities all throughout the
planet, so as then to rehash and reinstate their definitively nullified form.>
Deterrence Link
>>Insert specific explanation from lecture exercise<<
The ordering of society carried out through the sovereign force of law gives license to
unchecked anonymous violence in the name of preserving right.
Agamben 99
[Giorgio – prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ. Minnesota Press, p. 112—113]
<The concepts of sovereignty and of constituent power, which are at the core of our political tradition,
have to be abandoned or, at least, to be thought all over again. They mark, in fact, the point of
indifference between right and violence, nature and logos, proper and improper, and as such they do
not designate an attribute or an organ of the juridical system or of the state; they designate, rather,
their own original structure. Sovereignty is the idea of an undecidable nexus between violence and
right, between the living and language-a nexus that necessarily takes the paradoxical form of a
decision regarding the state of exception (Schmitt) or ban (Nancy) in which the law (language) relates
to the living by withdrawing from it, by a-bandoning it to its own violence and its own irrelatedness.
Sacred life-the life that is presupposed and abandoned by the law in the state of exception-is the
mute carrier of sovereignty; the real sovereign subject. Sovereignty, therefore, is the guardian who
prevents the undecidable threshold between violence and right, nature and language, from coming to
light. We have to fix our gaze, instead, precisely on what the statue of Justice (which, as Montesquieu
reminds us, was to be veiled at the very moment of the proclamation of the state of exception) was not
supposed to see, namely, what nowadays is apparent to everybody: that the state of exception is the
rule, that naked life is immediately the carrier of the sovereign nexus, and that, as such, it is today
abandoned to a kind of violence that is all the more effective for being anonymous and quotidian. If
there is today a social power [potenza], it must see its own impotence [impotenza] through to the end,
it must decline any will to either posit or preserve right, it must break everywhere the nexus between
violence and right, between the living and language that constitutes sovereignty.>
Mexico Link
Discourse of the Mexican narco-state under siege by cartels leads to exceptional
violence through racialized colonialism by positioning Mexico as culturally inferior and
in need of development – these representations reinforce violent sovereign
apparatuses of power which makes structural violence and Mexican instability
inevitable
Carlos, 2014 – Junior Fellow with the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, PhD
Candidate in Political Science at UC Irvine (Alfredo; “Mexico “Under Siege”: Drug Cartels or U.S.
Imperialism?”; Latin American Perspectives Volume 41 Number 2; DOA: 7/12/15, SagePub || NDW)
According to major U.S. newspapers and policy makers, Mexico
is currently waging a “war on drugs.” Former U.S. Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton (quoted in Dibble, 2010) described the situation as “starting to resemble an insurgency” and
compared it to Colombia’s crisis some two decades earlier. The Los Angeles Times (February 19, 2009) sponsored a conference with the University of San Diego’s
Trans-Border Institute at which it suggested that Mexico is “under siege” by drug cartels. Regular
updates on the drug war appear in U.S.
newspapers. For instance, on January 20, 2010, the Associated Press ran a story entitled “7 Bodies Linked to Drug Cartels Found in Mexico”; on March 19,
CNN had one entitled “Drug Criminals Block Roads in Mexico”; and on June 23 the New York Daily News announced, “Mexican Drug Violence Nears Bloodiest
Month, President Felipe Calderon Pleads for Country’s Support.” A simple Google News search will show that Mexican drugs, drug-related violence, and antidrug
efforts are front and center in Mexico and the United States and have become the primary issue between the two countries. Drug-related
violence is
not, however, Mexico’s foremost problem, and the reporting on it obscures the more serious and immediate
economic and social problems it faces. More important, it masks their origin in U.S. economic foreign policy while
providing justification for continued and future U.S. paternalism and domination. The media and the
government in the United States have a long history of constructing and perpetuating this type of
discourse about Mexico. It is linked to discourses surrounding the colonization of the Americas, the
white man’s burden, the extermination of the native population, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican-American War, racial segregation in the United States,
and prejudice against immigrants. While the current discourse regarding Mexico is different in that Mexicans themselves are concerned about
what is going on, the way it is shaped and manipulated by the media reflects the earlier ones. Gilbert Gonzalez (2004: 7) suggests that the current understandings
and representations of Mexico date back to the 1800s, when “U.S. capital interests sought to penetrate Mexico.” The
original discourse was
expressly linked to economic processes, and the same is true of the current drug-related violence story.
In that regard discourse can be and in this case is extremely powerful. Meta-Narratives and Dominant Discourses Michel Foucault (1972–
1977: 120) argues that “discourse serves to make possible a whole series of interventions, tactical and positive
interventions of surveillance, circulation, control and so forth.” Discourses generate knowledge and “truth,” giving those who
speak this “truth” social, cultural, and even political power. This power “produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (Foucault,
1979: 194). For Foucault (1972–1977: 119), “what makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is . . . that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure,
forms knowledge, produces discourse.” In essence, power
produces discourse that justifies, legitimates, and increases it.
Similarly, Edward Said (1994: 14), speaking in reference to literary discourse, says that literature as a cultural form is not just about literature. It is not autonomous;
rather, it is about history and politics. He says that literature supports, elaborates, and consolidates the practices of empire. Television, newspapers, magazines,
journals, books, advertisements, and the Internet all help construct stories, creating cultures of “us” that differentiate us from “them” (Said, 1994: xiii). They all
Dominant discourses
are constructed and perpetuated for particular reasons. As Kevin Dunn (2003: 6) points out, representations have
very precise political consequences. They either legitimize or delegitimize power, depending on what they are and
elaborate and consolidate the practices of empire in multiple overlapping discourses from which a dominant discourse emerges.
about whom (Said, 1994: 16). Said asserts that a narrative emerges that separates what is nonwhite, non-Western, and non-Judeo/Christian from the acceptable
Western ethos as a justification for imperialism and the resulting policies and practices and argues that discourse is manipulated in the struggle for dominance (36).
Discourses are advanced in the interest of exerting power over others; they tell a story that provides a justification for action. For
Said, there is always an intention or will to use power and therefore to perpetuate some discourses at the
expense of others. It is this intentionality that makes them dangerous and powerful. As Roxanne Doty (1996: 2) suggests, through repetition they
become “regimes of truth and knowledge.” They do not actually constitute truth but become accepted
as such through discursive practices, which put into circulation representations that are taken as truth.
Dominant discourses, meta-narratives (master frames that are often unquestioned [see Klotz and Lynch, 2007]), and cultural representations are important because
they construct “realities” that are taken seriously and acted upon. Cecelia Lynch (1999: 13) asserts that “ dominant
narratives do ‘work’ even
when they lack sufficient empirical evidence, to the degree that their conceptual foundations call upon
or validate norms that are deemed intersubjectively legitimate.” They establish unquestioned “truths” and thus provide
justification for those with power to act “accordingly.” They allow the production of specific relations of power. Powerful social actors are in a prime position to
construct and perpetuate discourses that legitimize the policies they seek to establish. Narrative interpretations don’t arise out of thin air; they must be constantly
articulated, promoted, legitimized, reproduced, and changed by actual people (Lynch, 1999). Social actors with this kind of power do this by what Doty (1996) calls
self-definition by the “other.” Said (1994: 52) suggests that the formation of cultural identities can only be understood contrapuntally—that an identity cannot exist
without an array of opposites. Western1
powers, including the United States, have maintained hegemony by
establishing the “other”: North vs. South, core vs. periphery, white vs. native, and civilized vs. uncivilized are identities
that have provided justifications for the white man’s civilizing mission and have created the myth of a
benevolent imperialism (Doty, 1996: 11; Said, 1994: 51). The historical construction of this “other”’ identity produces current events and policies
(Dunn, 2003). Through constant repetition, a racialized identity of the non-American, barbaric “other” is constructed, along with a U.S. identity considered civilized
and democratic despite its engagement in the oppression, exploitation, and brutalization of that “other.” Consequently,
dominant discourses
and meta-narratives provide a veil for “imperial encounters,” turning them into missions of salvation
rather than conquests or, in Mexico’s case, economic control (Doty, 1996). Dunn (2003: 174) suggests that dominant
discourses legitimize and authorize specific political actions, particularly economic ones. Scholars, intellectuals,
and academics also engage in the perpetuation of discourses and participate in their construction. There is a large body of scholarly
literature that describes Latin America as a “backward” region that “irrationally” resists modernization.
Seymour Martin Lipset (1986), drawing on Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, portrays Latin America as having different, “inherently”
faulty and “detrimental” value systems that lack the entrepreneurial ethic and are therefore antithetical
to the systematic accumulation of capital. A newer version of this theory is promoted by Inglehart and Welzel (2005), who focus on countries
that allow “self-expression” and ones that do not. Howard Wiarda (1986) suggests that the religious history of Latin America promotes a corporatist tradition that is
averse to democratic and liberal values, asentiment more recently echoed by the political scientist Samuel Huntington (1996). Along these same lines, Jacques
Lambert (1986) argues that the paternalistic latifundia (feudal-like) social structure of Latin America provides no incentive for self-improvement or mobility.
Ultimately, the
discourse created by the modernization and development literature focuses on the
“backward” values of the “other” and becomes the West’s justification for the continued
underdevelopment of the region. These interpretations lead to partial, misleading, and unsophisticated
treatment of complex political and economic dynamics, particularly in Latin America. They ignore the long history of
colonization and imperialism. Several notable Latin American intellectuals have countered with a critique of the development literature through dependency theory
and Marxist theories of imperialism. Writing on underdevelopment, Andre Gunder Frank (1969) focuses on exogenous factors affecting Latin American economic
development, among them the penetration of capital into the region and the asymmetrical trading relationships that were created. Celso Furtado (1986) expands
this notion and writes about the international division of labor and Latin America’s weakened position as the producer of primary raw materials for Europe and the
United States. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1979) suggest that the domestic
economic processes in Latin American
states emerged from this relationship of dependency. More notably Raul Fernandez and Jorge Ocampo (1974) argue that the Marxist
theory of imperialism provides an explanation for the persistence of “backwardness” and identifies the basic contradictions in Latin America as between imperialism
and the Latin American nations. This Latin American scholarship, with rich critiques of mainstream modernization theory, has been dismissed, however, because it
comes from non-mainstream academic and professional circles. Doty (1996: 164) views scholarship as an inventory in which non-Western scholarship is excluded
because it is not regarded as legitimate. While dependency theory and Marxist theories of imperialism were briefly allowed into the inventory in the late 1980s and
the 1990s, they quickly went out of fashion and are now excluded from the canon, easily dismissed and ultimately illegitimate. Dale Johnson (1981) suggests that
these theories were rejected for their determinism—the assumption that Latin American nations had no agency in their own economic development. Others
criticized them for assuming that economic development in its neoliberal form was a positive goal and still others for providing no prescriptions for change or
alternatives to modernization. Scholars critical of modernization theories, including Theotônio dos Santos (1971) and Fernandez and Ocampo (1974), addressed all
of these critiques and argued that these theories were not in fact deterministic but, rather, merely sought to highlight exogenous historical processes, including the
penetration of industrialized capital, that had affected endogenous economic and political dynamics in Latin America and led to the persistence of “backwardness.”
Yet dependency theory and Marxist theories of imperialism and their corresponding discourse remained marginalized, largely because the scholarship itself is not
from an industrialized society or from scholars in the mainstream of their disciplines. There
is an asymmetrical relationship between
scholars from the North (the United States) and scholars from the South (Latin America, Africa, et al.)
and even between white and nonwhite (American Latino) scholars. The literature, while rich in analysis and highlighting
critical issues, is read by many Northern scholars from an impoverished, reductionist, and simplistic perspective. Discursive authorship is thus not equal, and clearly
Western representations exert hegemony by constructing discourses, representations, and narratives from underdeveloped regions as illegitimate (Dunn, 2003). It
is important, then, to understand and deconstruct discourses, unmasking their political and economic motivations and consequences. The
goal, as Lynch (1999)
to expose the material and ideological power relationships that underlie them—in the current
case, U.S. imperialism—and to examine counterhegemonic alternatives. The U.S. Discourse on Mexico
points out, is
The original U.S. discourse on Mexico dates back to the 1800s, when
Mexicans were depicted as an “uncivilized species—dirty,
unkempt, immoral, diseased, lazy, unambitious and despised for being peons” (Gonzalez, 2004: 8). This
discourse set the stage for the creation of what Gonzalez calls a “culture of empire,” in which the United States
made a concerted effort to dominate Mexico economically and subordinate it to U.S. corporate interests
(2004: 6). This narrative depicted the country as a huge social problem and its people as inferior to
Americans, and it continues to dominate U.S. understandings of Mexico. Sometimes this is done with the help of
Mexican politicians themselves, as in President Felipe Calderón’s extension of the hegemonic discourse of the “war on drugs.” The problem with this
contemporary representation is that it oversimplifies the country’s complex political dynamics and obscures
what is really going on. Mexico is suffering much more from extreme economic inequality, caused in
large part by U.S. economic imperialism and capital extraction (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank), than from drug-related violence. The great migration that has occurred since 1994 has been the result of a
decimated economy. While some people may leave Mexico out of fear of violence, the vast majority of the millions of emigrants have
left because of the necessity to feed their families. The discourse about drug-related violence detracts
from the recognition of this fact. Media coverage of drug-related violence and other negative reporting about Mexico have steadily increased
over the past 10–15 years and skyrocketed in the recent past. The Los Angeles Times, for example, has dedicated a web site to the series “Mexico Under Siege: The
Drug War at Our Doorstep.” It has reported, among other things, that President Calderón deployed 45,000 troops and 5,000 federal police to 18 states (Los Angeles
Times, February 3, 2010) and that there were 10,031 deaths from drug-related violence between January 1, 2007, and June 5, 2009 (Los Angeles Times, June 13,
2012). (One may question the reliability of these figures, given that on February 3, 2010, the paper had reported 9,903 such deaths since January 2007 and that on
August 18 of that year it had reported a total of 28,228.) As far back as 1997, M. Delal Baer (1997: 138), the director of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in Washington, DC, suggested that “skewed
coverage is just another example of how the U.S. media,
average Americans, and their representatives in Congress increasingly subscribe to a tabloid view of
Mexico.” He asserted that “drug and corruption stories have increased every year in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall
Street Journal, leaping from 338 in 1991, to 515 in 1996, and 538 during the first eight months of 1997 alone” (138). This was 16 years ago; one can only imagine
what the numbers are today as the drug problem in Mexico is depicted more and more as a U.S. national security problem. The U.S. State Department sent out
travel warnings in 2009, 2010, and 2011 to all U.S. universities regarding spring-break travel to Mexico, cautioning them about the increase in crime and spreading
fear about Mexico (Gomez, 2010). The same was done with the outbreak of H1N1, originally referred to as the “swine flu.” Within days of the outbreak Mexico was
under pressure from the world community and especially the United States to close down schools and heavily populated areas in order to avert the spread of the
flu. The
association of a disease named after swine with Mexico reinforced the “dirty,” “unkempt,” and
“uncivilized” representations that Gonzalez discusses. Lost on the majority of the U.S. media and, consequently, on average
Americans, however, was the fact that the outbreak originated in a town where the Smithfield Corporation, an American company with massive hog-raising
operations known to improperly handle its waste, had a factory farm (Morales, 2009). The
CDCP (2010) reported that only around
11,000 people died of the H1N1 virus between April through December of 2009, in comparison with the
average of 36,000 people dying in the United States each year of the “regular” seasonal flu. If the H1N1
flu was such an epidemic, why was no one reporting on the deaths from the regular seasonal flu in the
United States, which were clearly more numerous? A large portion of the U.S. Department of State web page on Mexico is dedicated to
warning Americans about such crime, safety, security, and health issues (U.S. Department of State, 2011). It currently advises citizens to delay
unnecessary travel to Mexico because of the drug war. One may expect this type of warning from an agency concerned with its
citizens’ welfare, but it is disturbing when the negative narrative becomes “common knowledge” and is included in government military strategic reports. In 2008
the U.S. Department of Defense published a report entitled The
Joint Operation Environment offering perspectives “on future trends, shocks,
contexts, and implications for future joint force commanders and other leaders and professionals in the national security field.” Part 3, Section C, of the report,
entitled “Weak and Failing States,” describes the “usual suspects” in this category—in Sub-Saharan
Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Discussing the concept of “rapid collapse,” it
asserts that while, “for the most part, weak and failing states represent chronic, long-term problems
that allow for management over sustained periods, the collapse of a state usually comes as a surprise,
has a rapid onset, and poses acute problems.” It goes on to suggest that “two large and important states
bear consideration for rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.” The discussion of Mexico is as
follows (U.S. Department of Defense, 2008: 35): The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial
infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will
have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any
descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American
response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone. Among the many things that
make this statement problematic is its simplification of Mexico’s political dynamics. First, it assumes that
politicians, the police, and the judiciary are separate from and therefore adversaries of criminal gangs
and drug cartels. Jorge Chabat (2002), a Mexican expert on drug trafficking and national security, challenges this
assumption, arguing that the drug cartels buy off politicians and are imbedded in political structures and
institutions. While the Mexican state has sought to clean up its politics and provide more transparency,
historically the political elite and government technocrats have used their positions of power to increase
their wealth, turning a blind eye to illicit operations. The Department of Defense statement is noteworthy
because it goes on to lay the groundwork for potential military intervention in the event that Mexico
descends into chaos. The problem here, of course, is who gets to define “chaos.” The Drug Enforcement
Administration is already preparing for such an event, maintaining a presence in Mexico (see Toro, 1999).
Representing Mexico as a potential “failing state” in the midst of violent anarchy provides the U.S.
justification for continued economic paternalism. The U.S. media and government have become
extremely effective in representing a strange and threatening foreign culture for the American audience
and thus manufacturing consent as it is considered necessary for action in Mexico, whether it be further
neoliberal economic development or military intervention. It is therefore not surprising to see the rise in negative reporting
parallel the time line of increased U.S. capital penetration into Mexico in the mid-1990s. Deconstructing the Dominant Discourse Since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823,
the United States has historically operated as if it had the moral high ground in the international community. It has contrasted its supposed traditional commitment
to human dignity, liberty, and self-determination with the barbaric brutality of the “others” (Said, 1994). This
American exceptionalism has
been used to legitimate its domination over other countries. The notion of “world responsibility” is the
rationale for its economic or military endeavors. Because of this, it may be instructive to look at its track record on some of the issues for
which it criticizes other countries. Because the current negative discourse about Mexico is constructed around crime, comparing crime statistics in the two countries
is helpful in deconstructing it. In 2010 there were an estimated 23 million reported crimes of violence and/or theft in the United States. Of these 1,246,248 were
violent crimes,2 403 per 100,000 people, and of these 14,748 were homicides (U.S. Department of Justice, 2010a). A murder is committed every 31 minutes (Watt,
2008). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1.35 million high school students in 2009 were either threatened or injured with a weapon on
school property at least once, while approximately 1.2 million acknowledged having carried a weapon on school property (CDCP, 2009). In the 2007–2008 school
year, a record 34 Chicago public school students were killed (IOSCC, 2008). The proportion of prisoners to its population in the United States is at an all-time high,
with 1.6 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation in the world; 1 in every 31 adults is in some part of the criminal justice system (U.S. Department
of Justice, 2010b). This proportion of prisoners to the total population is six times the world average (IOSCC, 2008). This snapshot does not include crimes
committed or provoked by U.S. military aggression abroad.3 However, these statistics clearly do not justify any assertion that the United States is a “failing state.”
Yet such data and observations are used to perpetuate a discourse that jumps to that conclusion about Mexico. In comparison, Mexico’s rate of homicides per
100,000 inhabitants as recently as 2007 was 8.1 and has only risen in response to a heavy government crack-down in what Youngers and Rosin (2005) call the
“cockroach effect.” The most recent data suggest that in 2011 the rate was 23.7, still middling and actually low compared with those of other Latin American
nations (see Table 1). The United States, with a rate of 4.8, is barely better than Uruguay and much worse than Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany.
Compared with other industrialized countries, it lags behind, closer to “chaos.” While proportionally more people are victims of homicide in Mexico than in the
United States, Mexico
is far from being an extreme outlier. It is safe to say that there are many countries in Latin America that have similar
United States faces similar issues within its own
borders. Yet, Mexico is scrutinized much more closely and is the only one viewed with concern as a
possible “failing state.” Furthermore, while more people are killed in Mexico, more people kill themselves in the United States. Are we to conclude,
then, that people in the United States are more self-destructive or psychotic? No one would argue that U.S. society is disintegrating
into chaos because a sizable number of its citizens want to end their lives. Yet similar figures are used to
arrive at this very conclusion when regarding Mexico. Some argue that Mexico is scrutinized because it borders the United States in a
post-9/11 world or because of corruption or the ineffectiveness of the Mexican judicial system. And while these critiques have some merit, the negative
discourse that dominates is about the violence, not about Mexican corruption or their ineffective
institutions. If looked at historically, Mexico’s violence problem has remained relatively constant over the course
of the past 25 years, while the negative discourse has grown exponentially in this same time period. The
condescending discourse perpetuated in the United States makes it seem as though Mexico were
becoming uninhabitable, when in reality this is far from the case. While many residents do have concerns about the violence
if not much more serious problems of crime and violence, while at the same time the
and it has in fact affected tourism, there are still people in Mexico going about their daily lives. There is a web site called “The Truth about Mexico” that is dedicated
to making this very point. It was created by Americans who have moved to Mexico to live but is now used by Mexicans as well to challenge the dominant discourse.
One story, entitled “Mexico Murder Rate Reality Check,” suggests that, according to the Mexican attorney general in 2009, “the drug-related violence has scared
away tourists and prompted some commentators to warn that Mexico risks collapse . . . but the country registered about 11 homicides per 100,000 residents last
year, down from 16 in 1997” (quoted in Brown, 2009). This was at the height of the negative reporting and was still a decrease of 30 percent since 1997 at that
point in time. An article regarding the U.S. State Department’s spring-break advisory by Frank Koughan (2009), a former CBS News 60 Minutes producer who has
been living in Queretaro since 2006, suggests that “consumers of American media could easily get the impression that Mexico is a blood-soaked killing field, when in
fact the bulk of the drug violence is happening near the border. (In fact, one way of putting this would be that Mexico is safe as long as you stay far, far away from
the US.)” While there may have been an increase in the numbers since 2009, the dominant discourse at the time was at least as horrific as today’s, even though the
statistics show that between 1997 and 2009 homicide rates had actually fallen and have since grown in proportion to the expansion of the war on drugs. There
has also been strong public pressure and civic engagement regarding the violence. One example is the Marcha por la
Paz, a march led by the poet-journalist Javier Sicilia seeking to draw attention to the government’s militaristic tactics for fighting narcotrafficking, which have only
increased and intensified the violence (Samano and Alonso, 2011). The march in 2011 attracted tens of thousands of participants from 38 cities in different states in
Mexico and from 26 other countries. Yet, the average television viewer in the United States never hears about events like this or about the people who have been
fighting to end the violence. Is there drug violence in Mexico? Yes, but this does not make Mexico a “failing state.” While people are victims of drug violence in
Mexico, in the United States they are also victims of drug, gang, or random violence and more recently of mass shootings. Both
countries experience
senseless violence that stems from complex societal and political dynamics that cannot be easily
simplified. It is essential that the dominant narrative be deconstructed in order to see why such
narratives are perpetuated to begin with, which in the case of Mexico brings us back to continued
economic domination. Implications of the Dominant Discourse The importance of the drug-related violence story lies in its masking the
nature of U.S. involvement in Mexico’s social and economic problems. It perpetuates a relationship of imperialism between the
United States and Mexico that manifests itself in NAFTA, International Monetary Fund and World Bank
lending policies, and direct intervention in Mexico’s “sovereign” internal politics disguised as economic
development and military assistance to help bring order to Mexico. Mexican politicians have bought the story and have been
willing collaborators with economic development to “help” Mexico. Former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his Institutional Revolutionary Party vigorously
pursued NAFTA as a mechanism for injecting foreign capital into Mexico’s ailing economy (Castañeda, 1993). Jaime Serra, a former secretary of trade, and J. Enrique
Espinoza, an economist formerly on the council of economic advisers to the president of Mexico, have fervently proclaimed NAFTA a resounding success (Serra and
Espinoza, 2002a), pointing to increased foreign direct investment as evidence. However, free trade has led only to the enrichment of a few monopolistic
corporations in the United States while the economic situation of Mexico’s people deteriorates (Robledo, 2006). Gilbert Gonzalez and Raul Fernandez (2003: 54)
argue that “NAFTA is just one of the most recent examples of U.S. domination over Mexico and how it continues to misdevelop and tear apart the socioeconomic
integrity of that society.” They
describe NAFTA as having two purposes: to “guarantee a free hand to U.S.
enterprises willing and able to invest in Mexico to take advantage of that country’s cheaper wages” and
to “deny in various forms and degrees to other economic powers the advantage of operations in and
exporting from Mexico.” In effect this means continuing Mexico’s long history as a U.S. economic colony, providing cheap labor, raw materials, and
manufactures for consumption in the United States while restricting Mexico’s access to the U.S. market. NAFTA called for the privatization of state companies and
the flexibilization of the labor market through “restrictions on wage increases, curtailment of vacations and sick-leave time, extensions of workweek, and increased
management powers” (Gonzalez and Fernandez, 2003: 55). This
process was supposed to lead to an opening for investment,
economic growth, and access to diversified export markets for Mexico. The impact of NAFTA on Mexican
agriculture has been greater because agricultural production was once the foundation of Mexico’s
national development. State investment in agriculture was reduced by 95.5 percent and credit made available to the rural sector by 64.4 percent
(Quintana, 2004: 251). Disinvestment in Mexican agriculture has meant that agricultural enterprises are unable to compete with subsidized U.S. commodities. The
United States maintains domestic subsidies that allow it to export corn at 30 percent below the cost of production, wheat at 40 percent below, and cotton at 57
percent below—a practice known as “asymmetrical trading” and “dumping” and deemed illegal in world commerce (Fernandez and Whitesell, 2008). Serra and
Espinoza (2002b) suggest that this is a nonissue because of NAFTA’s tariff-rate quota system, which charges tariffs for exceeding the import quotas. However,
Cavanaugh and Anderson (2002) point out that under NAFTA the tariffs were mandated to be phased out in 2008, and even while they were intact the Mexican
government declined to collect them. The outcome has been the disappearance of profitability for Mexican national agricultural producers. Five years after NAFTA,
corn had lost 64 percent of its value and beans lost 46 percent while at the same time prices of staple consumer goods rose 257 percent (Quintana, 2004: 256).
Despite these figures the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (OUSTR, 2006) points to the growth of Mexican agricultural exports to the United States by US$5.6
billion during the past 12 years as proof of the success of NAFTA. However, producers continue to abandon agricultural endeavors en masse, vacating 1.6 million
previously cultivated hectares (3.95 million acres) in the first eight years of NAFTA (Quintana, 2004: 256). Peter Goodman (2007) tells the story of Ruben Rivera, who
sat on a bench in a forlorn plaza, rather than working on his seven-acre farm. He used to grow tomatoes and onions, hiring 150 workers to help at harvest. Now he
doesn’t even bother to plant. He can buy onions in the supermarket more cheaply than he can grow them. A crop of tomatoes yields less than the taxes. He lives off
the $800 sent home monthly by his three sons, who run a yard work business in Macon, Ga. Stories like this have become all too common. As Quintana (2004: 256)
puts it, “One of the historically great agricultural civilizations of the world [now places] its food supplies in foreign hands.” Mexico now imports 95 percent of its
edible oils, 40 percent of its beef, pork, and other meat products, 30 percent of its corn, and 50 percent of its rice. NAFTA has resulted in the “complete inability of
the Mexican nation to produce the food required to feed its own people” (Gonzalez and Fernandez, 2003: 57). In the end, “free trade” has made Mexico a
completely open market for U.S. products while U.S. producers are guarded against Mexico’s products by subsidies and tariffs. NAFTA
was never
meant as a development policy for Mexico or a policy to help cure its social ills. It was a policy of U.S.
economic expansion for the purpose of deepening U.S. hegemony while allowing the continued
extraction of capital. It was promoted by huge U.S. multinational corporations as benevolent economic
development to allow them to integrate themselves into the Mexican market without having to deal
with that country’s requirements and legislative issues. Mark Weisbrot (2004) of the Center of Economic Policy Research in
Washington suggests that, had Mexico’s economy grown at the same pace from 1980 to the present as it did in the period from 1960 to 1980, today it would have
the same standard of living as Spain. . . . To have 25 years of this rotten economic performance, you’d have to conclude something is wrong. . . . It
is hard to
make the case that Mexico’s aggregate economic performance would have been even worse without
NAFTA. Not only has NAFTA not accomplished the growth propulsion its supporters promised in Mexico
but it has had devastating social costs for Mexican society. Poverty in rural areas has risen significantly
from 37 percent in 1992 to 52.4 percent in 2002, with 86.2 percent of rural inhabitants living in poverty (Quintana, 2004: 257). NAFTA
has left nearly half of Mexico’s 106 million people, 51 percent of the total population in 2010, living in poverty, causing the mass displacement of workers and
forced migration (Dickerson, 2006; World Bank, 2013). Since 1994 an average of 600 peasants a day (at least 1.78 million people) have migrated from rural areas,
many to northern cities along the U.S.-Mexican border and others into the United States (Quintana, 2004: 258). Migration
means family
disintegration and the destruction of the social fabric of Mexico. Many of these jobless displaced workers will try their luck at
crossing a militarized border into the United States. Peter Goodman (2007), interviewing Luz Maria Vazquez, a tomato picker from Jalisco, reports that six of her
brothers and sisters are in the United States, most of them without papers. More than 11 million Mexicans (a conservative estimate) now live in the United States
without documents, and 7 million of them immigrated after NAFTA, between 1994 and 2005 (Passel, 2006).4 Clearly the politics in Mexico are much more complex
than the drug story in the United States makes them out to be. Conclusion The
dominant discourse about Mexico in the United
States has a long history and has affected the way Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Chicanos are viewed and
treated. While much has changed since the 1800s, the current discourse about Mexico serves the same basic purpose. The United States
legitimizes its expansionist economic foreign policy in terms of the burden of civilizing, uplifting, and
promoting development in less developed countries, beginning with its neighbor to the south (Gonzalez, 2004:
185). It employs a foreign policy that advances its imperialist interests. U.S. government and media agencies generate
a representation of Mexico that has provided avenues for very specific courses of action. Promoting a
discourse of a “chaotic,” “unruly,” “failing state” has provided justification for direct U.S. military
intervention, especially along the border, now potentially with armed drones (O’Reilly, 2013), and legitimized the
penetration of U.S. capital interests in Mexico at the expense of Mexico’s own economy and, more important, its people. Even at its most basic level, we can only
call this imperialism. While Mexico has an ineffective justice system, government corruption, and crime and drug-related violence, these are problems that most
modern nation-states also face. In fact, the United States is itself heavily implicated in the drug trade, holding by far the largest stocks of cocaine in the world and
being Mexico’s primary market (INCB, 2008). It is also the largest supplier of arms not just to Mexico but to all of Latin America (Chomsky, 2012). Latin
American countries are working together toward the decriminalization of drugs, which has produced
very promising results in Portugal, while, in stark contrast, ”the coercive procedures of the 40-year U.S.
drug war have had virtually no effect . . . while creating havoc through the continent” (Chomsky, 2012). But the conversation doesn’t revolve
around what the United States can do to clean up its own act; it is about “othering” Mexico. The United States has had a tremendous
impact on Mexico’s internal dynamics regarding migration, unemployment, poverty, and crime. Its
economic imperialism has contributed to the weakness of Mexico’s economy and as a result its internal
politics. NAFTA has stunted Mexican economic growth and led to the mass displacement of workers,
forcing them into job markets that they would not have considered had they had access to jobs with dignity. For many it has led to migration to the United States,
while for others it has meant lives of crime and violence. But no one discusses this, and it gets no media coverage because the focus is not on the failed U.S.imposed neoliberal economy but on drug-related violence. This is done purposefully, since the story does specific work and is perpetuated because it benefits U.S.
economic interests and works as a mechanism of justification for continued U.S. imperialism. For the most part, the concerns that the vast majority of people
experience the vast majority of the time on a daily basis are not about these drug-violence outrages. Instead they are economic—how they will pay their bills and
clothe, shelter, and feed their families. Even in the conversation about immigration reform, no one discusses the fundamental right that people have to live and
grow in the place they consider home. No one discusses that people choose to migrate only when they have no other options. U.S. imperialism has led to people’s
having no other option. Representing Mexico as a “failing state” allows the United States to evade responsibility for creating many of these problems in Mexico
while also providing a powerful story to convince American citizens and Mexican politicians that U.S. economic intervention in Mexico is necessary. The irony of it all
is that NAFTA continues to be justified through a narrative of a chaotic and violent Mexico needing economic programs of development to solve its social problems,
when in fact it is the penetration of U.S. capital that has caused many of those problems. The meta-narrative helps to perpetuate an asymmetrical power
relationship between Mexico and the United States. The
dominant discourse provides the veil for this “imperial encounter”
to become a mission of salvation rather than of economic conquest. In the end, the way Mexico is
represented in the United States has little to do with its actual internal political or social dynamics,
instead it is a means to expand and maintain U.S. imperialism in Mexico. Over the past 150 years, one
thing that has stayed the same is Mexico’s position as an economic colony of the United States, a place
to go for cheap labor, raw materials, and cheap manufactures for consumption at home. Focusing on drugs and
violence obscures this. While Mexico does have serious issues of drug-related crime, this crime is not the most severe of Mexico’s problems. Those problems are
poverty and unemployment and the country’s inability, for the first time in its history, to feed its own people. Mexico
is indeed “under siege”—
not by drug lords but by U.S. economic interests—and this has had disastrous social costs for the
Mexican people. This is not, however, the discourse we engage in. That discourse is purposefully absent.
Legal Protections Link
Legal protections are a sovereign regulation of life that is the foundation of modern
politics. Life under the sovereign is life stripped of value and that may be killed with
impunity *gendered language under erasure.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, Stanford UP, p. 87-89)
<4.1. "For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide
life and death." Foucault's statement at the end of the first volume of the History of Sexuality (La
volonte, p. 119) sounds perfectly trivial. Yet the first time we encounter the expression "right over life
and death" in the history of law is in the formula vitae necisquepotestas, which designates not sovereign
power but rather the unconditional authority [potesta] of the pater over his sons. In Roman law, vita is
not a juridical concept but instead indicates either the simple fact of living or a particular way of life, as
in ordinary Latin usage (in a single term, Latin brings together the meaning of both zoe and bios). The
only place in which the word vita acquires a specifically juridical sense and is transformed into a real
terminus technicus is in the very expression vitae necisque potesta . In an exemplary study, Yan Thomas
has shown that que in this formula does not have a disjunctive function and that vita is nothing but a
corollary of nex, the power to kill ("Vita," pp. 5o8-9). Life thus originally appears in Roman law merely as
the counterpart of a power threatening death (more precisely, death without the shedding of blood,
since this is the proper meaning of necare as opposed to mactare). This power is absolute and is
understood to be neither the sanction of a crime nor the expression of the more general power that
lies within the competence of the pater insofar as he is the head of the domus: this power follows
immediately and solely from the father-son relation (in the instant in which the father recognizes the
son in raising him from the ground, he acquires the power of life and death over him). And this is why
the father's power should not be confused with the power to kill, which lies within the competence of
the father or the husband who catches his wife or daughter in the act of adultery, or even less with the
power of the dominus over his servants. While both of these powers concern the domestic jurisdiction
of the head of the family and therefore remain, in some way, within the sphere of the domes, the vitae
necisque potestas attaches itself to every free male citizen from birth and thus seems to define the very
model of political power in general. Not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or
sacred life) is the originary political element.
The Romans actually felt there to be such an essential affinity between the father's vitae necisque
potestas and the magistrate's imperium that the registries of the ius patrium and of the sovereign power
end by being tightly intertwined. The theme of the pater imporiosus who himself bears both the
character of the father and the capacity of the magistrate and who, like Brutus or Manlius Torquatus,
does not hesitate to put the treacherous son to death, thus plays an important role in the anecdotes
and mythology of power. But the inverse figure of the father who exerts his vitae necisque potestas
over his magistrate son, as in the case of the consul Spurius Cassius and the tribune Caius Flaminius, is
just as decisive. Referring to the story of the latter, who was dragged down from the rostra by his father
while he was trying to supersede the authority of the senate, Valerius Maximus defines the father's
potestas, significantly, as an imperium privatum. Thomas, who has analyzed these episodes, could write
that in Rome the patria potestaswas felt to be a kind of public duty and to be, in some way, a "residual
and irreducible sovereignty" ("Vita," p. 528). And when we read in a late source that in having his sons
put to death, Brutus "had adopted the Roman people in their place," it is the same power of death that
is now transferred, through the image of adoption, to the entire people. The hagiographic epithet
"father of the people," which is reserved in every age to the leaders invested with sovereign authority,
thus once again acquires its originary, sinister meaning. What the source presents us with is therefore a
kind of genealogical myth of sovereign power: the magistrate's irnperium is nothing but the father's
vitae necisque potestas extended to all citizens. There is no clearer way to say that the first
foundation of political life is a life that may be killed, which is politicized through its very capacity to
be killed.> <87-89>
Security Link
Rhetoric of security constructs an abject ‘outside’ that must be violently suppressed to
comply with dominant identities.
Campbell 2k5
[David - professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University in the U.K., “The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire,
and the Sports Utility Vehicle,” American Quarterly 57.3, p. 947-948]
<As an imagined community, the state can be seen as the effect of formalized practices and ritualized
acts that operate in its name or in the service of its ideals. This understanding, which is enabled by
shifting our theoretical commitments from a belief in pregiven subjects to a concern with the
problematic of subjectivity, renders foreign policy as a boundary-producing political performance in
which the spatial domains of inside/outside, self/other, and domestic/foreign are constituted through
the writing of threats as externalized dangers. [End Page 947] The narratives of primary and stable
identities that continue to govern much of the social sciences obscure such an understanding. In
international relations these concepts of identity limit analysis to a concern with the domestic
influences on foreign policy; this perspective allows for a consideration of the influence of the internal
forces on state identity, but it assumes that the external is a fixed reality that presents itself to the
pregiven state and its agents. In contrast, by assuming that the identity of the state is performatively
constituted, we can argue that there are no foundations of state identity that exist prior to the
problematic of identity/difference that situates the state within the framework of inside/outside and
self/other. Identity is constituted in relation to difference, and difference is constituted in relation to
identity, which means that the "state," the "international system," and the "dangers" to each are
coeval in their construction. Over time, of course, ambiguity is disciplined, contingency is fixed, and
dominant meanings are established. In the history of U.S. foreign policy—regardless of the radically
different contexts in which it has operated—the formalized practices and ritualized acts of security
discourse have worked to produce a conception of the United States in which freedom, liberty, law,
democracy, individualism, faith, order, prosperity, and civilization are claimed to exist because of the
constant struggle with and often violent suppression of opponents said to embody tyranny,
oppression, anarchy, totalitarianism, collectivism, atheism, and barbarism. This record demonstrates
that the boundary-producing political performance of foreign policy does more than inscribe a
geopolitical marker on a map. This construction of social space also involves an axiological dimension in
which the delineation of an inside from an outside gives rise to a moral hierarchy that renders the
domestic superior and the foreign inferior. Foreign policy thus incorporates an ethical power of
segregation in its performance of identity/difference. While this produces a geography of "foreign"
(even "evil") others in conventional terms, it also requires a disciplining of "domestic" elements on the
inside that challenge this state identity. This is achieved through exclusionary practices in which
resistant elements to a secure identity on the "inside" are linked through a discourse of "danger" with
threats identified and located on the "outside." Though global in scope, these effects are national in
their legitimation.12>
Link Section—K affs
Race/Identity L
The affirmatives subscriptions to a particular mode of being created by the state
reaffirms the sovereigns control over the populace which allows the state to commit
endless violence towards bodies marked for violence Sheth 2011 [Falguni A., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory Hampshire College.
“Foucault and Ontopolitics: Another Framework to Think about Race, Law, and Power” April 11th]
As such, race, or racialization,
is the transformation of a threat into a set of categories by which to divide
populations against themselves—bio-politically, culturally, 86 Ibid., 30-31. My emphasis. Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth 37 socially, etc. It is one
method by which sovereign power can fulfill its mandate to control and manage its populace, maintain
its hold over them. Then, it would seem that the state’s mission to divide is not dictated by random biological or material
characteristics, but rather by locating that which is potentially pernicious to sovereign power and managing it through the
technology of race: the production of a classification (medical, political, legal, cultural, moral—or some combination thereof) in
which the unruly is embedded; its subsequent naturalization or reification as an objective category; and
finally, its concealment as the expression of the relationship between sovereign power and its populace as one of potential violence.
Any or all of these technological dimensions may be augmented or informed through bio-politics; however, there must be an “unruly” threat that drives the
Foucauldian manifestation of race. We could understand the threat at level of “onto-power.” That is to say, the
threat might manifest itself
along the surface of ontological distinctions that are infused in the political and cultural discourse of
enemies and friends. Onto-power would still target bodies, and utilize bio-politics to create decisions about who will be forced to live and who will be
allowed to die, but it manifests itself alongside the biological, in seeking out the target of race through an ontological taxonomy that decides who fits into “man-asspecies,” and who fits into a different, “sub-” species. In the case of Hayder and Bah, they joined thousands of Muslims in being the targets of suspicion,
women, like their male Muslim counterparts, are met with hostility, suspicion, and extreme
harassment because they will return to this dimension of technology in transgressed a prevailing cultural and political regime that might be best
harassment, and persecution. These
described as “Western” secular liberalism. But their “crimes” are not the ones for which they were detained or arrested, nor are they selected on biopolitical
grounds (although they are certainly acted up through biopower). Rather, their common infraction is their conspicuously heterogeneous comportment—openly
subscribing to a particular mode of being designated as “Muslim” or “Islamic” culture. Similarly, all adherents of
Islam, violent or non-violent, secular or pious, are indiscriminately associated as “threatening” and dangerous. These
conflations form the basis of their public representation as a threat or a potential insurgence to a dominant discourse or regime. In turn, this threat prompts a
disciplinary framework that will manage, suppress, or force out the potential threat so that it does not upset or overturn the existing regime. Biopower is at work
here, through disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms. But so are other important forces: sovereign authority is hardly obsolete. It is alive and well in the personas
of presidents, legislators, and judges. And ontological
regimes, cast in terms of procedural classifications, seem to work
alongside biopower in the casting of certain groups in racial terms. The race war, too, is alive and well, and exercised in a
myriad of ways that can no longer masquerade as biological, but rather on the level of the ontojuridical.
Islamophobia L
We control the root cause – specifically in the context of islamaphobia
Sheth 2011 [Falguni A., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory Hampshire College.
“Foucault and Ontopolitics: Another Framework to Think about Race, Law, and Power” April 11th]
Foucault’s linking
of bio-politics and the inscription of racism is a crucial inroad to understanding politico-racial
fragmentation in contemporary society. This view is pathbreaking, since it disarticulates the scientific objectivity of race
in favor of a discursive production of race, namely where race is transcribed through the language of
biology rather being grounded in biology. Foucault’s concern, to be fair: is to illustrate one modern mode of racism, namely either the
domination of one population by another, or the elimination of heterogeneous elements from a monistic State racism (as in the case of 1930’s Germany). Still, this
analysis of biopower seems to pave the way for a reified biological transcription of race—one in which the race
literature is dominated by medical/health/biological discussions of race. Moreover, there is a burgeoning literature today that reflects myriad applications of
biopolitics to contemporary understandings of racism.6
Consider the following example: in March 2005, when the FBI detained two female Muslim teenagers from Queens, NY, on suspicion of being potential “suicide
bombers.” Initially detained for different reasons, the girls encountered each other for the first time while separately being escorted to immigration facilities in
Manhattan. FBI agents were alerted to Tashnuba Hayder five months earlier when her parents, Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh, reported that she had run
away. Fearing that Tashnuba would elope with a stranger in Michigan, her parents trusted the local police to find her. They canceled their request after she
returned home voluntarily. Five months later, FBI agents searched Tashnuba’s room and computer.62 After an initial interrogation, and on the false pretext of an
immigration violation—her mother’s—they detained her at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) offices in Manhattan. The FBI was
concerned by Tashnuba’s religious fervor, apparent in her propensity to listen to sermons by fundamentalist imams over the Internet, her chatroom comments
about those sermons, class notes from a discussion on the religious ethics of suicide, and perhaps most symbolically, her decision to observe full purdah “full Islamic
veil.” Their suspicions increased when Tashnuba and her government escorts encountered Adamah Bah in front of the BCIS building at 26 Federal Plaza. Adamah,
who wears the hijab, was originally detained because she missed a USCIS appointment in order to go on a high school field trip to see Christos’ “Gates” exhibit in
Central Park. During their encounter, Tashnuba Hayder and Adamah Bah reportedly acknowledged each other with an unspecified “traditional Muslim greeting,”
most likely “salaam aleikum.”63 That greeting, combined with their orthodox dress, were the basis of the FBI’s concern that the teenagers might be collaborators as
“potential” suicide bombers in a terrorist conspiracy.64 Both teens were sent to a detainment facility in Pennsylvania without access to lawyers or parents, where
they were subjected to constant interrogation for seven weeks. Now, at the level of regulatory power, we can account for this event by turning to the USA PATRIOT
Act, passed in October 2001, but also a spate of immigration and antiterrorism laws that were enacted well before September 2001, including the 1996 Welfare and
Immigration Act, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a 1908 Conspiracy Law, a 1918 Sedition Law, and
others long on the American law books. These laws
enable federal agents to circumvent any norms against search and
seizure, and privacy. They also single out certain kinds of individuals who are deemed to be more
expendable than others. They criminalize associations with certain organizations post-facto, i.e. they will name
certain interactions that were legal one or even two decades before as now “terroristic” and therefore illegal. They name certain kinds of communications
“obscene,” and illegal. In combination with a repeal of mandatory judicial review in the case of many immigration violations ,
it becomes evident how
Muslims can be targets of persecution through regulatory and even disciplinary measures. Western Europe has
also long been interested in pushing a racial agenda that involves the regulation of Muslim women who wear the hijab and niqab65: this seems to be a departure
from biopower and of a diffuse sovereign power. Rather, it seems to be directed by a much more central sovereign authority. It is clear that these laws are at best,
tangentially connected to the politics of biopolitical racialization. But the
racism in question, the kind that has long driven domestic
politics in the United States, is even more tangential to bio-politics. Indeed, this racism has much less to do
with biology or “life”—even when it has claimed to, such as at the turn of the 20th century—and much more to do with conceptions
of domestic security, and national identity. Are bio-politics the relevant level by which to analyze this set of— racial—regulations? Moreover, at
the level of disciplinary power, we can consider the neo-panoptical public gaze which intensifies the suspicion of “racial
others” through the wearing of the hijab and full purdah. In conjunction with other gestures of Muslim devotion, the hijab or
purdah are symbols that signify a threat to a larger regime. But who decides this threat? There are also other, more violent acts—hijackings, bombings,
mass murder, insurgencies—which, especially in a post 9-11 political discourse, have come to be understood as gestures of Islamic piety. The hijab was the source of
disciplinary regulation in several regions of Europe over a decade before 9-11.66 There are various modes of discipline and regulation that are at work; but as we
know, while all populations are implicated in disciplinary and regulatory regimes, they are not implicated in the same way, same degree, nor at the same time. And
so the question arises: why the hijab? Why Muslim women? Why not Orthodox Jewish67 or Bahai or Nigerian women? Is this “racial” focus bio-political? Or is it
engaged at some other level? And who has decided that Muslim women should be targeted as terrorists?
Foucault’s framework does not appear to account for other, fundamentally existential (or ontological), vehicles
These vehicles may
by which race is expressed.68
draw on bio-power,69 or they may not, but they can still account for divisions and breaks in the population. Nor can it account for
circumscribing the scope of his
how, why and which portions of a population become targeted for discipline and regulation. Moreover, by
analysis through biopower, something insightful is gained—namely a keen understanding about the
latent operation of power that underlies all social relations. But something important is lost as well: an understanding of who will
and won’t be subject to certain kinds of power, and why this is the case. We also lose the opportunity to ask who decides who will be placed on one side of a racial
division and who will be placed on the other. And finally, it does not account for the empirical evidence that such racialization is produced through a centralized
sovereign power—a source that has not become obsolete since Hobbes, but rather persisted, albeit in a masquerade of liberal representation. These questions
must be answered in order to fill out his account.
Deleuze Link
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-and-society/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 3000-2650BC
(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”.
Capitalism Link
Critique of capitalism functions not merely on the concrete allocation of resources but
becomes disparate and violent due to linguistic patterns creating identity. This critique
of the universal imposition of identity is mutually exclusive from conventional
concrete analysis of political economy in that the actors within economies are actively
constituted by their representations.
Agamben 2k
[Giorgio – prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ. Minnesota Press, p. 82-83]
<How can thought collect Debord's inheritance today, in the age of the complete triumph of the
spectacle? It is evident, after all, that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity and linguistic
being of humans. This means that an integrated Marxian analysis should take into consideration the
fact that capitalism (or whatever other name we might want to give to the process dominating world
history today) not only aimed at the expropriation of productive activity, but also, and above all, at
the alienation of language itself, of the linguistic and communicative nature of human beings, of that
logos in which Heraclitus identifies the Common. The extreme form of the expropriation of the
Common is the spectacle, in other words, the politics in which we live. But this also means that what
we encounter in the spectacle is our very linguistic nature inverted. For this reason (precisely because
what is being expropriated is the possibility itself of a common good), the spectacle's violence is so
destructive; but, for the same reason, the spectacle still contains something like a positive possibilityand it is our task to use this possibility against it.>
Focus on production and consumption obfuscates the functioning of disciplinary
practices on laborers that are at the core of capitalism.
Lazzarato 2k5
[Maurizo - sociologist and social theorist and a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes, July 9, Multitudes,
“Biopolitics/Bioeconomics: a politics of multiplicity,”online: http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001567.php]
<Labour is a factor in production, but at the same time it is passive in itself and only finds employment
and activity thanks to a rate of investment. Foucault widens the critique and asserts that it could also
be applied to Marxian theory. Why have both classical economists and Marx paradoxically neutralised
labour ? Because their economic analysis limits itself to the study of the mechanisms of production,
exchange and consumption and thus glides over the qualitative modulations of labourers, their
choices, behaviour and decisions. Neo-liberals, on the other hand, want to study labour as an economic
conduct that operates, is rationalised and calculated by those who work. This is the theory of “human
capital”, elaborated between the 1960s and 1970s, and Foucault uses it to illustrate this passage and
deepening of the logic of government. From the standpoint of the worker, wages are not the sale price
of his labour power but his income. An income of what ? Of its capital, that is to say a human capital that
cannot be separated from its bearer, a capital that is one and the same as the worker. From the
standpoint of the worker, the problem is the growth, accumulation and amelioration of his/her
human capital.>
Gender/Sex/Race Link
Classifications of gender, sex, and race divide forms of life establishing categories of
social belonging and undermining being as pure means.
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. 128)
The coercive monologism of an all-encompassing body politic that brings the body into History by
means of the hegemonic codes and recognizable splits of gender, sex, and race, the Ur-media of
representation, is perturbed by the quivering humanity of the barely living—in pain and in pleasure—
bodies resisting, differing, sexing, living, aging, and dying, touched and touching otherwise, elsewhere.
The coming politics of this “new body of humanity,” to borrow Agamben’s phrase, 1 haunts and
exceeds the ontology of representable institutional conditions of social belonging, the apparatuses of
capturing, counting, measuring, naming, recording, appropriating, and hailing that the medical, legal,
and demographic Law establish in the name of the social bond. The problem, then, remains how to
seek out the impossible and yet necessary possibilities: how to think representation (cultural, political,
textual) without the ontological presuppositions of authoritarian self-presence; how to think the body
beyond the “ontic,” beyond the representational presuppositions of the birth to presence; how to think
the political beyond sovereignty; and, finally, how to think the language of the political beyond
denomination. Facing this multifaceted problem entails taking the risk of facing and witnessing the
bodily self and human sociality in ways not assimilated or submitted to the representational
epistemes required by the metaphysics of presence—in spite of and yet with(in) Heidegger’s
engagement with technology, language, and metaphysics. In what respect does the venture into that
risk involve us in a possibility of theorizing the limit, or theorizing at the limit? [End Page 128]
Social Resistance Link
The law requires a certain degree of social instability and resistance to preserve its
functioning. The promotion of social outburst is necessary to sustain the law as a
method of domination.
Agamben 2k5 (Giorgio - Univ. Verona Aesthetics Prof, State of Exception, Univ Chicago Press, p. 59-60)
4.6 The stakes in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of exception can now be
defined more clearly. The dispute takes place in a zone of anomie that, on the one hand, must be
maintained in relation to the law at all costs and, on the other, must be just as impla¬cably released and
freed from this relation. That is to say, at issue in the anomie zone is the relation between violence and
law-in the last anal¬ysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action. While Schmitt attempts
every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking
every time to assure it-as pure violence-an existence outside of the law. For reasons that we must try to
clarify, this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Western politics as the gigantomachia peri
tes au¬sias, the "battle of giants concerning being," that defines Western meta-physics. Here, pure
violence as the extreme political object, as the "thing" of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to
pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which must ensure
the relation between anomic violence and law, is the counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy
aimed at capturing pure being in the meshes of the logos. That is to say, everything happens as if both
law and logos needed an anomic (or alogical) zone of suspension in order to ground their reference to
the world of life. Law seems able to subsist only by capturing anomie, just as language can subsist only
by grasping the nonlinguistic. In both cases, the conflict seems to concern an empty space: on the one
hand, anomie, juridical vacuum, and, on the other, pure being, devoid of any determination or real
predicate. For law, this empty space is the state of exception as its constitutive dimension. The relation
between norm and reality involves the suspension of the norm, just as in ontol¬ogy the relation
between language and world involves the suspension of denotation in the form of a fatigue. But just as
essential for the juridical order is that this zone-wherein lies a human action without relation to the
norm-coincides with an extreme and spectral figure of the law, in which law splits into a pure being-inforce [vigenza] without application (the form of law) and a pure application without being in force: the
force-of-law.
1nc Impact
Biopower Impact—1nc
This inscription within biopolitics is at the heart of violence allowing every ‘citizen’ to
be devalued and eliminated in the name of sovereign management.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, Stanford UP, p. 139-140)
**we don’t not agree with the authors use of gendered language
<3.3. It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which
still today, in certain coun¬tries, 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 (person) over his (their) 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
lifeof 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"(people) will be. It is even possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the
exceptio 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.> <139140>
Individualizing and identity forming methods of governance are the new predominant
forms of power. The production and administration of life lead to the maneuvering of
subjects in ways that culminate in violence, war, and genocide.
Foucault ’78 (Michel – late philosopher, History of Sexuality An Introduction Vol. 1, Vintage Books, p.
135-137) **We do not agree with this authors use of gendered language
For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and
death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria potestas that granted the father of
the Roman family the right to "dispose" of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given
them life, so he could take it away. By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classi¬cal
theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form. It was no longer considered that this power of
the sovereign over his (their) subjects could be exercised in an absolute and unconditional way, but
only in cases where the sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he
were threatened by external enemies who sought to over-throw him or contest his rights, he could then
legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without "directly
proposing their death," he was empowered to "expose their life": in this sense, he wielded an "indirect"
power over them of life and death.' But if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws,
then he could exercise a direct power over the offender's life: as punishment, the latter would be put to
death. Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute privilege: it was conditioned
by the defense of the sovereign, and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer
to the prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defend his life even if this meant the
death of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested with the formation of
that new juridical being, the sovereign?' In any case, in its modern form-relative and limited-as in its
ancient and absolute form, the right of life and death is a dissymmetrical one. The sovereign exercised
his (their) right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he
(they)evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right
which was formulated as the "power of life and death" was in reality the right to take life or let live.
Its symbol, after all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be referred to a historical type of
society in which power was exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prelevement), a subtraction
mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor
and blood, levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things,
time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated, in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to
suppress it. Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these
mechanisms of power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely
one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the
forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather
than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a
parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a lifeadministering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the
sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain,
or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and
all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But
this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism
with which it has so greatly expanded its limits -now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that
exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to adminis¬ter, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it
to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a
sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire
populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity:
massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so
many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a
turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out
destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly
informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process:
the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an
individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle-that one has to be
capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states.
But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological
existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a
recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of
life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.
Immigration impact—1nc
Surveillance has become the mechanism through which the sovereign exercises
control over immigrants and the border
Kalhan 14 – Associate Professor of Law, Drexel University. A.B., Brown University; M.P.P.M., Yale School
of Management; J.D., Yale Law School (Anil, “IMMIGRATION SURVEILLANCE,” 74 Md. L. Rev. 1)//BB
B. Immigration Enforcement as Immigration Surveillance These four sets of migration
and mobility surveillance functions identification, screening and authorization, mobility tracking and control, and information sharing - play
crucial but underappreciated roles in immigration control processes across the entire spectrum of migration
and travel. In the growing number of contexts in which immigration control activities now take place, enforcement actors engage in extensive
collection, storage, analysis, and dissemination of personal information, in order to identify individuals, screen them and authorize their
activities, enable monitoring and control over their travel, and share information with other actors who bear immigration control
responsibilities. Initially deployed for traditional immigration enforcement purposes, and expanded largely in the name of security, these
surveillance technologies and processes are qualitatively remaking the nature of immigration
governance, as a number of examples illustrate.∂ 1. Border Control∂ Despite implementation challenges, Congress and
DHS have placed new surveillance technologies at the heart of border control strategies. 162 Physical
barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border have been supplemented with advanced lighting, motion sensors,
remote cameras, and mobile surveillance systems, and DHS has deployed a fleet of unmanned aerial [42]
vehicles to monitor coastal areas and land borders. 163 To date, these drones primarily have been used to locate
illegal border crossers and individuals suspected of drug trafficking in remote areas using ultra high-resolution cameras,
thermal detection sensors, and other surveillance technologies. 164 However, drones also have been used to patrol and
monitor activities within Mexico itself. 165 In addition, government documents indicate that DHS's drones are capable
of intercepting wireless communications and may eventually incorporate facial recognition technology
linked to the agency's identification databases. 166 According to one official, CBP's drones can "scan large
swaths of land from 20,000 feet up in the air while still being able to zoom in so close that footprints can
be seen on the ground." 167 The DHS has plans both to expand its fleet of drones and to increase their
surveillance capabilities, and immigration reform proposals in Congress would significantly build upon
these recent expansions. 168
Ontology Impact—1nc
Biopolitics reduces the individual to a standing reserve and makes war a permanent
condition of society in which all individuals are implicated. Once everything is
rendered replaceable there can be no end to destruction.
MITCHELL 2005, ANDREW J., Stanford University, “HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM,” Research in
Phenomenology 35, 181-218>
<<<<see above for highlighted card^
With everything available as standing-reserve, troops included, the exhaustion of resources is no longer
possible. Resources are precisely in themselves replaceable, to the extent that, in being given over to replacement, even the idea
of an “in itself ” is already drained of reality ahead of time. There are no longer any “losses” that cannot be replaced. In
other words, there is no longer any friction. All uncertainty is lost, since it is not recognized in the first place. Everything is
monitored and controlled. The whole “battle” is given over to a planning that is able to incorporate
everything it encounters, since it only ever encounters what is already planable in essence, the standingreserve.
Strategy’s demise is the ascendancy of planning. What this means is that war can now go on interminably, subject to no
other logic or obligation than its own. Nothing can resist it. But without resistance, war must end. Peace can now go on
interminably as well, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. The logic in question for both war and peace is the logic of
replacement, the obligation for each is the obligation to consume. There is no law that would supervene or subtend consumption; there is no
order outside of it that could contain it. Clausewitz’s ideal is realized in a manner that collapses the very distinctions that gave it birth. “War” is
no longer a duel; it recognizes no authority outside of itself. The name for this new amalgam of war and peace is terrorism. Terrorism is
War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their
oppositional identity in the age of value and the ersatz. Without concern for resources, consumption continues
untroubled, since war is a kind of “consumption of beings” no different from peace: “War no longer
battles against a state of peace, rather it newly establishes the essence of peace” (GA 69: 180). The essence of
peace so established is a peace that defines itself in regards to war, which binds itself inseparably to war, and which functions equivalently to
war. In either case, it is simply a matter of resource consumption and replenishment. In Clausewitzian terms, there is
perhaps too much continuity or “continuation” between war and peace, “War has become a distortion
of the consumption of beings which is continued in peace” (GA 7: 89/EP, 104). The peace that technology brings is nothing
restful; instead it is the peace of unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when there will be peace or when the war
will end. Such a question, Heidegger specifies, cannot be answered, “not because the length of the war cannot be foreseen, but because the
Clausewitz’s absolute war in the mirror of technology.
question itself asks for something which no longer is, since already there is no longer a war that would be able to come to a peace” (GA 7:
89/EP, 104; tm). The basic oppositions of Clausewitzian warfare are undone at this point, an undoing that includes the distinction between ideal
and real. It
also includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Since such distinctions depend upon a
difference between war and peace, they too can no longer apply. Everyone is now a civilian-soldier, or
neither a civilian nor a soldier—a “worker,” one might say, or otherwise put, a target. With everyone involved in the same
processes of consumption and delivery, everyone is already enlisted in advance. There are no longer any “innocent” victims or bystanders in
this, and the same holds true of terrorism. Terrorism is not the use of warfare against civilians (pace Carr), for the simple reason that there no
longer are any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for this reason we go wrong to even consider it war. Terrorism is the only
conflict available and the only conflict that is in essence available and applicable. It can have everything as its target. Terrorism
follows
from the transformation in beings indicative of the technological age. This transformation remains important at each
point of a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism and is the ultimate consequence of the abolition of war and peace; beings have become
uncommon.
The alternative is an examination of the self—by finding our own identity we can
begin to divorce ourselves from power structures. Only the alt solves—liberation fails
to free us and simply reproduces those power structures
Frost, 15--Tom, Prof of Law, Politics and Sociology @ U of Sussex, "The Dispositif Between Foucault and
Agamben," https://www.academia.edu/9151315/The_Dispositif_Between_Foucault_and_Agamben
Despite this focus upon resistance, Foucault held reservations for the politics of what I term ‘mere’
resistance, and cautioned against the equating of resistance with liberation. Decisively, Foucault
distinguishes ‘freedom’ from ‘liberation’. Whilst admitting that liberation does exist, for example in the
colonial setting, Foucault makes clear that liberation is not sufficient to define the practices of freedom
needed for individuals to define “admissible and acceptable forms of existence or political society”.xxiii
Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination that release a pre-existing identity from
an oppressive external force.xxiv Freedom bears essentially on relations of power and domination –
liberation from domination only gives way to new power relationships, which must be controlled by
practices of freedom.xxv It is these practices of freedom which allows the subject to practice selfconstruction and in turn, resist and rework the dispositifs that constitute them. ‘Mere’ resistance to
power, like liberation, has the drawback of emerging in reaction to oppression and domination by
dispositifs of control.xxvi As such it is likely to create an attachment to an identity which is formed
through that oppression, and therefore will reinforce those self-same dominating biopolitical
dispositifs.xxvii More fundamentally, due to the spectre of biopolitics and the latent role of dispositifs in
‘letting die’, such a resistance and attempt to escape the dispositif will only, almost paradoxically, end
up repeating its logic of deciding and regulating life and death. This is why Foucault sees power, and the
dispositif, as imposing on the subject “a law of truth ... which he must recognise and which others have
to recognise in him”.xxviii Instead, the practice of freedom is a ‘limit-experience’: The idea of a limitexperience that wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me ... however erudite my
books may be, I’ve always conceived of them as direct experiences aimed at pulling myself free of
myself, at preventing me from being the same.xxix Following this theme, we can read Foucault in ‘What
is Enlightenment?’ as supporting the claim that this practice of freedom should be considered as a way
of being: We must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos
consisting in a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of
ourselves … This philosophical ethos may be characterised as a limit-attitude … We have to move
beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.xxx The politics of liberation is not
enough to guarantee freedom, as freedom is not mere resistance to power. Freedom is the careful and
innovative deployment of power, and by extension, dispositifs, in the effort to constitute the free self. In
other words, the dispositif is needed to constitute the ethos of freedom: I do not think that a society can
exist without power relations … The problem, then, is ... to acquire the rules of law, the management
techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these
games of power with as little domination as possible.xxxi This game of power is agonistic. There is no
‘essential freedom’ to be found, but a ‘permanent provocation’ between the self and the dispositifs of
power relations.xxxii The key task is to “refuse what we are”, to “promote new forms of subjectivity
through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several
centuries”.xxxiii The creation of new forms of subjectivity involves freedom as a practice which requires
the subject to self-create themselves anew, taking into account the dispositifs which constrain and
control, and enabling the individual to discern the types of actions and interventions that are needed to
effect change and create new subjectivities. Freedom connects the dispositif and what is always beyond,
the ‘outside’. It is here that the connection can be made to Foucault’s last essay, and his view of error as
the proper domain of life. When Foucault writes that life is that which is destined to err, we can
conclude that such a life contains the possibility to transcend dispositifs and break free of the logic of
deciding who should live and who should be left to die. Freedom is experienced at the limit of power
relations through their transgression, their erring, which is always-already a possibility, or destiny, for
individuals to enact: The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being
they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and reciprocally, transgression
would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.xxxiv The act of
freedom constitutes itself through acting at the limit of the dispositif, transgressing that limit, erring,
calling out to thought from the limit of the network of power relations, creating new subjectivities
through the very response of the dispositifs to those transgressive acts. The dispositif thus controls life,
but also is required for freedom in the form of self-creation. Crucially for this argument, this
transgressive freedom which brings about the self-creation of the new is a transcendent possibility,
which the individual effects and which power relations and dispositifs must react to in response to these
creative acts. This is why Deleuze spoke of this kind of self-relation as the ‘folding’ of power relations
back upon themselves. It is not possible to move ‘outside’ of the totalizing dispositif in terms of
liberation. However, it is possible to think from the outside, from the limit, in a manner which brings
together both the ‘inside’ of the dispositif and the ‘outside’, of which the dispositif is an operation. As
Deleuze states: The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements,
folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but
precisely the inside of the outside … The inside as an operation of the outside: in all his work Foucault
seems haunted by this theme of an inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a
folding of the sea.xxxv In acting on the individual, dispositifs produce an ‘inside’ as an “interiorisation of
the outside”.xxxvi This folding allows a subject to differentiate itself from dispositifs and no longer has
an internal dependence upon them – for Deleuze reading Foucault, there will always be a relation to
oneself that resists such dispositifs.xxxvii The individual has the potential to distance themselves from
the dispositifs that create our identity. This folding of power relations opens a space for the individual to
transgress. The question remains as to precisely how this transcendent transgressive freedom is
effected. Foucault did write of the need to bring about a “historical ontology of ourselves”,xxxviii such a
questioning of current modes of existence does, on a certain reading, suggest that if we discovered the
reality about how power operates in this world the individual can break free of its chains.xxxix This view
comes close to a Marxist view of ‘false consciousness’, and ignores the agonistic element to this reading
of Foucault.xl Rather, following Aurelia Armstrong, I draw upon comments suggesting that it is only
under the pressure of an event which makes our present identity and control problematic that we are
forced to exercise our freedom.xli Foucault suggests the following: [F]or a domain of action, a behaviour
to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to
have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These
elements result from social, economic, or political processes … their role is instigation.xlii These
transgressions or errors of life, of action, and of existing, are the transcendent experience of events
which force a questioning of the current dispositifs controlling the reality we inhabit. These errors allow
the individual to interiorize the outside, and practice freedom as a transgressive limit-experience,
agonistically questioning and forcing dispositifs to react to new subjectivities. These events do not have
to be epochal, or revolutionary.xliii As Foucault states, different processes can instigate this process –
the key is that it is the individual who responds to such instigation and practices this freedom through
their actions and errors, causing the very conception of life to be changed through an “experimental
mode of inquiry”.xliv
Racism Impact—1nc
Reduced state security leads to increased racism – without physical papers, actors
resort to biological markers for identification of illegal immigrants
Gordon 10
(Steven L., 2010 “Migrants in a ‘State of Exception” Transience, Volume 1, Issue 1, http://www2.huberlin.de/transcience/Vol1_Issue1_2010_3_21_gordon.pdf\\EJH)
However, this explanation fails to provide clarification on why nationality and not some other form of
social or economic difference is the determining feature that generates hostility. Nor does it explain the
racial component of xenophobia in South Africa. According to the national surveys conducted by SAMP
as well numerous other studies, it is always the ‘black’ foreigner from Africa that seems to constitute the
greatest possible threat (see Crush & Pendleton 2004; Crush 2008; and Landau and Segatti 2009). In a
disturbing replay of apartheid style tactics, this racial component has insinuated itself into the
identification of migrants by state authorities. Since documents can be forged, the possession of identity
books or papers is no longer considered to be a definitive indication of South African nationality.
Authorities, instead, rely on biocultural markers of difference, such as physical appearance and the
ability to speak one of South Africa’s dominant indigenous languages. During the mid 1990s, Minaar and
Hough (1996: 166--7) noted that members of the Internal Tracing Units have been known to give
suspected ‘illegal’ migrants accent tests, demanding that the suspect pronounce certain words such as
‘indololwane’ (the Zulu for 'elbow'), or 'buttonhole' or the name of a meerkat (for more information on
the ITUs see Misago et. al. 2009). Reports by the South African news media seem to indicate that these
practices have not been abandoned, and similar methods of identification were reportedly used by
antiimmigrant mobs during 20083.
The security reductions of the plan only promote a state of security later – increased
violence serves as a justification for a “state of siege”
Gordon 10
(Steven L., 2010 “Migrants in a ‘State of Exception” Transience, Volume 1, Issue 1, http://www2.huberlin.de/transcience/Vol1_Issue1_2010_3_21_gordon.pdf\\EJH)
The emerging discourse evokes a scenario in which the foreigner is depicted as illegitimate at best and
criminal at worst, and in which the notion of unsanctioned migration (whereby individuals change their
economic and social status through cross-border movement) endangers the nation’s sovereign control
over individuals or groups associated with economic and social development (Jensen and Buur 2007). In
other words, unsanctioned migration is at odds with the predominant nationalistic notions of how the
beneficiaries of national development are defined and becomes a threat to sovereign control over
economic and social reconstruction. Peberdy links this notion of economic sovereignty to a threatened
nation state, as follows: “The focus of the state on what it sees as the parasitical relationship of nonSouth Africans to the nation's resources, and the way that the state criminalizes them, suggests that the
state sees immigrants, and particularly undocumented migrants, as a threat to the nation and the post1994 nation building process (1999: 296).”
By envisioning South Africa as being ‘threatened’ by parasitical foreigners, the authorities are able to
invoke notions of ‘a state of siege’. Such a threatened position necessitates and justifies the suspension
of aspects of the constitution to protect against this threat.
Neolib Impact—1nc
The affs endorsement of the state reproduces neoliberal statist ideologies – the aff’s
enframing of the state as having the ability to order and govern beings constructs
them as a standing reserve
(or just read a cap link IDC)
Joronen 13 (Mikko, dept of geography and faculty of mathematics and natural sciences,
genius, U of Turku, http://www.mediafire.com/view/djj55v7gah3d9ms/Joronen.pdf>
Although Foucault’s discussion on the constitution of the self through the particular form of subjectivity
covers a great deal of the process of making the neoliberal state, governmentality approaches seem to
leave the question concerning the new ontology of human and non-human existence relatively
untouched. As Braun suggests, 18 governmentality does not merely rely on a rationality of self-control,
but also denotes a material process of govern- ing and measuring natural entities. Hence, it seems to
subject both human and non-human entities to the trade of calculative profit-making, not just by
reducing capabilities of citizens to the economically rational and productive conducts, but also by
enframing all things to the assemblage of ‘standing- reserves’ set available for the market-efficient use.
As David Harvey reminds us, 19 eventually neoliberalism can continue its process of accumulation only
by disposing the commons, such as clean water, through the commodi- fication and privatisation. The
neoliberal governmentality, thus, does not lead into a mere encouragement of the economically rational
conducts, but encloses all beings in terms of a uniform plane of existence: as a part of ‘enframing’
(Gestell), through which things are revealed as a usable and available set of ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand).
2According to Heidegger, the emergence of the apparatus of ‘enframing’ (Gestell) is fundamentally
rooted in the historical process where the modern techniques originally developed for controlling the
nature became turned back to us. 21 In the process, both the modern subject and the modern nature of
paralysed objects were sucked up into standing-reserves and thus revealed as an enframed array
available for the use of calculative machinations. Apparently such ontological shift has had massive
consequences: enframing can take place through an unlimited number of guises, practices and material
settings, since it works by creating certainty on the availability, usability and controllability of things and
subjects. Through the apparatus of enframing, defined by Heidegger as the “gathering together of that
setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering,
as a standing-reserve”, 22 subjects and objects are simply made available for the power to control,
calculate and order them with predictable certainty. As a number of studies have pointed out,
enframing is able to measure different sets of practices, discourses and material relations related, for
instance, to creative industries, 23 carbon economy, 24 colonialism, 25 for- est conservation, 26
globalisation, 27 and science, 28 and should be understood above all as a broader political order based
on metaphysical positioning of entities.
This statist ideology results in the enframing of beings where they are reduced to their
utility to the state—destroys value to life and causes nomadic homelessness
Joronen 13 (Mikko, dept of geography and faculty of mathematics and natural sciences, genius,
U of Turku, http://www.mediafire.com/view/djj55v7gah3d9ms/Joronen.pdf>
As a modality of enframing, the process of neoliberalisation has evi- dently created an entire array of
governmental politics actualised through the different orders, possibilities, and positions of things. First
of all, as Foucault writes, neoliberalism denotes an ethical order defining the proper constitu- tion of the
self. In neoliberalism, every action human subjects attempt to recognise as an end of their actions
becomes assimilated to the economy of market rationality, to the robust calculations of costs against
the bene- fits. Hence, human existence is solely caught up to serve the nihilist utility of maximum profit.
Under such ethos, or better, under such inversion of ethos, human existence is reduced to a nihilist
framework constituted by the arrangements efficiently implementing seemingly value neutral means.
Enframing thus represents everything that is nihilist in a contemporary world-economy: planetary
homelessness, calculative aimlessness, mischief of other forms of rationalities, and the constant
devaluation of nature and human existence as mere stocks of profits. 29 As Zizek writes, global capitalism is a “truth-without-meaning”, a worldless constellation capable of accommodating itself to any
cultural and material setting. 30 In ‘enframing’, a calculative regulation of all domains of life becomes a
fundamental goal of its own. As Heidegger prudently wrote as early as 1939, 31 the humanity seems to
be producing itself in such a manner that the “absolute meaningless is valued as the one and only
meaning”. The preser- vation of such nihilism appears not only as “a human domination of the globe”,
but also as a mode of existence sucked up to the process where the ‘will to calculate’ fumbles its own
strengthening. Hence, ‘enframing leads into a nihilist mode of subjectivity, where the human will is challenged to will more of the optimal calculations. Heidegger makes a great effort, in the four-book series
of Nietzsche lectures in particular, in order to show how such production of the nihilist mode of
revealing was inaugu- rated by Nietzsche’s notion of will to power. Through the ‘will to power’, beings
are revealed as makeable, as something dragged under the strength- ening power of human willing and
machinations. Eventually, the will wills nothing but its own empowerment, its will to will more of itself.
In the neoliberal modality of homo economicus this ‘will to will’ turns into a ‘will to profit’ evidently
following the same ontological logic of self-increasing calculations. As a consequence, human beings
turn into technical subjects self-controlling their conducts through the value-neutral calculation of the
means for the maximum profit. In a neoliberal common sense, we are hence not only part of the value
neutral and de-politicised economic nihilism, but also enframed, positioned, and tranquilised by the selfoptimising drive of calculative arrangements
The alt is existential resistance—only by affirming life from an ontological standpoint
can we reveal our true individuality
Joronen 13 (Mikko, dept of geography and faculty of mathematics and natural sciences, genius,
U of Turku, http://www.mediafire.com/view/djj55v7gah3d9ms/Joronen.pdf>
As Giorgio Agamben has argued, by being self-consciously Heideggerian, Foucault’s understand- ing of
the historical regimes of power is grounded on a more original relation between the constituted (or
actualised) forms of power and the constituting power of potentiality. While the constituting power
works as a condition of possibility for the constituted modes of power to emerge, all histori- cal
actualisations of power intrinsically depend on the suspension of the potentialities of constituting
power, on their concealment. 44 In this sense, constituting power has a similar ontological structure
with Aristotle’s notion of potentiality: it maintains itself without ever fully passing into actuality, without
being exhausted into actualisations. 45 It is not my intention here to go into details of Agamben’s
complex and nuanced argument in Homo Sacer, but instead to emphasise, as Agamben’s re-reading of
the distinction between potentiality and actuality indicates, how the coalescence of state power with
neoliberal governmentality con- stitutes politics at the domain of ontology. The constituting power does
not merely refer to the ontological possibility for the constituted modes of con- stituted power, but also
to the fundamental possibility for the political action as such. Accordingly, also the question of
resistance needs to be explored and confronted at this proper level of ontology: as a question of
existential resistance. In order to scrutinise the ontological implications Agamben’s distinction has for
the question of existential resistance, it is essential to pay atten- tion to what Agamben calls in Homo
Sacer the ‘life of possibility’. It is life that opposes the operations of constituted power: it constitutes an
inex- haustible possibility, which can be never entirely corralled into constituted forms of political
power. The power of potentiality in life, thus, denotes a power to constitute, a possibility to ground new
modes of life, to be otherwise. Governmentalities of neoliberal enframing evidently close this possibility,
or to use Rancière’s words in Disagreement, 46 follow the “logic of the police”, the logic of designating
ontological positions and divisions of power rather than opening them up for the power of potential life.
The ontological resistance, hence, does not only liberate life from the grasp of ontological
monopolisations, such as neoliberal enframing, but from all coded and corralled forms of belonging,
including the state. Agamben’s thinking evidently resolves the question of politics by mov- ing it from
the sphere of actualised forms of political power to the realm of ontology. Agamben’s ontological
discussion concerning the power of life can be thus subordinated to what Heidegger defines as the
fundamental con- dition of possibility for the constitution of all ontologies: the appropriation of
revealing from the abyssal source (Ab-Grund) of open being. 47 Supported by the fact that Agamben
was heavily influenced by Heidegger’s seminars he participated in during the 1960s, 48 the eclectic
position of Agamben – with one foot in the realm of biopolitics, the politics over life, and the other in
the realm of ontology – can be re-thought from an explicitly Heideggerian perspective. Agamben,
however, accuses Heidegger precisely of ignoring what he thinks is the fundamental origin of all
revealing: the pure fact of liv- ing things. 49 Heidegger evidently goes through a great effort, at least in
his early major contribution Being and Time (1927), to separate his existential-ontological analysis of
Dasein from the analyses of life formu- lated, in particular, by the key representatives of the German
‘life-philosophy’ movement (Lebensphilosophie), Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. 50 For Heidegger,
the fundamental flaw of the Lebensphilosophie was that it never came to properly treat life in
ontological terms, that is, as a mode of being/revealing. Heidegger’s separation, however, remained
quite ambigu- ous: it is not clear whether Heidegger was able to truly recede his existential-ontological
analysis of being from the strains of life-philosophy, or whether Heidegger’s own thinking would have
evolved into its shape without the significant influence of life-philosophy in the early phase of his
thinking. 51 Moreover, the compulsive distancing of life from being may, in the end, afford nothing by a
cul-de-sac. First of all, by locating the potential, even necessary, linkages between questions of life and
being, we may find more proper ways to grasp some of the crucial contemporary forms of power and
government, such as the biopolitical techniques, which have taken life itself as the target of ontological
politics. Second, in order to grasp the onto- logical politics behind neoliberalism, and further, to enable
alternatives that have the potential to widen the scope of ontological imagination, we need to take into
account how constituted forms of life and power are framed through the different ontological
monopolisations of revealing.
Biopower = Extinction
Biopolitics culminate in extinction.
Dillon ’04 (Michael – University of Lancaster Politics Prof., “Correlating Sovereign and Biopower,” in
Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 41)
Power is commonly associated with regimes of government and governance that regularly claim
universal, metaphysical status for the rights and cornpetences that comprise them; regimes whose very
raison d'etre, in the form of state sovereignty and raison d'etat, for example, seek to limit and confine if
not altogether rid us of politics. Sovereign power, a form of rule gone global, has also come to develop
and deploy modes of destruction whose dissemination and use it finds increasingly impossible to
control because these have become integral to its propagation and survival; modes of destruction that
put in question the very issue of planetary survival for the human as well as many other species.
Despite the fashion of speaking about the demise of sovereignty, political thought and practice have to
still struggle with terrains of power throughout which the legitimating narratives, iconography and
capabilities of sovereign power remain amongst the most persistent, and powerful and threatening
globally. As it has come to dominate our understanding of rule, so sovereign power has come to limit
our imagination in relation to the possibility and to the promise of politics.
Biopower = War
The sovereign is an endless state of war
Tran-Creque 13 Bard College, interdisciplinary research, education and art community working to understand unmanned and
autonomous vehicles. By bringing together research from diverse academic and artistic perspectives which have, up until now, remained fairly
silent on the issue, we aim to encourage new creative thinking and, ultimately, inform the public debate. We want to encourage dialogue
between the tech world and the non-tech world, and explore new vocabularies in diverse disciplines. This is an online space for people to follow
the latest news, encounter disparate views, access good writing and art, find resources for research, and engage a diverse community of
thinkers and practitioners with the shared goal of understanding the drone. (Steven, Center for the Study of the Drone, “The Forever War is
Always Hungry”, July 5, 2013, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/the-forever-war-is-always-hungry/ //SRSL)
The Raw Material of Sovereignty Weizman’s question is simple. “How, after the evacuation of the
ground surface of Gaza, did bodies, rather than territories, or death, rather than space, turn into the raw
material of Israeli sovereignty?” In Weizman’s Thanato-tactics, sovereignty is simply the management of
death. The Israeli General Security Service’s assassination program, which began in 2000—before 9/11—
produced the sprawling surveillance and counterinsurgency apparatus of the occupation. But it also
provided the template and testing grounds for the United States’ own assassination program. What
Weizman is really interested in is the logic of the lesser evil, by which economizing language produces
this environment of managed death. From this perspective, collateral damage calculations are not a
humanitarian triumph limiting the scope of violence. Rather, they are a crucial part of the ideological
apparatus by which acts of state violence are rendered legal and legitimate, encompassed within the
permissible logic of forestalling greater violence. Weizman quotes Israeli Air Force commander Eliezer
Shkedi saying, before the 2006 invasion of Gaza, that “the only alternative to aerial attacks is a ground
operation and the reoccupation.” Assassination, he added, “is the most precise tool we have.” So too
with proportionality, balancing, efficiency, pragmatism, the injunction to “be realistic,” and the entire
pantheon of reasonable constraints. All of the oppositional forces of military interests and intelligence
agencies, human rights groups and journalists, can be incorporated within the same project: the
maintenance of humanitarian violence, albeit one that bills itself as a lesser form of violence compared
to the alternatives. As Will Saletan put it in Slate earlier this year with memorable enthusiasm: Drones
kill fewer civilians, as a percentage of total fatalities, than any other military weapon. They’re the worst
form of warfare in the history of the world, except for all the others. … civilian casualties? That’s not an
argument against drones. It’s the best thing about them. The choice presented is always between
assassination and invasion, between Hellfire missiles and imprecise bombs—between fewer dead and
more dead. It is not a choice between war and peace. Well-trained commentators cannot even imagine
a world in which such things simply do not happen. And one never questions the legitimacy of the
system in which, as Hannah Arendt emphasized, one must choose evil. Periodic eruptions of unchecked
violence—as in the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2008 and the bombardment in 2012—are neither
accidents nor failures. The normal practice of violence through checkpoints, annexation, resource
extraction, and assassination is maintained against the the ever present threat of greater violence,
regularly demonstrated. The greater evil kept at bay by the lesser evil, in an endless state of war. This
permanent threat of arbitrary violence is precisely what we call sovereignty.
Biopower = All Violence
Biopolitics generates violence on a previously unseen scale authorizing extermination
at will.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, Stanford UP, p. 113-115)
<It is jean-Luc Nancy's achievement to have shown the ambiguity of Bataille's theory of sacrifice, and to
have strongly affirmed the concept of an "unsacrificeable existence" against every sacrificial temptation.
Yet if our analysis of homo sacer is correct, and the Bataillian definition of sovereignty with reference to
transgression is inadequate with respect to the life in the sovereign ban that may be killed, then the
concept of the "unsacrificeable" too must be seen as insufficient to grasp the violence at issue in
modern biopolitics. Homo sacer is unsacrificeable, yet he may nevertheless be killed by anyone. The
dimension of bare life that constitutes the immediate referent of sovereign violence is more original
than the opposition of the sacrificeable and the unsacrificeable, and gestures to-ward an idea of
sacredness that is no longer absolutely definable through the conceptual pair (which is perfectly clear in
societies familiar with sacrifice) of fitness for sacrifice and immolation ac-cording to ritual forms. In
modernity, the principle of the sacredness of life is thus completely emancipated from sacrificial
ideology, and in our culture the meaning of the term "sacred" continues the semantic history of homo
sacer and not that of sacrifice (and this is why the demystification of sacrificial ideology so common
today remain insufficient, even though they are correct). What confronts us today is a life that as such
is exposed to a violence without precedent precisely in the most profane and banal ways. Our age is
the one in which a holiday weekend produces more victims on Europe's highways than a war
campaign, but to speak of a "sacredness of the highway railing" is obviously only an antiphrastic
definition (La Cecla, Mente locale, p. 115).
The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means of the term "Holocaust"
was, from this perspective, an irresponsible historiographical blindness. The Jew living under Nazism is
the privileged negative referent of the new biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of a
homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing therefore constitutes,
as we will see, neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but simply the actualization of a mere
"capacity to be killed" inherent in the condition of the Jew as such. The truth-which is difficult for the
victims to face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils-is that the Jews
were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, "as lice,"
which is to say, as bare life. The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor
law, but biopolitics.
If it is true that the figure proposed by our age is that of an unsacrificeable life that has nevertheless
become capable of being killed to an unprecedented degree, then the bare life of homo sacer concerns
us in a special way. Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics, a line that is as
such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the
biological life itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is
perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri.> < 113-115 >
Biopolitics is in the constant act of generating a new periphery which must be
eliminated. This is at the heart of all violence.
Agamben 2k
[Giorgio – prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ. Minnesota Press, p. 34-35]
<When seen in this light, the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany acquires a radically new
meaning. As a people that refuses integration in the national body politic (it is assumed, in fact, that its
assimilation is actually only a feigned one), the Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost
the living symbol of the people, of that naked life that modernity necessarily creates within itself but
whose presence it is no longer able to tolerate in any way. We ought to understand the lucid fury with
which the German Volk-representative par excellence of the people as integral body politic-tried to
eliminate the Jews forever as precisely the terminal phase of the internecine struggle that divides People
and people. With the final solution-which included Gypsies and other unassimilable elements for a
reason-Nazism tried obscurely and in vain to free the Western political stage from this intolerable
shadow so as to produce finally the German Volk as the people that has been able to heal the original
biopolitical fracture. (And that is why the Nazi chiefs repeated so obstinately that by eliminating Jews
and Gypsies they were actually working also for the other European peoples.) Paraphrasing the Freudian
postulate on the relation between Es and Ich, one might say that modern biopolitics is supported by the
principle according to which "where there is naked life, there has to be a People," as long as one adds
immediately that this principle is valid also in its inverse formulation, which prescribes that "where
there is a People, there shall be naked life." The fracture that was believed to have been healed by
eliminating the people-namely, the Jews, who are its symbol-reproduced itself anew, thereby turning
the whole German people into sacred life that is doomed to death and into a biological body that has
to be infinitely purified (by eliminating the mentally ill and the carriers of hereditary diseases). And
today, in a different and yet analogous way, the capitalistic-democratic plan to eliminate the poor not
only reproduces inside itself the people of the excluded but also turns all the populations of the Third
World into naked life. Only a politics that has been able to come to terms with the fundamental
biopolitical split of the 'West will be able to arrest this oscillation and put an end to the civil war that
divides the peoples and the cities of the Earth.>
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-and-society/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 allows killing in the name of preserving life culminating in the most massive
acts of violence.
Campbell 2k5
[David - professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University in the U.K., “The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire,
and the Sports Utility Vehicle,” American Quarterly 57.3, p. 949-950]
<Michel Foucault argues that biopolitics arrives with the historical transformation in waging war from
the defense of the sovereign to securing the existence of a population. In Foucault's argument, this
historical shift means that decisions to fight are made in terms of collective survival, and killing is
justified by the necessity of preserving life.16 It is this centering of the life of the population rather
than the safety of the sovereign or the security of territory that is the hallmark of biopolitical power
that distinguishes it from sovereign power. Giorgio Agamben has extended the notion through the
concept of the administration of life and argues that the defense of life often takes place in a zone of
indistinction between violence and the law such that sovereignty can be violated in the name of
life.17 Indeed, the biopolitical privileging of life has provided the rationale for some of the worst cases
of mass death, with genocide [End Page 949] deemed "understandable" as one group's life is violently
secured through the demise of another group.18
However, the role of biopolitical power in the administration of life is equally obvious and ubiquitous in
domains other than the extreme cases of violence or war. The difference between the sovereign and the
biopolitical can be understood in terms of the contrast between Foucault's notion of "disciplinary
society" and Gilles Deleuze's conception of "the society of control," a distinction that plays an important
role in Hardt and Negri's Empire. According to Hardt and Negri, in the disciplinary society, "social
command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and
regulate customs, habits, and productive practices." In the society of control, "mechanisms of command
become ever more democratic, ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the
brains and bodies of the citizens." This means that the society of control is "characterized by an
intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate
our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the
structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks."19
Network is, therefore, the prevailing metaphor for social organization in the era of biopolitical power,
and it is a conception that permits us to understand how the effects of our actions, choices, and life are
propagated beyond the boundaries of our time-space location.20 It is also a conception that allows us to
appreciate how war has come to have a special prominence in producing the political order of liberal
societies. Networks, through their extensive connectivity, function in terms of their strategic
interactions. This means that "social relations become suffused with considerations of power,
calculation, security and threat."21 As a result, "global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in
which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the socio-economic and
cultural networks of biopolitical relations."22>
Biopower = Racism
The production of bare life turns the case – as bare life comes to be the fundamental
building block of modern governance humanitarian projects are ineffective in
correcting racism. A life that can be divided into many forms facilitates the exclusion
of those lives deemed inhuman.
Levinson 2k1 (Brett- assistant professor of comparative literature at the State University of New York at Binghamton,
Nepantla: Views from South 2.1, “Three Meditations on Our “Millennihilisms”Accents, Racism, Anti-Semitism,” p. 47-48)
<Let us articulate these two intertwined structures in another fashion: as representation and language. The politics of
representation (human life) concerns the privilege one field of representation, one set of signifiers, enjoys over
another, and the possible overcoming of that injustice. It concerns offense, and the surmounting of the offense;
bias, and the correcting of bias. In the politics of language (bare life), to the contrary, there is no offense, for only
the embodiment of language—not unlike a neutral accent—as the time, space, death of the master, is expelled.
In the expulsion of representation, abhorrent measures are indeed taken. In that of language, no being
is expelled. The first form of depravity is awful because it is offensive; the second is daunting precisely
because it is not.
This latter violence, directed against bare life, actually inverts that of racism. If in racism the oppressor twists the truth, and the
oppressed group works to rectify this bias by recuperating suppressed signifiers/representations, in the second model the
oppressor strives to straighten the bias (correct the twist of language, the figure, the trope, the nonneutral accent), while the
oppressed resists by restoring this very bias, this limit on the signifiers of those who dominate.
The politics of human life seeks to erase (from the right) or liberate (from the left) the alternative
signifier/representation. The politics of bare life or language labors to disclose (from the left) or disavow
(from the right) the alternative to the signifier (and not merely the signified), the “(non)neutral accent” as the mark
of “language as such.”
This description of two political operations could also be expressed as the distinction between humanitarianism and its limit (a
key theme in Agamben’s text). For Agamben humanitarianism, in whatever variation (but above all, within discourses
on human rights), protects and often rescues not life but human life, life that has been humanized. And
herein, for [End Page 47] Agamben, lies the problem of any humanitarianism (which is not to suggest that
humanitarianism is problematic in its entirety): that the beings whom despotic sovereign states abuse are
frequently cast outside the human prior to the defilement. Humanitarianism defends the rights of
human life; but human lives are not, as the perpetrator of human rights abuses has posited them,
necessarily the victims. Those who embody language, or the limit of the human, sometimes are.
State hegemony, we know, always includes and produces an outside it cannot incorporate or control. This outside potentially
represents the internal subversion or marginal human forces that are the condition of any dominant discourse or project, and
that so many recent intellectual endeavors have worked to tap.
Yet if hegemony indeed must exclude in order to be, we cannot assume that the banished thing is another human or group of
humans. For as Agamben and Mr. Pennella show us, albeit in distinct ways, the excluded today might also be the embodiment
of language: the inhuman, or the limit of the human.
Humanism, both in the “good” (humane activity) and “bad” sense (humanism as an intolerance toward difference: such
differences are cast as below the human), comes to a limit when the abused, the constitutive outside, is not necessarily human
or humanized—but still manages to yield abominations against all that is mortal. Stated in other terms, notions of hegemony
reach closure, yield to posthegemony, not when we realize that an excess, an excluded Other, is the condition of the totality
that, therefore, cannot account for its constituency. Posthegemony materializes, rather, when the excluded
Other need not be human: when hegemony can exclude any living thing without excluding anybody.>
Biopolitics, manifested through the care for life, particularly medicine, replicates the
conditions of racism and facilitates eugenics.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, Stanford UP, p. 146-147)
The new fact, however, is that these concepts are not treated as external (if binding) criteria of a
sovereign decision: they are, rather, as such immediately political. Thus the concept of race is defined, in
accordance with the genetic theories of the age, as "a group of human beings who manifest a certain
combination of homozygotic genes that are lacking in other groups" (Verschuer, .tat et state, p. 88). Yet
both Fischer and Verschuer know that a pure race is, according to this definition, almost impossible to
identify (in particular, neither the Jews nor the Germans constitute a race in the strict sense-and Hitler is
just as aware of this when he writes Mein Kampf as when he decides on the Final Solution). "Racism" (if
one understands race to be a strictly biological concept) is, therefore, not the most correct term for the
biopolitics of the Third Reich. National Socialist biopolitics moves, instead, in a horizon in which the
"care of life" inherited from eighteenth-century police science is, in now being founded on properly
eu¬genic concerns, absolutized. Distinguishing between politics (Pot¬itik) and police (Polizei), von Justi
assigned the first a merely negative task, the fight against the external and internal enemies of the
State, and the second a positive one, the care and growth of the citizens' life. National Socialist
biopolitics-and along with it, a good part of modern politics even outside the Third Reich-cannot be
grasped if it is not understood as necessarily implying the disappearance of the difference between
the two terms: the police now becomes politics, and the care of life coincides with the fight against
the enemy. "The National Socialist revolution," one reads in the introduction to State and Health,
"wishes to appeal to forces that want to exclude factors of biological degeneration and to maintain the
people's hereditary health. It thus aims to fortify the health of the people as a whole and to eliminate
influences that harm the biological growth of the nation. The book does not discuss problems that
concern only one people; it brings out problems of vital importance for all European civilization." Only
from this perspective is it possible to grasp the full sense of the extermination of the Jews, in which the
police and politics, eugenic motives and ideological motives, the care of health and the fight against
the enemy become absolutely indistinguishable.
Biopower = Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The aff creates a self fulfilling prophesy
Tran-Creque 13 Bard College, interdisciplinary research, education and art community working to understand unmanned and
autonomous vehicles. By bringing together research from diverse academic and artistic perspectives which have, up until now, remained fairly
silent on the issue, we aim to encourage new creative thinking and, ultimately, inform the public debate. We want to encourage dialogue
between the tech world and the non-tech world, and explore new vocabularies in diverse disciplines. This is an online space for people to follow
the latest news, encounter disparate views, access good writing and art, find resources for research, and engage a diverse community of
thinkers and practitioners with the shared goal of understanding the drone. (Steven, Center for the Study of the Drone, “The Forever War is
Always Hungry”, July 5, 2013, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/the-forever-war-is-always-hungry/ //SRSL)
“One simple imperative: Know your enemy” The
legalistic definition of sovereignty, the preoccupation with policy
making, even the basic assumption that the debates we have really matter—all of this starts to look
ideological in the worst sense. Following the Prism revelations last week, Christian Caryl wrote a retrospective in Foreign Policy comparing the
NSA and the East German Stasi: So which is worse, the Stasi or the NSA? Definitely the Stasi. East German citizens had no defense whatsoever against its intrusions.
American citizens can still exercise control over our own intelligence organizations, which are still bound
(or so we are told) by the rule of law. But do we really have the will to restrain them? There is admittedly some faint courage in being willing to
even make the comparison, but there is something utterly more remarkable in the ideological refrain of asking if “American citizens can still exercise control over
our own intelligence organization”—as if the state’s intelligence apparatus had ever been democratic—“or so we are told.” But this is hardly uncommon. Dan
Gettinger’s recent piece for the Center here frames the question in terms of legislative oversight in the application of the AUMF: Understanding
this
legal debate and the evolving strategic situation determines how this country deploys it’s forces abroad,
the kinds of military technologies that we invest in, and the degree of oversight that Congress has over
the use of force by the Executive Branch. While the outcome of this debate will likely result in some form forever war against terrorism, the
question remains as to whether it will be conducted in the shadows of ambiguity or limited by some degree of Congressional observation. And here we are back at
the lesser evil. It is significant, I think, that it is fundamentally impossible it is to reconcile any of this with anything like actual democracy. These
are
questions for policy elites—and perhaps for those who imagine themselves among their ranks. But the
question is always between more killing and less killing, between more secrecy and less secrecy, more
oversight and less oversight—always witheringly loyal to the same order of violence that produced
these choices in the first place—and which never bore any of us any loyalty. As the American liberal left has foundered
for years, attempting to articulate a challenge to the logic of permanent war and the terror state, it has failed to recognize that the War on Terror does not
represent an aberration or a failure of policy. It is not an imperial venture run rampant. Neither
is it the military-carceral response of an
empire incapable of delivering prosperity for anyone beyond its increasingly rapacious aristocracy. Nor is
it even the immanent danger of building weapons that will always one day be turned inwards. Of course, it is
all these things—but at its heart, the forever war is only an unusually visible moment in the only war there’s
ever been.
Rt Cause DS Impact
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 and 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.)//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 post-9/11 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- saries’
choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We
cannot let our enemies strike first.’’ 18 Whereas anticipatory selfdefence 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 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 non-localisable 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 extra-territorial 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 ‘onestop 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.
Rt Cause K Impact
Constant government surveillance has a normalizing function --- we seek to fit an
‘average’ created through aggregate data analysis --- this violently destroys
individualism --- when we take away government surveillance, disciplinary power
loses its efficacy
Hall, 5/7/2007 – Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, “Death, Power, and the Body: A Bio-political
Analysis of Death and Dying”, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, p. 15-17)//roetlin
Foucault labeled this new type of power as “disciplinary,” and while he acknowledged its earlier presence in isolated examples, his point was
that, in modernity, this type of disciplinary power extended its influence from society’s army barracks and monasteries to nearly every social
institution. Disciplinary
mechanisms, he contended, infiltrated the whole of society in the late seventeenth century when
the first concerted efforts to arrange and control specific and identifiable groups of people took place. According to Foucault, the forces
that are used to arrange and classify groups of people also render those people as individual units. The
individual, he argued, is thus a construction of power created only when that individual is recognized as part of a larger and
identifiable group–a group is not created by a mass of individuals, but vice versa. According to Foucault, it is only
through discipline that modern individuals are created out of a mass. Disciplinary power, he claimed, differs from preexisting power
mechanisms in that it is applied “primarily to bodies and what they do rather than to the land and what it
produces.” As a result of the propagation of disciplinary power, it at once becomes possible to “extract time and labor, rather than
commodities and wealth” from individual bodies (2003a, 35). An important step, Foucault points out, for the budding capitalist economies of
the time. Thus, for Foucault, this new mechanism of power was essentially “one of the basic tools for the establishment of industrial capitalism
and the corresponding type of society” that we now associate with capitalist economies (2003a, 36). In fact, it can be argued that the pressing
need to produce a labor force in the late seventeenth century sparked a refinement of existing disciplinary techniques–and the invention of
others–in order to shape the bodies of individuals into the exact type of laborers that would be appreciated by capitalists. The benefits of
disciplinary power, Foucault explained, lie in its precise manipulation of the body so as to render bodies “both
useful and docile” (Foucault 16 2003c, 249). “In short, [disciplinary power] dissociates power from the body; on the
one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude,’ a ‘capacity,’ which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course
of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection” (Foucault 1977, 138). All of
this takes place, Foucault maintains, through the meticulous regulation of the body’s movement and the time and
space in which it moves. Specifically, there are three elements of disciplinary power that Foucault claims train the bodies of individuals to
become both “useful and docile;” hierarchical observation,
examination, and normalizing judgment. According to
Foucault, the possibility of constant observation is crucial for disciplinary power to be effective. For capitalist
factories to succeed, he maintained, they need to be architecturally and managerially structured so as to facilitate constant
observation. Hierarchies must be established and workers must be monitored by those in positions above their own, thus
inducing good work habits without the threat of physical violence. Moreover, Foucault theorized that it was not specifically constant
observation that produced these results, for such observation of every worker would be both inefficient and impossible. It was merely the
possibility of being observed that shaped the behavior of laborers–the mere possibility that someone, somewhere might be watching.
According to Foucault, those that are being observed need to be evaluated in an effective way. Thus a second element of disciplinary power is
the examination. Workers are periodically tested on their abilities and their habits, however, the results of such tests matter little without some
sort of standard of comparison. The
third element of disciplinary power is normalizing judgment–this element is linked to
Foucault’s earlier interest in the development of statistics; the gathering of knowledge about individuals.
Through compiling such information, Foucault points out, it is possible to identify an “average,” a standard by
which to compare individual behavior. For Foucault, it is ultimately the desire to be “normal,” that shapes
individuals, their bodies and their minds. And “thanks to a whole system of surveillance, hierarchies, inspections,
bookkeeping, and reports–all technology that can be described as the disciplinary technology of labor,”
the power to define what qualifies as normal is taken completely out of the hands of those to which the
standard is applied (Foucault 2003c, 242). It is no accident that this form of power appears to be linked with another sense of the word
“discipline,” meaning an academic field of study. In fact, for Foucault, disciplinary power is inextricably bound to knowledge itself, particularly
the fields of knowledge that make the individual the object of study–psychiatry, criminology, sociology, psychology, and medicine. Together,
the human sciences create a regime of power that, according to Foucault, controls, describes, and monitors human behavior in terms of norms.
By setting out what is “normal,” the human sciences thus also intentionally create the idea of abnormality or
deviation. The more abnormal and excluded you are, the more individual you become. Individuality is thus,
for Foucault, not the desirable individuality of Liberalism–it is the mark of the mental patient, the convict,
and the over-comatose. It has nothing to do with taking control over one's own life and everything to do with
being controlled.
Rt Cause Terror Impact
The security state bred form the war on terror has resulted in a permanent state of
exception in which massive amounts of people are reduced to 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. 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 nonlocalisable 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.
1nc Alt
Alt—Destituent Power
The alternative is to adopt a political praxis of destituent power – only by breaking
completely from the law can we expose the anarchy captured in the state of control
and resist co-option
Agamben 13 [Giorgio, a leading continental philosopher best known for his work on the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life
and homo sacer, “From the State of Control to a Praxis of Destituent Power,” http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituent-powerdemocracy/, omak]
But I would like to conclude — or better to simply stop my lecture (in philosophy, like in art, no conclusion is possible, you can only abandon
your work) — with something which, as far as I can see now, is perhaps the most urgent political problem. If the state we have in front of us is
the security state I described, we have to think anew the traditional strategies of political conflicts. What shall we do, what strategy shall we
follow? The
security paradigm implies that each form of dissent, each more or less violent attempt to overthrow the order,
becomes an opportunity to govern these actions into a profitable direction. This is evident in the
dialectics that tightly bind together terrorism and state in an endless vicious spiral. Starting with French
Revolution, the political tradition of modernity has conceived of radical changes in the form of a revolutionary process that acts as the pouvoir
constituant, the “constituent power”, of a new institutional order. I
think that we have to abandon this paradigm and try
to think something as a puissance destituante, a purely “destituent power”, that cannot be captured in
the spiral of security. It is a destituent power of this sort that Benjamin has in mind in his essay On the Critique of Violence, when he
tries to define a pure violence which could “break the false dialectics of lawmaking violence and lawpreserving violence,” an example of which is Sorel’s proletarian general strike. “On the breaking of this cycle,” he writes at the end of
the essay “maintained by mythic forms of law, on the destitution of law with all the forces on which it depends, finally therefore on the
abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.” While
a constituent power destroys law only to recreate it
in a new form, destituent power — insofar as it deposes once for all the law — can open a really new
historical epoch. To think such a purely destituent power is not an easy task. Benjamin wrote once that nothing is so anarchical as the
bourgeois order. In the same sense, Pasolini in his last movie has one of the four Salò masters saying to their slaves: “true anarchy is the
anarchy of power.” It is precisely because power constitutes itself through the inclusion and the capture
of anarchy and anomy that it is so difficult to have an immediate access to these dimensions; it is so
hard to think today of something as a true anarchy or a true anomy. I think that a praxis which would
succeed in exposing clearly the anarchy and the anomy captured in the governmental security
technologies could act as a purely destituent power. A really new political dimension becomes possible only when we grasp
and depose the anarchy and the anomy of power. But this is not only a theoretical task: it means first of all the rediscovery of a
form-of-life, the access to a new figure of that political life whose memory the security state tries at any
price to cancel.
Our alternative is a display of inoperativity – not a negative cessation of labor but a
display of the endless potentiality of bodies that divorces us from the utilitarian
expectations
Agamben 13 [Giorgio Agamben is an Italian continental philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of
exception, “What is a destituent power?” http://www.envplan.com/fulltext_temp/0/d3201tra.pdf, pg. 6, omak]
Inoperativity does not mean inertia, but names an operation that deactivates and renders works (of economy, of
religion, of language, etc) inoperative. It is a question, that is, of going back to the problem that Aristotle fleetingly posed in the
Nicomachean Ethics (1097b, 22 sqq), when, in the context of the definition of the object of epistēmē politikē, of political science, he wondered
if, as for the flute player, the sculptor, the carpenter, and every artisan there exists a proper work (ergon), there is also for man as such
something like an ergon or if he is not instead argos, without work, inoperative. Ergon
of man means in this context not simply
‘work’, but that which defines energeia, the activity, the being-in-act proper to man. The question
concerning the work or absence of work of man therefore has a decisive strategic importance, for on it
depends not only the possibility of assigning him a proper nature and essence, but also, as we have
seen, that of defining his happiness and his politics. The problem has a wider meaning, therefore, and involves the very
possibility of identifying energeia, the being-in-act of man as man, independently and beyond the concrete social figures that he can assume.
Aristotle quickly abandons the idea of an argia, of an essential inoperativity of man. I
have sought on the contrary, reprising an ancient
think man as the living being without work, which is to say,
devoid of any specific vocation: as a being of pure potentiality (potenza), that no identity and no work could
tradition that appears in Averroes and in Dante, to
exhaust. This essential inoperativity of man is not to be understood as the cessation of all activity, but as an activity that consists in making
human works and productions inoperative, opening them to a new possible use. It
is necessary to call into question the
primacy that the leftist tradition has attributed to production and labor and to ask whether an attempt
to define the truly human activity does not entail first of all a critique of these notions. The modern epoch,
starting from Christianity—whose creator God defined himself from the origin in opposition to the deus otiosus of the pagans—is constitutively
unable to think inoperativity except in the negative form of the suspension of labor. Thus one
of the ways in which inoperativity
has been thought is the feast [la festa], which, on the model of the Hebrew Shabbat, has been conceived essentially as a temporary
suspension of productive activity, of melacha. But the feast is defined not only by what in it is not done, but primarily
by the fact that what is done—which in itself is not unlike what one does every day—becomes undone, is rendered
inoperative, liberated and suspended from its ‘economy’, from the reasons and purposes that define it
during the weekdays (and not doing, in this sense, is only an extreme case of this suspension).(4) If one eats, it is not done for the sake
of being fed; if one gets dressed, it is not done for the sake of being covered up or taking shelter from the cold; if one wakes up, it is not done
for the sake of working; if one walks, it is not done for the sake of going someplace; if one speaks, it is not done for the sake of communicating
information; if one exchanges objects, it is not done for the sake of selling or buying. There
is no feast that does not involve, in
some measure, a destitutive element, that does not begin, that is, first and foremost by rendering
inoperative the works of men. In the Sicilian feast of the dead described by Pitré, the dead (or an old woman named Strina, from
strena, the Latin name for the gifts exchanged during the festivities at the beginning of the year) steal goods from tailors, merchants, and
bakers to then bestow them on children (something similar to this happens in every feast that involves gifts, like Halloween, in which the dead
are impersonated by children). In
every carnival feast, such as the Roman saturnalia, existing social relations are
suspended or inverted: not only do slaves command their masters, but sovereignty is placed in the
hands of a mock king (saturnalicius princeps) who takes the place of the legitimate king. In this way the
feast reveals itself to be above all a deactivation of existing values and powers. “There are no ancient feasts
without dance”, writes Lucian, but what is dance other than the liberation of the body from its utilitarian movements, the exhibition of gestures
in their pure inoperativity? And what are masks—which play a role in various ways in the feasts of many peoples—if not, essentially, a
neutralization of the face? Only
if it is considered in this perspective can the feast furnish a paradigm for
thinking inoperativity as a model of politics. An example will allow us to clarify how one must understand this “inoperative
operation”. What is a poem, in fact, if not an operation taking place in language that consists in rendering inoperative, in deactivating its
communicative and informative function, in order to open it to a new possible use? What the poem accomplishes for the potentiality of
speaking, politics and philosophy must accomplish for the power of acting. Rendering inoperative the biological, economic, and social
operations, they show what the human body can do, opening it to a new possible use.
The alternative is to adopt a political praxis of destituent power – through destituent
power we can destroy existing institutions of biopower and envision radically
different social relationships
Bougsty-Marshall 14 [ Skye is an attorney based in San Francisco, California. At Accountability Counsel, Skye works as a Pro Bono
Attorney Advisor. Skye graduated summa cum laude from American University, Washington College of Law. Following law school, Skye worked
in Mumbai, India for the Human Rights Law Network where he engaged in strategic human rights and environmental litigation before the High
Court of Bombay to enforce the rights of marginalized individuals and groups, “The Coming Destituent Flood,” http://www.cnsjournal.org/thecoming-destituent-flood/, omak]
It is within this context of the prevailing security paradigm that we must evaluate and situate the mode of political struggle Flood Wall Street betokens. The
modern conception of political conflict has been predominantly understood in terms of “constituent
power,” which is the creative energy or violence that, ex nihilo, is capable of creating a (new)
institutional order—a new constitution and new juridical norms—whereby social relations are organized (into “constituted
power”). The peculiar and aporetic character of constituent power is revealed when considering that if constituent power succeeds in
creating a new legal order, constituent power will, in following its essence, instantly threaten the same
constituted power it has just created. Thus, if constituent power with this excess is not to undo the new legal order it has just constituted, as
Raffaele Laudani writes, “constituent power must then, at some indeterminate but decisive threshold, begin to be neutralized and contained.” It is in this dynamic
that Walter Benjamin, in his essay “On the Critique of Violence,” identified and located the dialectic between constituent
power—as
lawmaking violence—and constituted power—as law-preserving violence. The mutually constituting and reinforcing
nature of security and resistance reflects this underlying dialectic between constituent power and constituted power. The concept of destituent power, on the other
hand, originates from the Colectivo Situaciones’ (poder destituyente) analysis of the uprisings in Argentina on December 19th and 20th, 2001. Destituent
power exhibits a similar potency to constituent power, but operates as a continual process of openended withdrawal from or refusal of the juridical, institutional order. It functions completely outside the
law—extrainstitutionally—seeking to dismantle sovereign, constituted power altogether rather than to reform it or overthrow it and then re-institute it in a
different form. Destituent power is the energy immanent to law that tends toward the latter’s dissipation and
disordering in a relationship analogous to that between entropy and matter. Destituent power
undermines and erodes the obedience that is fundamental to and presupposed by the constituted order
for its continued existence. However, destituent power is not a purely reactive or nihilistic force, but instead is creative—not in the
sense of producing new institutions to replace the old, but through its deactivation of juridical norms it opens new horizons of
possibilities for harmonious social and ecological relationships far exceeding what is practicable under the current destructive political order.
Constituent power’s direct confrontation with the state—through terrorism or insurrection—simply reinforces the security apparatus (provides more effects for it
to control) and invites greater levels of repression. As destituent power, disobedience
can be conceived not as direct clash with
constituted power but instead as the withdrawal of consent to the political order, as a direct negation of its
legitimacy. Etienne de La Boetie recognized the potency of destituent power in 1548 in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude when he wrote: “I do not ask
that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer;
then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own
weight and break into pieces?” Benjamin also envisaged this immanent creative potential within destituent power as he attempted to identify a
pure violence that could “break the false dialectics of lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence.” Following this line of reasoning, he argues that “[o]n the
breaking of this cycle maintained by mythical forms of law, on the suspension [destitution] of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally
therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.” Thus, although
a constituent power destroys law only to
re-institute it again in a new form, merely perpetuating the cycle; insofar as destituent power
dismantles and deposes the law once for all, it can function to open onto the terrain of a new epoch
characterized by radically new possibilities. In deposing the political order, as Colectivo Situaciones suggests, destituent power opens
becomings, enabling for experimentation with new practices and the development of new knowledges that will, in turn, themselves be de-instituted in the continual
and open-ended process unfolding. Flood Wall Street arises within and partakes of the ferment of the most recent wave of global social movements—Occupy, the
Indignados, and the Arab Spring—that significantly articulated a strategy of radical disobedience that channeled a plurality of discontent into the unifying rejection
and refusal of the interrelated crises wrought by capitalism through its neoliberal expression. As
we confront the current security
paradigm of government, we must understand the critical importance of the destituent power embraced by
Flood Wall Street as its waters swell to inundate the centers of global capital to block the latter’s destruction of the planet and then recede in an exodus
withdrawing all support to the institutional order to open onto the wild of new possibilities. This motif expresses how Flood Wall Street must carefully proceed to
urgently bring the global machine of capital to an abrupt stop, while at the same time avoiding recuperation in the endless dialectical spiral that binds together
security and resistance through not aiming to overthrow the system and take power by re-instituting a new one, but evacuating institutions, dissolving and
dissipating them, emptying them of their support and power. This
radical disobedience, in the form of destituent power, has
the potential to escape from the dialectic of lawmaking and law-preserving violence—the most salient
expression of which is the prevailing reflexive interplay between security and terrorism, with each
inducing and strengthening the multiplication of the other. Each day passes as we lay prostrate on the precipice watching the
violent churning of the odious machine of capital. As Hannah Arendt argued, we voluntarily give power and legitimacy to institutions to the extent that we obey the
law-making authority. Accordingly,
acting with continued submissive obedience to the global capitalist order is
to be complicit in its depravity and serves as an ongoing legitimation and proffering of consent to the
system’s operation. In rushing torrents, Flood Wall Street is determined to follow Mario Savio’s exhortation to throw our bodies on the gears and levers
and all the apparatus of the machine to wrench it to a halt. Given the relative lack of radical militancy characterizing the political landscape, we cannot only rely on a
gradual mass exodus as the climate change juggernaut continues until tipping points have been reached and exponential accelerations in climatic disruptions
proliferate and become irreversible. With Flood Wall Street we endeavor to bring down the Colossus of capitalism and the illegitimate political institutions—the
state, corporations, financial institutions—which comprise it and act as its functional vehicles. At the same time, the flood announces the arrival of the beginning of
a process of withdrawal, the beginning of an open-ended process entailing a radical reorientation of our relationships with the biosphere through practices of food
sovereignty, commoning, and radical participatory democratic practices. In this way, the
concept of destitution should be understood
as a “positive no,” rather than a pure negation, that in rejecting representation at once “produces a
‘self-changing’ affirmation that engenders new practices and modes of subjectification, from which the
‘no’ first derives its force.” Destituent power deactivates sovereignty, institutions, and representation,
thereby expanding “the field of the thinkable” as if manipulating an aperture. This capacity of destituent power to
expand the thinkable, the horizon of possibilities, finds consonance in David Graeber’s analysis of the effects actualized through the neutralization of the constraints
imposed by institutional bureaucracy in past revolutionary moments. With
the destitution of the apparatus that limits
imaginaries, the unequal structures of creativity will unravel and a proliferation of social, artistic, and
intellectual creativity and experimenting with new ways to see the world can flourish. This destituent power is
affinitive and not hegemonic in both of its moments. This opening act of mass disobedience must be situated within a diffuse, expansive project of disruption to
deactivate capitalism’s assault on the biosphere on its many fronts; it belongs to the open set of a plurality of resistances based on microanalysis of concrete power
operations within the network of intersecting lines of power relationships. The
traditional revolutionary strategy of constituent
power as a direct assault on the heart of the state and its nerve centers does not reflect how power
operates—it is diffuse, decentralized, irreducible—and incites entanglement in the spiral of security.
This requires, as Laudani puts it, a response of a “diffused process of disintegration,” a process that is
open and attacks power in its nodes, in appreciation of its dominant mode of expression and the reticular nature of its relations. As Colectivo
Situaciones argue, the multiplicity of resistances cannot be thought in terms of a unity as a homogenous movement, and their transversality must be appreciated as
their echoes and resonances are felt across the rhizomatic network of experiments in practices of disobedience and destituent power. Similarly, the exodus and
flight from the system does not carry with it a hegemonic, universal program for constructing new social and ecological relations, but will be a perpetual process of
openness and experimentation with alternatives developed through a continual (re)negotiation of common social values using participatory democratic practices.
Such a participatory social body is created and sustained through an unfolding process of opening whose
conditions are “constantly undergoing a high degree of direct and immanent transformation” by the
various practices, experimentations, and people “who are also transformed, to varying degrees, by its
deployment.”
Alt—Playing with the Law—1nc
Rather than attempting to eliminate use of the law, you should adopt of a politics of
playing with the law – this means giving the law a new use that transforms the
ontology of the law from sacred to that of a 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 argues, by 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 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.”
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. 63-64)///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-read-agamben)///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. 46-64)///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.
Alt—Resistance
Individual resistance and analysis is the only way out --- “death bad” misses the point,
death has been politicized
Hall, 5/7/2007 – Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, “Death, Power, and the Body: A Bio-political
Analysis of Death and Dying”, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, p. 7)//roetlin
In the third and final chapter of this study I examine how death is politicized. As Agamben argues, death
is not a natural or
biological moment but a political decision. In order to tackle the nature of this decision I look at the work of Peter Singer who
compares two seemingly contradictory ethics, the ethics of the sanctity of life and the quality of life ethic. An
Agambenean analysis of these ethics however, suggest some problems that Singer may have not been able to articulate
because he fails to take into account the political nature of death. One of the criticisms that has been lodged against
Singer is that his ethics closely parallels Nazi eugenics programs in which the medical establishment made
decisions on whose life was worth living. This criticism bridges the gap between Singerís work and the point I have been making
through this piece bio- power is intimately enmeshed with sovereignty. Foucault saw this combination at work primarily in
totalitarian regimes. However, as Agamben argues, the distinctions between totalitarian regimes and democracies are crumbling. I argue in my
Conclusion that modern
power is increasingly an amalgamation between the bio-political and the
thanatopolitical. For power can both manage life and expose us to death. What is crucial to take from this analysis is
that we must formulate some sort of individual resistance to this power, even though techniques of modern biopower (bureaucratic planning, statistical analysis, population control) may expose us to death as a population rather than as individuals. This
resistance must be something greater than simply a call for physician assisted suicide or an appeal for individual ownership of our bodies, it
must first center on an engagement with what about life is really worth preserving.
Alt—Study Law
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).
Alt—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.
Alt—Whatever Being—1nc
Vote negative to embrace “whatever being.” Whatever being is life that has no
essence that can be separated from it, no capacity for the infusion of rights and yet no
need for their illusive promises of “freedom.” Whatever being dissolves the bond that
attaches the subject to sovereignty through dissolving the very basis of identity.
Caldwell 2k4 (Anne - Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville, “BioSovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity,” Theory & Event, 7.2)
<Agamben's alternative is therefore radical. He does not contest particular aspects of the tradition. He
does not suggest we expand the range of rights available to life. He does not call us to deconstruct a
tradition whose power lies in its indeterminate status.21 Instead, he suggests we take leave of the
tradition and all its terms. Whatever being is a life that defies the classifications of the tradition, and
its reduction of all forms of life to homo sacer. Whatever being therefore has no common ground, no
presuppositions, and no particular attributes. It cannot be broken into discrete parts; it has no essence
to be separated from its attributes; and it has no common substrate of existence defining its relation
to others. Whatever being cannot then be broken down into some common element of life to which
additive series of rights would then be attached. Whatever being retains all its properties, without any
of them constituting a different valuation of life (1993: 18.9). As a result, whatever being is "reclaimed
from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that
class (the reds, the French, the Muslims) -- and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple
generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself." (0.1-1.2). Indifferent to
any distinction between a ground and added determinations of its essence, whatever being cannot be
grasped by a power built upon the separation of a common natural life, and its political specification.
Whatever being dissolves the material ground of the sovereign exception and cancels its terms. This
form of life is less post-metaphysical or anti-sovereign, than a-metaphysical and a-sovereign.
Whatever is indifferent not because its status does not matter, but because it has no particular
attribute which gives it more value than another whatever being. As Agamben suggests, whatever
being is akin to Heidegger's Dasein. Dasein, as Heidegger describes it, is that life which always has its
own being as its concern -- regardless of the way any other power might determine its status. Whatever
being, in the manner of Dasein, takes the form of an "indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to
isolate something like a bare life. In the state of exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer,
which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into existence over which power no longer seems to
have any hold" (Agamben 1998: 153). We should pay attention to this comparison. For what Agamben
suggests is that whatever being is not any abstract, inaccessible life, perhaps promised to us in the
future. Whatever being, should we care to see it, is all around us, wherever we reject the criteria
sovereign power would use to classify and value life. "In the final instance the State can recognize any
claim for identity -- even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in
any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that
humans co-belong without a representable condition of belonging" (Agamben 1993:85.6). At every
point where we refuse the distinctions sovereignty and the state would demand of us, the possibility of
a non-state world, made up of whatever life, appears.>
Heidegger Versions
Heidegger 1nc
Struggles for rights and liberties only situate the individual more deeply within the
folds of sovereign power—This allows the sovereign to use bodies as a standing
reserve and manage them at will
Agamben 98 (Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, Stanford UP, p. 120-123)
<1.2. Karl Lowith was the first to define the fundamental character of totalitarian states as a
"politicization of life" and, at the same time, to note the curious contiguity between democracy and
totalitarianism: Since the emancipation of the third estate, the formation of bourgeois democracy and
its transformation into mass industrial democracy, the neutralization of politically relevant differences
and postponement of a decision about them has developed to the point of turning into its opposite: a
total politicization [totale Politisierung] of everything, even of seemingly neutral domains of life. Thus in
Marxist Russia there emerged a worker-state that was "more intensively state-oriented than any
absolute monarchy"; in fascist Italy, a corporate state normatively regulating not only national work, but
also "after-work" [Dopolavoro] and all spiritual life; and, in National Socialist Germany, a wholly
integrated state, which, by means of racial laws and so forth, politicizes even the life that had until then
been private. (Der okkasionelle Dezianismus, p. 33) The contiguity between mass democracy and
totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden transformation (as Lowith, here
following in Schmitt's footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light in our century,
the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his (their) life runs its course in a hidden but continuous
fashion. It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were doublesided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers
always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state
order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which
they wanted to liberate themselves. "The `right' to life," writes Foucault, explaining the importance
assumed by sex as a political issue, "to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs
and, beyond all the oppressions or `alienation,' the `right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can
be, this 'right'-which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending-was the
political response to all these new procedures of power" (La volonte, p. 191). The fact is that one and
the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the
public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the
decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions. And only because
biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the
otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were
able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century's totalitarian states were able to be
converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both cases, these
transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics had already turned
into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be decided was which form of organization
would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once their
fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right
and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and
enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling classes' unexpected fall into the most
extreme racism (as in the Serbian program of "ethnic cleansing") and the rebirth of new forms of fascism
in Europe also have their roots here. Along with the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a
displacement and gradual expansion beyond the limits of the decision on bare life, in the state of
exception, in which sovereignty consisted. If there is a line in every modern state marking the point at
which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this
line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones. This line is now in
motion and gradually moving into areas other than that of political life, areas in which the sovereign is
entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the
scientist, the expert, and the priest. In the pages that follow, we shall try to show that certain events
that are fundamental for the political history of modernity (such as the declaration of rights), as well
as others that seem instead to represent an incomprehensible intrusion of biologico-scientific principles
into the political order (such as National Socialist eugenics and its elimination of "life that is unworthy of
being lived," or the contemporary debate on the normative determination of death criteria), acquire
their true sense only if they are brought back to the common biopolitical (or thanatopolitical) context
to which they belong. From this perspective, the camp-as the pure, absolute, and impassable
biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception)-will appear as the hidden
paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to
learn to recognize.> <120-123>
Biopolitics reduces the individual to a standing reserve and makes war a permanent
condition of society in which all individuals are implicated. Once everything is
rendered replaceable there can be no end to destruction.
MITCHELL 2005, ANDREW J., Stanford University, “HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM,” Research in
Phenomenology 35, 181-218>
<<<<see above for highlighted card^
With everything available as standing-reserve, troops included, the exhaustion of resources is no longer
possible. Resources are precisely in themselves replaceable, to the extent that, in being given over to replacement, even the idea
of an “in itself ” is already drained of reality ahead of time. There are no longer any “losses” that cannot be replaced. In
other words, there is no longer any friction. All uncertainty is lost, since it is not recognized in the first place. Everything is
monitored and controlled. The whole “battle” is given over to a planning that is able to incorporate
everything it encounters, since it only ever encounters what is already planable in essence, the standingreserve.
Strategy’s demise is the ascendancy of planning. What this means is that war can now go on interminably, subject to no
other logic or obligation than its own. Nothing can resist it. But without resistance, war must end. Peace can now go on
interminably as well, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. The logic in question for both war and peace is the logic of
replacement, the obligation for each is the obligation to consume. There is no law that would supervene or subtend consumption; there is no
order outside of it that could contain it. Clausewitz’s ideal is realized in a manner that collapses the very distinctions that gave it birth. “War” is
no longer a duel; it recognizes no authority outside of itself. The name for this new amalgam of war and peace is terrorism. Terrorism is
War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their
oppositional identity in the age of value and the ersatz. Without concern for resources, consumption continues
untroubled, since war is a kind of “consumption of beings” no different from peace: “War no longer
battles against a state of peace, rather it newly establishes the essence of peace” (GA 69: 180). The essence of
peace so established is a peace that defines itself in regards to war, which binds itself inseparably to war, and which functions equivalently to
war. In either case, it is simply a matter of resource consumption and replenishment. In Clausewitzian terms, there is
perhaps too much continuity or “continuation” between war and peace, “War has become a distortion
of the consumption of beings which is continued in peace” (GA 7: 89/EP, 104). The peace that technology brings is nothing
restful; instead it is the peace of unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when there will be peace or when the war
Clausewitz’s absolute war in the mirror of technology.
will end. Such a question, Heidegger specifies, cannot be answered, “not because the length of the war cannot be foreseen, but because the
question itself asks for something which no longer is, since already there is no longer a war that would be able to come to a peace” (GA 7:
89/EP, 104; tm). The basic oppositions of Clausewitzian warfare are undone at this point, an undoing that includes the distinction between ideal
and real. It
also includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Since such distinctions depend upon a
difference between war and peace, they too can no longer apply. Everyone is now a civilian-soldier, or
neither a civilian nor a soldier—a “worker,” one might say, or otherwise put, a target. With everyone involved in the same
processes of consumption and delivery, everyone is already enlisted in advance. There are no longer any “innocent” victims or bystanders in
this, and the same holds true of terrorism. Terrorism is not the use of warfare against civilians (pace Carr), for the simple reason that there no
longer are any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for this reason we go wrong to even consider it war. Terrorism is the only
conflict available and the only conflict that is in essence available and applicable. It can have everything as its target. Terrorism
follows
from the transformation in beings indicative of the technological age. This transformation remains important at each
point of a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism and is the ultimate consequence of the abolition of war and peace; beings have become
uncommon.
The alternative is an examination of the self—by finding our own identity we can
begin to divorce ourselves from power structures. Only the alt solves—liberation fails
to free us and simply reproduces those power structures
Frost, 15--Tom, Prof of Law, Politics and Sociology @ U of Sussex, "The Dispositif Between Foucault and
Agamben," https://www.academia.edu/9151315/The_Dispositif_Between_Foucault_and_Agamben
Despite this focus upon resistance, Foucault held reservations for the politics of what I term ‘mere’
resistance, and cautioned against the equating of resistance with liberation. Decisively, Foucault
distinguishes ‘freedom’ from ‘liberation’. Whilst admitting that liberation does exist, for example in the
colonial setting, Foucault makes clear that liberation is not sufficient to define the practices of freedom
needed for individuals to define “admissible and acceptable forms of existence or political society”.xlv
Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination that release a pre-existing identity from
an oppressive external force.xlvi Freedom bears essentially on relations of power and domination –
liberation from domination only gives way to new power relationships, which must be controlled by
practices of freedom.xlvii It is these practices of freedom which allows the subject to practice selfconstruction and in turn, resist and rework the dispositifs that constitute them. ‘Mere’ resistance to
power, like liberation, has the drawback of emerging in reaction to oppression and domination by
dispositifs of control.xlviii As such it is likely to create an attachment to an identity which is formed
through that oppression, and therefore will reinforce those self-same dominating biopolitical
dispositifs.xlix More fundamentally, due to the spectre of biopolitics and the latent role of dispositifs in
‘letting die’, such a resistance and attempt to escape the dispositif will only, almost paradoxically, end
up repeating its logic of deciding and regulating life and death. This is why Foucault sees power, and the
dispositif, as imposing on the subject “a law of truth ... which he must recognise and which others have
to recognise in him”.l Instead, the practice of freedom is a ‘limit-experience’: The idea of a limitexperience that wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me ... however erudite my
books may be, I’ve always conceived of them as direct experiences aimed at pulling myself free of
myself, at preventing me from being the same.li Following this theme, we can read Foucault in ‘What is
Enlightenment?’ as supporting the claim that this practice of freedom should be considered as a way of
being: We must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting
in a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of ourselves … This
philosophical ethos may be characterised as a limit-attitude … We have to move beyond the outsideinside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.lii The politics of liberation is not enough to guarantee
freedom, as freedom is not mere resistance to power. Freedom is the careful and innovative
deployment of power, and by extension, dispositifs, in the effort to constitute the free self. In other
words, the dispositif is needed to constitute the ethos of freedom: I do not think that a society can exist
without power relations … The problem, then, is ... to acquire the rules of law, the management
techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these
games of power with as little domination as possible.liii This game of power is agonistic. There is no
‘essential freedom’ to be found, but a ‘permanent provocation’ between the self and the dispositifs of
power relations.liv The key task is to “refuse what we are”, to “promote new forms of subjectivity
through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries”.lv
The creation of new forms of subjectivity involves freedom as a practice which requires the subject to
self-create themselves anew, taking into account the dispositifs which constrain and control, and
enabling the individual to discern the types of actions and interventions that are needed to effect
change and create new subjectivities. Freedom connects the dispositif and what is always beyond, the
‘outside’. It is here that the connection can be made to Foucault’s last essay, and his view of error as the
proper domain of life. When Foucault writes that life is that which is destined to err, we can conclude
that such a life contains the possibility to transcend dispositifs and break free of the logic of deciding
who should live and who should be left to die. Freedom is experienced at the limit of power relations
through their transgression, their erring, which is always-already a possibility, or destiny, for individuals
to enact: The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess:
a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and reciprocally, transgression would be
pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.lvi The act of freedom
constitutes itself through acting at the limit of the dispositif, transgressing that limit, erring, calling out
to thought from the limit of the network of power relations, creating new subjectivities through the very
response of the dispositifs to those transgressive acts. The dispositif thus controls life, but also is
required for freedom in the form of self-creation. Crucially for this argument, this transgressive freedom
which brings about the self-creation of the new is a transcendent possibility, which the individual effects
and which power relations and dispositifs must react to in response to these creative acts. This is why
Deleuze spoke of this kind of self-relation as the ‘folding’ of power relations back upon themselves. It is
not possible to move ‘outside’ of the totalizing dispositif in terms of liberation. However, it is possible to
think from the outside, from the limit, in a manner which brings together both the ‘inside’ of the
dispositif and the ‘outside’, of which the dispositif is an operation. As Deleuze states: The outside is not
a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together
make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside
… The inside as an operation of the outside: in all his work Foucault seems haunted by this theme of an
inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea.lvii In acting on the
individual, dispositifs produce an ‘inside’ as an “interiorisation of the outside”.lviii This folding allows a
subject to differentiate itself from dispositifs and no longer has an internal dependence upon them – for
Deleuze reading Foucault, there will always be a relation to oneself that resists such dispositifs.lix The
individual has the potential to distance themselves from the dispositifs that create our identity. This
folding of power relations opens a space for the individual to transgress. The question remains as to
precisely how this transcendent transgressive freedom is effected. Foucault did write of the need to
bring about a “historical ontology of ourselves”,lx such a questioning of current modes of existence
does, on a certain reading, suggest that if we discovered the reality about how power operates in this
world the individual can break free of its chains.lxi This view comes close to a Marxist view of ‘false
consciousness’, and ignores the agonistic element to this reading of Foucault.lxii Rather, following
Aurelia Armstrong, I draw upon comments suggesting that it is only under the pressure of an event
which makes our present identity and control problematic that we are forced to exercise our
freedom.lxiii Foucault suggests the following: [F]or a domain of action, a behaviour to enter the field of
thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose
its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These elements result from
social, economic, or political processes … their role is instigation.lxiv These transgressions or errors of
life, of action, and of existing, are the transcendent experience of events which force a questioning of
the current dispositifs controlling the reality we inhabit. These errors allow the individual to interiorize
the outside, and practice freedom as a transgressive limit-experience, agonistically questioning and
forcing dispositifs to react to new subjectivities. These events do not have to be epochal, or
revolutionary.lxv As Foucault states, different processes can instigate this process – the key is that it is
the individual who responds to such instigation and practices this freedom through their actions and
errors, causing the very conception of life to be changed through an “experimental mode of inquiry”.lxvi
Heidegger 1nc—K Affs
The 1AC fails to solve their harms with only mere resistance--- their “one stop shop”
liberation only serves to reinvigorate oppressive structures of identity politics- they
start from the identity of a group and not that of an individual which means they will
never be able to solve
Frost, 15--Tom, Prof of Law, Politics and Sociology @ U of Sussex, "The Dispositif Between Foucault and
Agamben," https://www.academia.edu/9151315/The_Dispositif_Between_Foucault_and_Agamben
Despite this focus upon resistance, Foucault held reservations for the politics of what I term ‘mere’
resistance, and cautioned against the equating of resistance with liberation. Decisively, Foucault
distinguishes ‘freedom’ from ‘liberation’. Whilst admitting that liberation does exist, for example in the
colonial setting, Foucault makes clear that liberation is not sufficient to define the practices of freedom
needed for individuals to define “admissible and acceptable forms of existence or political society”.lxvii
Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination that release a pre-existing identity from
an oppressive external force.lxviii Freedom bears essentially on relations of power and domination –
liberation from domination only gives way to new power relationships, which must be controlled by
practices of freedom.lxix It is these practices of freedom which allows the subject to practice selfconstruction and in turn, resist and rework the dispositifs that constitute them. ‘Mere’ resistance to
power, like liberation, has the drawback of emerging in reaction to oppression and domination by
dispositifs of control.lxx As such it is likely to create an attachment to an identity which is formed
through that oppression, and therefore will reinforce those self-same dominating biopolitical
dispositifs.lxxi More fundamentally, due to the spectre of biopolitics and the latent role of dispositifs in
‘letting die’, such a resistance and attempt to escape the dispositif will only, almost paradoxically, end
up repeating its logic of deciding and regulating life and death. This is why Foucault sees power, and the
dispositif, as imposing on the subject “a law of truth ... which he must recognise and which others have
to recognise in him”.lxxii Instead, the practice of freedom is a ‘limit-experience’: The idea of a limitexperience that wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me ... however erudite my
books may be, I’ve always conceived of them as direct experiences aimed at pulling myself free of
myself, at preventing me from being the same.lxxiii Following this theme, we can read Foucault in ‘What
is Enlightenment?’ as supporting the claim that this practice of freedom should be considered as a way
of being: We must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos
consisting in a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of
ourselves … This philosophical ethos may be characterised as a limit-attitude … We have to move
beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.lxxiv The politics of liberation is not
enough to guarantee freedom, as freedom is not mere resistance to power. Freedom is the careful and
innovative deployment of power, and by extension, dispositifs, in the effort to constitute the free self. In
other words, the dispositif is needed to constitute the ethos of freedom: I do not think that a society can
exist without power relations … The problem, then, is ... to acquire the rules of law, the management
techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these
games of power with as little domination as possible.lxxv This game of power is agonistic. There is no
‘essential freedom’ to be found, but a ‘permanent provocation’ between the self and the dispositifs of
power relations.lxxvi The key task is to “refuse what we are”, to “promote new forms of subjectivity
through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several
centuries”.lxxvii The creation of new forms of subjectivity involves freedom as a practice which requires
the subject to self-create themselves anew, taking into account the dispositifs which constrain and
control, and enabling the individual to discern the types of actions and interventions that are needed to
effect change and create new subjectivities. Freedom connects the dispositif and what is always beyond,
the ‘outside’. It is here that the connection can be made to Foucault’s last essay, and his view of error as
the proper domain of life. When Foucault writes that life is that which is destined to err, we can
conclude that such a life contains the possibility to transcend dispositifs and break free of the logic of
deciding who should live and who should be left to die. Freedom is experienced at the limit of power
relations through their transgression, their erring, which is always-already a possibility, or destiny, for
individuals to enact: The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being
they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and reciprocally, transgression
would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.lxxviii The act of
freedom constitutes itself through acting at the limit of the dispositif, transgressing that limit, erring,
calling out to thought from the limit of the network of power relations, creating new subjectivities
through the very response of the dispositifs to those transgressive acts. The dispositif thus controls life,
but also is required for freedom in the form of self-creation. Crucially for this argument, this
transgressive freedom which brings about the self-creation of the new is a transcendent possibility,
which the individual effects and which power relations and dispositifs must react to in response to these
creative acts. This is why Deleuze spoke of this kind of self-relation as the ‘folding’ of power relations
back upon themselves. It is not possible to move ‘outside’ of the totalizing dispositif in terms of
liberation. However, it is possible to think from the outside, from the limit, in a manner which brings
together both the ‘inside’ of the dispositif and the ‘outside’, of which the dispositif is an operation. As
Deleuze states: The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements,
folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but
precisely the inside of the outside … The inside as an operation of the outside: in all his work Foucault
seems haunted by this theme of an inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a
folding of the sea.lxxix In acting on the individual, dispositifs produce an ‘inside’ as an “interiorisation of
the outside”.lxxx This folding allows a subject to differentiate itself from dispositifs and no longer has an
internal dependence upon them – for Deleuze reading Foucault, there will always be a relation to
oneself that resists such dispositifs.lxxxi The individual has the potential to distance themselves from the
dispositifs that create our identity. This folding of power relations opens a space for the individual to
transgress. The question remains as to precisely how this transcendent transgressive freedom is
effected. Foucault did write of the need to bring about a “historical ontology of ourselves”,lxxxii such a
questioning of current modes of existence does, on a certain reading, suggest that if we discovered the
reality about how power operates in this world the individual can break free of its chains.lxxxiii This view
comes close to a Marxist view of ‘false consciousness’, and ignores the agonistic element to this reading
of Foucault.lxxxiv Rather, following Aurelia Armstrong, I draw upon comments suggesting that it is only
under the pressure of an event which makes our present identity and control problematic that we are
forced to exercise our freedom.lxxxv Foucault suggests the following: [F]or a domain of action, a
behaviour to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have made it
uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties
around it. These elements result from social, economic, or political processes … their role is
instigation.lxxxvi These transgressions or errors of life, of action, and of existing, are the transcendent
experience of events which force a questioning of the current dispositifs controlling the reality we
inhabit. These errors allow the individual to interiorize the outside, and practice freedom as a
transgressive limit-experience, agonistically questioning and forcing dispositifs to react to new
subjectivities. These events do not have to be epochal, or revolutionary.lxxxvii As Foucault states,
different processes can instigate this process – the key is that it is the individual who responds to such
instigation and practices this freedom through their actions and errors, causing the very conception of
life to be changed through an “experimental mode of inquiry”.lxxxviii
That project of liberal subject building is a nihilistic violent enterprise that destroys
value to life and causes endless warfare
Evans and Reid 13
[Brad, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Bristole, and Julian, “Dangerously exposed: the life and death of the
resilient subject,” Resilience, 2013, Vol. 1 (2), pp. 83-98]
Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or secure themselves from the
difficulties they are faced with but instead adapt to their enabling conditions. This renders them fully compliant
to the logics of complexity with its concomitant adaptive and emergent qualities. Resistance here is transformed from
being a political capacity aimed at the achievement of freedom from that which threatens and
endangers to a purely reactionary impulse aimed at increasing the capacities of the subject to adapt to
its dangers and simply reduce the degree to which it suffers. This conflation of resistance with resilience
is not incidental but indicative of the nihilism of the underlying ontology of vulnerability at work in
contemporary policies concerned with climate change and other supposedly catastrophic processes. What is nihilism, after all, if
it is not a will to nothingness drawn from a willing reactive enslavement to forces deemed to be
beyond our control as one merely lives out the catastrophic moment? It also alerts us to the fundamentally liberal
nature of such policies and framings of the phenomenon of climate change defined, as liberalism has
been since its origins, by a fundamental mistrust in the abilities of the human subject to secure itself in
the world.10 Liberalism, as we have both explored extensively elsewhere, is a security project.11 From its outset, it has been
concerned with seeking answers to the problem of how to secure itself as a regime of governance
through the provision of security to the life of populations subject to it.12 It will, however, always be an incomplete
project because its biopolitical foundations are flawed; life is not securable. It is a multiplicity of antagonisms and
for some life to be made to live, some other life has to be made to die.13 That is a fundamental law of life which is
biologically understood. This is the deep paradox that undercuts the entire liberal project while inciting it to govern
∂
ever more and ever better, becoming more inclusive and more assiduous at the provision of security to life, while learning how better to take
life and make die that which falls outside and threatens the boundaries of its territories. Liberal
regimes, in essence and from the outset,
thrive on the insecurities of life which their capacity to provide security to provides the source of their
legitimacy, becoming ever more adept at the taking of life which the provision of security to life
requires.14 It is no accident that the most advanced liberal democracy in the world today, the United States of America,
is also the most heavily armed state in the world. And not just the most heavily armed state today, but also the most heavily
armed in human history. Liberal regimes do not and cannot accept the realities of this paradox. Which is why, far
from being exhausted, the liberal project remains and has to be, in order for it to be true to its mission, distinctly
transformative. Not only of the world in general and hence its endless resorts to war and violence to weed out
those unruly lives that are the source of insecurity to the life that is the font of its security, but also, and yet
more fundamentally, of the human subject itself; for this is a paradox which plays out, not just territorially, socially or between individuals, but
within the diffuse and ultimately unknowable domain of human subjectivity itself. The
liberal subject is divided and has to be in
order to fulfil its mission, critically astute at discerning the distinctions within its own life between that
which accords with the demands made of it in order to accord with liberal ways of living and those which do not comply
with its biopolitical ambitions.15 Being divided means the liberal subject will always be incomplete, needing work,
critical, insecure
and mistrustful of itself for the purpose of its own self-improvement. The liberal subject is a project;
one that renders life itself a project, subject to an endless task of critique and self-becoming, from cradle
to grave. Sadly, many still find the concept of life appealing and even utopian. We are taught to think that we ought to choose life over
emptiness or negation, Renton’s law.16 In fact, it is the source of the world’s greatest nihilisms. Liberalism too is and has always been a
nihilism. Perhaps it is the greatest of all nihilisms. In giving us over to life, it gives us no ends to live for but the
endless work on the self that contemporarily permeate our ways of living devoid of any meaning as
such. ∂
The alt is existential resistance—only by affirming life from an ontological standpoint
can we reveal our true individuality
Joronen 13 (Mikko, dept of geography and faculty of mathematics and natural sciences,
genius, U of Turku, http://www.mediafire.com/view/djj55v7gah3d9ms/Joronen.pdf>
As Giorgio Agamben has argued, by being self-consciously Heideggerian, Foucault’s understand- ing of
the historical regimes of power is grounded on a more original relation between the constituted (or
actualised) forms of power and the constituting power of potentiality. While the constituting power
works as a condition of possibility for the constituted modes of power to emerge, all histori- cal
actualisations of power intrinsically depend on the suspension of the potentialities of constituting
power, on their concealment. 44 In this sense, constituting power has a similar ontological structure
with Aristotle’s notion of potentiality: it maintains itself without ever fully passing into actuality, without
being exhausted into actualisations. 45 It is not my intention here to go into details of Agamben’s
complex and nuanced argument in Homo Sacer, but instead to emphasise, as Agamben’s re-reading of
the distinction between potentiality and actuality indicates, how the coalescence of state power with
neoliberal governmentality con- stitutes politics at the domain of ontology. The constituting power does
not merely refer to the ontological possibility for the constituted modes of con- stituted power, but also
to the fundamental possibility for the political action as such. Accordingly, also the question of
resistance needs to be explored and confronted at this proper level of ontology: as a question of
existential resistance. In order to scrutinise the ontological implications Agamben’s distinction has for
the question of existential resistance, it is essential to pay atten- tion to what Agamben calls in Homo
Sacer the ‘life of possibility’. It is life that opposes the operations of constituted power: it constitutes an
inex- haustible possibility, which can be never entirely corralled into constituted forms of political
power. The power of potentiality in life, thus, denotes a power to constitute, a possibility to ground new
modes of life, to be otherwise. Governmentalities of neoliberal enframing evidently close this possibility,
or to use Rancière’s words in Disagreement, 46 follow the “logic of the police”, the logic of designating
ontological positions and divisions of power rather than opening them up for the power of potential life.
The ontological resistance, hence, does not only liberate life from the grasp of ontological
monopolisations, such as neoliberal enframing, but from all coded and corralled forms of belonging,
including the state. Agamben’s thinking evidently resolves the question of politics by mov- ing it from
the sphere of actualised forms of political power to the realm of ontology. Agamben’s ontological
discussion concerning the power of life can be thus subordinated to what Heidegger defines as the
fundamental con- dition of possibility for the constitution of all ontologies: the appropriation of
revealing from the abyssal source (Ab-Grund) of open being. 47 Supported by the fact that Agamben
was heavily influenced by Heidegger’s seminars he participated in during the 1960s, 48 the eclectic
position of Agamben – with one foot in the realm of biopolitics, the politics over life, and the other in
the realm of ontology – can be re-thought from an explicitly Heideggerian perspective. Agamben,
however, accuses Heidegger precisely of ignoring what he thinks is the fundamental origin of all
revealing: the pure fact of liv- ing things. 49 Heidegger evidently goes through a great effort, at least in
his early major contribution Being and Time (1927), to separate his existential-ontological analysis of
Dasein from the analyses of life formu- lated, in particular, by the key representatives of the German
‘life-philosophy’ movement (Lebensphilosophie), Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. 50 For Heidegger,
the fundamental flaw of the Lebensphilosophie was that it never came to properly treat life in
ontological terms, that is, as a mode of being/revealing. Heidegger’s separation, however, remained
quite ambigu- ous: it is not clear whether Heidegger was able to truly recede his existential-ontological
analysis of being from the strains of life-philosophy, or whether Heidegger’s own thinking would have
evolved into its shape without the significant influence of life-philosophy in the early phase of his
thinking. 51 Moreover, the compulsive distancing of life from being may, in the end, afford nothing by a
cul-de-sac. First of all, by locating the potential, even necessary, linkages between questions of life and
being, we may find more proper ways to grasp some of the crucial contemporary forms of power and
government, such as the biopolitical techniques, which have taken life itself as the target of ontological
politics. Second, in order to grasp the onto- logical politics behind neoliberalism, and further, to enable
alternatives that have the potential to widen the scope of ontological imagination, we need to take into
account how constituted forms of life and power are framed through the different ontological
monopolisations of revealing.
Perm Answers
A2: Permutation—Top
Negotiating with sovereign power is a question of where to draw lines between forms
of life and a submission to the source of sovereign power. Only a refusal to distinguish
between forms of life can evade biopolitics.
Edkins & Pin-Fat ’04 (Jenny – University of Wales Aberystwyth international politics professor,
Veronique – University of Manchester IR lecturer, Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins,
Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 18)
What this tells us is that to contest sovereign power we need something different. In challenging
sovereign power, we are not facing a power relation but a relationship of violence, one that denies a
political voice to the form-of-life it has produced. Resistance such as would be possible from within a
power relation, and indeed as an inherent part of it, cannot take place. Other forms of opposition must
be found, forms that seek to reinstate a properly political relationship by producing sovereign power
as a form of power relation. Two strategies of contestation were suggested: a refusal and an
acceptance. First, the refusal. The abstract drawing of lines is the way in which sovereign power
produces bare life. This drawing of lines must be refused, wherever the lines are drawn. Negotiating the
precise location of the lines remains within the violence of sovereignty power. On the other hand, a
refusal to draw any line takes away the ground upon which sovereign power is constituted. It insists
instead on the politics of decisioning and particular distinctions and demands that specifics of time,
place, and circumstance be attended to in each instance. Second, the acceptance. When life is
produced as bare life, it is not helpful for that life to demand its reinstatement as politically qualified
life. To do so would be to validate the very drawing of lines upon which sovereignty depends and
which produces life as bare life in the first place. An alternative strategy is the acceptance or what we
have called the assumption of bare life. Through this strategy, the subject at one and the same time
both acknowledges its status as nothing but life and demands recognition as such. It refuses the
distinction between bare life and politically qualified life and demands that all life as such is worthy of
recognition.
As is apparent, the two strategies are the same at heart. Both seek to overturn the denial of politics
that has taken place under biopolitics and to reinstate properly political power relations, with their
accompanying freedoms and potentialities. We have discussed examples of what such contestation of
sovereign power might look like. Practices that contest sovereign power are apparent in many places:
whether in hunger strikes, grassroots communitas, or street demonstrations, creative ways of provoking
sovereign power and embroiling it into a political or power relation have been and are being found.
We must not falter in our call for subjectivity, the permutation is an attempt to
negotiate the rights of the populace back into the sovereign’s control
Agamben, 2000 - Professor of philosophy at the University of Verona (Giorgio; “Means without End:
Notes on Politics”; conference; Pg. 113; DOA: 7/16/15 || NDW)
Sovereignty, therefore, is the guardian who prevents the undecidable threshold between violence and right,
nature and language, from coming to light. We have to fix our gaze, instead, precisely on what the
statue of Justice (which, as Montesquieu reminds us, was to be state of exception) was not supposed to see, namely, what
nowadays is apparent to everybody: that the state of exception is the rule, that naked life is immediately
the carrier of the sovereign nexus, and that, as such, it is today abandoned to a kind of violence that is all
the more effective for being anonymous and quotidian. If there is today a social power [potenza], it must
see its own impotence [impotenza] through to the end, it must decline any will to either posit or preserve
right, it must break everywhere the nexus between violence and right, between the living and language
that constitutes sovereignty.
The affirmative’s defense of sovereignty makes liberation impossible – their “lesser
evil” logic culminates in absolute evil.
Prozorov, 2009 - Professor of Political Science at the University of Helenski (Sergie; “The
Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of Nature and the Political”; Article;
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313215_index.html; DOA: 7/16/15 ||
NDW)
In order to understand this claim let us consider Agamben’s criticism of Schmitt’s use of the notion of
the katechon in his defense of state sovereignty. In Schmitt’s political theology, sovereign power is
analogous to the figure of the katechon in the Catholic tradition, the force that delays the advent of the Antichrist, which in turn
would eventually lead to the messianic redemption (Schmitt 2003, 59-60). It is as this delaying force, as opposed to a direct agent of the Good, that the state must
be appreciated. In contrast, Agamben’s
interpretation of the famous passage in St. Paul’s Second Letter to the
Thessalonians on the katechon asserts that rather than grounding something like a Christian ‘doctrine of
State power’ (Agamben 2005b, 109), this passage harbours no positive valuation of the katechon whatsoever.
Instead, the katechon (every form of constituted power) merely conceals the ‘absence of law’ that already
characterizes the messianic present and thus does nothing other than defer or ‘hold back’ the moment
of the messianic suspension of the law (see ibid., 95-107). Instead, in the Pauline messianic logic the semblance of the law,
maintained by the katechon, must be stripped off and all power revealed as the ‘absolute outlaw’ (Agamben 2005b, 111).
As Agamben (2005b, 110) claims, ‘every theory of the State, including Hobbes’s – which thinks of it as a
power to block or delay catastrophe – can be taken as a secularization of this [traditional] interpretation of 2
Thessalonians 2.’ Indeed, in the Schmittian reading, which characterizes most contemporary political theories, including those extremely hostile to Schmitt, the
secularized katechon is legitimized as the only force that wards off the Antichrist [the anomie of the state of nature] and thus the end of the social order as we know
it. On the contrary, Agamben’s
reading of Paul posits the katechon as an obstacle to the advent of the
messianic kingdom and thus accuses the proponents of the ‘Christian doctrine of state power’ of a thinly
disguised nihilism. ‘[T]he katechon is the force – the Roman Empire as well as every constituted authority – that
clashes with and hides katargesis, the state of tendential lawlessness that characterizes the messianic,
and in this sense delays unveiling the ‘mystery of lawlessness’.’ (Agamben 2005b, 111) It is as if the erstwhile champions of a
Christian doctrine of power have forgotten their creed and embraced the imperfection of humanity as ‘all there is’. Their valorization of the katechon obscures a
simple question: ‘if we longed for parousia, should we not be impatient with the interference of the katechon?’ (Rasch 2007, 106) This, as Agamben shows, is
precisely Paul’s attitude, which is diametrically opposed to the attitude of the philosophers of the
political, for whom the katechon has assumed an autonomous value: What if, after two thousand years and untold promises,
we have lost our faith in the parousia and grown weary of waiting for the arrival of divine violence? Then would not delaying the Antichrist be what we should hope
for? [...] The katechon, as a figure for the political, rejects the promise of the parousia and protects the community from the dangerous illusions of both ultimate
perfection and absolute evil. (Rasch 2007, 107) In Rasch’s view, what the defenders of the katechon fear is not so much the Antichrist but the Messiah himself, who,
moreover, might well appear to them indistinct from the Antichrist: both
are ‘figures who promise us perfection, figures who
offer us redemption and bestow upon us the guilt of failing perfection or rejecting their offer.’ (Ibid., 107)
There is certainly a certain irony in the ‘Christian doctrine of state power’ ultimately coming down to the
apostasy of any recognizable Christianity in vision of an exhausted humanity that can no longer
distinguish between the Antichrist and the Messiah. However, Agamben’s reading of Paul leads us to a
different case of indistinction. If the katechon conceals that all power is ‘absolute outlaw’ and thereby
defers the reappropriation of this anomie by the messianic community, then would it be too much to
suggest that the katechon is the Antichrist, who perpetuates its reign by concealing the fact of its long
having arrived? Absolute Evil would thus attain domination precisely by pretending, as a ‘lesser evil’, to ward off its own advent. By converting the seekers
of redemption into the guardians of its perpetual inaccessibility, the katechon ensures the survival of greater evil in the guise of the lesser one. Thus, Agamben
argues that ‘[it] is possible to conceive of katechon and anomos [Antichrist] not as two separate figures, but as one single power before and after the final unveiling.
Profane power is the semblance that covers up the substantial lawlessness of messianic time.’ (2005b, 111) As
Rasch sums up Agamben’s claim
about the insidious manner of the self-perpetuation of sovereign power, ‘embracing the political is
equivalent to building concentration camps while awaiting the Antichrist’ (Rasch 2007, 106). The relation to the
katechon indicates nothing less than one’s stand on the possibility of the transcendence of the political.
While for the Schmittian orientation the political is ‘all there is’ and its disappearance is only thinkable as
the self-destruction of humanity (cf. Laclau 2007, 20-22), Agamben’s messianic approach welcomes the demise of the katechon as the condition
of possibility of life beyond sovereignty that remains concealed ‘only until the person now holding it back gets out of the way’ (2 Thessalonians 2, 7; cited in
Agamben 2005b, 110). In Walter Benjamin’s messianic politics (1986), this
demise of the sovereign takes the form of ‘divine
violence’ that is neither law-preserving nor law-making and transforms the ‘fictive’ state of exception,
inscribed within the legal order, into a ‘real state of exception’ that has severed all links to the law and
the state form. Agamben’s work from his earliest writings onwards may be viewed as an engagement with this
admittedly arcane and disconcerting idea of divine violence: ‘Only if it is possible to think the Being of
abandonment beyond every idea of the law (even that of the empty form of law’s being in force without significance) will we have
moved out of the paradox of sovereignty towards a politics freed from every ban.’ (Agamben 1998, 59. See also Mills
2004; Kaufman 2008) Prior to addressing the specific features of Agamben’s post-sovereign politics, let us
consider this idea of a politics freed from every ban in relation to the figure of state of nature.
A2: Perm—Reject Divisons of Life
Only a complete refusal to draw lines between forms of life can escape the dilemma of
sovereign power.
Edkins & Pin-Fat ’04 (Jenny – University of Wales Aberystwyth international politics professor,
Veronique – University of Manchester IR lecturer, Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins,
Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 13)
One potential form of resistance to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between
zoe_and bios, inside and outside, human and inhuman. As we have shown, sovereign power does not
involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a
form of governance or technique of administration through relationships of violence that reduce
political subjects to mere bare or naked life. As Michael Dillon puts it, "Sovereign power [is] a form of
rule gone global [that] has come to develop and deploy modes of destruction whose dissemination it
finds increasingly impossible to control because these have become integral to its propagation and
survival."
In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of resistance, then, we are not asking for the
elimination of power relations and, consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the possibility of
a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks: quite the
op¬posite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at
all (and, indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power (as a form of violence) can be contested
and a properly political power relation can be reinstated.
We could call this escaping the logic of sovereign power. Our overall argument is that we can escape
sovereign power and reinstate a form of power relation by contesting its assumption of the right to
draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign ban. Any other resistance always inevitably remains
within this relationship of violence. To move outside it (and return to a power relation), we need not
only contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also resist the call to draw any lines of the
sort sovereign power demands.
Co-Option DA
Pure alt framing is key—the state coops individual action
Tran-Creque 13 Bard College, interdisciplinary research, education and art community working to understand unmanned and
autonomous vehicles. By bringing together research from diverse academic and artistic perspectives which have, up until now, remained fairly
silent on the issue, we aim to encourage new creative thinking and, ultimately, inform the public debate. We want to encourage dialogue
between the tech world and the non-tech world, and explore new vocabularies in diverse disciplines. This is an online space for people to follow
the latest news, encounter disparate views, access good writing and art, find resources for research, and engage a diverse community of
thinkers and practitioners with the shared goal of understanding the drone. (Steven, Center for the Study of the Drone, “The Forever War is
Always Hungry”, July 5, 2013, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/the-forever-war-is-always-hungry/ //SRSL)
No War but the Forever War What exactly is one supposed to make of John Brennan’s admission that
the war against Al Qaeda will continue for another decade? How did the AUMF and the Patriot Act
together come to constitute something like America’s Article 48, creating a permanent state of
exception in which something like the NSA’s “giant automated Stasi” is simply accepted as the new
normal? How did drones become an inevitable part of the near future in New York City? After all, the War on Terror really isn’t anything
like a war at all— at least, not in the conventional imaginary of nation states commanding disciplined
military forces on established fields of battle. The United States commands a degree of military power
and comparative dominance simply unprecedented in human history—what is elegantly referred to, in
the anodyne language of military planners, as “asymmetry.” There are no strictly defined battlefields,
and the formal enemies in the War on Terror have rarely amounted to more than the insurgent army of
a deposed dictator (funded and armed by the U.S., albeit long ago) and a few hundred religious students
in the mountains of Central Asia. It is in fact genuinely strange how resiliently this conventional image seems to persist in both popular and
intellectual imagination. Even scholarly responses to the War on Terror begin from the assumption that something new and strange is happening when battlefields
and opponents alike are no longer delimited but rather always and everywhere. If one limits oneself to legal documents, this is pretty much the only possible
conclusion.
The conventional imagery really seems to be most useful in obscuring the more fundamental
realities of what war really is. In part, war consists of the far more common practice of civil wars,
guerrilla wars, genocide and internal repression—but also, in a larger sense, the fundamental state of
war between the sovereign and his people that is the originary, constitutive state for sovereign power
itself. The forever war, then, has effectively allowed the United States to claim sovereignty to farthest reaches of the earth. Certainly, this is not a
question purely of drones: the apparatus also consists of a deep surveillance state, total international
digital surveillance, a military larger than the combined militaries of the rest of the world, and extralegal
rendition and detention programs. But at the edges of this arrangement, one finds Agamben’s homo
sacer, Fiskesjö’s barbarians: those excluded from the legal order, stripped of rights, subject to death at
any time—the point at which an empire converts those beyond its reach into obedient subjects or
corpses. This is the logic of sovereign violence taken to its most extreme—and not insignificantly, this
has been accomplished in part by euphemizing that violence, whether in the sanitized parlance of the
military—“focused obstruction,” “targeted killing,” “kinetic action”—or the more artful, ideological
euphemization by which assassination programs become complex and debatable moral issues in the
liberal press. It should come as no surprise that this has been accompanied by the infinite expansion of an apparatus of domestic surveillance and control
unprecedented in human history. One should never forget that the instruments of sovereignty—drones, militarized
police, mass surveillance apparatus—were always directed inwards as much as outwards, because the
security state secures one thing: the safety of the sovereign above all. From the perspective of sovereign power, there is no
inside and there is no outside. There is only the violence to which we are all subject.
A2: Krishna
The aligment of “progressive” projects with the established political order makes
systemic change impossible and guarantees the preservation of the status quo.
Agamben 2k [Giorgio – prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ.
Minnesota Press, p. 136-138]
<Today, the political parties that define themselves as "progressive" and the so-called leftist coalitions
have won in the large cities where there have been elections. One is struck by the victors' excessive
preoccupation with presenting themselves as the establishment and with reassuring at all costs the
old economic, political, and religious powers. When Napoleon defeated the Mamluks in Egypt, the first
thing he did was to summon the notables who constituted the old regime's backbone and to inform
them that under the new sovereign their privileges and functions would remain untouched. Since here
one is not dealing with the military conquest of a foreign country, the zeal with which the head of a
party-that up until not too long ago used to call itself Communist-saw fit to reassure bankers and
capitalists by pointing out how well the lira and the stock exchange had received the blow is, to say the
least, inappropriate. This much is certain: these politicians will end up being defeated by their very will
to win at all costs. The desire to be the establishment will ruin them just as it ruined their
predecessors.6
It is important to be able to distinguish between defeat and dishonor. The victory of the right in the
1994 political elections was a defeat for the left, which does not imply that because of this it was also a
dishonor. If, as is certainly the case, this defeat also involved dishonor, that is because it marked the
conclusive moment of a process of involution that had already begun many years ago. There was
dishonor because the defeat did not conclude a struggle over opposite positions, but rather decided
only whose turn it was to put into practice the same ideology of the spectacle, of the market, and of
enterprise. One might see in this nothing other than a necessary consequence of a betrayal that had
already begun in the years of Stalinism. Perhaps so. What concerns us here, however, is only the
evolution that has taken place be-ginning with the end of the 1970s. It is since then, in fact, that the
complete corruption of minds has taken that hypocritical form and that voice of reason and common
sense that today goes under the name of progressivism.
In a recent book, Jean-Claude Milner has clearly identified and defined as "progressivism" the principle
in whose name the following process has taken place: compromising. The revolution used to have to
compromise with capital and with power, just as the church had to come to terms with the modem
world. Thus, the motto that has guided the strategy of progressivism during the march toward its
coming to power slowly took shape: one has to yield on everything, one has to reconcile everything
with its opposite, intelligence with television and advertisement, the working class with capital,
freedom of speech with the state of the spectacle, the environment with industrial development,
science with opinion, democracy with the electoral machine, bad conscience and abjuration with
memory and loyalty.
Today one can see what such a strategy has led to. The left has actively collaborated in setting up in
every field the instruments and terms of agreement that the right, once in power, will just need to
apply and develop so as to achieve its own goals without difficulty.
It was exactly in the same way that the working class was spiritually and physically disarmed by German
social democracy before being handed over to Nazism. And while the citizens of goodwill are being
called on to keep watch and to wait for phantasmatic frontal attacks, the right has already crossed the
lines through the breach that the left itself had opened up.>
A2: Pragmatism
Overcoming sovereign power is impossible as long as political options are confined to
the application of praxis to sovereign goals. The very relationship between liberatory
potential and sovereignty must be abandoned in order to achieve a politics of pure
means where life is not reduced to a specific form to be judged and regulated.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, Stanford UP, p. 43-44)
<The strength of Negri's book lies instead in the final perspective it opens insofar as it shows how
constituting power, when conceived in all its radicality, ceases to be a strictly political concept and
necessarily presents itself as a category of ontology. The problem of constituting power then becomes
the problem of the "constitution of potentiality" (II potere costituente, p. 383), and the unresolved
dialectic between constituting power and constituted power opens the way for a new articulation of
the relation between potentiality and actuality, which requires nothing less than a re-thinking of the
ontological categories of modality in their totality. The problem is therefore moved from political
philosophy to first philosophy (or, if one likes, politics is returned to its ontological position). Only an
entirely new conjunction of possibility and reality, contingency and necessity, and the other path(' tou
ontos, will make it possible to cut the knot that binds sovereignty to constituting power. And only if it
is possible to think the relation between potentiality and actuality differently-and even to think
beyond this relation-will it be possible to think a constituting power wholly released from the
sovereign ban. Until a new and coherent ontology of potentiality (beyond the steps that have been
made in this direction by Spinoza, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) has replaced the ontology
founded on the primacy of actuality and its relation to potentiality, a political theory freed from the
aporias of sovereignty remains unthinkable.> <43-44>
A2: Reform
Reform is impossible in the current apparatus - exclusion is the foundation to the
modern juridicial-political system of the west
Agamben 13 [Giorgio Agamben is an Italian continental philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of
exception, “What is a destituent power?” http://www.envplan.com/fulltext_temp/0/d3201tra.pdf, pg. 6, omak]
What was my intention when I began the archeology of politics that developed into the Homo Sacer
project? For me it was not a question of criticizing or correcting this or that concept, this or that institution of Western politics. It was,
rather, first and foremost a matter of shifting the very site of politics itself. (For centuries, politics remained in the
same place where Aristotle, then Hobbes and Marx, situated it.) The first act of investigation was therefore the
identification of bare life as the first referent and stake of politics. The originary place of Western politics
consists of an ex-ceptio, an inclusive exclusion of human life in the form of bare life. Consider the peculiarities of
this operation: life is not in itself political, it is what must be excluded and, at the same time, included by way of its own exclusion. Life—that is,
the Impolitical (l’Impolitico)—must be politicized through a complex operation that has the structure of an exception. The
autonomy of
the political is founded, in this sense, on a division, an articulation, and an exception of life. From the
outset, Western politics is biopolitical. 2. The structure of the exception was identified in Homo Sacer 1 starting from Aristotle.
The exception is an inclusive exclusion. Whereas the example is an exclusive inclusion (the example is excluded from the set to
which it refers, in as much as it belongs to it), the exception is included in the normal case through its exclusion. It is this inclusive
exclusion that defines the originary structure of the archē. (1) The dialectic of the foundation that defines
Western ontology since Aristotle cannot be understood if one does not understand that it functions as
an exception in the sense that we have seen. The strategy is always the same: something is divided,
excluded, and rejected at the bottom, and, through this exclusion, is included as the foundation. This is
true for life, which is said in many ways —vegetative life, sensitive life, intellectual life, the first of which is excluded to function as the
foundation for the others— but also for being, which is also said in many ways (to on legetai pollakos), one of which will act as foundation. In
the sovereign exception that founds the juridical-political system of the West, what is included through
its exclusion is bare life. It is important not to confuse bare life with natural life. Through its division and its capture in
the dispositif of the exception, life assumes the form of bare life, life that was divided and separated
from its form. It is in this sense that one must understand the assertion at the end of Homo Sacer 1 that “the fundamental activity of
sovereign power is the production of bare life as the originary political element.” And it is this bare life (or ‘sacred’ life, if sacer designates
primarily a life that can be killed without committing murder) that, in the juridical-political machine of the West, acts as a
threshold of articulation between zoē and bios, natural life and politically qualified life. And it will not be
possible to think another dimension of life if we have not first managed to deactivate the dispositif of
the exception of bare life. (If we relate the dispositif of the exception to anthropogenesis, it is possible that it will be clarified through
the original structure of the event of language. Language, in its taking place, both separates from itself and includes in itself life and the world.
It is, in the words of Mallarmé, a beginning that is based on the negation of every principle, on its own
situation in the archē. The ex-ceptio, the inclusive exclusion of the real from the logos and in the logos, is thus the original structure of
the event of language.)
A2: Solves Labeling
The government cannot be included—the people and the sovereign perpetually create
each other
Tran-Creque 13 Bard College, interdisciplinary research, education and art community working to
understand unmanned and autonomous vehicles. By bringing together research from diverse academic
and artistic perspectives which have, up until now, remained fairly silent on the issue, we aim to
encourage new creative thinking and, ultimately, inform the public debate. We want to encourage
dialogue between the tech world and the non-tech world, and explore new vocabularies in diverse
disciplines. This is an online space for people to follow the latest news, encounter disparate views,
access good writing and art, find resources for research, and engage a diverse community of thinkers
and practitioners with the shared goal of understanding the drone. (Steven, Center for the Study of the
Drone, “The Forever War is Always Hungry”, July 5, 2013, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/the-forever-waris-always-hungry/ //SRSL)
The Only War there Is Beginning with his observation that states are “at the same time forms of
institutionalized raiding or extortion, and utopian projects,” David Graeber’s definition of sovereignty is
simple enough: “the right to exercise violence with impunity.” Graeber offers the example of the Ganda kingship to the south
of the Shilluk. In the late 19th century, European visitors to the court of King Mutesa offered a gift of firearms. Mutesa responded by firing the rifle in the street and
killing his subjects at random. When David Livingstone asked why the Ganda king killed so many people, he was told that “if [the king] didn’t, everyone would
assume that he was dead.” However, the notoriety of the Ganda kings for arbitrary, random
violence towards their own people did not
prevent Mutesa from also being accepted as supreme judge and guardian of the state’s system of
justice. Indeed, it was the very foundation for it. Specifically, Graeber is interested in the transcendent
quality of violence: the violence and transgression of the king makes him “a creature beyond morality.”
Paradoxically, the sovereign may be arbitrarily violent—the etymology here is telling—and nevertheless
seen as the supreme source of justice and law. Graeber calls this transcendent aspect of violence “divine.” It isn’t just that kings act like
gods; it’s that they do so and get away with it. This remains the case in the modern state. Walter Benjamin’s famous distinction between
“law-making” and “law-maintaining” violence refers to the same phenomenon. We often say that no one is above the law, but if this
were true, there would be no one to bring the legal order into being in the first place: the signers of the
Declaration of Independence or the American Constitution were all traitors by the legal order under
which they were born. There really is no resolution to this paradox. The solution of the left is that the people may rise up periodically and overthrow
the existing legal regime in a revolution. The solution of the right is Carl Schmitt’s exception: that sovereignty is exercised by the head of
state in putting aside the legal order. But whichever solution one prefers, this really just defers the dilemma: all
sovereignty is built on a foundation of illegal acts of violence, and it always carries the immanent
potential for arbitrary violence. In 19th-century accounts of rainmakers in Southern Sudan, the function of violence is even clearer. With
rainmakers, as with Shilluk kings, the health of the land is tied to the health of the king. If the rains fail to fall, first people will bring petitions, then gifts. But after a
certain point, if the rains still don’t come, the rainmaker must either flee or face a community united to kill him. It isn’t hard to see why rainmakers would want
something like the state’s monopoly on violence or a retinue of loyal, armed followers. But the crucial point is that insofar as “the people” could be said to exist,
they were essentially seen as the collective enemy of the king. European explorers in the region often found kings raiding enemy villages only to find that the
villages contained the king’s own subjects. They were delivering arbitrary violence to the people they were supposed to protect. So Graeber reminds us, “predatory
violence was and would always remain the essence of sovereignty.” Such is the hidden logic of sovereignty. Above all, it depends on the transcendent quality of
violence that allows the sovereign to become, as Hobbes put it, a “mortal god.” But
this is also means that arbitrary violence is the
constitutive principle of sovereignty, defining the relationship between the sovereign and everything
else: What we call ‘the social peace’ is really just a truce in a constitutive war between sovereign power
and ‘the people,’ or ‘nation’—both of whom come into existence, as political entities, in their struggle
against each other. There is no inside or outside here. Contra Schmitt and his friend-enemy distinction, this constitutive war precedes wars between
nations and peoples. From the perspective of sovereign power, “ there is no fundamental difference in the relation between a
sovereign and his people, and a sovereign and his enemies,” explains Graeber. This constitutive war is a war
the sovereign can never win—a forever war that can never end.
A2: Inevitability Claims
TURN: The dominance of biopolitics is what has made these institutions inevitable.
Extend our 1NC Caldwell evidence. Whatever being is an abandonment of the
tradition of identity and teleology that has maintained the current political
philosophy. Its refusal to accept any finite end and stay permanently in potentiality
refuses the logic of supposedly inevitable metanarratives.
TURN: Inevitability claims posit a monolithic view of the present that destroys the
potential to effectuate change. Rather, the present is constituted by variety of
contingencies that can each be resisted.
Barry, Osborne, & Rose ’96 (Andrew - lecturer in the Department of Sociology Goldsmiths College,
University of London. Thomas - lecturer in the Department of Sociolou, University of Bristol, Nikolas Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Foucault and Political Reason,
“Introduction: Writing the History of the Present,” London, GBR: U C L Press, Limited p. 4-5)
Foucault might be said to approach the question of the present with a particular ethos but not with
any substantive or aptiti understanding of its status. His concern is not to identify some current, perhaps
definitive, “crisis” in the present. Foucault makes no reference to concepts such as post-fordism,
postmodernity, “McDonaldization” or late capitalism that have often been used to characterize a
certain kind of break with the past. Nor is he concerned simply with a blanket denunciation of the
present. No political programmatics follow automatically from his work in this field. Foucault once
argued in an interview, that one of the “most destructive habits of modern thought. . . is that the
moment of the present is considered in history as the break, the climax, the fulfilment, the return of
youth, etc.” - confessing that he had himself found himself at times drawn into the orbit of such a
temptation (Foucault 1989~: 251). But if it is the case that, for example, the closing pages of Madness
and civilization are unquestionably apocalyptic in their pronouncements on the present, and that
Foucault himself was to regret the adoption of such apocalyptic tones, in a sense, the conception of the
present does retain a certain stability across his work. Above all, one might say, Foucault was concerned
to introduce an “untimely” attitude in our relation towards the present. Untimely in the Nietzschean
sense: acting counter to our time, introducing a new sense of the fragility of our time, and thus acting
on our time for the benefit, one hopes, of a time to come (Nietzsche 1983: 60, cf. Rose 199313: 1, Bell 1994: 155).
Our time, that is to say, is not presumed to be the bearer or culmination of some grand historical
process, it has no inevitability, no spirit, essence or underlying cause. The “present”, in Foucault’s
work, is less an epoch than an array of questions; and the coherence with which the present presents itself to us and in which guise it is re-imagined by so much social theory - is something to be acted upon by historical investigation, to be
cut up and decomposed so that it can be seen as put together contigently out of heterogeneous elements each having their
own conditions of possibility. Such a fragmentation of the present is not undertaken in a spirit of poststructuralist
playfulness. It is undertaken with a more serious, if hopefully modest, ambition - to allow a space for the work of
freedom. Here, indeed, the place of ethics is marked in Foucault’s thought. Analyses ofthe present are concerned
with opening up “a virtual break which opens a room, understood as a room of concrete freedom,
that is possible transformation”; the received fixedness and inevitability of the present is destabilized, shown as just
sufliciendy fragile as to let in a little glimpse of freedom - as a practice of difference - through its fractures.
Framework Answers
Alt = 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
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, 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.
and signals a radical transformation of the political- philosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if
Alternative
Whatever Being k2 Ptx
-- Whatever being is characterized by pure belonging free from identity. This is
conducive to a new form of politically charged community freed from domination.
Agamben 93 (Giorgio – Prof Philosophy University Macerata, The Coming Community, Trans. Michael
Hardt, U Minnesota Press, p. 9-11)
One concept that escapes the antinomy of the universal and the particular has long been familiar to us:
the example. In any context where it exerts its force, the example is characterized by the fact that it
holds for all cases of the same type, and, at the same time, it is included among these. It is one
singularity among others, which, however, stands for each of them and serves for all. On one hand,
every example is treated in effect as a real particular case; but on the other, it remains understood
that it cannot serve in its particularity. Neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular
object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity. Hence the pregnancy of the Greek term,
for example: para-deigma, that which is shown alongside (like the German Bei-spiel, that which plays
alongside). Hence the proper place of the example is always beside itself, in the empty space in which
its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds. This life is purely linguistic life. Only life in the word is
undefinable and unforgettable. Exemplary being is purely linguistic being. Exemplary is what is not
defined by any property, except by being-called. Not being-red, but being-called-red; not being-Jakob,
but being-called-Jakob defines the example. Hence its ambiguity, just when one has decided to take it
really seriously. Being-called-the property that establishes all possible belongings (being-called-Italian,
-dog, -Communist)-is also what can bring them all back radically into question. It is the Most Common
that cuts off any real community. Hence the impotent omnivalence of whatever being. It is neither
apathy nor promiscuity nor resignation. These pure singularities communicate only in the empty
space of the example, without being tied by any common property, by any identity. They are
expropriated of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself, the sign e. Tricksters or fakes,
assistants or 'toons, they are the exemplars of the coming community.
Whatever Being k2 Ethics
Whatever being is being as it always matters. It cannot be divided into forms to be
valued over one another, rather it is being without particular essence, attributes, or
distinguishable qualities. The example of love is telling in that love is only given to a
whatever singularity, to a loved one as whatever they may be, regardless of their
attributes.
Agamben ’93 (Giorgio – prof of philosophy at College of International Philosophy - Paris, The Coming Community, p. 1-2)
<THE COMING being is whatever being. In the Scholastic enumeration of transcendentals (quodlibet ens
est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum-whatever entity is one, true, good, or perfect), the term that,
remaining unthought in each, conditions the meaning of all the others is the adjective quodlibet. The
common translation of this term as "whatever" in the sense of "it does not matter which, indifferently"
is certainly correct, but in its form the Latin says exactly the opposite: Quodlibet ens is not "being, it
does not matter which," but rather "being such that it always matters." The Latin always already
contains, that is, a reference to the will (libet). What-ever being has an original relation to desire.
The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common
property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but only in its being such
as it is. Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the
ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal. The intelligible, according to a
beautiful expression of Levi ben Gershon _(Gersonides), is neither a universal nor an individual included
in a series, but rather "singularity insofar as it is whatever singularity." In this conception, such-andsuch being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or
that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims) -and it is reclaimed not for another
class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself.
Thus being-such, which remains constantly hidden in the condition of belonging ("there is an x such that
it belongs toy") and which is in no way a real predicate, comes to light itself: The singularity exposed as
such is whatever you want, that is, lovable.
Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being
tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality
(universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The
lover desires the as only insofar as it is such-this is the lover's particular fetishism. Thus, whatever
singularity (the Lovable) is never the intelligence of some thing, of this or that quality or essence, but
only the intelligence of an intelligibility. The movement Plato describes as erotic anamnesis is the
movement that transports the object not toward another thing or another place, but toward its own
taking-place-toward the Idea.
A2 Ks of Agamben
AT: Derrida
Derrida fundamentally misunderstands Agamben – he’s a dumbass
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/on-derridas-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 politics and allow us all to return to our raw animality or unblemished nature — but 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.
AT: Foucault Wrong
Agambens theory of Biopower si 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 IR can only be
built upon a certain level of methodological adherence to these principles. The 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 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
***TAG***
Kendrick 2012 Victoria University of Wellington (Foucault, Biopower & IR)
Due to Agamben’s view of sovereignty, it is clear that his conception of biopower is fundamentally
dissimilar to Foucault. Some go so far as to say they are not talking about the same thing.40 Agamben’s
biopower rests on the idea that ‘bare life’ is its object, a mode of life that is exposed to an
unconditional threat of death via the suspension of sovereignty , a foundational practice that
serves to perpetually constitute sovereign power. Bare life exists in a ‘state of exception’, a
constitutive operation that links bare life directly to sovereign power. The state of exception thus
produces bare life which is the hidden foundation of biopolitics, which itself had been
concealed until Foucault identified practices of government that made it explicit. This objectification of
bare life is absolutely incongruent with Foucault’s subjectification of the life processes of a population. It
also directly contradicts Foucault. For Agamben, sovereign biopower produces bare life to
establish itself, a process that is “immensely reductive,”41 while for Foucault, the practice of
biopower is productive – to turn the mere “being” of life into “well-being.”42 Ojakangas sums up the
problem with Agamben’s perspective most succinctly when he says that is“[b]io-power needs a
notion of life that corresponds to its aims.”43 The necessary correspondence between
biopower and ‘more-than-life’ does mean Agamben is effectively talking about something
different to what Foucault meant. Schinkel (2010) even resolves this divergence in a model based on
citizenship as a technology of government. On this reading Foucauldian biopolitics is directed
towards the bios, taking as its object the social body, while Agambean biopower is a
zoēpolitics externally directed to persons outside the state.44 This is an important and helpful
distinction, but it leaves unresolved what branch of biopower is most pertinent to the study of
international relations. Like Hardt & Negri, the influence Agamben’s work wields within the
discipline of IR forces a complete appraisal of his conceptualisation , and from a Foucauldian
perspective methodological problems upset his argument. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History Foucault
eschews the search for truth in origins, whereby history becomes a handmaiden to philosophy.45
Agamben does not observe this methodological precaution and effectively identifies an originary
moment, whereby the articulation of the concepts of zoë and bios by Aristotle constitute the birthmoment of sovereignty. Not only does this “naively and problematically [assume] that there
was once a separation between zoë and bios,”46 Blencowe points out that this reading also
de-historicises biopower in a dual sense. First it removes Foucault’s work from its contexts of
concern with constructed and historical statuses, which “[forecloses] any transhistorical distinctions
such as zoë/bios, bare life/human life, or nature/culture”. Second, “the historical specificity of notions
that are central to biological thinking, such as species, is obliterated while all thought of living physicality
is subsumed under a ‘mere’ physicality.”47 The genealogical component of Foucault’s insight is
thus completely removed, and an abstract transhistorical category –zoë – is introduced.
AT: Hall***
Some biopolitics might be good, but that’s not the aff --- we specifically critique the
juridical biopolitics of the 1ac
THEIR AUTHOR Hall, 5/7/2007 – Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, “Death, Power, and the
Body: A Bio-political Analysis of Death and Dying”, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, p.
9)//roetlin
Foucault was careful to distinguish sovereign power from the mechanisms of power that emerged in
modernity. For him, an essential aspect of modern power is its surreptitious nature–it works so well precisely because we are intent
on looking for power in rules and laws; in prohibitive mechanisms rather than in productive ones. While
Damiens’ execution was perhaps the last great hurrah for pure sovereign authority–as it would only be a few decades later that the French King
himself would see his power stripped away by the cold steel blade of the guillotine–Foucault famously contended that, “in
political
thought and analysis, we still [have yet to] cut off the head of the king” (1978, 88-89). In other words, for Foucault,
power is still represented in juridical terms despite the fact that deduction, the primary manifestation of sovereign authority,
has become merely one element in a range of mechanisms “working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize and organize the forces
under it” (1978, 136).
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.
Biopolitics generates the groundwork for racism and eugenics --- these invisible
violences outweigh any purported benefits of biopolitics --- FYI we also don’t link to h
triv
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: Schmitt**
The affirmation of enmity re-creates violent states of exception in which the sovereign
is able to enact racialization as a tool of colonial domination
Canavan, 2011 - Assistant Professor @ Marquette University (Gerry; “Fighting a war you've already
lost: Zombies and zombis in Firefly/Serenity and Dollhouse”; Science Fiction Film and Television > Volume
4, Issue 2, Autumn 2011; Pg. 175-176; DOA: 7/19/15, ProjectMUSE || NDW)
To draw out this relationship between biopolitics, capitalism and resistance I begin with the zombie's mythic origins in Haiti. For
Achille Mbembe, the
figure of the zombie perfectly captures the self-undermining way in which biopolitics, through everwidening gaps of permanent emergency and states of exception, has always been as much a technology
of death as of life - in his [End Page 175] memorable terminology, a necropolitics. In his essay of that name, Mbembe, echoing Agamben in
proclaiming death camps the 'nomos of the political world in which we still live', argues that in the contemporary moment 'the
human being truly becomes a subject - that is, separated from the animal - in the struggle and the work
through which he or she confronts death (understood as the violence of negativity)' (14). Consequently, 'the state of
exception and the relation of enmity have become the normative basis of the right to kill. . . . power (and
not necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a
fictionalized notion of the enemy. It also labors to produce that same exception, emergency, and
fictionalized enemy' (16). Extending Foucault's theory that race war is the constitutive foundation of the modern state, as well as Hannah Arendt's
argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the two world wars reflected the reimportation of technologies of violence from the colonies (in which they were
first developed) into 'civilised' metropolitan Europe, Mbembe
argues that the declaration of enmity required by the state of
exception is an act of racialisation that has its origins in colonialism and imperialism, as well as
plantation economics and the slave trade ('Necropolitics' 18). Sovereignty in this (post)colonial valence operates
in accordance with a zombic logic of quarantine and extermination: 'sovereignty means the capacity to
define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not' ('Necropolitics' 27). This basic assumption of
disposability, and the reign of terror it engenders, has necessarily taken many different forms in the many different locations and contexts in which it has been
deployed; Mbembe's own examples
range from the '"savages" of the colonial world' to refugees, stateless
persons, enslaved persons and the working class. Mbembe's work suggests that colonialism's
assignation of nonhuman disposability to human beings can be abstracted as modernity's foundational
theoretical investment, its original (and ongoing) sin. For Mbembe, the history of this assignation of disposability and the consequent 'rise of modern
terror' begins not with state action but with the plantation system and the figure of the slave, which he notes 'could be considered one of the first instances of
biopolitical experimentation' ('Necropolitics' 21). But the exclusion of the slave from the body politic and her subsumption into the market as an object-commodity
can never be completely realised; the productive capacity, creativity and intentional mind of the enslaved are required to produce wealth for the slave-owner, but
these same human values must be denied in order for the practice of slavery to be justified in the first place. This is to say, the humanity of the slave must be
retained even as it is denied: [End Page 176]
Schmitts ontology leads to marginalizing violence – don’t trust their apologism
Farr 9 [Evan, PhD Student in Political Science. With Friends Like These...Carl Schmitt, Political Ontology, and
National Socialism]
In the next section, I will work from this foundation to map Schmitt’s ontology. In doing this, I will demonstrate that Schmitt’s
errors
involve much more than bath water. 2: Problems with the Schmittian Ontology As seen above, the
agonistic attempt to salvage Carl Schmitt focuses upon Schmitt’s attacks on a certain universalistic
understanding liberalism. In this reading, it is liberalism that suppresses the possibility of difference,
while Schmitt’s antagonism and decisionism merely recognize reality: that the political always
inevitably involves conflict and difference, and – no matter the insufficiency of Schmitt’s solution –
the key goal for political theorists is to navigate the seemingly incommensurable struggle between
sometimes violently different theories of democratic legitimacy. But how compatible are the agonistic
and Schmittian perspectives? In this section, I will argue that Schmittian antagonism and democratic agonism
are more deeply conflicting than Chantal Mouffe and others recognize. Because Schmitt is oriented toward a
statist and action-centric ontology, his theory is significantly more dangerous than his apologists
admit.
Schmitts epistemology is flawed – his arguments are based around a defense of
Nazism – prefer this evidence, its from the top of the article and cut by a straight beast
Emden 2009 [J. Emden, Department of German Studies, Rice University. How to Fall into Carl
Schmitt's Trap. July.]
This is a long review and perhaps a controversial one. The much-awaited English translation of Raphael Gross's seminal book on Carl Schmitt's
antisemitism, based on a doctoral dissertation at the University of Essen and first published by Suhrkamp ten years ago to much media
attention in Germany, and subsequently in France, makes a substantial contribution to contemporary scholarship on Schmitt, one of the most
influential public lawyers and constitutional theorists of the Weimar Republic. Preceded by a well-balanced preface by Peter C. Caldwell, which
elegantly situates Gross's argument in the contemporary intellectual field, Joel Golb's translation is accurate and precise. It is, however, the
argument of Gross's study which seems initially strikingly persuasive, but emerges as increasingly problematic. On the one hand, no doubt
remains that Schmitt held deeply entrenched antisemitic views throughout his life. As such, Gross's study serves as a warning
against the uncritical Schmitt enthusiasm that occasionally marks contemporary cultural studies, that is, a kind of desire for political
Eigentlichkeit now that poststructuralist theories have run their course. On the other hand, Gross's study has a far more ambitious goal than
simply providing an account of Schmitt's antisemitism and, in this respect, it does have severe limitations that require a more detailed
assessment. Most importantly, Gross unwittingly falls into Carl Schmitt's trap. The central question of Gross's study is not whether Schmitt
really was antisemitic--not
even the most enthusiastic Schmitt apologists would seriously deny this. Neither is the
central question whether traces of Schmitt's antisemitic convictions can be found throughout his political
thought and his work as a constitutional scholar--needless to say, they can. Rather, Gross's project seeks to reduce Schmitt's
entire way of thinking about the political and about law to the binary opposition between "friend" and "enemy"--introduced in Der Begriff des
Politischen (1932)--which Gross interprets from the
perspective of Schmitt's involvement in the Nazi state as the
difference between a homogeneous German Volk and a perceived "other," that is, Judaism, that is not only
"alien" to this Volk but threatens the latter's existential survival.[1] Seen from this perspective, Gross claims, not only does
Schmitt's thought stand in clear opposition to the tradition of the liberal Rechtsstaat--indeed, the very source of his critique of the
modern democratic state is to be found in his antisemitic convictions.
The alternative is the state of exception – makes the aff’s impacts inevitable
Boersma, 5 (Jess Boersma teaches courses in Peninsular literatures, critical thought, and Spanish
language at U of NC, “What About Schmitt? Translating Carl: Schmitt’s Theory of Sovereignty as Literary
Concept”, published in Discourse, 27.2&3, Spring & Fall 2005, pp. 215-227 (Article), accessed 7/16/13,
projectMUSE)
It would be too hasty to conclude that Schmitt’s current critical standing indicates any kind of resolution
of the polemics between left and right regarding the legacy of his legal thought and his political
association with the Nazi party. It almost goes without saying that the extreme right has taken pains to
revive the friend-enemy distinction, developed in Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political and, in many
cases, has reduced it further to a friend-foe distinction in order to justify strategies of total war and
cultural, religious, and ethnic cleansing.3 On the other side of the spectrum, Giorgio Agamben, in his
Homo Sacer series argues that the possibly tyrannical consequences of Schmitt’s thinking on the friendenemy distinction and the sovereign decision are not isolated to the followers of the ‘‘Crown Jurist of
the Third Reich,’’ but rather are only too alive and well within the practices of present day liberal
democratic states.4 Let me give one quick example of Agamben’s line of thought in the form of
biopolitics and the sovereign decision. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Agamben argues
that the state of exception is fast becoming the rule, with the consequence that the state of nature and
the state of law are nearly indistinguishable (38). Rather than a pure Hobbesian state of nature of all
against all, the sovereign state maintains the monopoly over violence and yet the demand for obedience
is no longer contingent upon the guarantee of protection. In Remnants of Auschwitz, the Nazi
concentration camp is shown to be the end result of a legal process which produces a separation
between the living being (zoe) and the speaking being (bios) with the aim ‘‘no longer to make die or to
make live, but to survive’’ (155). Agamben then seeks to illustrate how states of exception have played
out in American history by following the sovereign decisions of presidents Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow
Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George W. Bush. In the last case, he states that as a result of
September 11 ‘‘Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and
the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible’’
(State of Exception 22). Evidence for Agamben’s claims would appear to be provided externally by the
suspended legal status of the Guanta´- namo prisoners; and internally by the recent ethical and legal
battles over the coma case of Terri Schiavo (whose last name happens to mean slave in Italian), along
with the present debates between the legislative and the executive branches in which Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales has defended the constitutional legality of President Bush’s decision to not fully
disclose matters regarding domestic spying.5
Schmitt’s politics lead to Nazism – don’t discard the obvious in favor of his apologists
Farr, 9
Evan, With Friends Like These...Carl Schmitt, Political Ontology, and National Socialism, PhD Student in
Political Science, University of Virginia Graduate Student Conference,
http://www.virginia.edu/politics/grad_program/print/Farr_gradconference09.pdf
3: Schmitt’s Nazism: Interlude or Inevitability? Carl Schmitt’s membership in the Nazi Party from 1933
to 1936 is the most obvious problem for his apologists, and it has spawned a thriving body of
literature seeking to demonstrate that his involvement with the Third Reich was negligible.49
According to his defenders, if Schmitt was a Nazi he was only a Nazi of opportunity, stringing along
the NSDAP leadership (especially Hermann Goering) in order to retain his academic posts. Like
Heidegger or Pound, Schmitt is forgiven his transgression for the sake of ostensibly non-fascist work
elsewhere. This section will argue that it is a mistake to discount Schmitt’s Nazism as an
opportunistic interlude. Although he certainly did not share the millenarian, mystical mania marking
the hardcore Nazi ideologues, the ontological commitments described in the foregoing section
predisposed Schmitt to sympathize with a totalitarian – and ultimately genocidal – regime.
i
Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in: Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 2000), pp.282-283.
ii
Aurelia Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance: A Response to Žižek’s Critique of Foucault’s Subject of Freedom,”
Parrhesia 5 (2008), pp.19-31, 22.
iii
Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” pp.283-284.
iv
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.22-23.
v
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: power and freedom in late modernity, (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1995), p.27.
vi
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p.212.
vii
Michel Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3: Power,
Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2002), pp.241-242.
viii
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity
and Truth, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.315-316.
ix
Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” p.298.
x
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p.221-222.
xi
Op. cit., p.216.
xii
Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol 2: Aesthetics, Ethics
and Epistemology, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.73.
xiii
Deleuze, Foucault, pp.96-97.
xiv
Deleuze, Foucault, p.103; Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.26-27.
xv
Deleuze, Foucault, p.101, 103.
xvi
Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” p.315.
xvii
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.28-29.
xviii
See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Rodney Livingstone (tr.),
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
xix
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.28-29.
xx
Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” In: The Foucault Reader, Lydia Davis (tr.), Paul
Rabinow (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p.388.
xxi
Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” In: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984: Power, J. D.Faubion (ed.)
(London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.449-453.
xxii
Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p.174.
xxiii
Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in: Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 2000), pp.282-283.
xxiv
Aurelia Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance: A Response to Žižek’s Critique of Foucault’s Subject of Freedom,”
Parrhesia 5 (2008), pp.19-31, 22.
xxv
Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” pp.283-284.
xxvi
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.22-23.
xxvii
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: power and freedom in late modernity, (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1995), p.27.
xxviii
xxix
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p.212.
Michel Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3: Power,
Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2002), pp.241-242.
xxx
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity
and Truth, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.315-316.
xxxi
Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” p.298.
xxxii
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p.221-222.
xxxiii
Op. cit., p.216.
xxxiv
Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol 2: Aesthetics,
Ethics and Epistemology, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.73.
xxxv
Deleuze, Foucault, pp.96-97.
xxxvi
Deleuze, Foucault, p.103; Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.26-27.
xxxvii
Deleuze, Foucault, p.101, 103.
xxxviii
Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” p.315.
xxxix
xl
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.28-29.
See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Rodney Livingstone (tr.),
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
xli
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.28-29.
xlii
Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” In: The Foucault Reader, Lydia Davis (tr.), Paul
Rabinow (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p.388.
xliii
Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” In: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984: Power, J. D.Faubion (ed.)
(London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.449-453.
xliv
Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p.174.
xlv
Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in: Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 2000), pp.282-283.
xlvi
Aurelia Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance: A Response to Žižek’s Critique of Foucault’s Subject of Freedom,”
Parrhesia 5 (2008), pp.19-31, 22.
xlvii
Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” pp.283-284.
xlviii
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.22-23.
xlix
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: power and freedom in late modernity, (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1995), p.27.
l
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p.212.
li
Michel Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3: Power,
Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2002), pp.241-242.
lii
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity
and Truth, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.315-316.
liii
Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” p.298.
liv
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p.221-222.
lv
Op. cit., p.216.
lvi
Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol 2: Aesthetics, Ethics
and Epistemology, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.73.
lvii
Deleuze, Foucault, pp.96-97.
lviii
Deleuze, Foucault, p.103; Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.26-27.
lix
Deleuze, Foucault, p.101, 103.
lx
Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” p.315.
lxi
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.28-29.
lxii
See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Rodney Livingstone (tr.),
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
lxiii
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.28-29.
lxiv
Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” In: The Foucault Reader, Lydia Davis (tr.), Paul
Rabinow (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p.388.
lxv
Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” In: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984: Power, J. D.Faubion (ed.)
(London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.449-453.
lxvi
Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p.174.
lxvii
Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in: Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 2000), pp.282-283.
lxviii
Aurelia Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance: A Response to Žižek’s Critique of Foucault’s Subject of Freedom,”
Parrhesia 5 (2008), pp.19-31, 22.
lxix
Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” pp.283-284.
lxx
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.22-23.
lxxi
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: power and freedom in late modernity, (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1995), p.27.
lxxii
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p.212.
lxxiii
Michel Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3: Power,
Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2002), pp.241-242.
lxxiv
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity
and Truth, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.315-316.
lxxv
Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” p.298.
lxxvi
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p.221-222.
lxxvii
Op. cit., p.216.
lxxviii
Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol 2: Aesthetics,
Ethics and Epistemology, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.73.
lxxix
Deleuze, Foucault, pp.96-97.
lxxx
Deleuze, Foucault, p.103; Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.26-27.
lxxxi
Deleuze, Foucault, p.101, 103.
lxxxii
Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” p.315.
lxxxiii
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.28-29.
lxxxiv
See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Rodney Livingstone (tr.),
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
lxxxv
Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance,” pp.28-29.
lxxxvi
Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” In: The Foucault Reader, Lydia Davis (tr.), Paul
Rabinow (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p.388.
lxxxvii
Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” In: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984: Power, J. D.Faubion (ed.)
(London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.449-453.
lxxxviii
Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p.174.