1nc
“USFG should” means the debate is about a policy established by
governmental means
Jon M. ERICSON, Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U.,
et al., 3 [The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4]
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action
In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from
comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An
agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United
States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the
sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow
should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action
though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade,
for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs,
discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet
occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do,
then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling
reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
That means the affirmative has to affirm legalization in one or more
of the topic areas.
This is best for predictable limits – the only way to have a discussion
in which all sides are prepared to debate is if we are all aware of what
the terms of the debate will be. There are infinite criticisms that exist
outside of the resolution that are overly specific and unpredictable.
This means we can never be ready to engage in the specifics. The more
their specific arguments are true, the more we need to be able to
predict exactly what the affirmative is so we can go in depth on the
subject and clash with the affirmative. Modest predictability of the
resolution is worth potential substantive tradeoff. Topicality creates
space for relevant debate.
Toni M. MASSARO, Professor of Law, University of Florida, 89 [August, 1989, “Empathy,
Legal Storytelling, and the Rule of Law: New Words, Old Wounds?” Michigan Law Review, 87
Mich. L. Rev. 2099, Lexis]
Yet despite
their acknowledgment that some ordering and rules are necessary, empathy
proponents tend to approach the rule-of-law model as a villain. Moreover, they are hardly alone in their deep
skepticism about the rule-of-law model. Most modern legal theorists question the value of procedural regularity when it denies
substantive justice.52 Some even question the whole notion of justifying a legal decision by appealing to a rule of law, versus
justifying the decision by reference to the facts of the case and the judges' own reason and expe-rience.53 I do not intend to enter
this important jurisprudential de-bate, except to the limited extent that the "empathy" writings have suggested that the rule-of-law
chills judges' empathic reactions. In this regard, I have several observations.
My first thought is that the rule-of-law model is only a model. If the term means absolute separation of legal decision and "politics,"
then it surely is both unrealistic and undesirable.54 But our actual statutory and decisional "rules" rarely mandate a
particular (unempathetic) response. Most of our rules are fairly open-ended. "Relevance," "the best
interests of the child," "undue hardship," "negligence," or "freedom of speech" - to name only a few legal concepts hardly admit of precise definition or consistent, predictable application. Rather, they represent a weaker, but still
constraining sense of the rule-of-law model. Most rules are guidelines that establish spheres of
relevant conversation, not mathematical formulas.
Moreover, legal training in a common law system emphasizes the indeterminate nature of rules and the significance of even subtle
variations in facts. Our legal tradition stresses an inductive method of discovering legal principles. We are taught to
distinguish different "stories," to arrive at "law" through experience with many stories, and to
revise that law as future experience requires. Much of the effort of most first-year law professors is, I believe,
devoted to debunking popular lay myths about "law" as clean-cut answers, and to illuminate law as a dynamic body of policy
determinations constrained by certain guiding principles.55
As a practical matter, therefore, our rules often are ambiguous and fluid standards that offer substantial
room for varying interpretations. The interpreter, usually a judge, may consult several sources to aid in
decisionmaking. One important source necessarily will be the judge's own experiences -including the experiences that seem to
determine a person's empathic capacity. In fact, much ink has been spilled to illuminate that our stated "rules" often do not dictate
or explain our legal results. Some writers even have argued that a rule of law may be, at times, nothing more than a post hoc
rationalization or attempted legitimization of results that may be better explained by extralegal (including, but not necessarily
limited to, emotional) responses to the facts, the litigants, or the litigants' lawyers,56 all of which may go un-stated. The opportunity
for contextual and empathic decisionmaking therefore already is very much a part of our adjudicatory law, despite our commitment
to the rule-of-law ideal.
Even when law is clear and relatively inflexible, however, it is not necessarily "unempathetic." The assumed antagonism of legality
and empathy is belied by our experience in rape cases, to take one important example. In the past, judges construed the general,
open-ended standard of "relevance" to include evidence about the alleged victim's prior sexual conduct, regardless of whether the
conduct involved the defendant.57 The solution to this "empathy gap" was legislative action to make the law more specific - more
formalized. Rape shield statutes were enacted that controlled judicial discretion and specifically defined relevance to exclude the
prior sexual history of the woman, except in limited, justifiable situations.58 In this case, one can make a persuasive argument not
only that the rule-of-law model does explain these later rulings, but also that obedience to that model resulted in a triumph for the
human voice of the rape survivor. Without the rule, some judges likely would have continued to respond to other inclinations, and
admit this testimony about rape survivors. The example thus shows that radical rule skepticism is inconsistent with at least some
evidence of actual judicial behavior. It also suggests that the principle of legality is potentially most critical for people who are least
understood by the decisionmakers - in this example, women - and hence most vulnerable to unempathetic ad hoc rulings.
A final observation is that the principle of legality reflects a deeply ingrained, perhaps inescapable, cultural instinct. We value
some procedural regularity - "law for law's sake" - because it lends stasis and structure to our
often chaotic lives. Even within our most intimate relationships, we both establish "rules," and expect
the other party to follow them.59 Breach of these unspoken agreements can destroy the
relationship and hurt us deeply, regardless of the wisdom or "substantive fairness" of a
particular rule. Our agreements create expectations, and their consistent application fulfills
the expectations. The modest predictability that this sort of "formalism" provides actually may
encourage human relationships.60
1nc
The aff claims “spirituality grounds the political” in anti-colonialism.
Gregor McLENNAN Sociology @ Bristol ‘7 “Towards Postsecular Sociology?” Sociology 41 (5)
p. 859-866
To take these themes further, I want to indicate how the issue of secularism/ postsecularism has become pivotal
to four different areas of social theory. In interpreting these developments, I challenge the ease with which some
postsecularists move from observations on the social role of faith or spirituality to
intellectual endorsements of faith-led perspectives on social life. From any generally naturalistic perspective on
the idea of sociology (e.g. McLennan, 2006), the strains of fideism and obscurantism that surface in these literatures give cause
for concern. Thus, when Burawoy rousingly announces that sociology today must show its public face by defending civil society and the interests
of humanity against the tyrannies of the market and the state, it is becoming important to add … ‘and against the encroachments of religiosity too’. This
does not mean that sociologists cannot be religious; it just means that their religiosity comes into play when, for whatever reason, their sociology ceases
to provide the answers they seek.
Expressions of Postsecularism: Poststructuralist Vitalism
As with the term postmodern, the ‘post’ in postsecular need not automatically signal anti-secularism, or what comes after or instead of secularism. For
many, the key postsecular move is simply to question and probe the concept of the secular, and to re-interrogate the whole ‘faith versus reason’
problematic that has so consistently punctuated modern thought. This probing seems timely, not least because under postpositivist lights, mainstream
philosophical thought is now fairly comfortable about looking at modern science itself as a kind of ‘web of belief’. Accordingly, little is to be gained by
harking back to rigidly scientistic models for sociological epistemology. Even so, it remains hard to see how sociology can be other than ‘on the side of
science’, and the postsecular move to surpass the antinomy between (religious) faith and (naturalistic) reason turns out to be much easier said than
done.
Let me exemplify this claim by examining one ‘postmodernist’ expression of postsecularism, noting first that several prominent figures within
poststructuralist social theory (Virilio, Kristeva, de Certeau, Agamben) have pointed to new forms of ‘re-enchantment’ in the world, or highlighted the
sacred forms of‘bare life’, or insisted that the received view of modernity itself as being thoroughly disenchanted is plain mistaken (Bennett, 2001).
Derrida (2001), for his part, has been developing something like ‘religion beyond religion’, while Rorty is trying to square his erstwhile secular
postmodern pragmatism with Vattimo’s idea that secularization itself is our contemporary way of following the religious life (Rorty and Vattimo, 2005).
Finally, Zizek (2003) has been arguing that in a secular world that is hardly ‘beyond belief’, the JudeoChristian heritage must be defended for the sake
of Leninist politics. All these expressions of postsecular theory are interesting; but too complex and cryptic for our purposes. More amenable to
summary treatment is political theorist William Connolly’s manifesto Why I am Not a Secularist (1999), which also reveals something of the current
renaissance of vitalism.
Connolly insists that the kinds of distinctions that are characteristic of secular social thought,
such as that between public and private, and between reason, emotion and morality, have
completely broken down. Secularists, he says, uphold such distinctions mainly in order to screen
out any ‘metaphysics of the supersensible’, and so those distinctions themselves stand, precisely, as
metaphysical commitments. And viewed in that light, secular philosophies can then be regarded,
and pitied, as essentially ‘winter’ doctrines, formulae in search of an impossible moral
stabilization and cognitive purity. But if instead we develop an ‘impious reverence for life’, embracing
rather than disavowing desire, the visceral and the impure, and accepting wholeheartedly the mixedness of modes of apprehension whereby we
grasp the ‘protean energies’ that flow through the organization of all things, then we are
better placed to avoid the political exclusionism that necessarily results whenever the ‘irrational’
is intellectually stigmatized or empirically ignored. What then emerges is a more pluralistic,
open, life-enhancing ethical stance, one that requires us to abjure altogether the traditional
opposition of social science to religious worldviews. Instead, a conscious embrace of ‘multiple loyalties’ should be
cultivated, a spiritual openness that might be regarded as nothing less than the very soul of the ‘democratic adventure’ (Connolly, 1999: 24, 54, 88, 95).
There are two main problems with this apparently refreshingly innocent outlook. The first is that this kind of discourse is characteristically expressive
and philosophical rather than social scientific, and whilst many of us would insist that these two facets of social understanding are closely interwoven,
they are not identical. One need not follow Goldthorpe (2004) in dismissing the kind of general debates that I listed at the head of this article, and no
doubt this particular discussion of postsecularism too, as nothing but ‘pretend social science’ to grow weary of indeterminate reflexive speculation,
untrammelled by empirical positivity and systematic propositional thinking. Thus, leaving aside the question of how good it is as philosophy, it is not
obvious that Connolly’s freewheeling postsecularism could ground any public sociology as such, rather than serving as one kind of straw in the wind.
But in any case, secondly, it remains unclear how deeply postsecular Connolly’s discourse actually is, and how far it is particularly encouraging of those
who take their religious faith seriously. As one observant reviewer on an Islamicist web journal noted,1 the whole framework of argument that Connolly
constructs, and the agonistic moral pose adopted, are ‘only intelligible within a secularist worldview’. Notably, he ‘does not deliver a single confessional
reflection’, and exudes merely ‘a dogmatic claim of uncertainty’ that genuine believers can only experience as thoroughly disingenuous. This is
germane, because the
moralistic tone that is evident in Connolly’s discourse gains much of its strength from the
implication that his ‘open’ perspective on the plenitude of social being would be something that
the faithful would thank him for bringing to their attention. No wonder, then, that as his discussion wears on,
Connolly spins his stance in rather different terms, naming it finally as one of ‘ironic evangelical atheism’, signalling a spirit of ‘nontheistic gratitude for
the … plurivocity of being’ (1999: 159). Secularism may well be in question here, but it has hardly been negated.
Transcendental Realism
My second instance of postsecularism highlights
the way in which authors within the critical realist movement have moved
embark upon spiritually
steadily away from their 1970s’ concern to be specifically ‘for science in the social sciences’ (Papineau, 1978) to
transcendent quests. Critics always suspected realism of being overly metaphysical, proliferating theses about the nature and levels of
being that were strictly surplus to investigative requirements. And realism, internally, was from the start somewhat divided between naturalist and
anti-naturalist strands (Benton, 1981). But now Roy Bhaskar, its leading theorist over the years, has developed critical realism into a cosmic speculative
philosophy that is increasingly dislocated from social science explanatory practice. Bhaskarian realism now claims directly to access,
and to name, in a series of extravagant hypostatizations, the essential objects of understanding – ‘the transcendent’, the ‘ultimatum’, ‘the absolute
simpliciter’, and ‘the
categorical structure of the world’. This is no longer a project to establish the plain old truth, but an
self-grounding
ground of all being’, or, in simple terms, God (Bhaskar, 2000: 31). By way of such spiralling equations (man=God=unconditional
love/joy=the cosmic envelope), all remnants of analytical precision and empirical constraint are thrown to
the winds. But it gets worse, because a foolish piece of intellectual blackmail is thrown in for good measure:
if you choose to be sceptical about all this, then you are ‘in denial’, victim of the ‘cardinal
error of Western philosophy’, namely seeking and proposing a purely ‘positive’ account of
being that falsely ‘absents’ the fundamental category of ‘absence’ itself (Bhaskar, 2000: 7–8). In trying to come
immanent unveiling of what realists now call the ‘alethic’ truth, a kind of really true truth, sometimes rendered as ‘ the
to terms with this inflated, reifying, entirely self-sustaining run of thought, Popper’s notion of falsifiability once again comes to mind as a useful
criterion of assessment. The sociological theorist Margaret Archer can no longer quite follow Bhaskar in his ‘odyssey’, but she too increasingly seeks to
find within both realism and sociology an essentially religious rationale. For Archer and her co-authors, the driving idea is to correct the previous
secular bias within realist circles by establishing a ‘level playing field’ between atheistic realists and those who are believers (Archer et al., 2004: x). To
that end, the argument is put forward that we can be realist ‘about God’ in just the same way that we can be realist about other deep-lying forces and
powers, the exact nature of whose existence typically escapes the everchanging state of empirical knowledge. Realism, after all, enables us to hold our
ontological commitments steady, even when a large degree of epistemic relativism is inescapable. God’s existence can therefore be rationally debated,
and credible points can be made on both sides. Belief and disbelief in God are thus both held to be rational responses. It follows that ‘the objective
arguments for and against God’s existence are equally strong, or weak’ (Archer et al., 2004: 3).
But this train of argument is flawed. Realism, in the first place, is not, or at least should not be, the kind of philosophy that enjoins us to be realist
‘about’ anything in particular. Originally, the realist project was to give an ontological overview of the different levels of structure and appearance
involved in any substantive process of knowledge, but the nature and identity of any specific existents and generative mechanisms were strictly the
business of the specific sciences. What specific investigative practice, it needs to be asked, informs us of the nature and existence of God? Moreover,
conclusions about what happens to exist, and in what relations to other forces, are arrived at within the special sciences only after painstaking,
systematic, and publicly available empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning concerning generative mechanisms and developmental patterns. Yet the
‘knowledge’ that we have of God is accepted to be simply not of this kind, being chiefly a matter of revelation. In that sense, the contemporary ‘realist’
debate about God is no further forward than the one about the status of personal testimony concerning miracles that pitted David Hume against George
Campbell 250 years ago. We have good grounds, then, to think that being realist ‘about’ God is not a viable or productive posture for (scientific) realists
to adopt, or one that is in any tangible way related to questions of substantive social investigation.
Notice, in addition, the conceptual slippage that marks Archer’s argument. People do indeed have reasons for believing in God, and in that sense there
is no problem about thinking of the debate about God as ‘rational’ in a broad sense. But it does not follow from the holding of reasons on both sides,
that belief and disbelief are equally rational responses. And even if they were considered equally rational responses, that would not justify the
conclusion that equally objective arguments existed on both sides, nor would it mitigate the peculiarity of the idea that objective arguments come in
various strengths, ranging from ‘weak’ to ‘strong’. Archer’s more sociological efforts to establish parity for religious consciousness are blocked by
parallel non-sequiturs. In Being Human (2000) – much of which I find valuable – Archer specifies our ‘triune’ social environment as comprising the
‘practical order’, the ‘natural order’ and the ‘social order’, and each ofthese is said to possess a distinctive logic. Definitive
of the practical
order, Archer insists, is that its modes of knowledge and personal orientation are nothing like
‘applied’ rational understanding, nor can they be regarded as the consequences of sociality and solidarity per se. Rather, the
logic of practice is a matter of embodied, experiential, ritualized, illuminated comprehension,
and religious practice stands as the quintessential example of this (Archer, 2000: 184–6). As a sui
generis form of practical action, this is deemed to be not (just) a matter of social routine, but of
genuine knowledge, specifically religious knowledge, in which emotionality and understanding
are too closely fused together, and too close to the lived discipline of ecstasy, to be analysed in a superficially ‘rational’ way. What is
going on is a unique experience of, and formation of unity with, the divine. ‘Hence, the appropriate response to divinity is love, love of the Transcendent
itself’. But this is not sociological thinking. As it develops, we
move from an analytical stance that is poised between the inside and
insider’s standpoint only. Nothing in Archer’s initially
suggestive account of what people do and think and feel when they are involved in intense, dense,
affective practical routines sanctions in any way her theologico-moralistic conclusion
about what the divine requires by way of ‘appropriate response’. Similarly, nothing whatever
can be reasoned about the existence of God or the divine or the transcendent from the (social)
fact that people display astonishingly rich and varied ways of expressing their personal and
collective commitments to such things.
the outside of the phenomenon under examination, to an
In similar manner, Philip Mellor in Religion, Realism and Social Theory turns on its head Durkheim’s definitively social understanding of what
religious collective effervescence represents. From
the perfectly proper, or at least interesting, sociological claim that religion can be
seen as ‘a phenomenon that expresses, through actions and beliefs, a collective engagement with
the possibility of transcendence emergent from the contingencies, potentialities and limitations of embodied human life’, the
proposition is steadily contrived that society itself can be seen as ‘the creative force through
which humanity realizes its deepest, most profound levels of being’, in particular ‘hyper-spirituality’
(Mellor, 2004: 19, 67 and passim). But clearly there is a mutation going on here, and an illegitimate one, such that religious hyper-spirituality, which
stands as the explanandum of the first thought, becomes the veritable explanans in the second. From a collective engagement with the possibility of
transcendence, we get transcendence itself working in and through collective strivings. This
is straightforward religious
essentialism, something that goes decisively beyond anything that can be taken even from appreciative analysts of religion like Durkheim or
William James.
Equating lack of spiritual grounding with colonialism and violence
denies the legacy and virtue found in humanism. This totalizing
picture writes off many members of our society as spiritually dead
and ethically bankrupt.
Linell CADY Religious Studies @ ASU ‘5 “Secularism, Secularizing, and Secularization:
Reflections on
Stout’s Democracy and Tradition” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73 (3)
p.875-877 [Gender paraphrased – Turner]
According to Stout’s retelling, American democratic life and its expression in the writings of some of its most seminal theorists reveal a developing
tradition that is deeply attentive to the virtues and to moral and spiritual excellence. This tradition is by no means hostile to religion, although it does
reflect a secularizing trajectory driven by the increasing religious pluralism of the nation. The secular liberal contractarians and its foremost
theoretician, John Rawls, misconstrue this tradition, Stout argues, by seeking to translate the secularizing trajectory into an epistemological model that
excludes religion in principle. Public reasoning, for Rawls means “being willing to accept a common basis for reasoning that others, similarly motivated,
could not reasonably reject” (67). As Stout convincingly argues, however, this model is far too restrictive and, tellingly, “so contrary to the spirit of free
expression that breathes life into democratic culture” (68). It suggests that figures like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. were deficient,
judged in light of the ideal of public reason, rather than “paradigms of discursive excellence” in American democratic political life. The Rawlsian
approach, Stout contends, suffers from its Kantian pursuit of universal norms and principles to ground and constrain public reasoning in a pluralistic
society. Advocating an Hegelian expressivism in its stead, Stout contends that norms and principles emerge in ongoing discursive exchange and rules
for what is “reasonable” cannot be established in advance or for all time. That said, Stout makes room for the Rawlsian ideal of public reason that
largely precludes religious language in public discourse. It is most appropriate as a “vague ideal” whose merit rests upon the respect for persons and
commitment to exchanging reasons that characterize American democratic political life. In a religiously diverse nation public life generally fosters
discourse and arguments that are not explicitly religious. So while
not an epistemological rule, secularized public
discourse can be understood as a matter of rhetorical prudence, etiquette, and even morality
insofar as it arises from respect for others. But it does not abrogate one’s right to express one’s
deepest convictions in public. Unless this is fully appreciated, we end up with “too much silence at precisely the points where more
discussion is most badly needed” (90). Developing a more adequate picture of our secularized political culture
is also essential to counter its religious despisers or, as Stout calls them, the ‘new traditionalists” such as John Milbank and
Stanley Hauerwas. Exhibiting a similar “resentment of the secular,” their excessively negative picture
of the “world” is aligned with an equally excessive, though exhalted, picture of “church.” Through his prolific and rhetorically powerful writings
Hauerwas has done more than any other contemporary Christian thinker, Stout argues, to disparage democracy and our shared civic life. “ ‘Liberal
society,’ ‘the secular,’ and ‘democracy’ are Hauerwas’ names for what the world has become in an age
of fragmentation after the demise of virtue and tradition” (147). Against the moral bankruptcy of the broader
society stands the “church,” a tradition of narratives and practices that nurture discipleship for the “peaceable kingdom.” Stout contends that the
distinction between “church” and “world” has hardened into an undialectical opposition in the “new traditionalism,” dangerously undermining
identification with civic life and progressive political coalitions. Stout engages in a sustained immanent critique of the “new traditionalism,” admirably
modeling his theoretical commitment to a pluralistic public conversation that includes religion. Stout challenges Hauerwas’s dualistic take on both
“church” and “world.” Although Hauerwas claims “to be speaking for the actual church of communion, homilies, Bible study, and potluck dinners,”
Stout pointedly notes that “the actual church does not look very much like a community of virtue, when judged by pacifist standards” (160–161). He
persuasively argues that Hauerwas and those attracted to his rhetoric of “church” harbor democratic sentiments that are left “unvoiced and
unexplained” in their exaggerated critique of contemporary society. Stout
insists that our shared democratic life is not as
fragmented or as indifferent to the virtues as its new despisers claim. The charge reflects a
narrow and authoritarian interpretation of tradition and virtue that implicitly serves to
invalidate “a tradition dedicated to the project of loosening up that conception democratically
and dialogically” (136). In this democratic model of tradition, the individual is not primarily viewed
as a member of a bounded community with authoritative leaders and expositors controlling the
parameters of the beliefs and practices of the tradition. To the contrary, a democratic tradition
seeks to form individuals with “the practical wisdom to fashion a critical language for
himself[themselves] out of materials borrowed from many sources” (138). The democratic shift means abandoning
“an essentially deferential posture toward the past in spiritual affair” and developing a self-reliant piety that “holds, in contrast, that it is our own
Although Stout clearly
acknowledges the “horrors and injustices” (138) of our shared democratic life, he rightly
refuses to paint it as a moral wasteland. He reminds us that the “most challenging democratic thinkers” have cared
responsibility to imagine the sources on which we depend and to fashion lives worthy of our best imaginings” (37).
deeply about questions of virtue and character. He goes so far as to insist, “What they want to promote in society generally and hope to exemplify in
their own lives is excellence—and, if possible, spiritual greatness” (283). Stout is most effective at exposing the unfounded and insidious contrast
between “church” and “world” that informs the new traditionalism. He
rightly notes that this contrast is facilitated by the
alignment of “world” to an ideology of secularism that is viewed as morally and spiritually
vacuous. His insistence that “church” does not have a monopoly on virtues, character, and spiritual excellence—and constitutes a remarkable
hubris to suggest otherwise—is absolutely critical.
Asserting spiritual holism as the ground of politics justifies ritual
scapegoating and sacrifice of secularists. Turns the case.
Jeffrey STOUT Religion @ Princeton ‘4 Democracy and Tradition p.114-115
So there are reasons to be alarmed about the current condition of public discourse. But if I am right about the historical causes of secularization and
the material conditions of contemporary fragmentation, the
school of resentment in theology is actually making things
worse. Theologies designed to articulate, defend, and reinforce resentment of the secular are
symptoms of the disease they are meant to cure. They are the ideological expression of the
enclave society. Their social function is to legitimate identification with the enclave as the
primary social unit. The main means they employ to generate solidarity within the small group
is the bashing of liberals, practiced as a form of ritual sacrifice. The ritual comes in two types, depending on
whether the scapegoats are selected from inside or outside the enclave. The former type makes a negative example of believers, especially theologians,
who have identified with movements of democratic reform in the broader society. The latter type holds up nonbelievers as symbolic representatives of
the secularism that supposedly defines the broader society. In both cases, the
boundary and discourage others from crossing it.
effect of the exercise is to define the enclave
You shouldn’t require that anti-colonialism grounds the political in
the spiritual. Even if ethical relationships should respect spiritual,
the propositional statement the 1AC makes equates spirituality with
fulfillment and secular naturalism with alienation. This is not
historically valid, and denigrates ethically committed humanists.
Gregor McLENNAN Sociology @ Bristol ‘7 “Towards Postsecular Sociology?” Sociology 41 (5)
p. 869
The result is that the faith/reason polarity is consistently presented as if all the humanity and
richness and morality fall on the religion side, with nothing but alienation and
depersonalization on the side of secularism/scientific naturalism. But my second objection is that
this balance sheet is thoroughly distorted. Religion may well cultivate a range of social and
moral goods, but it may equally well poison them too, and meanwhile many of the qualities
supposedly distinctive of religion – collective morality, existential meaning, love, creativity and
imagination, social energy, and spirituality – are readily encompassed and celebrated within a
secular humanist outlook.
Thirdly, we should question Habermas’s insistence that mutual respect and a common learning
process between believers and non-believers must take an epistemic form. Indeed, this proposal strikes
me as both implausible and undesirable. It is implausible because from within the perspective of secular
sociological naturalism (broadly conceived), the question of the ‘truth content’ of claims about heaven and hell, God’s
grace, salvation and the rest cannot really be entertained: these items are not candidates for truth and explanation. That is why the
debating point sometimes scored by believers, to the effect that even if God’s existence cannot be proven, at least it cannot be disproved either, has no
traction whatsoever. And the converse holds too: for a religious person whose worldview really is grounded on the notion of some ultimate
Transcendent realm and an omnipotent, loving Spirit, then the explanation of life in terms of generative mechanisms, interlocking contingent material
processes, and human agency can never be nearly enough.
Habermas is thus backing the wrong horse when he seeks to base democratic dialogue on epistemological reflexivity. Generally over-rated as a source of
self-correction, reflexivity
is more effective in matters of ethics than of truth, and in relation to lifeaffecting events rather than propositions. Moreover, the power of common human morality in
our appreciation of other people’s motivation and purpose should not itself be sold short. We
can readily respond to, and value, people as people, partly through sociological imagination of
their situation and plight, even if we are unlikely to share some of their presumptions about
truth, existence and causality.
1nc
The 1AC’s glorification of “indigenous knowledge” opposes “western”
thought. This creates a power dynamic that always holds “indigenous”
above “western”
Gordon and Krech 12 [David M. Gordon is an associate professor of history at Bowdoin College. He is author of
Nachituti’s Gift: Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa and numerous articles on African social, cultural, and
environmental history.] [Shepard Krech III is a professor emeritus of anthropology at Brown University and a research associate in
the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. A trustee of the National
Humanities Center, he is the author or editor of many essays and books, including The Ecological Indian and The Encyclopedia of
World Environmental History, edited with John McNeill and Carolyn Merchant.] Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment
“Indigenous knowledge ” excites and infuriates. One of its leading academic proponents and critics, Michael Dove, argues that its
conceptual space has evolved from “innovative tool to hackneyed dichotomy.”1 Historians and anthropologists are uncomfortable at its mention—
increasingly so, we sense, at the very moment that others press its birth as a discipline. After all, is not the notion of an impenetrable body of knowledge
that belongs to an unchanging group of indigenes a romantic projection of our modern imaginations into the past? As newcomers—transients and
immigrants—arrive in any particular place, some conquering, some settling, some exchanging genes and culture, and so on, with people already
present, might not the notion of “indigenous” lack historical nuance? At the same time, however, indigenous knowledge holds political appeal and
moral valence. It offers an alternative to a Western teleology of civilization (or development), even if the notion is a creation of the encounter between
the West and the rest. It offers
an alternative to the power-knowledge nexus of Western thought, and yet
it introduces its own modalities of power. It unsettles stable categories of knowledge and
fields of human agency, such as science and religion, and then tends to confirm the very same
epistemological oppositions. This conceptual and political slipperiness is what makes “indigenous
knowledge” such an academic apostasy, so essential and so interesting to study.
This book investigates the historical constructions, the political uses, and the epistemological nuances of indigenous knowledges. Rather than
claiming that indigenous knowledge stands in some kind of exterior relationship to Western
conquest, colonialism, and science, we argue that the emergence of modern indigenous
knowledges was intimately related to conquest and colonial rule. This is not to claim that people who are now
termed indigenous—or who term themselves indigenous—did not have knowledge prior to contact with Europeans. Quite the opposite: the chapters in
this volume detail such precolonial forms of knowledge. But they also show that during times of conquest and colonization, by Europeans and by
others, attaching
“indigenous” to “knowledge” often was, and often continues to be, a strategy
entwined with acts of domination and resistance. Rather than an established body of knowledge that can be owned,
written, and transmitted unchanged over time, we regard indigenous knowledges as claims, as strategic maneuvers that
challenge the imposition of power and make claims to power. Most of all, we reveal modern
indigenous knowledges as palimpsests upon which, if we look carefully and ask the right questions, we can detect the signs of past
conflicts that scraped out notions of indigeneity.
We are not the first to notice the conceptual and political inconsistencies of indigenous
knowledge. In a seminal article that appeared just as indigenous knowledge became the catchphrase of environmental and developmental policymakers and activists, Arun Agrawal pointed to the fallacious oppositions that scholars and activists invoke
between “Western science” and indigenous knowledge. Agrawal argued that the tendencies to try to
“preserve” indigenous knowledges ex situ have not confronted the political and economic
processes that marginalize people termed “indigenous.” 2 Others, including Dove, Roy Ellen, and
Paul Sillitoe, have followed Agrawal with significant contributions to the debate that we join in this collection.3
This creates a notion of a superior “indigenous people” that should
reorder the world, creating a new set of elites
Gordon and Krech 12 [David M. Gordon is an associate professor of history at Bowdoin College. He is author of
Nachituti’s Gift: Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa and numerous articles on African social, cultural, and
environmental history.] [Shepard Krech III is a professor emeritus of anthropology at Brown University and a research associate in
the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. A trustee of the National
Humanities Center, he is the author or editor of many essays and books, including The Ecological Indian and The Encyclopedia of
World Environmental History, edited with John McNeill and Carolyn Merchant.] Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment
Despite the instrumental, moral, and ideological qualities of indigeneity, some still insist
on viewing it in biological terms.
Early twentiethcentury racial theories remain inscribed in theories of indigenous belonging. This biological—
or “blood”—understanding of indigeneity emerges from legal formulations that insist on proof of belonging. Blood seems to offer such convincing proof.
In addition, outside of institutional, state, and legal arrangements, blood
kinship models still inspire models of wider
corporate group membership. For these reasons, even while this volume—along with a range of scholarship—emphasizes the historical
model of the indigenous belonging, the biological blood model of indigenous belonging prevails in quotidian, and even some academic understandings.
The notion of “indigenous people” may even “provide ideological ammunition to those
who would reorder the world according to blood and soil,” as André Béteille points out.19 Yet, as
analyses in this volume and elsewhere make clear, lurking beneath the surface of blood is always power:
power, exercised by the state or by the people of indigenous status themselves, to determine that
indigeneity depends on descent from an ancestor on a particular historical list; on descent from a man but not a woman or a woman but
not a man; on descent from a person free but not from one enslaved; on comportment; on culture—the vexed tradition; on membership in a
group of a certain size; or on myriad other historical and cultural factors.
In its emphasis on an unchanging body of knowledge and in its opposition to modernity,
indigenous knowledges share a conceptual relationship with “tradition.” Like “tradition,” “indigenous” implies
something ancient, even primordial. In their influential work The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger argue that while
tradition disguises itself as unchanging, it is dynamic and invented according to political and
ideological exigencies.20 In their view, tradition is often conservative, involving cultural
artifacts that legitimize established elites —thus the need for historians to lay bare its invention. Tradition is also
typically modern in its nostalgia for a lost past. The idea of indigenous knowledge has comparable qualities
(indeed, indigenous knowledge is often referred to as “traditional environmental knowledge,” or TEK).
Indigenous knowledges conceal their dynamism under the appearance of a timeless body of knowledge. They
share a nostalgia for a culturally particular form of knowledge and an imagined past, which makes them an adept tool to resist ostensibly scientific and
universal discourses. (Unlike “traditions,” however, indigenous knowledges are often thought to be a tool of the disempowered and dispossessed, rather
than of the elite.) Indigenous
knowledges invoke their conceptual power by claims of timelessness,
even while their ability to respond to contemporary articulations of power demands flexibility.
Like tradition, indigenous knowledges have hidden and often repressed histories.
Over time, cultural (including indigenous) knowledge is unevenly produced, unevenly shared, and unevenly
distributed. And society is rarely, if ever, insular, tightly bounded, and exclusionary. It rarely remains homogeneous in its membership and
composition. What this means is obvious: No assumption should be made that indigenous knowledges are closed to external influence or history, that
they do not incorporate or reflect originally nonindigenous conception or perception, or that what one or several people might think or perceive is held
universally in that society.
That creates widespread Occidentalist violence
Baber 02 Zaheer BABER Sociology @ Saskatchewan ‘2 The European Legacy 7 (6) p. 748-749
Despite the highly mediated nature of the diverse networks of intellectual influences, there is no doubt that residues of the European legacy of colonial
conquest and rule continue to influence certain dominant strands of social scientific discourses. One
of the intellectual responses to
the situation has been the project of “indigenization,” an attempt to exorcise the remnants of
the Eurocentric elements of the European legacy from academic discourse. The task at hand for scholars associated with
this project is to provide a corrective to what is perceived to be the valorization of the experience of “Western” societies as the yardstick for measuring
“Other” societies and cultures. At the extreme end of the spectrum is the Indian scholar Claude Alvares, who yearns for a radically anti-modern era that
would be in tune with “our own distinctive eastern traditions.” In a recent book, Science, Development and Violence: the Revolt Against Modernity,
Alvares makes the dramatic announcement that he has cut off connections with all institutions.6 Presumably, with the exception of Oxford University
Press (his publisher), all institutions are compromised products of Eurocentric modernity. The degree of commitment of other intellectuals to the
project of indigenization is variable, depending on the issues at hand. Vandana Shiva, for example, whose contribution to the critical literature on
biotechnology, patents and development has been insightful and important, unnecessarily conjures up visions of a kinder and gentler science based on
a highly romanticized “feminine principle.” Determined not to make any concessions to heterogeneity, ambivalence, contradictory formations or even a
Shiva categorically rejects “Western” categories, science
and knowledge with the objective of constructing a friendlier, decidedly non-strategic
essentialist model derived from “non-Western” worldviews, because, as she puts it, “most nonWestern cultures have been based on the democracy of all life.”7 The attractions of replacing
presumably Eurocentric discourses and institutions are all also all too evident in anthropologist T. N. Madan’s
nod to the Spivakian “strategic use of positive essentialism,”
confident dismissal of the state policy of secularism in India. He has no doubts about the fact that in the Indian context, the policy of secularism
exhibits “moral arrogance” since it constitutes an “alien cultural ideology … a gift of Christianity … an impossible credo of life … the dream of a minority
(secularists) which wants to shape the majority in its own image.”8 Not to be outdone, Ashis Nandy who in some of his earlier writings has steered away
from Manichean dichotomies, ratchets up the temperature of the polemical game by quite a few degrees. As he puts it, secularism is quite obviously a
“Western concept … introduced into Indian public life to subvert and discredit” Indian society. The policy of secularism for him constitutes the
archetypical Eurocentric project if ever there was one, peddled by individuals who are obviously “intellectually crippled and morally  awed … senile …
seduced and brainwashed … anaemic” and who have “taken over the white man’s burden in this part of the world.”9 However, not all intellectual
encounters with the legacy of Europe in postcolonial societies and theories inevitably traverse the path that leads to a categorical rejection of “alien”
epistemologies and knowledge. Nor do all proponents of what has come to be known as the “indigenization” project seek concepts that are sui generis,
untainted, and unalloyed by non-indigenous influences. A nuanced variation on the indigenization theme is the promotion of a universalism based on
intellectual titration that would replace parochialism masquerading as universalism.10 As formulated by Alatas, the driving force behind this
movement is the “idea that social scientific theories, concepts, and methodologies can be derived from the histories and cultures of the various nonWestern civilizations” with the ultimate objective of explaining and interpreting “the whole world from various non-Western vantage points.”11 Arguing
that the “culture-specific situation of a society determines, at least in part, the concepts, theories and methodologies that arise from tackling specifically
indigenous problems,” the ultimate objective of the movement is the construction of “systematized bodies of knowledge … that are based on the
indigenous cultures in the same way that Western social science is based on Western historical experiences and cultural practices.”12 While Alatas has
been careful to emphasize that as he conceives of it, the
move to indigenize the social sciences should not and must not
end up being a form of “nativism” or “occidentalism and orientalism in reverse,” not all scholars have been as cautious as
seeking to contest the dominance of Eurocentric ideas in the social sciences, some scholars
have ironically and perhaps unwittingly reinforced the very paternalistic Orientalism that they claim to be
contesting. In more ways than one, some proponents of this project variously known as “indigenization,” “ethnosociology” and “alternative discourses” have succeeded in unintentionally inflicting heavy doses of
conceptual violence on the very idea of social science and knowledge. Little wonder that Edward Said, who is
frequently saddled with the responsibility of contributing to the construction of such unreflexive
nativism, has been highly critical of this gesture.13 The claims of two scholars gone native with a vengeance are discussed
him. In
below in some detail, but these two do not by any means exhaust the laundry list.
This Occidentalist view turns the case – flips the power binary and
allows the destruction of humanity
Buruma and Margalit 04 Ian Buruma is a Dutch writer and academic. Much of his work focuses on the culture of
Asia, particularly that of China and 20th-century Japan and Avishai Margalit, is an Israeli George F. Kennan Professor at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
“Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies” P. 10-11
There are, of course, perfectly valid reasons to be critical of many elements that go into the venomous brew we call Occidentalism. Not all the critiques
of the Enlightenment lead to intolerance or dangerous irrationalism. The belief in universal progress, driven by business and industry, is certainly open
to criticism. Blind faith in the market is a self-serving and often damaging dogma. American society us far from ideal, and U.S. policies are often
disastrous. Western colonialism has much to answer for. And the revolt of the logical against claims of the global can be legitimate, even necessary. But
criticism of the West, harsh as it may be, is not the issue here. The
view of the West in Occidentalism is like the worst
aspects of its counterpart, Orientalism, which strips its human targets of their humanity .
Some Orientalist prejudices made non-Western people seem less than fully adult human beings;
they had the minds of children, and could thus be treated as lesser breads. Occidentalism is at
least as reductive; its bigotry simply turns the Orientalist view upside down. To diminish an
entire society or a civilization to a mass of soulless, decadent, money-grubbing, rootless,
faithless, unfeeling parasites is a form of intellectual destruction. Once again, if this were merely a matter of
distaste or prejudice, it would not be of great interest. Prejudices are part of the human condition. But when the idea of others as less
than human gathers revolutionary force, it leads to the destruction of human beings.
Our alternative: Recognize that the epistemology diversity and
density of native communities. Epistemological investigation should
emphasize density not absolute difference because Western
epistemes assist everyday struggles against resource exploitation.
Andersen 09 Chris ANDERSEN Michif (Métis) from western Canada. He is an associate professor in the Faculty of Native
Studies @ Alberta ‘9 “critical indigenous studies From Difference to Density” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2) p.95-96
By way of conclusion, let
me offer some thoughts on where my removal of difference—a central pillar of
studies—leaves us with respect to fashioning a discipline which can honour our past complexity
while accounting for its contemporary and future manifestations.68 Champagne spends much of his analytical time
arguing that Western concepts and disciplines are of only limited use to Indigenous studies because
they fail to account for the distinctive needs, aspirations and epistemologies of Indigenous
communities. A proper Indigenous studies discipline must thus produce: points of view and conceptualizations drawing on the everyday
Champagne’s Native
strategies and conceptions of American Indian communities that require mainstream academics and policy makers to rethink and extend the views of
indigenous groups, as a means to include their views and socio-cultural actions outside the use of class, ethnicity, race, and even nationality. Native
American Studies, and more generally indigenous studies, calls for conceptualizations and strategies that encompass issues, rights, and strategies of
political, cultural, and territorial survival.69 He
thus positions Native studies (a position familiar to Native
studies practitioners) as a dog on the leash for Indigenous communities and nations . Such a position
offers little in the way of analysis about the complexity of academic/community relations but it certainly feels good to say. He doesn’t appear to realise
the extent to which analysing such a relationship necessarily requires sliding into disciplinary territory long claimed by other disciplines. If his point is
that as Indigenous studies practitioners we need to claim this territory as our own, I am in full agreement. My point is merely that staking such a claim
requires none of the epistemological baggage he wants to pack for the journey, and indeed raises troubling issues that require us to carefully unpack
what he proposes to bring. Two of these are worth unpacking here. First, the community/academic relationship which appears to anchor Champagne’s
formulation is problematic in that it ignores the ways that whiteness in the academy shapes the boundaries of its knowledge production in ways which
do not necessarily subscribe to the regimes under which community knowledges are produced: Moreton-Robinson contends quite rightly that such
representations ‘may not reflect the same knowledges about authenticity that are created and deployed within and by Indigenous communities and as
such they may not be acceptable’.70 In ignoring this complexity, how on earth is Champagne to deal with the conflicts that inevitably arise? It does little
good to acquiesce to one discourse or the other (though more often than not academic representations are given the nod), nor can we pretend that such
differences are always reconcilable. These conflicts arise in situations pertaining to fundamentally irreconcilable positions on precisely the relationships
between humans and nature (as Champagne points to) but they can also arise in more mundane situations, such as how to provide honorariums for
elders involved in research projects in ways which don’t claw back from their monthly social assistance cheques. Second, even (or
especially) if
Indigenous studies is a dog on the leash for Indigenous communities and nations, why does this
necessarily require an entirely new set of theoretical or methodological precepts that differ from
those of mainstream disciplines? I agree with the broad strokes of Champagne’s argument about constructing a specific niche for
ourselves in the academic, as do many other Native studies practitioners. But many of us have been involved in situations in
which an Indigenous community has approached our department to ask for research assistance
for mundane issues about collecting data on telephone or internet use in their community;
proper application of census documents to produce the robust statistical profiles through which
they interface with government funders; water purity samples to make determinations of water
safety; or even archival documents to assist them in legal battles over hunting, fishing and other
resource extraction questions. Although the disciplines of sociology, biological sciences, history
or anthropology could and have undertaken this assistance, so can many existing Indigenous
studies departments. It seems inherently strange to call for a theoretical and methodological
orientation—and thus, according to Champagne, a discipline—which possessed none of this capability. His model
presupposes the difference of Indigenous communities and in doing so slams the shutters closed
on forms of expertise which might nonetheless prove of central concern to the
communities. Champagne contends that ‘the issues confronting indigenous peoples are not reducible to race, class, ethnicity or other
common analytical dimensions in use within mainstream disciplines’.71 The problem, from an epistemological standpoint, is that no issues of any
peoples can be reduced to these factors. Concepts—all concepts—are by definition schematic and as such are laughably simplistic in the face of the
enormous complexity of human life. This complexity requires us to acknowledge that Indigenous communities are—and have been for centuries—more
than the ‘holistic, institutionally nondifferentiated’ entities in which ‘knowledge is inherently integrated with community, culture, and political and
economic relations’72 painted by Champagne. Thus, although
not fully captured by terms like race, ethnicity or
class, such terms nonetheless assist greatly in reflecting upon the relationships between our
communities and the various nation-states, and not only because they possess symbolic
power in dominant society. The real irony of Champagne’s model of Indigenous studies is that his choices of analytical focus require
none of the theoretical or methodological prescriptions he begs of them. For example, his most prominent critique of Indigenous
studies—that a ‘cacophony’ of theoretical and methodological tools will ‘doom’ it to institutional
marginality73—is usually emphasised as a disciplinary strength. Thus, Indigenous studies scholar Jace Weaver writes
that: in dealing with the totalizing systems that we know as Native cultures, each view from
traditional disciplines is limited and partial, NAS must draw together the various disciplines and
their methods in order to achieve something approaching a complete picture of Natives, their
cultures and experiences.74 This isn’t an issue for Champagne, apparently, since his positioning of Indigenous communities strips them
of any of the epistemological complexity that would require us to intrude on others’ disciplinary turf. He sees this as his model’s strength but in fact it
becomes its Achilles heel. By
beginning with the assumption that Indigenous communities are
epistemologically dense (rather than just different), however, Weaver’s appeal for interdisciplinarity
becomes vital. Indeed, failure to account, interdisciplinarily, for this density elevates the danger
of producing a naive, substantialist and ultimately parochial Indigenous studies.
Case
Humanist ideas have the possibility of being helpful or hurtful,
however, their ideas have helped critique imperialism
Sankar MUTHU Poli Sci @ Chicago ‘3 Enlightenment Against Empire p. 266-271
Universal Dignity, Cultural Agency, and Moral Incommensurability Do commitments to the idea
of a shared humanity, to human dignity, to cross-cultural universal moral principles, and to
cross-cultural standards of justice rest upon assumptions and values that unavoidably denigrate,
or that disturbingly undermine respect for, cultural pluralism, that is, the wide array of human institutions and
practices in the world?16 Are they imperialistic either explicitly, to justify Europe's political, military, and
commercial subjugation of the non-European world, or implicitly, by indicating a rank ordering of superior and inferior
peoples, which could then be used to justify a more indirect, quasi-imperial 'civilizing' process? The
aforementioned commitments are sometimes collectively gathered under the term 'Enlightenment
universalism' and, as we have seen, they are sometimes considered to constitute the core of 'the
Enlightenment project'. I have suggested already that such assertions mask and distort a complex reality. In
this case, they obscure the multiplicity of universalisms across eighteenth-century European
political thought, each with distinct foundational claims, varying relationships to conceptualizations of human
diversity and to humanity (which themselves differ from thinker to thinker, and even from text to text), and different political
orientations toward the nature and limits of state power in theory and in practice. These philosophical sensibilities and approaches can yield
remarkably dif-ferent political arguments toward foreign peoples, international justice, and imperialism. Thus, rather than ask whether 'the
Enlightenment project' and 'Enlightenment universalism' are compatible with an appreciation of cultural pluralism or whether they are at bottom
imperializing ideologies, it is more constructive to pose more precise and historically accurate versions of such questions with regard to particular texts
and thinkers. In this book, I have studied a
distinctive variant of Enlightenment writings against empire, one
which includes the philosophical and political arguments of Diderot, Kant, and Herder. While there is
no such thing as 'Enlightenment universalism' as such, let alone a larger 'Enlightenment project', there is nonetheless an identifiable set of
philosophical and political arguments, assumptions, and tendencies about the relationship
between universal and pluralistic concepts that animates the strand of Enlightenment political thought under study here. With
this in mind, one can more meaningfully ask what the relationship is between universalism, pluralism, and incommensurability in such political
philosophies, and how precisely they yield anti-imperialist political commitments. Answers to these more circumscribed questions can be given by
better understanding the core elements of Diderot's, Kant's, and Herder's political philosophies, and how they differ from earlier (and, indeed, from
many later) understandings and judgements of empire. Immanuel Kant
remarks pointedly in Toward Perpetual Peace that the
Europeans who landed and eventually settled in the New World often denied indigenous peoples
any moral status. When America, the Negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so forth
were discovered, they were, to them [to Europeans], countries belonging to no one [die keinem
angehorten], since they counted the inhabitants as nothing. (8:358, emphasis added) What philosophical
concepts and arguments were necessary for New World peoples to be counted finally as something and especially to be considered as equals, as they
were eventually in some crucial respects, by anti-imperialist political thinkers in the Enlightenment era? In this section, I focus on what I have taken in
this book to be the philosophically most robust strand of Enlightenment anti-imperialist political thought. 17 Despite the many differences in the
ethnographic sources that Diderot, Kant, and Herder consulted, the philosophical languages that these thinkers employed, and the particular concepts
they drew upon to attack European empires, their anti-imperialist arguments intriguingly overlap in important respects. Thus, in this section, I identify
and elucidate the family resemblances that exist among their philosophical arguments and rhetorical strategies, and discuss the underlying
assumptions, ideas, and intellectual dispositions that make their version of anti-imperialist political thinking conceptually possible. In contrast to what
is effectively the premiss of the kinds of familiar questions asked at the opening of this section, the commitments of Diderot, Kant, and Herder to moral
universalism, cultural diversity, partial incommensurability, and the delegitimization of empire are not fundamentally in tension but rather reinforce
one another. Overall, there
are three principal philosophical sources of Enlightenment anti-imperialism.
The first and most basic idea is that human beings deserve some modicum of moral and political
respect simply because of the fact that they are human. This humanistic moral principle alone, however, was
far from sufficient for engendering an anti-imperialist politics. The whole modern tradition_Qf natural right and social contract theory held this view in
some form. Moreover, Amerindians inparticurar: were explicitly described by such thinkers as the pure, natural humans of the state of nature. Yet
much of this tradition of modern political thought, from Grotius onward, was either agnostic about imperialism or lent philosophical support to
European empires. Not every understanding of what it means fundamentally to be a human fosters the philosophical materials necessary to build a
more inclusive and pluralistic political theory that could serve as the basis of anti-imperialist arguments. Indeed, as I will argue, some understandings
of humanity that are manifestly egalitarian can nevertheless impede such a development. Second, therefore, these
anti-imperialist
arguments rested upon the view that human beings are fundamentally cultural beings.
Diderot, Kant, and Herder all contend that the category of the human is necessarily marked by
cultural difference; in this view, humanity is cultural agency. This thicker, particularized
view of the human subject, paradoxically, helped to engender a more inclusive and meaningful moral
universalism. Third, a fairly robust account of moral incommensurability and relativity was also
necessary for the rise of anti-imperialist political thought. The anti-imperialist arguments offered by
Diderot, Kant, and Herder all partly rest upon the view that peoples as a whole are incommensurable. From this
perspective, entire peoples cannot be judged as superior or inferior along a universal scale of value. Moreover, in distinct but closely related ways,
these thinkers argue that our cultural freedom produces a wide variety of individual and
collective practices and beliefs that are incommensurable, given their view that many practices and beliefs lie outside
the bounds of a categorical judgement or universal standard. When these three conceptual developments were brought together, the strand of
Enlightenment anti-imperialist political theory that I have identified became philosophically possible. I want to reiterate here that this framework is not
meant to elucidate all of the anti-imperialist arguments that one can find in the philosophical writings of the Enlightenment era. Moreover, the distinctive intellectual dispositions, personal idiosyncrasies, and domestic political commitments of Enlightenment-era thinkers significantly shaped their
particular arguments on the issue of empire. Still, as I will show, these three philosophical ideas play a crucial role in enabling the development of a rich
strand of anti-imperialist political theory in the late eighteenth century. In discussing the development of a more inclusive and anti-imperialist political
theory, my focus in this section (as it has been generally in this book) is on Europeans' political attitudes toward non-Europeans. Many thinkers in nonEuropean societies clearly operated with similarly self-centred conceptions, but my emphasis throughout is on Europeans' intellectual responses to the
fact of cultural difference and imperial politics, not with non-European peoples' understandings of each other or of their ac-counfsofEuropean peoples.
Nor do I examine here the variety of intra-European distinctions between allegedly superior and inferior groups, those, for instance, involving
linguistic, geographical, class, religious, and gender differences, which of course historically also legitimated differential treatment within European
societies. Thus, I do not intend to argue that Enlightenment anti-imperialist political philosophies are inclusive as such, for their underlying principles
do not necessarily (and, in the eighteenth century, they manifestly did not) support egalitarian arguments against every form of exclusion. As I have
noted, the first idea that enables Enlightenment anti-imperialism- first both historically and analytically-is that foreigners are human beings and,
consequently, that they deserve moral respect, however understood. The
development, in other words, of some variant of
a humanistic moral universalism ensured that the shared humanity of both Europeans
and non-Europeans would be acknowledged and given some due. The philosophical and political legacy with which
Enlightenment anti-imperialist thinkers struggled, as they themselves understood, was one of exclusion. As they often noted, ethical
principles of respect and reciprocity had been limited almost always to (some) members of one's
own tribe, polis, nation, religion, or civilization. Accordingly, the distinction between one's own society, however defined,
and the barbaroi (others, foreigners), whether justified outright or tacitly assumed, influenced not only the anthropological conceptions of, and popular
understandings about, foreign peoples, but also legitimated the often brutally differential treatment of various groups. It is along these lines that
Kant expresses dismay, in a lecture on moral philosophy, at what he calls the "error that the [ancient] Greeks
displayed, in that they evinced no goodwill towards extranei [outsiders, or foreigners], but included them
all, rather, sub voce hastes = barbari [under the name of enemies, or barbarians]". (27:674) In the long history of imperial exploits,
actions that in at least some contexts might have provoked outrage in one's own land not only gainedlegitimacy on foreign soil but were deemed
praiseworthy, noble, and even morally obligatory abroad. While European imperialists in the New World, writes Diderot, "faithfully observe their own
laws, they will violate the rights of other nations in order to increase their power. That is what the Romans did."lB Enlightenment
antiimperialists recognized that such Janus-faced practices constituted the very core of imperial
activity from the empires of the ancient world to the imperial conquests and commercial voyages of their day. The fact of difference itself lay at the
heart of such inconsistent behaviour from Europeans' initial encounters with Amerindians onward, as Diderot notes: "[t]he Spaniard, the
first to be thrown up by the waves onto the shores of the New World, thought he had no duty to
people who did not share his colour, customs, or religi6n~" 19 Not wanting to single out tlie Spanish, Diderot
suggests further that the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Danes all followed in precisely
the same spirit of exclusion and injustice. From an anthropological viewpoint, such discoveries
of non-European peoples no doubt played a role in Europeans' changing conceptions of
humanity. From Herodotus onward, of course, travel narratives played a central role in contemplating what
it might mean to be, in some fundamental sense, a human being. Given that theorizations of human nature relate, in complicated
ways, to changing understandings of the range and characteristics of human societies, institutions, and practices, the European discovery of 'new' lands
and peoples accordingly generated further, and at times more complex, theorizations of humanity.2o Moreover, from the sixteenth century onward,
thinkers were particularly keen to consult and appropriate the latest ethnographic reports. In part, the heightened interest no doubt complemented,
and may in part have resulted from, what is often described as the intellectual revolution in 'natural philosophy' and the resulting emphasis on
experimentation, empirical study, and inductive reasoning in fields such as astronomy, but also (especially from the mid-seventeenth century onward)
in the study of human anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Although many of Hume's contemporaries did not share his hope of introducing "the
experimental method" to moral philosophy, there was nonetheless a widespread presumption that an understanding of the human condition needed to
take account, in some manner, of the growing anthropological literature that detailed the vast range of human experiences, customs, and practices
throughout the globe.21 This turn toward what Georges Gusdorf has called 'human science', however, requires a stable referent for what counts as
'human' while also upsetting the stability of the term by focusing attention increasingly on human difference.22 In this sense, the attempt at identifying
the most salient features of humanity was often an erratic and inherentlyconflicted task, as John Locke argued it would have to be, given the very
nature of our self-knowledge.
Anti-colonialism doesn’t require a break from our existing political
vocabulary. The tools of institutional engagement, the language of
rights, freedom and citizenship provide important resources for antiimperialism. The aff’s method risks self-marginalization.
James TULLY Poli Sci @ Victoria (Canada) ‘8 Public Philosophy in a New Key Vol. 1 p. 3-11
Public Philosophy in a New Key is a new approach to the study of politics. The
role of a public philosophy is to
address public affairs. This civic task can be done in many different ways. The type of public philosophy I practise
carries on this task by trying to enter into the dialogues with citizens engaged in struggles
against various forms of injustice and oppression. The aim is to establish pedagogical
relationships of reciprocal elucidation between academic research and the civic
activities of fellow citizens. The specific role of this public philosophy is to throw a critical light on the field of
practices in which civic struggles take place and the practices of civic freedom available to
change them. It does this by means of historical and critical studies of the field and the given
theoretical forms of representation of it. Reciprocally, this critical ethos learns from citizens and the
successes and failures of their civic activities how to improve the historical and critical studies
and begin again. In the studies that follow, I use the term 'citizen' to refer to a person who is subject to a
relationship of governance (that is to say, governed) and, simultaneously and primarily, is an active agent
in the field of a governance relationship. While this includes the official sense of 'citizen' as a
recognised member of a state, it is obviously broader and deeper, and more appropriate and
effective for that reason. By a 'relationship of governance', I refer not only to the official sense of
the institutional governments of states, but to the broad sense of any relationship of knowledge,
power and subjection that governs the conduct of those subject to it, from the local to the global. Governance relationships
in this ordinary sense range from the complex ways individuals and groups are governed in their producing and consuming activities
to the ways peoples and subalternised states are subject to global imperial relationships of inequality, dependency and exploitation.
They comprise the relationships of normativity, power and subjectivity in which humans find themselves constrained to recognise
themselves and each other, coordinate interaction, distribute goods, act on the environment and relate to the spiritual realm.
'Practices of civic freedom' comprise the vast repertoire of ways of citizens acting together on the
field of governance relationships and against the oppressive and unjust dimensions of them.
These range from ways of 'acting otherwise' within the space of governance relationships to contesting, negotiating, confronting and
seeking to transform them. The general aim of these diverse civic activities is to bring oppressive and unjust
governance relationships under the on-going shared authority of the citizenry subject to
them; namely, to civicise and democratise them from below. What is distinctively
'democratic' about public philosophy in a new key is that it does not enter into dialogues with
fellow citizens under the horizon of a political theory that frames the exchange and places the
theorist above the demos. It rejects this traditional approach. Rather, it enters into the relationships of
normativity and power in which academic researchers and civic citizens find
themselves, and it works historically and critically on bringing them into the light of public
scrutiny with the particular academic skills available to the researchers. Every reflective and
engaged citizen is a public philosopher in this sense, and every academic public philosopher is a fellow citizen
working within the same broad dialogue with his or her specific skills. Studies in public philosophy are thus specific
toolkits offered to civic activist and civic-minded academics working on the pressing political
problems of our times. I first developed this approach in Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. By
means of a series of historical studies, I argued that constitutional democracies could respond to contemporary struggles over
recognition by reconceiving constitutions as open to continuing contestation and negotiation by those subject to them. This would be
a transition from constitutional democracy (where the constitution is conceived as founding and standing behind democratic
activity) to democratic constitutionalism (where the constitution and the democratic negotiation of it are conceived as equally basic).
In the decade since it was published, I have come to see that this approach can be improved and applied to a broader range of
contemporary struggles: over diverse forms of recognition, social justice, the environment and imperialism. These two volumes
explore this complex landscape. Volume I, Part r sets out this public philosophy, its employment of historical studies, its relation to
contemporary political struggles and its orientation to the civic freedom of citizens. Chapter r is a sketch of my approach, the
tradition from which it derives, the contemporary authors from whom I have learned this approach, and a contrast with the
dominant theory-building approach. Chapters 2 and 3 provide the groundwork of public philosophy through an interpretation and
adaptation of the works of Wittgenstein, Foucault and the Cambridge school. These chapters provide the methods that are employed
in the case studies that follow in both volumes. Volume I, Part 2 consists of three applications to the democratic struggles over the
appropriate forms of recognition of diverse, multicultural and multinational citizens in contemporary societies. Chapter 4 locates the
approach relative to trends in political philosophy over the last thirty years and sketches out the general field of relations of power
and the freedom of citizens that is studied in detail in the following chapters. Chapter 5 is a study of ways to democratise various
types of contemporary recognition struggles while generating appropriate civic bonds of solidarity among diverse citizens. Chapter 6
is a study of democratic forms of recognition in political associations that are not only multicultural but also multinational, based on
the work of an international team of social scientists from the European Union and Canada. This is a comprehensive yet defeasible
analysis of the actual legal and political practices of democratic constitutionalism for multinational associations. Volume I, Part 3
consists of two studies of the struggles of Indigenous peoples for recognition in modern states and under international law. The first
sets out a normative framework for the bi-civilisational negotiation of decolonisation and reconciliation of the rights of Indigenous
peoples to govern themselves in their own ways over their territories and the rights of states that have colonised them over the last
half millennium. It is based on my work for the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1991-5). Chapter 8 addresses
the prevailing discursive and practical obstacles to the negotiation of reconciliation proposed in Chapter 7 and the practices of
freedom available to Indigenous peoples and their supporters to overcome the obstacles and initiate negotiations. Chapter 9
concludes Volume I, setting out this new approach to recognition and distribution struggles developed in the course of these studies
and the ways in which contemporary societies are beginning to adopt this democratic approach in their legal and political
institutions. I show how this approach represents a fundamental transformation of the manner in which struggles over recognition
are standardly conceptualised today in the dominant schools of thought. It recommends a transition from the orientation to discrete
and dyadic struggles for the just and definitive form of legal recognition in a state to multiple and interrelated negotiations over the
always-imperfect prevailing norms of mutual recognition of members of any form of association. This modest democratic approach
has a much better chance of bringing peace to the deeply diverse world of the twentyfirst century than the standard approaches.
Volume II applies public philosophy in a new key to global politics. It consists of historical and critical
studies of global relationships of horrendous inequality, dependency, exploitation and
environmental damage, and of the corresponding practices of civic freedom of global and local
citizens to transform them into democratic relationships. The transition to Volume II does not only mark a broadening
of the field of public philosophy to the global. More emphasis is also placed on specific locales of civic struggles, the diversity of governance
relationships and the range of ways of acting otherwise in them, provincialising
Eurocenrric traditions and bringing in more
non-Western voices and perspectives. Volume II, Part I consists of studies of global relationships and practices of civic freedom
available from the perspectives of the dominant schools of globalisation. Chapter I critically examines the tradition of international relations' and global
justice associated with Kant's theoty of a world federation of identical nation-states. Chapter 2 examines the theories of globalisation, global governance
and cosmopolitan democracy. Chapter 3 examines the activities of environmental movements from the perspective of civic freedom and advances a
democratic ethic of ecological politics. Chapter 4 is the most comprehensive. It is an immanent critique of the dominant and agonistic approaches to
global justice and international law. The critique leads step by step to the conclusion that only a more historical and contextual approach, related to the
actual practices of freedom on the ground, can illuminate the unequal global relationships and the possibilities for their transformation. The conclusion
I draw from these four studies is that these approaches, while illuminating and useful, are nevertheless limited and inadequate because they overlook
the historically persisting imperial character of the global relationships they analyse. This provides the transition to Part 2. Volume II, Part 2 consists in
studies of global relationships under the description of them as a network of vastly unequal imperial relationships between the North and global South
(the I20 former colonies that comprise the majority of the world's population). The three chapters show how different aspects of the contemporary
global order continue to be structured by imperial relationships inherited from five hundred years of Western imperialism. These relationships survived
decolonisation in the twentieth century in a new phase of imperialism, standardly called post-colonial or informal imperialism. Chapter 5 sets out this
argument in historical detail and shows how each of the major approaches to globalisation and international relations overlooks the imperial
dimensions of the present in different ways and marginalises other approaches that study globalisation under the category of imperialism. Even some
of the approaches that claim to take into account informal imperialism misrepresent the contemporary form of imperialism. With this disclosure of the
field of globalisation as the continuation of Western imperialism by informal means and through institutions of global governance, Chapter 6 turns to
the networkisation and communications revolution of the last twenty years. I show that this revolution, which is often portrayed as democratising
globalisation, has been Janus-faced: helping global citizens to organise effectively at the local and global levels, yet also helping institutions of global
governance, multinational corporations and the US military to network and govern informally the global relationships of inequality they inherited from
the period of colonial imperialism. Chapter 7 shows how the imperial spread of the modular form of modern, Western-style constitutional nation-states
and international law by colonisation, indirect rule and informal rule over the last three hundred years has not freed the non-West from imperialism.
Quite the opposite: it has been and continues to be the political, legal and economic form in which relationships of inequality, dependency and
exploitation have been extended and intensified around the world. Volume II concludes by asking the crucial question: what
can citizens
who are subject to these imperial relationships (in both the North and global South) do to
transform them into non-imperial, democratic relationships by bringing them under their
shared authority? T he general answer is the exercise of civic freedom by citizens in the North and global South and the
exercise of academic research in networks of reciprocal learning with these global/local citizen
movements: namely, a new public philosophy for a de-imperialising age. Chapter 8 takes the citizenry of the European Union as an example. I argue
that European citizens are already taking the lead in improvising new forms of democratising civic activities with respect to immigration, alternative
economics and relationships with the global South. Chapter 9 is the conclusion to Public Philosophy in a New Key. It draws together the strands of
argument throughout the two volumes and weaves them into a sketch of a new kind of local and global citizenship I call 'glocal'
citizenship.
This mode of citizenship has the capacity to overcome the imperialism of the present age and
bring a democratic world into being from the local to the global. Since it is the conclusion to the two volumes, I will
provide a brief synopsis at the outset to give a preliminary indication of where the chapters lead. The first part of the chapter summarises the imperial
character of the present global order and the dominant modular form of citizenship (modern citizenship) that has been spread by Western expansion.
Far from offering a challenge to imperialism, it actually serves in a number of ways to extend it, in both its national (civil) and its global (cosmopolitan)
forms. The second part argues that there is another mode of citizenship (diverse citizenship) that also developed historically in both the West and nonWest. It provides the democratic means to challenge and transform imperial relationships in both its local (civic) and local/global (glocal) forms. I set
out the main features of the traditions of diverse civic citizenship historically and conceptually, and then apply it to global struggles of deimperialisation and democratisation. It is a form of citizenship that is grounded in local civic practices yet extended globally by democratic networks.
The chapter thus brings together the three themes of the two volumes: public philosophy, practices of civic freedom and the countless ways they work
together to negotiate and transform oppressive relationships. This is not only possible but what millions of citizens, nongovernmental organisations,
networks and social movements are doing today. The chapter ends with a view of Gandhi's life as a civic citizen contra imperialism; it stands as an
exemplar of civic citizenship and engaged public philosophy. There are many public philosophers from whom I have drawn inspiration. John Locke,
Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldmann, Antonio Gramsci, Sojourner Truth, Paulo Friere, Bertrand Russell, Maude Barlow, Edward Said, Noam
Chomsky, Vandana Shiva, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Iris Marion Young and Gandhi are exemplary. And, as I mentioned, every engaged and
reflective citizen is an inspirational public philosopher in this democratic sense. But I have always questioned why more political philosophers and
political theorists are not also public philosophers. What stops many of them from seeing their work as a discussion with their fellow citizens as equals?
I think the answer is that many tend to enter into a relationship with citizens under the horizon of a political theory that sets them above the situated
civic discourses of the societies in which they live. This presumptive elevation is standardly based on four types of assumption. The first assumption is
that there are causal processes of historical development (globalisation) that act behind the backs of citizens and determine their field of activity. It is
the role of the theorist of modernisation to study these conditions of possibility of civic activity. The second is that there are universal normative
principles that determine how citizens ought to act. It is the role of the theorist of global justice to study these unchanging principles that prescribe the
limits of democracy. The third is that there are background norms and goods implicit within democratic practices that constrain and enable the field of
democratic activity of citizens in the foreground. It is the role of the interpretative and phenomenological theorists to make these background
conditions explicit. The fourth is that there are canonical institutional preconditions that provide the foundations of democratic activity, and it is the
role of political scientists to study these legal and political institutions. In each of these four cases, the theorist is elevated above the demos by the
assumption that there are background conditions of possibility of democracy that are separate from democratic activity and it is his or her role to study
them, not what takes places within them. In the course of the studies in the two volumes, each
pillar of elite political theory falls
to the ground. Each of the four conditions of possibility is shown to be internally related to and
reciprocally shaped by the everyday activities of democratic citizens, not separate from and
determinative of their field of freedom. It is this revolutionary discovery that brings political philosophy 'down' into the world
of the demos and renders it a situated public philosophy in conversation with fellow citizens. Equally
important, it enables us to see that we are much freer and our problems more tractable than the grand
theories of the four pillars make it seem. For while we are still entangled in conditions that constrain
and enable, and are difficult to change, we are no longer entrapped in background conditions that
determine the limits of our foreground activities, for none is permanently off limits. I associate
this revolutionary insight with the late Richard Rorty (Volume I, Chapter 4). Others will associate it with other writers and their own experiences of
human freedom and agency where they were told it was impossible. I would like to say a few words about the phrase 'in a new key' . Just
as a
jazz musician plays a composition in a new key relative to the classic performances of it, so too a
specific public philosopher plays the role in his or her own new style in relation to the classic
public philosophers in his or her field. The style of these studies is a new key in that it combines
historical studies and a reciprocal civic relationship (MARKED) in what I hope is a distinctive way. Jazz
musicians play in a new key in the course of improvising with other musicians and in dialogue
with classic performances and present audiences. Analogously, public philosophers improvise in
dialogues with contemporary theorists, the classics, engaged citizens and in response to the
political problems that confront and move them. This is the situated freedom of a public philosopher. I see the studies in
these volumes as improvisations in this sense.1 Finally, I would like to respond to a common objection to this style of public philosophy. Radical
critics often say, given the radical character of your particular public philosophy, why do you
engage in the 'mainstream' academic debates and use the conservative language of citizenship,
public philosophy, governance, democracy and civic freedom? Your work will be co-opted by the
mainstream you disagree with and alienated from the civic activists you hope to reach. You should
write in a language of radical politics. I acknowledge that my views are somewhat radical relative to much of the literature I discuss. However, there are
three reasons for the approach I take. Firstly, the
alternative language of radical politics often involves a kind of
self-marginalisation and an attitude of self-righteousness that I find incompatible with a
democratic ethos. Moreover, there are already many excellent public philosophers, such as
Chomsky, who write directly to civic activists and bypass the theoretical debates, and they too
write in the same plain and simple language of citizens, public goods and freedom. Secondly, the
economic, political and military elites and their ideologists have inherited not only much of the
earth and its resources but also many of its languages, including the manipulable language of
citizenship, democracy, civic goods and freedom. Yet, it is precisely this ordinary language that
the oppressed and exploited of the world have always used to express their outrage at the
injustices of the present and their hopes and dreams of another world. Like Edward Said, I refuse to
surrender it to our adversaries without a fight and abandon the repository of the history of
struggles from which we derive. 2 Moreover, the fall of the four pillars of the ancien regime also brings
down the fiction of an alternative, pure language of freedom (radical or otherwise) that stands above
the fray of politics and is impervious to unpredictable redescription by one's fellow adversaries.
Thirdly, I have deep respect for the elaborate Western and non-Western traditions of critical
political reflection, the great yet partial insights they can bring, and the people who carry them
on today in this public language. While I disagree with the dominant theories that legitimate the
status quo in these terms, engagement with them forces dissenters like myself constantly to test
our own views against them and, in so doing, to try to move the academic debate in
another direction. As we will see, I am far from the first or only one to take this agonistic stance. Furthermore, is it not
presumptuous to assume that these debates are alien and of no interest to citizens? T he
following chapters were written in conversations with engaged citizens. Academic debates are not as far from and
unrelated to the public debates as they are often portrayed from the perspectives of the four pillars. They are a
historically integral part of the complex field of practical discourses on which public philosophy
is inescapably thrown and in which it can find its voice and make a distinctive difference. Except for
the concluding chapter of Volume II, all chapters are based on works published previously over the last eight years and then rewritten to bring them
together in the sustained argument of these rwo volumes. The concluding chapter of Volume II was written for the rwo volumes and to bring their
themes together in a portrait of global/local civic freedom and public philosophy contra imperialism.
Their totalizing system for understanding sovereignty as nothing but
domination, control and the production of bare life is politically
counter-productive.
Ernesto LACLAU Political Theory @ Essex ‘7 in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life eds.
Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli p. 21-22
Needless to say, we
fully reject Agamben's third thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the
nomos or fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. He asserts: The birth of the camp in
our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. It is
produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state, which was founded on
the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the State) and mediated by automatic rules
for the inscription of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the State decides to assume directly the
care of the nation's biological life as one of its proper tasks. . . . Something can no longer function within the
traditional mechanisms that regulated this inscription, and the camp is the new, hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the
order—or, rather, the sign of the system's inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine. (HS, 174-75) This
series of wild statements would only hold if the following set of rather dubious premises were
accepted: I. That the crisis of the functional nexus between land, State, and the automatic rules for
the inscription of life has freed an entity called "biological—or bare—life" That the regulation of
that freed entity has been assumed by a single and unified entity called the State That the inner logic of
that entity necessarily leads it to treat the freed entities as entirely malleable objects whose archetypical form would be the ban
Needless to say, none of these presuppositions can be accepted as they stand. Agamben, who has presented a
rather compelling analysis of the way in which an ontology of potentiality should be structured, closes
his argument,
however, with a naïve teleologism, in which potentiality appears as entirely subordinated
to a pre-given actuality. This teleologism is, as a matter of fact, the symmetrical pendant of the "ethymologism" we
have referred to at the beginning of this essay. Their combined effect is to divert Agamben's attention from
the really relevant question, which is the system of structural possibilities that each new situation
opens. The most summary examination of that system would have revealed that: (1) the crisis of the "automatic rules
for the inscription of life" has freed many more entities than "bare life," and that the reduction of
the latter to the former takes place only in some extreme circumstances that cannot in the least be
considered as a hidden pattern of modernity; (z) that the process of social regulation to which the
dissolution of the "automatic rules of inscription" opens the way involved a plurality of instances that were far
from unified in a single unity called "the State"; (3) that the process of State building in
modernity has involved a far more complex dialectic between homogeneity and heterogeneity
than the one that Agamben's ‘`camp-based" paradigm reflects. By unifying the whole process of
modern political construction around the extreme and absurd paradigm of the concentration
camp, Agamben does more than present a distorted history: he blocks any possible
exploration of the emancipatory possibilities opened by our modern heritage. Let me
conclude with a reference to the question of the future as it can be thought from Agamben's perspective. He asserts: "Only if it is
possible to think the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of law (even that of the empty form of laws being in force without
significance) will we have moved out of the paradox of sovereignty towards a politics freed from every ban. A pure form of law is only
the empty form of relation. Yet the empty form of relation is no longer a law but a zone of indistinguishability between law and life,
which is to say, a state of exception" (HS, 59). We are not told anything about what a movement out of the
paradox of sovereignty and "towards a politics freed from every ban" would imply. But we do not need to be
told: the formulation of the problem already involves its own answer. To be beyond any ban and
any sovereignty means, simply, to be beyond politics. The myth of a fully reconciled
society is what governs the (non-)political discourse of Agamben. And it is also what allows
him to dismiss all political options in our societies and to unify them in the concentration
camp as their secret destiny. Instead of deconstructing the logic of political institutions, showing areas in
which forms of struggle and resistance are possible, he closes them beforehand through an
essentialist unification. Political nihilism is his ultimate message.