ADI 2010

FellowsShree

1
Agamben K

Agamben K
Agamben K........................................................................................................................................................................
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Strat Sheet..........................................................................................................................................................................
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1NC Shell...........................................................................................................................................................................
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1NC Shell...........................................................................................................................................................................
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1NC Shell...........................................................................................................................................................................
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Link: Citizenship Rights...................................................................................................................................................
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Link/Impact: Citizenship Rights.......................................................................................................................................
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Link: Counter-Struggle.....................................................................................................................................................
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Link: Democracy Citizenship...........................................................................................................................................
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Link: Disease....................................................................................................................................................................
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Link: Economy..................................................................................................................................................................
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Link: Political Process......................................................................................................................................................
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Link: Transnational Refugee Protection...........................................................................................................................
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Link: Rights Talk..............................................................................................................................................................
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Link: Rights Talk..............................................................................................................................................................
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Link: State Implementation...............................................................................................................................................
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Link: Immigration Reform Reinscribes the Exceptional State.........................................................................................
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Link: Terrorist Exclusion Reform.....................................................................................................................................
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Link: Visa Eligibility Expansion Makes People Self-Police (1/2).....................................................................................
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Link: Visa Eligibility Expansion Makes People Self-Police (2/2).....................................................................................
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Link: AT Rights Turn........................................................................................................................................................
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Internal Link: Securitization Leads to War.......................................................................................................................
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Impact: Internment............................................................................................................................................................
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Impact: Massacres.............................................................................................................................................................
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Impact: Genocide..............................................................................................................................................................
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Impact: No Value to Life...................................................................................................................................................
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Impact: Terrorism Reform Leads to Unending War.........................................................................................................
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FellowsShree

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Agamben K

Impact AT: Liberalism Stops Biopower.............................................................................................................................

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Impact AT: Liberalism Stops Biopower.............................................................................................................................
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Impact AT: Ojakangas........................................................................................................................................................
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Impact AT: Biopower Good (Foucaultian Zoe)................................................................................................................
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Impact AT: Biopower Good (Foucaultian Zoe)................................................................................................................
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Alternative: Whatever Being............................................................................................................................................
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Alternative: Passivity........................................................................................................................................................
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Alternative: Identity-Stripping (1/2).................................................................................................................................
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Alternative: Identity-Stripping (2/2).................................................................................................................................
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Alternative: AT No Roadmap............................................................................................................................................
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Framing Card (1/2)............................................................................................................................................................
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Framing Card (2/2)............................................................................................................................................................
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AT: Alt Doesnt Solve.......................................................................................................................................................
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AT: Perm (Cede the Political)...........................................................................................................................................
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AT: Perm (Cede the Political)...........................................................................................................................................
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AT: Perm...........................................................................................................................................................................
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AT: Perm...........................................................................................................................................................................
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AT: Perm...........................................................................................................................................................................
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AT: Perm...........................................................................................................................................................................
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AT: Perm...........................................................................................................................................................................
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AT: Framing......................................................................................................................................................................
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AT: Friend-Enemy Distinction Good................................................................................................................................
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AT: Realism.......................................................................................................................................................................
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AT: Agamben Totalizes.....................................................................................................................................................
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ADI 2010
FellowsShree

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Agamben K

**AFF Answers**
Aff:
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Alternative Doesnt Solve.........................................................................................................................................

Alternative Doesnt Solve.........................................................................................................................................
Alternative = Powerlessness......................................................................................................................................
Bare Life != Powerlessness.......................................................................................................................................
Alternative = Totalization..........................................................................................................................................
Biopower Good.........................................................................................................................................................
Friend/Enemy Distinction Good...............................................................................................................................
Link Turn...................................................................................................................................................................
Perm..........................................................................................................................................................................
Rejecting Sovereignty Bad........................................................................................................................................
Rights GoodDeranty..............................................................................................................................................
State of Exception Good...........................................................................................................................................

ADI 2010
FellowsShree

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Agamben K

Strat Sheet
The Agamben K is a useful generic K for all affirmative that attempts to expand the visa
regime. The kritik claims that Western politics relies on a process of inclusion/exclusion
that creates a distinction between zoe (bare, biological life for example, refugees not
under the purview of the law) and bios (politicized life). Agamben claims that this
paradigm of inclusion/exclusion is a monopolization of control and biopolitical violence by
the sovereignit is what allows the sovereign to make determinations of what constitutes
bare life and what constitutes a life that matters politically. The alternative is to rethink
the distinction between inclusion and exclusion, which Agamben thinks is the only
remaining point of contestation in modern politics. The control over political
representation via visas is what organizes and calculates the way in which violence occurs.
The affirmative can win against the Agamben K by defending Western politics.
Specifically, there are pretty good pieces of evidence (like Deranty) that indicate that
Agamben totalizes the detrimental aspects of the rights/visa system and neglects the
positive aspects. There are also your stock biopower/state of exception good arguments.
If you have specific questions about the K or its answers, feel free to contact me at
shree.awsare@gmail.com
-Shree

ADI 2010
FellowsShree

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Agamben K

1NC Shell
The 1ACs participation in the visa regime is not benignvisa eligibility expands the
sovereigns biopolitical management of populations
Slater 6 (Mark B, School of Poli Sci @ U of Ottawa, The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self:
Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics; Alternatives 31 P 174-7//shree)

The visa is a necessary supplement to the passport system, which constitute one quarter of the global mobility regime:
frontier formalities, passports, visas, and les sans-papiers (the stateless and the refugee). James Hollifield and Rey Koslowski have
offered grim prognoses on the health of the global mobility regime, when measured by the traditional standards of regime theory.30
However, if we use James N. Rosenaus progressive model of instantiation of global governance (ideas, behaviors, and institutions),31
the global mobility regime seems to be more robust. I have argued elsewhere that there exists a broad consensus on the fundamental
tenets of the global mobility regime, despite the lack of specific legal treaties.32 There is a normative consensus in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights: Every individual has a right to a nationality, to leave their country, and to return to their country.33 There
is also a broad behavioral consensus in relation to the documentary regime.34 There are also functional institutions, such as the
International Civil Aviation Organization and International Air Transportation Agency, that set global standards for travel.
Fundamental to this regime is the lack of a significant right of entry, and the concomitant function of a
state not only to regulate its population not only entry into it. Barry Hindess has argued that the rights of citizenship,
with its attendant right of entry, can be viewed as a way of managing international population.35 Nevzat Soguks discussion of the
refugee regime as a management of that surplus international population not encompassed by the nation-state norm is also central to
this perspective.36 At its root, then, the international global mobility regime endows the citizen with a right to exit their home, a right
to return home, and a right to become a refugee, at which point other sovereigns have an obligation to permit admission. The visa and
passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the community. In this structure, the fundamental right
of the sovereign is to be able to exclude and define the limits of its population with little reference to other states or sovereigns. Mobility
is structured in terms of entry, which is made obligatory by citizenship or refugee status, or entirely the discretionary by noncitizenship. I
want to unpack this discretionary moment that is vital to the delimitation of the population of the state. From the French vis, meaning
having been seen, the visa refers to (1) the authorisation given by a consul to enter or to pass through a country, and (2) the stamp
placed on the passport when the holder entered or left a foreign country.37 In modern usage, it refers to the prescreening of travelers
and represents a prima facie case for admission.38 The visa in no way guarantees actual admission, which remains
the prerogative of the sovereign and its agents at the border. The visa regime allows for a delocalization of the

border function so that states may engage in sorting behavior away from the physical limit of the
state.39 In some instances, visas may be applied for and received at the actual border of a state, but in such cases it is viewed mostly as a revenue
generator rather than a security function. Paralleling my earlier work in Rights of Passage, in which I examined the governmental problems to which a
passport was an administrative solution, it is important to detail the way in which the contemporary visa system has been built in response to (apparent and
real) failures. As the British Passport Office states, The British passport and visa system as it now is, has been built up as the result of practical experience
gained during and since the war and is applied in a practical spirit, in the light of conditions which exist in the world today.40 This method of international
political sociology, whereby the practices and beliefs of actors are taken into account in the consideration of public and international policies, pays close
attention to the importance of experience. I agree with Koslowski that mobility is a better description of the field of social relations than the more restrictive
migration which is why I talk about a global mobility regime and try to understand the system of tourist, business, and settler trajectories.41 Simon Dalby
has suggested ways in which mobility has become a luxury of the rich and developed populations, while fixity has become an encumbrance of the poor.42
Bauman discusses a politics of exclusion, which draws substantial interest toward the notion of rejection: The mark of excluded in an era of time/space
compression is enforced immobility.43 Generally, states issue settlement and temporary visas, which are distinguished by the length of stay and degree of
integration into the host community (often in terms of labor/taxes). Thus settlers are allowed to work and must contribute to the tax system; visitors are not
allowed to work and need not contribute to the tax system. Hollifield suggests the delocalization of border functions acts as a solution to the problem of

To preclude asylum seekers from claiming rights inherent in the liberal community, decisions are
made outside of the state where no such appeal can be claimed . We may see this dynamic in European discourse
liberal rights.44

wherein refugees and economic migrants have been recast as asylum seekers and the attempts to locate camps at the margins of the
European community.45 The United States, on the other hand, uses expedited removal, a process by which a
traveler with false travel documents is refused entry and barred entry for five years. Expedited removal is
not subject to judicial or administrative appeal.46 The voluntary departure program at the US/Mexico border
illustrates the power of the bureaucracy to condition marginalized migrants to give up their rights: Arrested aliens are permitted
(indeed, encouraged) to waive their rights to a deportation hearing and return to Mexico without lengthy
detention, expensive bonding, and trial.47 In each of these cases, rights of applicants are suspended at the border of
the community as an exceptional case of normal law. Preliminary empirical work suggests that there are a
number of common requirements for visas: a fee for processing (a remote tax); return tickets (good faith illustration that the
applicants stay is temporary); statement of qualifications (to distinguish the degree of skilled labor); funds for stay; a health
certificate (declarations that one is not an epidemiological risk : AIDS/HIV; yellow fever; tuberculosis; etc.); and
affirmation of acceptable

ADI 2010
FellowsShree

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Agamben K

1NC Shell
behavior (declarations that one is not a criminal /felon). Thus, the mobile subject is configured by the receiving state in
terms of health, wealth, labor/leisure, and risk. The guarantee of the passport is its isomorphic representation of a particular body to a set
of governmental records. The visa application, which always tests and depends on the validity of the passport, attempts to
render the position of the applicant in terms of state, educational, health, and police institutions. As Don
Flynn has suggested, the product of the visa bureaucracy is rejection , and efficiency is determined by rates
of rejection against some imagined norm of regularly occurring fraud.48 In 1920, we see responsibility for vetting travelers
shift from sending states to receiving states at the Conference on Passports, Customs Formalities and Through Tickets, which
represented the first modern institutionalization of the global mobility regime. In the first proceedings, preliminary visas (issued before
arrival at the border) were free of charge, and only to be issued if the validity of the passport was in doubt; entry and exit visas were
eliminated for nationals; and visas were to be issued with the same period of validity as the passport itself.49 The League Technical
Committee recommends that, like passports, except in special or exceptional cases, entrance visas should be abolished by all countries,
either generally or under condition of reciprocity, each country retaining its full freedom of action in respect to the enforcement of its
legislation with regard to police measures for foreigners, the regulation of the labour supply, etc.50 Public health threats are also
mentioned as a key concern for states at this meeting, and states agree to a standard inoculation document. Despite the lack of a
formal visa (or passport) conference, treaty, or institution, these norms of necessity, reciprocity, and cooperation typify the
modern visa system. Eric Neumayer outlines some of the nascent patterns in the global visa regime in the first empirical analysis of
visa requirements. Travelers from OECD countries possess far fewer restrictions on their travel than non-OECD travelers, though there
is a general trend toward reciprocity in the system: The average OEC citizen faces visa restrictions in travel to approximately 93
foreign countries, the average non-OECD citizen needs a visa to travel to approximately 156 countries.51 As in the interwar period, the
management of international populations is conditioned presently by nationality/statelessness, labor/leisure, health/disease, and
normalcy/risk. The loose structure of the global visa regime represents an important aspect of this international control
of bodies or control of international bodies.

ADI 2010
FellowsShree

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Agamben K

1NC Shell
Visas depict the world in terms of bare life and political life. Their move towards statist
politics tries to heal this originary biopolitical rupture through a eugenic politics that
displaces any value to life. The alternative is to break down the relationship between bios
and zoe, political life and bare lifeonly then can we begin to conceptualize a community
beyond biopolitical violence.
Wall 5 (Thomas Carl, professor of English at national tapai university, Andrew Norris, assistant professor of political science at the university
of Pennsylvania, editor, Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays On Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer, pg. 38-39)

Agambens advance on these analyses is as follows: between unqualified, bare life and its communities,
its ways of life, there exists no fundamental relation and there never has. This missing link is what the
West is running up against again and again in its perpetual crises: the production of the biopolitical
body always also secretes bare life, which remains as a proximity and an exception to any form of life
(or death). Between bare life and the ways in which it is lived, there is an always disappearing distinction, which runs pell mell
throughout life itself, fracturing the organism into a mosaic or melanae . The disappearance of this distinction is
biopolitical inspiration. This is what law and sovereign power have always been about, this has always
been their secret ambition: to make of that inspiration a separation and a relation . Homo Sacer is the history
of that secret. Between bare life and its ways of living, there can only be decision. Every sovereign and every state has always
confronted this. Whether the sovereign takes power, arranges power, or is given power, it always sees before it a magma of anchored
life. Power sees before it life that is already no longer natural but not yet properly the life of a people, a
state. And this is why, in the last analysis, political power must absorb death, for deaththe right to death (and,
for now, this is not about euthanasia, but about the decision as to what counts as death and when and in what way death counts as death
and not simply perishing, which is to say, ~ death, and thus the life it most intimately articulates, count at all)is the ontological
decision whereby the living being can remain possible unto its own-most self Bare life owns only itself, can be only itself,
in owning the estranged intimacy of its to-death. Estranged and intimate because death names only that which it
suspends. But if God can be killed, why not death? Does it not follow with perfect rigor that the death of God should be the death of
death, the disappearance of death as an event? Why should death not simply be a political strategy, a public health issue, a medicotechnical accident, an unceremonious being-killed and, at the same time and by the same logic, an unceremonious being-kept-alive by
any means necessary? (It is known, for example, that a deportee ill with influenza would be allowed to recover before being transported
to a death camp.) Indeed, the uncanny relation of being to death as delineated by Heidegger (where the possibility of not being there
anymore opens decisively the already-being-there that the existent is at its own most) is, at the same time, a primordial nonrelation,
nonconnection of bare life to death. Bare life is thrust, excepted, or even driven, outside the to-death that

defines Dasein and that transforms bare life into being. Falling outside Sein-zum-Tode is bare life au
hasard in the space of the political. In our era in which the furious and totalizing will-to-identity is
driven by the anxiety and shame of nihilism, and in which resistance to totality is driven only by
alternative identities (or lifestyles or communities), the absence of any determinate or destinal relation
to bare life will perpetually, exigently, and internally de-structure every form of relation from
makeshift anarchist collectives to fascist ethnocities. Bare life is the nonrelational and thus invites
decision. It is the very space of decision (political and ontological) and, as such, is perpetually au
hasard. If we are to think the political again, and not vainly try to rid ourselves of the political in favor
of who knows what theofundamentalist human nature or cosmosophical evolution, we must, Agamben
argues, begin to do this by thinking bios without relation to zoe. We must think that it is the essence of
bios to exist in its own zoe, its own simplicity and singularity, and this rethinking begins with analysis
of the ban.

ADI 2010
FellowsShree

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Agamben K

Link: Citizenship Rights

The notion of citizenship requires the exclusion of non-citizens intrinsic to sovereign power
and perpetuates violence
Astor 9 (Avi, phD in Socio at UMich, Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization, and the Making of Operation Wetback, 5/29, Latino
Studies, Palgrave Journals//shree)
Bare life is life that is excluded from the political order. The relation of bare life to the political order, however, is not purely a relation of
exteriority. Rather, bare life is the "zone of indistinction" in which political life and natural life "constitute
each other in including and excluding each other" (p. 90). Citizenship, the lynchpin of the modern political order,
would be meaningless without the presence , whether real or imaginary, of non-citizens. But the role played by noncitizens in constituting the political order is contingent on their exclusion from this order. Agamben sees this exclusive logic as the
fatal flaw of the modern nation-state, and attributes the myriad abuses suffered by refugees and denaturalized
subjects during the last two centuries to its immanent unfolding. The utility of Agamben's insights derive from their
uncanny ability to highlight both the constitutive role that politically marginalized populations play in shaping the modern political order
and the logic of their exclusion from this order. They are not excluded simply by virtue of being non-citizens ,
refugees or stateless persons, but by virtue of being the embodiment of pure life itself , which has no place in the
modern political order when decoupled from political existence . Scholars must be cautious, however, not to lose sight of the
fact that Agamben's analysis of bare life emerged from his analysis of specific European events, most notably the Holocaust, and
therefore may miss unique aspects of the experiences of racism and exclusion in non-European contexts. Hesse (2004), for instance,
argues that Agamben's conception of racism is "Eurocentric," as it defines racism as a "relation of exception" and consequently
overlooks the ways in which racism is built into social institutions. Taking the Holocaust as the ideal-typical case of biopolitical
exclusion, Hesse writes, obscures other experiences of racist exclusion that cannot be assimilated into this paradigm.

ADI 2010
FellowsShree

9
Agamben K

Link/Impact: Citizenship Rights

The existence of homo sacer is fundamental to citizenship rights and makes concentration
camps possible
Ellerman 9 (Antje, Dept of Politics @ U of British Columbia, Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State of Exception, p 2-4,
http://www.unc.edu/euce/eusa2009/papers/ellermann_02G.pdf//shree)
Giorgio Agambens seminal work on the relationship between the individual and the sovereign state is anchored in the concepts of
homo sacer and state of exception. Homo sacer, a figure of Roman law, embodies what Agamben terms bare or
depoliticized life (1998). Under Roman law, a man convicted of certain crimes was banished from society and stripped of his
rights as a citizen. Drawing on Hannah Arendts description of the naked life of the refugee (Arendt 1973), Agamben juxtaposes the
bare life of homo sacer who subsists in zones of exclusion and rightlessness with the citizens politicized and rights-based life. The
existence of homo sacer is central to Agambens understanding of sovereign power because the possibility of
rights-stripping reveals a schism between the individuals biological existence , on the one hand, and her
political life, on the other. Reduced to bare, or biological, life, the refugee is rendered politically insignificant.
Agamben elaborates on this relationship between sovereign power and bare life in his historical treatise State of Exception (2005). The
notion of state of exception reflects the augmentation of government powers during times of emergency when state sovereignty is
perceived to be under threat. In states of emergency, governments suspend elements of the normal legal order and strip individuals of the
rights that mark politicized life. The state of exception is thus the ultimate expression of state sovereignty as the
power to proclaim the emergency and suspend the operation of law. Agambens understanding of life in the
state of exception reflects a conception of rights as fundamentally grounded in the institution of national
citizenship. Following Arendt, Agamben rejects the notion that human rights are viable outside the confines of membership in the
nation-state. Instead, the so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no
longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state (1998, 126). Accordingly, it is those excluded from
citizenshipthe refugee, the stateless person, the illegal migrantwho most fundamentally represent bare life
in the exception. In Agambens work, the zone of exception is most clearly embodied in the detention center and
(concentration) camp. In State of Exception, Agamben treats the detention center at Guantanamo Bay not only as the exceptions
incarnation, but also as a case whose exceptionalism surpasses that of comparable zones of exclusion: What is new about President
Bushs order [of November 13, 2001] is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable an
unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva
Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American law. Neither prisoners nor persons
accused, but simply detainees, they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense
but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed form the law and from judicial oversight. (2005, 4-5) Agambens description
of bare life in Guantanamo thus suggests that the denial of citizenship rights not only deprives individuals of the prospect of ever leaving
behind bare life, but the related denial of a legal identity completely strips homo sacer of any state protection whatsoever.

ADI 2010
FellowsShree

10
Agamben K

Link: Counter-Struggle
Counter-struggles against the state dont change the fundamental nature of sovereignty
theyre working for the right to speak in its name.
Neal 4 (Andrew W, school of politics @ keele u, Cutting Off The Kings Head: Foucaults Society Must Be Defended and the Problem of
Sovereignty, Alternatives, 29, pg. 394)

Following the innovations of Society Must Be Defended, today we should consider that we are faced
with a politics not simply of rational-actor-led sovereign-state war and oppression, but with a politics
of collective subjective enmity wedded to a terrifying state machine . The question is not simply one of who is or is
being constructed either as "the enemy of the state" or "the enemy of the nation/society/people," but a frightening union of the two . The
challenge we face is that the potentially bellicose and oppressive state seeks to claim legitimacy not
simply by acting according to security imperatives or on behalf of a people, but in the name of a
national ideal. As Foucault makes clear, the nation becomes the aspiring bearer of the universal. Thus President Bush and Prime
Minister Blair seek to draw upon, promote, and propagate (perhaps differing) national images of universal
"freedom," "democracy," and "civilization." Neoconservatism in particular expresses this nationaluniversal ideology.^^ This also means that political counterstrugglesantiwar and civil-liberties
campaigns, for exampleare merely struggles over the meaning of, and right to speak for, the national
ideal, or at least a part of it. These struggles may be struggles against a particular form of the nation-state,
but they are not struggles against the state form. This opening leads into a more establisbed area of Foucault's work
that of the power, resistance, governmentality, and even freedom that permeates the coproduction of subjects by
society and of society by subjects . We could anticipate that a typical critical response to the argument that Foucault does not
"cut off the King's bead" is that his theory of governmentality is in fact his alternative to sovereignty. However, I would, in agreement
with Hardt and Negri, interpret governmentality not as an alternative to the concept of sovereignty, but rather
as a more sophisticated development of sovereignty. 24 As my analysis of Society Must Be Defended shows,

sovereignty should not simply be understood as an outmoded, centered institution of power but as a
political concept that holds a rich history of contestation, colonization, innovation, and radical
transformation. Once sovereignty has been transformed from modern state sovereignty to modern
nation-state sovereignty, many contemporary political and theoretical lines of flight have already been
recaptured.

ADI 2010
FellowsShree

11
Agamben K

Link: Democracy Citizenship

Democracy doesnt prevent totalitarianismcitizenship is founded on the primacy of bare
life which collapses into a zone of indistinction
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, prof of philosophy at university of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 121-123)
The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states , nevertheless, does not have the form of a
sudden transformation (as Lewith, here following in Schmitts footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light
in our century the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It is almost as
if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and
the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a
tacit but increasing inscription of individuals lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more
dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves . The
right to life, writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, to ones body, to health, to
happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or alienation, the right to rediscover what one is and all that
one can be, this rightwhich the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending was the political
response to all these new procedures of power (La volontt, p. 191). The fact is that one and the same
affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of
individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive
political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions. And only because biological life and its needs
had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentiethcentury parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this centurys

totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary
democracies. In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time
politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be decided was which
form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once
their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and
Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter
into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling classes unexpected fall into the most extreme
racism (as in the Serbian program of ethnic cleansing) and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also
have their roots here. Along with the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a displacement and gradual
expansion beyond the limits of the decision on bare life, in the state of exception, in which sovereignty consisted. If
there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision
on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable
border dividing two clearly distinct zones. This line is now in motion and gradually moving into areas other than
that of political life, areas in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with
the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest. In the pages that follow, we shall try to show that certain events that are fundamental
for the political history of modernity (such as the declaration of rights), as well as others that seem instead to represent an
incomprehensible intrusion of biologico-scientific principles into the political order (such as National Socialist eugenics
and its elimination of life that is unworthy of being lived, or the contemporary debate on the normative
determination of death criteria), acquire their true sense only if they are brought back to the common
biopolitical (or thanatopolitical) context to which they belong. From this perspective, the campas the pure,
absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception) will appear as the hidden

paradigm of the political space of modernity whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn
to recognize.

ADI 2010
FellowsShree

12
Agamben K

Link: Disease
Disease securitization turns subjects into apocalyptic bodies whose lives have meaning only
if they achieve health, justifying extermination
Gomel 2K (Elana, Head of Eng Dept @ Tel Aviv, 20

th

Cent. Lit V 46//shree)

In the secular apocalyptic visions that have proliferated wildly in the last 200 years, the world has been destroyed by nuclear wars, alien
invasions, climactic changes, social upheavals, meteor strikes, and technological shutdowns. These baroque scenarios are shaped by the
eroticism of disaster. The apocalyptic desire that finds satisfaction in elaboration fictions of the End is double-edged. On the one hand,
its ultimate object is some version of the crystalline New Jerusalem, an image of purity so absolute that it denies the organic messiness
of life. On the other hand, apocalyptic fictions typically linger on pain and suffering. The end result of apocalyptic purification often
seems of less importance than the narrative pleasure derived from the bizarre and opulent tribulations of the bodies being burnt by fire
and brimstone, tormented by scorpion stings, trodden like grapes in the winepress. In this interplay between the incorporeal purity of the
ends and the violent corporeality of the means the apocalyptic body is born. It is a body whose mortal sickness is a precondition of
ultimate health, whose grotesque and excessive sexuality issues in angelic sexlessness, and whose torture underpins a painlessand
lifelessmillennium. The apocalyptic body is perverse, points out Tina Pippin, unstable and mutating from maleness to femaleness and
back again, purified by the sadomasochistic bloodletting on the cross, trembling in abject terror while awaiting an unearthly
consummation (122). But most of all it is a suffering body, a text written in the script of stigma, scars, wounds, and sores. Any
apocalypse strikes the body politic like a disease, progressing from the first symptoms of a large-scale disaster through the crisis of the
tribulation to the recovery of the millennium. But of all the Four Horsemen, the one whose ride begins most intimately, in the private
travail of individual flesh, and ends in the devastation of the entire community, is the last one, Pestilence. The contagious body is
the most characteristic modality of apocalyptic corporeality . At the same time, I will argue, it contains a
counterapocalyptic potential, resisting the dangerous lure of Endism, the ideologically potent combination of apocalyptic terror, and
millennial perfection (Quinby 2). This essay, a brief sketch of the poetics and politics of the contagious body, does not attempt a
comprehensive overview of the historical development of the trope of pestilence. Nor does it limit itself to a particular disease, along the
lines of Susan Sontags classic delineation of the poetics of TB and many subsequent attempts to develop a poetics of AIDS. Rather, my
focus is on the general narrativity of contagion and on the way the plague-stricken body is manipulated within the overall
plot of apocalyptic millennialism, which is a powerful ideological current in twentieth-century political history, embracing
such diverse manifestations as religious fundamentalism, Nazism, and other forms of radical desperation (Quinby 4-5). Thus, I
consider both real and imaginary disease, focusing on the narrative construction of the contagious body rather than a precise
epidemiology of the contagion. All apocalyptic and millenarian ideologies ultimately converge on the utopian transformation of the
body (and the body politic) through suffering. But pestilence offers a uniquely ambivalent modality of corporeal apocalypse. On the
one hand, it may be approrpriated to the standard plot of apocalyptic purification as a singularly

atrocious technique of separating the damned from the saved. Thus, the plague becomes a metaphor
for genocide, functioning as such both in Mein Kampf and in Camuss The Plage. [2] On the other hand, the experience of a
pandemic undermines the giddy hopefulness of Endism. Since everybody is a potential victim, the line between the pure and the impure
can never be drawn with any precision. Instead of delivering the climactic moment of the Last Judgment, pestilence lingers on,
generating a limbo of common suffering in which a tenuous and moribund but all-embracing body politic springs into being. The end is
indefinitely postponed and the disease becomes a metaphor for the process of living. The finality of mortality clashes with the duration
of morbidity. Pestilence is poised on the cusp between divine punishment and manmade disaster. On the one hand, unlike nuclear war
or ecological catastrophe, pandemic has a venerable historical pedigree that leads back from current bestsellers such as Pierre Quellettes
The Third Pandemic (1996) to the medieval horrors of the Black Death and indeed to the Book of Revelation itself. On the other hand,
disease is one of the central tropes of biopolitics, shaping much of the twentieth-century discourse of power, domination, and the body.
Contemporary plague narratives, including the buregeoning discourse of AIDS, are caught between two contrary textual impulses:
acquiescence in a (super) natural judgment and political activism. Their impossible combination produces a clash of two distinct plot
modalities. In his contemporary incarnations the Fourth Horseman vacillates between the voluptuous
entropy of indiscriminate killing and the genocidal energy directed at specific categories of victims . As
Richard Dellamora points out in his gloss on Derrida, apocalypse in general may be used in order to validate violence done to others
while it may also function as a modality of total resistance to the existing order (3). But my concern here is not so much with the
difference between good and bad apocalypses (is total extinction better than selective genocide?) as with the interplay of
eschatology and politics in the construction of the apocalyptic body.

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Link: Economy
The invocation of the economy participates is supremely biopolitical
Agamben 4 (Giorgio, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, The Open: Man and Animal, p 76)
It is likely that the times in which we live have not emerged from this aporia. Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who
no longer have any essence or identitywho are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity {inoperosit~4}
and who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task? Even the

pure and simple relinquishment of all historical tasks (reduced to simple functions of internal or
international policing) in the name of the triumph of the economy, often today takes on an emphasis in
which natural life itself and its well-being seem to appear as humanitys last historical taskif indeed
it makes sense here to speak of a task.

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Agamben K

Link: Political Process

Every action that participates in the political process is one that creates an exception and
results in biopolitical control
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 8-9)
The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose
essential function in modern politics we intend to assert. An obscure figure of archaic Roman law, in which human life is included in the
juridical order II ordinamento Il solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed), has thus offered

the key by which not only the sacred texts of sovereignty but also the very codes of political power will
unveil their mysteries. At the same time, however, this ancient meaning of the term sacer presents us
with the enigma of a figure of the sacred that, before or beyond the religious, constitutes the first
paradigm of the political realm of the West. The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed,
in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zo~in rhepo/iswhich is, in itself, absolutely ancient
nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power. Instead the

decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the
realm of bare lifewhich is originally situated at the margins of the political order gradually begins
to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe right
and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once exclud ing bare life from and capturing
it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the
hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested . When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life
that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both
the organization of State power and emancipation from it. Everything happens as if, along with the disciplinary

process by which State power makes man as a living being into its own specific object, another process
is set in motion that in large measure corresponds to the birth of modern democracy, in which man as a
living being presents himself no longer as an object but as the subject of political power. These processeswhich in many
ways oppose and (at least apparently) bitterly conflict with each othernevertheless converge insofar as
both concern the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical body of humanity.

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Agamben K

Link: Transnational Refugee Protection

Refugees cannot appeal to their own state for protection because they exist in transnational
spacethe 1AC participates in a politics of inclusion/exclusion that results in violence
Caldwell 4 (Anne, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville, Theory & Event, 7.2)
This transformation suggests the

real novelty of the French Declaration is not its definition of citizenship.

What is novel is the new category of a "man" at once citizen and member of universal humanity -without fully being either. Life in and of itself, is for the first time offered up as a political category. That recognition
is not without precedent. Some sense of world citizenship, rather than local belonging, was evoked by the Stoics. The middle ages
recognized a "jus gentium" or law of nations. Those laws offered guidance for the treatment of one nation by another, without focusing
on either the rights of individuals as members of humanity, or on the rights of humanity as a universal group exceeding different
classifications of peoples. The French Declaration, despite its flaws, is among the first official formulations granting the natural life
scorned by the ancients a value purely for its own sake.
As Agamben teaches us, wherever natural life and political
appear, so too will appear the figure linking them: homo sacer. The complex mixture of these categories
were not particularly visible so long as life was wholly defined by nation-state belonging. The refugee ,
however, indicates contemporary political belonging, and the power regulating it, can no longer be coded

by domestic categories alone. Nor can the distinctions between natural and political life be limited to
the field of the nation-state. The refugee is the most explicit indication of this impossibility. The refugee exists in a
transnational space made of an awkward separation and mixture of domestic life and international life. By
definition, the refugee cannot appeal to its own state, or to national citizenship, for protection. The refugee must
therefore appeal to some other power to recognize it not as a national citizen, but as a figure of an international life or human belonging
meriting protection solely on that basis. A power that offers such protection can no longer be adequately classified under the heading of
nation-state sovereignty.

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Agamben K

Link: Rights Talk

Rights Talk and ethical principles are the founding feature of biopoliticsnotions of
citizenship create a community of violence. Gendered language under erasure.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at university of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 126-128)
Hannah Arendt entitled the fifth chapter of her book on imperialism, which is dedicated to the problem of refugees, The Decline of the
Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man. Linking together the fates of the rights of man and of the nation-state, her striking
formulation seems to imply the idea of an intimate and necessary connection between the two, though the author herself leaves the
question open. The paradox from which Arendt departs is that the very figure who should have embodied
the rights of man par excellencethe refugeesignals instead the concepts radical crisis. The
conception of human rights, she states, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such,

broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time
confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationshipsexcept that
they were still human (Orz~ins, p. 299). In the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable
rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no
longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state. If one considers the matter, this is in fact implicit in the
ambiguity of the very title of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, of 1789. In the phrase La dicia ration des dro its
tie Ihomme et du citoyen, it is not clear whether the two terms homme and citoyen name two autonomous beings or instead form a
unitary system in which the first is always already included in the second. And if the latter is the case, the kind of relation that exists
between homme and citoyen still remains unclear. From this perspective, Burkes boutade according to which he preferred his Rights of
an Englishman to the inalienable rights of man acquires an unsuspected profundity. Arendt does no more than offer a few, essential
hints concerning the link between the rights of man and the nation-state, and her suggestion has therefore not been followed up. In the

period after the Second World War, both the instrumental emphasis on the rights of man and the rapid
growth of declarations and agreements on the part of international organizations have ultimately made
any authentic understanding of the historical significance of the phenomenon almost impossible. Yet it is
time to stop regarding declarations of rights as proclamations of eternal, metajuridical values binding the legislator (in fact, without
much success) to respect eternal ethical principles, and to begin to consider them according to their real historical function in the modern
nation-state. Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the
juridico-political order of the nation-state. The same bare life that in the ancien regime was politically
neutral and belonged to God as creaturely life and in the classical world was (at least apparently) clearly
distinguished as zoe from political life (bios) now fully enters into the structure of the state and even
becomes the earthly foundation of the states legitimacy and sovereignty. A simple examination of the text of the
Declaration of 1789 shows that it is precisely bare natural lifewhich is to say, the pure fact of birththat appears here as the
source and bearer of rights. Men, the first article declares, are born and remain free and equal in
rights (from this perspective, the strictest formulation of all is to be found in La Fayettes project elaborated in July 1789: Every man
is born with inalienable and indefeasible rights). At the same time, however, the very natural life that, inaugurating the

biopolitics of modernity, is placed at the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of the citizen,
in whom rights are preserved (according to the second article: The goal of every political association is the
preservation of the natural and indefeasible rights of man). And the Declaration can attribute sovereignty to the
nation (according to the third article: The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation)
precisely because it has already inscribed this element of birth in the very heart of the political
community. The nationthe term derives etymologically from nascere (to be born)thus closes the
open circle of mans birth.

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Link: Rights Talk

Rights talk ties the population to the sovereign by defining life only in terms of what can be
defended by the statethis turns the citizen-subject into bare life.
Heins 5 (Volker, Visiting Professor of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Social
Research, Frankfurt, Germany, German Law Journal, Vol. 6, No. 5, p. 845-8)
A more forceful and radical critique has been put forth by the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben.2 In noticable

contrast
to the sociology of globalization, which has assured us for years that state sovereignty is gradually
disappearing to the benefit of a "world of flows" comprising goods, individuals, capital and
information, Agamben argues in his book Homo sacer that we continue to live under the auspices of a classical state as it was
conceived in early modern Europe. Accordingly, the primary charasteristic of the state is its capacity to define and
occasionally erase the boundary between "normality" and "emergency" and thus the capacity to
transform society into a "camp" or Lager populated by citizens reduced to "bare life." Moreover, the
current western state is said to blur the line between the normal and the exceptional, between peace
and war, by increasingly taking an interest in us not only as citizens, but also as embodied beingsan
interest illustrated, for example, by the growing tendency towards biometric registration of travelers at border crossings.
Agamben, in all seriousness, has placed this trend in an epochal relationship with the tatooing of concentration camp inmates.3 His
essay's far-reaching appeal rests on the fact that it combines in a single formula the moral and legal achievements of western societies
in particular the ethos of human rightswith their slides into totalitarianism. By suggesting that human rights are deeply
intertwined with the forces of inhumanity against which they are being invoked , Agamben plays to a primarily
Continental European public once again afflicted by self-doubts about the moral standing of liberal societies and their legal systems.

The vaguely dystopian perspective of his legal theory explains why Agamben is considered
"interesting" by many.4 Since Agamben's theses are already well-known and much-discussed, I will confine myself to a nutshell
summary of his main argument before I offer a concise critique of his ideas on the place of humanitarian law and humanitarian action in
today's legal and political world. Agamben maintains that since the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 the "bare life" of the

individual has been subjected to a twofold move: it was given a protected, even "sacred" status beyond
the immediate grasp of political power, but it was also isolated and separated from the wider range of human forms of
expression. The bare life of physical individuals, stripped of moral agency and social intercourse, became
the object of a particular juridical mode of attention. Agamben mistrusts the human right to physical
integrity in a way that is reminiscent of Michel Foucault, who felt that the discursive isolation of
"sexuality" along with its construction as a singular object of attention was far more significant than
the fluctuating history of its "liberation" or "repression."5 There is, of course, some prima facie plausibility that the
trafficking of human beings, medical end-of-life issues or the detention of "illegal combatants" have indeed turned the bare life of
individuals into an object of widespread concern and debate.6 The concern for the life of others is also nurtured by the reporting
mechanisms of U.N. human rights bodies as well as the continuous attention of specialized NGOs and the media. In all these cases,
Agambens principal cause for vexation lies in the persistent separation of this core aspect of the human from wider political and
communitarian questions. Drawing on the distinction between human rights and civil rights made by Hannah Arendt, he writes: The

separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase
of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen . In the final analysis, however,
humanitarian organizationswhich to-day are more and more supported by international commissions can only grasp
human life in the figure of bare and sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret
solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight [...]. A humanitarianism separated from politics
cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life at the basis of sovereignty, and the campwhich is
to say, the pure space of exceptionis the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot master .7 This paragraph
contains four propositions that are questionable on both empirical and normative grounds. In what follows, I will either reject these
propositions outright or extract the kernel of truth contained within them before making a suggestion about how we might theoretically
classify Agambens position. The four propositions are: 1) The distinction between the humanitarian and the

political is an expression of the opposition between human rights and civil rights. 2) The goal of
humanitarian organizations is the identification and preservation of "bare life." 3) Because of their
reliance on the political/humanitarian divide, such organizations become unwitting accomplices of
those who are responsible for the very social suffering that they aim to minimize. 4) The separation
between humanitarianism and politics can and should be overcome in favor of something completely
new.

Link: State Implementation

State action devalues life through ceaseless death threats

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Agamben 2K (Giorgio, prof of phil @ the College International de Philosophie in Paris, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, p 56)
Thus, life originally appears in law only as the counterpart of a power that threatens death . But what is valid
for the paters right of life and death is even more valid for sovereign power (imperium), of which the former constitutes the originary
cell. Thus, in the Hobbesian foundation of sovereignty, life in the state of nature is defined only by its being
unconditionally exposed to a death threat (the limitless right of everybody over everything) and political lifethat is,
the life that unfolds under the protection of the Leviathan is nothing but this very same life always exposed to a
threat that now rests exclusively in the hands of the sovereign. The puissance absolue et perpetuelle, which
defines state power, is not foundedin the last instanceon a political will but rather on naked life, which is
kept safe and protected only to the degree to which it submits itself to the sovereigns (or the laws) right of
life and death. (This is precisely the originary meaning of the adjective sacer (sacred] when used to refer to human life.) The

state of exception, which is what the sovereign each and every time decides, takes place precisely when
naked life which normally appears rejoined to the multifarious forms of social life is explicitly put into question and
revoked as the ultimate foundation of political power. The ultimate subject that needs to be at once
turned into the exception and included in the city is always naked life.

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Agamben K

Link: Immigration Reform Reinscribes the Exceptional State

The state of exception results in a catastrophe that encompasses the entire eartheven
when immigration reform encourages more emigration, it focuses state action on the
exception.
Agamben 5 (Giorgio, professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona, State of Exception, p. 56-57)
The division between sovereign power and the exercise of that power corresponds exactly to that between norms of law and norms of the
realization of law, which in Dictatorship was the foundation of commissarial dictatorship. In Political Theology Schmitt responded to
Benjamins critique of the dialectic between constituent power and constituted power by introducing the concept of decision, and to this
countermove Benjamin replies by bringing in Schmitts distinction between the norm and its realization. The sovereign, who
should decide every time on the exception, is precisely the place where the fracture that divides the body of
the law becomes impossible to mend: between Macht and Vermogen, between power and its exercise, a gap
opens which no decision is capable of filling. This is why, with a further shift, the paradigm of the state of
exception is no longer the miracle, as in Political Theology, but the catastrophe. In antithesis to the
historical idea of restoration, [the baroque] is faced with the idea of catastrophe . And it is in response to
this antithesis that the theory of the state of exception is devised (Benjamin 1928, 246/66) An unfortunate emendation in
the text of the Gesammelte Schriften has prevented all the implications of this shift from being assessed. Where Benjamins text read, Es
gibt eine barocke Eschatologie, there is a baroque eschatology the editors, with a singular disregard for all philological care, have
corrected it to read: Es gibt keine ...,there is no baroque eschatology (Benjamin 1928, 246/66). And yet the passage that follows is
logically and syntactically consistent with the original reading: and for that very reason [there is] a mechanism that gathers and exalts
all earthly creatures before consigning them to the end [dem Ende]. The baroque knows an eskhaton, an end of time; but, as Benjamin
immediately makes clear, this eskhaton is empty. It knows neither redemption nor a hereafter and remains immanent to this world:
The hereafter is emptied of everything that contains the slightest breath of this world , and from it the
baroque extracts a profusion of things that until then eluded all artistic formulation . . . in order to clear an ultimate heaven
and enable it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the earth with catastrophic violence (246/66). It is this white
eschatologywhich does not lead the earth to a redeemed hereafter, but consigns it to an absolutely
empty skythat configures the baroque state of exception as catastrophe. And it is again this white eschatology
that shatters the correspondence between sovereignty and transcendence , between the monarch and God, that
defined the Schmittian theologico-political. While in Schmitt the sovereign is identified with God and occupies a position in the state
exactly analogous to that attributed in the world to the God of the Cartesian system (Schmitt 1922, 43/46), in Benjamin the
sovereign is confined to the world of creation; he is the lord of creatures, but he remains a creature
(Benjamin 1928, 246/66). This drastic redefinition of the sovereign function implies a different situation of the

state of exception. It no longer appears as the threshold that guarantees the articulation between an
inside and an outside, or between anomie and the juridical context, by virtue of a law that is in force in its suspension: it is,
rather, a zone of absolute indeterminacy between anomie and law, in which the sphere of creatures and
the juridical order are caught up in a single catastrophe.

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Agamben K

Link: Terrorist Exclusion Reform

The 1AC reproduces terror discursively, which justifies securitizing the state of exception.
Agamben 1 (Giorgio, professor at the University of Verona, On Security and Terror, 9/20 //shree)
Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a
gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state,
security becomes the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several definitive
measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole
criterium of political legitimation. The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state
which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be
provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic. We should not forget that the first major organization of terror after
the war, the Organisation de lArme Secrte (OAS), was established by a French general, who thought of himself as a patriot,
convinced that terrorism was the only answer to the guerrilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When politics, the way it was
understood by theorists of the "science of police" in the eighteenth century, reduces itself to police, the difference between

state and terrorism threatens to disappears. In the end security and terrorism may form a single
deadly system, in which they justify and legitimate each others actions.

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Agamben K

Link: Visa Eligibility Expansion Makes People Self-Police (1/2)

Visa eligibility necessitates biopoliticsthey force subjects to participate in self-policing
Slater 6 (Mark B, School of Poli Sci @ U of Ottawa, The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self:
Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics; Alternatives 31 P 180-3//shree, gendered language under erasure)
This part of the mechanism for the creation of the modern subject who knows himself in relation to the confessionary state is a
function of unconditional obedience, uninterrupted examination, and exhaustive confession and appears as an
indispensable component of the government of men by each other.61 Though not traced by Foucault himself, the confessionary
complex (obedience, examination, confession) provides a crucial link between the political economy of the body62
and the biopolitical governmentality of international management of populations. It is not simply that the international
population is managed, but that we come to manage ourselves through the confessionary complex. Foucault describes the importance of
the way by which, through some political technology of individuals, we have been led to recognize ourselves as a society, as a part of a
social entity, as a part of nation or of a state.63 Balibar relates the governmental function of the border as the limit of community to the
process of identity-formation: The normality of the national citizen-subject . . . is also internalized by individuals, as it
becomes a condition, an essential reference of their collective, communal sense, and hence of their identity. . . . As a
consequence, borders cease to be purely external realities.64 The confessionary complex is a structure framed by
law and instantiated in various practices at the border (and in the faces of agents of the state). This is doubly true in the case of terrorism,
which is not viscerally visible. The exceptional application of law in this instance is also revealing of the weakness of Agamben in explaining the moment of
decision. In US vs. Montoya de Hernandez, the Supreme Court held that for offense for which there will be no external signsinspectors will
rarely possess probably cause to arrest or search, yet governmental interests in stopping smuggling at the border are high indeed.65 As with general
searches at the border, the standard of probable cause is held in abeyance at the body/border. Terror is similar to alimentary canal smuggling (swallowing
balloons of cocaine in this instance), in that the signs of the bad intent are secondary: nervousness, discomfort, anxiety. This confessionary complex is also
written on the body in terms of embodied anxiety and the signs of untruth: a . . . mechanism of shame that makes one blush at expressing any bad
thought.66 Thus, reasonable suspicion must be visible not only in the body but in the mind of a border guard. The examination at the border is a corporeal
documentary affair. As Gillian Fuller suggests, States dont deal with strange peculiarities of networked and virtualised individuals, they prefer to keep the
subject within the more knowable constraints of identity.67 Thus, at the border the

document is compared to the body which is

compared to the story. If the isomorphism between this body-dossier-narrative tests the guards credibility,
exclusion looms. This lighter reasonable suspicion standard is applied to other travelers at the airport. In US v. Sokolaw, the
court argued that adherence to a law enforcement profile, which does not meet the standard of probable cause, may meet the standard of
reasonable suspicion. The case revolved around a drug smuggler detained due to a number of suspicious activities that met a particular
profile. The court upheld that meeting an established profile would lead to reasonable suspicion and thus grant law enforcement the
authority to stop the traveler.68 Consequently the test of reasonable suspicion, tied with the exceptional state of the border, leads to the
rule by decision. However the moment of decision must be disaggregated. What are these profiles? How are they managed? How are
decisions made? Since Agamben neglects this moment of decision, focusing as he does on the capacity for decision, we must turn to
anthropologists or sociologists of the border. This leads to consideration of the agents of discretion. Timothy Mitchell, Heyman, and
Mountz have discussed the ways that governmental bureaucracies enact specific roles within an administrative structure, so that we may
not infer practice from policy documents alone.69 Gilboy charts how immigration inspectors informally share experiences that lead to
the supplementing of official risk profiles with national stereotypes.70 Heyman describes the thought-work of immigration officers,
consisting of developing conceptual schema through which to apply abstract rules to specific cases.71 In his evaluation of the thoughtwork of officers on the US/Mexico border, Heyman develops a broad model, with some specific implications for the policing of
populations. In addition to a legal superstructure, he points to covert classifications used by officers to structure their
discretionary decisions.72 The covert classification is made according to perceived moral worth, national origins
stereotypes similar to those elaborated by Gilboy, and apparent social class.73 These ethnographies of the bureaucracy
suggest there is a slippage between risk profiles and stereotypes. Didier Bigo suggests that within the European context the emergence of
a cohort of migration managers has shifted policing from the control of and hunt for individual criminals . . . to the surveillance of socalled risk groups, defined by using criminology and statistics.74 The reliance on technology to cope with the rapidly increasing
number and variety of risk profiles should be viewed with skepticism: Notwithstanding the increasing appeal to sophisticated computerbased models within geodemographics, the systems persist in relying on stereotypical images, and on small-scale narratives of
dispositions and their intended consequences.75 The credibility of the entrants story becomes crucial to the decision to admit or reject,
a decision that is always made on the basis of insufficient evidence and mistrust of the speaker, and complicated by an incomplete
documentary trail. It is clear that the right to be presumed innocent or to have a fair trial must be held in abeyance at the border under the
twin rubrics of efficiency and security. These social scripts are reached through the auto-confession of the body ,
through the presumption in training that the examined body will confess even if the soul is reluctant. This auto-confession
happens through the interpretation of body, face, teeth, clothes, posture, and language skills as evidence of
class, social group, ethnicity, gender, sexuality. It also is assumed to happen through the examination process. Psychologist Paul
Ekman trains law enforcement officials and others in his theory of micro-expressions, by which interrogators can learn the self-

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Link: Visa Eligibility Expansion Makes People Self-Police (2/2)

confessing secrets of facial expressions that last one twenty-fifth of a second.76 Training for Canada Customs agents in the
past has focused on this kind of visual acuity, described by one agent as training in one of these things is not
like the other. Other technologies on offer to the security apparatus of the state include heat cameras that detect blush
responses around the eyes during deception and motion sensors that detect awkward or abnormal movement. Thus,
a corporeal lens makes visible to us the ways in which the body comes to testify, along with our documents, about our
intentions, character, utility, moral quality, and social and economic origins. If we do not confess in a way that echoes with
the story that the examiner has told him/herself about us, then we are suspect. The confessionary dynamic is
illustrated by the ubiquitous no joking rule now posted at most airports. In the words of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority,
you should never joke or make small talk about bombs, firearms or other weapons while going through pre-board screening.77 Small
talk and jokes are dangerous because they express untruths. But border examiners rely on the anxiety of the passenger and themselves to
affect obedience, examination, and confession. Like doctors, judges, and teachers, we must all tell the truth to agents of the state:
not just the truth from a certain point of view, but the whole, entire, self-policing truth. These regulations against joking and
small talk train travelers to self-police their speech and behavior to present a low-risk profile toward the authority
figure. The ritual of obedience, confession, and examination thus binds the mobile subject to the sovereign, but does not accord
him/her rights.

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Link: AT Rights Turn

New linkthe affs claim that theyre good enough masks liberalisms exclusionary
impulses
Brown 4 (Wendy, Professor of Political Theory @ UC Berkeley, The Most We Can Hope ForHuman Rights and the Politics of Fatalism.
The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer p 461-2)

It is an old ruse of liberal reformers, in pursuing agendas that have significant effects in excess of the
explicit reform, to insist that all they are doing is a bit of good or holding back the dark. On this view,
rights simply set people free to make the world as they see fitthey do not have normative-or subject-producing
dimensions; they do not carry cultural assumptions or aims; they do not prescribe or proscribe anything; they do not configure the
political in a particular way or compete with other political possibilities or discourses. They simply expand autonomy and choice. I
have suggested otherwise and in deciding whether the reduction of suffering promised by human rights is the most we can hope
for, I have argued that we must take account of that which rights discourse does not avow about itself. It is a
politics and it organizes political space, often with the aim of monopolizing it. It also stands as a
critique of dissonant political projects, converges neatly with the requisites of liberal imperialism and
global free trade, and legitimates both as well. If the global problem today is defined as terrible human
suffering consequent to limited individual rights against abusive state powers, then human rights may
be the best tactic against this problem. But if it is diagnosed as the relatively unchecked globalization of capital,
postcolonial political deformations, and superpower imperialism combining to disenfranchise peoples in many parts of
the first, second, and third worlds from the prospects of self-governance to a degree historically unparalleled in
modernity, other kinds of political projects, including other international justice projects, may offer a
more appropriate and far-reaching remedy for injustice defined as suffering and as systematic
disenfranchisement from collaborative self-governance. In addition to the question of how one diagnoses the present
ills of the world, there is another question here, a genuine question, about the nature of our times. Is the prevention or
mitigation of suffering promised by human rights the most that can be hoped for at this point in history? Is
this where we are, namely, at a historical juncture in which all more ambitious justice projects seem remote if not utopian by comparison
with the task of limiting abuses of individuals? Is the prospect of a more substantive democratization of power so dim that the relief and
reduction of human suffering is really all that progressives can hope for? If so, then human rights politics probably deserves the support
of everyone who cares about such suffering. But if there are still other historical possibilities, if progressives have not yet

arrived at this degree of fatalism, then we would do well to take the measure of whether and how the
centrality of human rights discourse might render those other political possibilities more faint.

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Internal Link: Securitization Leads to War

Securitization breeds war as a permanent condition and banishes us to bare life
Moretti 3 (Ben, Der Standard, 2/3, http://www.mail-archive.com/nettime@bbs.thing.net/msg00101.html)
It is the suspension of such procedures that, according to Giorgio Agamben, characterizes the state of
emergency, in which all sovereign power is assumed by the police. It surely is no coincidence that the
new interventions are often likened to police operations, quite as if they were a matter of the
superpower's official duties. In a paradoxical way, this state of emergency seems to establish itself as a
permanent condition in which the difference between "war" and "peace" becomes obsolete because
both terms are dissolved in the technological spectacle of "security" - a kind of cold peace that rests on
the permanent possibility of war. Consequently, the appeal speaks of "peace" only in conjunction with
"security", while arguing in favour of war. Already now many speak of "the war" against Iraq, not of
"a possible" war. But "the war" has always already begun, it has its place in peace . As Brecht writes, "Their
war kills what their peace has left". The appeal of the "new Europe" shows that the argument for peace as security is an implicit
argument for war, and postulates war as an instrument of peace. This becomes possible when in the state of emergency
the moral criterion of justice is dissolved in the technological criterion of "precision" (strategists have
already pointed at the increased precision of the weapons systems to be used against Iraq ), and the democratic criterion of an

open debate is substituted by the tactical criterion of speed and trick. In this way, the justification of
war is annulled by being placed within the police / military logic of the state of emergency, where and
can be deployed smoothly and efficiently, much like an artillery gun or a aircraft carrier . The military
notion of unity is placed above the democratic notion of difference. In all this, the present can only be understood as a result of past
wars (more precisely: victories), and violence becomes more natural with each further war: more difficult to identify and name, more
difficult to distinguish from what happens anyway, more problematic to ward off. With every new war, it becomes more

difficult to argue in favour of peace without being viewed as insane or irresponsible. As a result, aside
from killing of people and destroying resources, aside from the suffering generated, wars such as the
one which is now being prepared turn the intellectual landscape into a desert. Their unnamed
casualties include the intellectual foundations which would make it possible to think of politics as
something different from security. Perhaps, after "Desert Shield" and "Desert Storm", it would be appropriate to name the
coming invasion "Desert Peace". (How could we not think that a system that can no longer function at all except on the basis of
emergency would not also be interested in preserving such an emergency at any price?) This is that case also and above

all
because naked life, which was the hidden foundation of sovereignty, has meanwhile become the
dominant form of life everywhere. Life in its state of exception that has now become the norm is
the naked life that in every context separates the forms of life from their cohering into a form-of-life .
The Marxian scission between man and citizen is thus superceded by the division between naked life (ultimate and opaque bearer of
sovereignty) and the multifarious forms of life abstractly recodified as social-juridical identities (the voter, the worker, the journalist, the
student, but also the HIV-positive, the transvestite, the porno star, the elderly, the parent, the woman) that all rest on naked life. The

state of exception is the reduction of humanity to the homo sacer, the life that can be killed but not
sacrificed. The person stripped of citizenship, held at undisclosed locations, possibly subject to torture,
unable to make any claim whatever to human rights (in as much as those rights are predicated on the power of a nationstate to recognize them) can be killed or disappeared but nothing more. This "recognition" of human rights,
the power of the State to see in us a humanity deserving of such rights, is failing under a system where
proof of our guilt has become always already visible. Identity papers are no longer visible evidence of
rights inasmuch as a piece of clothing, a gesture, an utterance is enough to supercede our citizenship
and banish us to naked life.

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Impact: Internment
TheaffirmativedividesBeingbetweenthelivingandthedead,producingboththe
normativesubjectofthelawandaconcomitantzoneofindistinctionbetweenthetwopoles
wherethe Muselmann arises as the zero point of atrocity, annihilating meaning and value.
Agamben 99 (Giorgio, Professor of Philosophy at University of Verona, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 155-157)
In the light of the preceding reflections, a third formula can be said to insinuate itself between the other two, a

formula that defines

the most specific trait of twentieth-century biopolitics: no longer either to make die or to make live, but
to make survive. The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or
death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival. In every case, it is a matter of dividing
animal life from organic life, the human from the inhuman, the witness from the Muselmann,
conscious life from vegetative life maintained functional through resuscitation techniques, until a
threshold is reached: an essentially mobile threshold that, like the borders of geopolitics, moves according to the progress of
scientific and political technologies.Biopowers supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute
separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoe and bios, the inhuman and the human
survival. This is why in the camp, the Muselmann like the body of the overcomatose person and the
neomort attached to life-support systems today not only shows the efficacy of biopower, but also
reveals its secret cipher,so to speak its arcan urn. In his De arcanhs publicarurn (1605), Clapmar distinguished in the structure of
power between a visible face (jus imperil) and a hidden face (arcan urn, which he claims derives from arca, jewel casket or coffer). In
contemporary biopolitics, survival is the point in which the two faces coincide, in which the arcan urn imperli comes to light as such.
This is why it remains, as it were, invisible in its very exposure, all the more hidden for showing itself as such. In the Muselmann,
biopower sought to produce its final secret: a survival separated from every possibility of testimony , a

kind of absolute biopolitical substance that, in its isolation, allows for the attribu tion of demographic,
ethnic, national, and political identity. If, in the jargon of Nazi bureaucracy, whoever participated in the Final Solution
was called a Geheimnistriiger, a keeper of secrets, the Muselmann is the absolutely unwitnessable, invisible ark of biopower. Invisible
because empty, because the Muselmann is nothing other than the volkioser Raum, the space empty of people at the center of
the camp that, in separating all life from itself, marks the point in which the citizen passes into
theStaatsangeh~irige of non-Aryan descent, the non-Aryan into the Jew, the Jew into the deportee and,
finally, the deported Jew beyond himself into the Muselmann,that is, into a bare, unassignable and unwitness-

able life.

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Impact: Massacres
Biopolitical management thru visas create the notion of an undivided people which
necessitates purging all that is difference
Agamben 2K (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, Means Without End: Notes on
Politics, p. 33-34//shree)
If this is the caseif the concept of people necessarily contains within itself the fundamental biopolitical
fractureit is possible to read anew some decisive pages of the history of our century. If the struggle between the two peoples has
always been in process, in fact, it has undergone in our time one last and paroxysmal acceleration. In ancient Rome, the split internal to
the people was juridically sanctioned by the clear distinction between populus and plebseach with its own institutions and magistrates
just as in the Middle Ages the division between artisans [popolo minu to] and merchants [popolo grasso] used to correspond to a
precise articulation of different arts and crafts. But when, starting with the French Revolution, sovereignty is entrusted solely

to the people, the people become an embarrassing presence, and poverty and exclusion appear for the
first time as an intolerable scandal in every sense. In the modern age, poverty and exclusion are not
only economic and social concepts but also eminently political categories. (The economism and
socialism that seem to dominate modern politics actually have a political, or, rather, a biopolitical,
meaning.) From this perspective, our time is nothing other than the methodical and implacable attempt to fill the split
that divides the people by radically eliminating the people of the excluded. Such an attempt brings together,
according to different modalities and horizons, both the right and the left, both capitalist countries and socialist countries,
which have all been united in the plan to produce one single and undivided people an ulti mately
futile plan that, however, has been partially realized in all industrialized countries. The obsession with
development is so effective in our time because it coincides with the biopolitical plan to produce a
people without fracture.

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Impact: Genocide
Biopower necessitates genocide for the sake of the health of the population
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at university of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 145-147)
Hence the radical transformation of the meaning and duties of medicine, which is increasingly integrated into the functions and the
organs of the state: Just as the economist and the merchant are responsible for the economy of material values, so the physician is
responsible for the economy of human values.. . . It is absolutely necessary that the physician contribute to a rationalized human
economy, that he recognize that the level of the peoples health is the condition for economic gain.... Fluctuations in the biological substance and in the material budget are usually parallel (ibid., p. 40). The principles of this new biopolitics are dictated
by eugenics, which is understood as the science of a peoples genetic heredity . Foucault has documented the
increasing importance that the science of police assumes starting in the eighteenth century, when, with Nicolas De Lemare, Johan Peter
Franc, andJ. H. G. von Justi, it takes as its explicit objective the total care of the population (Dits et tCcrzts, 4: I5o6i). From the end of
the nineteenth century, Francis Galtons work functions as the theoretical background for the work of the science of police, which has by
now become biopolitics. It is important to observe that Nazism, contrary to a common prejudice, did not

limit itself to using and twisting scientific concepts for its own ends. The relationship between National
Socialist ideology and the social and biological sciences of the timein particular, geneticsis more
intimate and complex and, at the same time, more disturbing. A glance at the contributions of Verschuer (who,
surprising as this may seem, continued to teach genetics and anthropology at the University of Frankfurt even after the fall of the Third
Reich) and Fischer (the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin) shows beyond a doubt that the genetic
research of the time, which had recently discovered the localization of genes in chromosomes (those genes that are ordered, as Fischer
writes, like pearls in a necklace), gave National Socialist biopolitics its fundamental conceptual structure. Race, Fischer writes, is
not determined by the assembly of this or that measurable characteristic, as in the case, for example, of a scale of colors. . . . Race is
genetic heredity and nothing but heredity (in Verschuer, tat et sant4 p. 84). It is not surprising, therefore, that the exemplary reference
studies for both Verschuer and Fischer are T. H. Morgan and J. B. S. Haldanes experiments on drosophila and, more generally, the very
same works of Anglo-Saxon genetics that led, during the same years, to the formation of the first map of the X chromosome in man and
the first certaln identification of hereditary pathological predispositions. The new fact, however, is that these concepts are not treated as
external (if binding) criteria of a sovereign decision: they are, rather, as such immediately political. Thus the concept of race is

defined, in accordance with the genetic theories of the age, as a group of human beings who manifest
a certain combination of homozygotic genes that are lacking in other groups (Verschuer, ttat et sante, p. 88).
Yet both Fischer and Verschuer know that a pure race is, according to this definition, almost
impossible to identify (in particular, neither the Jews nor the Germans constitute a race in the strict senseand Hitler is just as
aware of this when he writes Mein Kampf as when he decides on the Final Solution). Racism (if one understands race to be a
strictly biological concept) is, therefore, not the most correct term for the biopolitics of the Third Reich.
National Socialist biopolitics moves, instead, in a horizon in which the care of life inherited from
eighteenth-century police science is, in now being founded on properly eu genic concerns, absolutized.
Distinguishing between politics (Politik) and police (Polizei), von Justi assigned the first a merely negative task, the fight
against the external and internal enemies of the State, and the second a positive one, the care and
growth of the citizens life. National Socialist biopoliticsand along with it, a good part of modern
politics even outside the Third Reich cannot be grasped if it is not understood as necessarily
implying the disappearance of the difference between the two terms: the police now becomes politics,
and the care of life coincides with the fight against the enemy. The National Socialist revolution, one reads in the
introduction to State and Health, wishes to appeal to forces that want to exclude factors of biological degeneration and to maintain the
peoples hereditary health. It thus aims to fortify the health of the people as a whole and to eliminate influences that harm the biological
growth of the nation. The book does not discuss problems that concern only one people; it brings out problems of vital importance for all
European civilization. Only from this perspective is it possible to grasp the full sense of the extermination of

the Jews, in which the police and politics, eugenic motives and ideological motives, the care of health
and the fight against the enemy become absolutely indistinguishable.

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Impact: No Value to Life

Biopower ensures the devaluation of life
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at university of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 139-140)
3.3. It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still today, in certain countries,
occupies a substantial position in medical debates and provokes disagreement. Nor are we concerned with the radicaliry with which
Binding declares himself in favor of the general admissibility of euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that the
sovereignty of the living man over his own life has its immediate counterpart in the determination of a

threshold beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the
commission of a homicide. The new juridical category of life devoid of value (or life unworthy of being
lived) corresponds exactlyeven if in an apparently different direction to the bare life of homo sacer and can
easily be extended beyond the limits imagined by Binding. It is as if every valorization and every
politicization of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence) necessarily
implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant,
becomes only sacred life, and can as such be eliminated without punishment . Every society sets this limit;
every societyeven the most moderndecides who its sacred men will be. It is even possible that this limit, on which the
politicization and the exceprio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history
of the West and has now in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereigntymoved inside

every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite
category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.

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Impact: Terrorism Reform Leads to Unending War

The rhetoric of terrorism is a political construct used to manage the future through future
surveillance and vigilancethis results in extermination
Puar and Rai 4 (Jasbir, Asst Prof of Gender @ Rutgers and Amit, Prof of English @ FSU, Social Text 22:3//shree)
But perhaps most crucial is the very grammar involved: the obsessive use of the future tense signals both a
founding anxiety of (and in) this discourse and the drawing of the subject of counterterrorism to the pleasures of the always as yet
unimagined. As if projecting itself into an always already mastered future, where the risk of terrorism is
neutralized before actualization, the time of counterterrorism discourse is always in a future that is continuous with a
fixed and romanticized national past. Derrida once said, "The future can only be anticipated in the form of

an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity."
Counterterrorism is a technology that dreams of managing and mastering this monstrosity by targeting subjectivities, communities, countries, and, indeed,
time itself. Thus, if "the United States will confront the threat of terrorism for the foreseeable future," the counterterrorism imaginary aspires to the total
management of this "foreseeable" political risk.38 In that sense its immediate precursor and ally is the technology of insurance. In insurance, the term risk
designates neither "an event nor a general kind of event occurring in reality (the unfortunate kind) but a specific mode of treatment of certain events capable
of happening to a group of individualsor, more exactly, to values or capitals possessed or represented by a collectivity of individuals: that is to say, a
population. Nothing is a risk in itself ; there

is no risk in reality. But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all
depends on how one analyzes the danger, considers the event."39 In the counterterrorism imaginary, risk names a [End
Page 92] procedure of assessment, counterintelligence, containment, and projection into the future. Its analysis is predicated on
the fixity of implacably opposed political forces whose only resolution resides in the murderous destiny
of the United States to manage democracy for the world (it is our "calling," as President Bush says). Moreover, the sliding
between structure and network returns here in the form of a sort of insurance value. The sliding between the securely fixed and the terrifyingly unmoored
that names the essential dynamic of counterterrorism technologies generates specific kinds of self-legitimating exchange values that have innumerable
trajectories and their own surplus: cultural (counterterrorism revalues Western civilization), political (it gives the security state the aura of a need), economic
(the economics of fear drives the billions of dollars spent on everything from spy planes to home security systems), and affective (fear itself has been given

Risk is at once the technology of the future that calls forth all the arts of prediction that science can conjure in its
mission to master the future and the abstract machine that diagrams our present. But these termspre-sent, futureare no longer
actually operative in community formations of terrorist risk. They interpenetrate at each moment, determining each other in a dance of
pure repetition. Thus when Randy Martin states that risk "is a rhetoric of the future that is really about the present; it is a means of price
setting on the promise that a future is attainable," one must see that, first, risk (financial or terroristic) is not merely a rhetoricit is an
abstract machine whose shiny surfaces do not reflect or signify something as much as they form assemblages with other
machines, like panopticism, biopolitics, or necropolitics; and second, the future is now: the ambivalence of the
a new value after 9/11).

present has given way to the anxieties of the present-future, this anxiety is itself a temporality, an
impossible becoming-totalitarian.40 Terrorist risk engenders a nation or, better, civilizational burden unequally shared
between members of a risk community. Members of that community would include the capitalist elite from all countries, but not all
could exercise equally the right to articulate a position in a "collectively binding" process of "decision making,"41 which demonstrates
the discursive kinship to ecological risk. Terrorist risk is both an acknowledgment of the limits of knowledge

and a kind of abstract but very real spur forever driving into the bodies of these men and women,
driving them to produce absolute knowledge of the other, to connect bodies to security machines, to
detain, harass, and always surveil citizens and immigrants and thereby multiply the borders to be
policed (and, of course, as Homi K. Bhabha so brilliantly points out, it is the enunciation of the stereotype that is crucial to this
paradox).42 In that sense, the terrorist threat draws its enemies (the civilized subjects [End Page 93] of modern risk communities) to a
future that has already excluded it. In the future, when it will come, and it will certainly come, there will be no terrorism; meanwhile, in
the present, its seemingly infinite proliferation only means that all we are saying is beside the point: we must exterminate the
brutes.43 In any case, what becomes possible through this preliminary diagram of terrorist risk is the return of the early modern
practice of a "good risk," which is affirmative and designed to be "embraced for self-betterment."44 Because terrorist risk is both a
burden of civilization for the transnational risk community against the axis of evil and a mission for the truth, the good, and humanity,
danger is revalued as a civilizational value. That is why the civilized are waging an unending war. With every new body bag and
suicide bomber the value of "danger" goes up. Counterterrorism, as Achille Mbembe has so movingly shown, is a war machine that assembles, on the same
plane of immanence, strategies and rationalities of discipline, biopolitics, and now, once again, necropolitics. As strategy, rationality, and discourse, what
this document outlines is a civilizational project machined to a necropolitics. As we have shown, civilization is the nodal point for multiple axes of power: a
normalizing sexuality as well as a white supremacist agenda operate through it; "free and open economies" (it goes without saying today that a very closed
capitalist restructuring is implied by this phrase) are enshrined in its charter; future-oriented, market-savvy subjective forms are produced through its
normalization practices; an implicitly Christian cosmology gives its adherents a sense of mission; microtechnologies of surveillance and policing
everything from a total awareness database to eye recognition softwareoperate at speeds up to a hundred times faster than current computer processors.45
This civilizational project also puts in place specific spaces of participation and resistanceartificial negativity, Adorno once called it; the "subaltern public
sphere" is another version of itwhere civility, reason, and the rule of law govern who has a voice, what enunciations are heard, and the parameters of
debate. But all dissent of course is treason in a state of emergency, and so the spaces of resistance alternate as holding cells as well.

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Impact AT: Liberalism Stops Biopower

Liberalism becomes totalitarianism when it becomes concerned with biopolitical
management
Hoffmann 7 (Kasper, International Development Studies at Roskilde University, May, Militarised Bodies and Spirits of Resistance,
http://diggy.ruc.dk:8080/handle/1800/2766 //shree)
In modern forms of government, concepts of the norm and normal have played a kind mediating role in the formulation and execution of
normative projects (Canguilhem 2005 [1966]; Ewald 1990). It is through the systematic accumulation of knowledge

about certain social problems and deviations that we come to know the normal and the norm that
stabilise and indicate it in social contexts (Ewald 1990: 140). By aligning delinquent or abnormal
subjectivities (through, for instance, techniques of pedagogy, health, economic development, human development, spirituality etc.)
to the norm, the normal order, can be restored allowing normative goals to be considered for the
good: [T]he good is figured in terms of adequacy the good product is adequate to the purpose it was meant to serve. Within the
normative system, values are not defined a priori, but instead through an endless process of
comparison and normalization (Ewald 1990: 152). Rose has made the point that the very notion of normality has emerged
out of a concern with types of conduct, thought, expression deemed troublesome or dangerous (Rose 1996: 26), so that normality can
only be understood in relation to the abnormal. Therefore, even if the norm has allowed modern biopower to

transform negative restraints of power into more positive controls or normalisation, it is still producing
dangerous subjectivities. Within liberal forms of government , at least, there is a long history of people
who, for one reason or another, are deemed not to possess or to display the attributes (e.g. autonomy,
responsibility) required of the juridical and political subjects of rights and who are therefore subjected to
all sorts of disciplinary, bio-political and even sovereign interventions. (Dean 1999: 134) The list of those so
subjected would include at various times those furnished with the status of the indigent, the degenerate, the feeble-minded, the native,
the savage, the homosexual, the delinquent, the dangerous etc. Modern so-called liberal practices of government
therefore also entail illiberal aspects (see Hindess 2001; Dean 1999 Chapter 7). Liberalism always contains the

possibility of non-liberal interventions in the lives of those who do not possess the attributes required to
be a citizen. However, bio-politics is not confined to liberal forms of rule: liberalism just makes the articulation in a specific way.
Other types of rule, such as authoritarian or totalitarian forms, also depend on the elements of a bio-politics
that is concerned with the detailed administration of life. Rather than denying that non-liberal practices are indeed an
integral part of all forms of liberal democratic government, we could see the will to establish the authority of liberal democracy this
will to power as an element of sovereignty in the heart of the democracy. In modern processes of government, the

focus is on the fostering and promotion of life, though in certain circumstances this fundamental
security of the population is experienced as threatened. In such circumstances the community calls
upon its fundamental right to exist as such and thus evokes its right to deny the right to life of those
who are seen as a threat to the life of that same population. This allows us to consider what might be thought of
as the dark side of bio-politics (Dean 1999: 139). In Foucaults account, bio-politics, as concrete political method of
security, does not put an end to the practice of war; it provides it with renewed scope. This new scope
allows the actual neutralization, or even elimination of life at the level of entire populations, or micro populations.
It intensifies the killing, whether by ethnic cleansing that visits holocausts upon whole groups or by
the mass slaughter of classes and groups in the name of the utopia to be achieved. Governance is now
exercised at the level of life and of the population, and wars will be waged at that level on behalf of the
security of each and all. This brings us to the heart of Foucaults challenging thesis about bio-politics, namely that there is
an intimate connection between the exercise of a life-administering power and the commission of
genocide: If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers [] it is because power is located at the
level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population (Foucault 1976: 180, my
translation). Thus, there seems to be a kind of inescapable connection between the power to foster life and
the power to disqualify life which is characteristic of bio-power. The emergence of a bio-political
racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in which the demand for a
homogenous social space articulated by the norm appears to turn into a life necessity. Through the
establishment of the norm, abnormality is inscribed upon individual other bodies, casting certain
deviations as both internal dangers to the body politic and as inheritable legacies that threatens the
well-being of race: On behalf of the existence of everyone entire populations are mobilised for the

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Impact AT: Liberalism Stops Biopower

purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of the life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as
managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so
many wars, causing so many men to be killedat stake is the biological existence of a population.
(Foucault 1976: 180, my translation, emphasis) Bio-politics presides over the processes of birth, death, production and illness. It
acts on the human species. Within this bio-political practice the sovereign right to kill appears in a new
form; as an excess of biopower that does away with life in the name of securing it, and in its most
radical form it is a means of introducing a fundamental distinction between those who must live and
those who must die. It fragments the biological field and establishes a break within the biological
continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of races, a set of subdivisions in which certain
races are classified as good, fit and superior (Stoler 1995: 84). It therefore establishes a positive relation
between the right to kill and the assurance of life. It posits that, the more you kill and let die, the more you
will live. Thus, in modern biopolitical practice, war does more than reinforce ones own kind by eliminating a
racial adversary: it regenerates ones own race (Stoler 1995: 56). It is essential to note that racism as a biopolitical practice does not draw on a particular theory of race it does not need to. Instead racism
designates a much more general practice which introduces a rift in the biological continuum that is the
human species between those who are worthy of citizenship and those who are not. Internal threats to
the health and wellbeing of a social body come from those who were deemed to lack an ethics of how
to live and thus the ability to govern themselves. It is worth remembering that the Nazi concentration
camps housed not only Jews, but also Gypsies, homosexuals, Bolsheviks and other inassimilable
elements. To sum up, Foucault understands racism as a sort of permanent feature of biopower and not as the
paroxysmal convulsion of a decaying moral order (Stoler, 1995: 64). Foucaults argument is that racism is not only confined
within those obviously racist forms of authoritarian government such as the German Nationalist
Socialist state, but that it is intrinsic to the nature of all modern, normalising governmental
rationalities and their bio-political technologies. By showing how racism possesses a polyvalent mobility, he shows that
racism is not merely an ideological discourse of exceptionally cruel regimes, but a fundamental feature
of modern processes of government.

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Impact AT: Ojakangas

Even if biopolitics necessitates care for part of the population, it REQUIRES that
subsections of the population be perpetually annihilated so that the rest can optimize the
quality of their lives. Biopower deserves presumption of suspicion because it justifies
violent intervention.
Dillon 5 (Michael, Prof of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, May, Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 43-44)
The key point of dispute with Ojakangas concerns the self-immolating logic of biopolitics . Not bare life
that is exposed to an unconditional threat of death, he says in the introduction to his paper, but the care of all living is the foundation
of biopower. (emphasis in the original). Ojakangas says: Foucaults biopower has nothing to do with that [Agamben] kind of bare
life. I agree. Foucaults biopolitics concerns an historically biologised life whose biologisation continues to mutate as the life sciences
themselves offer changing interpretations and technical determinations of life. This biologised life of biopolitics nonetheless also raises
the stake for Foucault of a life that is not a biologised life. So it does for Agamben, but differently and in a different way.24 For
Foucault, the biologised life of biopolitics also raises the issue of a life threatened in supremely violent and novel ways. So it does for
Agamben, but again differently and for the same complex of reasons. 25 In contesting Agamben in the ways that he does, Ojakangas
marks an important difference, then, between Foucault and Agamben. That done, perhaps the difference needs however to be both
marked differently and interrogated differently. I have argued that there is a certain betrayal in the way Agamben reworks Foucault.
There is however much more going on in this betrayal than misconstruction and misinterpretation. There is a value in it. Exploring that
value requires another ethic of reading in addition to that of the exegesis required to mark it out. For Agambens loathing of
biopolitics is I think more true to the burgeoning suspicion and fear that progressively marked
Foucaults reflections on it than Ojakangas account can give credit for , since he concentrates on providing the
exegetical audit required to mark it out rather than evaluate it. In posing an intrinsic and unique threat to life through the
very ways in which it promotes, protects and invests life, care for all living threatens life in its own
distinctive ways. Massacres have become vital. The threshold of modernity is reached when the life of the species is
wagered on its own (bio) political strategies. Biopolitics must and does recuperate the death function. It does
teach us how to punish and who to kill.26 Power over life must adjudicate punishment and death as it
distributes live across terrains of value that the life sciences constantly revise in the cause of lifes very promotion. It has to.

That is also why we now have a biopolitics gone geopolitically global in humanitarian wars of
intervention and martial doctrines of virtuous war.27 Here, also, is the reason why the modernising
developmental politics of biopolitics go racist: So you can understand the importance I almost said the vital importance
of racism to such an exercise of power.28 In racism, Foucault insists: We are dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to
work.29 But: The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies or the lies
of power. It is bound up with the techniques of power, with the technology of power.30 In thus threatening life, biopolitics prompts a
revision of the question of life and especially of the life of a politics that is not exhaustively biologised; comprehensively subject to
biopolitical governance in such a way that life shows up as nothing but the material required for biopolitical governance, whether in
terms posed by Foucault or Agamben. Emphasising care for all living - the promotion, protection and investment of the life of
individuals and populations elides the issue of being cared to death. Being cared to death poses the issue of

the life that is presupposed, nomologically for Agamben and biologically for Foucault, in biopolitics.
Each foregrounds the self-immolating logic that ineluctably applies in a politics of life that understands
life biologically, in the way that Foucault documents for us, or nomologically, in the way that Agambens bare life contends.
When recalling the significance of the Christian pastorate to biopolitics, Ojakangas seems to emphasize a line of
succession rather than of radical dissociation. One, moreover, which threatens to elide the intrinsic violence of
biopolitics and its essential relation with correction and death.

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Impact AT: Biopower Good (Foucaultian Zoe)

The 1ACs politics of inclusion participates in a ceaseless decision on bare lifemodern
democracy and its bedrock of rights is capable of genocidal violence
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at university of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 8-11//shree)
The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not
sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert. An obscure figure of archaic Roman law, in which
human life is included in the juridical order [ordinamento] solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its
capacity to be killed), has thus offered the key by which not only the sacred texts of sovereignty but also the very codes of
political power will unveil their mysteries. At the same time, however, this ancient meaning of the term sacer presents us with the
enigma of a figure of the sacred that, before or beyond the religious, constitutes the first paradigm of the political realm of the West.

The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what
characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zoe in the poliswhich is, in itself,
absolutely ancientnor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections
and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere
becomes the rule, the realm of bare lifewhich is originally situated at the margins of the political ordergradually begins to
coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and Zoe right and fact, enter into a zone of
irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of
exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire
political system rested. When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both
subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it.

Everything happens as if, along with the disciplinary process by which State power makes man as a
living being into its own specific object, another process is set in motion that in large measure
corresponds to the birth of modern democracy, in which man as a living being presents himself no longer as an object
but as the subject of political power. These processeswhich in many ways oppose and (at least apparently) bitterly conflict with
each othernevertheless converge insofar as both concern the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical
body of humanity~ If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy, then, it is that modern
democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoe and that it is constantly trying to transform its own
bare life into a way of life and to find, so to speak, the bios of zoe Hence, too, modern democracys specific aporia: it

wants to put the freedom and happi ness of men into play in the very placebare lifethat marked
their subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden process that leads to the recognition of rights and
formal liberties stands once again the body of the sacred man with his double sovereign, his life that
cannot be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed. To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests
and accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very
moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest
height, proved itself incapable of saving zoe to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from
unprecedented ruin. Modern democracys decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states in post-democratic
spectacular societies (which begins to become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds its linal sanction in the analyses of Guy
Debord) may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks the beginning of modern democracy and forces it into complicity with its most
implacable enemy. Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the
contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascismwhich transformed the decision on bare life
into the supreme political principlewill remain stubbornly with us. According to the testimony of Robert Antelme, in fact,
what the camps taught those who lived there was precisely that calling into question the quality of man provokes an almost biological
assertion of belonging to the human race (Lespece humaine, p. it). The idea of an inner solidarity between democracy
and totalitarianism (which here we must, with every caution, advance) is obviously not (like Leo Strausss thesis concerning the
secret convergence of the final goals of liberalism and communism) a historiographical claim, which would authorize

the liquidation and leveling of the enormous differences that characterize their history and their
rivalry. Yet this idea must nevertheless be strongly maintained on a historico-philosophical level, since it alone will
allow us to orient ourselves in relation to the new realities and unforeseen convergences of the end of
the millennium. This idea alone will make it possible to clear the way for new politics, which remains
largely to be invented.

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Impact AT: Biopower Good (Foucaultian Zoe)

Your turn misunderstands biopoliticsbiopower is the production of bare life rather than
just lifeWestern politics creates a distinction between political and non-political life
which requires subsets of the population to be annihilated to care for the population
Caldwell 4 (Anne, Asst Prof in the Dept of Poli Sci @ Louisville, Theory & Event, 7:2//shree)
Although homo sacer is the figure who will "unveil" the mysteries of sovereignty (p.8), Agamben's account of sovereignty is equally
indebted to Greek thought. As Agamben reports, something of homo sacer appears in Aristotle's distinction between

zoe as the natural life shared by all animals, and bios as a specific political way of life. The good life of
the polis emerges from a distinction between natural and political life, and their integration into the
exception. What at first appears an opposition between natural life and political life is rather an implication "of bare life in politically
qualified life" (p. 7), political life is defined by the exception of natural life. Agamben here treats zoe (natural life) as bare life or homo
sacer. That usage is strange. He finds a Roman category in a Greek world that would not have known it, and appears to treat bare life as
identical to natural life.10
Despite periodic uses of bare life and zoe interchangeably, their distinction is essential to his argument.

Bare life is distinct from natural life because its precarious status is due to its capture by sovereign
power. As Agamben explains, homo sacer is "the hinge on which each sphere [zoe and bios] is articulated at the
threshold at which the two spheres are joined in becoming indeterminate . Neither political bios nor natural zoe,
sacred life is the zone of indistinction in which zoe and bios constitute each other in including and excluding each other (p. 90). Like
sovereignty, homo sacer is a creature of the limit; it belongs to the zone of indeterminacy generated by sovereignty. 11 Homo sacer,

regardless of whether it lives a life of happiness or misery, is defined by its dependence upon sovereign
power for its status. This nexus, in which sovereignty emerges by capturing life in the exception,
defines the nature of political belonging in the West. The terminology we are familiar with from modernity, especially of
contract and rights, are, on this analysis, secondary phenomena.

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Alternative: Whatever Being

Vote negative to endorse Whatever-being in opposition to the affirmatives maintenance of
sovereign power
Caldwell 4 (Anne, Asst Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville, Theory & Event, 7.2//shree)
Can we imagine another form of humanity, and another form of power? The bio-sovereignty described by Agamben is so fluid as to
appear irresistible. Yet Agamben never suggests this order is necessary. Bio-sovereigntyresults from a particular and
contingent history, and it requires certain conditions. Sovereign power, as Agamben describes it, finds its
grounds in specific coordinates of life, which it then places in a relation of indeterminacy. What defies sovereign
power is a life that cannot be reduced to those determinations : a life "that can never be separated from its form, a
life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life. " (2.3). In his earlier Coming
Community,Agamben describes this alternative life as "whatever being." More recently he has used the term "formsof-life." These concepts come from the figure Benjamin proposed as a counter to homo sacer: the "total condition that is 'man'." For
Benjamin and Agamben,mere life is the life which unites law and life. That tie permits law, in its endless cycle
of violence, to reduce life an instrument of its own power. The total condition that is man refers toan alternative
life incapable of serving as the ground of law. Such a lifewould exist outside sovereignty. Agamben's own
concept of whatever being is extraordinarily dense. It is made up of varied concepts, including language and potentiality; it is also
shaped by several particular dense thinkers, including Benjamin and Heidegger. What follows is only a brief consideration of whatever
being, in its relation to sovereign power.
"Whatever being," as described by Agamben, lacks the features permitting
the sovereign capture and regulation of life in our tradition. Sovereignty's capture of life has been

conditional upon the separation of natural and political life. That separation has permitted the
emergence of a sovereign power grounded in this distinction, and empowered to decide on the value,
and non-value of life (1998: 142). Since then, every further politicization of life, in turn, calls for "a new
decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only
'sacred life,' and can as such be eliminated without punishment " (p. 139). This expansion of the range of
life meriting protection does not limit sovereignty, but provides sites for its expansion . In recent decades,
factors that once might have been indifferent to sovereignty become a field for its exercise. Attributes such as national status, economic
status, color, race, sex, religion, geo-political position have become the subjects of rights declarations. From a liberal or cosmopolitan
perspective, such enumerations expand the range of life protected from and serving as a limit upon sovereignty. Agamben's analysis
suggests the contrary. If indeed sovereignty is bio-political before it is juridical, then juridical rights come into being only where life is
incorporated within the field of bio-sovereignty. The language of rights, in other words, calls up and depends upon the life caught within
sovereignty: homo sacer.

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Alternative: Passivity
Only a politics of passivity can rupture biopolitics and achieve whatever-being.
Franchi 4 (Stefano, Professor of Philosophy at Stanford, December, Contretemps 5, p. 36-37//shree)
We are finally in a position to introduce the notion of passivity. The opposition to the work of man, and thus the
argos, must be found by a detour through the terms that Aristotle links to itenergeia, actuality, and its opposite, dynamis, potentiality.
If the work of man, his ergon, is ultimately connected to the notion of energeia, that is to man in his actuality, then the argos is,
conversely, the being of pure dynamis, and is therefore a potential being. Since Agambens insistence on this concept is rather wellknown, I will limit myself to pointing out an aspect that is not always adequately emphasized. Agamben remarks that the
potentiality of human beings is always the potentiality not to do something(as opposed, for instance, to the
potentiality of the child who does not know but eventually will, once she has suffered the proper alteration). The architect who
knows how to build a house, on the contrary,has at the same time the potential not to build it. She does not need
to undergo any any alteration: she has it already (that is, she has already learned how to build one) and it is on that basis that she may
decide not to build it. After having generalized his reading to Aristotles treatment to sensation and perception (see de An. 418b-419a1),
Agamben moves on to Met. Theta 1 (1050b10) and remarks that if to be potential means to be in relation to ones own
incapacity, to the potential not to be, then what is potential is capable of both being and not being . He
concludes that the potential welcomes not-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality,
fundamental passivity.12 Here I think we have reached our first conclusion: the being of desoeuvrement that is at

stake in the definition of the argos is to be found in potentiality as fundamental passivity, as

fundamental opening to non-Being. The voyou is not just inoperose, it is lazy, or rather it is inoperose because it is lazy, and
it is lazy because it is always capable, as a purely potential being, of not-being, that is, of not-doing. The voyou welcomes not-Being and
its fundamental passivity is exposed in this welcoming. As I said above, it follows that the fundamental problem of Agambens thought
and I use the word here in the sense of Sache (des Denkens)is passivity. Or, to be more precise, it is the thought of desoeuvrement
as passivity. If this statement is true in general, that is, when applied to Agambens thought as a whole, it follows that it is true a fortiori,
for the reasons briefly mentioned above, when applied to the political dimension of his project. Thus, I think we are allowed to clarify
and amend the visionary statement found in the Postilla 2001 to the Coming Community in the following fashion: Not work, but
inoperosity and decreation, [that is,fundamental passivity] are the paradigm of the politics to come (to come, does
not mean future).13 The politics to come (-venir) will be a passive politics.

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Alternative: Identity-Stripping (1/2)

The sovereigns ability to exercise biopolitical control is contingent on identity documents
like visasidentity stripping makes resistance possible
Ellerman 9 (Antje, Dept of Politics @ U of British Columbia, Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State of Exception, p 11-15,
http://www.unc.edu/euce/eusa2009/papers/ellermann_02G.pdf//shree)
The exercise of sovereignty over homo sacer is ultimately contingent on the states knowledge of the
individuals identity. As John Torpey argued, individuals who remain beyond the embrace of the state necessarily represent a
limit on its penetration (1997, 224). In contemporary states, identity is the authoritative marker of exclusion and
inclusion, and, in the case of illegal migrants, a necessary condition for expulsion from the national territory.
Migrants whose name and nationality is unknown to the state cannot be issued the identity and travel
documents on which lawful deportation to anothers states territory hinges. In other words, unidentifiable migrants
are constitutionally rather invulnerable to expulsion (van der Leun 2003, 108). As liberal states have stepped up their deportation
efforts, migrants, in particular unsuccessful asylum seekers, have sought to escape the states reach by destroying or
hiding their identity documents. This act of resistance is far from exceptional. While the following figures and
illustrations all refer to immigration enforcement in Germany, they could easily apply to control contexts elsewhere
in the advanced democratic world. German interior officials estimate that, in the mid-1980s, immigration authorities had to
obtain travel documents for about 30 to 40 percent of all asylum seekers. By the year 2000, the population of
undocumented asylum applicants is estimated to have increased to 85 percent (Bhling 2001). The dilemma
that an unknown identity poses to the state is aptly captured by a deportation officers account of the resistance strategies of
illegal migrants: People have started to realize, if they dont know who I am, they cant touch me.1 What is
important to note is that homo sacers ability to render herself unidentifiable is ultimately contingent on bare life. The lives of illegal
migrants and refugees in many ways exemplify the condition of rightlessness that marks bare life. The territorialization of life means
that the refugee is put in a position where she lacks apportioned rights but depends on the charity or goodwill of aid workers or the
police. The refugee is outside the law. Levels of innuendo and violence unthinkable to regular human beings, citizens, are regularly
perpetrated against the refugee or asylum seeker. The refugee as homo sacer describes the condition of exclusion that those exempt from
the normal sovereignty are subject to. (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004, 41) While much has been written on the
dehumanizing consequences of the denial of membership, the absence of rights at the same time makes
possible acts of resistance such as identity-stripping. The vast majority of those who lead politicized lives
have entered into too many bureaucratic relationships with the state to have the choice to render
themselves unknowable. Liberal states infrastructurally penetrate their societies far too deeply (Mann 1984) to
allow for a pervasive creation of fog (Broeders and Engbersen 2007, 1593) by their citizens. Thus, it is the rightlessness of the
illegal migrant that is the source of her capacity for resistance by means of identity-stripping. These self-stripping strategies clearly
exemplify the possibility of resistance in the state of exception. In the words of Broeders and Engbersen, [t]he strategy of
noncooperation shows that many immigrants are not docile persons who fully cooperate with the authorities. Many of them are difficult
to manage by state officials, and they are able to very effectively frustrate the administrative processing of return programs. (2007,
1603) We will now return our focus on the state and explore how its officers handle these acts of identity-stripping. In particular, we will
examine whether these forms of resistance can succeed in curtailing the states sovereign powers. What are the implications of identitystripping for the exercise of state sovereignty? Confronted with the challenge of expelling an unidentifiable noncitizen across international borders, the hands of the liberal state are tied. International law only obliges states to readmit
their own nationals while recognizing the right of states to refuse entry to any non-national. Unless a state seeks to transport
individuals surreptitiously to a foreign territory, it simply cannot expel individuals with unknown identities. For the state,
the inability to render legible those within its custody presents a significant threat to sovereignty.
Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, from the perspective of immigration officers , the inability to execute
deportation orders because of missing documents is particularly frustrating because it presents the last in
a lengthy chain of administrative actions. Being unable to bring deportees across the border turns the administrative
successes of identifying, locating, apprehending, prosecuting, and detaining deportable immigrants into sunk costs.(2008, 172). It is
important to recognize that the states inability to secure travel documents is directly linked to the individuals
refusal to cooperate. Presumably the only effective way for states to induce voluntary compliance would be to grant the migrant
residence rightsin which case travel documents would of course no longer be needed. Unable to secure voluntary compliance, state
officers are forced to go embassy-shopping in the vague hope of identifying the migrants nationality. We need to get papers for a
Sudanese national. we apply for an interview with the Sudanese embassy. Finally we get an interview. The embassy employee tells
us, hes not from Sudan, hes from Liberia. Then we go to the Liberian embassy, they tell us, hes not Liberian, hes from the Gambia.
The Gambians, in turn, argue, if he is Gambian hell have to confirm that hes applying for papers voluntarily. But maybe hes not
Gambian, he could be from Nigeria. We go to the Nigerian embassy, and they say, there is a good chance that hes from Nigeria.
However, you need to

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Alternative: Identity-Stripping (2/2)

provide us with clear evidence. (Author interview, deportation officer, district Ostprignitz-Ruppin, Brandenburg, November 27, 2001)
Significantly, the diplomatic representatives of the countries of origin of most undocumented migrants face few
incentives to actively cooperate with the identification efforts of deporting states because they only stand to
lose from the return of their nationals. Not only does return migration represent the loss of vital
remittances, it often is accompanied by enormous problems in the area of social and economic reintegration. While
the deporting states of the Global North have pursued various diplomatic strategies to improve bilateral cooperation to facilitate the
issuing of documentsmost prominently the conclusion of readmission agreementssuccess has rarely been forthcoming (Ellermann,
2008). The paper will now examine a number of identification strategies pursued by the German state that target the undocumented
migrant herself. These strategies can be distinguished both by the extent to which they rely on the migrants cooperation and by the
degree of coercion involved.

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Agamben K

Alternative: AT No Roadmap
There is no roadmap for whatever beingit is impossible to know the history of when we
take action
Agamben 99 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at university of Verona, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, pg. 174)
It is in this light that one must read the enigmatic passage in Kafkas notebooks that says, The

Messiah will only come when

he is no longer necessary, he will only come after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on
the very last day. The particular double structure implicit in this messianic theologumenon
corresponds to the paradigm that Benjamin probably has in mind when he speaks, in the Eighth
Thesis, of a real state of exception as opposed to the state of exception in which we live. This paradigm is
the only way in which one can conceive something like an eskhatonrhar is, something that belongs to historical time and its law and,
at the same time, puts an end to it. Although while the law is in force we are confronted only with events that happen without happening
and that thus indefinitely differ from themselves, here, instead, the messianic event is considered through a bi-unitary figure. This

figure probably constitutes the true sense of the division of the single Messiah (like the single Law) into
two distinct figures, one of which is consumed in the consummation of history and the other of which
happens, so to speak, only the day after his arrival. Only in this way can the event of the Mes siah
coincide with historical time yet at the same time not be identified with it, effecting in the eskhaton that
small adjustment in which, according to the rabbis saying told by Benjamin, the messianic kingdom
consists.

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Agamben K

Framing Card (1/2)

Challenging sovereign representations is key to preventing violence
Agamben 2K (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, Means Without End: Notes on
Politics, p. 93-95)
Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always already in the open and do
not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it. That is why they are not interested in
mirrors, in the image as image. Human beings, on the other hand, separate images from things and give them a

name precisely because they want to recognize themselves, that is, they want to take possession of their
own very appearance. Human beings thus transform the open into a world, that is, into the battlefield
of a political struggle without quarter. This struggle, whose object is truth, goes by the name of History. It is happening
more and more often that in pornographic photographs the portrayed subjects, by a calculated stratagem, look into the camera, thereby
exhibiting the awareness of being exposed to the gaze. This unexpected gesture violently belies the fiction that is implicit in the
consumption of such images, according to which the one who looks surprises the actors while remaining unseen by them: the latter,
rather, knowingly challenge the voyeurs gaze and force him to look them in the eyes. In that precise moment, the insubstantial nature of
the human face suddenly comes to light. The fact that the actors look into the camera means that they show that they are simulating;
nevertheless, they paradoxically appear more real precisely to the extent to which they exhibit this falsification. The same procedure is
used today in advertising: the image appears more convincing if it shows openly its own artifice. In both cases, the one who looks is
confronted with something that concerns unequivocally the essence of the face, the very structure of truth. We may call tragicomedy of
appearance the fact that the face uncovers only and precisely inasmuch as it hides, and hides to the extent to which it uncovers. In this
way, the appearance that ought to have manifested human beings becomes for them instead a resemblance that betrays them and in
which they can no longer recognize themselves. Precisely because the face is solely the location of truth, it is also and immediately the
location of simulation and of an irreducible impropriety. This does not mean, however, that appearance dissimulares what it uncovers by
making it look like what in reality it is not: rather, what human beings truly are is nothing other than this dissimulation and this
disquietude within the appearance. Because human beings neither are nor have to be any essence, any nature,

or any specific destiny, their condition is the most empty and the most insub stantial of all: it is the
truth. What remains hidden from them is not something behind appearance, but rather appearing itself, that is, their being nothing
other than a face. The task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance
itself to appear. The face, truth, and exposition are today the objects of a global civil war, whose
battlefield is social life in its entirety, whose storm troopers are the media, whose victims are all the
peoples of the Earth. Politicians, the media establishment, and the advertising industry have understood the insubstantial character
of the face and of the community it opens up, and thus they transform it into a miserable secret that they must make sure to control at all
costs. State power today is no longer founded on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence a mo -

nopoly that states share increasingly willingly with other nonsovereign organizations such as the
United Nations and terrorist organizations; rather, it is founded above all on the control of appearance
(of doxa). The fact that politics constitutes itself as an autonomous sphere goes hand in hand with the
separation of the face in the world of spectacle a world in which human communication is being
separated from itself. Exposition thus transforms itself into a value that is accumulated in images and
in the media, while a new class of bureaucrats jealously watches over its management.

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Agamben K

Framing Card (2/2)

Language shapes reality
Agamben 2K (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, Means Without End: Notes on
Politics, p. 95-97)

If what human beings had to communicate to each other were always and only something, there would
never be politics properly speaking, but only exchange and conflict, signals and answers. But because
what human beings have to communicate to each other is above all a pure communicability (that is,
language), politics then arises as the communicative emptiness in which the human face emerges as
such. It is precisely this empty space that politicians and the media establishment are trying to be sure to control, by keeping it separate
in a sphere that guarantees its unseizability and by preventing communicativity itself from coming to light. This means that an integrated
Marxian analysis should take into consideration the fact that capitalism (or whatever other name we might want to give to the process
dominating world history today) not only was directed to the expropriation of productive activity, but was also and above all directed to
the alienation of language itself, of the communicative nature of human beings. Inasmuch as it is nothing but pure communicability,
every human face, even the most noble and beautiful, is always suspended on the edge of an abyss. This is precisely why the most
delicate and graceful faces sometimes look as if they might suddenly decompose, thus letting the shapeless and bottomless background
that threatens them emerge. But this amorphous background is nothing else than the opening itself and communicability itself inasmuch
as they are constituted as their own presuppositions as if they were a thing. The only face to remain uninjured is the one

capable of taking the abyss of its own communicability upon itself and of exposing it without fear or
complacency. This is why the face contracts into an expression, stiff ens into a character, and thus sinks
further and further into itself. As soon as the face realizes that communica bility is all that it is and
hence that it has nothing to express thus withdrawing silently behind itself, inside its own mute
identityit turns into a grimace, which is what one calls character. Character is the constitutive reticence that
human beings retain in the word; but what one has to take possession of here is only a nonlatency, a pure visibility: simply a visage.

The face is not something that transcends the visage: it is the exposition of the visage in all its nudity, it
is a victory over characterit is word.

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Agamben K

AT: Alt Doesnt Solve

Ontology can access the whatever singularity a position of nonjudgment that can rupture
disciplinary technologies
Agamben 93 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the university of Verona, The Coming Community: Theory Out of Bounds Volume 1, pg.
28-29)

Only the idea of this modality of rising forth, this original mannerism of being, allows us to find a
common passage between ontology and ethics. The being that does not remain below itself, that does not presuppose
itself as a hidden essence that chance or destiny would then condemn to the torment of qualifications, but rather exposes itself in its
qualifications, is its thus without remainder-such a being is neither accidental nor necessary, but is, so to speak, continually engendered
from its own manner. Plotinus had to have this kind of being in mind when, trying to define the freedom and

the will of the one, he explained that we cannot say that it happened to be thus, but only that it is as
it is, without being master of its own being and that it does not remain below itself, but makes use of
itself as it is and that it is not thus by necessity, in the sense that it could not be otherwise, but because
thus is best. Perhaps the only way to understand this free use of the self, a way that does not, however, treat existence as a
property, is to think of it as a habitus, an ethos. Being engendered from ones own manner of being is, in effect, the very definition of
habit (this is why the Greeks spoke of a second nature): That manner is ethical that does not befall us and does not

found us but engenders us. And this being engendered from ones own manner is the only happiness
really possible for humans. But a manner of rising forth is also the place of whatever singularity, its
principium individuationis. For the being that is its own manner this is not, in effect, so much a property that determines and
identifies it as essence, but rather an improperty; what makes it exemplary, however, is that this improperty is assumed and appropriated
as its unique being. The example is only the being of that of which it is the example; but this being does not

belong to it, it is perfectly common. The improperty, which we expose as our proper being, manner,
which we use, engenders us. It is our second, happier nature.

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Agamben K

AT: Perm (Cede the Political)

The affs immigration politics is predicated on isolating bare life which justifies infinite
atrocity. The exclusion of bare life is inscribed in immigration policy.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 8)
The question In what way does the living being have language? corresponds exactly to the question In what way does bare life dwell
in the polis? The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its
own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it. Politics therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of

Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being
and the logos is realized. In the politicization of bare lifethe metaphysical task par excellence the
humanity of living man is decided. In assuming this task, modernity does nothing other than declare its own faithfulness to
the essential structure of the metaphysical tradition. The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of
friend! enemy but that of bare life/political existence, Lou bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man
is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same
time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.

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Agamben K

AT: Perm (Cede the Political)

The alternative comes firsthealing the split between natural and political life is a
prerequisite to solving the problems that have plagued Western Politics.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 4-5)
Foucaults death kept him from showing how he would have developed the concept and study of biopolitics. In any case, however,the
entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis the politicization of bare life as suchconstitutes the decisive event of
modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if

politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon
with this foundational event of modernity. The enigmas (Furet, LAllemagne nazi, p. 7) that our century has
proposed to historical reason and that remain with us (Nazism is only the most disquieting among them) will be
solved only on the terrainbiopoliticson which they were formed. Only within a biopolitical horizon
will it be possible to decide whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left,
private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc.)and which have been steadily dissolving, to the point of
entering today into a real zone of indistinctionwill have to be abandoned or will, instead, even tually
regain the meaning they lost in that very horizon. And only a reflection that, taking up Foucaults and
Benjamins suggestion, thematically interrogates the link between bare life and politics, a link that secretly
governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one another, will be able to bring the
political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to its practical calling.

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Agamben K

AT: Perm
The Perm cannot avoid codifying the exception of bare life
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 11)
In contrasting the beautiful day (euemeria) of simple life with the great difficulty of political bios in
the passage cited above, Aristotle may well have given the most beautiful formulation to the aporia that
lies at the foundation of Western politics. The 24 centuries that have since gone by have brought only provisional and
ineffective solutions. In carrying out the metaphysical task that has led it more and more to assume the
form of a biopolitics, Western politics has not succeeded in constructing the link between zoe and bios,
between voice and language, that would have healed the fracture. Bare life remains included in politics
in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion. How is it
possible to politicize the natural sweetness of zoe? And first of all, does zoe really need to be
politicized, or is politics not already contained in zoe as its most precious center? The biopolitics of
both modern totalitarianism and the society of mass hedonism and consumerism certainly constitute
answers to these questions. Nevertheless, until a completely new politicsthat is, a politics no longer
founded on the exception of bare lifeis at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain
imprisoned and immobile, and the beautiful day of life will be given citizenship only either through
blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.

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Agamben K

AT: Perm
The permutation damns the attempts to conceive of a new politics because it refuses to
extend the happy life to everyone.
Agamben 2K (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, Means Without End: Notes on
Politics, p. 113-115)

While the state in decline lets its empty shell survive everywhere as a pure structure of sovereignty and
domination, society as a whole is instead irrevocably delivered to the form of consumer society, that is,
a society in which the sole goal of production is comfortable living. The theorists of political
sovereignty, such as Schmitt, see in all this the surest sign of the end of politics . And the planetary masses of
consumers, in fact, do not seem to foreshadow any new figure of the polis (even when they do not simply relapse into the old ethnic and
religious ideals). However, the problem that the new politics is facing is precisely this: is it possible to have a
political community that is ordered exclusively for the full enjoyment of wordly life? But, if we look closer,
isnt this precisely the goal of philosophy? And when modern political thought was born with Marsilius of Padua, wasnt it defined
precisely by the recovery to political ends of the Averroist concepts of sufficient life and well-living? Once again Walter Benjamin,
in the TheologicoPolitical Fragment, leaves no doubts regarding the fact that The order of the profane should be erected on the idea
of happiness. The definition of the concept of happy life remains one of the essential tasks of the
coming thought (and this should be achieved in such a way that this concept is not kept separate from ontology, because: being:
we have no experience of it other than living itself). The happy life on which political philosophy should be

founded thus cannot be either the naked life that sovereignty posits as a presupposition so as to turn it
into its own subject or the impenetrable extraneity of science and of modern biopolitics that everybody
today tries in vain to sacralize. This happy life should be, rather, an absolutely profane sufficient life that has reached the
perfection of its own power and of its own communicability a life over which sovereignty and right no longer have
any hold.

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Agamben K

AT: Perm
The perm is a normalization of resistance that links to the K and justifies extinction
Dumm 96 (Thomas, Professor of Political Science at Amherst College, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom. P. 116-117)
Here I am slightly ahead of myself. The problem of the normalization of norms is perhaps better discussed under the rubric bio-power.
The emergence of this more complete normalizing discourse is itself not neatly or completely separate from its own genealogy within
disciplinary society. However, in working to normalize even that which resists normalization, in normalizing

the forms of resistance as they emerge from delinquency, those who engage in contemporary exercises
of power may have been able to put at risk more than just a mode of freedom but the very possibility of
free existence itself. Normalizing the normis there a more succinct definition of cybernetics than that? Normalizing the
norm---is this not the great (unannounced) end of the various strategies aimed at human extinction? A question
that emerges for us at the end of the twentieth century is whether the style of freedom that has accompanied
disciplinary society and that has been nurtured by itand for the sake of brevity let us call that freedom liberal
freedom---has itself been the reason leading humankind to this moment of terminal risk . But even if it has, this
does not mean that liberal freedom has not been a way of being free. Instead, what it may suggest is that the freedom that has been so
long associated with a particular organization under the banner of sovereign right may need to be rethought so that we may better
understand and give shape to a politics of freedom more commensurate with the conditions of late modernity. I believe that this is what
Foucault may be thinking when he urges us to rethink the form that the idea of right might take as sovereignty and normalization vitiate
the very possibility of repression in a disciplinary age.

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Agamben K

AT: Perm
The liberal philosophy of the permutation guarantees perm failure
Norris 5 (Andrew, assistant professor of political science at the university of Pennsylvania, Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays On
Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer, pg. 14-15)
Finally, the

liberal strategy reveals its limitations when we recognize that the notion of the threshold is in
fact expanding into areas where we will not have the luxury of refusing to consider the inner logic of
phenomena we should like to reject as evil and incomprehensible . What, for instance, are we to do when we are
dealing with agents or things that have not already been recognized as the bearers of rights? Here the reassertion of rights is simply not
an option. We must decide whether a neomorta body whose only signs of life are that it is warm,

pulsating, and urinatingis in fact a human being at all, an agent or a thing. In such cases, life and
death [cease to be] properly scientific concepts [and become] political concepts, which as such acquire
a political meaning precisely only through a decision (164). Ironically, such decisions are increasingly
made by scientists, and not by politicians: In the biopolitical horizon that characterizes modernity , the
physician and the scientist move into the no-mans-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate (159). These are
still marginal figures in our current political life. But if Agamben is right, the concept of the margin is itself being swept away. It is this
that leads him to conclude that the camp is the as yet unrecognized paradigm of the modern. As the logic of the sovereign
exception comes unraveled (or is realizedthis paradox being a necessary function of that logic), and the impossibility of categorically
distinguishing between exception and rule is made manifest, the distinction between bare life and political life is hopelessly confused.
When life and politicsoriginally divided, and linked together by means of the no-mans-land of the

state of exception that is inhabited by bare lifebegin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all
politics becomes the exception (I48)~~ In the end, the attempt to resist this through the assertion of human rights ignores the
connection between the humanism that undergirds the concept of rights and the events that seem to conflict with it. Agambens
argument is not that Aristotles or Lockes reflections on politics carry with them an implicit commitment to
the substantive racist policies of National Socialism; nor does he claim that they caused the Holocaust (a term to which he
objects [114]). What he does argue is that there is a deep affinity between such contemporary horrors
and the tradition of political philosophy to which we might turn in an effort to understand and combat
such phenomena. The practical implication would be not that there is no differ ence between Aristotle
or Hitler, but that Aristotle will not provide a stable point from which to critique those who follow after
him, or from which to construct an alternative.~~ There is no Archimedean point outside biopoli tics.
Politics is always a matter of the body, and the body is always already a biopolitical body (187).

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Agamben K

AT: Perm
The perm maintains human rights are ontologically correlated with the state of exception
only the alternative alone can solve
Rancire 4 (Jacques, professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 103, no. 2/3, p. 301-02)
In such a way, the

correlation of sovereign power and bare life takes place where political conflicts can be
located. The camp is the space of the "absolute impossibility of deciding between fact and law , rule and
application, exception and rule."10 In this space, the executioner and the victim, the German body and the Jewish
body, appear as two parts of the same "biopolitical" body. Any kind of claim to rights or any struggle
enacting rights is thus trapped from the very outset in the mere polarity of bare life and state of
exception. That polarity appears as a sort of ontological destiny: each of us would be in the situation of
the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any
political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap . Agamben's view of the camp as the
"nomos of modernity" may seem very far from Arendt's view of political action. Nevertheless, I would assume that the radical
suspension of politics in the exception of bare life is the ultimate consequence of Arendt's archipolitical position, of her attempt to
preserve the political from the contamination of private, social, apolitical life. This attempt depopulates the political stage by sweeping
aside its always-ambiguous actors. As a result, the political exception is ultimately incorporated in state power, standing in front of bare
lifean opposition that the next step forward turns into a complementarity. The will to preserve the realm of pure politics
ultimately makes it vanish in the sheer relation of state power and individual life . Politics thus is equated with
power, a power that is increasingly taken as an overwhelming historico-ontological destiny from which only a God is likely to save us.
If we want to get out of this ontological trap, we have to reset the question of the Rights of Man more

precisely, the question of their subjectwhich is the subject of politics as well. This means setting the
question of what politics is on a different footing. In order to do this, let us have a closer look at the Arendtian argument
about the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, an argument that Agamben basically endorses. She makes them a quandary, which can be
put as follows: either the rights of the citizen are the rights of manbut the rights of man are the rights of the unpoliticized person; they
are the rights of those who have no rights, which amounts to nothingor the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, the rights
attached to the fact of being a citizen of such or such constitutional state. This means that they are the rights of those who have rights,
which amounts to a tautology.11

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Agamben K

AT: Framing
Policy analysis should precede discourse most effective way to challenge power
Taft-Kaufman 95 (Jill, Speech prof @ CMU, Southern Comm. Journal, Spring, v. 60, Iss. 3, Other Ways)
The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by
substantial analysis of the concrete contexts of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire . The political
sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their ostensible concern for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns
them with the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial posture and talk of opposition, their discourses on

intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore the conditions that have produced
leftist politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice . In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts, postmodern emphasis on new
subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and transportation, as well as
to the media that depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no vision, will, or commitment to
activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is underscored by the absence of focused collective or politically
active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and
laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or activism and as

much radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness: phallocentrism or Eurocentric

tropes has become a lazy academic substitute for actual engagement with the detailed histories and
contemporary realities of Western racial minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment
of the postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger
indictment against the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in which Lyotard maintains that
virtually all social relations are linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm of
terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies: I can think of few more striking indicators of the

political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the discursive. If
the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are appallingly ignorant of
terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what else do
we do but speak?), but its projection onto the rest of the world would be calamitous ....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the
discursive is derived from the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in
a world of ideas or symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require collective activity for their
fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on the discursive without an accompanying analysis of how the
discursive emerges from material circumstances hides the complex task of envisioning and working
towards concrete social goals (Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that create the situation of marginality escape
the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences are not overlooked by scholars from marginalized groups. Robinson
(1990) for example, argues that "the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just textual " (p. 571).
Lopez (1992) states that "the starting point for organizing the program content of education or political
action must be the present existential, concrete situation" (p. 299). West (1988) asserts that borrowing French poststructuralist discourses about "Otherness" blinds us to realities of American difference going on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike
postmodern "textual radicals" who Rabinow (1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy about power and the realities of socioeconomic
constraints" (p. 255), most writers from marginalized groups are clear about how discourse interweaves with the concrete circumstances
that create lived experience. People whose lives form the material for postmodern counter-hegemonic

discourse do not share the optimism over the new recognition of their discursive subjectivities, because
such an acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their collective historical and current struggles
against racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not appreciate being told they
are living in a world in which there are no more real subjects. Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing
the discursive self when a person is hungry and homeless represents both a cultural and humane
failure. The need to look beyond texts to the perception and attainment of concrete social goals keeps
writers from marginalized groups ever-mindful of the specifics of how power works through political
agendas, institutions, agencies, and the budgets that fuel them.

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Agamben K

AT: Friend-Enemy Distinction Good

Western politics is not built on friend/enemy but rather on inclusion/exclusion
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at university of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 8, gendered
language under erasure)

The question In what way does the living being have language? corresponds exactly to the question
In what way does bare life dwell in the polis? The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice
in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it. Politics therefore appears
as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on
which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized. In the politicization of bare life
the metaphysical task par excellence the humanity of living man is decided. In assuming this task,
modernity does nothing other than declare its own faithfulness to the essential structure of the
metaphysical tradition. The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy
but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/ bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is
the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same
time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.

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Agamben K

AT: Realism
Recourse to a prediscursive realm of realist politics is exactly how the state of exception
operates. Discourse acts as the law and expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion that is the
structure of sovereignty and politics
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 21)
Hegel was the first to truly understand the presuppositional structure thanks to which language is at once outside and inside
itself and the immediate (the nonlinguistic) reveals itself to be nothing but a presupposition of language.
Language, he wrote in the Phenomenology of Spirit, is the perfect element in which interioriry is as external as exteriority is internal
(see Phdnomenologie des Geistes, pp. 52729). We have seen that only the sovereign decision on the state of

exception opens the space in which it is possible to trace borders between inside and outside and in
which determinate rules can be assigned to determinate territories. In exactly the same way, only
language as the pure potentiality to signify, withdrawing itself from every concrete instance of speech,
divides the linguistic from the nonlinguistic and allows for the opening of areas of meaningful speech in
which certain terms correspond to certain denotations. Language is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of
exception, declares that there is nothing outside language and that language is always beyond itself.
The particular structure of law has its foundation in this presuppositional structure of human
language. It expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion to which a thing is subject because of the fact of
being in language, of being named. To speak [dire] is, in this sense, always to speak the law, ius
dicere.

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Agamben K

AT: Agamben Totalizes

Agamben is not totalizingthe original form of politics is the sovereign ban and implicit in
this process is the death of homo sacer
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 84-85)
This symmetry between sacratio and sovereignty sheds new light on the category of the sacred , whose
ambivalence has so tenaciously oriented not only modern studies on the phenomenology of religion but also the most recent inquiries
into sovereignty. The proximity between the sphere of sovereignty and the sphere of the sacred , which has
often been observed and explained in a variety of ways , is not simply the secularized residue of the originary
religious character of every political power, nor merely the attempt to grant the latter a theological foundation. And this
proximity is just as little the consequence of the sacredthat is, august and accursed character that inexplicably belongs to life as
such. If our hypothesis is correct, sacredness is instead the originary form of the inclusion of bare life in the

juridical order, and the syntagm homo sacer names something like the originary political relation,
which is to say, bare life insofar as it operates in an inclusive exclusion as the referent of the sovereign
decision. Life is sacred only insofar as it is taken into the sovereign exception, and to have exchanged a
juridico-political phenomenon (homo sacers capacity to be killed but not sacrificed) for a genuinely religious
phenomenon is the root of the equivocations that have marked studies both of the sacred and of
sovereignty in our time. Sacer esto is not the formula of a religious curse sanctioning the unheimlich, or the
simultaneously august and vile character of a thing: it is instead the originary political formulation of
the imposition of the sovereign bond. The crimes that, according to the original sources, merit sacratio (such as terminum
exarare, the cancellation of borders; verberatio parentis, the violence of the son against the parent; or the swindling of a client by a
counsel) do not, therefore, have the character of a transgression of a rule that is then followed by the
appropriate sanction. They constitute instead the originary exception in which human life is included
in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed. Not the act of tracing
boundaries, but their cancellation or negation is the constitutive act of the city (and this is what the myth of the
foundation of Rome, after all, teaches with perfect clarity ). Numis homicide law (parricidas esto) forms a system with
homo sacers capacity to be killed (parricidi non damnatur) and cannot be separated from it. The originary
structure by which sovereign power is founded is this complex.

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Agamben K

Aff: Alternative Doesnt Solve

The alternative fails to confront biopolitics and entrenches the harms
Virno 2 (Paolo, Revolutionary, General intellect, exodus, multitude, Archipelago n54, June//shree)
Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no political vocation. Then, when
Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it into an ontological category
with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinion, he is very wrong-headed. The problem is, I
believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power. When there is a
commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on the other
hand, that labor-power is only one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a
paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but rather
is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is
necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential . Toni (Negri)
and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in
few pages of the biopolitical - in relation to the birth of liberalism - that Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a

discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the biopolitical can be
transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of being an instrument for confronting
them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an exclamation point, a word that carries the
risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of fetish words in politics
because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama,
mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a serious content in the term,
however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child,
when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.

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Agamben K

Aff: Alternative Doesnt Solve

The alternative leaves no hope for politics beyond obscure aesthetics
Morris 4 (Daniel, cultural critic, Life, or Something Like It: The Philosophical Chiaroscuro of Giorgio Agamben, Summer, 2004, pg.
http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_04/morris.html)

Contemporary critics of Agamben at times accuse him of reveling in the indeterminacy of naked life.
Some even charge that he aestheticizes the denuding of life as a pornographic transfixion for his gaze,
and that therefore his understanding of human life is left wanting. These critiques are usually launched against
Agamben's two best-known books, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995 [1998]) and Remnants of Auschwitz: The
Witness and the Archive (1998 [1999]). I mention these criticisms here not because they are facile and misinformed (though they are)
but because they emerge from a refusal to understand the full range of Agamben's philosophical project. Agamben is today in his early
sixties. When he published The Man Without Content, he was twenty-eight. For decades, his thought has been sailing in search of that
ungraspable something that not only constitutes life but also makes it worth living. The Man Without Content begins to chart that course
in order to resist the dark temptations of unknowability and ineffability. Kant says somewhere in the Critique of Pure Reason that all
possible knowledge and experience are marooned on an island surrounded by the dangerous waters of the unknown. The trick is to
discover the best way to set sail. Only when there is no mast in knowledge or experience that can be raised are we in trouble. "In
civilizations without boats," Michel Foucault remarked in a 1967 lecture, "dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and
the police take the place of pirates." The boats of thought capsize when they no longer carry ideas, categories, and concepts as brigand
chasers of our dreams. Part of the misadventure of aesthetic thought for Agamben is that it traffics in
nothingness, death, and the skeletal remains of the living. "Whatever criterion the critical judgment employs to
measure the reality of the work," he argues, "it will only have laid out, in place of a living body, an interminable skeleton of dead
elements. . . . What has been negated is reassumed into the judgment as its only real content, and what has been affirmed is covered by
this shadow. . . . Caught up in laboriously constructing this nothingness, we do not notice that in the meantime art has become a planet of
which we only see the dark side, and that aesthetic judgment is . . . the reunion of art and its shadow." In contemporary art, art criticism
reaches its terminus: extreme object-centeredness, as Agamben dubs it, "through its holes, stains, slits, and nonpictorial materials, tends
increasingly to identify the work of art with the non-artistic product. Thus, becoming aware of its shadow, art

immediately receives in itself its own negation. . . . In contemporary art, it is critical judgment that lays
bare its own split, thus suppressing and rendering superfluous its own space." Many critics, theorists,
and philosophers have phlegmatically resigned themselves to this space of abnegation. Art is important
to us because it has no purchase on meaning, significance, or the world. That it does not have to matter
is perhaps the only reason it does. Yet Agamben won't go there. Where will he go? In a phrase: to
Aristotle, Benjamin, and Kafka.

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Agamben K

Aff: Alternative = Powerlessness

The alternative breeds powerlessnessit makes resistance to oppression impossible
Hardt & Dumm 2K (Michael & Thomas, Prof of Romance Studies Dept @ Duke University, Prof @ Amherst College, "Sovereignty,
Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire, Theory & Event,
4:3, Project Muse//shree)
MH: Our argument in Empire does share some central concerns with Agamben's Homo Sacer, particularly surrounding the notions of
sovereignty and biopower. Agamben brilliantly elaborates a conception of modern sovereignty based on Carl Schmitt's notions of the
decision on the exception and the state of emergency, in which the modern functioning of rule becomes a permanent state of exception.
He then links this conception to the figure of the banned or excluded person back as far as ancient Roman law with his usual spectacular
erudition. The pinnacle and full realization of modern sovereignty thus becomes the Nazi concentration camp: the zone of exclusion and
exception is the heart of modern sovereignty and grounds the rule of law. My hesitation with this view is that by posing the

extreme case of the concentration camp as the heart of sovereignty it tends to obscure the daily
violence of modern sovereignty in all its forms. It implies, in other words, that if we could do away with
the camp then all the violence of sovereignty would also disappear. The most significant difference between our
projects, though, is that Agamben dwells on modern sovereignty whereas we claim that modern sovereignty
has now come to an end and transformed into a new kind of sovereignty, what we call imperial
sovereignty. Imperial sovereignty has nothing to do with the concentration camp. It no longer takes the
form of a dialectic between Self and Other and does not function through any such absolute exclusion,
but rules rather through mechanisms of differential inclusion, making hierarchies of hybrid identities.
This description may not immediately give you the same sense of horror that you get from Auschwitz
and the Nazi Lager, but imperial sovereignty is certainly just as brutal as modern sovereignty was, and
it has its own subtle and not so subtle horrors . But still none of that addresses the passivity you refer to. For that we have
to look instead at Agamben's notions of life and biopower. Agamben uses the term "naked life" to name that limit of
humanity, the bare minimum of existence that is exposed in the concentration camp. In the final
analysis, he explains, modern sovereignty rules over naked life and biopower is this power to rule over
life itself. What results from this analysis is not so much passivity, I would say, but powerlessness. There is no
figure that can challenge and contest sovereignty. Our critique of Agamben's (and also Foucault's) notion of
biopower is that it is conceived only from above and we attempt to formulate instead a notion of
biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules over life. (In this sense, the notion of
biopower one finds in some veins of ecofeminism such as the work of Vandana Shiva, although cast on a very different register, is closer
to our notion of a biopower from below.) What we are interested in finally is a new biopolitics that reveals the

struggles over forms of life.

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Agamben K

Aff: Bare Life != Powerlessness

The production of bare life doesnt prevent subjects from being politicizedthose who are
interpellated as bare life can transcend that labeling
Cesarino and Negri 4 (Cesare, assoc prof of cultural studies, Antonio, revolutionary, Its a Powerful Life: A Conversation on
Contemporary Philosophy, Cultural Critique, V 57, Spring, pg. 172-174)
CC: Well, yes, but what do you think? And, in particular, what do you think about the fact that the concept of naked life has become so
enormously and increasingly important for Agamben lately? AN: I believe Giorgio is writing a sequel to Homo Sacer, and I feel that this
new work will be resolutive for his thoughtin the sense that he will be forced in it to resolve and find a way out of the ambiguity that
has qualified his understanding of naked life so far. He already attempted something of the sort in his recent book on Saint Paul, but I
think this attempt largely failed: as usual, this book is extremely learned and elegant; it remains, however, somewhat trapped within
Pauline exegesis, rather than constituting a full-fledged attempt to reconstruct naked life as a potentiality for exodus, to rethink naked
life fundamentally in terms of exodus. I believe that the concept of naked life is not an impossible, unfeasible one. I believe it is possible
to push the image of power to the point at which a defenseless human being [un povero Cristo] is crushed, to conceive of that extreme
point at which power tries to [End Page 173] eliminate that ultimate resistance that is the sheer attempt to keep oneself alive. From a
logical standpoint, it is possible to think all this: the naked bodies of the people in the camps, for example, can lead one precisely in this
direction. But this is also the point at which this concept turns into ideology: to conceive of the relation between power and life in such a
way actually ends up bolstering and reinforcing ideology. Agamben, in effect, is saying that such is the nature of power: in the final
instance, power reduces each and every human being to such a state of powerlessness. But this is absolutely

not true! On the contrary: the historical process takes place and is produced thanks to a continuous
constitution and construction, which undoubtedly confronts the limit over and over againbut this is
an extraordinarily rich limit, in which desires expand, and in which life becomes increasingly fuller . Of
course it is possible to conceive of the limit as absolute pow-erlessness, especially when it has been
actually enacted and enforced in such a way so many times . And yet, isn't such a conception of the limit
precisely what the limit looks like from the standpoint of constituted power as well as from the
standpoint of those who have already been totally annihilated by such a powerwhich is , of course, one
and the same standpoint? Isn't this the story about power that power itself would like us to believe in and reiterate? Isn't it
far more politically useful to conceive of this limit from the standpoint of those who are not yet or not
completely crushed by power, from the standpoint of those still struggling to overcome such a limit, from the
standpoint of the process of constitution, from the standpoint of power [potenza]? I am worried about the fact that the concept of naked
life as it is conceived by Agamben might be taken up by political movements and in political debates: I find this prospect quite troubling,
which is why I felt the need to attack this concept in my recent essay. Ultimately, I feel that nowadays the logic of traditional eugenics is
attempting to saturate and capture the whole of human realityeven at the level of its materiality, that is, through genetic engineering
and the ultimate result of such a process of saturation and capture is a capsized production of subjectivity within which ideological
undercurrents continuously try to subtract or neutralize our resistance. [End Page 174] CC: And I suppose you are suggesting

that the concept of naked life is part and parcel of such undercurrents. But have you discussed all this
with Agamben? What does he think about your critiques? AN: Whenever I tell him what I have just finished
telling you, he gets quite irritated, even angry. I still maintain, nonetheless, that the conclusions he draws
in Homo Sacer lead to dangerous political outcomes and that the burden of finding a way out of this
mess rests entirely on him. And the type of problems he runs into in this book recur throughout many of his other works. I
found his essay on Bartleby, for example, absolutely infuriating. This essay was published originally as a little book
that also contained Deleuze's essay on Bartleby: well, it turns out that what Deleuze says in his essay is exactly the contrary of what
Giorgio says in his! I suppose one could say that they decided to publish their essays together precisely so

to attempt to figure this limit that is, to find a figure for it, to give it a formby some sort of
paradoxical juxtaposition, but I don't think that this attempt was really successful in the end. In any
case, all this incessant talk about the limit bores me and tires me out after a little while. The point is
that, inasmuch as it is death, the limit is not creative. The limit is creative to the extent to which you
have been able to overcome it qua death: the limit is creative because you have overcome death.

as

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Agamben K

Aff: Alternative = Totalization

Only the plan can solve the harmstheir totalization of state power is unable to explain
violence and prevents effective action
Astor 9 (Avi, phD in Socio at UMich, Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization, and the Making of Operation Wetback, 5/29, Latino
Studies, Palgrave Journals//shree)

Agamben's argument does, however, suffer from several shortcomings. The most serious is that it is
overly teleological, attributing essentially all atrocities committed against those at the margins of the
political community to the actualization of the logic inherent to the foundational principles of nationstates. Consequently, Agamben's ideas are not especially useful for explaining why xenophobic
sentiment and discriminatory practices crystallize during some periods and not others, or why they
target certain collectives but neglect others similarly situated economically and socially. This
shortcoming results, in part, from Agamben's overemphasis on political and legal exclusion, and his
neglect of the important role of social processes and practices in determining which populations
become marked as excluded and targeted by discriminatory policies, and when this tends to occur.

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Agamben K

Aff: Biopower Good

Biopower goodit doesnt create bare life; instead it produces extra-life.
Ojakangas 5 (Mika, Doctorate in Social Science, Impossible Dialogue on Biopower, Foucault Studies)
Moreover, life as the object and the subject of bio power given that life is everywhere, it becomes everywhere
is in no way bare, but is as the synthetic notion of life implies, the multiplicity of the forms of life, from the nutritive life to the
intellectual life, from the biological levels of life to the political existence of man.43 Instead of bare life, the life of bio
power is a plenitude of life, as Foucault puts it.44 Agamben is certainly right in saying that the production of bare life is, and has
been since Aristotle, a main strategy of the sovereign power to establish itself to the same degree that sovereignty has been the main
fiction of juridicoinstitutional thinking from Jean Bodin to Carl Schmitt. The sovereign power is, indeed, based on bare

life because it is capable of confronting life merely when stripped off and isolated from all forms of life,
when the entire existence of a man is reduced to a bare life and exposed to an unconditional threat of death . Life is undoubtedly
sacred for the sovereign power in the sense that Agamben defines it. It can be taken away without a
homicide being committed. In the case of bio power, however, this does not hold true. In order to
function properly, bio power cannot reduce life to the level of bare life, because bare life is life that can only be
taken away or allowed to persist which also makes understandable the vast critique of sovereignty in the era of biopower. Bio
power needs a notion of life that corresponds to its aims . What then is the aim of biopower? Its aim is not to
produce bare life but, as Foucault emphasizes, to multiply life,45 to produce extra life.46 Bio power
needs, in other words, a notion of life which enables it to accomplish this task. The modern synthetic notion of life
endows it with such a notion. It enables bio power to invest life through and through, to optimize forces,
aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. It could be
argued, of course, that instead of bare life (zoe) the form of life (bios) functions as the foundation of biopower. However, there is
no room either for a bios in the modern bio political order because every bios has always been, as Agamben
emphasizes, the result of the exclusion of zoe from the political realm. The modern biopolitical order does not exclude anything not
even in the form of inclusive exclusion. As a matter of fact, in the era of biopolitics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe. It
has already moved into the site that Agamben suggests as the remedy of the political pathologies of modernity, that is to say,
into the site where politics is freed from every ban and a form of life is wholly exhausted in bare life. 48
At the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben gives this life the name formoflife, signifying always and above all possibilities of life,
always and above all power, understood as potentiality (potenza).49 According to Agamben, there would be no power that could have
any hold over mens existence if life were understood as a formoflife. However, it is precisely this life, life as

untamed power and potentiality, that bio power invests and optimizes. If bio power multiplies and
optimizes life, it does so, above all, by multiplying and optimizing potentialities of life, by fostering and
generating forms of life.50

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Agamben K

Aff: Friend/Enemy Distinction Good

Whatever Being is built on a politics of universal friendship built upon the designation of
an inhuman enemy, enabling endless violence
Rasch 3 (William, Henry, Prof of Germanic Studies @ Indiana U, Human Rights as Geopolitics: Cultural Critique 54 120-147//shree)
Yes, this passage attests to the antiliberal prejudices of an unregenerate Eurocentric conservative with a pronounced affect for the
counterrevolutionary and Catholic South of Europe. It seems to resonate with the apologetic mid-twentieth-century Spanish reception of
Vitoria that wishes to justify the Spanish civilizing mission in the Americas. But the contrast between Christianity and humanism is not
just prejudice; it is also instructive, because with it, Schmitt tries to grasp something both disturbing and elusive about the modern world
namely, the apparent fact that the liberal and humanitarian attempt to construct a world of universal
friendship produces, as if by internal necessity, ever new enemies . For Schmitt, the Christianity of Vitoria, of
Salamanca, Spain, 1539, represents a concrete, spatially imaginable order, centered (still) in Rome and, ultimately, Jerusalem. This, with
its divine revelations, its Greek philosophy, and its Roman language and institutions, is the polis. This is civilization, and outside its
walls lie the barbarians. The humanism that Schmitt opposes is, in his words, a philosophy of absolute humanity. By virtue of

its universality and abstract normativity, it has no localizable polis, no clear distinction between what
is inside and what is outside. Does humanity embrace all humans? Are there no gates to the city and
thus no barbarians outside? If not, against whom or what does it wage its wars? We can understand Schmitt's
concerns in the following way: Christianity distinguishes between believers and nonbelievers. Since nonbelievers can become believers,
they must be of the same category of being. To be human, then, is the horizon within which the distinction between believers and
nonbelievers is made. That is, humanity per se is not part of the distinction, but is that which makes the distinction possible. However,

once the term used to describe the horizon of a distinction also becomes that distinction's positive pole,
it needs its negative opposite. If humanity is both the horizon and the positive pole of the distinction
that that horizon enables, then the negative pole can only be something that lies beyond that horizon,
can only be something completely antithetical to horizon and positive pole alikecan only, in other
words, be inhuman. As Schmitt says: Only with the concept of the human in the sense of absolute humanity does there appear as
the other side of this concept a specially new enemy, the inhuman. In the history of the nineteenth century, setting off the inhuman from
the human is followed by an even deeper split, the one between the superhuman and the subhuman. In the same way that the human
creates the inhuman, so in the history of humanity the superhuman brings about with a dialectical necessity the subhuman as its enemy
twin.9 This "two-sided aspect of the ideal of humanity" (Schmitt 1988, Der Nomos der Erde, 72) is a theme Schmitt had already
developed in his The Concept of the Political (1976) and his critiques of liberal pluralism (e.g., 1988, Positionen und Begriffe, 151-65).
His complaint there is that liberal pluralism is in fact not in the least pluralist but reveals itself to be an

overriding monism, the monism of humanity. Thus, despite the claims that pluralism allows for the
individual's freedom from illegitimate constraint, Schmitt presses the point home that political opposition to
liberalism is itself deemed illegitimate. Indeed, liberal pluralism, in Schmitt's eyes, reduces the political to the social and
economic and thereby nullifies all truly political opposition by simply excommunicating its opponents from the High Church of
Humanity. After all, only an unregenerate barbarian could fail to recognize the irrefutable benefits of
liberal order.

the

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Agamben K

Aff: Link Turn

Illegal migrants exist in a zone of indistinctionthe plan reverses this through expansion of
visas
Ngai 3 (Mae M., Asst Prof of History @ U Chi, The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien: Immigration Restriction and Deportation Policy in the
United States, 1921-1965, JSTOR//shree)
The illegal alien that is abstractly defined is thus something of a spec- ter, a body stripped of individual personage, whose very presence
is trou- bling, wrong. Moreover, this body stripped of personage has no rights. It is no coincidence that the regime of immigration
restriction emerged with World War I. The war, by simultaneously destroying the geopolitical sta- bility of Europe and solidifying the
nation-state system, also created millions of refugees and stateless persons, as well as denationalized and de- naturalized persons during
the postwar period.22 Recalling Hannah Arendt, philosopher Giorgio Agamben tells us, "In the system of the nation-

state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and
reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a
state." Certainly the illegal alien appears in the same historical moment and in the same juridical noman's- land that was created when the war loosened the links between birth and nation, human being
and citizen.23 Second, the mere idea that persons without formal legal status resided in the nation
engendered images of great danger. In 1925 the Immigration Service reported with some alarm that
1.4 million immigrants-20 percent of those who had entered the country before 1921-might already be
liv- ing illegally in the United States. The service conceded that these immi- grants had lawfully entered
the country, but because it had no record of their admission, it considered them illegal. It warned, (I)t is
quite possible that there is an even greater number of aliens in the coun- try whose legal presence here could not be established. No
estimate could be made as to the number of smuggled aliens who have been unlawfully intro- duced into the country since the quota
restrictions of 1921, or of those who may have entered under the guise of seamen. The figures presented are wor- thy of very serious
thought, especially when it is considered that there is such a great percentage of our population ... whose first act upon reaching our
shores was to break our laws by entering in a clandestine manner-all of which serves to emphasize the potential source of trouble, not to
say men- ace, that such a situation suggests.24 Positive law thus constituted undocumented immigrants as

criminals, both fulfilling and fueling nativist discourse. Once nativism succeeded in leg- islating
restriction, anti-alien animus shifted its focus to the interior of the nation and the goal of expelling
immigrants living illegally in the country. The Los Angeles Evening Express alleged that there were
"several million foreigners" in the country who had "no right to be here." Nativists like Madison Grant,
recognizing that deportation was "of great importance," also advocated alien registration "as a necessary prelude to deport on a large
scale." Critics of nativism predicted that "if every man who wears a beard and reads a foreign newspaper is to be suspected unless he can
produce either an identification card or naturalization papers, we shall have more confusion and bungling than ever." 25

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Agamben K

Aff: Perm
Perm: Do the plan and break down the relationship between bios and zoe. Sovereignty
must be used strategically critique can be simultaneous
Lombardi 96 (Mark Owen, Associate Political Science Prof @ Tampa, Perspectives on Third-World Sovereignty, p 161)
Sovereignty is in our collective minds.

What we look at, the way we look at it and what we expect to see must be altered.
This is the call for international scholars and actors. The assumptions of the paradigm will dictate the solution and

approaches considered. Yet, a mere call to change this structure of the system does little except
activate reactionary impulses and intellectual retrenchment. Questioning the very precepts of
sovereignty, as has been done in many instances, does not in and of itself address the problems and issues so
critical to transnational relations. That is why theoretical changes and paradigm shifts must be
coterminous with applicative studies. One does not and should not precede the other. We cannot wait
until we have a neat self-contained and accurate theory of transnational relations before we launch
into studies of Third-World issues and problem-solving. If we wait we will never address the latter and
arguably most important issue-area: the welfare and quality of life for the human race.

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Agamben K

Aff: Rejecting Sovereignty Bad

Cleansing the ontological slate of sovereignty justifies unconditional violence
Rasch 4 (William, Prof of Germanic Studies @ Indiana U, Sovereignty and its Discontents, p 3-4//shree)
Now, if the triumph of a particular species of liberal pluralism denotes the de-politicization of society; one would think that theoretical
opposition to this trend would seek to rehabilitate the political. But rather than asserting the value of the political as an essential structure
of social life, the post-Marxist left seems intent on hammering the final nails into the coffin. In the most celebrated works of recent
years, Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer (1998) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris Empire (2000), the political (denoted
by the notion of sovereignty) is irretrievably identified with nihilism and marked for extinction. In both instances, the political
is the cause of the loss of natural innocence (Agamben, -1998, p 28), that flowering of human productivity that the
Western metaphysical tradition has suppressed; and the logical paradox of sovereignty is to be overcome by the
instantiation of a new ontology. In this way, violence, which is not thought of as part of the state of nature but is introduced
into the human, condition by flawed or morally perverse social institutions, is to be averred. That is, the faulty supposition of ineluctable
violence that guides political theory from Hobbes to Weber is to be replaced by a Heideggerian, Deleuzean, Spinozan or Christian
ontology of original harmony. In the words of John Milbank, a Christian social theorist who currently enjoys a modest following among
political thinkers on the Left, there is no original violence, but rather an originary harmonic peace which is the sociality of
harmonious difference. Thus violence is always a secondary willed intrusion upon this possible infinite order (Milbank, 1990, p 5).
This, then, is the great supposition that links the ascetic pessimism of an Adorno with the cheery Christian optimism of Milbank; the
world as it is is as it is because of the moral perversity of (some) human agents who willfully construct flawed social institutions. To
seek to remedy the perversity of the world as it is from within the flawed social and political structures as they are only increases the
perversity of the world. One must, therefore, totally disengage from the world as it is before one can become truly
engaged. Only a thorough, cataclysmic cleansing of the world will allow our activities to be both innocent and productive. Clear,
though only partially acknowledged, is the fact that this cleansing, which aims at ridding the world of intrusive
violence, is itself an act of fierce and ultimate violence ultimate in its purported finality, but also,
certainly, in its extreme ferocity. What remains equally clear, though not acknowledged, is that whoever has the power to

determine the nature of this harmonious sociality is the one who can determine which acts of violence
are to be judged as intrusions into the placid domain and which acts of violence are to be condoned as
necessary means of re-establishing the promise of perpetual peace . Determining the nature of this
desired, nay, required originary peace is itself a sovereign act, not the abolition of such sovereignty . What our
ultimate sovereign of harmonious peace will do with the willfully violent intruders can only be guessed, but it is certain that they
will not be looked upon as legitimate political dissenters, and the unconditional violence that will be
used to eliminate their presence will be justified by invoking the harmonic peace or natural innocence
they have so deliberately and maliciously disturbed.

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Agamben K

Aff: Rights GoodDeranty

Human rights are goodthe alternative is totalizing and re-entrenches domination
Deranty 4

(Jean-Philippe, Assoc Lecturer in Phil @ Macquarie University, Agambens Challenge to Normative Theories of Modern
Rights, Borderlands, V 3, N 1//shree)
In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena seems particularly counter-intuitive in the case of
dissimilar modes of internment. From a practical point of view, it seems counter-productive to claim that there is no

substantial difference between archaic communities and modern communities provided with the
language of rights, between the lawlessness of war times and democratic discourse. There must be a
way of problematising the ideological mantra of Western freedom, of modernitys moral superiority,
that does not simply equate it with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie 2001). Habermas and Honneth probably have a point
when they highlight the advances made by modernity in the entrenchment of rights. If the ethical task is that of testimony,
then our testimony should go also to all the individual lives that were freed from alienation by the
establishment of legal barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion . We should heed Honneths reminder that
struggles for social and political emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over any
other discourse (Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human rights altogether could be a costly
gesture in understanding past political struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious
strategic, political loss for accompanying present struggles. We want to criticise the ideology of human
rights, but not at the cost of renouncing the resources that rights provide. Otherwise, critical theory
would be in the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very people it purports to speak for, and of
depriving itself of a major weapon in the struggle against oppression.

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Agamben K

Aff: State of Exception Good

The state of exception has been used to stop political violence
Bull 5 (Malcolm, editor, London Review of Books, State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben, pg. 104-114//shree)
This distorts Agamben's argument at both a historical and a theoretical level. Missing from his account of the state of
exception is any real acknowledgment that, in its modern form, a primary function of the emergency has been to deal with strikes. In the
United Kingdom, the first Emergency Powers Act was passed in 1920 and used the following year against the miners' strike; a state of
emergency (which lasted eight months) was declared to deal with the General Strike, and, most recently, during the Heath government,
there were five states of emergency, all in response to strikes. The symmetry between the strike and the emergency is

not just historical. In a strike, workers break their contracts with a view to renegotiating them, then
resuming work. Like the state of exception, the strike is simultaneously within the law and outside it.
Yet unlike exceptions to the law, exceptions to work can easily come about by accident, through the
spread of wildcat strikes or absenteeism. A formal state of exception may result. Livy mentions an occasion when a
iustitium was declared because people had given up going to work to participate in the Bacchanalia. (The 2 January Bank Holiday in
Scotland is a more recent example.) Who then decides the exception? In Agamben's work, the state of exception produces outlaws, but if
there are enough outlaws there is effectively no law in any case. Instances such as this, in which the government sanctions collective
(in)action, are unusual. The state of exception is more often used to suppress industrial action: an attempt to

turn law into violence in order to oppose the law-making violence of the strike. But Agamben gives
little indication that the state of exception is usually only one side of a social confrontation, or that,
rather than creating a void in the law, the exception is often made in an attempt to close a space opened
up by someone else. According to Schmitt, 'in the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of mechanism that has
become torpid by repetition.' Yet it is not the state of exception itself that carries the power of real life so much as the crisis with which it
attempts to deal, or the crisis that it provokes. The state of exception is, in itself, a purely formal device which allows 'the state to exist
even as the law recedes', and provides a bridge across the abyss between two moments of law. In this respect, the exception differs
significantly from constituent power and the political general strike, both of which have the capacity to remake established legal and
social frameworks. The ability to revise existing norms is, as Machiavelli first recognised, just as important for the survival of
institutions as dictatorship, for while dictatorship only allows norms to be preserved, reformation enables them to be renewed.
Dictatorship and renovation may both be precipitated by crisis, but whereas the former is to be deployed as sparingly as possible, the
latter is to be encouraged, for institutions last longer if they retain the capacity to start over. Agamben does not refer to this

tradition of exception, but it has its own sacred history. In the Jewish law, jubilees were years when
normal working activities ceased, and the socially dead were resuscitated - debtors given relief, slaves
freed and the poor reunited with their property. Such practices provided the model for the first
attempted general strike, William Benbow's 'Grand National Holiday', so named because 'a holiday
signifies a holy day and ours is to be of holy days the most holy . . . established to establish plenty, to
abolish want, to render all men [and women] equal.' Unlike the state of exception, when all men [and
woman] become homines sacri, on the holy day, when 'we shall legislate for all [hu]mankind', all men
[and women] are sovereign, and it is the body politic that becomes the defenceless homo sacer.