Kritik Answers

Kritik Defense (Deleuze on Cross-X)

Kritik ist Kaput................................................................................................ 1
**GENERAL K ANSWERS**..........................................................................8
**Framework**............................................................................................... 8
Fiat Good: 2AC............................................................................................... 8
General Defense of the Aff: 2AC (1/2)............................................................9
Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Long) (~50 sec.)....................................................12
Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Short) (<20 sec.)...................................................13
Do the Plan Perm: 2AC.................................................................................14
#1 Steals Aff Ground: 1AR.............................................................................15
#4 Ext. Turns Offense: 1AR...........................................................................16
A2 Plan Focus Bad: 1AR.............................................................................17
A2 Plan is only a tiny part of the speech/Discourse of 1AC is ~9 min.: 1AR18
Must Have an Alternative: 2AC.....................................................................19
Hasty Generalization Bad: 2AC....................................................................20
Law Transformative: 2AC (1/2)....................................................................21
Policymaking Good: 1AR (1/2)..................................................................23
A2 Only Learn As Spectators: 1AR............................................................30
Policy Debate Good.......................................................................................31
Switch-side Debate Good (1/3).....................................................................32
Debate Solves Authoritarianism...................................................................35
Roleplaying Good (1/3).................................................................................36
Traditional Debate Good (1/2).....................................................................40
Traditional Debate Accesses Peformativity..................................................43
Competition Good......................................................................................... 44
**Permutations**.......................................................................................... 45
Juxtaposition Perm: 2AC..............................................................................45
Juxtaposition Perm: 1AR..............................................................................46
Campbell Perm: 2AC....................................................................................49
Campbell Perm: 1AR..................................................................................... 50
Strategic Essentialism Perm: 2AC.................................................................51
Strategic Essentialism Perm: 1AR.................................................................52
Bleiker Perm: 2AC......................................................................................... 53
Perm Solves: Coalitions Key.........................................................................54
Perm Solves: Hybridization Effective...........................................................55
Perm Solves: Multifaceted Resistance Best..................................................55
Perm Solves: Radicalism Dooms the Movement..........................................55
Perm Solves: Working within Institutions Key to Change............................55
**Classic Turns**.......................................................................................... 55
Derrida Turn: 2AC........................................................................................55
Fear of Co-optation Turn: 2AC.....................................................................55
Fear of Co-optation Turn: 1AR......................................................................55
The Fetish: 2AC............................................................................................. 55
The Fetish: 1AR............................................................................................. 55
Authenticity Impossible: 1AR.......................................................................55
Kulynych Turn: 2AC...................................................................................... 55
Kulynych Turn: 1AR......................................................................................55
Praxis Turn: 2AC........................................................................................... 55
Praxis Turn:1AR............................................................................................ 55
Praxis Turn: 2AR..........................................................................................55
Praxis Turn: Ext............................................................................................ 55
Presymbolism Turn: 2AC..............................................................................55
Presymbolism Turn: 1AR..............................................................................55
Rejection Bad Turn: 2AC..............................................................................55
Rejection Bad Turn: 1AR...............................................................................55
Rejection Bad Turn: Ext................................................................................55
Ricouer Turn: 2AC........................................................................................55
Ricoeur Turn: 1AR........................................................................................55
Ricoeur Turn: Ext.........................................................................................55
Romanticization Turn: 2AC..........................................................................55
Romanticization Turn: 1AR..........................................................................55
Romanticization Turn: 2AR..........................................................................55
Said Turn: 2AC.............................................................................................. 55
Academic Work Spurs Activism: Ext (1/2)...................................................55
Academics as Politics is Bad (1/2).................................................................55
Criticism Destroys Agency............................................................................55
Criticism is Nihilistic (1/4)............................................................................55
**Postmodernism Bad**...............................................................................55

Kritik Answers
Floating Subjectivity Bad (1/3).....................................................................55
**Pragmatism**............................................................................................ 55
Pragmatism Good: 2AC (1/3)........................................................................55
Plan focus good: Rorty (1/2).........................................................................55
**Realism**................................................................................................... 55
Realism Good: 2AC (1/2)..............................................................................55
#1 Mearsheimer: 1AR....................................................................................55
#1 Mearsheimer: Ext.....................................................................................55
#2 Guzzini: 1AR............................................................................................55
#2 Guzzini: Ext.............................................................................................55
#3 Murray: 1AR............................................................................................. 55
#3 Murray: Ext.............................................................................................. 55
Democratic Realism Solves the Links...........................................................55
Violence is Endemic......................................................................................55
Realism Good: Prevents Nuclear War...........................................................55
Realism Good: Prevents War (1/3)...............................................................55
Realism Good: Militarism Solves War (1/2).................................................55
Realism Good: Militarism Solves Genocide..................................................55
Realism Good: Militarism Solves Democracy...............................................55
Alt Bad: Could Make Things Worse..............................................................55
Alt Fails: Realism Inevitable (1/2)................................................................55
Alt Fails: Realism Will Reasset Itself............................................................55
IR is Realist Now (1/2)..................................................................................55
Miscalculation Inevitable..............................................................................55
Perm Solves: Realism Necessary to Understand Parts of IR........................55
A2 9/11 Disproves Realism........................................................................55
A2 Cold War Disproves Realism (1/2).......................................................55
A2 Cold War End Proves Liberalism..........................................................55
A2 Cooperation Good (1/2)........................................................................55
A2 Democracy Solves War.........................................................................55
A2 Defense Solves......................................................................................55
A2 Human Nature...................................................................................... 55
A2 Mindset Shift........................................................................................55
A2 Realism Assumes States Rational.........................................................55
A2 Realism Constructs Threats..................................................................55
A2 Realism is Amoral.................................................................................55
A2 Realism is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (1/2)...........................................55
A2 Social Constructivism (1/3)..................................................................55
A2 State/Sovereignty Bad..........................................................................55
**Calculability/Util**....................................................................................55
Utilitarianism Good: 2AC (1/2).....................................................................55
Utilitarianism Good: 1AR..............................................................................55
Calculability Good: 2AC (1/2).......................................................................55
A2 Tyranny of Survival (1/2)......................................................................55
A2 Ontology First: 2AC..............................................................................55
A2 Your Impact is Inevitable: 2AC.............................................................55
A2 Your Impact is Inevitable: 1AR.............................................................55
A2 Your Impact = Bare Life: 2AC (1/3)......................................................55
A2 No Value to Life: 2AC (1/3)..................................................................55
No Value To Life Justifies Genocide..........................................................55
No Value To Life Justifies Nazism.............................................................55
Theres Always Value To Life........................................................................55
A2 Communication Scholar Framework: 2AC...........................................55
**Democratic Talk**.....................................................................................55
Democratic Talk Turn: 2AC (1/2).................................................................55
Democratic Talk Turn: 1AR (1/3)..................................................................55
Debate Solves Democratic Talk: Ext.............................................................55
Democratic Talk Key to Autonomy: Ext........................................................55
Democratic Talk Key to Checking Right: Ext................................................55
Restoring Public Sphere Solves Oppression: Ext..........................................55
Talk is Action: Ext......................................................................................... 55
**Performance**........................................................................................... 55
A2 Performativity (1/2)..............................................................................55
Performance is Commodified (1/2)..............................................................55
Performance Fails.........................................................................................55
**Link Answers: General**...........................................................................55
A2 The Case is Apolitical/Has No Theory..................................................55
**Alternative Answers: General**................................................................55
Individual Action Fails..................................................................................55
Mann............................................................................................................. 55
Power Vaccuum............................................................................................55
**SPECIFIC K ANSWERS**.........................................................................55
**Apocalyptic Rhetoric**..............................................................................55

Kritik Answers
Perm Solvency............................................................................................... 55
Apocalyptic Rhetoric Good (1/3)..................................................................55
**Badiou**.................................................................................................... 55
A2 Badiou: 2AC.......................................................................................... 55
Perm Solvency (1/3)...................................................................................... 55
Human Rights Solve.....................................................................................55
Double Bind.................................................................................................. 55
Alternative Fractures Coalitions...................................................................55
Divorcing Politics from State Bad.................................................................55
**Baudrillard**............................................................................................. 55
Baudrillard Destroys Social Change (1/2).....................................................55
Alternative Masks Violence...........................................................................55
Our Representations Solve............................................................................55
Baudrillard is Wrong (1/2)............................................................................55
A2 Disaster Porn (1/3)...............................................................................55
**Butler**...................................................................................................... 55
Butler Answers: 2AC (1/2)............................................................................55
A2 Legal Categories Bad............................................................................55
**Biopolitics**.............................................................................................. 55
Agamben Answers: 2AC (1/6).......................................................................55
#2 Alternative Kills Liberation: 1AR (1/2)....................................................55
#5 Perm: 1AR................................................................................................ 55
#5 Perm: Ext................................................................................................. 55
#7 Good Biopower: 1AR (1/2).......................................................................55
#9 Essentialism: 1AR (1/2)...........................................................................55
#9 Essentialism: Ext.....................................................................................55
#10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness: 1AR (1/2)...........................................55
#10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness: Ext (1/3)............................................55
A2 Neilson Conclude Negative: 1AR..........................................................55
#11 Agamben Misunderstands Sovereignty: 1AR.........................................55
#11 Agamben Misunderstands Sovereignty: Ext (1/2)..................................55
#13 Praxis: 1AR............................................................................................. 55
#14 Liberalism Doesnt Cause Exception: 1AR.............................................55
Agamben Collapses the State........................................................................55
**Foucault**................................................................................................. 55
Foucault Answers: 2AC (1/3)........................................................................55
#2 Perm: 1AR................................................................................................ 55
Juxtaposition Solves: 1AR (1/2)....................................................................55
#5 Demands on the State Good: 1AR (1/4)...................................................55
#6 Nihilism (Cook): 1AR (1/2)......................................................................55
#10 Reformism Good: 1AR...........................................................................55
Alt Fails: Body Cannot Be a Site of Resistance..............................................55
Alt Fails: Cannot Escape Subjectivity............................................................55
Alt Fails: Geneologies Dont Produce Change...............................................55
Alt Fails: Remains Enmeshed in Power........................................................55
Alt Fails: Praxis............................................................................................. 55
Alt Fails: Suspicion.......................................................................................55
**Benjamin**................................................................................................ 55
Benjamin Answers: 2AC...............................................................................55
**Chaloupka**.............................................................................................. 55
Chaloupka Answers: 2AC (1/3).....................................................................55
**CLS**......................................................................................................... 55
CLS Answers: 2AC (1/4)................................................................................55
#4 Permutation: 1AR (1/2)...........................................................................55
#7 Experiential Deconstruction Turn: 1AR...................................................55
A2 Religious Institution Rationalized Oppression: 1AR............................55
#8 Liberalism Good Turn: 1AR.....................................................................55
No Links (1/2)............................................................................................... 55
Turns: Ricoeur.............................................................................................. 55
Turns: Judicial Oppression...........................................................................55
Turns: Criticism Perpetuates Capitalism......................................................55
Turns: Law Key to Solving Atrocity..............................................................55
Turns: Law Key to Solving Exploitation........................................................55
Turns: Rights Good (1/4)..............................................................................55
Turns: Alternative Causes Rights Rollback...................................................55
Turns: Minorities.......................................................................................... 55
Turn: Working in System Good (1/2)...........................................................55
Indeterminacy False (1/4).............................................................................55
A2 Language Makes Law Indeterminate: 2AC...........................................55
CLS Recreates Oppression (1/2)...................................................................55
CLS is Nihilistic............................................................................................. 55
No Alternative (1/2)......................................................................................55
Alternative Fails: Elitism..............................................................................55

Kritik Answers
Alternative Fails: Fractures Movement.........................................................55
Alternative Fails: Indeterminacy Kills Criticism...........................................55
Alternative Fails: Historical Record of Marxism..........................................55
Alternative Fails: Non-Rights Strategies Bad...............................................55
Alternative Fails: Praxis (1/3).......................................................................55
A2 Thats Not Our Indeterminacy Thesis: 1AR..........................................55
A2 Reification: 2AC....................................................................................55
A2 Rights Tradeoff: 2AC............................................................................55
A2 Feminist Jurisprudence: 2AC...............................................................55
A2 Fem K of Intl Law: 2AC........................................................................55
**CRT**........................................................................................................ 55
CRT Answers: 2AC (1/4)...............................................................................55
#5 Perm: 1AR................................................................................................ 55
**Cuomo**.................................................................................................... 55
Preventing Nuke War Is a Prerequisite to Positive Peace.............................55
Negative Peace Key to Positive Peace...........................................................55
Absolutism Bad............................................................................................. 55
**Deep Ecology**.......................................................................................... 55
Permutation Solvency: 2AC..........................................................................55
Permutation Solvency: 1AR..........................................................................55
Anthro Good/Inevitable (1/3).......................................................................55
Human Intervention Good............................................................................55
Deep Ecology Justifies Ecocide (1/2)............................................................55
Deep Ecology Reinscribes Anthropocentrism (1/2)......................................55
Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: 2AC............................................................55
Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: Ext (1/2).....................................................55
A2 Were Not Fascists: 1AR........................................................................55
Deep Ecology Justifies State/Capitalism......................................................55
Deep Ecology Creates Suffering....................................................................55
Case Comes First........................................................................................... 55
Alternative Fails: Bad Activism.....................................................................55
Alternative Fails: Premodern Society Bad....................................................55
Asteroid Turn................................................................................................ 55
HIV Turn....................................................................................................... 55
African AIDS Outweighs...............................................................................55
Singularity Turn............................................................................................ 55
**Deleuze and Guattari**..............................................................................55
Perms............................................................................................................ 55
Alternative Increases Oppression.................................................................55
Deleuze Bad (General)..................................................................................55
D & G Exclude Women.................................................................................55
A2 Life is Carbon........................................................................................ 55
A2 Death Doesnt Destroy Being: 2AC (1/2)..............................................55
A2 Life is Meaningless Because the Sun Will Go Out: 2AC.......................55
**Derrida**................................................................................................... 55
A2 Deconstruction....................................................................................... 55
A2 New International (1/2)........................................................................55
**Discourse Kritiks (General)**....................................................................55
Discourse Kritik Answers: 2AC (1/3)............................................................55
Newspeak Turn: 1AR..................................................................................55
#2 Newspeak Turn: Ext (1/5)........................................................................55
#4 Censorship Bad Turns: 1AR.....................................................................55
#4 Censorship Bad Turns: Ext (1/4).............................................................55
#7 Discourse Focus Trades off with Action: 1AR..........................................55
#7 Discourse Focus Trades off with Action: Ext...........................................55
#8 Alternative Fails: 1AR..............................................................................55
Holocaust Trivialization Answers: 2AC (1/3)...............................................55
A2 Representation Links (1/4)...................................................................55
A2 Indigenous Peoples Labels Bad: 2AC...................................................55
EPrime Answers: 2AC (1/3)..........................................................................55
EPrime Bad (Jack Attack!)............................................................................55
**Fear Bad**................................................................................................. 55
A2 Fear of Death Bad: 2AC (1/5)...............................................................55
#3 Good Fear of Death: 1AR (1/2)................................................................55
#4 Repression Turn: 1AR (1/3).....................................................................55
#5 Fear is Key to Love: 1AR..........................................................................55
#6 Inaction Turn: 1AR..................................................................................55
#7 Fear Solves War: 1AR...............................................................................55
Spectacle of Death Good (1/4)......................................................................55
**Empire**.................................................................................................... 55
Movements Fail............................................................................................. 55
Alternative Causes Violence..........................................................................55
Alternative is False Radicalism.....................................................................55

Kritik Answers
Capitalism is Sustainable..............................................................................55
Resistance Fails............................................................................................. 55
Alternative = Oppression..............................................................................55
Alternative Fractures Other Movements......................................................55
Alternative Causes Terrorism.......................................................................55
**Exceptionalism (USC)**............................................................................55
Exceptionalism Answers: 2AC......................................................................55
**Feminism**............................................................................................... 55
Feminism Answers: 2AC (1/2)......................................................................55
White Feminism Bad: 1AR............................................................................55
**Gift**......................................................................................................... 55
A2 The Gift: 2AC (1/4)...............................................................................55
Anti-Globalization Turn: 1AR (1/2)..............................................................55
Anti-Globalization Movements Up Now (1/2)..............................................55
Provisional Truth Turn: 2AC (1/2)................................................................55
Provisional Truth: 1AR..................................................................................55
**Global/Local**........................................................................................... 55
Micropolitics Only Benefit Privileged...........................................................55
Localism Causes Oppression (1/2)................................................................55
Globalism Key to Resistance.........................................................................55
Alternative Kills Movements.........................................................................55
Rejection Bad................................................................................................ 55
A2 Localism................................................................................................ 55
Permutation.................................................................................................. 55
**Habeas Corpus**.......................................................................................55
Habeas Corpus Answers: 2AC (1/3)..............................................................55
**Habermas**............................................................................................... 55
Habermas Answers: 2AC..............................................................................55

**Heidegger**..........55
Ethics Turn.................................................................................................... 55
Ontological Fascism Turn: 2AC....................................................................55
Ontology = Nazism: 1AR...............................................................................55
Ontology = Nazism: Ext (1/3).......................................................................55
A2 We Dont Advocate Nazism: 1AR..........................................................55
A2 Nazism is Inauthentic: 1AR..................................................................55
Heidegger Kills Change.................................................................................55
Heidegger Irrelevent.....................................................................................55
Rejecting Tech Leads to Extinction...............................................................55
Alternative Fails: Lapses Into Ontic Thought...............................................55
Alternative Fails: Tech Returns....................................................................55
Alternative Causes Suffering.........................................................................55
Alternative Causes Paralysis (1/2)................................................................55
Heidegger Was a Nazi...................................................................................55
Anti-Humanism Justifies Genocide..............................................................55
Liberal Humanism Solves Oppression..........................................................55
Humanism Solves Genocide.........................................................................55
A2 Reject Technology: 2AC........................................................................55
A2 Spanos: 2AC (1/3)....................................................................................55
A2 Spanos: 2AC (3/3)...................................................................................55
HR Bad Answers: 2AC (1/4).........................................................................55
#3 Essentialism Turn: 1AR...........................................................................55
#5 Relativist Apologism Turn: 1AR...............................................................55
#8 Permutation: 1AR (1/3)...........................................................................55
#10 Zizek Presymbolism: 1AR (1/2)..............................................................55
No Link......................................................................................................... 55
Relativism Is Self-Refuting...........................................................................55
Defense: Non-Westerners Want Dignity......................................................55
A2 Foundationalism Bad...........................................................................55
A2 Morality Is Culturally Created..............................................................55
K = Imperialist.............................................................................................. 55
**Kappeler**................................................................................................. 55
Kappeler Answers: 2AC (1/5)........................................................................55
#5 Alternative Causes Violence: 1AR (1/2)...................................................55
#7 Negation: 1AR.......................................................................................... 55
#8 Subversion: 1AR......................................................................................55
#12 Authenticity: 1AR...................................................................................55
**Kato**........................................................................................................ 55
Kato Answers: 2AC (1/4)...............................................................................55
**Levinas/Derrida**.....................................................................................55
A2 Infinite Responsibility (1/3).................................................................55
Levinas Destroys Ethics (1/2).......................................................................55

Kritik Answers
Levinas/Derrida Destroy Ethics....................................................................55
**Nietzsche**................................................................................................ 55
Nietzsche Answers: 2AC (1/6).......................................................................55
Nietzsche = Nihilism.....................................................................................55
Nietzsche Legitimizes Genocide (1/2)...........................................................55
Nietzsche Legitimizes Patriarchy..................................................................55
Alternative Causes Annihilation...................................................................55
Nihilism Fails................................................................................................ 55
Nihilism Causes Terrorism (1/2)..................................................................55
Nihilism Causes Terrorism (2/2)..................................................................55
Nihilism is the Root Cause of Violence.........................................................55
Nihilism Causes Authoritarianism................................................................55
**Nonviolence**...........................................................................................55
Nonviolence Answers: 2AC (1/6)..................................................................55
#2 Pragmatic Pacifism Perm: 1AR (1/2).......................................................55
A2 Violence Snowballs: 1AR......................................................................55
#5 Violence Inevitable: 1AR..........................................................................55
#7 Pacifism Allows Atrocity: 1AR..................................................................55
Pacifism = State Collusion (1/2)...................................................................55
Embracing Violence = Nonviolence..............................................................55
Pacifism = Violence (1/3)..............................................................................55
Pacifism Doesnt Solve Violence...................................................................55
Pacifist Activism Fails: General....................................................................55
Pacifist Activism Fails: Law is Violent..........................................................55
Pacifist Activism Fails: Final Solution (1/3).................................................55
Pacifist Activism Fails: Final Solution (3/3).................................................55
Civil Disobedience Fails (1/2).......................................................................55
A2 Violence Alienates the People: 2AC......................................................55
A2 Non-Violence Key to Prevent Eradication of Movement: 2AC.............55
Pacifism Bad: War Good (1/2)......................................................................55
Pacifism Bad: Unethical................................................................................55
Pacifism Causes Oppression.........................................................................55
Pacifism Causes Aggression (1/2).................................................................55
**Normativity**............................................................................................ 55
Normativity Answers: 2AC (1/7)...................................................................55
#3 Permutation: 1AR....................................................................................55
#3 Permutation: Ext.....................................................................................55
#5 Sublime Justice: 1AR...............................................................................55
#7 Alt Reinscribes Subject: 1AR (1/2)...........................................................55
#9 Normativity Good: 1AR............................................................................55
#10 Simulation/Roleplaying Good: 1AR (1/3)..............................................55
#11 Alt Lapses Back into NLT: 1AR...............................................................55
#11 Alt Lapses Back into NLT: Ext................................................................55
Normative Thought Inevitable (1/3).............................................................55
Alternative Fails............................................................................................ 55
Pragmatism Good.........................................................................................55
**Nuclearism**............................................................................................. 55
Nuclearism Answers: 2AC (1/3)....................................................................55
#1 Permutation: 1AR.....................................................................................55
#5 Fear of Nuc Weapons Solves Usage: 1AR.................................................55
#5 Fear of Nuc Weapons Solves Usage: Ext..................................................55
#5 Nuclear Imagery Good: 1AR....................................................................55
A2 Nuclear Numbing: 2AC.........................................................................55
A2 Nuclear Deterrence Immoral: 2AC (1/2)..............................................55
A2 Proliferation K: 2AC.............................................................................55
**Religion**.................................................................................................. 55
Wrath of God Answers: 2AC (1/6)................................................................55
#1 Finite Quantum States: 1AR.....................................................................55
A2 Cant Disprove Gods Existence: 1AR....................................................55
#7 Religious Suffering: 1AR (1/3).................................................................55
A2 Those Ppl Werent Real Christians: 1AR...............................................55
#8 Evilution Disproves Religion: 1AR..........................................................55
Evolution Contradicts Christianity: Ext (1/2)...............................................55
A2 Evolution Is Only a Theory: 1AR..........................................................55
A2 Evolution Contradicts Thermodynamics: 1AR.....................................55
A2 No Transitional Fossils: 1AR................................................................55
#12 Sexual Abuse: 1AR..................................................................................55
Christianity = Sex Abuse: Ext (1/3)...............................................................55
A2 Life Without God Pointless: 1AR..........................................................55
A2 Life Without God is Terrifying: 1AR.....................................................55
Alternative Hurts Religion............................................................................55
**Securitization**.........................................................................................55
Security Good: Helps Marginalized People...................................................55

Kritik Answers
Alt Bad: Allows Suffering to Continue..........................................................55
Alt Fails: Engagement/Nonengagement Doublebind...................................55
Alt Fails: Securitizes Itself.............................................................................55
Perm Solves: Starting Point..........................................................................55
Perm Solves: Must Act..................................................................................55
A2 Dillon: 2AC...........................................................................................55
**Speaking for Others**................................................................................55
A2 Speaking for Others: 2AC (1/2)............................................................55
#3 Retreat: 1AR............................................................................................. 55
#3 Retreat: Ext.............................................................................................. 55
#6 Perm: 1AR................................................................................................ 55
#9 Reductionism: 1AR..................................................................................55
The Alternative is a Fantasy..........................................................................55
**State Bad, Juhdge**...................................................................................55
Strategic Use of State Good...........................................................................55
State is Key to Solving Oppression (1/2).......................................................55
State Key to Solving War (1/2)......................................................................55
Alternative Creates Worse Oppression (1/2)................................................55
Alternative Causes Nuclear War...................................................................55
Permutation Solvency (1/3)..........................................................................55
No Link......................................................................................................... 55
No Alternative............................................................................................... 55
A2 Borders: 2AC......................................................................................... 55
**Terror Talk**............................................................................................. 55
Terror Talk Answers: 2AC (1/5)....................................................................55
Terror Discourse Good: 1AR.........................................................................55
Counterspeech Solves: 1AR...........................................................................55
**Threat Construction**...............................................................................55
Threat Construction Answers: 2AC (1/3)......................................................55
#2 Threat Rhetoric Deters War: 1AR............................................................55
#5 Realism Inevitable: 1AR...........................................................................55
#7 Scenario Analysis Good: 1AR (1/3)..........................................................55
#9 Prefer Our Args: 1AR...............................................................................55
Dillon Supports Acting Against Terrorism...................................................55
**Zizek: Psychopolitics**..............................................................................55
Lacan Destroys Social Change (1/2).............................................................55
Lacan = Being Towards Death......................................................................55
Lacan = Oppression......................................................................................55
A2 Stavrakakis: 2AC...................................................................................55
Marxism Answers: 2AC (1/2)........................................................................55
Brown Turns (1/2)........................................................................................55
Permutation Key to Socialism.......................................................................55
**Miscellaneous**......................................................................................... 55
A2 Art (1/2)................................................................................................ 55
A2 Love...................................................................................................... 55
A2 Poetry.................................................................................................... 55
A2 Silence................................................................................................... 55
A2 Third World Bad.................................................................................55

Kritik Answers

**GENERAL K ANSWERS**
**Framework**
Fiat Good: 2AC
Next, our interpretation is that plan is a yes/no question. If its better than the squo or a competing policy option,
we win. Thats good because
A.

It is the most predictable because the resolution asks a question about federal action. The lack of
individual agency stipulations in the resolution mean that introducing such questions are outside the
scope of the subject matter we were asked to prepare to debate. We would be happy to address such
concerns under different resolutions

B.

It facilitates the best policy analysis because it ensures that we are not forced to compare aff apples
versus neg oranges

C.

Aff choice justifiesthey can run critical affirmatives if they want and we will engage themthey
should reciprocally respect our choice to play the fiat game

D.

Our affirmative impact claims necessitateclaims of individual agency beg the question of the efficacy
of liberal politics, and we impact turn such claims by proving that their drive for unfettered autonomy
lets the government get away with destroying the world

E.

Most educationalkritiks are run in debate because graduate assistants like to talk about their course
readings with debaterswe lack the foundational understanding to engage in high speed discourse
about such arguments until weve done our homework, whereas high school civics provides adequate
grounding for policy debate. We think that there should be two debate leagues: a policy circuit for
undergrads and a critical circuit for grad students.

F.

Even if we lose the fiat debate, we still get to leverage our aff impacts against those of the kritikthe
discursive (or other) mechanism through which their alternative solves is just as available to our
message about the necessity of authoritarianism. We are both theoretical kritiks of the status quo

Kritik Answers

General Defense of the Aff: 2AC (1/2)

PERM DO BOTH
PERM DO THE PLAN AND ALL OF THE ALTERNATIVE
EXCEPT THE PARTS THAT LINK TO PLAN
POLICYMAKING PROVIDES A UNIQUE SPACE TO BECOME
EDUCATED ABOUT CRITICAL ADVOCACY, THE ONLY
ALTERNATIVE IS THE CREATION OF A NEW ELITE
Coverstone 95
[Alan, Princeton High School, An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchells Outward Activist Turn,
www.wfu.edu/Student-organizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm, acc
3-16-05//uwyo-ajl]

Yet, Mitchell goes too far. In two important areas, his argument is slightly
miscalibrated. First, Mitchell underestimates the value of debate as it is currently
practiced. There is greater value in the somewhat insular nature of our present
activity than he assumes. Debate's inward focus creates an unusual space for
training and practice with the tools of modem political discourse. Such space is
largely unavailable elsewhere in American society. Second, Mitchell overextends
his concept of activism. He argues fervently for mass action along ideological lines.
Such a turn replaces control by society's information elite with control by an elite
all our own. More than any other group in America today, practitioners of debate
should recognize the subtle issues upon which political diversity turns. Mitchell's
search for broad themes around which to organize mass action runs counter to this
insight. As a result, Mitchell's call for an outward activist turn threatens to subvert
the very values it seeks to achieve.

KRITIK CANT SOLVE THE AFF EXTEND THE TRIBE AND

LARSON EVIDENCE. IF THE COURTS DONT ACT, BUSH WILL
CONTINUE DETAINMENT, WHICH IS WORSE THAN PLAN
WE OUTWEIGH: FAILURE PASS PLAN THREATENS
MULTIPLE EXTINCTION SCENARIOS, INCLUDING
INTERNATIONAL LAW, MULTILATERALISM, EXECUTIVE
POWER, DEMOCRACY, AND RUSSIAN INDEPENDENCE.
EVEN IF THEY WIN ONE BIG IMPACT, WERE HOSING THEM
PLAN SOLVES BETTER THAN THE ALTERNATIVE
Cole 2003

[David, Prof. Georgetown U. Law Center, Judging the Next Emergency: Judicial Review
and Individual Rights in Times of Crisis, 101 Mich. L. Rev. 2565, August, LN//uwyo-ajl]
To be sure, judicial decisions are not the only forces that may constrain government actors in the next emergency.
Developing cultural norms may also play a role. As noted above, Korematsu has never been formally overruled, but it is
nonetheless highly unlikely that anything on the scale of the Japanese internment would happen again. The cultural
condemnation of that initiative, reflected in Congress's issuance of a formal apology and restitution, n52 has been so
powerful that the option is a nonstarter even without controlling Supreme Court law. But even here, the legislative
apology followed judicial decisions nullifying the convictions on writs of coram nobis. n53 In addition , the formal

requirements that judges give reasons that are binding on future judges means that judicial
decisions are likely to play a more specific constraining function than the development of
cultural norms. Indeed, John Finn has argued that the obligation to give reasons is constitutive of constitutionalism and underscores the necessity of
judicial review to any meaningful system of constitutional law. n54 Cultural norms and political initiatives are rarely as clear-cut as a
legal prohibition, and their very contestability means that they are likely to exert less restraining
force than a judicial holding. Court decisions are, of course, also contestable, but generally along a narrower
range of alternatives.

Kritik Answers

10

Kritik Answers

General Defense of the Aff: 2AC (2/2)

SPECIFIC SOLVENCY TRUMPS PREFER OUR EV ABOUT
HOW OVERRULING QUIRIN SOLVES ABUSIVE DETAINMENT
TO THEIR ABSTRACT CARDS THAT DONT ASSUME PLAN
WE MUST ASSUME A DOUBLE-RESPONSIBILITY TO
CRITICIZE INSTITUTIONS WHILE USING SOVEREIGNTY
AGAINST ITSELF
MICHAELSON & SHERSHOW (Profs of Engl @ MSU and UC Davis)
2004
[Scott & Scott, Jan. 11, p. online: http://www.merip.org/mero/mero011104.html, accessed
June 21, 2005 //buntin]

The act of sovereignty that captures the Guantnamo detainees only to push them beyond
the reach and protection of the sovereign state is the very manifestation of the existing state
system and its corollary values. Critics are confronted with a Hobson's choice between
attempting to limit or suspend the exercise of sovereignty through increasing legal
regulation or endorsing the exercise of sovereignty as a necessary corrective to injustice (as
in the king's or executive's pardon). On this point, progressive legal theorists have been split.
But the ultimate answer cannot lie solely in the enforcement of existing international law
and the production of yet more international documents within the same framework, nor in
the tenuous hope for occasional exceptions to that sovereign exceptionality that is always the
essential form of sovereign power. International law alone will never avail, and not merely
because its own logic always holds in reserve a right to the same indiscriminate violence that
it condemns in the guerrilla, the pirate or the terrorist. Sovereignty is the principle and
activity that founds the state, and therefore constitutes its innermost and outermost
possibility. The sovereign black hole, loophole or zone of legal limbo is foundational for the
existing juridico-political order. Even more broadly, within that order, the absolute end of
sovereignty is unthinkable. Without sovereignty, no decisions; and without decisions, no
justice. Since sovereignty itself is inevitable, yet particular instances of sovereign power
must still be confronted and challenged, critics of the current situation must assume a
double responsibility. On the one hand, the present resources of national and international
law must indeed be pursued to their limits, to discover and interpret precedents for the
urgent decisions of the day, and, more importantly, to set new precedents for decisions still
to come. But on the other hand, since law itself cannot in principle ever be adequate to the
full enormity of Guantnamo, sovereignty itself must be torqued in a strange reversal, and
made to work against itself. In other words, the sovereignty of strong states with the power
to decide global matters -- the sovereignty that is, after all, finally a collective force, a power
"of the people, by the people and for the people" -- must be expended without reserve in the
name, not of law, but of justice, to the point where the territory and its boundary trembles.
Such is not a mechanism or method which might be codified, because it will involve
sovereign (and hence unprecedented) acts and decisions; and because its goal is a justice
understood as an infinite task of thinking our relation to the Other. But as Jacques Derrida
suggests, "the fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news"; rather, one can "find in this
the political chance to all historical progress." All this is perhaps difficult to imagine in a
world so dominated by reasons of state and the fanaticism of borders and identities. But the
urgency of the task can hardly be overstated. At any rate, one thing is clear: at Guantnamo
Bay, as Walt Kelly once observed, "we have met the enemy and he is us."

11

Kritik Answers

Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Long) (~50

sec.)
Next, Floating PICs are bad:
1. Steals all aff ground- the plan is the foundation for all
affirmative offense in debate, allowing the negative to defend
the plan crushes our ability to answer arguments, including
their K. In a world where affirmatives are able to generate
foundational offense separate from the plan, the negatives
ability to debate is severely compromised, plan focus is best
for both teams.
2. Not educational- there is little education to be gained from
allowing the negative to agree that the plan is a good idea in
totality and that there was something wrong with the
Construction of the iac, this justifies allowing the negative
to Criticize the spelling of our tags, while advocating the
plan. Affirmatives rarely win in this world.
3. Undermines Reciprocal Burdens- allowing the negative to
advocate the plan means that the negatives burden has
shifted from disproving the plan to disproving anything that
the affirmative has said; that is too easy on negatives,
especially on a tiny topic with lots of generic negative ground.
Their argument justifies affirmatives defending the text of
the INC but not the justifications of the INC. It also justifies
severing out of everything that is not the plan.
4. We Turn their offensive arguments- They should have to win
the framework debate in order to win that their K comes
before the affirmative, allowing them to win because there is
a small risk that something was wrong with the aff, separate
from the plan, means that we dodge a discussion of
methodology and epistemology and its relationship to the aff,
they should have to win that there is a meaningful
relationship, not that there could be a meaningful
relationship. They dodge a discussion of these questions,
preventing any benefits of making affs defend their whole
iac.
5. This has to be a voting issue, we have to go for this argument
just to get back to ground zero; this should be a non-issue.

12

Kritik Answers

Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Short) (<20

sec.)
Next, Floating PICs are bad
1. Steals Aff ground- Floating PICs steal the only option that affs
have to generate offense, the plan.
2. Not educational- Floating PICs justify negatives defending the
plan and criticizing the spelling of our tags, crushing
education.
3. Not Reciprocal- the affirmative cannot agree with a bulk of
the neg strat and k their reps, we would have to win a
framework arg too.
4. We turn their offense- they sidestep a discussion of
epistemology and its effects on policymaking, not defending
the plan provides more meaningful education.
5. This has to be a voting issue, we have to go for this argument
just to get back to ground zero.

13

Kritik Answers

Do the Plan Perm: 2AC

Perm- do the plan.
Perm solves1. That the negative can divorce themselves from the bad
representations of the IAC surely means that we can too. If it
really is just as easy as saying, we defend the plan but not the
representations of the IAC; then there is no reason why we
would not be able to do the same thing.
2. No theoretical reason why the perm is illegit, they might win
substantive reasons why the our representations are tied to
our plan, but that is a reason why they also would not be able
to advocate it separate from the rest of the IAC, if the very
utterance of the rest of the iac ties it to the plan, then that is
irrevocable.
3. And we will defend that the perm is a test of the
competitiveness of part of their alternative- the part that
advocates the plan, which is decidedly not competitive, a
remedy to this non-competitive nature would be to disallow
the negative to advocate the plan.

14

Kritik Answers

#1 Steals Aff Ground: 1AR

Extend the 2AC #1- Floating PICs destroy all affirmative
Ground; the plan is the only way for affirmatives to generate
offense in debate. If the negative is allowed to defend the plan
as well, then there is no residual IAC offense that we can claim,
and the 2AC has to start from scratch, meaning that
affirmatives always start at a disadvantage. This pits the block
against the IAR, which means affs rarely ever win.
If instead the aff is able to generate offense in the IAC that does
not stem from the plan but something else, then debate for the
negative becomes difficult as they not only have to disprove the
plan but everything else.

15

Kritik Answers

#4 Ext. Turns Offense: 1AR

Extend the 2AC #4Any reason that they win that it is important for us to defend
the non-plan parts of the IAC, we will win are reasons why they
shouldnt defend the plan.
If the negative did not defend our plan, but solely engaged in a
criticism of our representations, then that would facilitate a
discussion of how our representations related to and affected
our plan. By choosing to defend the plan absent from the rest of
the IAC, they have limited our discussion to just one of
language, rather than including broader issues of epistemology.
This short-circuits any reason why it would be good or
educational to examine the representations because they have
severed them from

16

Kritik Answers

A2 Plan Focus Bad: 1AR

1. We will outweigh any of their arguments plan focus is bad
A. Ground- Both teams benefit immensely from plan focus
debate, their argument would not be possible in a world
where we didnt read a plan, most negative args would
be rendered meaningless
B. Education- the alternative is res-focused debate, which
prevents us from delving into the more interesting
aspects of the resolution by parametrisizing it.

17

Kritik Answers

A2 Plan is only a tiny part of the

speech/Discourse of 1AC is ~9 min.:
1AR
They say that the plan is relatively unimportant, this is just not
true:
1. The plan is the foundation for the rest of the affirmative,
taking the plan out of the affirmative would render the IAC
fairly nonsensical, just because the plan can be read
quickly does not render it meaningless.
2. This is untrue from the standpoint of the negative as well,
the plan is what they get before the round, not the entire
text of the affirmative, it is the focus of the debate in a
literal as well as figurative sense.

18

Kritik Answers

Must Have an Alternative: 2AC

NEXT, LACK OF ALT IS BAD
A. We need a text to provide us with ground to perm the kritiksuch arguments are critical tests
of the link
B. Utopian alternatives destroy debate because we can never win that the plan is better than
perfection
C. Vague alternatives are moving targets that prevent us from linking offense
D. It guts their solvency because their argument will never gain political traction, all of which
are voters for fairness and education

19

Kritik Answers

Hasty Generalization Bad: 2AC

HASTY GENERALIZATION
A. There are many instances where advocating government change is goodthese instances
would still vote to the K
B. Call to reject doesnt justify its utilitarian basisthere are still plenty of reasons to do the plan

20

Kritik Answers

Law Transformative: 2AC (1/2)

IT IS IMPORTANT THAT EACH ONE OF US DEFENDS THE
TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF THE LAW- WORLDWIDE
RIGHTS AND FREEDOM DEPEND ON IT
KENNEDY 06

(Anthony, Supreme Court Justice, Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the American Bar
Association, Federal News Service, August 12, 2006, Lexis)
we are at

turning point in the history of the law.

I sense, President Greco, as indicated in your remarks, that

another
The
Constitution gave us judges. It's really remarkable that it did. Remember that attacks and complaints against judges were one of the indictments, one of the
allegations, in the Declaration of Independence. The framers had been pushed around by judges. And what did they do? They created a judiciary and gave them life
tenure. Why did they do that? Because they were confident that the process of reason, the slow elaboration of the principles of justice through the case-by-case
method, was the surest way to interpret the Constitution. The framers knew that they were not prescient enough, and they were not brazen enough, to specify all of the
elements of justice. They knew this could become apparent only over time. They knew that the whole purpose of the Constitution is to rise above the inequities and the
injustices that you can't see. But now we are in an era where I sense something different happening. We know the truth needs no translation. There's a word for truth

the rule of law is essential. We hear a lot about security. But our best
we are not making the case as
well as we ought. It could be, to use a Pacific metaphor, that the tide has gone out and we're on the beach. But a tsunami of
expectations and discontent and demands and dissatisfaction may soon sweep in upon us.
We must explain to the rest of the world the meaning, the essentiality and the purpose of the
rule of law as it's understood by the American people and by other democracies throughout
the world. And we must begin to do a better job of it, and we must begin that now. (Applause.) I was
in every language. We know that the world is getting smaller. We know that

security, ultimately our only security, is in the world of ideas. And I sense a slight foreboding. I sense that

here in Hawaii, Governor Lingle, just a few months ago and met with the University of Hawaii law students. And I asked them, "What does the rule of law mean?" You
know, I never heard that term when I was in law school. And lawyers bandy it about a lot. Should it not be defined? If you parse it as a grammarian might, it doesn't
always work. You might have a dictator with laws that are known and that are enforced, but that can't be the rule of law. The rule of law does not exist just because a
dictator makes the trains run on time. And so I tried to define the rule of law. And before doing so, there were certain caveats. There are certain risks. The phrase has a
resonance, an allure, that you're reluctant to destroy. And we're often reluctant to talk about universal truths lest our efforts at formulating their specifics seem too
bland, too insufficient, for the great purpose behind the phrase. So there's a risk, when we talk about the rule of law, that you say too little or that you say too much;
that you say too little and you're facile, thereby preventing us from discovering other truths; that you say too much and that you're prolix. There's a reluctance to open
the bidding so that every interest group has its particular interest, its particular goal, incorporated in the rule of law. I always wanted to teach a law school course in
constitutional law to some very bright students who had never read the Constitution. And the way I'd do it is I'd say, "Now, here it is, but you can't read it. I want you
to tell me what you think the Constitution should contain if it's a model Constitution." They'd look. I'd say, "Now, don't peek." And just as an academic trick, I would
get them interested. I've done the same thing for you, and I'm glad it's dark, because I don't want you to look at it. I've given you a little definition of the rule of law. I
have one for all the Kameamea students. What would you put in your definition of the rule of law? Would you talk about process, knowing that there are certain truths
that are not evident to us now, that we're blind to the injustices and the prejudices of our own times? So you just talk about process? That really doesn't suffice. It's not
elevating enough. So you must talk about substance. What is the substance which you include? I suggested that the rule of law has three parts. This is simply a working
definition. If we were in the law school class at the University of Hawaii, or if we had more time, you could probably make some suggestions for how this should be
improved. But I think it's important for us to begin assessing where we are in this campaign to explain the meaning of freedom, the meaning of the rule of law, to a

There's a jury that's out. It's half the world. The verdict is not yet
in. The commitment to accept the western idea of democracy has not yet been made, and
they are waiting for you to make the case . I suggest that the rule of law has three parts. The first is
that the law is binding on the government and all of its officials. This may seem a rather self-evident matter, but it's
doubting world. My friends, make no mistake:

a proposition that most government officials in most countries do not fully understand. If an administrative agency and an administrator in that agency is charged
with giving you a permit, the permit is not given to you as a matter of grace. It's given to you because you're entitled to it, and it's his or her duty to give it to you. Very

The rule of law binds the government and all of its officials.

few countries in the world understand this.

This is an
essential lesson that must be taught if the corruption and the greed and the graft President Greco referred to are eliminated. The second part of the rule of law is there

the rule of law must

respect the dignity, equality and human rights of every person. And then there's a second sentence, and the second
sentence says that the people are entitled to have a voice in the laws that govern them . So there's a process element.
But it isn't just process, because the right to participate in government is nothing less than the right to help
shape your own destiny. And the framers of our Constitution made it very clear that each generation has a share, has a
chance to determine its own destiny, to determine its own direction. What are human rights? Is it the right to
for you on the little slip. It is, I think, in a sense, the most troubling for me. I'm not sure that it's complete. It says that

subsistence, the right to enough to eat, the right to breathe clean air, the right to an education? At this point the rule of law, as we, I think, would want to define it, may
depart from the idea of a model constitution. These are two different things. In the Constitution of the United States, there are a series of essentially negative
commands. "Congress shall make no law restricting free speech or the free press." "There shall be no unreasonable search and seizures." These are negative
commands. It's easier to have the Ten Commandments -- "Thou shalt not steal" -- than the Sermon on the Mount -- "Thou shalt love thy neighbor." It's harder to
enforce the latter. But what about affirmative rights? Aren't there some basic human entitlements? You see a man on a steam grate in the cold winter in Washington,
D.C. and you say, "Well, you have the right to a jury trial, and you actually have a right to own a newspaper." He'd say, "I'm cold. I'm hungry. I want to eat." Americans

if the rule of law is to have meaning, substance, hope, inspiration for the rest of
the world, it must be coupled with the opportunity to improve human existence. I became interested a
must understand that

few years ago in water systems in Africa, and I have attended a few lectures about it. Not long ago I heard a speaker say the following. He asked this question: "How
many hours of human labor per year are spent in the continent of Africa getting clean water?" This is work that falls on the shoulders of women. The answer was 8
billion hours a year. I was sitting in an audience like yours, thinking, "Now, did he say 8 million? No, that can't work out. Was it 80 million?" The answer is 8 billion.

The
biggest single cause of infant mortality in Africa and other undeveloped nations is diarrhea.
Children with a slight body mass dehydrate quickly, and there's nothing for the heart to
pump against. The heart can't pump if it's dry. This can be fixed. This is not rocket science. One of the
reasons it can't be fixed, under present conditions, is that governments are corrupt. And
people have a right to improve their lives, to gain basic security, without corrupt
governments depriving them of the very means of existence. CONTINUED ON NEXT
PAGEAnd I asked him about it later. He said, "This is very conservative, because I'm just talking about the water that's clean when it gets back to the source."

21

Kritik Answers

Law Transformative (2/2)

--KENNEDY 06 CONT-My third suggestion -- and it can only be a suggestion; it would be presumptuous to say that I can define the rule of law -- my third suggestion for you to think about

every person has a right to know what the laws are and to
enforce them without fear of retaliation or retribution . This is almost a process-sounding precept, but it's again substantive
as well. It's part of your identity, it's part of your self-definition, to know the laws that protect
you, to know the laws that are respected by your neighbors and friends and family. This is
part of who you are. And you're entitled to know this, and you're entitled to enforce them. I
surprised me when I wrote it, and it was this, that

was talking with some lawyers and judges not long ago from Bangladesh. They told me that a standard criminal sentence works something like this: A fine of three
dollars or nine to 12 months in jail, and at least 1,000 people a year spend a year in jail for want of the three dollars. I said, "Well, I'm not a man of great means, but I'll
write you a check for $1,000. That'll take care of 333 people." And they said, "Well, no, but then there'd be no deterrence." Is a nation, is a people, is a culture, is a

we must find some ways

to link the rule of law with real progress in improving the condition of humankind. We must have
society able to embrace the western idea of the rule of law under such conditions? I suggest to you the answer is no. And

some measures to assure that the vast aid, the work of the NGOs, the work of this association, has some immediate, visible, tangible return so that we can make the
case. You were gracious to mention my remarks, President Greco, in San Francisco, when you last met in that city. We talked about the criminal justice system. And I

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

mentioned at the time a book by

called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." And it occurred to me, when we were
coming here to Hawaii, that Solzhenitsyn might be relevant in a somewhat different connection. He was a writer whom I greatly admired. He had escaped from the
Soviet Union and from a gulag in order to write about that experience, and he was living in the United States. He was invited to Harvard to give the most important
address given every year to the Harvard students. It was in the mid or late '70s. I was living in California at the time. I was thrilled that my hero was addressing the
Harvard College. And this was pre-fax and Internet days, so it took me one or two days to get the text of his remarks, the text of his remarks from The New York Times.

attacked the West, and particularly the law

and the legal system. And he said that any society that defines the tissues of human
existence in legalistic terms is condemned to spiritual mediocrity. My hero was saying this about my profession,
And I was shocked, stunned, terribly disappointed to read his remarks, in which he

about the Constitution that is America's self-identity, about the Constitution that Americans still think as defining who they are as a people?I reflected on it for a few

We just define law differently than Solzhenitsyn did. From his era, from his
, law was a dictat, a ucas (ph) -- a command, a mandate. In sum, it was a cold decree. That's not
the meaning of law as our nation and our co- democracies define it. For us, law is a
liberating force. It's a promise. It's a covenant. It says that you can hope, you can dream, you
can dare, you can plan. You have joy in your existence. That's the meaning of the law as
Americans understand it, and that's the meaning of the law that we must explain to a
doubting world where the verdict is still out. You can make this case. You must make this
case. And that is because freedom -- your freedom, my freedom and the freedom of the next
generation -- hangs in the balance. I'm confident you will do this.
days, and then I got the answer.
culture

22

Kritik Answers

Policymaking Good: 1AR (1/2)

FIRST, EXTEND THE COVERSTONE 95 EVIDENCE. POLICY
DEBATE CREATES A SAFE SPACE ALLOWING US TO TEST
IDEAS, BECOMING EDUCATED ENOUGH TO HOLD ELITES
ACCOUNTABLE, STOPPING THE RISE OF NEW OPPRESSION
SECOND, DEBATE IS CIVIL SOCIETY: IT IS THE ROLE OF
CRITICAL INTELLECTUALS TO FORM A PUBLIC POLICY
SPHERE CONSTITUTED AROUND SPECIFIC POLICY IDEAS.
WE ARE NOT THE GOVERNMENT, BUT BY ORIENTING
OURSELVES TOWARDS THE STATE WE CAN ENSURE
EFFECTIVE POLITICS.
HABERMAS 98
[Jurgen, Prof. Philosophy at U. of Frankfurt, The Inclusion of the Other, p.
31//uwyo-crowe]
A law is valid in the moral sense when it could be accepted by everybody from the
perspective of each individual. Because only general laws fulfill the condition that they regulate matters in
the equal interest of all, practical reason finds expression in the generalizability or
universalizability of the interests expressed in the law. Thus a person takes the
moral point of view when he deliberates like a democratic legislator on whether the
practice that would result from the general observance of a hypothetically proposed
norm could be accepted by all those possibly affected viewed as potential colegislators. Each person participates in the role of co-legislator in a cooperative
enterprise and thereby adopts an intersubjectively extended perpective from which
it can be determined whether a controversial norm can count as generalizable from
the point of view of each participant. Pragmatic and ethical reasons, which retain their
internal connection to the interests and self0understanding of individual persons, also play a role in these
deliberations; but these agent-relative reasons no longer count as rational motives and value-orientations of
individual persons but as epistemic contributions to a discourse in which norms are examined with the aim of reaching a

Because a legislative practice can only be undertaken jointly, a

monological, egocentric operation of the generalization test in the manner of the
Golden Rule will not suffice.
communicative agreement.

23

Kritik Answers

Policymaking Good: 1AR (2/2)

THIRD, TECHNICAL, COMPETITIVE DEBATE IS A
DIALECTICAL METHOD THAT TEACHES STUDENTS ABOUT
INTERPLAY BETWEEN ARGUMENTS, TRAINING THEM FOR
POLICY ENGAGEMENT
Mitchell 2000
[Gordon R., the brilliant DOD at Pitt, Preface to Strategic Deception: Rhetoric, Science and Politics
in Missle Defense Advocacy, Michigan State University Press, 2000, xvi//uwyo]

intercollegiate policy debate is an odd and magical place, where a keen

spirit of competition drives debaters to amass voluminous research in preparation for
The world of

tournaments, and where the resulting density of ideas spurts speakers to cram arguments into strictly
timed presentation periods during contest rounds. Expert judges trained in policy analysis

keep track of such contests as they unfold at breakneck speed, with speakers
routinely delivering intricate argumentation at over 300 words per minute. To the
uninitiated onlooker, this style of debate reveals itself as an unintelligible charade, something like a movielength Federal Express commercial or an auctioneering competition gone bad. But there are rich

rewards for participants who master policy debate's special vocabulary, learn its
arcane rules, and acclimate themselves to the style of rapid-fire speaking needed to
keep up with the flow of arguments. The rigorous dialectical method of debate analysis
cultivates a panoramic style of critical thinking that elucidates subtle
interconnections among multiple positions and perspectives on policy
controversies. The intense pressure of debate competition instills a relentless
research ethic in participants. An inverted pyramid dynamic embedded in the
format of contest rounds teaches debaters to synthesize and distill their initial
positions down to the most cogent propositions for their final speeches.

FOURTH, ONLY STATE-CENTERED DISCUSSION ABOUT

POLITICS CAN REVERSE THE TREND TOWARD
TOTALITARIANISM. THIS DESTROYS DEBATE
TORGERSON 99
[Douglas, Prof and Chair Dept. Political Studies @ Trent U., The Promise of Green Politics:
Environmentalism and the Public Sphere, Duke University Press//uwyo-crowe]

One rationale for Arendt's emphasis on the intrinsic value of politics is that this value has been so
neglected by modernity that politics itself is threatened. Without a celebration of the
intrinsic value of politics, neither functional nor constitutive political activity has
any apparent rationale for continuing once its ends have been achieved. Functional
politics might well be replaced by a technocratic management of advanced
industrial society. A constitutive politics intent on social transformation might well be eclipsed by the coordinated
direction of a cohesive social movement. In neither ease would any need be left for what Arendt takes to be the essence of

there would be no need for debate.

Green authoritarianism, following in the footsteps of Hobbes, has been all too ready to reduce
politics to governance. Similarly, proponents of deep ecology, usually vague about politics, at least have been able
politics:

to recognize totalitarian dangers in a position that disparages public opinion in favor of objective management." Any attempt
to plot a comprehensive strategy for a cohesive green movement, moreover, ultimately has to adopt a no-nonsense posture
while erecting clear standards by which to identify and excommunicate the enemy that is within.
Green politics from its inception, however, has challenged the officialdom of advanced industrial society by invoking the
cultural idiom of the carnivalesque. Although tempted by visions of tragic heroism, as we saw in chapter, green politics has
also celebrated the irreverence of the comic, of a world turned upside down to crown the fool. In a context of political theater,
instrumentalism is often attenuated, at least momentarily displaced by a joy of performance. The comic dimension of
political action can also be more than episodic. The image of the Lilliputians tying up the giant suggests well the strength and
flexibility of a decentered constitutive politics. In a functional context, green politics offers its own technology of foolishness
in response to the dysfunctions of industrialism, even to the point of exceeding the comfortable limits of a so-called
responsible foolishness.
Highlighting the comic, these tendencies within green politics begin to suggest an intrinsic value to politics. To the
extent that this value is recognized, politics is inimical to authoritarianism and
offers a poison pill to the totalitarian propensities of an industrialized mass
society." To value political action for its own sake, in other words, at least has the
significant extrinsic value of defending against the antipolitical inclinations of

24

Kritik Answers
modernity. But what is the intrinsic value of politics? Arendt would locate this value in the virtuosity of political action,
particularly as displayed in debate. Although political debate surely has extrinsic value, this does not exhaust its value.

Debate is a language game that, to be played well, cannot simply be instrumentalized for
the services it can render but must also he played for its own sake. Any game pressed into
the service of external goals tends to lose its playful quality; it ceases to be fun.

25

Kritik Answers

Policymaking Good: Ext (1/3)

ACADEMIC SWITCH-SIDE DEBATING TEACHES STUDENTS
HOW TO ORGANIZE INFORMATION AND DEFEND
ARGUMENTS, RESISTING TOTALITARIAN INFORMATION
OVERLOAD
Coverstone 95

[Alan, Princeton High School, An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchells

Outward Activist Turn, www.wfu.edu/Studentorganizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm, acc 316-05//uwyo-ajl]
Mitchell's argument underestimates the nature of academic debate in three ways.
First, debate trains students in the very skills required for navigation in the public
sphere of the information age. In the past, political discourse was controlled by
those elements who controlled access to information. While this basic reality will
continue in the future, its essential features will change. No longer will mere
possession of information determine control of political life. Information is widely
available. For the first time in human history we face the prospect of an entirely
new threat. The risk of an information overload is already shifting control of
political discourse to superior information managers. It is no longer possible to
control political discourse by limiting access to information. Instead, control
belongs to those who are capable of identifying and delivering bits of information
to a thirsty public. Mitchell calls this the "desertification of the public sphere."
The public senses a deep desire for the ability to manage the information around
them. Yet, they are unsure how to process and make sense of it all. In this
environment, snake charmers and charlatans abound. The popularity of the
evening news wanes as more and more information becomes available. People
realize that these half hour glimpses at the news do not even come close to covering
all available information. They desperately want to select information for
themselves. So they watch CNN until they fall asleep. Gavel to gavel coverage of
political events assumes top spots on the Nielsen charts. Desperate to decide for
themselves, the public of the twenty-first century drinks deeply from the well of
information. When they are finished, they find they are no more able to decide.
Those who make decisions are envied and glorified.
Debate teaches individual decision-making for the information age. No other
academic activity available today teaches people more about information gathering,
assessment, selection, and delivery. Most importantly, debate teaches individuals
how to make and defend their own decisions. Debate is the only academic activity
that moves at the speed of the information age. Time is required for individuals to
achieve escape velocity. Academic debate holds tremendous value as a space for
training.
Mitchell's reflections are necessarily more accurate in his own situation. Over a
decade of debate has well positioned him to participate actively and directly in the
political process. Yet the skills he has did not develop overnight. Proper training
requires time. While there is a tremendous variation in the amount of training
required for effective navigation of the public sphere, the relative isolation of
academic debate is one of its virtues. Instead of turning students of debate
immediately outward, we should be encouraging more to enter the oasis. A thirsty
public, drunk on the product of anyone who claims a decision, needs to drink from
the pool of decision-making skills. Teaching these skills is our virtue.

26

Kritik Answers

Policymaking Good: Ext (2/3)

DEBATE TRAINS STUDENTS TO BECOME ACTIVISTS BY
TESTING THEIR OPINIONS AND BECAUSE OF ITS COVERT
NATURE BECOMING OUTWARDLY POLITICAL THREATENS
TO HAVE US INFILTRATED
Coverstone 95

[Alan, Princeton High School, An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchells

Outward Activist Turn, www.wfu.edu/Studentorganizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm, acc 316-05//uwyo-ajl]
Mitchell's argument underestimates the risks associated with an outward turn.
Individuals trained in the art and practice of debate are, indeed, well suited to the
task of entering the political world. At some unspecified point in one's training, the
same motivation and focus that has consumed Mitchell will also consume most of
us. At that point, political action becomes a proper endeavor. However, all of the
members of the academic debate community will not reach that point together. A
political outward turn threatens to corrupt the oasis in two ways. It makes our oasis
a target, and it threatens to politicize the training process.
As long as debate appears to be focused inwardly, political elites will not feel
threatened. Yet one of Mitchell's primary concerns is recognition of our oasis in the
political world. In this world we face well trained information managers. Sensing a
threat from "debate," they will begin to infiltrate our space. Ready made
information will increase and debaters will eat it up. Not yet able to truly discern
the relative values of information, young debaters will eventually be influenced
dramatically by the infiltration of political elites. Retaining our present anonymity
in political life offers a better hope for reinvigorating political discourse.
As perhaps the only truly non-partisan space in American political society,
academic debate holds the last real possibility for training active political
participants. Nowhere else are people allowed, let alone encouraged, to test all
manner of political ideas. This is the process through which debaters learn what
they believe and why they believe it. In many ways this natural evolution is made
possible by the isolation of the debate community. An example should help
illustrate this idea.
Like many young debaters, I learned a great deal about socialism early on. This was
not crammed down my throat. Rather, I learned about the issue in the free flow of
information that is debate. The intrigue of this, and other outmoded political
arguments, was in its relative unfamiliarity. Reading socialist literature avidly, I
was ready to take on the world. Yet I only had one side of the story. I was an easy
mark for the present political powers. Nevertheless, I decided to fight City Hall. I
had received a parking ticket which I felt was unfairly issued. Unable to convince
the parking department to see it my way, I went straight to the top. I wrote the
Mayor a letter. In this letter, I accused the city of exploitation of its citizens for the
purpose of capital accumulation. I presented a strong Marxist critique of parking
meters in my town. The mayor's reply was simple and straightforward. He called
me a communist. He said I was being silly and should pay the ticket. I was
completely embarrassed by the entire exchange. I thought I was ready to start the
revolution. In reality, I wasn't even ready to speak to the Mayor. I did learn from
the experience, but I did not learn what Gordon might have hoped. I learned to
stop reading useless material and to keep my opinions to myself.
Do we really want to force students into that type of situation? I wrote the mayor
on my own. Debaters will experiment with political activism on their own. This is
all part of the natural impulse for activism which debate inspires. Yet, in the
absence of such individual motivation, an outward turn threatens to short circuit
the learning process. Debate should capitalize on its isolation. We can teach our
students to examine all sides of an issue and reach individual conclusions before we
force them into political exchanges. To prematurely turn debaters out threatens to
undo the positive potential of involvement in debate.

27

Kritik Answers

Policymaking Good: Ext (3/3)

OUTWARD ACTIVISM RISKS CREATING A NEW
HOMOGENEOUS ELITE, CRUSHING IDEOLOGICAL DISSENT,
TURNING THEIR ARGUMENT
Coverstone 95

[Alan, Princeton High School, An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchells

Outward Activist Turn, www.wfu.edu/Studentorganizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm, acc 316-05//uwyo-ajl]
My third, and final reaction to Mitchell's proposal, targets his desire for mass
action. The danger is that we will replace mass control of the media/government
elite with a mass control of our own elite. The greatest virtue of academic debate is
its ability to teach people that they can and must make their own decisions. An
outward turn, organized along the lines of mass action, threatens to homogenize
the individual members of the debate community. Such an outcome will, at best,
politicize and fracture our community. At worst, it will coerce people to participate
before making their own decisions.
Debate trains people to make decisions by investigating the subtle nuances of
public policies. We are at our best when we teach students to tear apart the broad
themes around which traditional political activity is organized. As a result, we
experience a wide array of political views within academic debate. Even people who
support the same proposals or candidates do so for different and inconsistent
reasons. Only in academic debate will two supporters of political views argue
vehemently against each other. As a group, this reality means that mass political
action is doomed to fail. Debaters do not focus on the broad themes that enable
mass unity. The only theme that unites debaters is the realization that we are all
free to make our own decisions. Debaters learn to agree or disagree with opponents
with respect. Yet unity around this theme is not easily translated into unity on a
partisan political issue. Still worse, Mitchell's proposal undermines the one
unifying principle.
Mitchell must be looking for more. He is looking for a community wide value set
that discourages inaction. This means that an activist turn necessarily will compel
political action from many who are not yet prepared. The greatest danger in this
proposal is the likelihood that the control of the media/government elite will be
replaced by control of our own debate elite.
Emphasizing mass action tends to discourage individual political action. Some will
decide that they do not need to get involved, but this is by far the lesser of two evils.
Most will decide that they must be involved whether or not they feel strongly
committed to the issue. Mitchell places the cart before the horse. Rather than
letting ideas and opinions drive action as they do now, he encourages an
environment where action drives ideas for many people. Young debaters are
particularly vulnerable. They are likely to join in political action out of a desire to
"fit in." This cannot be what Mitchell desires. Political discourse is a dessert now
because there are more people trying to "fit in" that there are people trying to break
out.

28

Kritik Answers

A2 Only Learn As Spectators: 1AR

FIRST, NOT TRUE DEBATES ABOUT DETAINMENT TRAIN
US TO HOLD POLICYMAKERS ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR
DECISIONS. IF WE CANT HAVE A DEBATE, WE WONT KNOW
WHAT TO DO WHEN WE CONFRONT REACTIONARIES.
CROSS-APPLY COVERSTONE
SECOND, TURN VIEWING DEBATE DECISIONS AS
ACTIVISM, IN AND OF THEMSELVES, CRUSHES ACTUAL
POLITICAL ACTIVITY. WINNING A TOURNAMENT BECOMES
GOOD ENOUGH CREATING NIHILISTS WHO NEVER
ACTUALLY LOBBY THE GOVERNMENT.
THIRD, THIS IS EMPIRICALLY DENIED BY THE MASSES OF
DEBATERS WHO GO ON TO BECOME SOCIAL ACTIVISTS AND
PROGRESSIVE ATTORNEYS. WE WOULDNT HAVE PEOPLE
LIKE GORDON MITCHELL DOING WORK IN MISSILE
DEFENSE OPACITY IF IT WERENT FOR THE SAFE SPACE OF
SWITCH SIDE DEBATE
FOURTH, WORLDY ACADEMIC WORK IS DEMOCRATIZING
AND SPURS ACTIVISM
Gordon R. Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh,
ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY, Fall 1998, p. 47.
argumentative agency involves the capacity to contextualize and employ the
skills and strategies of argumentative discourse in fields of social action, especially wider spheres of public
In basic terms the notion of

deliberation. Pursuit of argumentative agency charges academic work with democratic energy by linking teachers and students with civic organizations, social

argumentative agency
links decontextualized argumentation skills such as research, listening, analysis, refutation
and presentation, to the broader political telos of democratic empowerment. Argumentative
agency fills gaps left in purely simulation-based models of argumentation by focusing pedagogical energies
movements, citizens and other actors engaged in live public controversies beyond the schoolyard walls. As a bridging concept,

on strategies for utilizing argumentation as a driver of progressive social change. Moving beyond an exclusively skill-oriented curriculum, teachers and students
pursuing argumentative agency seek to put argumentative tools to the test by employing them in situations beyond the space of the classroom. This approach draws
from the work of Kincheloe (1991), who suggests that through "critical constructivist action research," students and teachers cultivate their own senses of agency and
work to transform the world around them

29

Kritik Answers

Policy Debate Good

CRITICAL THEORY DIMINISHES THE BENEFIT OF POLICY
DEBATE
Jentleson 2002

[Bruce, Dir. Terry Sanford Inst. Public Policy and Prof. Pub Plcy and Pol. Sci. @ Duke, The
Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Debate Back In, International Security 26:4, Spring,
ASP//uwyo-ajl]
To be sure, political science and international relations have produced and
continue to produce scholarly work that does bring important policy insights.
Still it is hard to deny that contemporary political science and international
relations as a discipline put limited value on policy relevancetoo little, in my
view, and the discipline suffers for it. The problem is not just the gap between
theory and policy but its chasmlike widening in recent years and the limited
valuation of efforts, in Alexander Georges phrase, at bridging the gap. The
events of September 11 drive home the need to bring policy relevance back in
to the discipline, to seek greater praxis between theory and practice.

AND DECENTRALIZED PUBLIC DEBATE IS NECESSARY OT

TRANSFORM BUREACRACY
Martin 90

[Brian, Bureacracy, www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/90uw/uw08.html, 9-2306//uwyo-ajl]

All of this can be quite useful and often effective, and should not be rejected. But working
through bureaucracy on the inside, or demanding policy changes from the outside, does
little to transform bureaucracy itself. In fact, working through bureaucracy can reinforce the
legitimacy and sway of bureaucracy itself. In addition, campaigns oriented towards working
through bureaucracy or applying pressure for change at the top tend to become
bureaucratised themselves.
Another important orientation adopted by many social activists is towards building selfmanaging organisational forms for their own activities, such as cooperative enterprises or
egalitarian action groups. Self-managing organisational forms are an alternative to
bureaucracy. Direct experience in self-managing groups strengthens the sense of community
and commitment to social action and also provides understanding and individual strength
to resist pressures for bureaucratisation in the wider society. In as much as social
movements organise themselves as decentralised self-managing groups, linked by
federations and networks, and self-consciously set out to develop and extend such
structures, they provide a strong challenge to the domination of bureaucratic forms of social
organisation.

30

Kritik Answers

Switch-side Debate Good (1/3)

CRITICAL DISTANCE & *PUBLICLY* ADVOCATING
ARGUMENTS WITH WHICH YOU DISAGREE ARE ETHICALLY
IMPORTANT:
Dennis G. Day, Professor, Speech, University of Wisconsin-Madison, CENTRAL STATES SPEECH
JOURNAL, February 1966, p. 7.
All must recognize and accept personal responsibility to present, when necessary, as
forcefully as possible, opinions and arguments with which they may personally disagree.
To present persuasively the arguments for a position with which one disagrees is, perhaps,
the greatest need and the highest ethical act in democratic debate. It is the greatest need
because most minority views, if expressed at all, are not expressed forcefully and
persuasively. Bryce, in his perceptive analysis of America and Americans, saw two dangers
to democratic government: the danger of not ascertaining accurately the will of the majority
and the danger that minorities might not effectively express themselves. In regard to the
second danger, which he considered the greater of the two, he suggested:
The duty, therefore, of a patriotic statesman in a country where public opinion rules, would
seem to be rather to resist and correct than to encourage the dominant sentiment. He will
not be content with trying to form and mould and lead it, but he will confront it, lecture it,
remind it that it is fallible, rouse it -out of its self-complacency
To present persuasively arguments for a position with which one disagrees is the highest
ethical act in debate because it sets aside personal interests for the benefit of the common
good. Essentially, for the person who accepts decision by debate, the ethics of the decisionmaking process are superior to the ethics of personal conviction on particular subjects for
debate. Democracy is a commitment to means, not ends. Democratic society accepts certain
ends, i.e., decisions, because they have been arrived at by democratic means. We recognize
the moral priority of decision by debate when we agree to be bound by that decision
regardless of personal conviction. Such an agreement is morally acceptable because the
decision-making process guarantees our moral integrity by guaranteeing the opportunity to
debate for a reversal of the decision.
Thus, personal conviction can have moral significance in social decision-making only so long
as the integrity of debate is maintained. And the integrity of debate is maintained only when
there is a full and forceful confrontation of arguments and evidence relevant to decision.
When an argument is not presented or is not presented as persuasively as possible, then
debate fails. As debate fails decisions become less "wise." As decisions become less wise the
process of decision-making is questioned.
And finally, if and when debate is set aside for the alternative method of decision-making by
authority, the personal convictions of individuals within society lose their moral significance
as determinants of social choice.

31

Kritik Answers

Switch-Side Debate Good (2/3)

SWITCH SIDE DEBATING IS PROFOUNDLY MORAL AND
GUARDS AGAINST ABSOLUTISM
Gary Alan Fine, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, Gifted Tongues, 2001,
p. 54-55.
Despite these concerns, most individuals with whom I discussed the issue felt that debating
both sides of an issue was valuable, perhaps the greatest benefit of the activity, teaching the
value of respect for differing opinions, multiple perspectives, and the dangers of absolutism.
For some the ability to argue both sides of an issue is profoundly moral:
I have seen some people become cynical as a result. I would hope with students I teach that
they learn some ethical responsibilities. But I think what debate does is allow students to
seriously consider important questions from both sides of the issue and see other
perspectives before they become committed themselves to a position. I have students who
will say, Well, I cant argue against this, because I really believe it. But after theyve done
some research they are not so certain of their convictions. They at least can see the other
side. I think they become more humane as a result of looking at both sides. (interview)
The ability to see both points of view has the potential in this view to make one more
humane and less self-righteous. Others suggest that not only does debating both sides of a
position not weaken ones position, but it strengthens it, perhaps by inoculating one to
opposing arguments. Many debaters have strong political positions, which the activity seems
to do nothing to diminish:
I think what happens is that you leam that there are two sides to every issue. I think most
debaters come down on one side or the other in their mind, but they are able to argue both
sides. And I think that is an important thing to be able to do. I mean because it makes what
you believe in, it makes that belief even more justified, because you do know both sides.
(interview)
The ability to take a position that is contrary to ones own beliefs has several benefits:
making one appreciate the perspective of ones foes, making ones own thoughts more
complex, and helping one become aware of counterarguments. Perhaps this stance does
suggest that positions are gamelike, but it is a game that corresponds to the way that much
political decision making operates in the real world.

32

Kritik Answers

Switch-Side Debate Good (3/3)

SWITCH-SIDE DEBATING IS NECESSARY TO EXAMINE
DIVERSE POLITICAL AGENDAS AND POLITICS. THE
SOLUTION IS NOT TO SILENCE ALL REPRESENTATION; ITS
TO MASSIVELY PROLIFERATE REPRESENTATIONS AND LET
THE DEBATE EXAMINE THE WORTHINESS OF INDIVIDUAL
REPRESENTATIONS WHICH CAN SUBVERT THE SYSTEM.
EVERY TIME ANOTHER IMAGE IS REPRESENTED, IT MAKES
OVERALL MARGINALIZATION LESS EASY.
Ann Marie

Baldonado, Fall 1996 http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Representation.html, accessed 3/23/01

This questioning is particularly important when the representation of the subaltern is involved. The problem does not rest solely with the fact that often marginalized
groups do not hold the 'power over representation' (Shohat 170); it rests also in the fact that representations of these groups are both flawed and few in numbers.
Shohat asserts that dominant groups need not preoccupy themselves too much with being adequately represented. There are so many different representations of
dominant groups that negative images are seen as only part of the "natural diversity" of people. However, "representation of an underrepresented group is necessarily
within the hermeneutics of domination, overcharged with allegorical significance." (170) The mass media tends to take representations of the subaltern as allegorical,

since representations of the marginalized are few, the few available are thought to be
representative of all marginalized peoples. The few images are thought to be typical, sometimes not only of members of a particular
minority group, but of all minorities in general . It is assumed that subalterns can stand in for other subalterns. A
meaning that

prime example of this is the fact that actors of particular ethnic backgrounds were often casted as any ethnic "other". (Some examples include Carmen Miranda
HYPERLINK "http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/carmen.gif" in The Gang's All Here (1943), Ricardo Mantalban in Sayonara (1957), and Rudolph Valentino in
The Son of the Sheik ). This collapsing of the image of the subaltern reflects not only ignorance but a lack of respect for the diversity within marginalized communities.
Shohat also suggests that representations in one sphere--the sphere of popular culture--effects the other spheres of representation, particularly the political one: The
denial of aesthetic representation to the subaltern has historically formed a corollary to the literal denial of economic, legal, and political representation. The struggle
to 'speak for oneself' cannot be separated from a history of being spoken for, from the struggle to speak and be heard. (173) It cannot be ignored that representations
effect the ways in which actual individuals are perceived. Although many see representations as harmless likenesses, they do have a real effect on the world. They are
meant to relay a message and as the definition shows, 'influence opinion and action'. We must ask what ideological work these representations accomplish.

Both the scarcity and the

importance of minority representations yield what many have called " the burden of
representation". Since there are so few images, negative ones can have devastating affects on
the real lives of marginalized people. We must also ask, if there are so few, who will produce them?
Who will be the supposed voice of the subaltern? Given the allegorical character of these representations, even subaltern writers, artists,
Representations or the 'images or ideas formed in the mind' have vast implications for real people in real contexts.

and scholars are asking who can really speak for whom? When a spokesperson or a certain image is read as metonymic, representation becomes more difficult and
dangerous. Solutions for this conundrum are difficult to theorize. We can call for increased "self representation" or the inclusion of more individuals from
'marginalized' groups in 'the act of representing', yet this is easier said then done. Also, the inclusion of more minorities in representation will not necessarily alter the
structural or institutional barriers that prevent equal participation for all in representation. Focusing on whether or not images are negative or positive, leaves in tact a
reliance on the "realness' of images, a "realness" that is false to begin with. Finally, I again turn to Spivak and her question, 'Can the Subaltern Speak'. In this seminal
essay, Spivak emphasizes the fact that representation is a sort of speech act, with a speaker and a listener. Often, the subaltern makes an attempt at selfrepresentation, perhaps a representation that falls outside the 'the lines laid down by the official institutional structures of representation' (306). Yet, this act of
representation is not heard. It is not recognized by the listener, perhaps because it does not fit in with what is expected of the representation. Therefore,
representation by subaltern individuals seems nearly impossible. Despite the fact that Spivak's formulation is quite accurate, there must still be an effort to try and
challenge status quo representation and the ideological work it does. The work of various 'Third world' and minority writers, artists, and filmmakers attest to the
possibilities of counter-hegemonic, anti-colonial subversion. It is obvious that representations are much more than plain 'likenesses'. They are in a sense ideological
tools that can serve to reinforce systems of inequality and subordination; they can help sustain colonialist or neocolonialist projects. A great amount of effort is needed

, this force
is not completely pervasive, and subversions are often possible. 'Self representation' may not
be a complete possibility, yet is still an important goal.
to dislodge dominant modes of representation. Efforts will continue to be made to challenge the hegemonic force of representation, and of course

33

Kritik Answers

Debate Solves Authoritarianism

DEBATE INVERTS DOCILITY AND AUTHORITARIANISM
N. Kirk Evans, two time NDT first-round and graduate student at U Chicago, [eDebate]
We Other Debaters, Feb 27, 2002,
http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200202/0747.html, accessed February 27, 2002
Although critics of debate (e.g., Kevin Sanchez) appropriate Foucauldian language such as
describing debate as ?the pedagogy devoted to scholarship and training in good conduct,? I
can?t help but wonder if there is a little ?repressive hypothesis? discourse going on here. ?
For a long time, the story goes, we supported a repressive/calculating/veritasseeking/flogocentric/docile body producing regime, and we continue to be dominated by it
even today. The image of the stratego-spewtron is emblazoned on our restrained, (un)mute,
and hypocrtical debating.? I don?t like certain aspects of debate as it is currently practiced.
Some of my objections are political (e.g., under-representation of minorities, propensity of
elite schools to dominate). Some are aesthetic (e.g., lack of clarity among most debaters). My
problem with criticisms such as Kevin S?s or William S?s or Jack S?s is that they lump
something together called ?debate? and criticize it from afar (if that isn?t rendering
something standing reserve and then surveying it with an enlightened imperial gaze, I don?t
know what is). Somehow the sentiment seems to be lurking about that we?d all be free,
uninhibited, and unrepressed beings if the debate-machine hadn?t turned us into assemblyline products of technostrategic thinking. Ummm? repressive hypothesis. The reality is that
proto-debaters enter high school with 8-9 years of educational training to be docile subjects
and liberal humanists. If debate still maintains vestiges of these systems of thought, I think
it has more to do with what people bring to the ?institution? of debate than what debate
teaches them. Debaters are taught to question authorit(ies), and there is certainly a higher
degrees of activism (both liberal and conservative) among debaters than among their nondebate counterparts.

34

Kritik Answers

Roleplaying Good (1/3)

AND, WE MUST POSIT OURSELVES AS THE GOVERNMENT
Rawls, Political Philosopher, 1999 (John, The Law of Peoples, p. 56-7)
How is the ideal of public reason realized by citizens who are not government officials? In a representative government, citizens vote for representativeschief
executives, legislators, and the likenot for particular laws (except at a state or local level where they may vote directly on referenda questions, which are not usually

, citizens are to think of themselves as if they were

legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they
would think it most reasonable to enact. When firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view
themselves as ideal legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for
public office who violate public reason, forms part of the political and social basis of liberal
democracy and is vital for its enduring strength and vigor. Thus in domestic society citizens fulfill their
duty of civility and support the idea of public reason, while doing what they can to hold
government officials to it. This duty, like other political rights and duties, is an intrinsically moral duty . I emphasize that it
fundamental questions). To answer this question, we say that, ideally

is not a legal duty, for in that case it would be incompatible with freedom of speech. Similarly, the ideal of the public reason of free and equal peoples is realized, or
satisfied, whenever chief executives and legislators, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow the principles of the Law
of Peoples and explain to other peoples their reasons for pursuing or revising a peoples foreign policy and affairs of state that involve other societies. As for private

citizens are to think of themselves as if they were executives and

legislators and ask themselves what foreign policy supported by what considerations they would think it
most reasonable to advance. Once again, when firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view
themselves as ideal executives and legislators , and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate
the public reason of free and equal peoples, is part of the political and social basis of peace and understanding
among peoples
citizens, we say, as before, that ideally

AND, ROLE-PLAYING DEBATES PROMOTE PREPARE US FOR

REAL WORLD ACTIVISM BY GIVING US A BETTER
UNDERSTANDING OF HOW POLICY WORKS, MAKING US
AFFECTIVE AGENTS TO ACHIEVE CHANGE. THIS ALLOWS US
AS INDIVIDUALS TO BECOME ACTORS WHO COULD INDEED
TRANSFORM INTERNATIONAL POLITICS.
Joyner 1999

[Christopher, Professor international Law @ University of Georgetown, Teaching

International Law: Views from an international relations political scientist].
The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives. First, students on each
team must work together to refine a cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal
position on a foreign policy issue confronting the United States. In this way, they gain
greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas faced by policy makers. Second, as they
work with other members of their team, they realize the complexities of applying and
implementing international law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United
States policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former or creatively
reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates forces students to become
familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States foreign policy agenda and the
role that international law plays in formulating and executing these policies. 8 The debate
thus becomes an excellent vehicle for pushing students beyond stale arguments over
principles into the real world of policy analysis, political critique, and legal defense.

35

Kritik Answers

Roleplaying Good (2/3)

ROLEPLAYING IS KEY TO SOCIAL JUSTICE LEARNING
WHAT THE STATE SHOULD DO ALLOWS US TO ACHIEVE
THE ALTERNATIVES GOALS
Richard Rorty, philosopher, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, 1998, p. 98-99
The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is
therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is
that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent
capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on
Americans. It is no comfort to those in danger of being immiserated by globalization to be
told that, since national governments are now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement
for such governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich do not think any replacements are
needed, and they are likely to prevail. Bill Readings was right to say that the nation-state
[has ceased] to be the elemental unit of capitalism, but it remains the entity which makes
decisions about social benefits, and thus about social justice. The current leftist habit of
taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was
faith in Marxs philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally
irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how
to prevent right-wing populists from taking advantage of resentment at that reemergence.
When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essential
transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semiconscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties. This Left
will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for "the system" and
start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to
form alliances with people outside the academyand, specifically, with the labor unions.
Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a
nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms
no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them
will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America as Disneyland
as a country of simulacraand to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country,
inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be
cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than
agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms. The
existence of such a list endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and
production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who
clean the professionals' toiletsmight revitalize leftist politics.

36

Kritik Answers

Roleplaying Good (3/3)

ROLE PLAYING IN DEBATE IS ESSENTIAL TO BREAK DOWN
ASSUMPTIONS, DEVELOP CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS, AND
DECONSTRUCT THE STATE
Joyner, Professor International Law @ Georgetwon, 99

(Christopher TEACHING
INTERNATIONAL LAW: VIEWS FROM AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS POLITICAL
SCIENTIST ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law, Spring, 5 ILSA J Int'l &
Comp L 377)

Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social

sciences. Debates, like other role-playing simulations, help students understand

different perspectives on a policy issue by adopting a perspective as their own.
But, unlike other simulation games, debates do not require that a student
participate directly in order to realize the benefit of the game. Instead of
developing policy alternatives and experiencing the consequences of different
choices in a traditional role-playing game, debates present the alternatives and
consequences in a formal, rhetorical fashion before a judgmental audience.
Having the class audience serve as jury helps each student develop a well-thought-out
opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views and enabling audience
members to pose challenges to each debating team.
These debates ask undergraduate students to examine the international legal
implications of various United States foreign policy actions. Their chief tasks are to
assess the aims of the policy in question, determine their relevance to United States national
interests, ascertain what legal principles are involved, and conclude how the United States
policy in question squares with relevant principles of international law. Debate questions are
formulated as resolutions, along the lines of: "Resolved: The United States should deny
most-favored-nation status to China on human rights grounds;" or "Resolved: The United
States should resort to military force to ensure inspection of Iraq's possible nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons facilities;" or "Resolved: The United States' invasion of
Grenada in 1983 was a lawful use of force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill
Saddam Hussein." In addressing both sides of these legal propositions, the
student debaters must consult the vast literature of international law, especially the
nearly 100 professional law-school-sponsored international law journals now being
published in the United States. This literature furnishes an incredibly rich body of legal
analysis that often treats topics affecting United States foreign policy, as well as other more
esoteric international legal subjects. Although most of these journals are accessible in good
law schools, they are largely unknown to the political science community specializing in
international relations, much less to the average undergraduate. [*386]
By assessing the role of international law in United States foreign policy- making,
students realize that United States actions do not always measure up to
international legal expectations; that at times, international legal strictures get
compromised for the sake of perceived national interests, and that concepts
and principles of international law, like domestic law, can be interpreted and
twisted in order to justify United States policy in various international
circumstances. In this way, the debate format gives students the benefits
ascribed to simulations and other action learning techniques, in that it makes
them become actively engaged with their subjects, and not be mere passive
consumers. Rather than spectators, students become legal advocates,
observing, reacting to, and structuring political and legal perceptions to fit the
merits of their case.
The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives. First,
students on each team must work together to refine a cogent argument that
compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign policy issue confronting
the United States. In this way, they gain greater insight into the real-world legal
dilemmas faced by policy makers. Second, as they work with other members of
their team, they realize the complexities of applying and implementing
international law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States
policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former or
creatively reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates forces

37

Kritik Answers
students to become familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States
foreign policy agenda and the role that international law plays in formulating
and executing these policies. 8 The debate thus becomes an excellent vehicle for
pushing students beyond stale arguments over principles into the real world of
policy analysis, political critique, and legal defense.

38

Kritik Answers

Traditional Debate Good (1/2)

SWITCH-SIDE PLAN-FOCUSED DEBATE ENSURES EVERY
COMPETITOR MUST EVALUATE BOTH SIDES OF POTENTIAL
POLICIES. THEY ENCOURAGE DEBATES WITHOUT CLASH.
THIS UNCRITICAL FORM OF DEBATE ELIMINATES OUR
CAPACITY TO ENGAGE IN SOCRATIC QUESTIONING, THE
ONLY FIREWALL AGAINST GENOCIDE
Dana R. Villa, Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton
University, Political Theory, April 1998 v26 n2 p147(26)
Arendt sees the categorical imperative as an absolute in the Platonic/authoritarian sense, standing above men and the realm of human affairs, measuring them
without any concern for context, specificity, or the "fundamental relativity" of the "interhuman realm."(30) Arendt emphasizes this inheritance of Platonism because

The more judgment is identified with the application

of a rule or an unvarying standard, the more our powers of judgment atrophy, and the less
we are able to "stop and think" in the Socratic sense. Moreover, the insistence that judgment is dependent on such standards
she sees it as inculcating a habit of mechanical, unthinking judgment.

leads to a "crisis in judgment" when these standards are revealed to be without effective power. This, according to Arendt, is what happens in the course of the modern

.
This process--call it the crisis in authority or, to use Nietzsche's symbolic formulation, the "death of God"--comes to its conclusion
with the advent of the evils of totalitarianism, evils so unprecedented that they "have clearly
exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment."(31) The
age, as new and unprecedented moral and political phenomena reveal the hollowness and inadequacy of the "reliable universal rules" the tradition had offered

failure of the inherited wisdom of the past, the fact of a radical break in our tradition, throws us back upon our own resources. Potentially, Arendt notes, the crisis is
liberating, as it frees the faculty of judgment from its subservience to objectivist regimes such as Plato's ideas or Kant's categorical imperative. As Arendt puts it in
"Understanding and Politics": Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is
beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.
(32) The hope that the "crisis in authority" will lead to the rebirth of a genuinely autonomous faculty of judgment runs up against Arendt's own deeply ingrained sense

Minus the presence of Socrates

(who, like an electric ray, paralyzes his partners in dialogue, forcing them to stop and think),
the likely result of such a crisis is thankfulness for anything that props up the old set of
standards or provides the semblance of a new one. Responding to Hans Jonas's call for a renewed inquiry into ultimate, metaphysical grounds for judgment at
that ordinary individuals will find it difficult indeed to wean themselves from pregiven categories and rules.

a conference on her work in 1972, Arendt declared her pessimism that "a new god will appear," and went on to observe: If you go through such a situation [as
totalitarianism] the first thing you know is the following: you never know how somebody will act. You have the surprise of your life! This goes throughout all layers of
society, and it goes throughout various distinctions between men. And if you want to make a generalization, then you could say that those who were still very firmly
convinced of the so-called old values were the first to be ready to change their old values for a new set of values, provided they were given one. And I am afraid of this,
because I think that the moment you give anybody a new set of values--or this famous "bannister"--you can immediately exchange it. And the only thing the guy gets
used to is having a "bannister" and a set of values, no matter.(33) Arendt thought that the natural tendency of the ordinary person, when faced with the destruction of
one set of authoritative rules, would not be Socratic examination and perplexity (which only further dissolves the customary), but rather a grasping for a new code, a

Socratic thinking, dissolves grounds, it does not stabilize them.

new "bannister." Thinking, especially

It is, as
Arendt says, a "dangerous and resultless enterprise," one that can just as easily lead to cynicism and nihilism as to independent judgment and a deepened moral
integrity.(34) Arendt agrees with the analysis Kant gives in "What Is Enlightenment?": most people would simply prefer not to make the effort that independent

,
Arendt holds onto the Socratic possibility that ordinary individuals will remain open to the
"winds of thought." She profoundly agrees with Socrates that it is only through such examination that the
individual is likely to avoid complicity with the moral horrors perpetrated by popular
political regimes. Socratic thinking--which, in its relentless negativity, is the very opposite of all foundational or professional
philosophical thinking--liberates the faculty of judgment from the tyranny of rules and custom . In this way, it
judgment demands, let alone risk the taken-for-granted moral presuppositions of their existence. Yet however real this aversion to thinking or "paralysis" is

prevents the individual from being "swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in."(35) Independent judgment is, according to Arendt, the

) Thinking may not be able to

"make friends" of citizens as Socrates had hoped, but it can "prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when
"by-product" of this liberating effect of thinking; it "realizes" thinking "in the world of appearances."(36
the chips are down."(37)

39

Kritik Answers

Traditional Debate Good (2/2)

TRADITIONAL DEBATE IS RE-PRESENTATION. WE DONT
CLAIM TO SPEAK A HIGHER TRUTH OR KNOW WHAT IS
BEST FOR OTHERS. WE DEBATE THOSE ISSUES
CONTINGENTLY. THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO SAY THAT
DEBATE SHOULD BE PURELY REPRESENTATIVE ARE THE
ACTIVISM/CRITIQUE CROWD.
Ann Marie

Baldonado, Fall 1996 http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Representation.html, accessed 3/23/01

1. Presence, bearing, air; Appearance; impression on the sight. 2. An Image, likeness, or
reproduction in some manner of a thing; A material image or figure; a reproduction in some
material or tangible form; in later use, a drawing or painting. (of a person or thing); The
action or fact of exhibiting in some visible image or form; The fact of expressing or denoting
by means of a figure or symbol; symbolic action or exhibition. 3. The exhibition of character
and action upon the stage; the performance of a play; Acting, simulation, pretense. 4. The
action of placing a fact, etc., before another or others by means of discourse; a statement or
account, esp. one intended to convey a particular view or impression of a matter in order to
influence opinion or action. 5. A formal and serious statement of facts, reasons, or
arguments, made with a view to effecting some change, preventing some action, etc.; hence,
a remonstrance, protest, expostulation. 6. The action of presenting to the mind or
imagination; an image thus presented; a clearly conceived idea or concept; The operation of
the mind in forming a clear image or concept; the faculty of doing this. 7. The fact of
standing for, or in place of, some other thing or person, esp. with a right or authority to act
on their account; substitution of one thing or person for another. 8. The fact of representing
or being represented in a legislative or deliberative assembly, spec. in Parliament; the
position, principle, or system implied by this; The aggregate of those who thus represent the
elective body.
from The Oxford English Dictionary
Representation is presently a much debated topic not only in postcolonial studies and
academia, but in the larger cultural milieu. As the above dictionary entry shows, the actual
definitions for the word alone are cause for some confusion. The Oxford English Dictionary
defines representation primarily as "presence" or "appearance." There is an implied visual
component to these primary definitions. Representations can be clear images, material
reproductions, performances and simulations. Representation can also be defined as the act
of placing or stating facts in order to influence or affect the action of others. Of course, the
word also has political connotations. Politicians are thought to 'represent' a constituency.
They are thought to have the right to stand in the place of another. So above all, the term
representation has a semiotic meaning, in that something is 'standing for' something else.
These various yet related definitions are all implicated in the public debates about representation.
Theorists interested in Postcolonial studies, by closely examining various forms of representations,
visual, textual and otherwise, have teased out the different ways that these "images" are implicated in
power inequalities and the subordination of the 'subaltern'.
Representations-- these 'likenesses'--come in various forms: films, television, photographs, paintings,
advertisements and other forms of popular culture. Written materials--academic texts, novels and other
literature, journalistic pieces--are also important forms of representation. These representations, to
different degrees, are thought to be somewhat realistic, or to go back to the definitions, they are thought
be 'clear' or state 'a fact'. Yet how can simulations or "impressions on the sight" be completely true?
Edward Said, in his analysis of textual representations of the Orient in Orientalism, emphasizes the fact
that representations can never be exactly realistic:
In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a represence, or a representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement
about the Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such.
On the contrary, the written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded,
displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as "the Orient". (21)
Representations, then can never really be 'natural' depictions of the orient. Instead, they are constructed
images, images that need to be interrogated for their ideological content.

In a similar way, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes a distinction between Vertretung and
Darstellung. The former she defines as "stepping in someone's place. . .to tread in someone's
shoes." Representation in this sense is "political representation," or a speaking for the needs

40

Kritik Answers
and desires of somebody or something. Darstellung is representation as re-presentation,
"placing there." Representing is thus "proxy and portrait," according to Spivak. The
complicity between "speaking for" and "portraying" must be kept in mind ("Practical Politics
of the Open End," The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues.)

41

Kritik Answers

Traditional Debate Accesses

Peformativity
TRADITIONAL DEBATE COOPTS THEIR PERFORMANCE
GOOD OFFENSE. IT INCORPORATES STYLE WITHOUT
ELIMINATING SUBSTANCE
Jeff Parcher, February 26, 2001, www.ndtceda.com
BTW - my notions do not eliminate the notion of performance - they merely contextualize
them within a discussion that can be limited and fair. It merely requires the performance be
relevant by a reasonable criteria (ie the resolution). Also, debates have speaker points. It
seems fairly obvious to me that the debate ballot is a clear dichotomy. One affirms or
negates the resolution/plan and then gives speaker points to reward or punish performance.
Obviously, I realize that performance impacts truth. But that's only a reason why a focus on
the resolutional question coopts the performative criteria. Of course a good performance
gets rewared in both points and in the decision itself. That's why we don't need to make it
JUST about performance. We already take the perfromance into account inevitably. Mixing
it further simply makes us drift aimlessly.

PLAN FOCUSED DEBATES ALWAYS PROVIDE A CLEARER,

FAIRER, AND MORE EDUCATION FRAMEWORK
Jeff Parcher, February 26, 2001, www.ndtceda.com
This is absolutely devastating to the performance arguments. And even if we could hodgepodge together some inevtiably subjective criteria in each individual debate, they simply
could never match the benefits of debate provided by a clear plan/resolution focus.
Performance debates would be incredibly repetitive in that they would always be 90% about
methodolgy rather than the substance of performances. Because the limits to possible
performances are so large - both sides would always have an incentive to focus on
methodology rather than substance. The affirmative will be on an endless search to coopt
the negative performance (in the words of the Fort, "We are in solidarity with these words").
The negative on an endless search to exclude the affirmative performance through topicality
or general kritiks. Rarely do I think we would ever have debates which engaged the two
performances. The current puryeyors of this type of debate have certainly relied much more
on competitiveness arguments than on actual substantive engagement (as far as I've seen
anyway).

42

Kritik Answers

Competition Good
COMPETITION IS IS NECESSARY FOR SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION
Gary Olson

and Jean- Franois Lyotard, Resisting a Discourse of Mastery: A

Conversation with Jean-Franois Lyotard, JAC 15.3, 1995,
http://jac.gsu.edu/jac/15.3/Articles/1.htm, accessed 1/21/02
Second, competition is not competition between different groups in a cultural reality. Not at
all. The notion of competition as a male model is a notion I reject, maybe because I am a
male, but, in fact, because there is not any other way to understand the domination of the
competitive pattern in our society. I mean, this system has competed against all other
systems, all the other ways of organizing human communities. And we can consider human
history not as a linear succession with a sort of causality between each segment of this line,
but as the opposite, as the contingent and different ways in which human communities have
tried to organizeexactly in the same terms that so-called life has fortuitously produced
different forms of living beings. And between these different entitiesanimals, vegetables,
human beings, or human communitiescompetition was necessarily open. They are all open
systems; they need to grasp energy from outside in order to maintain themselves, and if they
have to grasp energy from outside, they are competitive with other systems. Thats true for
animals, even vegetables, and for human communities. And thats how our system, now,
won against other ways that communities have tried to organize themselves, and it has
internalized competition itself in order to continue to be able to grasp outside and inside
energies as much as possible. Its not a male idea; there is no argument against it. There is
no doubt: its not a male idea. And Im sure women are perfectly able to understand this,
even if they hate it; so do I. But we are in this condition.

43

Kritik Answers

**Permutations**
Juxtaposition Perm: 2AC
PERM DO BOTH, CRITICISM WITHOUT OPPOSITION
CAUSES COOPERTATION, ONLY JUXTAPOSITION ALLOWS
CONSTANT CRITICISM
Edelman 87

[Prof. Pol Sci @ Wisconsin, September, U. of Minn, Constructing the Political Spectacle]
Opposition in expressed opinion accordingly make for social stability: they are
almost synonymous with it, for they reaffirm and reify what everyone already
knows and accepts. To express a prochoice or an anti-abortion position is to affirm
that the opposite position is being expressed as well and to accept the opposition as
a continuing feature of public discourse. The well established, thoroughly
anticipated and therefore ritualistic reaffirmation of the differences
institutionalizes mboth rhetorics minimizing the chance of major shifts and leaving
the regime wide discretion; for there will be anticipated support and opposition no
matter what forms of action or inaction occur. As long as there is substantial
expression of opinion on both sides of an issue, social stability persists and so does
regime discretion regardless of the exact numbers or of marginal shifts in
members. The persistence of unresolved problems with conflicting meaning is vital.
It is not the expression of opposition but of consensus that makes for instability.
Wher statements need not be defended against counterstatements they are readily
changed or inverted. Consensual agreements about the foreign enemy of ally yield
readily to acceptance of the erstwhile enemy as ally and the former ally as enemy,
but opinions about abortion are likely to persist. Rebellion and revolution do not
ferment in societies in which there has been a long history of the ritualized
exchange of opposing views of issues accepted as important, but rather where such
exchanges have been lacking, so that a consensus on common action to oust the
regime is easily built.

44

Kritik Answers

Juxtaposition Perm: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC EDELMAN EVIDENCE. PURE CRITIQUE
FAILS BECAUSE IT FLIPS THE BINARISM, NOT ENGAGING
THE DISCOURSE IT CRITICIZED, CREATING A NEW
MONOLITHIC HEGEMONY. ONLY THE PERM THAT
COMBINES THE 1AC AND THE CRITICISM CREATES
CONSTANT CRITICISM, USING THE AFF AS A TARGET,
SOLVING BETTER THAN THE ALTERNATIVE
ALSO, ALL OF THEIR PERM THEORY AND LINK ARGUMENTS
DONT APPLY BECAUSE THE PERM COMBINES THE WHOLE
1AC AND THE CRITICISM, USING THAT CONTRADICTION TO
CONSIDER BOTH SIDES, IMPACT TURNING THEIR
ARGUMENT
ALSO, COMBINING THE AFF AND THE K SOLVES BETTER
Said 94

[Edward W., Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reich Lectures, Vintage, 1994,
60]
Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is
actual hear and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in
isoaltion. Every scene or situation in the new country necessarily draws on its
counterpart in the old country. Intellectually, this means that an idea or expreience
is always counterposed with another, therefore, making them both appear in a
sometimes new and unpredictable light: from that justaposition, one gets a better,
perhaps more universal idea of how to think say, about a human rights issue in one
situation by comparison with another. I have felt that most of the alarmist and
deeply flawed discussions of Islamic fundamentalism in the West have been
intellectually invidious precisely because they have not been compared with Jewish
or Christian fundamentalism, both equally prevalent and reprehensible in my own
experience of the Middle East. What is usually thought of as a simple issue of
judgment against an approved enemy, in double or exile perspective impels a
Western intellectual to see a much wider picture, with the requirement now of
taking a position as a secularist (or not) on all theocratic tendencies, not just
against the conventionally designated ones.

ALSO, PURE CRITICISM FAILS, ONLY COMBINATION OF

CONTRADICTORY IDEAS SOLVES
Walt 98

[Stephen M., Prof. Pol. Sci, U. of Chicago, International Relations: one world, many
theories, Foreign Policy, March 22, LN]
No single approach can capture all the complexity of contemporary world politics.
Therefore, we are better off with a diverse array of competing ideas rather than a
single theoretical orthodoxy. Competition between theories helps reveal their
strengths and weaknesses and spurs subsequent refinements, while revealing flaws
in conventional wisdom. Although we should take care to emphasize inventiveness
over invective, we should welcome and encourage the heterogeneity of
contemporary scholarship.

45

Kritik Answers

Juxtapositon Perm: 2AR

THE EDELMAN PERMUTATION IS THE ONLY ADVOCACY
WHICH PROVIDES FOR CONSTANT CRITICISM.
JUXTAPOSITION TAKES THE WHOLE AFFIRMATIVE SPEECH
ACT AND THE WHOLE NEGATIVE CRITICISM AND ALLOWS
YOU TO VOTE FOR THE PROCESS OF CONSTANT CRITICISM.
IT USES THE PLAN TO UPHOLD THE SYSTEM AS A TARGET
FOR THE NEG CRITICISM. WITHOUT THAT, THE CRITICISM
BECOMES INVERTED, EMBODYING ITS OWN OPPOSITE.
ALSO, NONE OF THEIR SPECIFIC EVIDENCE APPLIES. ITS
AN IN-ROUND PERMUTATION ABOUT OUR SPEECDH ACTS
AND THE BEST WAY TO MAINTAIN THE INTEGRITY OF
CRITICISM

46

Kritik Answers

Juxtaposition Perm: Ext

AND, JUXTAPOSING THE AFF AND THE ALTERNATIVE
CREATES EFFECTIVE, CONSTANT CRITICISM, OVERCOMING
THE HEGEMONY OF CRITIQUE
Connolly 2002

[William E., Prof. of Pol. Sci. @ John Hopkins U., Identity/Difference: Democratic
Negotiations of Political Paradox, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, September
2002, 180-1]
Another way to pose the paradox is this: The human animal is essentially
incomplete without social form and a common language, institutional setting, set of
political traditions, and political forum for inunciating public purposes are
indispensible to the acquisition of an identity and the commonalities essential to
life. But every form of social completion and enablement also contains subjugations
and cruelties within it. Politics, then, is the medium through which these
ambiguities can be engaged and confronted, shifted and stretched. It is
simultaneously a medum through which common purposes are crystalized and the
consummage means by which their transcription into musical harmonies is
exposed, contested, disturbed, and unsettled. A society that enables politics as this
ambiguous medium is a good society because it enables the paradox of difference to
find expression in public life

AND, JUXTAPOSITION OF INCOMPATIBLE IDEAS AVOIDS

THE PROBLEMS OF TRADITIONAL THEORY AND ENABLES A
PROCESS OF CONSTANT CRITICISM
Marcus '98
[George E., Professor of Anthro at Rice University, Ethnography through Thick
and Thin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, 186-7//uwyo-ajl]
The postmodern notions of heterotopia (Foucault), juxtapositions, and the blocking
together of incommensurables (Lyotard) have served to renew the long-neglected
practice of comparison in anthropology, but in altered ways. Juxtapositions do not
have the obvious meta-logic of older styles of comparison in anthropology (e.g.,
controlled comparisons within a cultural area or "natural" geographical region);
rather, they emerge from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose
controus are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making
an account which has different, complexly connected real-world sites of
investigation. The postmodern object of study is ultimately mobile and multiply
situated, so any ethnography of such an object will have a comparative dimension
that is integral to it, in the form of juxtapositions of seeming incommensurables or
phenomena that might conventionally have appeared to be "world apart."
Comparison reenters the very act of ethnographic specificity by a postmodern
vision of seemingly improbably juxtapositions, the global collapsed into and made
and integral part of a parallel, related local situations rather than something
monolithic and external to them. This move toward comparison as heterotopia
firmly deterritorializes culture in ethnographic writing and simulates accounts of
cultures composed in a landscape for which there is as yet no developed theoretical
comparison

47

Kritik Answers

Campbell Perm: 2AC

PERM DO THE PLAN WHILE ENDORSING THE CRITICISM
EXIGENCIES DEMAND ACTION EVEN IN THE FACE OF
CRITICISM
Campbell 98

[David, Intl Relations Prof @ UM, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice
in Bosnia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 186]
The undecidable within the decision does not, however, prevent the decision nor avoid its
urgency. As Derrida observes, a just decision is always required immediately, right away.
This necessary haste has unavoidable consequences because the pursuit of infinite
information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives
that could justify it are unavailable in the crush of time. Nor can the crush of time be
avoided, even by unlimited time, because the moment of decision as such always remains a
finite moment of urgency and precipitation. The decision is always structurally finite, it
aalways marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation
that precedes it, that must precede it. That is why, invoking Kierkegaard, Derrida, declares
that the instant of decision is a madness.
The finite nature of the decision may be a madness in the way it renders possible the
impossible, the infinite character of justice, but Derrida argues for the necessity of this
madness. Most importantly, Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most
importantly, although Derridas argument concerning the decision has, to this pint, been
concerned with an account of the procedure by which a decision is possible, it is with respect
to the ncessity of the decision that Derrida begins to formulate an account of the decision
that bears upon the content of the decision. In so doing, Derridas argument addresses more
directly more directly, I would argue than is acknowledged by Critchley the concern that
for politics (at least for a progressive politics) one must provide an account of the decision to
combat domination.
That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, that justice exceeds law
and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinalbe cannot and should not
serve as alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state, or
between institutions or states and others. Indeed, incalculable justice requires us to
calculate. From where do these insistences come? What is behind, what is animating, these
imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the
other, a relationship that because of its undecidability multiplies responsibility, and the fact
that left to itself, the incalculable and given (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to
the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse
calculation. The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty a duty that
inhabits the instant of madness and compels the decision to avoid the bad, the perverse
calculation, even the worst. This is the duty that also dwells with deconstructive thought
and makes it the starting point, the at least necessary condition, for the organization of
resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical
political concerns when we recognize that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the
worst as those violences we recognize all too well without yet having thought them through,
the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism.

48

Kritik Answers

Campbell Perm: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC CAMPBELL 98 EVIDENCE. WHEN FACED
WITH UNDECIDABLE SITUATIONS AND THE STAKES ARE AS
HIGH AS THE 1AC, YOU HAVE TO ACT IN THE FACE OF
CRITICISM OR RISK POLITICAL PARALYSIS BECAUSE EVERY
ACTION SEEMS DOOMED, ALLOWING OPPRESSION AND
VIOLENCE TO REIGN UNCHECKED

49

Kritik Answers

Strategic Essentialism Perm: 2AC

PERMUTATION: THE PLAN IS A STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISM
THAT CREATES SPACE FOR ACTIVIST POLITICS
(THE CRITIQUE IS A FALSE CHOICE THAT IMPEDES
ACTIVISM.)
Sankaran Krishna, Professor, Political Science, University of Hawaii, Alternatives v. 18, 19 93, p.
400-401.
The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either indulges in
total critique, delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed to nostalgic,
essentialist unities that have become obsolete and have been the grounds for all our
oppressions. In offering this dichotomous choice, Der Derian replicates a move made by
Chaloupka in his equally dismissive critique of the move mainstream nuclear opposition, the
Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s, that, according to him, was operating along
obsolete lines, emphasizing facts and realities, while a postmodern President Reagan
easily outflanked them through an illusory Star Wars program (See KN: chapter 4)
Chaloupka centers this difference between his own supposedly total critique of all sovereign
truths (which he describes as nuclear criticism in an echo of literary criticism) and the more
partial (and issue based) criticism of what he calls nuclear opposition or antinuclearists
at the very outset of his book. (Kn: xvi) Once again, the unhappy choice forced upon the
reader is to join Chaloupka in his total critique of all sovereign truths or be trapped in
obsolete essentialisms. This leads to a disastrous politics, pitting groups that have the most
in common (and need to unite on some basis to be effective) against each other. Both
Chaloupka and Der Derian thus reserve their most trenchant critique for political groups
that should, in any analysis, be regarded as the closest to them in terms of an oppositional
politics and their desired futures. Instead of finding ways to live with these differences and
to (if fleetingly) coalesce against the New Right, this fratricidal critique is politically suicidal.
It obliterates the space for a political activism based on provisional and contingent
coalitions, for uniting behind a common cause even as one recognizes that the coalition is
comprised of groups that have very differing (and possibly unresolvable) views of reality.
Moreover, it fails to consider the possibility that there may have been other, more
compelling reasons for the failure of the Nuclear Freeze movement or anti-Gulf War
movement. Like many a worthwhile cause in our times, they failed to garner sufficient
support to influence state policy. The response to that need not be a totalizing critique that
delegitimizes all narratives. The blackmail inherent in the choice offered by Der Derian and
Chaloupka, between total critique and ineffective partial critique, ought to be transparent.
Among other things, it effectively militates against the construction of provisional or
strategic essentialisms in our attempts to create space for activist politics. In the next
section, I focus more widely on the genre of critical international theory and its impact on
such an activist politics.

50

Kritik Answers

Strategic Essentialism Perm: 1AR

NEXT, EXTEND THE KRISHNA PERM. THE NEGS WITH US
OR AGAINST US MENTALITY FRACTURES EFFECTIVE
SOCIAL ACTION INSTEAD OF FOCUSING ON DIFFERENCES.
WE SHOULD HIGHLIGHT OUR AGREEMENTS. THIS HAS 2
IMPLICATIONS:
IT FLIPS THE K SOLVENCY BECAUSE IT ENTRENCHING AN
ALIENATING PRAXIS
IT PROVES THAT ONLY THE PERM, WHICH RECOGNIZES
THE VALUE OF BOTH ADVOCACIES, CAN LEAD TO
EFFECTIVE POLITICAL ACTION DICHOTOMOUS CHOICE
COLLAPSES PRAXIS

51

Kritik Answers

Bleiker Perm: 2AC

VIEWING TWO COMPETING IDEOLOGIES TOGETHER AND
CREATING CONTRADICTIONS ALLOWS THE IDEOLOGIES TO
COEXIST, OPENING MORE AVENUES FOR POLITICAL
THOUGHT
Bleiker 97

[Roland, PhD Cand @ Australian National U. of Political Sci, Alternatives 22, 57-85//uwyo]
No concept will ever be sufficient, will ever do justice to the object it is trying to capture. The objective then becomes to conceptualize thoughts so that they do not
silence other voices, but coexist and interact with them. Various authors have suggested methods for this purpose, methods that will always remain attempts without

Bakhtins dialogism, a theory of knowledge and language that tries to avoid the excluding
accepts the existence of multiple meanings, draws connections
between differences, and searches for possibilities to establish conceptual and linguistic dialogues among competing ideas,
ever reaching the ideal state that they aspire to. We know of Mikhail
tendencies of monological thought forms. Instead, he

values, speech forms, texts, and validity claims, and the like. Jurgen Habermas attempts to theorize the preconditions for ideal speech situations. Communication, in
this case, should be as unrestrained as possible, such that claims to truth and rightness can be discursively redeemed, albeit, one should add, though a rationalism
and universalism that it violently anti-Bakhtinian and anti-Adornian. Closer to the familiar terrain of IR we find Christine Sylvesters feminist method of

empathetic cooperation, which aims at opening up questions of gender by a process of

positional slippage that occurs when one listens seriously to the concerns, fears, and agendas of those
one is unaccustomed to heeding when building social theory. But how does one conceptualize such attempts if
concepts can ever do justice to the objects they are trying to capture?
The daring task is, as we know from Adorno, to open with concepts what does not fit into concepts, to resist the distorting power of reification and return the
conceptual to the nonconceptual. This disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of critical philosophy. It impedes the concept from developing its own dynamics
and from becoming an absolute in itself. The first step toward disenchanting the concept is simply refusing to define it monologically. Concepts should achieve
meaning only gradually in relation to each other. Adorno even intentionally uses the same concept in different way in order to liberate it from the harrow definition

.
One cannot eliminate the contradictory, the fragmentary, and the discontinuous.
Contradictions are only contradictions if one assumes the existence of a prior universal
standard of reference. What is different appears as divergent, dissonant, and negative only as long as
our consciousness strives for a totalizing standpoint, which we must avoid if we are to
escape the reifying and excluding dangers of identity thinking. Just as reality is fragmented, we need to
think in fragments. Unity then is not to be found be evening out discontinuities. Contradictions are to be referred over
artificially constructed meanings and the silencing of underlying conflicts. Thus, Adorno advocates writing
that language itself had already imposed on it. That contradictions could arise out of this practice does not bother Adorno. Indeed, he considers them essential

in fragments, such that the resulting text appears as if it always could be interrupted, cut off abruptly, any time, and place. He adheres to Nietzsches advice that one
should approach deep problems like taking a cold bath, quickly into them and quickly out again. The belief that one does not reach deep enough this way, he claims,
is simply the superstition of those who fear cold water. But Nietzsches bath has already catapulted us into the vortex of the next linguistic terrain of resistance the
question of style.

52

Kritik Answers

Perm Solves: Coalitions Key

THE OPPRESSED SHOULD WELCOME THOSE FROM THE DOMINANT GROUP
COMMITTED TO FIGHTING AGAINST OPPRESSION
Ali Khan, Professor, Law, Washburn University. Lessons From Malcolm X: Freedom by Any Means
Necessary, HOWARD LAW JOURNAL v. 38 1994.
Yet, no concept of freedom requires that every member of the dominant group be
dehumanized. Such dehumanization is unnecessary, even counter-productive, in the fight
against oppression. The oppressed should welcome those among the dominant group who
gather the moral courage to rebel against their own kind and fight for the sake of justice.
n60 [*95]

53

Kritik Answers

Perm Solves: Hybridization Effective

THE PERM FUNCTIONS AS A NEGOTIATION BETWEEN THE
POLITICS OF THE 1AC AND THE ALTERNATIVE, ALLOWING
FOR MORE EFFECTIVE POLITICAL CHANGE THAN EITHER
THE ONE OR THE OTHER.
Homi K. Bhabha, Professor, University of Sussex, THE LOCATION OF CULTURE, 19 94, p. 28.
My illustration attempts to display the importance of the hybrid moment of political
change. Here the transformational value of change lies in the rearticulation, or translation,
of elements that are neither the One (unitary working class) nor the Other (the politics of
gender) but something else besides, which contests the terms, and territories of both. There
is a negotiation between gender and class, where each formation encounters the displaced,
differentiated boundaries of its group representation and enunciative sites in which the
limits and limitations of social power are encountered in an agonistic relation. When it is
suggested that the British Labour Party should seek to produce a socialist alliance among
progressive forces that are widely dispersed and distributed across a range of class, culture
and occupational forces - without a unifying sense of the class for itself - the kind of
hybridity that I have attempted to identify is being acknowledged as a historical necessity.
We need a little less pietistic articulation of political principle (around class and nation); a
little more of the principle of political negotiation.

54

Kritik Answers

Perm Solves: Multifaceted Resistance

Best
THE PERM SOLVES BEST A MULTIFACETED APPROACH TO COMBATING
OPPRESSION IS KEY
Ali Khan, Professor, Law, Washburn University. Lessons From Malcolm X: Freedom by Any Means
Necessary, HOWARD LAW JOURNAL v. 38 1994.
It must be noted that Malcolm's concept of any means necessary includes, but is not limited
to non-violent civil disobedience. n29 If non-violent civil disobedience does not change the
system, then any means necessary allows the oppressed to consider armed resistance. The
oppressed may use multiple strategies. One group among the oppressed, for example, may
use non-violent means to fight oppression; another may advocate more radical methods to
change the system. This multi-faceted approach creates more pressure on the oppressor to
lift oppression. In order for such a movement to be effective, however, the oppressor must
believe that those who are involved are serious about [*87] their cause. Those who are
oppressed must be willing to sacrifice their lives to abolish the state of subjugation. n30 It is
also important that the oppressed maintain their underlying solidarity because it is
inevitable that they will encounter efforts to divide them and turn them against each other.

55

Kritik Answers

Perm Solves: Radicalism Dooms the

Movement
THEY WONT ACHIEVE THEIR MINDSET SHIFT, AND EVEN IF THEY DO
CONCRETE POLICIES OPTIONS WILL STILL BE KEY
Martin Lewis professor in the School of the Environment and the Center for International Studies at
Duke University. GREEN DELUSIONS, 1992 p 11-12.
Here I will argue that eco-radical political strategy, if one may call it that, is consummately
self-defeating. The theoretical and empirical rejection of green radicalism is thus bolstered
by a series of purely pragmatic objections. Many eco-radicals hope that a massive ideological
campaign can transform popular perceptions, leading both to a fundamental change in lifestyles and to large-scale social reconstruction. Such a view is highly credulous. The notion
that continued intellectual hectoring will eventually result in a mass conversion to
environmental monasticism (Roszak 1979:289)marked by vows of poverty and
nonprocreationis difficult to accept. While radical views have come to dominate many
environmental circles, their effect on the populace at large has been minimal. Despite the
greening of European politics that recently gave stalwarts considerable hope, the more
recent green plunge suggests that even the European electorate lacks commitment to
environmental radicalism. In the United States several decades of preaching the same ecoradical gospel have had little appreciable effect; the public remains, as before, wedded to
consumer culture and creature comforts. The stubborn hope that nonetheless continues to
inform green extremism stems from a pervasive philosophical error in radical environmentalism. As David Pepper (1989) shows, most eco-radical thought is mired in idealism: in
this case the belief that the roots of the ecological crisis lie ultimately in ideas about nature
and humanity As Dobson (1990:37) puts it: Central to the theoretical canon of Green
politics is the belief that our social, political, and economic problems are substantially
caused by our intellectual relationship with the world (see also Milbrath 1989:338). If only
such ideas would change, many aver, all would be well. Such a belief has inspired the writing
of eloquent jeremiads; it is less conducive to designing concrete strategies for effective social
and economic change. It is certainly not my belief that ideas are insignificant or that
attempting to change others opinions is a futile endeavor. If that were true I would hardly
feel compelled to write a polemic work of this kind. But I am also convinced that changing
ideas alone is insufficient. Widespread ideological conversion, even if it were to occur, would
hardly be adequate for genuine social transformation. Specific policies must still be formu lated, and specific political plans must be devised if those policies are ever to be realized.

56

Kritik Answers

Perm Solves: Working within

Institutions Key to Change
ONLY WORKING WITHIN THE INSTITUTIONS OF POWER
CAN CREATE CHANGE
393

Lawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, WE GOTTA GET OUTTA THIS PLACE, 1992, p. 391The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance,
understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which power is actively
realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that power can be
challenged. The Left has assumed from some time now that, since it has so little access to
the apparatuses of agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through
tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to
the entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise, the Left has
nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation
and the other social disgraces of our world, although it is individuals who must take
responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they must act within organizations, and
within the system of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as well as the moral
responsibility) to fight them. Without such organizations, the only models of political
commitment are self-interest and charity. Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others
who cannot act on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of
global capitalism, and everyones position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will
not take much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the
experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the fallen middle class demonstrates.
Nor are there any guarantees about the future of any single nation. We can imagine
ourselves involved in a politics where acting for another is always acting for oneself as well, a
politics in which everyone struggles with the resources they have to make their lives (and the
world) better, since the two are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to think of
affirmation action as in everyones best interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We
need to think with what Axelos has described as a planetary thought which would be a
coherent thoughtbut not a rationalizing and rationalist inflection; it would be a
fragmentary thought of the open totalityfor what we can grasp are fragments unveiled on
the horizon of the totality. Such a politics will not begin by distinguishing between the local
and the global (and certainly not by valorizing one over the other) for the ways in which the
former are incorporated into the latter preclude the luxury of such choices. Resistance is
always a local struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to
connect into its global structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is
predicated precisely on locating the points of articulation between them, the points at which
the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the meaning of these
terms has to be understood in the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting
both globally and locally: Think globally, act appropriately! Fight locally because that is the
scene of action, but aim for the global because that is the scene of agency. Local struggles
directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point of their insertion into
the field of immanence. This requires the imagination and construction of forms of unity,
commonality and social agency which do not deny differences. Without such commonality,
politics is too easily reduced to a question of individual rights (i.e., in the terms of classical
utility theory); difference ends up trumping politics, bringing it to an end. The struggle
against the disciplined mobilization of everyday life can only be built on affective
commonalities, a shared responsible yearning: a yearning out towards something more and
something better than this and this place now. The Left, after all, is defined by its common
commitment to principles of justice, equality and democracy (although these might conflict)
in economic, political and cultural life. It is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion,
that such things are possible. The construction of an affective commonality attempts to
mobilize people in a common struggle, despite the fact that they have no common identity or
character, recognizing that they are the only force capable of providing a new historical and
oppositional agency. It strives to organize minorities into a new majority.

57

Kritik Answers

58

Kritik Answers

**Classic Turns**
Derrida Turn: 2AC
TURN CALL TO REJECT RE-INVENTS HIERARCHIES
POLITICAL ACTION IS KEY TO TRANSCEND THEIR FALSE
BINARIES
Newman 2001

[Saul, Sociology @ Macquarie University, Philosophy & Social Criticism 27: 3, pp. 46//uwyo]
Derrida does not simply want to invert the terms of these binaries so
that the subordinated term becomes the privileged term. He does not want to put writing in the place of speech, for
instance. Inversion in this way leaves intact the hierarchical, authoritarian structure of the
binary division. Such a strategy only re- affirms the place of power in the very attempt to
overthrow it. One could argue that Marxism fell victim to this logic by replacing the bour- geois state with the equally authoritarian workers state. This is a
logic that haunts our radical political imaginary. Revolutionary political theories have often succeeded only in
reinventing power and authority in their own image. However, Derrida also recognizes the
dangers of subversion that is, the radical strategy of overthrowing the hierarchy altogether,
It must be made clear, however, that

rather than inverting its terms. For instance, the classical anarchists critique of Marxism went along the lines that Marxism neglected political power in particular
the power of the state for economic power, and this would mean a restoration of political power in a Marxist revolution. Rather, for anarchists, the state and all

Derrida believes that subversion and inversion

both culminate in the same thing the reinvention of authority, in different guises . Thus, the
forms of political power must be abolished as the first revolutionary act. However,

anarchist critique is based on the Enlightenment idea of a rational and moral human essence that power denies, and yet we know from Derrida that any essential

, anarchism substituted political and economic

authority for a rational authority founded on an Enlighten- ment-humanist subjectivity.
Both radical politico-theoretical strategies then the strategy of inversion, as exemplified by
Marxism, and the strategy of subversion, as exemplified by anarchism are two sides of the
same logic of logic of place. So for Derrida:
identity involves a radical exclusion or sup- pression of other identities. Thus

What must occur then is not merely a suppression of all hierarchy, for an- archy only consolidates just as surely the established order of a metaphys- ical hierarchy;
nor is it a simple change or reversal in the terms of any given hierarchy. Rather the Umdrehung must be a transformation of the hierar- chical structure itself.

to avoid the lure of authority one must go beyond both the anarchic desire to
destroy hierarchy, and the mere reversal of terms. Rather, as Derrida suggests, if one wants to avoid this trap the hierar- chical
structure itself must be transformed. Political action must invoke a rethinking of revolution and authority in
a way that traces a path between these two terms, so that it does not merely reinvent the
place of power. It could be argued that Derrida propounds an anarchism of his own, if by anarchism one means a questioning of all authority, including
In other words,

textual and philosophical authority, as well as a desire to avoid the trap of reproducing authority and hierarchy in ones attempt to destroy it.
This deconstructive attempt to transform the very structure of hier- archy and authority, to go beyond the binary opposition, is also found in Nietzsche. Nietzsche
believes that one cannot merely oppose auth- ority by affirming its opposite: this is only to react to and, thus, affirm the domination one is supposedly resisting.

One must, he argues, tran- scend oppositional thinking altogether go beyond truth and error ,
beyond being and becoming, beyond good and evil. For Nietzsche it is simply a moral prejudice to privilege truth
over error. However, he does not try to counter this by privileging error over truth, because this leaves the
opposition intact. Rather, he refuses to confine his view of the world to this opposition: Indeed what compels us to
assume that there exists any essential antithesis between true and false? Is it not enough to suppose grades of apparentness and as it were lighter and darker
shades and tones of appearance? Nietzsche displaces, rather than replaces, these oppositional and authoritarian structures of thought he displaces place. This

.
Rather than reversing the terms of the binary opposition, one should perhaps question, and
try to make prob- lematic, its very structure.
strategy of displacement, similarly adopted by Derrida, provides certain clues to developing a non-essentialist theory of resist- ance to power and authority

59

Kritik Answers

Fear of Co-optation Turn: 2AC

FEAR OF CO-OPTATION LEADS TO PASSIVE ACCEPTANCE OF
OPPRESSION THE BETTER ALTERNATIVE IS TO ENGAGE
IN POLITICS WHILE ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR
INCOMPLETION THAT VERY FAILURE SPURS MORE
RADICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE SYSTEMS
UNCONSCIOUS COORDINATES
Zizek 2004
[Slavoj, Ocean Rain, Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek, The Electronic Book Review, July
1, 2004, www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servlet/ebr?comman=view_essay&essay_id=rasmussen, Acc.
10-23-04//uwyo-ajl]

Zizek: Im trying to avoid two extremes. One extreme is the traditional pseudoradical position which says, If you engage in politics - helping trade unions or
combating sexual harassment, whatever - youve been co-opted and so on. Then
you have the other extreme which says, Ok, you have to do something. I think
both are wrong. I hate those pseudo-radicals who dismiss every concrete action by
saying that This will all be co-opted. Of course, everything can be co-opted
[chuckles] but this is just a nice excuse to do absolutely nothing. Of course, there is
a danger that - to use the old Maoist term, popular in European student
movements thirty some years ago, the long march through institutions will last so
long that youll end up part of the institution. We need more than ever, a parallax
view - a double perspective. You engage in acts, being aware of their limitations.
This does not mean that you act with your fingers crossed. No, you fully engage, but
with the awareness that - the ultimate wager in the almost Pascalian sense - is not
simply that this act will succeed, but that the very failure of this act will trigger a
much more radical process.

60

Kritik Answers

Fear of Co-optation Turn: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC #__ ZIZEK 2004 EVIDENCE WHICH
INDICATES THAT AVOIDING CO-OPTATION CREATES
PARALYZING POLITICS THAT ENABLE OPPRESSION TO FILL
THE VOID. ONLY THE AFF POLITICS OF INCOMPLETION
SHATTERS STATUS QUO POLITICS BY UNDERMINING THE
ROOT CAUSE OF VIOLENCE
AND, FEAR OF CO-OPTATION FALLS INTO POWERLESSNESS
Pritchard 2000

[Elizabeth, Bowdoin College, Hypatia, Summer, CWI]

The third way in which a feminist reinscription of the development logic of mobility
jeopardizes women's well-being is that a fixation on development or liberty as
escaping or exiting the "closure" entailed in various locations reinscribes a
utopianism that jeopardizes the possibility of a politics directed toward
constructing an alternative and liveable world. And here again, some postmodern
theorists betray the legacy of the Enlightenment. The dislocated mobile subjects of
the Enlightenment are "at home" in a utopianism that defers the burden of the
definitions, representations, and affiliations necessary for democratic political
action. Such burdensome tasks are seen to threaten closure--and hence are
repudiated.
Reinhart Koselleck argues that a legacy of the Enlightenment is the persistence and
pathology of utopianism (Koselleck 1988). The tradition of Enlightenment critique
arises in the context of political absolutism that is instituted in the wake of religious
wars. Setting themselves against the constraining tendencies of absolutism, the
Enlightenment thinkers, whose field of action is a "single global world," engage in a
"ceaseless movement" of depersonalized critique within the horizon of an "openended future." This produces a utopian self-conception whereby "modern man is
destined to be at home everywhere and nowhere" (Koselleck 1988, 5). The error in
this legacy of modernity, according to Koselleck, is that an unpolitical position of
utopianism is mistaken as a political position. The Enlightenment thinkers were
unwilling to take responsibility for history by formulating concrete policies and
goals and designing and joining social and political institutions; instead they
resorted to polar positions as persons who negate present realities and dream of a
future they are powerless to realize.

61

Kritik Answers

The Fetish: 2AC

DISAVOWAL OF THE VIOLENCE OF REPRESENTATION AND
CALLS FOR INTERNAL RETHINKING RELY ON
ASSUMPTIONS OF METAPHYSICAL INNOCENCE,
FETISHIZING AN AUTHENTICITY THAT NEVER EXISTED
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 195-6//uwyo-ajl]
postmodernism has actually become
something. Its principal characteristic is the retreat from and disavowal of the violence of
representation - both political and semiotic. There are three further aspects to this essentially
ignominious cultural operation: (i) a cultivation of stupidity (what I have called Kelvinism, or 'metaphysical innocence')
as a means of circumventing the ideational 'brutality' of the political life; (ii) a recourse to
the idea of an internal or subjective 'truth of the soul' which transcends political reality,
along with the contingencies of representation. Both of these signal an attachment to a
surface/ depth model of subjectivity which in each case amounts to a fetishization of
authenticity, whether by opting to 'remain' on the surface, or by retreating 'inwards' ; (iii) a collapse
Despite the diligence and the sterling efforts of its best theoreti-cians, then, it seems that

of faith by individuals and even politicians themselves, not only in the political infrastructure but in the very' concept of political engagement - here it becomes
apparent that Tony Blair, for example, is more 'postodern' than any theoretician.
.

these three responses stand in an approximately analogous relationship to the archetypal forms in which consciousness,
in a state of anxiety, shrinks from the violence of determinate negation and 'strives to hold on to what it is in danger
It should be clear that

of losing'. 59 At various points throughout the present work I have used the terms 'decadence', 'irony' and 'relativism' to refer to these instances of an epistemological

capitulation to 'things as they are'

loss of nerve, this

; it may be as well here to remind ourselves of the terms in which Hegel describes these
manifestations of a retreat from truth. Consciousness, he says, at the decisive moment in which it is required to go beyond its own limits, (i) 'wishes to remain in a
state' of unthinking inertia'; (ii) gloats over its own understanding, 'which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego instead of any

Postmodernism, an empirical social

legitimizes these symptoms of

content'; (iii) 'entrenches itself in sentimentality, which assures us that it finds everything to be good in its kind'. 60
condition - by which I mean that a series of critical-theoretical strategies has attained a certain concrete form -

cultural anxiety; postmodernism becomes synonymous, therefore, with deceleration, with a sense of cultural and political conclusivity; postmodernism is
the principal vehicle of what Baudrillard calls 'the illusion of the end'.

AUTHENTICITY FETISHIZATION AND ITS FEAR OF REASON

AND VIOLENCE ALLOW US TO SPEND HOURS DEBATING
THE FINE POINTS OF BAUDRILLARIAN ETHICS WHILE GAS
CHAMBERS ARE BUILT
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997,146-7//uwyo-ajl]
If it is unreasonable to suppose that the Final Solution was potentiated or even necessarily
facilitated by Schmitt's theories, it is certainly the case that this metaphysical structure of
domination in the Third Reich, whereby the status of public citizens is reduced to a level
determined entirely in the 'natural' or biological realm of necessity, is foreshadowed in his
1927 essay. In an abstract and insidious way Schmitt introduces the idea that the
'transcendent' realm of the political, as a matter of course, will not accommodate a people
with insufficient strength to ensure its own participation, and that such a fact is ipso facto
justification for its exclusion. 'If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to
maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world.
Only a weak people will disappear.'130 Schmitt's concept of the 'political', quite simply, is
nothing of the sort - is instead weighed down by necessity, in the form of what Marshall
Berman calls German-Christian interiority - by its preoccupation with authenticity, that is to
say, and true political 'identity'. Auschwitz is a corollary not of reason, understood as risk,
but of the fear of reason, which paradoxically is a fear of violence. The stench of burning
bodies is haunted always by the sickly aroma of cheap metaphysics.

62

Kritik Answers

The Fetish: 1AR

THEIR ARGUMENT THAT WE SHOULD AVOID DISCURSIVE
VIOLENCE IS SYMPTOMATIC OF ANXIETY IN THE WAKE OF
CONTEMPORARY FRAGEMENTATION. THIS FEAR OF
POLITICAL VIOLENCE ASSUMES THE EXISTENCE OF A
UTOPIAN VIOLENCE-FREE STATE OF METAPHYSICAL
INNOCENCE, IGNORING THE WAY THAT SUCH A STATE IS
FORECLOSED BY OUR ENTRY INTO THE POLITICAL,
DESTROYING ALL CRITICAL SOLVENCY. CROSS-APPLY THE
FIRST BEWES 97 EVIDENCE.
THIS MOURNING OF AUTHENTICITY IS DEPOLITICIZING. IT
NECESSITATES A TURN TOWARDS INTERNAL QUESTIONING
AND A RETREAT FROM POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT,
ALLOWING US TO FOCUS ON THE TRUTH OF OUR
INDIVIDUAL IDENTITIES WHILE WERE COMPLICIT WITH
ATROCITY, IN MUCH THE SAME WAY THAT EICHMANN
TOILED AWAY ENSURING THAT, UNDERNEATH IT ALL, HE
WAS A GOOD PERSON WHILE HE PARTICIPATED IN
GENOCIDE. THATS THE SECOND BEWES CARD
THIS PRECEDES ALL OF THEIR ARGUMENTS BECAUSE THE
RESISTANCE ADVOCATED BY THEIR ALTERNATIVE CANNOT
OCCUR WITHOUT POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
AUTHENTICITY CAUSES THE INTELLECTUAL PARALYSIS
THAT ALLOWS ATROCITIES TO OCCUR
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997,154-5//uwyo-ajl]
Thus Fackenheim's encounter with the horror and the 'obscene rationality' of Auschwitz, secondly, displays an anxiety concerning the perceived integrity of the Third
Reich, which is in fact an instinctive gesture of revulsion at the extremes which it is possible for man to justify. This revulsion, perfectly defensible in itself, is a

It is this question of Hitler's

'integrity', perhaps more than anything, which leads to the intellectual paralysis
characteristic of postmodernity, of which the most typical symptom is cynicism, in its various forms.
On one level, of course, Hitler's programme was thoroughly 'integrated', if by this is meant 'internally coherent'. Certainly the consistency with
which both 'good' and 'bad' Jews were persecuted - and Eichmann's diligence, it emerged,
was exemplary in this regard - ensured that the Third Reich could indeed boast of a
mindless sort of integrity. It is this consistency, together with what he calls its 'cosmic scope', which for Fackenheim elevates Nazi ideology to the
prerequisite and an important if unacknowledged constituent of the postmodern 'critique' of rationality.

status of a Weltanschauung, deserving of 'respect, even awe' .154 In this, how ever, Fackenheim's conception of what is or is not appropriate to the machinery of a
political regime is warped, his values infected by those of the very society he is attempting (or refusing) to analyse. Integrity, to begin with, is not a political virtue,
since it is one of those characteristics (like honesty, or moral scrupulousness) which cannot by their very nature appear intact in the public sphere.

integrity, particularly in this narrow sense of 'internal coherence' (and this is the third point), has no positive correlation
with rationality, and is in fact profoundly opposed to the processes of reason conceived, as
Gillian Rose has defined it, in terms of risk '1" as a continually hazardous endeavour of going beyond
existing limits, a spirit directed towards progress and the future, in which the "Hegelian moment of determinate
negation is actively and recursively constitutive. The violence' represented by determinate negation is in essence
mobilized against integration, just as it is perpetrated by the 'disintegrated' figures of Rameau, Daisy Miller, or Walter Benjamin's 'destructive
character' against the philosopher) Diderot-Moi, the dullard Winterbourne, and the 'etui-man' of Benjamin's essay .
Furthermore

63

Kritik Answers

Authenticity Impossible: 1AR

1. THERE IS NO PURE RELATIONSHIP WITH ANYTHING
BECAUSE EVERY ENGAGEMENT IS TAINTED BY
MISPERCEPTION, COGNITIVE MEDIATION, AND VIOLENCE.
CROSS-APPLY THE FIRST BEWES 97 CARD
2. EVERY ACT IS ALWAYS ALREADY INAUTHENTIC BECAUSE
OF ITS MEDIATION BY SIGNFICATION AND CULTURE. ONLY
YOUR DEATH IS
AUTHENTIC
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 59//uwyo-ajl]
If the K Foundation sought by such an act to demonstrate their freedom from the
incrimination of art by capital, and thereby their own authenticity as artists, they inevitably
failed. As perhaps they realize: 'I don't think people should find out about it,' Cauty tells
Reid. 'Nobody would understand. The shock value would spoil ,it. Because it doesn't want to
be a shocking thing; it just wants to be a fire.' Such an absence of semiosis is unthinkable
and unattainable: ,how could the incineration of one million pounds possibly refuse to
signify? As Reid observes 0 his article, 'this piece is the beginning of ithe art work. Without
this article none of it ever existed.'
Drummond and Caut are compromised from the outset, not only by money but by art itself,
by representation, by the 'passage' from idea to vehicle, from signified to signifier - precisely
because such a passage is neither linear nor free from diversion, is in fact
",eciprocal and systemically constituted: one begins at the signifier as often as one begins at
the signified, and at every place in the system, and at no place. The intention to demonstrate
authenticity is impli-cated in the demonstration itself. To have bothered to'destroy the
money at all, even in complete privacy, is already to determine their sabservience to it, to
bow to its power. To make a statement, 'artis-tic' or otherwise, is to concede at once to the
violent demands of signification. Absolute authenticity necessitates one's own extinc -tion;
only in death does one accede to the immaculate. The business of humanity, 'and thus of art,
is precisely one of compromise, 'inau-thenticity' and fabication. In finding the artistic
institution phoney and depraved, the K Foundation confuse ethics with aesthetics. Their
failure to bring about the end of art dictates that Drummond and Cauty proceed logically to
self-destruction; the next bonfire must surely,be one intended for their own physical
immolation.

64

Kritik Answers

Kulynych Turn: 2AC

DEBATE HAS VALUE DELIBERATIVE POLITICS AND
PERFORMANCE RECAPTURE DELIBERATIVE SPACE FROM
OPPRESSIVE STRUCTURES
Kulynych 97

[Jessica, Asst. Prof. of Poli Sci @ Winthrop, Polity 30: 2, Winter//uwyo]

A performative perspective on participation enriches our understanding of deliberative democracy. This enlarged understanding can be demonstrated by considering
the examination of citizen politics in Germany presented in Carol Hager's Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the West German Energy Debate.
(86) Her work skillfully maps the precarious position of citizen groups as they enter into problemsolving in contemporary democracies. After detailing the German
citizen foray into technical debate and the subsequent creation of energy commissions to deliberate on the long-term goals of energy policy, she concludes that a dual
standard of interpretation and evaluation is required for full understanding of the prospects for citizen participation. Where traditional understandings of
participation focus on the policy dimension and concern themselves with the citizens' success or failure to attain policy preferences, she advocates focusing as well on
the discursive, legitimation dimension of citizen action. Hager follows Habermas in reconstituting participation discursively and asserts that the legitimation

, success is not
defined in terms of getting, but rather in terms of solving through consensus. Deliberation is
thus an end in itself, and citizens have succeeded whenever they are able to secure a realm of
deliberative politics where the aim is forging consensus among participants, rather than
achieving victory by some over others.
dimension offers an alternative reason for optimism about the efficacy of citizen action. In the discursive understanding of participation

Through the creation of numerous networks of communication and the generation of publicity, citizen action furthers democracy by assuming a substantive role in
governing and by forcing participants in the policy process to legitimate their positions politically rather than technically. Hager maintains that a sense of political
efficacy is enhanced by this politically interactive role even though citizens were only minimally successful in influencing or controlling the outcome of the policy
debate, and experienced a real lack of autonomy as they were coerced into adopting the terms of the technical debate. She agrees with Alberto Melucci that the impact
of [these] movements cannot.., be judged by normal criteria of efficacy and success .... These groups offer a different way of perceiving and naming the world. They
demonstrate that alternatives are possible, and they expand the communicative as opposed to the bureaucratic or market realms of societal activity.(87)
Yet her analysis is incomplete. Like Habermas, Hager relies too heavily on a discursive reconstitution of political action. Though she recognized many of the
limitations of Habermas's theory discussed above, she insists on the :innovative and creative potential of citizen initiatives. She insists that deliberative politics can
resist the tendency toward authoritarianism common to even a communicative, deliberative search for objective truth, and that legitimation debates can avoid the
tendency to devolve into the technical search for the better argument. She bases her optimism on the non-hierarchical, sometimes even chaotic and incoherent, forms
of decisionmaking practiced by citizen initiatives, and on the diversity and spontaneity of citizen groups.
Unfortunately, it is precisely these elements of citizen action that cannot be explained by a theory of communicative action. It is here that a performative conception of

, the goal of action is not only to secure a realm for deliberative

to disrupt and resist the norms and identities that structure such a realm and its
participants. While Habermas theorizes that political solutions will emerge from dialogue, a performative understanding of participation
highlights the limits of dialogue and the creative and often uncontrollable effect of
unpremeditated action on the very foundations of communication.
When we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative perspective, we look precisely at those moments of defiance and disruption
that bring the invisible and unimaginable into view. Although citizens were minimally successful in influencing or controlling the out
come of the policy debate and experienced a considerable lack of autonomy in their coercion into the technical debate , the goal-oriented debate
within the energy commissions could be seen as a defiant moment of performative politics. The existence
of a goal-oriented debate within a technically dominated arena defied the normalizing
separation between expert policymakers and consuming citizens. Citizens momentarily
recreated themselves as policymakers in a system that defined citizens out of the policy
process, thereby refusing their construction as passive clients. The disruptive potential of
the energy commissions continues to defy technical bureaucracy even while their decisions
are non-binding.
political action implicitly informs Hager's discussion. From a performative perspective
politics, but

65

Kritik Answers

Kulynych Turn: 1AR

NEXT, EXTEND OUR KULYNYCH EVIDENCE:
DEBATE IS AN END UNTO ITSELF BECAUSE IT DISRUPTS
NORMALIZING SYSTEMS BY ELUCIDATING THE LIMITS AND
CONSTRAINTS ON DIALOGUE THROUGH A PERFORMATIVE
ACT OF RESISTANCE WHAT WE DO IS NOT JUST
CONSTITUTED BY THE RATIONALITY OF OUR ARGUMENTS
BUT BY THE TECHNIQUES WE USE WHETHER OR NOT
THIS PARTICULAR DISCUSSION CAUSES POLITICAL ACTION,
OUR ACT OF DEFIANCE EMPOWERS IDENTITIES AND
MAKES DEBATE MEANINGFUL

66

Kritik Answers

Praxis Turn: 2AC

AND, THEORETICAL INTERVENTIONS EMPTY OF PRACTICE
JUST COMMODIFY AND DESTROY THE CRITICISM PERM
SOLVES BEST
Routledge 96

[Paul, The Third Space as Critical Engagement, Antipode 28(4), October, 399//uwyo]
One of the problems of theory is that we attempt to understand processes, things,
others, in a moment of cultural petrification, where we objectify living culturalpolitical forms (Jeudy, 1994). Such theory takes place at a distance. In the
production of theory we are distanced from what Bey (1994) terms
immediatism direct, lived experience. Rather we become engaged in
representations of (an)others reality. As such, we are alienated form the lived
moment, enmeshed in the theory market, where the production of theory
becomes another part of spectacular production, another commodity.
This commodification imples that a mediation has occurred, and with every
mediation so our alienation from live experience increases. As Mies (1983) notes,
we are too frequently engaged in uninvolved spectator knowledge, one separated
form active participation. As such, research and theory can remain
analytical and disembodied. It is not lived. To enact a third space within and
between academia and activism is to attempt to live theory in the immediate.

67

Kritik Answers

Praxis Turn:1AR
AND, EXTEND THE 2AC #__, ROUTLEDGE PRAXIS
ARGUMENT. THEORETICAL ENGAGEMENT REMOVES
ITSELF FROM LIVED EXPERIENCE, RENDERING ITSELF
ANOTHER COMMODITY TO BE BOUGHT AND SOLD,
PREVENTING TRANSFORMATION
AND, THINKING ABOUT THINKING IS USELESS. THINKING
ABOUT DOING IS KEY TO CHANGING STRUCTURAL WRONGS
Booth 97

[Ken, Chair of Intl Pltcs @ Wales, Critical security studies, Ed. Krause & Williams, p.
114//uwyo]
study of
security can beneft from a range of perspectives, but not from those who would refuse to
engage with the problems of those, at this minute, who are being starved, oppressed, or shot. It is therefore
legitimate to ask what any theory that purports to belong within world politics has to say about Bosnia or nuclear deterrence. Thinking about
thinking is important, but, more urgently, so is thinking about doing. For those who believe that we live in a
humanly constituted world, the distinction between theory and practice dissolves: theory is a form of practice, and practice is a form of theory. Abstract
ideas about emancipation will not suffice: it is important for critical security studies to
engage with the real by suggesting policies, and sites of change, to help humankind in whole or in
part, to move away from its structural wrongs.
Security is concerned with how people live. An interest in practice (policy relevance) is surely part of what is involved in being a security specialist. The

ALSO, MUST LINK PROTEST TO DEMANDS ON THE STATE OR

WE LAPSE INTO POLITICAL PARALYSIS IN THE FACE OF
OPPRESSION
Foucault 82
[Michel, God, Politics and Ethics: An Interview, The Foucault Reader, Trans.
Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 377//uwyo-ajl]
Q. And this is hard to situate within a struggle that is already under way, because the lines are drawn by
others. . . .
M.F. Yes, but I think that ethics is a practice; ethos is a manner of being . Let's take an
example that touches us all, that of Poland. If we raise the question of Poland in strictly
political terms, it's clear that we quickly reach the point of saying that there's nothing
we can do. We can't dispatch a team of para- troopers, and we can't send armored cars to liberate
Warsaw. I think that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I think we also agree that, for
ethical reasons, we have to raise the problem of Poland in the form of a

nonacceptance of what is. happening there, and a nonacceptance of the passivity of

our own governments. I think this attitude is an ethical one, but it is also political; it does not
consist in saying merely, "I protest," but in making of that attitude a political
phenomenon that is as substantial as possible, and one which those who govern,
here or there, will sooner or later be obliged to take into account.

68

Kritik Answers

Praxis Turn: 2AR

NEXT, EXTEND THE 2AC #__, THE ROUTLEDGE PRAXIS
ARGUMENT.
OUR POSITION IS THAT THE AFFS DEPLOYMENT OF
THEORY IS NOTHING BUT AN EMPTY GESTURE THAT FAILS
BECAUSE ITS DEVOID OF PRACTICE
A PURELY ACADEMIC CRITICISM, LIKE THE NEGS,
DIVORCES ITSELF FROM ANY SENSE OF PRAXIS,
INEXORABLY COMMODIFYING ARGUMENT, WHERE
THEORY BECOMES ANOTHER PRODUCT OF UNIVERSITY
FACTORIES
NOT ONLY DOES THIS ARGUMENT PROVIDE SOLVENCY FOR
OUR PWERM, WHICH COMBINES THEORY AND PRACTICE,
BUT IT SERVES AS A POWERFUL INDICTMENT OF THE
POTENTIAL FOR ANY POSITIVE CRITICAL IMPACT

69

Kritik Answers

Praxis Turn: Ext

REAL PROBLEMS DEMAND ACTION IVORY TOWER
CRITICISMS CAUSE IMMOBILIZATION
Booth 95

[Ken, Prof. of IR, Human wrongs and international relations, International Affaris,
ASP//delizzozzle]
Philosophical sceptics, for whom nothing is certain, and so for whom the bases of
action are always problematic, are a familiar feature of academic life Tom Stoppard
enjoyable caricatured them in his clever comedy Jumpers, and in particular in the
scene in which philosophical sceptics were discussed whether the train for Bristol
left yesterday from Paddington station. On what basis could they ever know? Even
if they were actually on the train that was supposed to leave for Bristol, might not
the happening be explained by Paddington leaving the train? We all know such
conundrums, and indeed such people Meanwhile, flesh is being fed or famished,
and people are being tortured and killed And even philospohical skeptics have to
catch trains Some of them do Unless acadmeics are merely to spread confusion, or
snipe from the windows of ivory towers, we must engage with the real. This means
having the courage of our confusions and thinking and acting without certainty.
In reply to those sensitive to post-colonial critiques of Western imperialism I would
argue that just because many Western ideas were spread by commerce and the
Gatling gun, it does not follow that every idea originating in the West, or backed by
Western opinion, should therefore simply be labelled imperialist and rejected.
There are some ethnocentric ideas and individual human rights is one of them
for which we should not apologize. Furthermore, I do not see the dissemination of
powerful social and political ideas as necessarily occurring in one direction only. As
the economic and political power of Asia grows, for example, so will its cultural
power. World politics in the next century will be more Asian than the present one.
What matters from a cosmopolitan perspective is not the birthplace of an idea, but
the meaning we give it.

70

Kritik Answers

Presymbolism Turn: 2AC

TURN GROUNDING RESISTANCE IN A BEFORE THE FALL
IDENTITY RENDERS THE COLONIZED PASSIVE VICTIMS
WITHOUT AGENCY ACTIVISM WITHIN THE SYSTEM USES
ITS OWN EXCESSES TO DISMANTLE IT
Zizek '99

[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish
Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 256-7//uwyo-ajl]
Against Butler, one is thus tempted to emphasize that Hegel was well aware of the
retroactive process by means of which oppressive power itself generates the form of
resistance is not this very paradox contained in Hegel's notion of positing the
presuppositions, that is, of how the activity of positing-mediating does not merely
elaborate the presupposed immediate-natural Ground, but thoroughly transforms
the very core of its identity? The very In-itself to which Chechens endeavour to
return is already mediated-posited by the process of modernization, which
deprived them of their ethnic roots.
This argumentation may appear Eurocentrist, condemning the colonized to repeat
the European imperialist pattern by means of the very gesture of resisting it
however, it is also possible to give it precisely the opposite reading. That is to say: if
we ground our resistance to imperialist Eurocentrism in the reference to some
kernel of previous ethnic identity, we automatically adopt the position of a victim
resisting modernization, of a passive object on which imperialist procedures work.
If, however, we conceive our resistance as an excess that results from the way
brutal imperialist intervention disturbed our previous self-enclosed identity, our
position becomes much stronger, since we can claim that our resistance is
grounded in the inherent dynamics of the imperialist system that the imperialist
system itself, through its inherent antagonism, activates the forces that will bring
about its demise. (The situation here is strictly homologous to that of how to
ground feminine resistance: if woman is 'a symptom of man', the locus at which the
inherent antagonisms of the patriarchal symbolic order emerge, this in no way
constrains the scope of feminine resistance but provides it with an even stronger
detonating force.) Or to put it in yet another way the premise according to
which resistance to power is inherent and immanent to the power edifice (in the
sense that it is generated by the inherent dynamic of the power edifice) in no way
obliges us to draw the conclusion that every resistance is co-opted in advance,
including in the eternal game Power plays with itself the key point is that through
the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very inherent
antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which leads to its own
ultimate downfall.
It seems that such a notion of antagonism is what Foucault lacks: from the fact that
every resistance is generated ('posited') by the Power edifice itself, from this
absolute inherence of resistance to Power, he seems to draw the conclusion that
resistance is co-opted in advance, that it cannot seriously undermine the system
that is, he precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent
inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able to master
and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In short,
Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its
cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is as such
absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. (the philosophical point to
be made here is that this is the fundamental feature of the dialectical-materialist
notion of 'effect': the effect can 'outdo' its cause; it can be ontologically 'higher' than
its cause.) One is thus tempted to reverse the Foucauldian notion of an allencompassing power edifice which always-already contains its transgression, that
which allegedly eludes it: what if the price to be paid is that the power mechanism
cannot even control itself, but has to rely on an obscene protuberance at its very
heart? In other words: what effectively eludes the controlling grasp of Power is not

71

Kritik Answers
so much the external In-itself it tries to dominate but, rather, the obscene
supplement which sustains its own operation.

72

Kritik Answers

Presymbolism Turn: 1AR

AND, EXTEND THE 2AC # ___ ZIZEK 99 PRESYMBOLISM
TURN. RESISTING OPPRESSION CREATES A BEFORE THE
FALL FANTASY, RENDERING US PASSIVE VICTIMS. ONLY
USING THE SYSTEMS OWN EXCESSES AGAINST ITSELF
EXPLODES IT FROM WITHIN, CAUSING ITS DOWNFALL
ALSO, POWER IS SPLIT FROM WITHIN BY ITS TRAUMATIC
EXCESS USING THAT DISAVOWED FOUNDATION
DISMANTLES IT
Zizek '97

[Slavoj, The Game, The Plague Fantasies, NYC: Verso, 1997, 26-7//uwyo-ajl]
This last point must be further radicalized: the power edifice itself is split from
within: in order to reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has to rely on an
inherent excess which grounds it - to put it in the Hegelian terms of speculative
identity, Power is always-already its own transgression, if it is to function, it has to
rely on a kind of obscene supplement. It is therefore not enough to assert, in a
Foucauldian way, that power is inextricably linked to counter-power, generating it
and being itself conditioned by it: in a self-reflective way, the split is alwaysalready mirrored back into the power edifice itself, splitting it from within, so that
the gesture of self-censorship is consubstantial with the exercise of power.
Furthermore, it is not enough to say that the `repression' of some libidinal content
retroactively eroticizes the very gesture of `repression' - this `eroticization' of
power is not a secondary effect of its exertion on its object but its very disavowed
foundation, its `constitutive crime', its founding gesture which has to remain
invisible if power is to function normally. What we get in the kind of military drill
depicted in the first part of Full Metal Jacket, for example, is not a secondary
eroticization of the disciplinary procedure which creates military subjects, but the
constitutive obscene supplement of this pro- cedure which renders it operative.
Judith Butler27 provides a perfect example of, again, Jesse Helms who, in his very
formulation of the text of the anti-pornography law~ displays the contours of a
particular fantasy - an older man who engages in sadomasochistic sexual activity
with another, younger man, preferably a child - which bears witness to his own
perverted sexual desire. Helms thus unwittingly brings to light the obscene
libidinal foundation of his own crusade against pornography.

73

Kritik Answers

Rejection Bad Turn: 2AC

TURN - CALL TO REJECT IMPOVERISHES DISCOURSE
PERM SOLVES BEST
Ashley 88

[Richard, Untying the Soveregin State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17(2), June, 227-262//uwyo]
The monological reading of theoretical discourse of the anarchy problematique thus
leaves the reader with the dichotomous choice of positions mentioned earlier: the choice titled the
blackmail of the heroic practice. One must be either inside this discourse or outside, either for or against. On
the one hand, in order to enter this discursive enclosure even if ones interest is criticism or reform one must adopt a subjective standpoint that
affirms the objective and original powers of the heroic practice and interpret everything in its terms. One must resign oneself to complicity with the

in
order to stand outside this discursive enclosure thus to repudiate the hard core
representations of the anarcy problematique one must condemn oneself to a position of
practical futility, no matter how self-righteous it may be. Saying no to a
powerful discourse that participates in the construction of the selfevIdent truth of the anarchy problematique, one is left to construct
subjective counter-truths that cannot be effective precisely because
they remove themselves from the workings of objective sources of
power in history.
knowledgeable practices by which the anarchy problematique is constituted as a self-evident and objective condition of life. On the other hand,

74

Kritik Answers

Rejection Bad Turn: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC #___ ASHLEY EVIDENCE. TOTAL
REJECTION LOCKS US OUTSIDE OF DISCURSIVE SYSTEMS,
PREVENTING US FROM CHANGING THEM FROM WITHIN,
CONDEMNING US TO PASSIVE FUTILITY. THIS IS A NET
BENEFIT TO THE PERM
ALSO, TOTAL DOGMATIC SYSTEMS WHERE ONE SIDE IS
RIGHT AND THE OTHER WRONG CREATE TOTALIZING
POLITICS, RESULTING IN SLAUGHTER AND WAR
Said 94
[Edward W., Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reich Lectures,
Vintage, 1994, 113]
Such transfigurations sever the living connection between the intellectual and the
movement or process of which he or she is a part. Moreover there is the appalling
danger of thinking of oneself, ones views, ones rectittude, ones stated positions as
all-important. To read over The God That Failed testimonial is for me a depressing
thing. I want to ask: Why as an intellectual did you believe in a god anyway? And
besides, who gave you the right to imagine that your early belief and later
disenchantment were so important? In and of itself religious belief is to me both
understandable and deeply personal: it is rather when a total dogmatic system in
which one side is innocently good, the other irreducibly evil is substituted for the
process , the give and take of vital interchange that the secular intellectual feels the
unwelcome and inappropriate enroachment of one realm on another. Politics
becomes religious enthusiasm as it is the case today in former Yugoslavia
with results in ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter and unending conflict that are
horrible to contemplate.

AND, FOREIGN POLICY CRITICISMS BECOME COMPLICIT

WITH THE STRUCTURES THEY OPPOSE
Ashley 96

[Richard, Erics Best Friend for Life & Prof. of Poli Sci @ ASU, The achievements
of post-structuralism, International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1996, 247-8]
And to these four premises I might add just one more. Under these circumstances,
it can make little sense to rehearse all those strains of argument that have explored
the limitations of the model of critical activity I have been discussing this in the
hope that I might thereby open up a conversation that seems so disposed to
closure. Call them post-structuralist or call them what you will, these, once more,
are strains of argument that have rigorously demonstrated how very paradoxical is
every attempt to cling fast to this model of criticism in the face of all manner of
excessive happenings that transgress or overflow the limits of every rendition of it;
how much every such attempt depends upon strategiems for disciplining excess
whose arbitrariness, whose violence, is right there on the surface for all to see; how
much, therefore, every such attempt must rely upon effecting a blindness to its own
emergence; and how readily, thanks to all of this,
these attempts can be drawn into a complicity (thought not a secret complicity)
with those very practices that would arrest ambiguity, discipline the proliferation of
possibilities, tame resistances, and sustain structures of domination ostensibly
opposed.

75

Kritik Answers

Rejection Bad Turn: Ext

REJECTION OF SPECIFIC SOLUTIONS BECAUSE OF RADICAL
DKEPTICISM IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN PLAN
Fierlbeck 94

[Katherine, Prof. Poli Sci @ Dalhousie, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights,
Inroads, and Intrusions, History & Theory, 33: 1, ASP//uwyo-ajl]
In many respects, even the dismally skeptical post-modernists are too optimistic in their allegiance to post-modern ideas. As many others have already pointed out,
post-modernism offers little constructive advice about how to reorganize and reinvigorate modern social relations. "The views of the post-modern individual," explains
Rosenau, "are likely neither to lead to a post-modern society of innovative production nor to engender sustained or contained economic growth." This is simply
because "these are not post-modern priorities"(55). Post-modernism offers no salient solutions; and, where it does, such ideas have usually been reconstituted from
ideas presented in other times and places.[9]

What we need are specific solutions to specific problems : to trade disputes,

. If one cannot prioritize public policy

to the redistribution of health care resources, to unemployment, to spousal abuse

alternatives, or assign political responsibility to address such issues, or even say without hesitation that wealthy nations that steadfastly ignore pockets of
virulent poverty are immoral, then the worst nightmares of the most cynical post-modernists will likely
come to life. Such an overarching refusal to address these issues is at least as dangerous as
any overarching affirmation of beliefs regarding ways to go about solving them.
Post-modernism suffers from -- and is defined by -- too much indeterminacy. In order to achieve anything, constructive or otherwise,
human beings must attempt to understand the nature of things, and to evaluate them. This
can be done even if we accept that we may never understand things completely, or evaluate them
correctly. But if paralysis is the most obvious political consequence of post-modernism, a graver danger lies in the rejection of the "Enlightenment ideals" of

t the opposite of "universalism" is

is, some combination of intolerance, local
prejudice, suspicion, bigotry, fear, brutality, and persecution. The uncritical affiliation with the community of one's
universality and impartiality. If the resounding end to the Cold War has taught us anything, it should be tha
not invariably a coexistence of "little narratives": it can be, and frequently

birth, as Martha Nussbaum notes, "while not without causal and formative power, is ethically arbitrary, and sometimes ethically dangerous -- in that it encourages us
to listen to our unexamined preferences as if they were ethical laws."[10]

76

Kritik Answers

Ricouer Turn: 2AC

TURN THE SEARCH FOR HIDDEN MOTIVES ENGAGES IN A
HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION, RISKING SPIRAL INTO
PROFOUND SKEPTICISM
Berman 2001
[Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, LN]
Ricoeur contrasts two different "poles" among hermeneutic styles. At one pole, "hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of ...
meaning." 23 At the other pole, hermeneutics is "understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion." 24 It is not entirely clear to me precisely

a hermeneutics of faith to be one that treats the

object of study as possessing inherent meaning on its own terms. In contrast, the
hermeneutics of suspicion seeks to expose societal practices as illusory edifices that
mask underlying contradictions or failures of meaning. I will return to the first pole in Part Four of this
what Ricoeur means by these two categories. Nevertheless, I understand

Essay, but for now I wish to focus on the hermeneutics of demystification and suspicion.

t each of these
thinkers makes "the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as
"false' consciousness." 25 Ricoeur sees this perspective as an extension of Descartes' fundamental position of doubt at the dawn of the
Ricoeur locates in the work of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud the central hallmarks of this suspicious approach. He argues tha

Enlightenment. According to Ricoeur, "The philosopher trained in the school of Descartes knows that things are doubtful, that they are not such as
they appear; but he does not doubt that consciousness is such as it appears to itself; in consciousness, meaning and consciousness of meaning
coincide." 26

The hermeneutics of suspicion takes doubt one step farther, by distrusting even our
perceptions.
This suspicious position questions the so-called "correspondence [*104] theory" of truth. As we go through our lives, most of us generally assume that
our mental perceptions accord with reality because we believe we have direct access to reality through our senses or through reason. This is the legacy
of the Enlightenment, the "answer" to the fundamental Cartesian doubt. But the hermeneutics of suspicion maintains that human beings create false
truths for themselves.

Such false truths cannot be "objective" because they always serve some interest or
purpose.
By discovering and revealing those interests or purposes, suspicious analysis seeks to expose so-called "false consciousness" generated through social
ideology or self-deception. False consciousness may arise in many different ways. Nietzsche looked to people's self-deceit in the service of the "will to
power." Marx focused on the social being and the false consciousness that arises from ideology and economic alienation. Freud approached the
problem of false consciousness by examining dreams and neurotic symptoms in order to reveal hidden motivations and desires. Thus, "the Genealogy
of Morals in Nietzsche's sense, the theory of ideologies in the Marxist sense, and the theory of ideas and illusions in Freud's sense represent three
convergent procedures of demystification." 27

AND, SKEPTICISM STOPS SOCIAL CHANGE THEIR

PARANOIA FORECLOSES UPON REVOLUTION
Berman 2001
[Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, LN]

, one might view this as a positive development. One might think people
should stop being lulled into a false sense of believing that the rhetoric of public life
really matters. If people began to view such rhetoric as a construction of
entrenched power, so the argument might go, they would form the nucleus of a
truly revolutionary political movement.
I doubt that such an eventuality is likely to occur. Moreover, I am not sure that a culture
of suspiciousness is the most effective way to seek political (or personal) change anyway.
Of course

Suspicious analysis seeks to expose the dangers of our enchantment with reason or truth or collectivity, but there are dangers that arise from
relentless disenchantment as well. As [*123] Richard K. Sherwin has observed,

Without the means of experiencing more profound enchantments , without communal rituals
those beliefs
ultimately lose their meaning and die... . Forms of enchantment in the service of
deceit, illicit desire, and self-gratification alone must be separated out from forms of enchantment
in the service of feelings, beliefs, and values that we aspire to affirm in light of the self, social, and legal realities they help to
and social dramas through which the culture's deepest beliefs and values may be brought to life and collectively reenacted,

construct and maintain. 112

77

Kritik Answers

Ricoeur Turn: 1AR

AND, EXTEND 2AC # ___, THE RICOUER TURN.
SUSPCION OF HIDDEN MOTIVATIONS BEHIND
POLICYMAKING FORCES INFINITE SKEPTICISM BECAUSE
EVERY OUTCOME IS DETERMINATELY NEGATIVE. THE
IMPACT IS THE OTHER RICOUER CARD, WHICH SHOWS
THAT SUCH PARANOIA PREVENTS SOCIAL CHANGE,
ALLOWING NIHILISM TO REPLACE REVOLUTIONARY
TRANSFORMATION
ALSO, THEIR HERMENEUTICS WORK AGAINST SOCIAL
CHANGE AND KILL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Berman 2001
[Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, LN]
The second drawback of the hermeneutics of suspicion is perhaps even more important. As some scholars
have noted, the hermeneutics of suspicion can easily slip from healthy skepticism into
a kind of rhetorical paranoia. Paranoia, of course, is a loaded term, and probably a bit unfair.
Nevertheless, because it is used frequently in the academic literature about the hermeneutics of suspicion, I
will use it as well - though I want to make clear that I believe paranoia to be the hypothetical extreme in the
movement toward skeptical scholarship. I do not mean to imply that any actual scholars necessarily display
such paranoid logic.
Critics of the hermeneutics of suspicion describe the "paranoid style of functioning" 104 as "an intense,
sharply perceptive but
narrowly focused mode of attention" that results in an attitude of "elaborate suspiciousness." 105 Paranoid
individuals constantly strive to demystify appearances; they take nothing at face value because "they regard
reality as an obscure dimension hidden from casual observation or participation." 106 On this vision,
The obvious is regarded as misleading and as something to be seen through. So, the paranoid style sees the
world as constructed of a web of hints to hidden meaning... . The way in which the paranoid protects fragile
autonomy is by insuring, or at least insisting, that the paranoid's interpretation of events is the
interpretation. 107
Such a paranoid style may, over time, have a potentially corrosive effect on society. 108 Consider the longterm consequences of repeated exposure to suspicious stories. An appeal to religious ideals is portrayed as
an exercise of political power or the result of deluded magical thinking. A [*122] canonical work of art is
revealed to be the product of a patriarchal "gaze." The programs of politicians are exposed as crass
maneuverings for higher office or greater power. 109 The idealistic rhetoric of judicial opinions is depicted
as an after-the-fact justification for the exercise of state-sanctioned violence. And the life choices of
individuals are shown to be responses to psychological neurosis, or social pathology.
All of these are exaggerations, but they increasingly represent the rhetoric that is used to describe human
interaction both in contemporary society and in the past. As Richard Rorty describes,
In this vision, the two-hundred-year history of the United States - indeed, the history of the European and
American peoples since the Enlightenment - has been pervaded by hypocrisy and self-deception. Readers

of Foucault often come away believing that no shackles have been broken in the
past two hundred years: the harsh old chains have merely been replaced with slightly more
comfortable ones. Heidegger describes America's success in blanketing the world with modern technology
as the spread of a wasteland. Those who find Foucault and Heidegger convincing often
view the United States of America as ... something we must hope will be replaced, as
soon as possible, by something utterly different. 110
If that is one's viewpoint, it will inevitably be difficult to muster one's energy to believe

in the possibility of positive action in the world, short of revolution (and even
revolution is probably inevitably compromised). As Rorty points out, though the writers of
supposedly "subversive" works "honestly believe that they are serving human liberty," it may
ultimately be "almost impossible to clamber back down from [these works] to a
level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate,
or a political strategy." 111

78

Kritik Answers

Ricoeur Turn: Ext

LAW CAN BE VIEWED AFFIRMATIVELY THE
MULTIPLICITY OF STORES CAN PROVE MORE HOPE FOR
CHANGE AND MEANING NOT LESS
Berman 2001

[Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. of Law @ Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and Humanities,
LN//uwyo]
Recently, Richard K. Sherwin's When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and Popular Culture n127 has attempted a similar project. Sherwin argues (as I

skeptical
postmodernism "manifests a marked inclination toward pessimism and disenchantment."
n128 If truth, meaning, and reality are no longer discernible, and if any sense of the unified
self or human agency is illusory, he argues, we risk living in a world where "individuals can no
longer be held accountable for having "authored' their acts or caused an event to happen ." n129
According to Sherwin, "In the end th e skeptical postmodern is left with nothing more than endless play and
detached irony." n130
Nevertheless, like me, Sherwin refuses to jettison postmodern theory altogether. Instead, he contends, " Postmodernism need not be
skeptical... . A story might concede the demise of the autonomous modern subject, but still
find meaning through the distributed self: an identity made up of multiple cultural and
social constructs shared by others in particular communities ." n131 Similarly, taking Sherwin's [*129] "affirmative
postmodern" view, we might recognize that concepts such as truth and justice are contingent, but
still see those ideas as coherent. "Abstraction may give way to particularity, contextuality,
multiplicity; judgment may turn toward characteristic voices and localized accounts. But
localization and contextualization are not fatal to meaning. It remains possible to seek
rather than abandon meaning for concepts like truth and justice - even in the face of
contingency, unpredictability, and spontaneity." n132
have earlier in this Essay) against what he calls "skeptical postmodernism." Referring to Baudrillard, Sherwin observes that

Following Sherwin's suggestion, I wish to pursue a story about law that makes no attempt to return to a formalist world where legal rules are "truths" to be
"discovered" by judges. Rather, I accept the idea that there is an infinite number of possible narratives for describing reality and that each narrative is inevitably a
product of many cultural forces. Further, I will accept that, at least within a certain range, none of these narratives necessarily has a stronger claim to truth than any
other. In such a world, how might one understand and justify law practice in America? n133

we might conceive of law as a site for encounter, contestation, and play among
various narratives. I draw on Hannah Arendt's conception of the "public" as a space of appearance where actors stand before others and are subject to
My suggestion is that

mutual scrutiny and judgment from a plurality of perspectives. n134 The public, on this view, "consists of multiple histories and perspectives relatively unfamiliar to

By communicating about their differing

perspectives on the social world in which they dwell together, people and communities can
collectively constitute an enlarged understanding of the world. n136 In this Part, therefore, I will first outline a
one another, connected yet distant and irreducible to one another." n135

prominent conception of "communicative democracy" that builds on Arendt, offered by political theorist Iris M. Young. Then, I will speculate about law's potential as a
site for the type of idealized public discourse Young envisions. n137

79

Kritik Answers

Romanticization Turn: 2AC

TURN: APPROPRIATING THE OTHER VIOLENTLY SEIZES
THE RIGHT TO SPEAK FOR SELFISH ENDS
Routledge 96

[Paul, The Third Space as Critical Engagement, Antipode 28(4), October, 399//uwyo]
The issue of representation is a vexed one which has received much attention
within the social sciences. For example, in discussing the academic strategy of
polyphony, Crang (1992) raises issues of how the voices of others are (re)presented;
the extent to which these voices are interwoven with persona of narrator the degree
of authorial power regarding who initiates research, who decides on textual
arrangements, and who decides which voices are heard; and the power relations
involved in the cultural capital conferred by specialist knowledge. Moreover,
Harrison (quoted in McLaren 1995 240) argues that polyphony can end up being
aform of romantic ventroloquism creating the magical notion of the Others coming
to voice. These questions have important political implications for research which
must be negotiated according to the specific circumstances of a particular project.
It is all too easy for academics to claim solidarity with the oppressed and act as
relays for their voices within social scientific discourse. This raises the danger of an
uncritical alignment with resisters on the assumption that they know all there is to
know without the intervention of intellectuals; and hence an academics role
becomes that of helping them seize the right to speak.

80

Kritik Answers

Romanticization Turn: 1AR

AND, EXTEND THE 2AC #___ ROUTLEDGE 96
ROMANTICIZATION TURN. SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF
OTHERS USES THEIR SUFFERING FOR ONES OWN ENDS,
SILENCING THEM BY SEIZING THE RIGHT TO SPEAK,
REINSCRIBING THE IMPACT

81

Kritik Answers

Romanticization Turn: 2AR

NEXT, EXTEND THE 2AC #__, THE ROUTLEDGE
ROMANTICIZATION ARGUMENT.
OUR CLAIM IS THAT EFFORTS TO OPEN SPACE FOR THE
OTHER WITHIN A COMPETITIVE FRAMEWORK ARE
PROBLEMATIC BECAUSE
THE WAY THAT THE VOICE IS PRESENTED IS NOT ONLY
DETERMINED BY THE NEG, BUT ITS RE-PRESENTATION
LEGITIMIZES THE AUTHORIAL POWER OF ACADEMICS TO
SPEAK FOR OTHERS
THAT POWER USES THE GUISE OF POLYPHONY TO
PROMULGATE A FORM OF ROMANTIC VENTRILOQUISM
THAT MASKS THE OPPRESSIVE NATURE OF THEIR
RESEARCH
THIS IS DEVASTATING TO THE NEG ON 2 LEVELS
FIRST, ITS AN ABSOLUTE TAKEOUT TO ANY POSITIVE
IMLICATIONS OF THE CRITICISM BECAUSE THE NEGS
ALLEGED SPACE-CLEARING CAN NEVER LET OTHERS SPEAK
SECOND, IT TURNS THE IMPLICATIONS BECAUSE THEIR
PERFORMANCE ONY FURTHER COMMODIFIES THE USE OF
THE PAIN OF OTHERS FOR PERSONAL GAIN, PLACING A
WARM, FUZZY LEG WARMER OVER THE JACKBOOT OF
DOMINATION

82

Kritik Answers

Said Turn: 2AC

THE ALTERNATIVE OPTS FOR INACTION IN THE FACE OF
DOMINATION ONLY POLICY DISCUSSIONS CAN REORIENT
INTELLECTUALS TOWARDS FIGHTING INJUSTICE
SAID (University Professor, Columbia University) 94
[Edward W., The Intellectuals and the War, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle
for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994, New York: Vintage, p. 316-19]
HARLOW: What are the political, intellectual, and cultural imperatives for combating this agenda? In 1967 Chomsky wrote the essay Responsibility of Intellectuals.
What would be the main component of such an essay today?

jargonistic postmodernisms that now dot the landscape. They are worse
are neither capable of understanding and analyzing the power structure of this
country nor are they capable of understanding the particular aesthetic merit of an individual
work of art. Whether you call it deconstruction or postmodernism or poststructuralism or post-anything, they all represent a sort of spectacle of giving back
SAID: One would have to pretty much scuttle all the jaw-shattering
than useless. They

tickets that the entrance and saying, were really out of it. We want to check into our private resort and be left alone. [317]

Reengagement with intellectual processes has very little to do with being politically correct, or
citing fashionable names, or striking acceptable poses, but rather having to do with a return in a way to a
kind of old-fashioned historical, literary, and above all, intellectual scholarship based upon the premise that
human beings, men and women, make their own history. And just as things are made, they can be unmade and re-re-remade. That
sense of intellectual and political and citizenry empowerment is what I think the intellectual class needs.
Theres only one way to anchor oneself, and that is by affiliation with a cause, with a political movement. There has to be some identification, not with the

; there has to be an affiliation with

matters involving justice, principle, truth, conviction. Those dont occur in a laboratory or a library. For the American
intellectual, that simply means, at bottom, in a globalized environment, that there is today one superpower, and the
relationship between the United States and the rest of the world, based upon profit and
power, has to be altered from an imperial one to one of coexistence among human
communities that can make and remake their own histories together. This seems to me to be
the number-one priority---theres nothing else.
powers that be, with the Secretary of State or the great leading philosopher of the time or sage

An American has a particular role. If youre an anthropologist in America, its not the same thing as being an anthropologist in India or France; its a
qualitatively different thing.
HARLOW: Were both professors in English departments, despite the fact that the humanities have been quite irresponsible, unanswerable
SAID: Not the humanities. The professors of humanities.
HARLOW: Well, OK, the professors, but there is this question
SAID: I take the general view that, for all its inequity, for all its glaring faults and follies, the university in this society remains a relatively utopian place, a place of

. There needs to be some sense of the university as a place in which these issues are
not, because it is that kind of place, trivialized. Universities cannot afford to become just a
platform for a certain kind of narcissistic specialization and jargon. What you need is a
regard for the product of the human mind. And thats why Ive been very dispirited, I must tell you, but aspects of the great
great privilege

Western canon debate, which really suggest that the oppressed of the world, in wishing to be heard, in wishing their work to be recognized, really wish to do dirt on
everything else. Thats not the spirit of resistance. We come [318] back to Aime Cesaires line, There is room for all that at the rendezvous of victory. Its not that
some have to be pushed off and demeaned and denigrated. The question is not whether we should read more black literature or less literature by white men. The issue
is excellence---we need everything, as much as possible, for understanding the human adventure in its fullest, without resorting to enormous abstractions and
generalizations, without replacing Euro-centrism with other varieties of ethnocentrism, or say, Islamo-centrism or Afro-centrism or gyno-centrism. Is it a game of
substitutions? Thats where intellectuals have to clarify themselves.
HARLOW: I agree, but at least within certain university contexts there have been lately two major issues: the Gulf War and multiculturalism. I have not seen any
linkage between the two.
SAID: The epistemology and the ethic of specialization have been accepted by all. If youre a literature professor, thats what you talk about. And if youre an education
specialist, thats what you talk about. The whole idea of being in the university means not only respect for what others do, but respect for what you do. And the sense
that they all are part of a community. The main point is that we ascribe a utopian function to the intellectual. Even inside the university, the prevalence of norms based
upon domination and coercion is so strong because the idea of authority is so strong---whether its authority derived from the nation-state, from religion, from the
ethnos, from tradition---is so powerful that its gone relatively unchallenged, even in the very disciplines and studies that we are engaged in. Part of intellectual work is

And if you can understand that,

they your work is conducted in such a way as to be able to provide alternatives to
authoritative and coercive norms that dominate so much of our intellectual life, our national
and political life, and our international life above all.
understanding how authority is formed. Like everything else, authority is not God-given. Its secular.

HARLOW: What can alternative publications do to interrupt that particular way of presenting authority?
SAID: One is to remind readers that there are always other ways of looking at the issue---whatever it happens to be---than those that are officially credentialed.
Second, one of the things that one needs to do in intellectual enterprises is to---Whitehead says somewhere---always try to write about an author keeping in mind
what he or she might say of what youre writing. To adapt from that: some sense in which your constituency might be getting signals about what youre doing. The
agenda isnt set only by you; its set by others. You cant represent the others, but you can take them into account by soliciting their attention. Let such a publication be
a place in which its pages that which is occluded or suppressed or has disappeared from the consciousness of the West, of the intellectual, can be allowed to appear.
Third, some awareness of the methodological issues involved, and the gathering of information, the production of scholarship, the relationship between scholarship
and knowledge. The great virtue of these journals is that they are not guided by professional norms. Nobody is going to get tenure out of writing for these journals.
And nobody is trying to advance in a career by what he or she does there. So that means therefore that one can stand back and look at these things and take questions
having to do with how people know things. In other words, a certain emphasis on novelty is important and somewhat lacking. You dont want to feel too virtuous in
what you are doing: that Im the only person doing this, therefore, I must continue doing it. Wit is not such a bad thing.

83

Kritik Answers

Academic Work Spurs Activism: Ext

(1/2)
INTELLECTUAL WORK SERVES AS A CRITICAL RESOURCE
FOR ACTIVISTS
Milan Rai, independent peace researcher, CHOMSKYS POLITICS, 1995, p. 156.
Chomsky suggests that the intellecutal can make an important contribution to the struggle
for peace and justice by agreeing to serve as a resource, providing information and analysis
to popular movements. Intellectuals have the training, facilities, access to information and
opportunity to organize and control their own work, to enable them to make a very
significant contribution to people who are trying to escape the confines of indoctrination
and to understand something about the real world in which they live; in particular, to people
who may be willing to act to change this world. For the same reasons, intellectuals can be
active and effective organizers. Furthermore, by virtue of their privilege, intellectuals are
also often visible and can exploit their privilege in valuable and important ways.

WORLDY ACADEMIC WORK IS DEMOCRATIZING AND SPURS

ACTIVISM
Gordon R. Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh,
ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY, Fall 1998, p. 47.
In basic terms the notion of argumentative agency involves the capacity to contextualize and
employ the skills and strategies of argumentative discourse in fields of social action,
especially wider spheres of public deliberation. Pursuit of argumentative agency charges
academic work with democratic energy by linking teachers and students with civic
organizations, social movements, citizens and other actors engaged in live public
controversies beyond the schoolyard walls. As a bridging concept, argumentative agency
links decontextualized argumentation skills such as research, listening, analysis, refutation
and presentation, to the broader political telos of democratic empowerment. Argumentative
agency fills gaps left in purely simulation-based models of argumentation by focusing
pedagogical energies on strategies for utilizing argumentation as a driver of progressive
social change. Moving beyond an exclusively skill-oriented curriculum, teachers and
students pursuing argumentative agency seek to put argumentative tools to the test by
employing them in situations beyond the space of the classroom. This approach draws from
the work of Kincheloe (1991), who suggests that through "critical constructivist action
research," students and teachers cultivate their own senses of agency and work to transform
the world around them.

ACADEMICS FOSTER ACTIVISM BY LEGITIMATING DISSENT

Suzie Mackenzie, columnist, THE GUARDIAN, January 4, 2003, p. 20.
What does the intellectual have to offer that isn't already out there? "Dissent," Rose says. "It
is the task of the intellectual to think thoughts, to say things, that can't be said anywhere
else. What I think goes most frighteningly and disturbingly wrong in politics is that people
hold intransigently to their ideals. They admit no flaw, no break in (their own) system." You
can't argue with this, it's what any good liberal intellectual would say.

84

Kritik Answers

Academic Work Spurs Activism: Ext

(2/2)
WORLDLY ENGAGEMENT FOSTERS ACTIVISM WITHIN THE
ACADEMY
Gordon R. Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh,
ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY, Fall 1998, p. 47.
Encounters with broader public spheres beyond the realm of the academy can deliver
unique pedagogical possibilities and opportunities. By anchoring their work in public
spaces, students and teachers can use their talents to change the trajectory of events, while
events are still unfolding. These experiences have the potential to trigger significant shifts in
political awareness on the part of participants. Academic debaters nourished on an exclusive
diet of competitive contest round experience often come to see politics like a picturesque
landscape whirring by through the window of a speeding train. They study this political
landscape in great detail, rarely (if ever) entertaining the idea of stopping the train and
exiting to alter the course of unfolding events. The resulting spectator mentality deflects
attention away from roads that could carry their arguments to wider spheres of public
argumentation. However, on the occasions when students and teachers set aside this
spectator mentality by directly engaging broader public audiences, key aspects of the
political landscape change, because the point of reference for experiencing the landscape
shifts fundamentally.

85

Kritik Answers

Academics as Politics is Bad (1/2)

ACADEMICS AS POLITICS IS INEFFECTIVE AND CORRUPTS
THE LEARNING PROCESS
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor, Princeton University, interviewed by Jenny Attiyeh, CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE MONITOR, August 22, 2002, p. 12.
No, not as an intellectual, because your responsibility as an intellectual is to deepen your
understanding and therefore our understanding.... I think our university life would be
corrupted irremediably if you said to everybody in the university, beyond understanding,
you have an obligation to go out and change those parts of the world that your
understanding can help change. I don't think we're especially good at it - practical wisdom
doesn't come with theoretical understanding usually. Do we think Einstein would have made
a better leader for Britain ... than Winston Churchill? I don't think so!

ACADEMIC POLITICIZATION UNDERMINES UNIVERSITIES

QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE
Bradford P. Wilson, Executive Director of the National Assocation of Scholars and former Professor
of Political Science, Ashland University, NATIONAL FORUM PHI KAPPA PHI JOURNAL, Winter 19 99,
p. 18.
The culture wars in higher education are not between a political left and a political right, or
between liberals and conservatives. They are between those who wish to politicize academic
life as part of a larger agenda of social transformation, and those who see in the university
the only institution in American life where knowledge is valued for its own sake, where
students can be forgiven a temporary lack of social concern and engagement for the sake of
remedying a more fundamental deprivation, their lack of self-knowledge. The cure, insofar
as there is one, is to be found in a liberal education, not in an identity-fix offered by the
latest multicultural initiative.

POLITICS AND ACADEMICS HAVE FUNDAMENTALLY

CONTRADICTORY GOALS
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor, Princeton University, interviewed by Jenny Attiyeh, CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE MONITOR, August 22, 2002, p. 12.
The fundamental vocation of the intellectual is to figure things out, you know, intellego, to
understand. And politics isn't about understanding, politics is about getting things done.
Understanding can be an instrument of getting things done, but nuance and complexity of
understanding can be an obstacle to getting things done. Politics - it's the art of the possible,
and sometimes in order to do the best that can be done, you have to ride roughshod over
what are, for an intellectual, important distinctions - for example, between the truth and the
untruth.

86

Kritik Answers

Academics as Politics is Bad (2/2)

DEMANDS OF POLITICAL RELEVANCE DESTROY THE VERY
FOUNDATION OF THE ACADEMY
Wendy Brown, Professor of Womens Studies, University of California-Santa Cruz, THEORY AND
EVENT 2:2, 1998, p. npg.
I think it is a terrible mistake to conflate or identify academic and political work. To see Left
academics as necessarily confining their intellectual endeavors, their theorizing, the texts
they love, their reflections, to that which is politically useful in an immediate way, is, I think,
a serious error. It is a mistake just as it would be a mistake to claim that Alan Sokal is no
Leftist because he is a physicist and is poorly versed in social theory, and I would never
make such a silly claim. But I think it is equally silly to suggest that everything any of us ever
write or say must have immediate political cache. What we do in the academy is think, and
to constrain that thinking entirely to what is understandable and useful outside the academy
is basically to eliminate the point of the academy's existence. It is to constrain the space of
imagination, open-ended search, and inquiring into our own knowledge and beliefs, all of
which are the life-blood of intellectual work. For me, to stop calling into question that which
I believed yesterday, to stop examining ideas I have always been attached to, would literally
be to stop thinking. It would be to go into a kind of political automatic, as opposed to using
the great privilege of being an intellectual, to keep digging up the political ground we stand
on. It would also be to constrain the space of original critique that has always been so vital to
Left projects

87

Kritik Answers

Criticism Destroys Agency

ACADEMIC CRITICISM BECOMES A REPLACEMENT FOR
INDIVIDUAL ACTION. THE CRITIC BECOMES SO
COMMITTED TO REJECTION OF POWER STRUCTURES THAT
THEY FAIL TO CREATE A MIDDLE GROUND NECESSARY FOR
CHANGE
Barber 92

Benjamin (prof o political science at Rutgers), An Aristocracy for Everyone, pg. 111-112
The questions this poses for pedagogy are drawn in the re condite language of literary
postmodernism and deconstruction, but are of the first importance for education.
Does the art of criticism doom the object of critical attention to displacement by the selfabsorbed critic? In other words, does criticizing books replace reading them? Can the
art of questioning be made self limiting, or do critics always become skeptics? Are
skeptics in turn doomed by their negative logic to be relativists? Must relativists melt
down into nihilists? Conservatives have worried that this particularly slippery slope cannot
be safely traversed at all, and thus have worried about a pedagogy that relies on a
too critical mode of radical questioning. They prefer to think of education as instilling the
right values and teaching authoritative bodies of knowledge to compliant students for
whom learning is primarily a matter of absorbing information. When these conservatives
appeal to the ancients, it is the rationalist Plato to whom they turn, rather than the
subversive Socrates. Yet pedagogical progressives actually confirm the conservatives' fears
when they themselves tumble happily down the slope, greasing it as they go with an
epistemology that denies the possibility of any stopping place, any objectivity, any rationality,
any criterion of reasonableness or universalism whatsoever. Asked to choose between dogma
and nihilism, between affirming hegemonic authority and denying all authority, including the
authority of reason, of science, and of open debate, what choice does the concerned teacher
have but despair? Where she seeks a middling position, she is offered orthodoxy or nihilism.
Where she seeks moderation in her students-a respect for rationality but an unwillingness to
confound it with or measure it by somebody's power, or eloquence, or status-she is informed
that all appeals to rationality are pretense: Bertrand Russell's no less than Joseph
Goebbels's, Hannah Arendt's no less than Catherine the Great's, the rationality with which
the skeptic skewers conventional reason no less than the rationality the skeptic skewers.

88

Kritik Answers

Criticism is Nihilistic (1/4)

DECONSTRUCTION WITHOUT ACTION FOR MATERIAL
JUSTICE BLOCKS POLITICAL ESCAPE FROM OPPRESSION
AND REINFORCES IVORY TOWER ELITISM
Anthony Cook, Associate Professor, Law, Georgetown University, NEW ENGLAND LAW REVIEW,
Spring 1992, p. 761-762.
The effect of deconstructing the power of the author to impose a fixed meaning on the text
or offer a continuous narrative is both debilitating and liberating. It is debilitating in that
any attempt to say what should be done within even our insular Foucaultian preoccupations
may be oppositionalized and deconstructed as an illegitimate privileging of one term, value,
perspective or narrative over another. The struggle over meaning might continue ad
infinitum. That is, if a deconstructionist is theoretically consistent and sees deconstruction
not as a political tool but as a philosophical orientation, political action is impossible,
because such action requires a degree of closure that deconstruction, as a theoretical matter,
does not permit. Moreover, the approach is debilitating because deconstruction without
material rootedness, without goals and vision, creates a political and spiritual void into
which the socially real power we theoretically deconstruct steps and steps on the
disempowered and dispossessed. [*762] To those dying from AIDS, stifled by poverty,
dehumanized by sexism and racism, crippled by drugs and brutalized by the many forms of
physical, political and economic violence that characterizes our narcissistic culture, power
hardly seems a matter of illegitimate theoretical privileging. When vision, social theory and
political struggle do not accompany critique, the void will be filled by the rich, the powerful
and the charismatic, those who influence us through their eloquence, prestige, wealth and
power.

89

Kritik Answers

Criticism is Nihilistic (2/4)

CRITICISM IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE THAT WILL EVENTUALLY
LEAD TO THE REJECTION OF EVERYTHINGWHAT BEGINS
AS AN UNWILLINGNESS TO ACCEPT ON-FACE OBJECTIVE
KNOWLEDGE ENDS WITH A COMPLETE REJECTION OF ANY
ATTEMPT TO OBTAIN KNOWLEDGE (EXTINCTION)
Barber 92

Benjamin (prof o political science at Rutgers), An Aristocracy for Everyone, pg. 116-118
This cursory history of esoteric arguments about the nature of knowledge may seem far
removed from the educational controversies of our time. It is offered only as a reminder
that such fashionable new forms of radical criticism as deconstruction are but echoes of a
very ancient skepticism and a very well en trenched tradition of reductionism. It is for
this reason that Allan Bloom pins the blame for the changes in modern education on
Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marx, and other maverick critics of reason and reason's canon (see
Chapter 5). It is for this same reason that conservatives who esteem the role reason plays
in grounding and justifying fundamental values view post-modern skepticism with alarm,
and that liberals who care about reform worry that reductive strategies are ill-suited to
their purposes. As Edmund Burke once noted, those who destroy everything are certain
to remedy some grievance. The annihilation of all values will undoubtedly rid us of
hypocritical ones or the ones misused by hypocrites. We can prevent the powerful
from using reason to conceal their hegemony by burning the cloak-extirpating reason
from political and moral discourse. However, those who come after can hardly
complain that they feel naked or that their discourse, absent such terms as reason,
legitimacy, and justice, seems incapable of establishing an affirmative pedagogy or a
just politics.
Just how crucially such seemingly abstruse issues impact on actual college curricula is
unpleasantly evident in this approving portrait of literature and culture in a recent issue
of the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors:
Cultural studies moves away from "history of ideas" to a contested history of struggles
for power and authority, to complicated relations between "center" and "margin,"
between dominant and minority positions. Literature is no longer investigated primarily as
the masterworks of individual genius, but as a way of designating specialized practices of
reading and writing and cultural production.... The renaming of "literature" as
"culture" is thus not just a shift in vocabulary. It marks a rethinking of what is
experienced as cultural materials ...[including] media, MTV, popular culture,
newspapers, magazines, advertising, textbooks, and advice materials. But the shift also
marks the movement away from the study of an "object" to the study of a practice, the
practice called "literary study" or "artistic production," the practice of criticism.'
How slippery this particular slope has become! What begins as a sound attempt to show
that art is produced by real men and women with agendas and interests attached to things
like their gender, race, and economic status ends as the nihilistic denial of art as object.
What begins as a pedagogically useful questioning of the power implications of truth
ends as the cynical subverting of the very possibility of truth. What begins as a prudent
unwillingness to accept at face value "objective" knowledge, which is understood to be,
at least in part, socially constructed, ends as the absurd insistence that knowledge is
exclusively social and can be reduced entirely to the power of those who produce it. What
begins as an educationally provocative inquiry into the origins of literature in the
practice of literary production ends in the educationally insidious annihilation of literature
and its replacement by criticism-the practice, it turns out ever so conveniently, of those
asking the questions! Thus does the whirling blade of skepticism's latest reductive
manifestations, post-modernism and deconstruction, cut and cut and go on cutting until
there is nothing left. Thus does the amiable and pedagogically essential art of criticism
somehow pass into carnage.

90

Kritik Answers

Criticism is Nihilistic (3/4)

USING THE ACADEMIC AREA FOR CRITICIZING EXISTENT
SYSTEMS RISKS HYPER SKEPTICAL DISCUSSIONS. THE
SELECTION OF THE MEDIAN FORCES RADICALISM AND
NIHILISM
Barber 92

Benjamin (prof o political science at Rutgers), An Aristocracy for Everyone

All thoughtful inquiry, and hence all useful education, starts with questioning. All usable
knowledge, and thus all practical science, starts with the provisional acceptance of answers.
Education is a dialectic in moderation in which probing and accepting, questioning and
answering, must achieve a delicate balance. Stories must be told, queried, retold, revised,
questioned, and retold still again much as the American story has been. In periods of
rebellion, academic no less than social, when challenging authority means questioning
answers, there is an understandable tendency toward skepticism, even cynicism.
Michael Wood has characterized Jacques Derrida's approach to method as "a patient
and intelligent suspicion,' 3 which is a useful description of one moment in a student's
democratic education.
The methodologies deployed by critics of power and convention in the academy do not
always find the dialectical center, however, and are subject to distortion by hyperbole.
Sometimes they seem to call for all questions and no answers, all doubt and no
provisional resting places. This radicalism has many virtues as scholarship, but as pedagogy
far fewer. In its postmodern phase, where the merely modern is equated with something
vaguely reactionary and post-modernism means a radical battering down of all certainty,
this hyperskeptical pedagogy can become self-defeating.
Skepticism is an essential but slippery and thus dangerously problematic teaching tool. It
demystifies and decodes; it denies absolutes; it cuts through rationalization and
hypocrisy. Yet it is a whirling blade, an obdurate reaper hard to switch off at will. It is not
particularly discriminating. It doesn't necessarily understand the difference between
rationalization and reason, since its effectiveness depends precisely on conflating them. It
can lead to a refusal to judge or to take responsibility or to impose norms on conduct. If, as
Derrida has insisted, "the concept of making a charge itself belongs to the structure of
phallogocentrism" (the use of reason and language as forms of macho domination), there
can be no responsibility, no autonomy, no morals, no freedom. 4 Like a born killer who
may be a hero in wartime but, unable to discriminate between war and peace, becomes a
homocidal maniac when the war ends for everyone else, radical skepticism lacks a sense of
time and place, a sense of elementary propriety.

91

Kritik Answers

Criticism is Nihilistic (4/4)

THEIR PROJECT IS BANKRUPT. CONFRONTING POWER
RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH CYNICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND
REJECTION WILL NOT CREATE PRAGMATIC SOLUTIONS
Barber 92

Benjamin (prof o political science at Rutgers), An Aristocracy for Everyone, pg. 122-123
There can be no simple answer to such complex psycho -political questions, and I
certainly do not mean to challenge philosophical reductionism by psychoanalyzing
philosophers and thereby replacing one reductive logic with another. Nonetheless, as
already suggested, Thrasymachus understood the connection between his brand of
reductive questioning and brute power perfectly well: his was the cynicism of the power
realist who wanted to convince Socrates' audience that power was all there was. He
wished not to legitimize and thus limit power, but to enthrone and sacralize it. This is
clearly not the goal of the far more naive advocates of the new hyperskepticism. They are
genuine reformers struggling against the dogmas of what they see as a hypocritical
establishment. They seek more equality, more justice, better education for all. They want
not just to expose the hypocrisies of power, but to tame and equalize it. They want to
reclaim true justice from its hypocritical abusers. They chase shadows in the valley of
cynicism but trust they are on the path that leads to redemption.
Yet the instruments of revolution they have chosen are more suited to the philosophical
terrorist than the pedagogical reformer. Radical skepticism, reductionism, solipsism,
nihilism, subjectivism, and cynicism will not help American women gain a stronger voice in
the classroom; will not lift Americans of color from the prison of ignorance and despair to
which centuries of oppression, broken families, and ghettoized schools have rele gated
them; will not provide a firm value foundation for the young in equality,
citizenship, and justice. How can such reform-ers think they will empower the
voiceless by proving that voice is always a function of power? How can they believe the
ignorant will be rescued from illiteracy by showing that literacy is an arbitrary form of
cultural imperialism? How do they think the struggle for equality and justice can be
waged with an epistemology that denies standing to reasons and normative rational terms
such as justice and equality?

92

Kritik Answers

**Postmodernism Bad**
Floating Subjectivity Bad (1/3)
POSTMODERN SUBJECTIVITY IS A SHELL GAME IT CAN
EXIST ONLY BY STRENGTHENING THE HOLD OF
CAPITALISM
Laura Bartlett

Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville, Boundary

Dissolution in film, photography & advertising, 2000, http://athena.louisville.edu/as/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html, accessed 10/15/02
The argument I am making about the postmodern theories of subjectivity and global
capitalism are similar to arguments made about multiculturalism and global capitalism by
David Rieff and Slavoj Zizek. Rieff suggests that multiculturalism is a byproduct or
corollary of a specific material integument (62). Rieffs position is that although
multiculturalists often regard their work as politically leftist: resulting in the breakdown of
patriarchal, European hegemony and the ascendancy of the previously marginalized, they
actually function as the silent partner of global capitalism. Additionally, Rieff points out
how closely the buzz words of multiculturalism--cultural diversity, difference, the need to
do away with boundariesresemble the stock phrases of the modern corporation: product
diversification, the global marketplace, and the boundary-less company (Rieff).
Similarly, Zizek contends that postmodern identity politicswhile ostensibly seeking to
subvert capitalismare made possible only in the field of global capitalism. He writes that
cultural studies, is performing the ultimate service for the unrestrained development of
capitalism and that the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism
(218; 216).My argument is that postmodern theories and global capitalism dialectically
influence one another. Postmodern theory is generated by the material conditions of labor
and production in late capitalism, which needs consumers who will disregard national
boundaries. By the logic that all products of the system are necessary to the system, we
assume that anything the system produces, it needs. Ideological state apparatuses, like the
university, do the work necessary to interpellating the ideal subject of global capitalism. My
thought is that global capitalism needs postmodern theories of subjectivity because they
produce subjects who are seamlessly articulated with the structures of global capitalism.
While postmodern subjectivity may seem wildly radical at firstbreaking down boundaries
between genders, between machines and humansthe similarities between its subjectivities
and the structures of global capitalism are eerily similar. Fluidity, flexibility, and boundary
dissolution equally describe both. The celebration of the loss of the unified, coherent subject
of modernity and the new fluid, flexible, fragmented subject of postmodernity is the stuff of
Millenial Dreams, Paul Smiths term for the rhetoric of globalization and the array of
ideological forms which interpellate the desired subject of global capitalism. Smith writes
that the annunciation of globalization itself is part of the ideological battery used to
interpellate subjects in the current conjuncture . . . and attempt to regulate the moral and
cultural practices of subjects (46). I agree with Tereas Ebert that post-al theories are
complicit with patriarchal capitalism. Rather than seeking the liberation of the exploited
workers of late capitalismprimarily third-world, minority, poverty-stricken women
postmodern theorists celebrate a liberatory freedom experienced by a small percentage of
the first world at the expense of the rest of the world.

93

Kritik Answers

Floating Subjectivity Bad (2/3)

FLOATING SUBJECTIVITY AND REBELLION AGAINST
MODERNITY REINFORCES PATTERNS OF DOMINATION
Kevin Cryderman, Jane and Louisa: The Tapestry Of Critical Paradigms: Hutcheon, Lyotard,
Said, Dirlik, And Brodber, 2000, http://65.107.211.206/post/caribbean/brodber/kcry1.html, accessed
11/7/01
In "Borderlands Radicalism," Dirlik is critical of the trends of postmodernism and
postcolonialism in regard to borders, subjectivity, and history. Dirlik claims that
postmodernism and postcolonialism tend to simply reinforce the reign of late capitalism:
Post-modernism, articulating the condition of the globe in the age of flexible production, has
done great theoretical service by challenging the tyrannical unilinearity of inherited
conceptions of history and society. The political price paid for this achievement, however,
has been to abolish the subject in history, which destroys the possibility of political action,
or to attach action to one of another diffuse subject positions, which ends up in narcissistic
preoccupations with self of one kind of another. (89) Dirlik claims that the 'happy pluralism'
of postcolonialism -- such as its emphasis on flux, borderlands and liminal space -- does not
so much oppose elite unified narratives of nations and cultures as it does reinforce them.
Dirlik also links this trend of "fluid subject positions" (98) in postmodernism to
postcolonialism and Global Capitalism: "in the age of flexible production, we all live in the
borderlands. Capital, deterritorialized and decentered, establishes borderlands where it can
move freely, away from the control of states and societies but in collusion with states against
societies" (Dirlik 87). Moreover, the problem "presented by postcolonial discourse" is "a
problem of liberating discourse that divorces itself from the material conditions of life, in
this case Global Capitalism as the foundational principle of contemporary society globally"
(99). Dirlik also links the intellectual class as a product of global capitalism which, according
to Dirlik, "has jumbled up notions of space and time" (100). Indeed, both postmodernist and
post-colonialist literature involve the fragmentation and rebellion against modernist
ideologies that impose essentializing identity, linear time schemes, and totalizing narratives.

FLOATING SUBJECTIVITY FACILITATES THE HEGEMONY OF

TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALISM
Laura Bartlett

Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville, Boundary

Dissolution in film, photography & advertising, 2000, http://athena.louisville.edu/as/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html, accessed 10/15/02
This web site explores the ways postmodern theories of subjectivity facilitate global
capitalism. The seed for this project was planted during Deconstructed Selves, Postmodern
Narratives, a session at the 20th Century Lit. Conference. I had just heard a paper on
Crash so thoughts of cyborgs and strange postmodern desires were already mingling with a
project topic that was due in my Theories of Interpretation seminar. While Silvio Gaggi
flashed slides of Cindy Shermans photographythe pictures of her well-groomed,
appropriately feminized body, a 50s starlet in juxtaposition with images of excrement, false
eyelashes, cigarette butts--I discovered my topic: the ways that the postmodern notion of
subjectivity--fluid, unfixed, transgressed boundaries--and the modern notion of subjectivitystable, unified, coherent, preserved boundaries-are analogous to the evolution from classical
to global/late capitalism. My theory: While the dissolution of boundaries in postmodern
subjectivity may at first seem wildly radical, it actually facilitates the hegemony by
interpellating the ideal subject of global capitalism, one who can manipulate fluid capital,
produce/consume intangible data, and accept the dissolution of national boundaries for the
purpose of exporting manufacturing work to 3rd world countries, for the purpose of global
e-commerce, and for the formation of multinational corporations.

94

Kritik Answers

Floating Subjectivity Bad (3/3)

FOCUSING ON TRANSITIONAL SUBJECTIVITIES CEMENTS
OPPRESSION
Aihwa Ong, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP: THE
CULTURAL LOGIC OF TRANSNATIONALITY, 1999, p. 13.
However, the influence on American cultural studies of the Center for Contemporary
Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, with which Hall and Gilroy are associated, has
generally been limited. American studies of diasporan cultures have tended to uphold a
more innocent concept of the essential diasporan subject, one that celebrates hybridity,
cultural border crossing, and the production of difference. In the United States, the conjuncture of postcolonial theory and diaspora studies seems to produce a bifurcated model of
diasporan cultures. Some scholars dwell on narratives of sacrifice, which are associated with
enforced labor migrations, as well as on critiques of the immorality of development. Others,
who write about displacements in borderland areas, emphasize subjects who struggle
against adversity and violation by affirming their cultural hybridity and shifting positions in
society. The unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects now also clings to diasporan
ones, who are invariably assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore
constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power. Furthermore, because of the
exclusive focus on texts, narratives, and subiectivities, we are often left wondering what are
the particular local-global structural articulations that materially and symbolically shape
these dynamics of victimhood and ferment.

FRAGMENTARY IDENTITY IS CRUCIAL TO GLOBALIZING

CAPITALISM
Laura Bartlett

Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville,

Boundary Dissolution in film, photography & advertising, 2000,
http://athena.louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html, accessed 10/15/02
With its dependence on fluid capital and the production/consumption of intangible data,
global capitalism demands the dissolution of national boundaries for the purpose of
exporting manufacturing work to 3rd world countries, for the purpose of global ecommerce, and for the formation of multinational corporations. Global capitalism makes
similar demands on its ideal producing and consuming subject, who is articulated as fluid,
fragmented, and flexible. Clearly, this subject is a radical reconfiguration of the unified,
coherent subject of classical capitalism, who is articulated for the purposes of producing and
consuming solid material goods and preserving national boundaries.

95

Kritik Answers

**Pragmatism**
Pragmatism Good: 2AC (1/3)
VOTE AFF IN SOLIDARITY WITH OUR PROJECT TO REPOLITICIZE THE ACADEMY
McClean

01

David E.
, New School University, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, Presented at the 20
Annual Conference of the Society for the
Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm.

leftist critics continue

to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including
Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than
Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do
suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national
belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who
are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they
have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The
disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multisyllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than
the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or
Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue,

whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We

"When
one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you
can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or
Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These
futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what
happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the
problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical
hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in
America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for
lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's
own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action."
don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it,

Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for
good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather
than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is

, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often

dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a
disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for
our social hopes, as I will explain.
Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury
some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public
and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the
tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words

country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke

, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help

create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots
for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based
the words of King, and with reference to the American society

initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as

. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to

create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry
theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other
important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the
prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the
part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism

character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile
defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?"

The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade
theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets
and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of
complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going
down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details
where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those
institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples'
lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions
actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This
might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually
know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from

96

Kritik Answers
which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their
snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."

97

Kritik Answers

Pragmatism Good: 2AC (2/3)

SMACK TALKING ABOUT CHEATERS: READ LIBERALLY
McClean

01

David E.
, New School University, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, Presented at the 20
Annual Conference of the Society for the
Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm.
There is a lot of philosophical prose on the general subject of social justice. Some of this is quite good, and some of it is quite bad. What distinguishes the good from

. Displays of high erudition are gratuitously reflected in much of the

writing by those, for example, still clinging to Marxian ontology and is often just a useful
smokescreen which shrouds a near total disconnect from empirical reality. This kind of
political writing likes to make a lot of references to other obscure, jargon-laden essays and
tedious books written by other true believers - the crowd that takes the fusion of Marxian
and Freudian private fantasies seriously. Nor is it the lack of scholarship that makes this prose bad. Much of it is well "supported" by
footnotes referencing a lode of other works, some of which are actually quite good. Rather , what makes this prose bad is its utter
lack of relevance to extant and critical policy debates, the passage of actual laws, and the
amendment of existing regulations that might actually do some good for someone else. The
writers of this bad prose are too interested in our arrival at some social place wherein we will
finally emerge from our "inauthentic" state into something called "reality." Most of this stuff, of course,
the bad is not merely the level of erudition

comes from those steeped in the Continental tradition (particularly post-Kant). While that tradition has much to offer and has helped shape my own philosophical

it is anything but useful when it comes to truly relevant philosophical analysis , and no selfWhat
Pragmatists see instead is the hope that we can fix some of the social ills that face us if we
treat policy and reform as more important than Spirit and Utopia.
Like light rain released from pretty clouds too high in the atmosphere, the substance of this prose dissipates before it can
reach the ground and be a useful component in a discussion of medicare reform or how to better
sensibilities,

respecting Pragmatist can really take seriously the strong poetry of formations like "authenticity looming on the ever remote horizons of fetishization."

regulate a pharmaceutical industry that bankrupts senior citizens and condemns to death HIV patients unfortunate enough to have been born in Burkina Faso - and a

It is often too drenched in abstractions and references to a narrow and

not so merry band of other intellectuals (Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, Luk cs, Benjamin)
to be of much use to those who are the supposed subject matter of this preternatural social justice literature. Since I have no particular allegiance to
regulatory regime that permits this.

these other intellectuals, no particular impulse to carry their water or defend their reputations, I try and forget as much as I can about their writings in order to make
space for some new approaches and fresh thinking about that important question that always faces us - "What is to be done?" I am, I think, lucky to have taken this
decision before it had become too late.
One might argue with me that these other intellectuals are not looking to be taken seriously in the construction of solutions to specific socio-political problems. They
are, after all, philosophers engaged in something called philosophizing. They are, after all, just trying to be good culture critics. Of course, that isn't quite true, for

they often write with specific reference to social issues and social justice in mind, even when
they are fluttering about in the ether of high theory (Lukcs, for example, was a government officer, albeit a minister of
culture, which to me says a lot), and social justice is not a Platonic form but parses into the specific quotidian acts of institutions and individuals. Social justice is but
the genus heading which may be described better with reference to its species iterations- the various conditions of cruelty and sadism which we wittingly or
unwittingly permit. If we wanted to, we could reconcile the grand general theories of these thinkers to specific bureaucracies or social problems and so try to increase

such attempts, usually

performed in the reams of secondary literature generated by their devotees, usually make
things even more bizarre. In any event, I don't think we owe them that amount of effort.
After all, if they wanted to be relevant they could have said so by writing in such a way that
made it clear that relevance was a high priority. For Marxians in general, everything tends to get reduced to class. For Lukcs
everything tends to get reduced to "reification." But society and its social ills are far too intricate to gloss in these
ways, and the engines that drive competing interests are much more easily explained with
reference to animal drives and fears than by Absolute Spirit. That is to say, they are not easily explained at all.
their relevance. We could construct an account which acts as a bridge to relevant policy considerations. But

98

Kritik Answers

Pragmatism Good: 2AC (3/3)

INTELLECTUALS HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO ENGAGE
WITH REAL PROBLEMSCRITICAL TO MAKING THEIR
CRITICISM RELEVANT
McClean

01

David E.
, New School University, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, Presented at the 20
Annual Conference of the Society for the
Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm.
Is it really possible to philosophize by holding Foucault in one hand and the Code of Federal Regulation or the Congressional Record in the other? Given that whatever

, I see no reason why referring to the way things are

actually done in the actual world (I mean really done, not done as we might imagine) as we think through issues of
public morality and social issues of justice shouldn't be considered a viable alternative to the
way philosophy has proceeded in the past. Instead of replacing epistemology with
hermeneutics or God knows what else as the foundation of philosophical practice, we should
move social philosophers in the direction of becoming more like social and cultural auditors
rather than further in the direction of mere culture critics. We might be able to recast
philosophers who take-up questions of social justice in a serious way as the ones in society
able to traverse not only disciplines but the distances between the towers of the academy
and the bastions of bureaucracies seeking to honestly and sometimes dishonestly assess
both their failings and achievements. This we can do with a special advantage over
economists, social scientists and policy specialists who are apt to take the narrow view of
most issues. We do have examples of such persons. John Dewey and Karl Popper come to mind as but two examples, but in neither case was there enough
it has meant to be a philosopher has been under siege at various levels

grasp of the actual workings of social institutions that I believe will be called for in order to properly minister to a nation in need of helpful philosophical insights in
policy formation. Or it may just be that the real work will be performed by philosophically grounded and socially engaged practitioners rather than academics. People
like George Soros come to mind here.
But there are few people like George Soros around, and I think that the improbability of philosophers emerging as a special class of social auditor also marks the limits

philosophers are the class most likely to see the places at which bridges of
true understanding can be built not only between an inimical Right and Left, but between
public policy and the deep and relevant reflections upon our humanity in which
philosophers routinely engage. If philosophers seek to remain what the public thinks we are anyway, a class of persons of whom it can be
of social hope, inasmuch as

said, as Orwell put it,

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool, then I do not know from what other class of persons to turn to

. For I do not see how policy

wonks, political hacks, politicians, religious ideologues and special interests will do the work
that needs to be done to achieve the kind of civic consensus envisioned in our Constitution
and Declaration of Independence. Without a courageous new breed of public intellectual,
one that is able to help articulate new visions for community and social well being without
fear of reaching out to others that may not share the narrow views of the Cultural Left and
Cultural Right, I do not see how America moves beyond a mere land of toleration and
oligarchy.
navigate the complicated intellectual and emotional obstacles that prevent us from the achievement of our country

McClean

01

David E.
, New School University, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, Presented at the 20
Annual Conference of the Society for the
Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm.
Our new president, possessing no towering intellect, talks of a people who share a continent, but are not a nation. He is right, of course. We are only beginning to learn
to put tribal loyalties aside and to let ourselves take seriously other more salutary possibilities, though we delude ourselves into believing that we have made great
progress. Perhaps so-called "compassionate conservatism," though a gimmick to win a political contest, will bear a small harvest of unintended and positive

if the
not-too-Neanderthal-Right is finally willing to meet the not-too-wacky-Left at a place of
dialogue somewhere in the "middle," then that is good news, provided the Left does not miss
the opportunity to rendevous. Yet, there is a problem here. Both the Cultural Left and the
Cultural Right tend to be self-righteous purists. The best chance, then, is for the emergence of
Rorty's new Political Left, in conjunction with a new Political Right. The new Political Left would be in the better
position of the two to frame the discourse since it probably has the better intellectual hardware
(it tends to be more open-minded and less dogmatic) to make a true dialogue work. They,
unlike their Cultural Left peers , might find it more useful to be a little less inimical and a little more
sympathetic to what the other side might, in good faith, believe is at stake. They might leave
behind some of the baggage of the Cultural Left's endless ruminations (Dewey's philosophical cud chewing)
about commodity fetishization, or whether the Subject has really died, or where crack babies fit into neocapitalist hegemonies, and join the political fray by parsing and exposing the more basic idiotic claims
and dogmas of witless politicians and dangerous ideologues, while at the same time finding
common ground, a larger "We" perspective that includes Ronald Reagan and Angela Davis
under the same tent rather than as inhabitants of separate worlds. The operative spirit
should be that of fraternal disagreement, rather than self-righteous cold shoulders.
consequences, although I remain dubious about this if the task of thinking through what it might actually mean remains the chore of George W. Bush. But

99

Kritik Answers

100

Kritik Answers

Plan focus good: Rorty (1/2)

SPECIFIC PROPOSALS PROVE THE ACTION IS THE
SUPERIOR FORM ACTIVISM
Richard Rorty, philosopher, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, 1998, p. 98-99
When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essential
transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semiconscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties. This Left
will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for "the system" and
start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to
form alliances with people outside the academyand, specifically, with the labor unions.
Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a
nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms
no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them
will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America as Disneyland
as a country of simulacraand to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country,
inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be
cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than
agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms. The
existence of such a list endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and
production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who
clean the professionals' toiletsmight revitalize leftist politics.

THE FACT THAT SOMETHING IS PRODUCTIVE AND

DESTRUCTIVE DOESNT ELIMINATE THE NEED FOR
CONCRETE POLICY ACTION
Richard Rorty, Professor, Humanities, University of Virginia, TRUTH, POLITICS, AND
POSTMODERNISM: SPINOZA LECTURES, 1997, p. 51-52.
Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating
that something very important meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship is both necessary
and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida
usually replies that the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of
the writers who are labeled `post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good
experimentalist social democrats when it comes to actual political activity. I suspect, for example, that
Gray, Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be
voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist philosophers have gotten a bad
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by

name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like `impossible; `self-contradictory' and `unrepresentable'. They have helped
create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more generally, to the `metaphysics of

I am all for getting rid of

the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and unrepresentability is
counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the metaphor of things being accurately
presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible.

represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for philosophers, and we would be better
off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate representation' was never a fruitful way

Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls "a full presence beyond
the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity will not have changed. We
have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from psychoanalysis . All that we have
learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion
of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss which the Enlightenment offered. We have been given no reason to abandon
the belief that a lot of progress has been made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political
program. Since Darwin we have come to suspect that whether such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop
hoping to get lucky.
to describe intellectual progress.

101

Kritik Answers

Plan focus good: Rorty (2/2)

FOCUS ON THE SPECIFIC, STATE-FOCUSED PLANS IS
CRITICAL TO ALLIANCES AND ACTIVISM
Richard Rorty, philosopher, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, 1998, p. 98-99
The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with

the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of
making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.
It is no comfort to those in danger of being immiserated by globalization to be told that,
since national governments are now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement for such
governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich do not think any replacements are needed, and they
are likely to prevail. Bill Readings was right to say that the nation-state [has ceased] to be the elemental unit of capitalism, but it
remains the entity which makes decisions about social benefits, and thus about social
justice. The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marxs philosophy of
this claim is that

history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how to prevent
right-wing populists from taking advantage of resentment at that reemergence. When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the
essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semiconscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the

This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for the
system and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it
begin to form alliances with people outside the academyand, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy,
Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place . If the Left
forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To
form them will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillards account of America as Disneyland
as a country of simulacraand to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country,
inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be
cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than
agreement on a concrete political platform, a Peoples Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of
such a list endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory
both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals toilets might revitalize leftist politics.
late Sixties.

FOCUSING ON THE DETAILS OF POLICY IS CRITICAL TO

POLITICAL EFFECTIVENESS
Richard Rorty, philosopher, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, 1998, p. 103-104.
The Sixties did not ask how the various groups of stakeholders were to reach a consensus about when to remodel a factory rather than build a new one, what prices to

. Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of nonmarket economies
seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats
and entrepreneurs, the people would know how to handle competition from steel mills or
textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they
never told us how the people would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over
such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about the system
rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this
Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like late capitalism suggests
that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what , in the absence
of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be
won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to
be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to
know how participatory democracy is supposed to function . The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for
further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest
in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in
pay for raw materials, and the like

in the so-called socialist countries. They

participatory democracythe liberation of the people from the power of the technocratsuntil it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how
which only the technocrats presently possess. Even someone like myself, whose admiration for John Dewey is almost unlimited, cannot take seriously his defense of
participatory democracy against Walter Lippmanns insistence on the need for expertise

102

Kritik Answers

**Realism**
Realism Good: 2AC (1/2)
FIRST, STATES INEVITABLY COMPETE WITH EACH OTHER
FOR INTERNATIONAL POWER ANY ATTEMPT TO DEVIATE
FROM THIS STRUCTURE CAUSES VIOLENCE
Mearscheimer 2001

[John J., Prof. of Pol. Sci @ U. of Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Warfare]
Great powers fear each other. They regard each other with suspicion, and
they worry that war might be in the offing. They anticipate danger. There is little
room for trust among states. For sure, the level of fear varies across time and space, but it
cannot be reduced to a trivial level. From the perspective of any one great power, all other great
powers are potential enemies. This point is illustrated by the reaction of the United Kingdom and
France to German reunification at the end of the Col War. Despite the fact that these three states had been
close allies for almost forty-five years, both the United Kingdom and France immediately began worrying
about the potential danger of a united Germany.
The basis for this fear is that in a world where great powers have the capability to

attack each other and might have the motive to do so any state bent on
survival must be at least suspicious of other states and reluctant to trust them.

Add to this the 911 problem the absence of a central authority to which a threatened state can turn for
help and states have even greater incentive to fear each other. Morever, there is no mechanism, other
than the possible self-interest of third parties, for punishing an aggressor. Because it is sometimes difficult
to deter potential aggressors, states have ample reason not to trust other states and to be prepared for war
with them.
The possible consequences of falling victim to aggression further amplify
the importance of fear as a motivating force in world politics. Great powers
do not compete with each other as if international marketplace. Political competition among
states is a much more dangerous business than mere economic intercourse, the former can lead to

war, and war often means mass killing on the battlefield as well as mass
murder of civilians. In extreme cases, war can even lead to the destruction of states. The
horrible consequences of war sometimes cause states to view each other not just as
competitors, but as potentially deadly enemies. Political antagonism, in short, tends to be
intense because the stakes are great.
States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Because
other states are potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come to their rescue when
they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see
itself as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it
aims to provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those who help
themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming alliances. But alliances are
only temporary marriages of convenience: todays alliance partner might be tomorrows enemy, and todays
enemy might be tomorrows alliance partner. For example, the United States fought with China and the
Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in World War II, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and
partners and allied with West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold
War.

States operating in a self-help world almost always act according to

their own self-interest and do not subordinate their interests to the
interests of other states, or the so-called international community. The reason is simple: it
pays to be selfish in a self-help world. This is true in the short term as well as in
the long term, because if a state loses in the short run, it might not be
around for the long haul.
Apprehensive about the ultimate intentions of other states, and a ware that they oeprate in a self-help
system, states quickly understand that the best way to ensure their survival

is
to be the most powerful state in the system. The stronger a state is relative to
its potential rivals, the less likely it is that any of those rivals will attack it and
threaten its survival. Weaker states will be reluctant to pick fights with more powerful states because
the weaker states are likely to suffer military defeat. Indeed, the bigger the gap in power between
any two states, the less likely it is that the weaker will attack the stronger. Neither
Canada nor Mexico, for example, would countenance attacking the United States, which is far more
powerful than its neighbors. The ideal situation is to be the hegemon in the system. As Immanuel Kant
said, It is the desire of every state, or of its ruler,

to arrive at a condition of perpetual peace by conquering the whole world , if that

were possible. Survival would then be almost guaranteed

103

Kritik Answers

Realism Good: 2AC (2/2)

SECOND, REALISM MUST BE USED STRATEGICALLY
REJECTING IT RISKS WORSE USES
Stefano Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European Univ., Realism in International Relations
and International Political Economy, 1998, p. 212
it is impossible just to heap realism onto the dustbin of history and
start anew. This is a non-option. Although realism as a strictly causal theory has been a disappointment, various realist assumptions are
well alive in the minds of many practitioners and observers of international affairs. Although it does not correspond to a theory which
helps us to understand a real world with objective laws, it is a world-view which suggests thoughts about it, and which permeates our daily
language for making sense of it. Realism has been a rich, albeit very contestable, reservoir of lessons of the past, of metaphors and historical analogies, which,
Therefore, in a third step, this chapter also claims that

in the hands of its most gifted representatives, have been proposed, at times imposed, and reproduced as guides to a common understanding of international affairs.
Realism is alive in the collective memory and self-understanding of our (i.e. Western) foreign policy elite and public, whether educated or not. Hence, we cannot but

, forgetting realism is also questionable. Of course, academic observers should not bow to the whims of
being critical, does not mean that they should lose the capacity to
understand the languages of those who make significant decisions, not only in government, but also in firms,
NGOs, and other institutions. To the contrary, this understanding, as increasingly varied as it may be, is a prerequisite for their very profession. More particularly,
it is a prerequisite for opposing the more irresponsible claims made in the name, although not always
necessarily in the spirit, of realism.
deal with it. For this reason

daily politics. But staying at distance, or

THIRD, THE PERM SOLVES BEST REALISM OPENS UP

SPACE FOR ONGOING CRITICISM, MAKING THE
ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE
Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H.,

Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 193-6)

For realism man remains, in the final analysis, limited by himself. As such, it emphasizes caution, and focuses not merely upon the achievement of long-term

in the absence of a resolution of such

difficulties, longer-term objectives are liable to be unachievable, realism would seem to offer
a more effective strategy of transition than relativism itself. Whereas, in constructivism, such strategies are divorced from an awareness
objectives, but also upon the resolution of more- immediate difficulties. Given that,

of the immediate problems which obstruct such efforts, and, in critical theoretical perspectives, they are divorced from the current realities of international politics

realism's emphasis on first addressing the immediate obstacles to development ensures that it at least
generates strategies which offer us a tangible path to follow. If these strategies perhaps lack the visionary appeal of reflectivist
altogether,

proposals, emphasizing simply the necessity of a restrained moderate diplomacy in order to ameliorate conflicts between states, to foster a degree of mutual

, they
seek to take advantage of the possibilities of reform in the current international system without
jeopardizing the possibilities of order. Realism's gradualist reformism, the careful tending of what it regards as an essentially organic
understanding in international relations, and, ultimately, to develop a sense of community which might underlie a more comprehensive international society
at least

process, ultimately suggests the basis for a more sustainable strategy for reform than reflectivist perspectives, however dramatic, can offer. For the realist, then, if
rationalist theories prove so conservative as to make their adoption problematic, critical theories prove so progressive as to make their adoption unattractive. If the
former can justifiably be criticized for seeking to make a far from ideal order work more efficiently, thus perpetuating its existence and
legitimating its errors, reflectivist theory can equally be criticized for searching for a tomorrow which may never exist, thereby endangering the possibility of

Realism's distinctive contribution thus lies in its attempt to drive a

path between the two, a path which, in the process, suggests the basis on which some form of synthesis between rationalism and relativism
might be achieved. Oriented in its genesis towards addressing the shortcomings in an idealist transformatory project, it is centrally motivated by
establishing any form of stable order in the here and now.

concern to reconcile vision with practicality, to relate utopia and reality. Unifying technical and a practical stance, it combines aspects of the positivist methodology
employed by problem-solving theory with the interpretative stance adopted by critical theory, avoiding the monism of perspective which leads to the self-destructive
conflict between the two. Ultimately, it can simultaneously acknowledge the possibility of change in the structure of the international system and the need to probe the
limits of the possible, and yet also question the proximity of any international transformation, emphasize the persistence of problems after such a transformation, and
serve as a reminder of the need to grasp whatever semblance of order can be obtained in the mean time. Indeed, it is possible to say that realism is uniquely suited to
serve as such an orientation. Simultaneously to critique contemporary resolutions of the problem of political authority as unsatisfactory and yet to support them as an
attainable measure of order in an unstable world involves one in a contradiction which is difficult to accept. Yet, because it grasps the essential ambiguity of the
political, and adopts imperfectionism as its dominant motif, realism can relate these two tasks in a way which allows neither to predominate, achieving, if not a
reconciliation, then at least a viable synthesis. Perhaps the most famous realist refrain is that all politics are power politics. It is the all that is important here. Realism
lays claim to a relevance across systems, and because it relies on a conception of human nature, rather than a historically specific structure of world politics, it can
make good on this claim. If its observations about human nature are even remotely accurate, the problems that it addresses will transcend contingent formulations of
the problem of political order. Even in a genuine cosmopolis, conflict might become technical, but it would not be eliminated altogether.67 The primary
manifestations of power might become more economic or institutional rather than (para)military but, where disagreements occur and power exists, the employment
of the one to ensure the satisfactory resolution of the other is inevitable short of a wholesale transformation of human behaviour. Power is ultimately of the essence of

, realism achieves a universal relevance to the problem of

political action which allows it to relate the reformist zeal of critical theory, without which advance would be impossible,
with the problem-solver's sensible caution that before reform is attempted, whatever measure of security is possible under
contemporary conditions must first be ensured
politics; it is not something which can be banished, only tamed and restrained. As a result

104

Kritik Answers

#1 Mearsheimer: 1AR
EXTEND THE 2AC #___ MEARSCHEIMER 2001 EVIDENCE.
THE SELF-HELP INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM MAKES REALISM
INEVITABLE BECAUSE OF STATE COMPETITION AND THE
DESIRE FOR SURVIVAL. TRYING TO BREAK DOWN THAT
SYSTEM CAUSES POWER DIFFERENTIALS THAT RESULT IN
MASS WAR AND DEATH
THAT MAKES THEIR ARGUMENT TERMINALLY NOT
UNIQUE, BECAUSE STATES WILL STILL COMPETE AND FILL
THE VOID AND YOU VOTE ON ANY RISK OF WAR
ALSO, STATES ALWAYS ACT TO INCREASE THEIR RELATIVE
POWER, MAKING SECURITY COMPETITION INEVITABLE
Mearscheimer 2001
[John J., Prof. of Pol. Sci @ U. of Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Warfare]
Given the difficulty of determing how much power is enough for today and
tomorrow, great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to
achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of a challenge by another
great power. Only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity to be the
hegemon in the system because it already had sufficient power to survive. But even
if a great power does not have the wherewithal to achieve hegemony (and that is
usually the case), it will still act offensively to amass as much power as it can,
because states are always better off with more rather than less power. In short,
states do not become status quo powers until they completely dominate the system.
All states are influence by this logic, which means htat not only do they look for
opportunities to take advantage of one another, they also work to ensure that other
states do not take advantage of them. After all, rival states are driven by the same
logic, and most states are likely to recognize their own motives at play in the
actions of other states. In short, states ultimately pay attention to defense as well as
offense. They think about conquest themselves, and they work to check aggressor
states from gaining power at their expense. This inexorably leads to a world of
constant security competition, hwere states are wiling to lie, cheat, and use brute
force if it helps them gain advantage over their rivals. Peace, if one defines that
concept as a state of tranquility or mutual concord, is nt liekly to break out in this
world.

105

Kritik Answers

#1 Mearsheimer: Ext
THEIR CRITICISM DOESNT PROVIDE US WITH A ROADMAP
WHICH ENSURES VIOLENCE REALISM IS NEEDED TO
KEEP THE BALANCE OF POWER STABLE IT IS ON BALANCE
BETTER
Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H.,

Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 188-9)

His disagreement with realism depends on a highly contestable claim - based on Herz's argument that, with the development of global threats, the conditions which
might produce some universal consensus have arisen - that its 'impossibility theorem' is empirically problematic, that a universal consensus is achievable, and that its
practical strategy is obstructing its realisation. In much the same way, in `The poverty of neorealism', realism's practical strategy is illegitimate only because Ashley's
agenda is inclusionary. His central disagreement with realism arises out of his belief that its strategy reproduces a world order organised around sovereign states,
preventing exploration of the indeterminate number of - potentially less exclusionary - alternative world orders. Realists, however, would be unlikely to be troubled by
such charges. Ashley needs to do rather more than merely assert that the development of global threats will produce some universal consensus, or that any number of
less exclusionary world orders are possible, to convince them. A universal threat does not imply a universal consensus, merely the existence of a universal threat faced
by particularistic actors. And the assertion that indeterminate numbers of potentially less exclusionary orders exist carries little weight unless we can specify exactly
what these alternatives are and just how they might be achieved. As such, realists would seem to be justified in regarding such potentialities as currently unrealizable

Despite the
adverse side-effects that such a balance of power implies, it at least offers us something tangible
rather than ephemeral promises lacking a shred of support . Ultimately, Ashley's demand that a new, critical approach
ideals and in seeking a more proximate good in the fostering of mutual understanding and, in particular. of a stable balance of power.

be adopted in order to free us from the grip of such 'false conceptions depends upon ideas about the prospects for the development of a universal consensus which are
little more than wishful thinking, and ideas about the existence of potentially less exclusionary orders which are little more than mere assertion. Hence his attempts, in
'Political realism and human interests', to conceal these ideas from view by claiming that the technical base of realism serves only to identify, and yet not to reform, the
practical, and then, in 'The poverty of neorealism', by removing the technical from investigation altogether by an exclusive reliance on a problem of hermeneutic

, Ashley's post-structuralist approach

circularity. In the final analysis, then

boils down to little more than a critique which fails. It is
predicated on the assumption that the constraints upon us are simply restrictive knowledge practices, such that it presumes that the entirety of the solution to our

offers nothing by way, of

strategies,

problems is little more than the removal of such false ways of thinking. It
alternative - no
no
proximate goals, indeed, little by way of goals at all. If, in constructivism, the progressive purpose leads to strategies divorced from an awareness of the problems
confronting transformatory efforts, and, in critical theoretical perspectives, it produces strategies divorced from international politics in their entirety, in post-

critique ultimately proves

unsustainable. With its defeat, post-structuralism is left with nothing. Once one peels away the layers of misconstruction, it simply fades away. If
realism is, as Ashley puts it, 'a tradition forever immersed in the expectation of political tragedy'. it at
least offers us a concrete vision of objectives and ways in which to achieve them which his own
structuralism it generates a complete absence of strategies altogether. Critique serves to fill the void, yet this

position. forever immersed in the expectation of deliverance- is manifestly unable to provide."

AND, COMPETITION AMONG STATES IS INEVITABLE 3

REASONS:
1) NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY
2) STATES HAVE OFFENSIVE CAPABILITIES
3) VAGUE INTENTIONS
MEARSHEIMER 2001

[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research

fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 3. )
Why do great powers behave this way? My answer is that the structure of the
international system forces states which seek only to be secure nonetheless to act
aggressively toward each other. Three features of the international system combine
to cause states to fear one another: 1) the absence of a central authority that sits
above states and can protect them from each other. 2) the fact that states always
have some offensive mili- tary capability, and 3) the fact that states can never be
certain about other states' intentions. Given this fear-which can never be wholly
eliminat- ed-states recognize that the more powerful they are relative to their
rivals, the better their chances of survival. Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is
to be a hegemon, because no other state can seriously threaten such a mighty
power.

106

Kritik Answers

#2 Guzzini: 1AR
REALISM MUST BE USED STRATEGICALLY BECAUSE REALWORLD ACTORS RELY ON IT
Stefano Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European Univ., Realism in International Relations
and International Political Economy, 1998, p. 235
Third, this last chapter has argued that although the evolution of realism has been mainly a disappointment as a general causal theory, we have to deal with it. On the
one hand, realist assumptions and insights are used and merged in nearly all frameworks of analysis offered in International Relations or International Political
Economy. One of the book's purposes was to show realism as a varied and variably rich theory, so heterogeneous that it would be better to refer to it only in plural

,
to dispose of realism because some of its versions have been proven empirically wrong, ahistorical, or logically incoherent, does not
necessarily touch its role in the shared understandings of observers and practitioners of international
affairs. Realist theories have a persisting power for constructing our understanding of the present. Their assumptions, both as theoretical constructs, and as
terms. On the other hand

particular lessons of the past translated from one generation of decision-makers to another, help mobilizing certain understandings and dispositions to action. They

realism's several deaths as a general causal theory, it can still powerfully enframe action. It exists in the minds, and
is hence reflected in the actions, of many practitioners. Whether or not the world realism depicts is
out there, realism is. Realism is not a causal theory that explains International Relations, but, as long as realism continues to be a powerful mind-set,
we need to understand realism to make sense of International Relations. In other words, realism is a still necessary hermeneutical
bridge to the understanding of world politics. Getting rid of realism without having a deep understanding of it, not only risks unwarranted
dismissal of some valuable theoretical insights that I have tried to gather in this book; it would also be futile. Indeed, it might be the best way to
tacitly and uncritically reproduce it.
also provide them with legitimacy. Despite

REJECTION FAILS IT REPRODUCES SOVEREIGNTY AND

PERPETUATES EXPLOITATION ACTION MUST BE TAKEN
Agathangelou, Director of the Global Change Institute, 1997 (Anna M., Studies
in Political Economy, v. 54, p. 7-8)

dissident IR also paralyzes itself into non-action. While it

challenges the status quo, dissident IR fails to transform it . Indeed, dissident IR claims
Yet, ironically if not tragically,

that a coherent paradigm or research program even an alternative one reproduces the stifling parochialism and hidden
powermongering of sovereign scholarship. Any agenda of global politics informed by critical social theory perspectives, writes Jim
George must forgo the simple, albeit self-gratifying, options inherent in readymade alternative Realisms and confront the dangers,
closures, paradoxes, and complicities associated with them. Even references to a real world, dissidents argue, repudiate the very meaning

dissident scholarship
opts for, instead, is a sense of disciplinary crisis that resonates with the effects of marginal
and dissident movements in all sorts of other localities. Despite its emancipatory
intentions, this approach effectively leaves the prevailing prison of
sovereignty intact. It doubly incarcerates when dissident IR highlights the
layers of power that oppress without offering a heuristic, not to mention a program, for
emancipatory action. Merely politicizing the supposedly non-political
neither guides emancipatory action nor guards it against demagoguery. At best,
dissident IR sanctions a detached criticality rooted (ironically) in Western
modernity. Michael Shapiro, for instance, advises the dissident theorist to take a critical distance or position offshore from
which to see the possibility of change. But what becomes of those who know they are burning
in the hells of exploitation, racism, sexism, starvation, civil war, and the like while the
esoteric dissident observes critically from offshore ? What hope do they have of overthrowing these
shackles of sovereignty? In not answering these questions, dissident IR ends up
reproducing despite avowals to the contrary, the sovereign outcome of discourse divorced
from practice, analysis from policy, deconstruction from reconstruction, particulars from universals, and critical
theory from problem-solving.
of dissidence given their sovereign presumption of a universalizable, testable Reality. What

107

Kritik Answers

#2 Guzzini: Ext
BALANCE OF POWERS REMAINS A TOP PRIORITY- STATES
WILL STILL FEAR EACH OTHER POST THE ALT
Mearsheimer, Professor of Pol Sci at University of Chicago, 01, The Tragedy
of Great Power Politics

The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been
burned out of the system is wrong. In fact, all of the major states around the globe still care
deeply about the balance of power and are destined to compete for power among themselves
for the foreseeable future. Consequently, realism will offer the most powerful explanations
of international politics over the next century, and this will be true even if the debates
among academic and policy elites are dominated by non-realist theories. In short, the real
world remains a realist world. States still fear each other and seek to gain power at each
other's expense, because international anarchythe driving force behind great-power
behaviordid not change with the end of the Cold War, and there are few signs that such
change is likely any time soon. States remain the principal actors in world politics and there
is still no night watchman standing above them. For sure, the collapse of the Soviet Union
caused a major shift in the global distribution of power. But it did not give rise to a change in
the anarchic structure of the system, and without that kind of profound change, there is no
reason to expect the great powers to behave much differently in the new century than they
did in previous centuries.

OTHERS WONT FOLLOW OUR LEAD MAKES REALISM

NECESSARY
Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H.,

Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 181-2)

This highlights the central difficulty with Wendt's constructivism. It is not any form of unfounded
idealism about the possibility of effecting a change in international politics. Wendt accepts that the

intersubjective character of international institutions such as self-help render

them relatively hard social facts. Rather, What is problematic is his faith that such
chance, if it could be achieved, implies progress. Wendt's entire approach is governed by the
belief that the problematic elements of international politics can be transcended, that the competitive
identities which create these elements can be reconditioned, and that the predatory policies which underlie
these identities can be eliminated. Everything in his account, is up for gabs: there is no

core of recalcitrance to human conduct which cannot be reformed, unlearnt, disposed of.
This venerates a stance that so privileges the possibility of a systemic
transformation that it simply puts aside the difficulties which it recognises
to be inherent in its achievement. Thus, even though Wendt acknowledges that the

intersubjective basis of the self-help system makes its reform difficult, this does not dissuade him. He simply
demands that states adopt a strategy of 'altercasting', a strategy which 'tries to induce alter to take on a new
identity (and thereby enlist alter in ego's effort to change itself) by treating alter as if it already had that
identity'. Wendt's position effectively culminates in a demand that the state

undertake nothing less than a giant leap of faith. The fact that its opponent
might not take its overtures seriously. might not be interested in
reformulating its own construction of the world. or might simply see such an opening as
a weakness to be exploited. are completely discounted. The prospect of achieving a
systemic transformation simply outweighs any adverse consequences which might arise from the effort to
achieve it. Wendt ultimately appears, in the final analysis, to have overdosed on 'Gorbimania'.

108

Kritik Answers

#3 Murray: 1AR
REALISM IS THE BEST MIDDLE GROUND IT SYNTHESISES
CRITICAL THEORIES IN ORDER TO PROVIDE THE REAL
POSSIBILITY FOR TRANSFORMATION
Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H.,

Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 178-9)

I
n Wendt's constructivism, the argument appears in its most basic version, presenting an analysis of realist
assumptions which associate it with a conservative account of human nature. In Linklater's critical
theory it moves a stage farther, presenting an analysis of realist theory which locates it within a
conservative discourse of state-centrism. In Ashley's post-structuralism it reaches its highest form, presenting
an analysis of realist strategy which locates it not merely within a conservative statist order, but,
moreover, within an active conspiracy of silence to reproduce it. Finally, in Tickner's feminism, realism
becomes all three simultaneously and more besides, a vital player in a greater, overarching, masculine
conspiracy against femininity. Realism thus appears, first, as a doctrine providing the grounds for a
relentless pessimism, second, as a theory which provides an active justification for such pessimism, and,
third, as a strategy which proactively seeks to enforce this pessimism, before it becomes the vital
foundation underlying all such pessimism in international theory. Yet, an examination of the arguments put
forward from each of these perspectives suggests not only that the effort to locate realism within a
conservative. rationalist camp is untenable but, beyond this, that realism is able to provide reformist
strategies which are superior to those that they can generate themselves. The progressive

purpose which motivates the critique of realism in these perspectives ultimately

generates a bias which undermines their own ability to generate effective
strategies of transition. In constructivism, this bias appears in its most limited version,
producing strategies so divorced from the obstacles presented by the current
structure of international politics that they threaten to become counterproductive. In critical theory it moves a stage further producing strategies so abstract that one is at a
loss to determine what they actually imply in terms of the current structure of international politics.
And, in post-modernism, it reaches its highest form, producing an absence of

such strategies altogether, until we reach the point at which we are left with
nothing but critique. Against this failure, realism contains the potential to
act as the basis of a more constructive approach to international relations,
incorporating many of the strengths of reflectivism and yet avoiding its
weaknesses. It appears, in the final analysis, as an opening within which some
synthesis of rationalism and reflectivism. of conservatism and progressivism
might be built.

109

Kritik Answers

#3 Murray: Ext
REALISM BRIDGES THE GAP BETWEEN CRITIQUE AND THE
NEED FOR POLITICAL ACTION IT CAN ENCORPORATE ALL
OF THEIR ARGUMENTS WHILE STILL RECOGNIZING THAT
TEHRE ARE PROBLEMS THAT HAVE TO BE DEALT WITH IN
THE WORLD TODAY
Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H.,

Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 202-3)

Ultimately, the only result of the post-positivist movement's self-styled 'alternative' status is
the generation of an unproductive opposition; between a seemingly mutually exclusive
rationalism and reflectivism. Realism would seem to hold out the possibility of a more
constructive path for international relations theory. The fact that it is engaged in a normative enquiry is
not to say that it abandons a concern for the practical realities of international politics, only that it is
concerned to bridge the gap between cosmopolitan moral and power political logics. Its approach
ultimately provides an overarching framework which can draw on many different strands of
thought, the 'spokes' which can be said to be attached to its central hub , to enable it to relate
empirical concerns to a normative agenda. It can incorporate the lessons that geopolitics yields, the
insights that neorealism might achieve, and all the other information that the approaches which
effectively serve to articulate the specifics of its orientation generate, and. once incorporated within its
theoretical framework, relate them both to one another and to the requirements of the ideal ,
in order to support an analysis of the conditions which characterise contemporary international politics and
help it to achieve a viable political ethic. Against critical theories which are incomprehensible
to any but their authors and their acolytes and which prove incapable of relating their
categories to the issues which provide the substance of international affairs , and against
rationalist, and especially neorealist, perspectives which prove unconcerned for matters of values and which
simply ignore the relevance of ethical questions to political action, realism is capable of formulating a
position which brings ethics and politics into a viable relationship. It would ultimately seem
to offer us a course which navigates between the Scylla of defending our values so badly that
we end up threatening their very existence, and the Charybdis of defending them so efficiently

that we become everything that they militate against. Under its auspices. we can perhaps
succeed in reconciling our ideals with our pragmatism.

110

Kritik Answers

Democratic Realism Solves the Links

DEMOCRATIC REALISM RESPONDS TO THE CRITIQUES
CONCERNS, PROMOTING THE NATIONAL INTEREST AT THE
SAME TIME AS WORLD PEACE AND PROSPERITY.
Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute, Democratic Realism: The
Third Way, BLUEPRINT, Winter 2000,
http://www.ndol.org/blueprint/winter2000/marshall.html.

Democratic Realism seeks a new balance of American ideals and interests. It builds on the
time-honored principles of liberal internationalism: At the core of the post-Cold War world
is a growing zone of democracies committed to relatively open markets and free trade,
political relations based on agreed-upon rules and norms of behavior, and institutions to
cooperatively manage and enforce those standards. Protecting and extending that
democratic community serves our security and economic interests while also expressing
Americans' ingrained belief in our country's historic mission. Deftly executed, policies based
on Democratic Realism can not only underpin America's vital interests and continued global
success, but help ensure a safer, more prosperous, and more democratic world.

111

Kritik Answers

Violence is Endemic
POLITICS MUST INCORPORATE THE EXISTENCE OF
ENDEMIC VIOLENCE. WE CAN INCORPORATE THIS
WITHOUT BUYING INTO EVERY REALIST PREMISE
Stefano Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European University, The enduring dilemmas of
realism in International Relations, Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, December 2001,
http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/gus02/gus02.pdf, accessed 8/13/02
Until now, the purpose of this article might have appeared to be just another, perhaps more
systematically grounded, critique of the difficulties realist theories of International Relations
have been facing. By drawing on the lessons one can learn from these dilemmas, this
conclusion wants to suggest a way forward. Once we know where realism gets stuck in its
analytical justification, the study of its dilemmas should open a more reflexive way to reapprehend Realism as a double negation and the trap of the realism-idealism debate In what
follows, I argue that the underlying reason why realists are not facing up the implications of
the identity (distinctiveness/determinacy) and the conservative (science/tradition) dilemma
consists in the terms of the first debate in which many realists feel compelled to justify
realism. According to this self-understanding, realists are there to remind us about the
fearful, the cruel side of world politics which lurks behind. This distinct face of international
politics inevitably shows when the masquerade is over. In the Venetian carnival of
international diplomacy, only the experienced will be prepared when the curtain falls and
world history picks up its circular course. By trying to occupy a vantage point of (superior)
historical experience, science came then as an offer, IR realism could not refuse. IR Realism
has repeatedly thought to have no other choice but to justify this pessimism with a need to
distance itself from other positions, to be nonsubsumable. It needed to show that whatever
else might temporarily be true, there is an unflinching reality which cannot be avoided.
Realism needed to point to a reality which cannot be eventually overcome by politics, to an
attitude which would similarly rebuff the embrace by any other intellectual tradition. The
first debate is usually presented as the place in which this negative attitude has been
played out, indeed mythically enshrined. It is to this metaphorical foundation to which
many self-identified realists return. Yet, I think that the first debate is a place where the
thoughts not only of so-called idealist scholars, but also of self-stylised realists look unduly
impoverished exactly because it is couched in terms of an opposition. When scholars more
carefully study the type of opposition, however, they quickly find out that many so-called
realist scholars have been not only critical of utopian thought and social engineering, but
also of Realpolitik. In other words, if one concentrates on scholars and their work, and not
on labels, one sees realism not simply as an attitude of negation which it is but as an
attitude of double negation: in the words of R.N. Berki, realism must oppose both the
conservative idealism of nostalgia and the revolutionist idealism of imagination. Norberto
Bobbio has developed this double negation in his usually lucid style as both a conservative
realism which opposes the ideal, and a critical realism which opposes the apparent, a
difference too few realists have been able to disentangle. For this double heritage of political
realism is full of tensions. Realism as anti-idealism is status-quo oriented. It relies on the
entire panoply of arguments so beautifully summarised by Alfred Hirschman. According to
the futility thesis, any attempt at change is condemned to be without any real effect. The
perversity thesis would argue that far from changing for the better, such policies only add
new problems to the already existing ones. And the central jeopardy thesis says that
purposeful attempts at social change will only undermine the already achieved. The best is
the enemy of the good, and so on. Anti-apparent realism, however, is an attitude more akin
to the political theories of suspicion. It looks at what is hidden behind the smokescreen of
current ideologies, putting the allegedly self-evident into the limelight of criticism. With the
other form of realism , it shares a reluctance to treat beautiful ideas as what they claim to be.
But it is much more sensible to their ideological use, revolutionary as well as conservative.
Whereas anti-ideal realism defends the status quo, anti-apparent realism questions it. It
wants to unmask existing power relations.

112

Kritik Answers

Realism Inevitable
WE MUST USE REALISM BECAUSE OTHERS RELY ON IT
Stefano Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European Univ., Realism in International Relations
and International Political Economy, 1998, p. 227
The main line of critique can be summarized as follows: realism does not take its central
concepts seriously enough. To start with, its critiques claim that realism is a sceptical
practice which however, stops short of problematizing the inherent theory of the state. It is,
second, a practice which informs an international community. Third, international politics is
not power politics because it resembles realist precepts, but because the international
community which holds a realist world-view acts in such a way as to produce power politics:
it is a social construction. Realist expectations might hold, not because they objectively
correspond to something out there, but because agents make them the maxims that guide
their actions. Finally, this can have very significant policy effects: even at the end of the Cold
War which might have shattered realist world-views, realist practices could mobilize old
codes, such as to belittle the potential historical break of the post-Berlin wall system.
Realism still underlies major re-conceptualization of the present international system, from
Huntington's geocultural reification to `neomedievalism' - and justifies the foreign policies
which can be derived from them.

113

Kritik Answers

Realism Good: Prevents Nuclear War

REALISM KEY TO STOPPING NUCLEAR WAR.
Hans Morgenthau, University of Chicago, Realism in International Politics, 19 58, Published in
NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW, Winter 1998.
It seems to me that to a great extent the future peace of the world-and the future peace of
the world means under present conditions the future existence of the world-will depend
upon the restoration of the original, the traditional, the realistic concepts of foreign policy:
of a foreign policy which was regarded and practiced as what you might call the "mundane
business" of accommodating divergent interests, defining seemingly incompatible interests,
and then redefining them until finally they became compatible. For it seems to me to be very
unlikely that the "cold war," as it has been practiced in the last ten years, will continue
indefinitely. About five or six years ago Sir Winston Churchill said in a speech in the House
of Commons exactly this: "Things as they are cannot last; either they will get better, or they
will get worse." If the present trend continues, I think, in spite of what has been said about
the desirability and possibility of limited war, the danger of an all-out atomic war will
increase. One of the instruments to avoid this universal catastrophe lies in the restoration of
those processes of a realistic foreign policy to which I have referred.

114

Kritik Answers

Realism Good: Prevents War (1/3)

REALISM IS KEY TO INTERNATIONAL PEACE THE
CRITIQUE ATTACKS THE WORST ASPECTS OF REALIST
POLITICS, THE PLAN EMBODIES THE BEST.
Robert Jervis, President, American Political Science Association, INTERNATIONAL
ORGANIZATION, Autumn 1998, ASP.
Realism can also speak to the conditions under which states are most likely to cooperate and
the strategies that actors can employ to foster cooperation. This line of theorizing is sometimes associated with
neoliberalism, but the two are hard to distinguish in this area. Making a distinction would be easy if realism believed that conflict was zero-sum, that actors were
always on the Pareto frontier. This conclusion perhaps flows from the view of neoclassical economics that all arrangements have evolved to be maximally efficient, but

. Although offensive realists

who see aggression and expansionism as omnipresent (or who believe that security requires
expansion) stress the prevalence of extreme conflict of interest, defensive realists believe
that much of international politics is a Prisoners dilemma or a more complex security
dilemma. The desire to gain mixes with the need for protection; much of statecraft consists
of structuring situations so that states can maximize their common interests. The everpresent fear that others will take advantage of the state and the knowledge that others
have reciprocal worries leads diplomats to seek arrangements that will reduce if not
neutralize these concerns. Even if international politics must remain a Prisoners Dilemma, it can often be made into one that is more benign by
realists see that politics is often tragic in the sense of actors being unable to realize their common interests

altering the pay-offs to encourage cooperation, for example, by enhancing each states ability to protect itself should the other seek to exploit it and increasing the

The knowledge that even if others

are benign today, they may become hostile in the future due to changes of mind,
circumstances, and regimes can similarly lead decision makers to create arrangements that
bind others and themselves, as previously noted.
transparency that allows each to see what the other side is doing and understand why it is doing it.

REALISM KEY TO DIPLOMACY AND PREVENTING CONFLICT.

Robert Jervis, President, American Political Science Association, INTERNATIONAL
ORGANIZATION, Autumn 1998, ASP.
Just as understanding the limits of the states power can reduce conflict, so in protecting
what is most important to them states must avoid the destructive disputes that will result
from failing to respect the vital interests of others. Realists have long argued that diplomacy
and empathy are vital tools of statecraft: conceptions of the national interest that leave no
room for the aspirations and values of others will bring ruin to the state as well as to its
neighbors.

WAR AND VIOLENCE ARE ENDEMIC TO IR POLITICS,

MOVING AWAY WILL INEVITABLY RESULT IN GREAT
POWER WARS
MEARSHEIMER 2001

[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the
Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg xi-xii. )
The twentieth century was a period of great international violence.In World
War I (1914-18), roughly nine million people died on European battlefields. About fifty million people were killed duringWorld War 11(1939-45), well
over half of them civilians. Soon after the end of World War II, the Cold War engulfed the globe. During this con-frontation, the Soviet Union and its
Warsaw Pact allies never directly fought the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies,but many millions died in proxy wars in
Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Millions also died in the century's lesser, yet still fierce, wars, including
the Russo-Japanese con-flicts of 1904-5 and 1939, the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1920, the Russo-Polish War of 1920-

Hopes
for peace will probably not be realized, because the great powers that
shape the international system fear each other and compete for power
as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant
power over others, because having dominant power is the best means
21, the various Arab-Israeli wars, and the han-Iraq War of 1980-88. This cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium.

115

Kritik Answers
to ensure one's own survival. Strength ensures safety, and the greatest
strength is the greatest insurance of safety. States facing this incentive are fated to clash as each
competes for advantage over the others. This is a tragic situation, but there is no escaping it
unless the states that make up the system agree to form a world government. Such a vast transformation is hardly a realistic prospect, however , so
conflict and war are bound to continue as large and enduring features
of world politics.

116

Kritik Answers

Realism Good: Prevents War (2/3)

ANY SHIFT AWAY FROM REALISM WILL CAUSE A POWER
VACUUM RESULTING IN GREAT POWER WARS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 3. )
Alas, the claim that security competition and war between the great powers have
been purged from the international system is wrong. Indeed, there is much
evidence that the promise of everlasting peace among the great powers was
stillborn. Consider, for example, that even though the soviet threat has
disappeared, the United States still maintains about one hundred thousand troops
in Europe and roughly the same number in Northeast Asia. It does so because it
recognizes that dangerous rivalries would probably emerge among the major
powers in these regions if U.S. troops were withdrawn. Moreover, almost every
European state, includ- ing the United Kingdom and France, still harbors deepseated, albeit muted, fears that a Germany unchecked by American power might
behave aggressively; fear of Japan in Northeast Asia is probably even more
profound, and it is certainly more frequently expressed. Finally, the possi- bility of
a clash between China and the United States over Taiwan is hard- ly remote. This is
not to say that such a war is likely, but the possibility reminds us that the threat of
great-power war has not disappeared. The sad fact is that international politics has
always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way.
Although the intensity of their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear
each other and always compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of
each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gain- ing power at
the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the
strongest of all the great powers, although that is a wel- come outcome. Their
ultimate aim is to be the hegemon--that is, the only great power in the system.
(NEXT PAGE)

117

Kritik Answers

Realism Good: Prevents War (3/3)

(PREVIOUS PAGE)
There are no status quo powers in the international system, save for the occasional
hegemon that wants to maintain its dominating position over potential rivals.
Great powers are rarely content with the current dis- tribution of power; on the
contrary, they face a constant incentive to change it in their favor. They almost
always have revisionist intentions, and they will use force to alter the balance of
power if they think it can be done at a reasonable price.3 At times, the costs and
risks of trying to shift the balance of power are too great, forcing great powers to
wait for more favorable circumstances. But the desire for more power does not go
away, unless a state achieves the ultimate goal of hegemony. Since no state is likely
to achieve global hegemony, however, the world is condemned to perpetual greatpower competition. This unrelenting pursuit of power means that great powers
are Inclined to look for opportunities to alter the distribution of world power in
their favor. They will seize these opportunities if they have the necessary capability. Simply put, great powers are primed for offense. But not only does a great
power seek to gain power at the expense of other states, it also tries to thwart rivals
bent on gaining power at its expense. Thus, a great power will defend the balance of
power when looming change favors another state, and it will try to undermine the
balance when the direction of change is in its own favor.

SURVIVAL IS CONTIGENT ON OFFENSIVE MILITARY POWER

MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 36-7. )
The security dilemma," whith is one of the most well-known concepts in the
international relations literature, reflects the basic logic of offensive realism. The
essence of the dilemma is that the measures a state takes to increase its own
security usually decrease the security of other states. Thus, it is difficult for a state
to increase its own chances of survival with- out threatening the survival of other
states. John Hen first introduced the security dilemma in a 1950 article in the
journal World Politkc.'7 After dis- cussing the anarchic nature of international
politics. he writes, "Striving to attain security from . . . attack, [states] are driven to
acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others.
This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for
the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing
units, power competition ensues, and the vicious circle of secu- rity and power
accumulation is on."8 The implication of Herz's analysis is clear: the best way for a
state to survive in anarchy is to take advantage of other states and gain power at
their expense. The best defense is a good offense. Since this message is widely
understood, ceaseless security com- petition ensues. Unfortunately, little can be
done to ameliorate the securi- ty dilemma as long as states operate in anarchy.
It should be apparent from this discussion that saying that states are power
maximizers is tantamount to saying that they care about relative power, not
absolute power. There is an important distinction here, because states concerned
about relative power behave differently than do states interested in absolute
power.'9 States that maximize relative power are concerned primarily with the
distribution of material capabilities. In particular, they try to gain as large a power
advantage as possible over potential rivals, because power is the best means to
survival in a danger- ous world. Thus, states motivated by relative power concerns
are likely to forgo large gains in their own power, if such gains give rival states even
greater power, for smaller national gains that nevertheless provide them with a
power advantage over their rivals.20 States that maximize absolute power, on the
other hand, care only about the size of their own gains, not those of other states.
They are not motivated by balance-of-power logic but instead are concerned with
amassing power without regard to how much power other states control. They
would jump at the opportunity for large gains, even if a rival gained more in the

118

Kritik Answers
deal. Power, according to this logic, is not a means to an end (survival), but an end
in itself.2'

119

Kritik Answers

Realism Good: Militarism Solves War

(1/2)
U.S. MILITARISM IS CRITICAL TO WORLD PEACE
Kagan, Hillhouse Professor of History at Yale, 1997 (Donald, Roles and Missions.
Orbis, Spring, Volume 41)

the keystone of
American strategy should be an effort to preserve and sustain the situation as well and as long as
possible. America's most vital interest , therefore, is maintaining the general peace , for war
has been the swiftest, most expensive, and most devastating means of changing the balance of international power. But peace does not
keep itself, although one of the most common errors in modern thinking about international relations is the assumption that peace is natural and can be
Few, if any, nations in the history of the world have ever enjoyed such a favorable situation. It stands to reason that

preserved merely by having peace-seeking nations avoid provocative actions. The last three-quarters of the twentieth century strongly suggests the opposite

major war is more likely to come when satisfied states neglect their
defenses and fail to take an active part in the preservation of peace . It is vital to
understand that the current relatively peaceful and secure situation is neither
inevitable nor immutable. It reflects two conditions built up with
tremendous effort and expense during the last half century: the great power
of the United States and the general expectation that Americans will be
willing to use that power when necessary. The diminution of U.S. power
and credibility, which would follow on a policy of reduced responsibility, would thus not be a neutral act that
would leave the situation as it stands. Instead, it would be a critical step in
undermining the stability of the international situation. Calculations based
on the absence of visible potential enemies would immediately be made
invalid by America's withdrawal from its current position as the major
bulwark supporting the world order. The cost of the resulting upheaval in
wealth, instability, and the likelihood of war would be infinitely greater
than the cost of continuing to uphold the existing international structure.
conclusion:

AND, NON-VIOLENCE DOESNT SOLVE ITS JUST WISHFUL

THINKING
Regan, Political Science Professor at Fordham, 1996 (Richard, Just War: Principles
and Causes, p. 6)

Pacifists generally argue that nonviolence and nonresistance will ultimately win the
minds and hearts of aggressors and oppressors, but that argument is neither
convincing nor dispositive. The success of Gandhi or King may have been due (at least in part) to the appeal of their
nonviolent campaigns to the conscience of their oppressors. But if that is true, it is because Gandhi could appeal to
the moral conscience of a free British electorate over the heads of colonial administrators, and
King could appeal to the moral conscience of the national American
electorate over the heads of regional southern officials. There is no reason to believe that such
campaigns would have been successful against the rulers of Nazi Germany .
Second, the argument rests on an extremely optimistic view about the
reformability of human behavior. Hobbes was surely correct in describing a persistent conflictual pattern of
human behavior. To imagine that every or even most human beings will behave like
saints seems to be wishful thinking. And even were human beings to be so
transformed at some indefinite future point of time, why should innocent
human beings suffer oppression in the intervening short run?

120

Kritik Answers

Realism Good: Militarism Solves War

(2/2)
AND, THEIR STRATEGY IS IMMORAL AND INCITES MORE
VIOLENCE
Coates, Politics Lecturer at Reading, 1997 (A.J., The Ethics of War, p. 115-6)
Doubts arise not just about the utility or efficacy of the pacifist strategy, but also about its
moral consistency. The moral claim of the strategy rests on the assumption that non-violent
resistance is noncoercive, that here is a morally superior form of action that is not part of a
culture or cycle of violence. That assumption seems unfounded. As one critic argues: Even
though your action is non-violent, its first consequence must be to place you and your
opponents in a state of war. For your opponents now have only the same sort of choice that
an army has: that of allowing you to continue occupying the heights you have moved on to,
or of applying force dynamic, active, violent force to throw you back off them. Your
opponents cannot now uphold the laws which they value without the use of such violence.
And to fail to uphold them is to capitulate to you In terms of its practical impact,
therefore, your tactic is basically a military one rather than a morally persuasive one or
even a political one. (Prosch 1965, pp. 104-5) Not only does non-violent resistance invite a
violent response from an opponent; it also produces in some cases even deliberately
engineers circumstances in which those of a more militant and less sensitive disposition
can realize their violent ambitions. In such circumstances it seems either nave or
hypocritical to parade ones pacific and non-violent credentials while ignoring the key role
that has been played in the unleashing of the cycle of violence.

121

Kritik Answers

Realism Good: Militarism Solves

Genocide
U.S. MILITARISM IS CRITICAL TO PREVENTING GENOCIDE
Diamond, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 1996 (Larry, Why the
United States must remain engaged, Orbis, Summer, Volume 40, Number 3)

Much in Nordlinger's book is wise, prudent, and morally responsible. Let us hope that we never again so
demonize a global challenger that our officials are tempted to vitiate our constitution and values, or
make the mistake, so tragically common in the cold war, of embracing any ethically repugnant regime
that happens to be on "our side." Let us have a serious debate on our national interests and the military
means we need to defend them. If we can pare our defense spending further by eliminating expensive
weapons programs that are not needed or not likely to work (or even in some cases not wanted by the
armed forces themselves), by all means let us do so. But let us not make the mistake - the core
mistake of isolationists then and now - of

assuming that a world without effective

rules and the power to enforce them would be any more benign than Hobbes
imagined it would be, or that a world full of escalating rivalries, arms buildups,
aggression, repression, genocide, and war would not ultimately threaten
our values, our security, and our way of life. Especially now, in a turbulent era of power
instabilities and rapidly resurgent nationalisms, world order will depend heavily on
preeminent American military power, selectively but strategically engaged around
the world in the service of liberal principles. In the necessary task of reconfiguring U.S. foreign

policy for a new century, liberal internationalism offers the best, wisest, most secure, and most humane
foundation on which to build.

EVEN IF THEY WIN THAT THE PLAN DOESNT PASS WELL

WIN THAT THE KRITIK SANCTIONS GENOCIDE
Willis 12-19-95 (Ellen, The Village Voice)
If intellectuals are more inclined to rise to the discrete domestic issue than the
historic international moment, this may have less to do with the decay of the notion of international
solidarity than with the decay of confidence in their ability to change the world, not
to mention the decay of anything resembling a c oheren t fram ework of ideas
within which to understand it. Certainly the received ideas of the left, to the extent that a left can still be said to
exist, have been less than helpful as a framework for understanding the Bosnian crisis or organizing a response to it. Although the idea
of American imperialism explains less and less in a world where the locus of power is rapidly shifting to a network of
transnational corporations, it still fuels a strain of reflexive anti-interventionist sentiment
whose practical result is paralyzed dithering in the face of genocide. Floating
around "progressive" circles and reinforcing the dithering is a brand of
vulgar pacifism whose defining characteristic is not principled rejection of
violence but squeamish aversion to dealing with it. In the academy in particular,
entrenched assumptions about identity politics and cultural relativism promote a
view of the Balkan conflict as too complicated and ambiguous to allow for choosing
sides. If there is no such thing as universality, if multiethnic democracy is not intrinsically preferable to ethnic separatism, if there are no
clear-cut aggressors and victims but merely clashing cultures, perhaps ethnic partition is simply the most practical way of resolving those
"implacable ancient rivalries."\

122

Kritik Answers

Realism Good: Militarism Solves

Democracy
U.S. MILITARISM IS CRITICAL TO THE SPREAD OF
DEMOCRACY
Diamond, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 1996 (Larry, Why the
United States must remain engaged, Orbis, Summer, Volume 40, Number 3)

In the past, global power has been an important reason why certain countries have become
models for emulation by others. The global power of the United States, and of its Western
democratic allies, has been a factor in the diffusion of democracy around the world, and
certainly is crucial to our ability to help popular, legitimate democratic forces deter armed
threats to their overthrow, or to return to power (as in Haiti) when they have been overthrown.
Given the linkages among democracy, peace, and human rights - as well as the recent finding of
Professor Adam Przeworski (New York University) that democracy is more likely to survive in a country
when it is more widely present in the region - we should not surrender our capacity to diffuse and
defend democracy. It is not only intrinsic to our ideals but important to our national security that

we remain globally powerful and engaged - and that a dictatorship does not rise to
hegemonic power within any major region.

LITTLE B: DEMOCRACY PREVENTS WAR, MASS DEATH, AND

GENOCIDE
Rummel, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii & Director of the
Haiku Institute of Peace Research, 1994 (Rudolph J., Power, Genocide and Mass
Murder, Journal of Peace Research, February, Volume 31, Nubmer 1)

The principal empirical and theoretical conclusion emerging from this project confirms previous work
on the causes of war: Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely. The more

power a regime has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims
and desires of the elite. The more freely a political elite can control the power of the state
apparatus, the more thoroughly it can repress and murder its subjects and the more insistently it can
declare war on domestic and foreign enemies. By contrast, the more it will make war on others and
murder its foreign and domestic subjects, the more constrained the power of a regime - the more

political power is diffused, checked, and balanced - the less it will aggress on
others and commit democide. This finding holds up through a variety of multivariate

analyses comprising over a hundred different kinds of political, cultural, social, and economic variables.
All considered, including the partial correlations, regression analysis, and the independent dimensions
defined through factor analysis, a measure of democracy versus totalitarian regimes and measures of
war and rebellion are the best independent predictors of democide (Rummel, 1995). At the extremes of
power, the totalitarian regimes murdered their people by the tens of millions,
while many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers. The

way to
virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through
restricting and checking power. This means to foster democratic freedom. This is the ultimate
conclusion of this project.

123

Kritik Answers

Alt Bad: Could Make Things Worse

THE ALTERNATIVE MAY MAKE THINGS WORSE, WILL
ELIMINATE BENEFITS OF THE CURRENT ORDER
Alastair J.H. Murray, RECONSTRUCTING REALISM: BETWEEN POWER POLITICS AND
COSMOPOLITAN ETHICS, Keele University Press: Edinburgh, 1997, p. 182.
This is not merely to indulge in yet another interminable discourse on the lessons
of Munich, rejecting all strategies of assurance for more familiar policies of
deterrence. A realist perspective does not, as Wendt seems to assume, require
worst-case forecasting, nor does it adopt an ethic of sauve qui peut. But it is to
suggest that, when realism emphasizes the need for a cautious, gradual approach to
attempts to transform the nature of the system, it had a point. In Wendts analysis,
change ultimately becomes as privileged as the status quo in rationalist
perspectives. If he does not hold that history is progressive, he does hold that
change is. If he is not idealistic about the possibilities of effecting a transformation
of the system, he is with regard to the way in which it might be accomplished. Yet,
even if we acknowledge that a transformation in the structure of international
politics would be beneficial, this does not imply the acceptance of a desperate
gamble to accomplish it. And, at the end of the day, if we can accept that the
current structure of international politics contains many injustices, there is no
guarantee that its transformation would remove such iniquities anyway. The only
thing that the quest to overthrow the status quo does not guarantee to do is to
undermine those fragments of order that we currently possess. Ultimately,
constructivism can be seen to rest upon a value of judgment which sacrifices the
safe option of remaining within the current situation for the attempt to explore its
possibilities. It can be seen to rest on a progressive philosophy which privileges the
possible over the extant and sacrifices stability on the altar of transformation.

124

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Realism Inevitable (1/2)

REALISM IS INEVITABLE
John Mearsheimer, Professor, University of Chicago, THE TRAGEDY OF GREAT
POWER POLITICS, 2001, p. 2.
The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business,
and it is likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of their competition waxes and
wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete with each other for power. The
overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining
power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the
strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is
to be the hegemon-that is, the only great power in the system.

REALISM IS A FACT OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS EVEN IF

WE DONT LIKE IT
John Mearsheimer, Professor, University of Chicago, THE TRAGEDY OF GREAT
POWER POLITICS, 2001, p. 3-4.
This situation, which no one consciously designed or intended, is genuinely tragic. Great
powers that have no reason to fight each other- that are merely concerned with their own
survival- nevertheless have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the
other states in the system. This dilemma is captured in brutally frank comments that
Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck made during the early 1860s, when it appeared that
Poland, which was not an independent state at the time, might regain its sovereignty.
Restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for
any enemy that chooses to attack us, he believed, and therefore he advocated that Prussia
should smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I have every sympathy
for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to wipe them out.
Although it is depressing to realize that great powers might think and act this way, it
behooves us to see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. For example, one of the
key foreign policy issues facing the United States is the question of how China will behave if
its rapid economic growth continues and effectively turns China into a giant Hong Kong.
Many Americans believe that if China is democratic and enmeshed in the global capitalist
system, it will not act aggressively; instead it will be content with the status quo in Northeast
Asia. According to this logic, the United States should engage China in order to promote the
latters integration into the world economy, a policy that also seeks to encourage Chinas
transition to democracy. If engagement succeeds, the United States can work with a wealthy
and democratic China to promote peace around the globe. Unfortunately, a policy of
engagement is doomed to fail.

125

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Realism Inevitable (2/2)

STATES COMPETE WITH EACHOTHER TO SURVIVE; ANY
LOSS OF POWER IS ZERO SUM, MAKING REALIST AN
INEVITABILITY
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 32-33 )
.
There is little room for trust among states. For sure, the level of fear varies across time and space, but it cannot be
reduced to a trivial level. From the per- spective of any one great power, all other great powers
are potential ene- mies. This point is illustrated by the reaction of the United Kingdom and France to German reunification at the
Great powers fear each other, They regard each other with suspicion, and they worry that war might be in the offing. They anticipate danger

end of the Cold War. Despite the fact that these three states had been close allies for almost forty-five years, both the United Kingdom and France

t in a world where
great powers have the capability to attack each other and might have the motive to do so, any state
bent on survival must be at least suspicious of other states and reluctant to trust them. Add to this the
"911" problem-the absence of a cen- tral authority to which a threatened state can turn for help-and states have even
greater incentive to fear each other. Moreover, there is no mechanism, other than the possible
self-interest of third parties, for pun- ishing an aggressor. Because it is sometimes difficult to deter potential aggressors, states
have ample reason not to trust other states and to be prepared for war with them. The possible consequences of falling
victim to aggression further amplIfy the importance of fear as a motivating force in world politics.
Great pow- ers do not compete with each other as if international politics were merely an economic marketplace. Political
competition among states is a much more dangerous business than mere economic
intercourse; the former can lead to war, and war often means mass killing on the battlefield as well as
immediately began worrying about the potential dangers of a united Germany.' The basis of this fear is tha

mass murder of civilians. In extreme cases, war can even lead to the destruction of states. The horrible consequences of war sometimes cause states to

Political antagonism, in short, tends to be

intense, because the stakes are great. States in the international system also aim to
guarantee their own sur- vival. Because other states are potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come to
their rescue when they dial 911, states can- not depend on others for their own security . Each state tends to see itself as
vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own sur- vival. In international politics, God helps those who help
view each other not just as competitors, but as potentially deadly enemies.

themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming alliances." But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience:
today's affiance partner might be tomorrow's enemy, and today's enemy might be tomorrow's alliance partner. For example, the United States fought
with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in World War H, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and allied with

States operating in a self-help world

almost always act according to their own sell-interest and do not subordinate their
interests to the inter- ests of other states, or to the interests of the so-called international com- munity. The reason is
simple: it pays to be selfish in a self-help world. This is true in the short term as weli as in the long term, because if a state loses in the
West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

short run, it might not be around for the long haul. Apprehensive about the ultimate intentions of other states, and aware that they operate in a self-

states quickly understand that the best way to ensure their survival is to be
the most powerful state in the system. The stronger a state is relative to its potential rivals, the less likely it is that any
help system,

of those rivals will attack it and threaten its survival. Weaker states will be reluctant to pick fights with more powerful states because the weaker states
are likely to suffer military defeat. Indeed, the bigger the gap in power between any two states, the less likely it is that the weaker will attack the
stronger. Neither Canada nor Mexico, for example, would countenance attacking the United States, which is far more powerful than its neighbors. The
ideal situation is to be the hegemon in the system. As Immanuel Kant said, "It is the desire of every state, or of its ruler, to arrive at a condition of
perpetual peace by conquering the whole world, if that were possible."12 Survival would then be almost guaranteed." Consequently, states pay close
attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special effort to maximize their share of world power. Specifically, they look for
opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential rivals. States employ a variety of
means-economic, diplomatic, and military-to shift the balance of power in their favor, even if doing so makes other states suspicious or even hostile.

Because one state's gain in power is another state's loss, great powers tend to have
a zero-sum mentality when dealing with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this
competition and to dominate the other states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that

states are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their
ultimate motive is simply to survive. In short, great powers have aggressive intentions.'4

126

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Realism Will Reasset Itself

RELYING ON A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO REFORMING
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS FAILS, NEW PROBLEMS WILL
ALWAYS DEMAND SPECIFIC REALISTIC SOLUTIONS.
Hans Morgenthau, University of Chicago, Realism in International Politics, 19 58, Published in
NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW, Winter 1998.
I could go on and on to give you examples. I'll give you another one which just comes to my
mind: the expectation (which was very prevalent in the last year or so of the Second World
War) that at the end of that war, with the enemies defeated, we would enter into a kind of
millennium from which, again, power politics with all of its manifestations would be
dispelled. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, when he came back from the Moscow Conference
of 1943, at which the establishment of the United Nations had been agreed upon, said that
the United Nations would usher in a new era in foreign policy by doing away with power
politics, with alliances, with the armaments race, with spheres of influence, and so forth.
And he repeated this utopian expectation much later, in his memoirs. This is another
example of the belief that the difficulties which confront us, the risks which threaten us, the
liabilities which we must face in international affairs are the result of some kind of
ephemeral, unique configuration; that if you do away with the latter you will have done away
with the liabilities, the risks, and the difficulties as well. This belief is mistaken; for it is the
very essence of historic experience that whenever you have disposed of one danger in foreign
policy another one is going to raise its head. Once we had disposed of the Axis as a threat to
American security, we were right away confronted with a new threat: the threat of the Soviet
Union. I daresay if we could, by some kind of miracle, do away tomorrow with the threat
which emanates from the Soviet Union, we would very soon be confronted again with a new
threat-and perhaps from a very unexpected quarter.

127

Kritik Answers

IR is Realist Now (1/2)

REALPOLITIK DOMINATES THE IR (5 REASONS):
1. NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY OVER STATES
2. STATES HAVE OFFENSIVE MILITARY CAPABILTIES
3. STATES INTENTIONS ARE AMBIGUOUS
4. LONG TERM SURVIVAL IS A STATES PRIMARY
GOAL
5. STATES ARE RATIONAL ACTORS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 31-2 )
The first assumption is that the international system is anarchic, which does not
mean that it is chaotic or riven by disorder. It is easy to thaw that conclusion, since
realism depicts a world characterized by security compe- tition and war. By itself,
however, the realist notion of anarchy has noth- ing to do with conflict; it is an
ordering principle, which says that the system comprises independent states that
have no central authority above them.4 Sovereignty, in other words, inheres in
states because there is no higher ruling body in the international system.' There is
no "government over governments. "~ The second assumption is that great
powers inherently possess some offensive military capability, which gives them the
wherewithal to hurt and possibly destroy each other. States are potentially
dangerous to each other, although some states have more military might than
others and are therefore more dangerous. A state's military power is usually
identified with the particular weaponry at its disposal, although even if there were
no weapons. the Individuals in those states could still use their feet and hands to
attack the population of another state. After all, for every neck, there are two hands
to choke it. The third assumption is that states can never be certain about other
states' intentions. Specifically, no state can be sure that another state will not use
its offensive military capability to attack the first state. This is not to say that states
necessarily have hostile intentions. Indeed, all of the states in the system may be
reliably benign, but it is impossible to be sure of that judgment because intentions
are impossible to divine with 100 percent cer- tainty.7 There are many possible
causes of aggression, and no state can be sure that another state is not motivated by
one of them.8 Furthermore, intentions can change quickly, so a state's intentions
can be benign one day and hostile the next. Uncertainty about intentions is
unavoidable, which means that states can never be sure that other states do not
have offensive intentions to go along with their offensive capabilities. The fourth
assumption is that survival is the primary goal of great pow- ers. Specifically, states
seek to maintain their territorial integrity and the autonomy of their domestic
political order. Survival dominates other motives because, once a state is
conquered, it is unlikely to be in a posi- tion to pursue other aims. Soviet leader
Josef Stalin put the point well during a war scare in 1927: "We can and must build
socialism in the [Soviet Union]. But in order to do so we first of all have to exist."9
States can and do pursue other goals, of course, but security is their most important objective. The fifth assumption is that great powers are rational actors. They
are aware of their external environment and they think strategically about how to
survive in it. In particular, they consider the preferences of other states and how
their own behavior is likely to affect the behavior of those other states, and how the
behavior of those other states is likely to affect their own strategy for survival.
Moreover, states pay attention to the long term as well as the immediate
consequences of their actions.

128

Kritik Answers

IR is Realist Now (2/2)

STATES VIEW POWER IS AN END IN ITSELF THIS HAS TWO
IMPLICATIONS:
1. MAKES THEIR LINKS NON-UNIQUE AND
INEVITABLE
2. TAKES OUT SOLVENCY AS THEIR ALTERNATIVE IS
UNREALISABLE
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 36 )
It should be apparent from this discussion that saying that states are power
maximizers is tantamount to saying that they care about relative power, not
absolute power. There is an important distinction here, because states concerned
about relative power behave differently than do states interested in absolute
power.'~ States that maximize relative power are concerned primarily with the
distribution of material capabilities. In particular, they try to gain as large a power
advantage as possible over potential rivals, because power is the best means to
survival in a danger- ous world. Thus, states motivated by relative power concerns
are likely to forgo large gains in their own power, if such gains give rival states even
greater power, for smaller national gains that nevertheless provide them with a
power advantage over their rivals.2U States that maximize absolute power, on the
other hand, care only about the size of their own gains, not those of other states.
They are not motivated by balance-of-power logic but instead are concerned with
amassing power without regard to how much power other states control. They
would jump at the opportunity for large gains, even if a rival gained more in the
deal. Power, according to this logic, is not a means to an end (survival), but an end
in itself.2'

129

Kritik Answers

Miscalculation Inevitable
POWER MISCALCULATION IS INEVITABLE
1. STATES LIE
2. THEY MAKE MISTAKES IN CALCULATED
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 38. )
Nevertheless, great powers miscalculate from time to time because they invariably make
important decisions on the basis of imperfect informa- tion . States hardly ever have complete
information about any situation they confront. There are two dimensions to this problem. Potential adver- saries have
incentives to misrepresent their own strength or weakness, and to conceal their
true aims.24 For example, a weaker state trying to deter a stronger state is likely to exaggerate its own power to discourage the potential
aggressor from attacking. On the other hand, a state bent on aggression is likely to emphasize its
peaceful goals while exaggerating its military weakness, so that the potential victim
does not build up its own arms and thus leaves itself vulnerable to attack . Probably no
national leader was better at practicing this kind of deception than Adolf Hitler. But even if disinformation was not a problem, great powers are often
unsure about how their own military forces, as well as the adversary's, will perform on the battlefield. For example, it is sometimes difficult to
determine in advance how new weapons and untested combat units will perform in the face of enemy fire. Peacetime maneuvers and war games are
helpful but imperfect indicators of what is likely to happen in actual combat. Fighting wars is a complicated business in which it is often diffi- cult to
predict outcomes. Remember that although the United States and its allies scored a stunning and remarkably easy victory against Iraq in early 1991,
most experts at the time believed that Iraq's military would be a formidable foe and put up stubborn resistance before finally succumbing to American
military might.25

Great powers are also sometimes unsure about the resolve of opposing states as
well as allies. For example, Germany believed that if it went to war against France
and Russia in the summer of 1914, the United Kingdom would probably stay out of the fight.
Saddam Hussein expected the United States to stand aside when he invaded Kuwait in
August 1990. Both aggressors guessed wrong, but each had good reason to think that its initial judgment was correct. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler
believed that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was

, great powers constantly find

themselves confronting situations in which they have to make important decisions
with incomplete information. Not surprisingly, they sometimes make faulty
judgments and end up doing themselves serious harm. Some defensive realists go so far as to suggest that
determined to get someone else to assume that burden. He guessed right. In short

the constraints of the international system are so powerful that offense rarely succeeds, and that aggressive great powers invariably end up being
punished.2' As noted, they emphasize that 1) threatened states balance against aggressors and ultimately crush them, and 2) there is an offensedefense balance that is usually heavily tilted toward the defense, thus making conquest especially difficult. Great powers, therefore, should be content
with the existing balance of power and not try to change it by force. After all, it makes little sense for a state to initiate a war that it is likely to lose; that
would be self- defeating behavior. It is better to concentrate instead on preserving the balance of power.27 Moreover, because aggressors seldom
succeed, states should understand that security is abundant, and thus there is no good strategic reason for wanting more power in the first place. In a
world where conquest seldom pays, states should have relatively benign inten- tions toward each other. If they do not, these defensive realists argue,
the reason is probably poisonous domestic politics, not smart calculations about how to guarantee one's security in an anarchic world.

ITS IMPOSSIBLE FOR STATES TO ADEQUATELY PERCIEVE

FUTURE POWER RELATIONMISCALCULATION IS
INEVITABLE
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 35. )
Second, determining how much power is enough becomes even more
complicated when great powers contemplate how power wifi be distributed among them ten or twenty years down the road. The capabilities of
individual states vary over time, sometimes markedly, and it is often difficult to predict the direction and scope of change in the balance of power.
Remembet few in the West antidpated the collapse of the Soviet Union
before it happened. In fact, during the first hail of the Cold War, many in
the West feared that the Soviet economy would eventually generate
greater wealth than the American economy, which would cause a marked
power shift against the United States and its allies. What the future holds
for China and Russia and what the balance of power will look like in 2020
is difficult to foresee.

130

Kritik Answers

131

Kritik Answers

Perm Solves: Realism Necessary to

Understand Parts of IR
PERM: COMBINE THE ALTERNATE APPROACH TO IR WITH
THE REALIST STANCE OF THE 1AC THIS PROVIDES THE
BEST POSSIBLE SOLVENCY FOR DECREASING VIOLENCE
AND WAR.
Robert Jervis, President, American Political Science Association, INTERNATIONAL
ORGANIZATION, Autumn 1998, ASP.
The popularity of alternative approaches to international politics cannot be explained
entirely by their scholarly virtues. Among the other factors at work are fashions and
normative and political preferences. This in part explains the increasing role of rationalism
and constructivism. Important as they are, these approaches are necessarily less complete
than liberalism, Marxism and realism. Indeed, they fit better with the latter than is often
realized. Realism, then, continues to play a major role in IR scholarship. It can elucidate the
conditions and strategies that are conducive to cooperation and can account for significant
international change, including a greatly decreased tolerance for force among developed
countries, which appears to be currently the case.

132

Kritik Answers

A2 9/11 Disproves Realism

EVEN IN THE POST 9/11 WORLD, WE STILL LIVE IN AN
INTENSELY REALIST WORLD THE UN IS IN THE GUTTER,
COUNTRIES DO NOT WANT TO ENGAGE IN A COMMUNITY,
AND THE US STILL REMAINS DIVIDED WITH EUROPE
Rieff, Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, 2003 (David, Mother Jones, Goodbye, New
World Order, July-August, http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/07/ma_442_01.html)
<Yes, many people still want to believe in the United Nations -- though they're becoming fewer and fewer in number. There is even the fantasy that some institutional
or policy silver bullet -- the International Criminal Court, say, or the Kyoto Protocol -- will provide an Archimedean lever for solving the world's woes. Were it not for
the machinations of the United States, which refused to sign on to either Kyoto or the international court, the argument goes, we would be well on our way to a better

America stands only as an obstacle that will be overcome on the road to inevitable
progress.
Such claims have all the ingredients of a fine press release, but the reality is more depressing. It is true, for example, that European governments
increasingly subscribe to the ideology -- some would say the secular religion -- of human rights. But then so
does the United States; after all, the official position of the U.S. government is that the
intervention in Iraq was undertaken at least in part in the name of human rights . Now a doctrine that
world; even so,

can be claimed by the United States of America as well as the still social democratic nations of Western Europe, and the nongovernmental organizations that view the
United States as little more than a rogue state -- not to mention major transnational corporations that have signed on to a U.N. "compact with business" -- has become
elastic to the point of fatuousness. If we all claim to be pledged to the cause of human rights (and who, it seems, does not?), then it is hard not to think of Dr.
Johnson's remark about patriotism, that it is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

There is the United Nations

sunk in irrelevancy, except as the world's leading humanitarian relief organization. There is
a landscape of international relations that seems far more to resemble the bellicose world of
pre-1914 Europe than the interdependent, responsible world imagined by the framers of the
U.N. Charter. There is an entire continent, sub-Saharan Africa, mired in an economic
calamity largely not of its own making. There is a Europe that pays lip service to human
rights, but remains intransigent where its own real interests -- such as farm subsidies that effectively condemn subSaharan Africa to grinding poverty by limiting its agricultural exports -- are concerned. And then there is the United States,
seemingly bent on empire.
As far as the international system is concerned, what are the most striking aspects of the current situation?

Where was the good news again? That Augusto Pinochet was briefly detained in London, or that Slobodan Milosevic will likely spend the rest of his life in a U.N. jail?
This, while somewhere between 2 and 4 million Congolese die in the first general war in Africa since decolonization? The truth is that, outside the developed

, much of the world is actually in worse shape than it was just a few decades ago. Where
there has been progress, if that term is even appropriate in so apocalyptic a context, it has been in the realm of norms
-- that is, the laws that nations try to evade and ignore, and in which many of the most decent people on this slaughterhouse of
a planet continue to believe. But we are deep in loaves-and-fishes land here. To believe that states will suddenly come to their
senses and behave as responsible members of an "international community," when few
states have ever done this, is, indeed, to believe in miracles.
countries

There is unquestionably a globalized world economy, which remains largely dominated by the United States and is administered through central banks, the

there is no such thing as an international community,

International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. But

at least not
one worthy of the name -- assuming, that is, we mean a community of shared values and interests, not just shared membership in the United Nations. For that matter,

even the old, Cold War-era blocs are disintegrating: The G-77, the major international
organization representing the developing world, now has trouble agreeing on anything
beyond the most generic recommendations. The run-up to the Iraq war showed the depth of
the divisions within the so-called transatlantic family, and equally sharp splits were evident
within Europe during the same period. Never mind community; how can there be any
international system when what we have actually witnessed in the period since 9/11 has
been the steady erosion of the very idea of consensus in international relations?

133

Kritik Answers

A2 Cold War Disproves Realism (1/2)

REALISM ACCURATELY DESCRIBES THE WORLD POST-COLD
WAR U.S. INTERVENTIONISM PROVES
Miller, IR at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003 (Benjamin, Integrated Realism and

Hegemonic Military Intervention in Unipolarity, Hanami, Associate Professor of Political Science at San
Francisco State University, Perspectives on Structural Realism, p. 34-35)
Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has undertaken several military interventions
abroad, fluctuating widely in scope from the massive intervention in the Gulf War through
medium-scale intervention in Panama and Haiti to the limited and abruptly terminated
engagement in Somalia. Similarly another regional crisis (Bosnia) was the occasion for great
fluctuations of policy. The U.S. response to the crisis shifted from military disengagement in
the first four years of the crisis to a considerable intervention on the ground in the last three
years. It has also refrained from intervention on other occasions, notably in post-Soviet and
African crises.
Is there a coherent logic behind these wide-ranging variations in post-Cold War U.S.
intervention behavior? Numerous critics have argued that there is not, and that this erratic
behavior reflects a lack of focus in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the former archenemy. For example, in a recent comprehensive
treatment Gholz, Press and Sapolsky characterize U.S. behavior this way: "the U.S.
intervenes often in the conflicts of others, but without a consistent rationale, without a clear
sense of how to advance U.S. interests, and sometimes with unintended and expensive
consequences" (1997, 5).
In the following discussion I will challenge the conventional wisdom about the illogic and
incoherence of recent U.S. military interventions. I will argue that in contrast to widespread
opinion, there is a clear logic to postCold War interventions, even if it does not amount to
a preconceived and purposive grand strategy. Indeed, the U.S. has followed, whether
consciously or not, the logic of costs and benefits, namely different combinations of
incentives and constraints in different regions. More specifically, the intensity of U.S.
interests at stake and the intensity of the regional constraints on intervention (as reflected
by the estimated costs of intervention, especially in terms of casualties) best account for the
scope of U.S. military interventions in the postCold War era. My argument suggests that
different types of regions are prone to specific levels of intervention or nonintervention
because of the different combinations of U.S. interests and constraints in each region. Thus,
this logic accounts for the variations in the scope of interventions and predicts different
patterns of U.S. intervention in different regions. The realist explanation presented here
integrates the classical realist focus on state interests with the structural realist emphasis on
constraints on state action in order to provide a theoretical model of hegemonic military
intervention in unipolarity. To illustrate this model, this study will outline briefly the
variations in the scope of U.S. military engagement in all the major post-Cold War regional
crises, notably the Persian Gulf (1990-1991, Fall 1994), Panama (1989), Somalia (19921994), Bosnia (since 1995), Kosovo (since 1999), Haiti (1994-1996) and also the cases of
nonintervention in post-Soviet and African crises. The proposed explanation will
demonstrate the continuing relevance of realism to major issues of postCold War U.S.
foreign policy.

134

Kritik Answers

A2 Cold War Disproves Realism (2/2)

REALISM IS MORE APPLICABLE IN THE POST COLD WAR
ERA UNIPOLARITY MAKES ALL STATES MORE
VULNERABLE TO FOREIGN AGGRESSION
Hanami, Associate Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, 2003

(Andrew, December, Structural Realism and Interconnectivity, Perspectives on Structural Realism, p.

200-201)
, it has been said that structural realism has run its course in explanations of
international relations in the post-Cold War era. Presumably this is because since the end of the Cold War, there is now as
As a theory, now decades old

expected the long-term absence of a major war between the major states. For some, it was the high-conflict era of bipolarity in which structural realism had its greatest

But the occurrence of war was never the sole reason why structural realism
explained international behavior. It was only its most dramatic, and in some ways, its most important. Structural realism
today can be expected to endure as long as state preeminence endures and states remain the
most important actors in the international system, even in peace, for in peace one finds the rudiments of war. In
explanatory power.

recent years, non-state and near-state actors have been put forth as decisive new units in a world now focused on economics, limited campaigns or on terrorism. The
state therefore is said to have declined in relative importance. But one needs to identify the impact of such non-state actors in the world before we can make an

Interconnectivity is the relationship

between states as conditioned by structure and state motive. Interconnectivity, as a feature of the prevailing
international structure, allows that significant internal or even multilateral actors can forge relations across
borders. The inside-out and outside-in perspectives can be seen to combine when individual personalities of key leaders, for example, may be pushed by
assessment about the significance of the new relations they create, and the theory that explains them.

internal, historical or group dynamics to act outwardly. An international organization may decide on an agenda simply from the internal inertia of its members. But

personalities and organizations are important, in part, because they represent a state's power, and to be
effective they must push with that state and act with one eye on their external environment.
Personalities and organizations may initiate foreign policy, bin foreign policy action that stems from internal drives but
which goes against the grain of structure is risking failure, and over time, successful
leadership will see that.1 The disappearance of the Soviet Union from the center stage for some seems to mean that suddenly unit-level
explanations have replaced structure. But in reality the unipolarity that was created when the Soviet Union slid away merely gives unit-level actors like personalities
the appearance of .1 greater relative profile because they stand on a narrower stage. They went there before. Systemic dynamics that operated then continue to persist.

We should not be repulsed by the

continuation of the familiar just because it did not explain all actions in the past. As the simplest
A change in history does not necessarily require a change in the general theory that explains history.

structure, unipolarity may not seem as threatening to all states as bipolarity had been. If, however implausible, under bipolarity then-was a direct U.S.Soviet conflict
of any proportion, the results would have significant systemic effects. But since the onset of unipolarity if the U.S. and any other power engaged in a conflict, there
would be much less system it impact. Thus all states feel the release of dread that accompanied the prospect of superpower confrontation in which they as smaller

The change from bipolarity to unipolarity is forcing most

states to learn more about themselves, and their world. Structure still instructs. With a lone superpower, the
challenge today is not only what the U.S. might do to second states, and they may feel the U.S. has less urgency
to shape some of them as formerly was the case, but what other second states could do to them, directly or indirectly. Whether it
was true or not, states believed that strong bipolar confrontations would have negative consequences sooner or later . Unipolarity, whether it is a moment or
a few decades in length, has ushered in a more variegated and self-help environment and has thus
caused states to focus on their most likely or immediate problems. Neither Asia nor a united
states could only watch, wait and weather as best they can.

Europe, as David Rieff believes, is likely to successfully challenge U.S. hegemony in the twenty-first century. In pan, this is

because European armies are shrinking both in "size and in capability. The only threats to U.S. leadershipterrorism, failed states, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan
Milosivic or even the heirs to Osama bin Laden are limited." In bipolarity, major confrontations being rare and their prevention by the action of lesser states was not
possible, the international system below the level of the superpowers was, in a sense, frozen in time. Their maneuvers mattered less because it was the potential top
tier movement that held the greatest leverage. Thus the orbit of state actions took place within a relatively immobile, stable and patterned bipolar world, as

. With the erosion to unipolarity, the calculus has changed considerably. Now
more states must watch more states. There are not just two sides, therefore there is no "protection," sociology or
structure of belonging to East or West. There is a sense of greater anarchy, or at least, greater uncertainty
as to both the movement and consequences of the actions of states in an unbalanced world.
This is worrisome particularly to smaller states because the prospect of rescue in unipolarity is reduced as the U.S.
has greater choices of how and if to prop up second states in proportion to their value in a
less bifurcated world. Both Africa and Latin America have received less attention and aid from the U.S. since 1990. This has caused Kenneth Jowitt
to remark that large parts of the world today are now "disconnected" from the main states of the world. Therefore, many things suddenly
become or appear to become important to smaller states: their economies, militaries, allies, rivals, relations with the
U.S. and even their relations with bigger states like Russia, China or other regional powers . Everything matters more because the
importance of margins has increased in a unipolar world as small gains or losses tilt states
no longer buoyed by a superpower sponsorship . Indeed, the fact that the U.S. remains the only important superpower may have
structuralists have predicted

led Osama bin Laden to target the "World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as he and his al Qaida group tried to "balance" or, in their minds, punish
or alter U.S. behavior in the Middle East

135

Kritik Answers

A2 Cold War End Proves Liberalism

REMOVING US HEGEMONY WOULD BE CATASTROPHIC IN A
POST COLD-WAR WORLD
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 2-3. )
Alas, the claim that security competition and war between the great powers have
been purged from the international system is wrong. Indeed, there is much
evidence that the promise of everlasting peace among the great powers was
stillborn. Consider, for example, that even though the soviet threat has
disappeared, the United States still maintains about one hundred thousand troops
in Europe and roughly the same number in Northeast Asia. It does so because it
recognizes that dangerous rivalries would probably emerge among the major
powers in these regions if U.S. troops were withdrawn. Moreover, almost every
European state, includ- ing the United Kingdom and France, still harbors deepseated, albeit muted, fears that a Germany unchecked by American power might
behave aggressively; fear of Japan in Northeast Asia is probably even more
profound, and it is certainly more frequently expressed. Finally, the possi- bility of
a clash between China and the United States over Taiwan is hard- ly remote. This is
not to say that such a war is likely, but the possibility reminds us that the threat of
great-power war has not disappeared. The sad fact is that international politics has
always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way.
Although the intensity of their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear
each other and always compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of
each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gain- ing power at
the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the
strongest of all the great powers, although that is a wel- come outcome. Their
ultimate aim is to be the hegemon--that is, the only great power in the system.

136

Kritik Answers

A2 Cooperation Good (1/2)

PEACE IS IMPOSSIBLESTATES WILL CHEAT
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 35 )
All states are Influenced by this logic, which means that not only do
they look for opportunities to take advantage of one another, they also
work to ensure that other states do not take advantage of them. After all,
rival states are driven by the same logic, and most states are likely to recognize their own motives at play in the actions of other states. In short,
states ultimately pay attention to defense as well as offense. They think
about conquest themselves, and they work to check aggressor states from
gaining power at their expense. This inexorably leads to a world of constant security competition, where states are willing to lie, cheat, and use
brute force if it helps them gain advantage over their rivals. Peace, if one
defines that concept as a state of tranquility or mutual concord, is not likely to break out in this world.

STATES COOPERATE TO GAIN POWER OVER POTENTIAL

RIVALSEVERY COOPERATION IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO
SUSTAIN
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 48ish]
One might conclude from the preceding discussion that my theory does not allow
for any cooperation among the great powers. But this Conclusion would be wrong.
States can cooperate, although cooperation is sometimes difficult to achieve and
always difficult to sustain. Two factors inhibit cooperation: considerations about
relative gains and concern about cheating.'3 Ultimately, great powers live in a
fundamentally competitive world where they view each other as real, or at least
potential, enemies, and they therefore look to gain power at each other's expense.
Any two states contemplating cooperation must consider how profits or gains will
be distributed between them. They can think about the division in terms of either
absolute or relative gains (recall the distinction made earlier between pursuing
either absolute power or relative power; the concept here is the same). With
absolute gains, each side is concerned with maximizing its own profits and cares
little about how much the other side gains or loses in the deal. Each side cares
about the other only to the extent that the other side's behavior affects its own
prospects for achieving maximum profits. With relative gains, on the other hand,
each side considers not only its own individual gain, but also how well it fares
compared to the other side. Because great powers care deeply about the balance of
power, their thinking focuses on relative gains when they consider cooperating with
other states. For sure, each state tries to maximize its absolute gains; still, it is more
important for a state to make sure that it does no worse, and perhaps better, than
the other state in any agreement. Cooperation is more difficult to achieve, however,
when states are attuned to relative gains rather than absolute gains.~' This is
because states concerned about absolute gains have to make sure that if the pie is
expanding, they are get- ting at least some portion of the increase, whereas states
that worry about relative gains must pay careful attention to how the pie is divided,
which complicates cooperative efforts. Concerns about cheating also hinder
cooperation. Great powers are often reluctant to enter into cooperative agreements
for fear that the other side will cheat on the agreement and gain a significant
advantage. This concern is especially acute in the military realm, causing a "special
peril of defection." because the nature of military weaponry allows for rapid shifts
in the balance of power.5' Such a development could create a window of

137

Kritik Answers
opportunity for the state that cheats to inflict a decisive defeat on its victim. These
barriers to cooperation notwithstanding, great powers do cooper- ate in a realist
world. Balance-of-power logic often causes great powers to

138

Kritik Answers

A2 Cooperation Good (2/2)

ALLIANCES ARE TEMPORARY AND UNRELIABLE
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 33-4 )
States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Because other states are potential threats, and because there is no
higher authority to come to their rescue when they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see itself
as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those who help themselves.
This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming
alliances." But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience:
today's affiance partner might be tomorrow's enemy, and today's enemy
might be tomorrow's alliance partner. For example, the United States
fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in
World War I, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and
allied with West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union
during the Cold War.

139

Kritik Answers

A2 Democracy Solves War

DEMOCRACIES STILL ENGAGE IN REALIST MINDSET
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 5. )
Unfortunately, a policy of engagement is doomed to fail. If China becomes an
economic powerhouse it will almost certainly translate its economic might into
military might and make a rim at dominating Northeast Asia. Whether China is
democratic and deeply enmeshed in the global economy or autocratic and autarkic
will have little effect on its behavior, because democracies care about security as
much as non- democracies do, and hegemony is the best way for any state to
guarantee its own survival. Of course, neither its neighbors nor the United States
would stand idly by while China gained increasing increments of power. Instead,
they would seek to contain China, probably by trying to form a balancing coalition.
The result would be an intense security competition between China and its rivals,
with the ever-present danger of great-power war hanging over them. In short,
China and the United States are des- tined to be adversaries as China's power
grows.

140

Kritik Answers

A2 Defense Solves
OFFENSE IS THE BEST DEFENSEWHOEVER COMMITS THE
FIRST STRIKE WINS 60% OF WARS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 38. )
There is no question that systemic factors constrain aggression, especially
balancing by threatened states. But defensive realists exaggerate those restraining
forces.28 Indeed, the historical record provides little support for their claim that
offense rarely succeeds. One study estimates that there were 63 wars between 1815
and 1980, and the initiator won 39 times, which translates into about a 60 percent
success rate. Turning to specific cases, Otto von Bismarck unified Germany by
winning military victories against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in
1870, and the United States as we know it today was created in good part by
conquest in the nineteenth century. Conquest certainly paid big dividends in these
cases. Nazi Germany won wars against Poland in 1939 and France `0 1940, but lost
to the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945. Conquest ultimately did not pay for the
Third Reich, but if Hitler had restrained himself after the fall of France and had
not invaded the Soviet Union, conquest probably would have paid handsomely for
the Nazis, In short, the historical record shows that offense sometimes succeeds
and some- times does not. The trick for a sophisticated power maximizer is to
figure out when to raise and when to fold.

141

Kritik Answers

A2 Human Nature
THE ANARCHIC SYSTEM OF IR IS THE REASON WHY
OFFENSIVE REALISM IS CORRECTWE NEVER MAKE
CLAIMS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 56-7]
In sum, my argument is that the structure of the international system. not the
particular characteristics of individual great powers, causes them to thinic and act
offensively and to seek hegemony.6C I do not adopt Morgenthau's claim that states
invariably behave aggressively because they have a will to power hardwired into
them. Instead, I assume that the prin- cipal motive behind great-power behavior is
survival. In anarchy, however, the desire to survive encourages states to behave
aggressively Nor does my theory classify states as more or less aggressive on the
basis of their eco- nomic or political systems. Offensive realism makes only a
handful of assumptions about great powers, and these assumptions apply equally
to all great powers. Except for differences in how much power each state con- trols,
the theory treats all states alike. I have now laid out the logic explaining why states
seek to gain as much power as possible over their rivals. I have said little, however,
about the object of that pursuit: power itself. The next two chapters provide a
detailed discussion of this important subject.

142

Kritik Answers

A2 Mindset Shift
INEVITABLY PARANOIA AND DISAGREEMENTS OVER
COOPERATION MAKES REALIST IDEOLOGY INEVITABLE
MOVING AWAY RISKS A DECAPITATING BLOW BY AN
INVADING NATION
MEARSHEIMER 2001

[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the
Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 40. )
The claim Is sometimes made that great powers can transcend realist
logic by working together to build an international order that fosters
peace and justice. World peace, it would appear, can only enhance a state's pros- perity and security. America's political leaders
paid considerable lip service to this line of argument over the course of the twentieth century. President Clinton, for example, told an audience at the
United Nations in September 1993 that "at the birth of this organization 48 years ago a generation of gifted leaders from many nations stepped
forward to organize the world's efforts on behalf of security and prosperity . . . Now history has granted to us a moment of even greater opportunity . .
Let us resolve that we will dream larger. . . . Let us ensure that the world we pass to our children is healthier, safer and more abundant than the one we
inhabit today.""
This rhetoric notwithstanding, great powers do not work together to promote world
order for its own sake. Instead, each seeks to maximize its own share of
world power, which is likely to clash with the goal of creat- ing and
sustaining stable international orders. This is not to say that great powers never aim to prevent wars and

keep the peace. On the con- trary, they work hard to deter wars in which they would be the likely vic tim. In such cases, however, state behavior is
driven largely by narrow calculations about relative power, not by a commitment to build a world order independent of a state's own interests. The
United States, for exam- ple, devoted enormous resources to deterring the Soviet Union from start- ing a war in Europe during the Cold War, not
because of some deep-seated commitment to promoting peace around the world, but because American leaders feared that a Soviet victory would lead
to a dangerous shift in the balance of power.46
The particular international order that obtains at any time is mainly a by-product of the self-interested behavior of the system's great powers. The
configuration of the system, in other words, is the unintended conse- quence of great-power security competition, not the result of states acting
together to organize peace. The establishment of the Cold War order in Europe illustrates this point. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States
intended to establish it, nor did they work together to create it. In fact, each superpower worked hard in the early years of the Cold War to gain power
at the expense of the other, while preventing the other from doing likewise.47 The system that emerged in Europe in the aftermath of World War II
was the unplanned consequence of intense security compe- tition between the superpowers.
Although that intense superpower rivalry ended along with the Cold War in 1990. Russia and the United States have not worked together to create
the present order in Europe. The United States, for example, has rejected out of hand various Russian proposals to make the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe the central organizing pillar of European security (repladng the U.S.-dominated NATO). Furthermore,
Russia was deeply opposed to NATO expansion, which It viewed as a serious threat to Russian security. Recognizing that Russia's weakness would
pre- clude any retaliation, however, the United States ignored Russia's concerns and pushed NATO to accept the Czech Republic, Hungary, and
Poland as new members. Russia has also opposed u.S. policy in the Balkans over the past decade, especially NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia.
Again, the United States has paid little attention to Russia's concerns and has taken the steps it deems necessary to bring peace to that volatile region.
Finally, it is worth noting that although Russia is dead set against allowing the
United States to deploy ballistic missile defenses, it is highly likely that Washington will deploy such a system if it is judged to be technologically
feasible. For sure, great-power rivalry will sometimes produce a stable interna- tional order, as happened during the Cold War. Nevertheless, the
great powers will continue looking for opportunities to increase their share of world power, and if a favorable situation arises, they will move to undermine that stable order. Consider how hard the United States worked dur- ing the late 1980s to weaken the Soviet Union and bring down the stable
order that had emerged in Europe during the latter part of the Cold War.48 Of course, the states that stand to lose power will work to deter aggression
and preserve the existing order. But their motives will be selfish, revolving around balance-of-power logic, not some commitment to world peace.

states are unlikely to

agree on a general formula for bolstering peace. Certainly, international
relations scholars have never reached a consensus on what the
blueprint should look like. In fact, it seems there are about as many theories on the causes of war and peace as there are
scholars studying the subject. But more important, poll- cymakers are unable to agree on how to
create a stable world. For exam- ple, at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, important differences
Great powers cannot commit themselves to the pursuit of a peaceful world order for two reasons. First,

over how to create stability in Europe divided Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson.49 In particular, Clemenceau was
determined to impose harsher terms on Gennany over the Rhineland than was either Lloyd George or Wilson, while Lloyd George stood out as the

. The Treaty of Versailles, not sur- prisingly, did little to

promote European stability.
hard-liner on German reparations

Furthermore, consider American thinking on how to achieve stability in Europe in the early days of the Cold War.' The key elements for a sta- ble
and durable system were in place by the early 1950s. They included the division of Germany, the positioning of American ground forces in Western
Europe to deter a Soviet attack, and ensuring that West Germany would not seek to develop nuclear weapons. Officials in the Truman administration,
however, disagreed about whether a divided Germany would be a source of peace or war. For example, George Kennan and Paul Nitze, who held
important positions in the State Department, believed that a divided Germany would be a source of instability whereas Secretary of State Dean
Acheson disagreed with them. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower sought to end the American commitment to defend Western Europe and to provide
West Germany with its owr~ nuclear deterrent. This policy, which was never fully adopted, nevertheless caused significant instability in Europe. as it
led directly to the Berlin crises of 1958-59 and 196l.~'

Second, great powers cannot put aside power considerations and work to
promote international peace because they cannot be sure that their
efforts will succeed. If their attempt fails, they are likely to pay a steep
price for having neglected the balance of power, because if an aggressor
appears at the door there will be no answer when they dial 911. That is a
risk few states are willing to run. Therefore, prudence dictates that they
behave according to realist logic. This line of reasoning accounts for
why collective security schemes, which call for states to put aside
narrow con- cerns about the balance of power and instead act in
accordance with the broader interests of the international community,
invariably die at birth.

143

Kritik Answers

144

Kritik Answers

A2 Realism Assumes States Rational

FIRST, HISTORY PROVES THAT ONLY STATES THAT ACT
THROUGH SELF-INTEREST WILL SURVIVE ONLY THE LONG
RUN, ENSURING RATIONAL BEHAVIOR. CROSS-APPLY
MEARSHEIMER
SECOND REALISM DOES NOT POSIT RATIONALITY OR
CONSTANCY BY STATES. WE ONLY POINT OUT THAT SELFHELP SYSTEMS REINFORCE THOSE TENDENCIES
Kenneth Waltz, Crams BFF, Neorealism and its Critics, ed. by Robert Keohane, 1986, p. 117-118
Most of the confusions in balance-of-power theory and criticisms of it, derive from misunderstanding these three points. A balance-of-power theory, properly stated,

states:

are unitary actors who,

, seek their own preservation

begins with assumptions about

They
at a minimum
and,
at a maximum, drive for universal domination. States, or those who act for them, try in more or less sensible ways to use the means available in order to achieve the
ends in view. Those means fall into two categories: internal efforts (moves to increase economic capability, to increase military strength, to develop clever strategies)
and external efforts (moves to strengthen and enlarge ones own alliance or to weaken and shrink an opposing one). The external game of alignment and realignment
requires three or more players, and it is usually said that balance-of-power systems require at least that number. The statement is false, for in a two-power system the
politics of balance continue, but the way to compensate for an incipient external disequilibrium is primarily by intensifying ones internal efforts. To the assumptions
of the theory we then add the condition for its operation: that two or more states coexist in a se1f-help system, one with no superior agent to come to the aid of states
that may be weakening or to deny to any of them the use of whatever instruments they think will serve their purposes. The theory, then, is built up from the assumed
motivations of states and the actions that correspond to them. It describes the constraints that arise from the system that those actions produce, and it indicates the

. The system,
like a market in economics, is made by the actions and interactions of its units, and the theory is based on assumptions
about their behavior. A self-help system is one in which those who do not help themselves, or who do so less effectively than others,
will fail to prosper, will lay themselves open to dangers, will suffer. Fear of such unwanted consequences
stimulates states to behave in ways that tend toward the creation of balances of power. Notice
that the theory requires no assumptions of rationality or of constancy of will on the part of all of the actors.
The theory says simply that if some do relatively well, others will emulate them or fall by the wayside.
Obviously, the system wont work if all states lose interest in preserving themselves. It will, however,
continue to work if some states do, while others do not, choose to lose their political identities, say, through amalgamation. Nor need it be
assumed that all of the competing states are striving relentlessly to increase their power. The possibility that force may be used by
some states to weaken or destroy others does, however, make it difficult for them to break out of the competitive
system.
expected outcome: namely, the formation of balances of power. Balance-of-power theory is microtheory precisely in the economists sense

THIRD, STATES RATIONALLY CALCULATE OFFENSIVE

MEASURES BEFORE TAKING RISKS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 38. )
Nevertheless, great powers miscalculate from time to time because they invariably
make important decisions on the basis of imperfect informa- tion. States hardly
ever have complete information about any situation they confront. There are two
dimensions to this problem. Potential adver- saries have incentives to misrepresent
their own strength or weakness, and to conceal thek true aims.24 For example, a
weaker state trying to deter a stronger state is likely to exaggerate its own power to
discourage the potential aggressor from attacking. On the other hand, a state bent
on aggression is likely to emphasize its peaceful goals while exaggerating its
military weakness, so that the potential victim does not build up its own arms and
thus leaves itself vulnerable to attack. Probably no national leader was better at
practicing this kind of deception than Adolf Hitler.

145

Kritik Answers

A2 Realism Constructs Threats

REALISM DOESNT REQUIRE WORST CASE FORECASTING
OR THREAT CONSTRUCTION. THE CRITIQUE SACRIFICES
STABILITY ON THE ALTER OF UNCERTAIN
TRANSFORMATION.
Alastair Murray, Politics Department, University of Wales Swansea, Reconstructing Realism,

1997, p. 182
This is not merely to indulge in yet another interminable discourse on the `lessons of Munich', rejecting all strategies of assurance for more familiar policies of

.
A realist perspective does not, as Wendt seems to assume, require worst-case forecasting, nor does it adopt an ethic
of `sauve qui peut'. But it is to suggest that, when realism emphasises the need for a cautious, gradual approach
to attempts to transform the nature of the system, it has a point. In Wendt's analysis, change ultimately becomes
deterrence

as privileged as the status quo in rationalist perspectives. If he does not hold that history is progressive, he does hold that change is. If he is not idealistic about the
possibilities of effecting a transformation of the system, he is with regard to the way in which it might be accomplished. Yet, even if we acknowledge that a

at the
end of the day, if we can accept that the current structure of international politics contains
many injustices, there is no guarantee that its transformation would remove such iniquities
transformation in the structure of international politics would be beneficial, this does not imply the acceptance of a desperate gamble to accomplish it. And,

anyway. The only thing that the quest to overthrow the status quo does guarantee to do is to undermine those fragments of order that we currently possess. Ultimately,

constructivism can be seen to rest upon a value judgment which sacrifices the safe option of remaining within the current situation for the attempt to
explore its possibilities. It can be seen to rest on a progressive philosophy which privileges the possible
over the extant and sacrifices stability on the altar of transformation. This is not to attempt to level a charge of
utopianism, as Wendt complains that Mearsheimer does, by emphasising constructivism's normative rather than explanatory commitment. As Wendt responds:
`Constructivists have a normative interest in promoting social change, but they pursue this by trying to explain how seemingly natural social structures, like self-help
or the Cold War, are effects of practice ... If critical theorists fail, this will be because they do not explain how the world works, not because of their values."' All
theories ultimately have normative commitments; the fact of their existence does not allow us to question the validity of constructivism's explanatory power. What

Just as reflectivists argue that the

implicit conservatism of neorealism generates its ahistoricism, the implicit progressivism of
constructivism generates its unwillingness to acknowledge even the possibility of elements
of permanency. And, just as reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of neorealism generates strategies which threaten to become
self-perpetuating, so the implicit progressivism of constructivism generates strategies which threaten to become
counter-productive.
does, however, is the impact of these normative assumptions on its account of international politics.

REALISM IS NOT A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.

Alastair Murray, Politics Department, University of Wales Swansea, Reconstructing Realism,

1997, p. 184-5
Now, if this is directed at realism, as it would seem to be, it seriously misinterprets its
approach. First, as we have seen, the `logic of anarchy' that realism portrays is not a
material phenomenon, but the intersubjective emanation of cumulative past choices, albeit
choices rooted in a material account of human nature. If realism maintains that this logic
represents a relatively entrenched structure, it nevertheless holds that it is, potentially at
least, malleable by judicious statecraft. If it takes the state to be the principal focus of this
logic in contemporary world politics, there is no sense that this is permanent or final indeed, no sense that it is even unproblematic. Second, the notion that realism ignores the
clash between the individual's simultaneous identification as both man and citizen mistakes
the entire thrust of its work. If realism is concerned with the duties owed to the state, it is
only for the conflict that this produces with the cosmopolitan moral obligations which fall
upon men. Third, if realism insisted that change must be compatible with the national
interests of the state, it also recognised that, particularly in an age of interdependence and
nuclear weapons, a stable international order could ultimately only be built on some broader
sense of community than that which existed in states alone, and was thus centrally
concerned with the extension of community in international relations.

146

Kritik Answers

A2 Realism is Amoral
THEY DONT UNDERSTAND REALISMIT IS AN EFFORT TO
NEGOTIATE BETWEEN THE INTERESTS OF MORAL AGENTS
Alastair J.H. Murray, RECONSTRUCTING REALISM: BETWEEN POWER POLITICS AND
COSMOPOLITAN ETHICS, Keele University Press: Edinburgh, 1997, p. 2.
Consequently, realism is portrayed by its opponents not only as being silent in the
contemporary normative debate, but as being incapable of saying anything. Such a
conception of realism is, however, fundamentally erroneous. Realism arose in
opposition to idealism; and, given that the locus of idealism was a concern with the
moral, realisms genesis was oriented towards normative issues. Of course, it never
sought to engage in the type of abstract moral principles, and to introduce an
awareness of the pervasive influence of power in the determination of political
outcomes. Yet, whilst this presupposed an intimate involvement with the facts as
they really are, the realist concern with the real was not exclusive, but rather a
function of its desire to juxtapose it to the ideal. It sought to interrelate morality
and power in a viable synthesis, to generate a practical ethic which might prove
more realistic, and more productive, than those which ignored the rules of
international politics. Realism ultimately represented a fundamentally practical
tradition of thought, centrally concerned with the moral understandings of
participants, with the productive application of these understandings, and with the
task of generating some form of moral consensus in international relations which
might support a stable international order. Whatever the merits of its solutions to
these issues, it clearly was not a positivist, explanatory theory; it was profoundly
concerned for normative issues, and, in particular, for the articulation of a selfconsciously political ethic.

147

Kritik Answers

A2 Realism is a Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy (1/2)
THEYVE GOT IT BACKWARDS FAILURE TO PLAN FOR
CATASTROPHES CAUSES THEM
Macy General Systems Scholar and deep ecologist, 1995 (Joanna, Ecopsychology)
There is also the superstition that negative thoughts are self-fulfilling . This is of a

piece with the notion, popular in New Age circles, that we create our own reality I have had people tell me that to speak of catastrophe will

the contrary is nearer to the truth. Psychoanalytic

theory and personal experience show us that it is precisely what we repress that eludes
our conscious control and tends to erupt into behavior. As Carl Jung observed, When
an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate . But
ironically, in our current situation, the person who gives warning of a likely
ecological holocaust is often made to feel guilty of contributing to that very fate.
just make it more likely to happen. Actually,

REALISM DOES NOT REQUIRE WORST CASE FORECASTINGIT SIMPLY DOES NOT SACRIFICE STABILITY FOR
UTOPIANISM
Murray, Professor of Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H., Reconstructing
Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 192)

This is not merely to indulge in yet another interminable discourse on the "lessons of
Munich', rejecting all strategies of assurance for more familiar policies of deterrence. A
realist perspective does not, as Wendt seems to assume, require worst-case forecasting, nor
does it adopt an ethic of "sauve qui peut'. But it is to suggest that, when realism emphasizes
the need for a cautious, gradual approach to attempts to transform the nature of the system,
it has a point. In Wendt's analysis, change ultimately becomes as privileged as the status quo
in rationalist perspectives. If he does not hold that history is progressive, he does hold that
change is. If he is not idealistic about the possibilities of effecting a transformation of the
system, he is with regard to the way in which it might be accomplished. Yet, even if we
acknowledge that a transformation in the structure of international politics would be
beneficial, this does not imply the acceptance of a desperate gamble to accomplish it. And, at
the end of the day, if we can accept that the current structure of international politics
contains many injustices, there is no guarantee that its transformation would remove such
iniquities anyway. The only thing that the quest to overthrow the status quo does guarantee
to do is to undermine those fragments of order that we currently possess. Ultimately,
constructivism can be seen to rest upon a value judgment which sacrifices the safe option of
remaining within the current situation for the attempt to explore its possibilities. It can be
seen to rest on a progressive philosophy which privileges the possible over the extant and
sacrifices stability on the altar of transformation. This is not to attempt to level a charge of
utopianism, as Wendt complains that Mearsheimer does, by emphasizing constructivism's
normative rather than explanatory commitment. As Wendt responds: "Constructivists have
a normative interest in promoting social change, but they pursue this by trying to explain
how seemingly natural social structures, like self-help or the Cold War, are effects of
practice... If critical theorists fail, this will be because they do not explain how the world
works, not because of their values."1 All theories ultimately have normative commitments;
the fact of their existence does not allow us to question the validity of constructivism's
explanatory power. What does, however, is the impact of these normative assumptions on its
account of international politics. Just as reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of
neo-realism generates its ahistoricism the implicit progressivism of constructivism
generates its unwillingness to acknowledge even the possibility of elements of permanency.
And, just as reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of neorealism generates

148

Kritik Answers
strategies which threaten to become self-perpetuating, so the implicit progressivism of
constructivism generates strategies which threaten to become counter-productive.

149

Kritik Answers

A2 Realism is a Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy (2/2)
REALISM IS NOT A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY- IT
ACCURATELY DESCRIBES THE WORLD
Murray, 1997 [Alastair, Politics at the University of Wales Swansea, Reconstructing Realism,
1997 pg. 184-185]

Now, if this is directed at realism, as it would seem to be, it seriously misinterprets its
approach. First, as we have seen, the 'logic of anarchy' that realism portrays is not a material
phenomenon, but the intersubjective emanation of cumulative past choices, albeit choices
rooted in a material account of human nature. If realism maintains that this logic represents
a relatively entrenched structure, it nevertheless holds that it is, potentially at least,
malleable by judicious statecraft. If it takes the state to be the principal focus of this logic in
contemporary world politics, there is no sense that this is permanent or final - indeed, no
sense that it is even unproblematic. Second, the notion that realism ignores the clash
between the individual's simultaneous identification as both man and citizen mistakes the
entire thrust of its work. If realism is concerned with the duties owed to the state, it is only
for the conflict that this produces with the cosmopolitan moral obligations which fall upon
men. Third, if realism insisted that change must be compatible with the national interests of
the state, it also recognized that, particularly in an age of interdependence and nuclear
weapons, a stable international order could ultimately only be built on some broader sense
of community than that which existed in states alone, and was thus centrally concerned with
the extension of

150

Kritik Answers

A2 Social Constructivism (1/3)

CHANGING REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES DOESNT
ALTER THE MATERIAL REALITY OF STATE PRACTICES OR
HELP CREATE BETTER POLICY FOR THE OPPRESSED
Jarvis 2k [DSL, lecturer in the Dept. of Gov and International Relations, Faculty of Economics,
Politics and Business at U. of Sydney International Relations and the Challenge of Post Modernism,
University of South Carolina Press, pg 128-30]
Perhaps more alarming though is the outright violence Ashley recom-mends in response to what at best seem trite, if not imagined, injustices. Inculpating modernity,
positivism, technical rationality, or realism with violence, racism, war, and countless other crimes not only smacks of anthropomorphism but, as demonstrated by
Ashley's torturous prose and reasoning, requires a dubious logic to malce such connections in the first place. Are we really to believe that ethereal entities like
positivism, mod-ernism, or realism emanate a "violence" that marginalizes dissidents? Indeed, where is this violence, repression, and marginalization? As selfprofessed dissidents supposedly exiled from the discipline, Ashley and Walker appear remarkably well integrated into the academy-vocal, pub-lished, and at the center
of the Third Debate and the forefront of theo-retical research. Likewise, is Ashley seriously suggesting that, on the basis of this largely imagined violence, global
transformation (perhaps even rev-olutionary violence) is a necessary, let alone desirable, response? Has the rationale for emancipation or the fight for justice been
reduced to such vacuous revolutionary slogans as "Down with positivism and rationality"? The point is surely trite. Apart from members of the academy, who has

In an
era of unprecedented change and turmoil, of new political and military configurations, of war in the Balkans and ethnic
cleansing, is Ashley really suggesting that some of the greatest threats facing humankind or some of
the great moments of history rest on such innocu-ous and largely unknown nonrealities like positivism and realism? These
are imagined and fictitious enemies, theoretical fabrications that represent arcane, selfserving debates superfluous to the lives of most people and, arguably, to most issues of importance in international
relations. More is the pity that such irrational and obviously abstruse debate should so occupy us at a time of great global
turmoil. That it does and continues to do so reflects our lack of judicious criteria for evaluating the-ory and, more importantly , the lack of
attachment theorists have to the real world. Certainly it is right and proper that we ponder the depths of our theoretical
heard of positivism and who for a moment imagines that they need to be emancipated from it, or from modernity, rationality, or realism for that matter?

imaginations, engage in epistemological and ontological debate, and analyze the sociology of our lmowledge.37 But to suppose that this is the only task of international
theory, let alone the most important one, smacks of intellectual elitism and displays a certain contempt for those who search for guidance in their daily struggles as

does Ashley's project, his deconstructive efforts, or valiant fight against positivism say to the truly
it help solve the plight of the poor, the displaced refugees, the
casualties of war, or the emigres of death squads? Does it in any way speak to those whose
actions and thoughts comprise the policy and practice of international relations? On all these
questions one must answer no. This is not to say, of course, that all theory should be judged by its technical rationality and problem-solving capacity
as Ashley forcefully argues. But to suppose that problem-solving technical theory is not necessary-or is in some way badis a contemptuous position that abrogates any hope of solving some of the nightmarish
realities that millions confront daily. As Holsti argues, we need ask of these theorists and their theories the ultimate question, "So what?"
actors in international politics. What

marginalized, oppressed, and des-titute? How does

To what purpose do they deconstruct, problematize, destabilize, undermine, ridicule, and belittle modernist and rationalist approaches? Does this get us any further,
make the world any better, or enhance the human condition? In what sense can this "debate toward [a] bottomless pit of epistemology and metaphysics" be judged
pertinent, relevant, help-ful, or cogent to anyone other than those foolish enough to be scholasti-cally excited by abstract and recondite debate.38 Contrary to Ashley's

poststructural approach fails to empower the marginalized and , in fact, abandons

them. Rather than ana-lyze the political economy of power, wealth, oppression, production, or international relations and render an intelligible understanding of
these processes, Ashley succeeds in ostracizing those he portends to represent by delivering an
obscure and highly convoluted discourse. If Ashley wishes to chastise structural realism for its abstractness and detachment, he
assertions, then, a

must be prepared also to face similar criticism, especially when he so adamantly intends his work to address the real life plight of those who struggle at marginal

, we might ask to what extent the

postmodern "empha-sis on the textual, constructed nature of the world" represents "an
unwarranted extension of approaches appropriate for literature to other areas of human
practice that are more constrained by an objective reality. " All theory is socially constructed
places. If the relevance of Ashley's project is questionable, so too is its logic and cogency. First

and realities like the nation-state, domestic and international politics, regimes, or transnational agencies are obviously social fabrications. But to what extent is this

Just because we acknowledge that the state is a socially fabricated entity , or that
does not make the reality of the state disappear
or render invisible international politics. Whether socially constructed or objectively given, the argument over the
ontological status of the state is of no particular moment . Does this change our experience of the state or somehow
observation of any real use?

the division between domestic and international society is arbitrar-ily inscribed

diminish the political-economic-juridical-military functions of the state? To recognize that states are not naturally inscribed but dynamic entities continually in the
process of being made and reimposed and are therefore culturally dissimilar, economically different, and politically atypical, while perspicacious to our historical and
theoretical understanding of the state, in no way detracts from its reality, practices, and consequences. Similarly, few would object to Ashley's hermeneutic
interpretivist understanding of the international sphere as an artificially inscribed demarcation. But, to paraphrase Holsti again, so what? This does not malce its

That international politics and

states would not exist with-out subjectivities is a banal tautology. The point, surely, is to move beyond this and
study these processes. Thus, while intellectually interesting , con-structivist theory is not an end point as Ashley seems to think,
where we all throw up our hands and announce there are no foundations and all reality is an
arbitrary social construction. Rather, it should be a means of rec-ognizing the structurated nature of our being and the reciprocity between
subjects and structures through history. Ashley, however, seems not to want to do this, but only to deconstruct the state,
international politics, and international theory on the basis that none of these is objectively given but fictitious
entities that arise out of modernist practices of representation. While an interesting theoretical enterprise, it is of no
effects any less real, diminish its importance in our lives, or excuse us from paying serious attention to it .

great conse- quence to the study of international politics. Indeed, structuration theory has long talcen care of these ontological dilemmas that otherwise seem to
preoccupy Ashley.40

151

Kritik Answers

A2 Social Constructivism (2/3)

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS FLAWED IT FAILS TO
ACKNOWLEDGE THE VALUES THAT WE HAVE THAT HAVE
CREATED PROSPERITY, FOR EXAMPLE BY STOPPING
SLAVERY
Kors, Professor of History at University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the
Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2001 (Alan Charles, Triumph without Self-Belief,
Orbis, Summer, ebsco)

. It is a dangerous
intellectual error to imagine that goodness, wisdom, order, justice, peace, freedom, legal equality, mutual forbearance,
and kindness are the "default mode" in human affairs, and that it is malice, folly, disorder,
war, coercion, legal inequality, murderous intolerance, and cruelty that stand in need of historical explanation. The
West, in theory, always has understood that man has a lower side to which he is drawn, that man is a wolf to man, and that we are governed more
by prejudice and passion than by the rational capacity of our minds. If that is so, however, then we err
What often denies us both optimism and pride, however, is the very stringency of our self-judgment untempered by historical realism

grievously in our assumptions of what it is that requires particular explanation in the world. We understand the defaults; what should astonish us is the ability to
change them. Rousseau and the postmodernists have it all backward in this domain. It is not aversion to difference, for example, that requires historical explanation,

aversion to difference is the human condition; rather, it is the West's partial but breathtaking
ability to overcome tribalism and exclusion that demands explanation, above all in the
singular American accomplishment. Anti-Semitism is not surprising; the opening of Christian America to Jews is what should amaze.
Racial aversion and injustice are not sources of wonderment; the Fourteenth Amendment and its gradual implementation are what should astonish. It is not
the abuse of power that requires explanation--that is the human condition--but the Western
rule of law. Similarly, it is not coerced religious conformity that should leave us groping for understanding, but the forging of values and institutions of
religious toleration. It is not slavery that requires explanation, for slavery is one of the most universal of all human
institutions; rather, it is the values and agency by which the West identified slavery as an
evil and, astonishment of astonishments, abolished it. Finally, it is not relative pockets of poverty in the West that should occasion our wonder,
for

because we used to term almost infinitely worse absolute levels of poverty simply "the human condition." Instead, what is extraordinary are the values, institutions,
knowledge, risk, ethics, and liberties that created such prosperity that we even notice that poverty at all, yet alone believe that it is eradicable. We are surprised, in a

we lose our wonder at the accomplishments and

aspirations of our civilization as a tragic result. Depravity should never startle us; rather, the identification and naming of
failure of intellectual analysis, by all of the wrong things, and

depravity should amaze us, and the attempt, frequently successful, to contain it should fill us with awe. Indeed, that attempt has been so successful in the West,
relative to the human condition, that the other world fantasized by the multiculturalists seeks entrance, again and again, at our doors, and the multiculturalists are not

the multiculturalists' ostensible rejection of the

West's philosophical realism--their vaunted "social constructionism"-does not stay with
them past their medical doctor's door. In the final analysis, it is that last trait, the West's commitment to a logically ordered
riding leaky boats to the otherness of the Third World. Most obviously,

philosophical realism, that undergirds its ways of thinking, valuing, and, indeed, worshiping. Such philosophical realism was defended by Augustine, Aquinas, and
almost all fathers and doctors of the Church. While various extreme epistemological and ontological skepticisms and radical irrationalisms have flourished, sometimes

Western civilization has always had at its core. a belief that there is
a reality independent of our wishes for and ideas of it; that natural knowledge of that reality
is possible and indeed indispensable to human dignity; that such knowledge must be
acquired through a discipline of the will and mind; and that central to that discipline is a
compact with reason. The West has willed, in theory at least, to reduce the chaos of the world to natural coherence by the powers of the mind.
Indeed, the belief that truth is independent of a particular time and place is precisely what has
led the West to borrow so much from other cultures, such that, ironically, whole schools of tendentious thought decry
with brilliance and profundity in our history,

Western "thefts," as if the recognition of compelling example and argument in others were a weakness, not a strength. The West recognized and adopted Eastern
systems of numbers superior to that of the Romans; it took the Aristotelianism of the High Middle Ages from the Islamic scholars who had preserved and interpreted
it in manners superior to the schools of the West; it took music, art, forms of expression, and new foods from around the earth that, in large part out of restless
curiosity about realities beyond its own, it had explored. The West has always renewed and revitalized itself by means Of recognizing superior ways to its own. It did
so, however, with a commitment to being a rational culture. The Greek principle of self-contradiction as the touchstone of error, and thus its avoidance as a touchstone
of truth, is the formal expression of a commitment to reason that the Christian West always understood to separate us from beasts and madmen. To live with selfcontradiction was not merely to fail an introduction to philosophy, it was to be less than human. Induction from experience always had a logic, and the exploration of
that logic was one of the great and ultimately triumphant pursuits of the Western mind. To live with error was to deny oneself the fruits of human light. Again, the core
philosophical assumption of Western civilization is that there is a reality that exists independently of our will and wish, and that this reality can be known by human
inquiry and reason. There were many radical ruptures in the history of certain disciplines in the West; there were no radical ruptures with the Western compact with
reality and reason. It is that compact that led to a civilization of self-scrutiny and honest borrowings; to a civilization in which self-criticism gave rise to a critical
scholarship that could question and either strengthen or repair the West's received beliefs themselves; to a civilization in which the mind could appeal, with ultimate
success, against the irrational to the rational; to a way of understanding that led to the sciences that have changed both the entire human relationship to nature and
our sense of human possibilities, always tempered by our knowledge of human nature.

152

Kritik Answers

A2 Social Constructivism (3/3)

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF THEIR
HARMS- FAILURE TO TAKE REALIST ACTION ENSURES
SYSTEMIC OPPRESSION
Kors, Professor of History at University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy
Research Institute, 2001 (Alan Charles, Triumph without Self-Belief, Orbis, Summer, ebsco)
The fruits of that civilization have been an unprecedented ability to modify the remediable
causes of human suffering, to give great agency to utility and charity alike; to give to each individual a degree of
choice and freedom unparalleled in all of human history; to offer a means of overcoming the station in life to which one
was born by the effort of one's labor, mind, and will. A failure to understand and to teach that accomplishment would be its very betrayal . To the extent
that Western civilization survives, then, the hope of the world survives to eradicate
unnecessary suffering; to speak a language of human dignity, responsibility, and rights
linked to a common reality; to minimize the depredations of the irrational, the unexamined,
the merely prejudicial in our lives; to understand the world in which we find ourselves, and, moved by interest and charity, to apply that
knowledge for good. The contest, then, is between the realists and the antirealists, and the triumph of
the West ultimately depends on its outcome. The failure to assess the stakes of the struggle between the West and its communist
adversary always came from either a pathological self-hatred of one's own world or, at the least, from a gross undervaluation of what the West truly represented in the

. The West has altered the human relationship to nature from one of fatalistic
helplessness to one of hopeful mastery. It has made possible a human life in which biological
atavism might be replaced by cultural value, the rule of law, individuation, and growing
tolerance. It also created an intellectual class irrationally devoted to an adversarial stance. That adversarial view of the West, in the past generation at least,
history of mankind

had become a neo-Gramscian and thus neo-Marxist one in which the West was seen as an unparalleled source of the arbitrary assignment of restrictive and lifestultifying roles. The enemies of the West--for some, in practice; for others, increasingly in the ideal represented a fictive make-believe that supposedly cast grave
doubt upon the West's claim of enhancing freedom, dignity, and opportunity. With the triumph of the West in reality, and with the celebration of Marxism and the

the adversarial intellectual class appears to be

retreating into ideologies and philosophies that deny the very concept of reality itself. One
sees this in the growing strength in the humanities and social sciences of critical theories
that view all representations of the world as mere text and fiction. When the world of fact
can be twisted to support this or that side of delusion (as in astrology or parapsychology), pathology tries to
appropriate what it can of the empirical. When the world of fact manifestly vitiates the very foundations of pathological delusion, then
Third World shown more and more to have been truly delusional,

it is the claim of facticity or reality per se that must be denied. This is what we now may expect: the world having spoken, the intellectual class, the left academic wing
of it above all, may appropriate a little postcommunist chaos to show how merely relative a moral good the defeat of Stalin's heirs has been. If it does so, however, it

In Orwell's 1984, it was the mark of realistic, totalitarian power to make

its subjects say that all truth was not objective but political--"a social construction ," as intellectuals
would say now--and that, in the specific case, 2 + 2 = 5. By 2004, making students in the humanities and social sciences grant the
will assail the notion of reality itself.

equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5 will be the goal of adversarial culture. They will urge that all logical--and, one should add, inferential--inductive truths from experience are
arbitrary, mere social constructions. The West Has Indeed Survived,, So Far The ramifications of that effort will dominate the central debates of the humanities in the
generation to come. Until there is a celebration and moral accounting of the historical reality of "The Triumph of the West," that "triumph" will be
ephemeral indeed. Academic culture has replaced the simplistic model that all culture was functional, a model that indeed could not account for massive discontents

Whole
disciplines now teach that propositions are to be judged by their therapeutic value rather
than by their inductive link to evidence until, in the final analysis, feeling good about saying
something determines the truth-value of what is said. Understanding human weakness, however, the West has always
or revolutionary change, let alone for moral categories, by the yet more astonishing and absurd model that virtually all culture is dysfunctional.

believed that it is precisely when we want to believe something self-gratifying that we must erect barriers of experiment, rigor, and analysis against our self-indulgence

The human ability to learn from experience and nature, so slighted in current
, is not merely an object of cultural transmission, let alone of social control, but an
evolutionary triumph of the species, indeed, a triumph on which our future ultimately
depends. There is nothing more desperate than helplessness, and there is no more inveterate cause of helplessness than the inability to affect and mitigate the
traumas of our lives. If the role of both acquired knowledge and the transmission and emendation of
the means of acquiring knowledge is only a "Western" concern, then it is a Western concern
upon which human fate depends. In the current academic climate of indoctrination, tendentiousness, and fantasy, the independence of
critical intellect and the willingness to learn open-mindedly from experience of a reality independent
of the human will are the greatest hopes of our civilization. Has Western civilization survived? That is, has a human
and our propensity for self-serving error.
humanistic theory

relationship to the world based upon the assumption of a knowable reality, reason, and a transcendent value of human dignity and responsibility survived? Has a will
to know oneself and the world objectively survived? Has a recognition of human depravity and the need to limit the power of men over men survived? I do not think
that free men and women will abandon that hard-won shelter from chaos, ignorance, parochial tribalism, irrationalism, and, ultimately, helplessness. Has Western
civilization survived, its principle of reality justified and intact? Yes, indeed, though it requires constant defense. The demand for perfection is antinomian, illogical,
and empirically absurd. The triumph of the West is flawed but real. While everyone else around you weeps, recall Alexander Ushakov, and celebrate the fall of the
Soviet threat as he celebrated the fall of Grenada. Then recall how everything depends on realism in our understanding, and rejoin the intellectual struggle.

153

Kritik Answers

A2 State/Sovereignty Bad
INTERNATIONAL GOALS CAN ONLY BE ACHIEVED BY
STATES. ONLY REALISM ESCAPES THE TYRANNY OF SMALL
DECISIONS
Kenneth

Waltz, Travis BFF, Neorealism and its Critics, ed. by Robert Keohane, 1986, p. 105-108

We may well notice that our behavior produces unwanted outcomes, but we are also likely to see that such instances as these are examples of what Alfred E. Kahn

people are victims of the

tyranny of small decisions, a phrase suggesting that if one hundred consumers choose option x, and
this causes the market to make decision X (where X equals 100x), it is not necessarily true that those
same consumers would have voted for that outcome if that large decision had ever been
presented for their explicit consideration (Kahn 1966:523). If the market does not present the large question for decision, then
individuals are doomed to making decisions that are sensible within their narrow contexts even though they
know all the while that in making such decisions they are bringing about a result that most of them do not
want. Either that or they organize to overcome some of the effects of the market by changing its structurefor example, by bringing consumer units roughly up to
the size of the units that are making producers decisions. This nicely makes the point: So long as one leaves the structure
unaffected it is not possible for change in the intentions and the actions of particular actors to produce
desirable outcomes or to avoid undesirable ones. Structures may be changed, as just mentioned, by changing the distribution of capabilities across
describes as large changes that are brought about by the accumulation of small decisions. In such situations

units. Structures may also be changed by imposing requirements where previously people had to decide for themselves. If some merchants sell on Sunday, others may
have to do so in order to remain competitive even though most prefer a six-day week. Most are able to do as they please only if all are required to keep comparable
hours. The only remedies for strong structural effects are structural changes. Structural constraints cannot be wished away, although many fail to understand this. In
every age and place, the units of self-help systems nations, corporations, or whateverare told that the greater good, along with their own, requires them to act for
the sake of the system and not for their own narrowly defined advantage. In the 1950s, as fear of the worlds destruction in nuclear war grew, some concluded that the
alternative to world destruction was world disarmament. In the 1970s, with the rapid growth of population, poverty, and pollution, some concluded, as one political
scientist put it, that states must meet the needs of the political ecosystem in its global dimensions or court annihilation (Sterling 1974:336). The international
interest must be served; and if that means anything at all, it means that national interests are subordinate to it. The problems are found at the global level.

Solutions to the problems continue to depend on national policies. What are the conditions that would make
nations more or less willing to obey the injunctions that are so often laid on them? How can they resolve the tension between pursuing their own interests and acting
for the sake of the system? No one has shown how that can be done, although many wring their hands and plead for rational behavior. The very problem, however, is
that rational behavior, given structural constraints, does not lead to the wanted results. With each country constrained to take care of itself, no one can take care of the
system. A strong sense of peril and doom may lead to a clear definition of ends that must be achieved. Their achievement is not thereby made possible. The possibility
of effective action depends on the ability to provide necessary means. It depends even more so on the existence of conditions that permit nations and other

. World-shaking problems cry for global solutions, but there

is no global agency to provide them. Necessities do not create possibilities. Wishing that final causes were efficient ones does not make
them so. Great tasks can be accomplished only by agents of great capability. That is why states,
and especially the major ones, are called on to do what is necessary for the worlds survival. But states
have to do whatever they think necessary for their own preservation, since no one can be
relied on to do it for them. Why the advice to place the international interest above national
interests is meaningless can be explained precisely in terms of the distinction between micro- and macrotheories. Among economists the
organizations to follow appropriate policies and strategies

distinction is well understood. Among political scientists it is not. As I have explained, a microeconomic theory is a theory of the market built up from assumptions
about the behavior of individuals. The theory shows how the actions and interactions of the units form and affect the market and how the market in turn affects them.
A macro-theory is a theory about the national economy built on supply; income, and demand as systemwide aggregates. The theory shows how these and other
aggregates are interconnected and indicates how changes in one or some of them affect others and the performance of the economy. In economics, both micro- and
macrotheories deal with large realms. The difference between them is found not in

A macrotheory of
international politics would show how the international system is moved by system-wide ag gregates. One can imagine what some of them might beamount of world GNP, amount of world imports and exports, of deaths in war, of everybodys defense
the size of the objects of study; hut in the way the objects of study are approached and the theory to explain them is constructed.

spending, and of migration, for example. The theory would look something like a macroeconomic theory in the style of John Maynard Keynes, although it is hard to
see how the international aggregates would make much sense and how changes in one or some of them would produce changes in others. I am not saying that such a

a macrotheory of
international politics would lack the practical implications of macroeconomic theory.
National governments can manipulate system-wide economic variables. No agencies with
comparable capabilities exist internationally. Who would act on the possibilities of adjustment that a macrotheory of international
politics might reveal? Even were such a theory available, we would still be stuck with nations as the
only agents capable of acting to solve global problems. We would still have to revert to a micropolitical approach in order
to examine the conditions that make benign and effective action by states separately and collectively more or less likely. Some have hoped that
changes in the awareness and purpose, in the organization and ideology of states would change the quality
of international life. Over the centuries states have changed in many ways, but the quality of
international life has remained much the same. States seek reasonable and worthy ends, but they cannot figure out how to reach
theory cannot be constructed, but only that I cannot see how to do it in any way that might be useful. The decisive point, anyway, is that

them. The problem is not in their stupidity or ill will, although one does not want to claim that those qualities are lacking. The depth of the difficulty is not understood

intelligence and goodwill cannot discover and act on adequate programs. Early in this century Winston
States facing
global problems are like individual consumers trapped by the tyranny of small decisions.
until one realizes that

Churchill observed that the British-German naval race promised disaster and that Britain had no realistic choice other than to run it.

154

Kritik Answers

**Calculability/Util**
Utilitarianism Good: 2AC (1/2)
FIRST, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST
HORRIBLE IMPACT IMAGINEABLE, PUTTING RIGHTS FIRST
IS PUTTING A PART OF SOCIETY BEFORE THE WHOLE
Schell 1982

(Jonathan, Professor at Wesleyan University, The Fate of the Earth, pages 136-137 uw//wej)
Implicit in everything that I have said so far about the nuclear predicament there has been a perplexity that I would now like to take up explicitly, for it
leads, I believe, into the very heart of our response-or, rather, our lack of response-to the predicament. I have pointed out that our species is the most
important of all the things that, as inhabitants of a common world, we inherit from the past generations, but it does not go far enough to point out this
superior importance, as though in making our decision about ex- tinction we were being asked to choose between, say, liberty, on the one hand, and

the species not only overarches but contains all the

benefits of life in the common world, and to speak of sacrificing the species for the
sake of one of these benefits involves one in the absurdity of wanting to de- stroy
something in order to preserve one of its parts, as if one were to burn down a house
in an attempt to redecorate the living room, or to kill someone to improve his character. ,but even to point out this
the survival of the species, on the other. For

absurdity fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must
protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of
saying that extinction is unique not because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys mankind as the source of all possible human
subjects, and this, in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death, for one's own individual death is the end not of any object in life
but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, how- ever, places the mind in a quandary. One of-the confounding char- acteristics of
death-"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that, precisely because it removes the person himself rather than something in his life, it seems to
offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak "about" death at all, as. though death were a thing
situated some- where outside us and available for objective inspection, when the fact is that it is within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we are.
It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that death, as a fundamental element of our being, "thinks" in us and through us about whatever we
think about, coloring our thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives

SECOND, SURVIVAL OF POLITICAL ORDER KEY TO ETHICS

Stenlisli, 2003 (Pace nr.1 accessed onlinehttp://www.pacem.no/2003/1/debatt/stensli/ )
The debate on political realism, a set of ontological assumptions about international politics, has been a central theme in international relations over the past 40 years.
Many scholars and politicians have wrestled over the question of the limitations and insights of realism. Still, realism seems very much alive today, one reason perhaps
being that the value of realism as an analytical tool seems to become more relevant to policymakers in times of crises. In turn, such changes cause further debate
among realists and their critics. In PACEM 5:2 (2002), Commander Raag Rolfsen(1) in practise argues that we are in need of a new framework for analysing
international politics. According to Rolfsen, A situation characterized by globalisation, democratisation and a new sense of shared vulnerability demands a novel
theoretical framework for world politics. Rolfsen`s aim is indeed ambitious, but his state of departure is surprising: political realism cannot provide this framework
because, again according to Rolfsen, it was developed in an undemocratic environment.(2) Thus, we are not far from concluding that realism is corrupted and that
realists are conspicuous people.(3) This bold proclamation illuminates the front between idealism and realism in a manner that is not typical of Norwegian academic
discourses on international relations. Rolfsen has delivered a substantial and refreshing article. It is of such originality and importance that it deserves to be debated
and criticised, which is no evident feature in contributions on world politics in Norway. Having said that, my motivation to engage in such a debate does not spring
from a wholehearted embracement of realism. Rather, its source is the belief that a theory of foreign policy cannot do without significant elements of realism.
Traditional security policy can never remove our vulnerability. At this point there simply is no disagreement between realists and idealists. However, security has
an instrumental value in ensuring other ends. Thus, acknowledging our vulnerability does not remove the value and importance of security as phenomenon and
concept.(4) In this article, I will discuss whether the effort to construct a new security concept possibly can succeed when it simultaneously becomes an attack on
political realism (PR). Rolfsen undoubtedly deals some blows against Hans Morgenthaus Theory of International Politics, although the same points have been made
by others before him.(5) Indeed, political realism has to be anchored to ideals and visions of desired end states beyond its basic assumptions,(6) but my main line of
argument is that any attempt at establishing a basis for ethical conduct in politics is bound to remain a purely theoretical construction without empirical relevance if it

since the existence of a polity is a

precondition for thinking about, implementing and evaluating policies in other areas,
politics based on realism is required in the first place in order to secure the polity. There can
be no democracy without a modern state, and no state without a minimum level of security through a monopoly of violence. Herein
lies a significant aspect of what makes the state legitimate to its citizens. In this way, one can even claim that all normative evaluations and theories implicitly rest on minimum requirements both to the practises and theoretical
considerations of realism.(7) Indeed, one should at least question whether attempts at denying the empirical relevance of PR could lead us into
is not mixed with a sound and thorough understanding of PR. The reason simply is, that

paralysis or hypocrisy. The latter can even serve, unintentionally to be sure, as a basis for demonising opponents, thus functioning as a (moral) sentiment that forms
the basis of a more hawkish or brutal conduct in international crisis than is necessary. The prudence found in Morgenthau should not be seen as cynical or a-ethical,
but rather as a configuration of thought that should balance our aspirations to fulfil what Morgenthau calls the ultimate aims of politics. The central political problem
is exactly how to translate these aspirations (like democracy and human rights) into feasible and efficient decisions. But in order to pursue these important goals, the
ability to use power, be it hard or soft, is required.

155

Kritik Answers

Utilitarianism Good: 2AC (2/2)

DEONTOLOGY LOCKS US INTO A DEADLOCK WHEN VALUES
CONFLICT, ONLY WAY TO RESOLVE THAT IS BY USING
CONSEQUENTIALISM
Person, 1997

(lngmar. Lund University. Three Methods of Ethics: a debate. Eds. Baron, Marcia, Philip
Petit, and Michael Stole. Pg 13-14. uw//wej)
Now the natural rights theorist maintains, of course, that. the presence of a right is such a relevant factor, or reason, that may justify departing
from the goal of fulfilment maximization. In Ronald Dwor. kin's phrase, rights could in this way `trump' the pursuit of maximal fulfilment. A right to
M provides a reason for holding that one morally should have M even if this is at odds with the goal mentioned. I do not say that it ensures that one
should have M because the rights theorist may like to impose a limit on the weight of rights, on how great the loss of fulfilment overall may be if a
right is not to be outweighed. Suppose that my hair has a unique healing quality: thousands of terminally ill patients could be saved if a couple of
strands are removed and made into a medicine. What should the rights theorist say if I none the less refuse to have these strands removed? Surely,
something like this: the suffering caused by respecting my right to my strands of hair is so great that we are morally justified in violating the right. But

there is a limit on the weight of my right , on its capacity to restrain maximiza- tion; a right
provides a moral reason that can be outweighed . As an aside, note that, like the limit on the extension of rights,
this limit would seem to have to be based on consequentialist considera- tions , on
then

weighing the frustration and confusion occasioned by infring- ing our deep-seated intuitions about rights against the frustration and suffering caused

when It comes to the precise weight of rights, no less than their

extension, we see that it cannot be fixed unless we transcend the natural rights
framework in favour of a consequentialist one.
by respecting them. Thus,

UTILITY CALCULUS ALLOWS ACTION, MORAL DOGMATISM

FREEZES US INTO INACTION
Smart, 1973

(J.J.C prof. of philosophy, Australian riatibual university. Utilitarianism: For and

Against uw//wej)
lf we are able to take account of probabilities in our ordinary prudential decisions it seems idle to say that in the
field of ethics, the field of our universal and humane atti- tudes, we cannot do the same thing, but must rely on some
dogmatic morality, in short on some set of rules or rigid criteria, Maybe sometimes we just will be
unable to say whether we prefer for humanity an improbable great advantage or a
probable small advantage, and in these cases perhaps we shall have to toss a penny to decide what to do. Maybe we have not any
precise methods for deciding what to do, but then our imprecise methods must just serve their turn.
We need not on that account be driven into authori.- tarianism, dogmatism or
romanticism.

156

Kritik Answers

Utilitarianism Good: 1AR

First, extend our Jonathan Schell evidence, he explains that
accepting extinction to uphold rights is like burning down a
house to remodel the living room, rights are a result of human
society and accepting the destruction of that society to uphold a
right is going too far and ultimately self-defeating.
Second, Stenlisli indicates that survival of the political order is
a precondition of all other values. The alternative is impossible
without a stable security framework.
Third, LIFE IS KEY TO ETHICS
Diana Meyers, prof of Philosophy @ Connecticut University, 19 85 Inalienable Rights, p. 54
The right to life prohibits other persons from killing the person who possesses the right and allows this person to defend
himself if he is attacked. It is obvious that a person cannot be a moral agent unless he is alive (at least, not within the moral
sphere in which we presently find ourselves), and so it is also obvious that this right protects something essential to moral
agency. But it is doubtful that it is always supererogatory when it is appropriate for a person to sacrifice his life for the benefit of others. Two representative
cases can be adduced to call this claim into question: I) a soldier has a duty to follow orders to participate in battles if her army is involved in a just war, and 2) a
citizen may have a duty to join her countrys army in wartime.

Fourth, Ingmar Person explains even rights must be weighed

against each other, but that deontology doesnt allow
preferential treatment of one right over another without
resorting to consequentialism, making consequentialism
inevitable, or action impossible.
Fifth, Smart in 73 illustrates how consequentialism avoids
dogmatic action, making it flexible in dealing with different
situations
UTILITARIANISM IS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE TO
EXTINCTION, OUTWEIGHING RIGHTS
Ratner 84

[Leonard G., Legion Lex Prof. Law @ USC, The Utilitarian Imperative: Autonomy,
Reciprocity, and Evolution, 12 Hofstra L. Rev. 723, Spring, LN//uwyo-ajl]
The search for the ought is a search for the goals of human behavior. Underlying the ought of every goal is an implicit description of reality that predicts the
consequences for humans of compliance or noncompliance with the ought. n49 Humans choose the goals. n50 And the perceived accuracy of the description, along
with the perceived value of the consequences predicted by the description, influence the choice. Ought and is thus coalesce.

The goal of enhanced human need/want fulfillment implies that such enhanced fulfillment
is possible and will facilitate long-run human existence.Goals that facilitate human existence
are persistently chosen by most humans, because human structure and function have
evolved and are evolving to facilitate such existence. The decisionmaking organism is
structured to generally prefer survival, although some may trade long-term existence for short-term pleasure, and physiological
malfunction or traumatic experience may induce the preference of a few for personal nonsurvival. Intermediate human goals change
with human structure and function; long-run human survival remains the ultimate human
goal as long as there are humans.

157

Kritik Answers

Calculability Good: 2AC (1/2)

FIRST, FAILURE TO CALCULATE ALLOWS
TOTALITARIANISM BY DENYING INSTITUTIONAL
RESPONSIBILITY
Campbell 98

[David, Intl Relations Prof @ UM, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice
in Bosnia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 186]
The undecidable within the decision does not, however, prevent the decision nor avoid its urgency. As Derrida observes, a just decision is always

the pursuit of infinite

information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical
imperatives that could justify it are unavailable in the crush of time . Nor can the crush of time be avoided,
required immediately, right away. This necessary haste has unavoidable consequences because

even by unlimited time, because the moment of decision as such always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation. The decision is
always structurally finite, it aalways marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must
precede it. That is why, invoking Kierkegaard, Derrida, declares that the instant of decision is a madness.
The finite nature of the decision may be a madness in the way it renders possible the impossible, the infinite character of justice, but Derrida argues
for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, although Derridas argument
concerning the decision has, to this pint, been concerned with an account of the procedure by which a decision is possible, it is with respect to the
ncessity of the decision that Derrida begins to formulate an account of the decision that bears upon the content of the decision. In so doing, Derridas
argument addresses more directly more directly, I would argue than is acknowledged by Critchley the concern that for politics (at least for a
progressive politics) one must provide an account of the decision to combat domination.

undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, that justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable
should not serve as alibi for staying out of juridicopolitical battles, within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and others.
Indeed, incalculable justice requires us to calculate . From where do these insistences come? What
That

exceeds the determinalbe cannot and

is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship
that because of its undecidability multiplies responsibility, and the fact that

left

(donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it

to itself, the incalculable and given

can always be reappropriated by the

most perverse calculation. The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty a duty that inhabits the instant
of madness and compels the decision to avoid the bad, the perverse calculation, even the worst. This is the duty that also dwells with
deconstructive thought and makes it the starting point, the at least necessary condition, for
the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical
political concerns when we recognize that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences we recognize all too well without yet
having thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism.

SECOND, EVEN IF WE OBSCURE THE INCALCULABLE, WE

HAVE AN ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY TO CALCULATE DEATH
BECAUSE ITS OUR ONLY MEANS OF FIGHTING INJUSTICE
Santilli 2003
[Paul C., Siena College, Radical Evil, Subjection, and Alain Badious Ethic of the Truth Event, World Congress of the
International Society for Universal Dialogue, May 18-22, www.isud.org/papers/pdfs/Santilli.pdf, acc. 9-2406//uwyo-ajl]
From the standpoint of an ethics of subjection there is even something unnecessary or superfluous about the void of suffering in the subject bearers of evil. For
Levinas, the return to being from the ethical encounter with the face and its infinite depths is fraught with the danger the subject will reduce the other to a "like-me,"
totalizing and violating the space of absolute alterity. As Chalier puts it, "Levinas conceives of the moral subject's awakening, or the emergence of the human in being,
as a response to that pre-originary subjection which is not a happenstance of being." But if there really is something inaccessible about suffering itself, about the
'other' side of what is manifestly finite, subjected, and damaged, then to a certain extent it is irrelevant to ethics, as irrelevant as the judgment of moral progress in the
subject-agent. Let me take the parent-child relation again as an example. Suppose the child to exhibit the symptoms of an illness. Are not the proper "ethical"
questions for the parent to ask questions of measure and mathematical multiples: How high is the fever? How long has it lasted? How far is the hospital? Can she get
out of bed? Has this happened before? These are the questions of the doctor, the rescue squads and the police. They are questions about being, about detail, causes

Ethically our response to the needs of must be reduced to a positivity simply because we
have access to nothing but the symptoms, which are like mine. Our primary moral responsibility is to
treat the symptoms that show up in being, not the radically other with whom I cannot
identify. Say we observe someone whose hands have been chopped off with a machete. How would we characterize this? Would it not be slightly absurd to say,
and effects.

"He had his limbs severed and he suffered," as though the cruel amputation were not horror enough. Think of the idiocy in the common platitude: "She died of cancer,
but thank God, she did not suffer", as though the devastating annihilation of the human by a tumor were not evil itself. For ethics, then, the only suffering that matters
are the visible effects of the onslaught of the world. All other suffering is excessive and inaccessible. Therefore, it is in being, indeed in the midst of the most elemental
facts about ourselves and other people, that we ethically encounter others by responding to their needs and helping them as best we can

by identifying being and not pretending that we know any thing about suffering,
other than it is a hollow in the midst of being, that we can act responsibly. What worries me about Levinas
It is precisely

is that by going beyond being to what he regards as the ethics of absolute alterity, he risks allowing the sheer, almost banal facticity of suffering to be swallowed in the
infinite depths of transcendence. Indeed, it seems to me that Levinas too often over emphasizes the importance of the emergence of the subject and the inner good in
the ethical encounter, as though the point of meeting the suffering human being was to come to an awareness of the good within oneself and not to heal and repair. I
agree with Chalier's observation that Levinas's "analyses adopt the point of view of the moral subject, not that of a person who might be the object of its solicitude."

an ethics that
would be oriented to the vulnerabilities of the subjected (which are others, of course, but also myself) needs to
address the mutilation, dismemberment, the chronology of torture, the numbers
incarcerated, the look of the bodies, the narratives, the blood counts, the mines knives, machetes, and poisons. Evil really is all that. When the
mind does its work, it plunges into being, into mathematical multiples and starts counting the cells,
Ethics has limits; there are situations like the Holocaust where to speak of a moral responsibility to heal and repair seems pathetic. But

158

Kritik Answers
graveyards, and bullet wounds. Rational practical deliberation is always about the facts that encircle the void inaccessible to deliberation and practical

the
reason.

159

Kritik Answers

Calculability Good: 2AC (2/2)

THIRD, INFINITE JUSTICE REQUIRES CALCULATION
Jacques Derrida, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Drucilla Cornell, ed, 92, p. 289.
, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not
serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state or between
institutions or states and others. Left to itself, the incalculable and giving (donatrice) idea of justice is always very
close to the bad, even to the worst for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse
calculation. It's always possible. And so incalculable justice requires us to calculate. And first, closest to what we
That justice exceeds law and calculation

associate with justice, namely, law, the juridical field that one cannot isolate within sure frontiers, but also in all the fields from which we cannot separate it, which

. Not only must we

calculate, negotiate the relation between the calculable and the incalculable, and negotiate without the sort of rule that wouldn't have to be reinvented there
where we are cast, there where we find ourselves; but we must take it as far as possible, beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond the
intervene in it and are no longer simply fields: ethics, politics, economics, psycho-sociology, philosophy, literature, etc

-already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond the distinction between national and international, public and private, and so on. This requirement
does not properly belong either to justice or law. It only belongs to either of these two domains by exceeding each one in the direction of the other. Politicization, for
example, is interminable even if it cannot and should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism or a triviality, we must recognize in it the following
consequence: each advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret the very 4bundations of law such as they had previously been calculated or

This was true for example in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery,
all the emancipatory battles that remain and will have to remain in progress, everywhere in the world, for men
and for women. Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. We
cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without treating it too lightly and
forming the worst complicities. But beyond these identified territories of juridico-politicization on the grand geopolitical scale, beyond all
delimited.
in

self-serving interpretations, beyond all determined and particular reappropriations of international law, other areas must constantly open up that at first can seem like
secondary or marginal areas. This marginality also signifies that a violence, indeed a terrorism and other forms of hostage-taking are at work (the examples closest to
us would be found in the area of laws on the teaching and practice of languages, the legitimization of canons, the military use of scientific research, abortion,
euthanasia, problems of organ transplant, extra-uterine conception; bio-engineering, medical experimentation, the social treatment of AIDS, the macro- or
micro-politics of drugs, the homeless, and so on, without forgetting, of course, the treatment of what we call animal life, animality. On this last problem, the Benjamin
text that I'm coming to now shows that its author was not deaf or insensitive to it, even if his propositions on this subject remain quite obscure, if not quite
traditional).

FOURTH, FOCUS ON THE INCALCULABLE IS PARALYZING

Mithcell Stephens, chairman of the journalism and mass-communication department at NYU,
New York Times Magazine, January 23, 1994, http://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/Jacques
%20Derrida%20-%20NYT%20-%20page.htm, accessed 11/7/02
Deconstruction had another problem: the widely held belief that reading in search of
contradictions and misunderstandings is foolish, if not insidious. John Updike has attacked
what he has called "deconstruction's fatiguing premise that art has no health in it." Critics
on the right are outraged by the implication that there is something tangled or "impossible"
about such important concepts as "reality" and "truth," which they are committed to
extricating from the grip of quotation marks. "Derrida's influence has been disastrous,"
Roger Kimball, a conservative critic and author of "Tenured Radicals," proclaims. "He has
helped foster a sort of anemic nihilism, which has given imprimaturs to squads of imitators
who no longer feel that what they are engaged in is a search for truth, who would find that
notion risible." Though Derrida considers himself a member of the democratic left, critics on
the left haven't necessarily been any kinder. Some have charged that all this emphasis on the
"impossible," on what we can't know, threatens to leave us paralyzed, "standing" -- like poor
Bartleby -- "mute and solitary" before the world's injustices.

160

Kritik Answers

A2 Tyranny of Survival (1/2)

FIRST, WE OUTWEIGH EVEN IF SURVIVAL RHETORIC
CAUSES TYRANNY, THEY HAVENT DISPROVEN OUR TRUTH
CLAIMS. WE STILL PREVENT EXTINCTION
SECOND, NO LINK THE NAZIS ALSO WORE T-SHIRTS,
THAT DOESNT PROVE OUR USE OF SURVIVAL CAUSES
OPPRESSION
THIRD, IRREVERSIBLE CHANGE JUSTIFIES SURVIVAL
RHETORIC
Daniel Callahan, Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, Hastings-on-Hudson, New
York, The Tyranny of Survival, 1973, p. 106-7
But let us assume that the stage of a dark cloud on some distant horizon has been passed,
and the evidence is good that serious deterioration has already set in. At what point in the
deterioration should survival become a priority? Observe that I said a priority; it should
never become the priority if that means the sacrifice of all other values. But there are surely
conditions under which it could become a priority, and a very high one. The most important
of those conditions would be the existence of evidence that irreversibility was beginning to
set in, making it increasingly impossible to return to the original conditions. That situation,
combined with visible evidence of serious present deterioration-for instance, an urgent need
to develop compensatory technologies-would warrant a focus on survival; for that is just
what would be at stake.

FOURTH, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST

HORRIBLE IMPACT IMAGINEABLE, PUTTING RIGHTS FIRST
IS PUTTING A PART OF SOCIETY BEFORE THE WHOLE
Schell 1982

(Jonathan, Professor at Wesleyan University, The Fate of the Earth, pages 136-137 uw//wej)
Implicit in everything that I have said so far about the nuclear predicament there has been a perplexity that I would now like to take up explicitly, for it
leads, I believe, into the very heart of our response-or, rather, our lack of response-to the predicament. I have pointed out that our species is the most
important of all the things that, as inhabitants of a common world, we inherit from the past generations, but it does not go far enough to point out this
superior importance, as though in making our decision about ex- tinction we were being asked to choose between, say, liberty, on the one hand, and

the species not only overarches but contains all the

benefits of life in the common world, and to speak of sacrificing the species for the
sake of one of these benefits involves one in the absurdity of wanting to de- stroy
something in order to preserve one of its parts, as if one were to burn down a house
in an attempt to redecorate the living room, or to kill someone to improve his character. ,but even to point out this
the survival of the species, on the other. For

absurdity fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must
protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of
saying that extinction is unique not because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys mankind as the source of all possible human
subjects, and this, in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death, for one's own individual death is the end not of any object in life
but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, how- ever, places the mind in a quandary. One of-the confounding char- acteristics of
death-"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that, precisely because it removes the person himself rather than something in his life, it seems to
offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak "about" death at all, as. though death were a thing
situated some- where outside us and available for objective inspection, when the fact is that it is within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we are.
It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that death, as a fundamental element of our being, "thinks" in us and through us about whatever we
think about, coloring our thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives

161

Kritik Answers

A2 Tyranny of Survival (2/2)

FIFTH, *INDIVIDUALISM IS ALSO TYRANNY: CALLAHAN
ARGUES AGAINST ABSOLUTISM, NOT FOR CATEGORICAL
REJECTION OF ARGUMENTS APPEALING TO SURVIVAL.
Daniel Callahan, Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, Hastings-on-Hudson, New
York, The Tyranny of Survival, 1973, p. 134-5
The irony with which Rieff analyzes psychological man makes evident his distrust and final
rejection. But Rieff offers little to put in its place, in great part because he does not offer a
positive view of culture which would strike a good bargain between the demands of the
individual and of the culture. No more than Freud can he offer the foundation for a social
ethic which would integrate a range of values in a way that would enable the individual and
civilization to mutually behave toward each other in ways which respected the requirements
of each. What Rieff has done is to lay bare the hubris and folly of an individualism run
amuck, seeking a final break from all cultural restraints. But having rejected that form of
individualism, what are the alternatives? Not an ethic of survival, which would manage to
keep the individual in line at the price of a final victory of the community over the
individual, resolving all tensions, ending the possibility of a mutual respect. If the tyranny of
individualism, inherent in the mode of life of psychological man, presents only the prospect
of a culture of self-contained human monads occasionally jostling each other, the tyranny of
survival projects a world where the individual is effaced altogether. Both tyrannies are proof
against any kind of social ethic, for both dissolve that necessary dialectic between individual
and community which is the prime requirement of such an ethic. A failure in the first place
to posit the validity of both individual and community will make it impossible in the end to
combat the virulence of individualism and survivalism, a virulence which not paradoxically
draws them closer together with every advance in technology and affluence.
The first step, then, in constructing a social ethic for technological societies is to reject the
polarities of the analytic attitude, on the one hand, and the species attitude, on the other.
The analytic attitude dissolves all of life into a cunning detachment of individual from
community, providing the former with the psychological weapons to keep other human
beings at bay. The species attitude, seeking only survival and perpetuation, provides no less
effective weapons for keeping human beings at bay, only this time in the name of a future
made safe for the future. The great threat to the possibility of a social ethic for a
technological society is less the absence of all values than the triumph of one value over all
others. Both individualism and survival are struggling to achieve that position, with a
striking degree of success. Nothing is more important than to deny both the triumph they
seek.

SIXTH, SURVIVAL AS THE HIGHEST VALUE CAN'T JUST BE

REPLACED WITH UNCRITICAL INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AS
THE HIGHEST VALUE.
Daniel Callahan, Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, Hastings-on-Hudson, New
York, The Tyranny of Survival, 1973, p. 57-8
Moreover, as I will develop more fully in later chapters, technological societies impose both
a tyranny of survival and a tyranny of individualism. They impose the former because, in
times of stress, their extreme fragility (stemming from the high base of expectation they
engender and the high degree of total control their complexity demands) is instantly and
terrorizingly apparent, creating a natural environment for an obsessive fear of annihilation,
i.e., a tyranny of survival. They impose the latter-monomaniacal individualism-because only
the privatized life seems viable or endurable in the midst of a system which presents itself as
impersonal and uncontrollable. Thus is intensified the tyranny of individualism, which
demands that each person create his or her own world ex nihilo: self -direction,
self-realization, self-fulfillment-self, self, self.

162

Kritik Answers

A2 Ontology First: 2AC

PREVENTING VIOLENCE COMES BEFORE ONTOLOGY
Arnold Davidson,

1989

Critical Inquiry, Winter, p. 424

I understand Levinas work to suggest another path to the recovery of the human, one that
leads through or toward other human beings:
The dimension of the divine opens forth froni the human face. Hence metaphysics is
enacted where the social relation is enacted in our relations with men. . . . The Other is not
the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the
manifestation of the height in which God is revealed. It is our relations with men .. . that give
to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of.35
Levinas places ethics before ontology by beginning with our experience of the human face;
and, in a clear reference to Heideggers idolatry of the village life of peasants, he associates
himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he encountered men to the country with
its trees. In his discussion of skepticism and the problem of others, Cavell also aligns himself
with this path of thought, with the recovery of the finite human self through the
acknowledgment of others:
As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldnt the other suffer the fate of God? ... I wish
to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in
the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the
trace or scar of the departure of God. [CR, p. 47Oj
The suppression of the other, the human, in Heideggers thought accounts, I believe, for the
absence, in his writing after the war, of the experience of horror. Horror is always directed
toward the human; every object of horror bears the imprint of the human will.38 So Levinas
can see in Heideggers silence about the gas chambers and death camps a kind of consent to
the horror.39 And Cavell can characterize Nazis as those who have lost the capacity for
being horrified by what they do.4 Where was Heideggers horror? How could he have
failed to know what he had consented to?
Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul Valerys aphorism, Les evenments ne sont
que lcume des choses (Events are but the foam of things).4 I think one understands the
source of her intuition. The mass extermination of human beings, however, does not
produce foam, but dust and ashes; and it is here that questioning must stop.

163

Kritik Answers

A2 Your Impact is Inevitable: 2AC

AND, ALL OF THEIR INEVITABIILTY ARGUMENTS ARE
QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT THAN OUR 1AC SCENARIOS.
THEY REFER TO EXTREMELY LOW LEVEL WARS THAT
DONT CAUSE ANNIHILATION. ANY BIGGER IMPACT IS PURE
RHETORIC, WHEREAS WE HAVE EV THAT A BREAKDOWN
OF THE REALIST BALANCE CAUSES GREAT POWER WARS
ALSO, WARFARE IS AT ITS LOWEST EBB IN HUMAN
HISTORY
Gregg Easterbrook, journalist, The End of War? THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 30, 2005, p. 18.
War has entered a cycle of decline. Combat in Iraq
and in a few other places is an exception to a significant global trend that has gone nearly unnoticed--namely
that, for about 15 years, there have been steadily fewer armed conflicts worldwide . In fact, it is possible that a
person's chance of dying because of war has , in the last decade or more, become the lowest in human
history. Five years ago, two academics--Monty Marshall, research director at the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University, and Ted Robert Gurr, a
But here is something you would never guess from watching the news:

professor of government at the University of Maryland--spent months compiling all available data on the frequency and death toll of twentieth-century combat,
expecting to find an ever-worsening ledger of blood and destruction. Instead, they found, after the terrible years of World Wars I and II, a global increase in war from
the 1960s through the mid-'80s. But this was followed by a steady, nearly uninterrupted decline beginning in 1991. They also found a steady global rise since the
mid-'80s in factors that reduce armed conflict--economic prosperity, free elections, stable central governments, better communication, more "peacemaking
institutions," and increased international engagement. Marshall and Gurr, along with Deepa Khosla, published their results as a 2001 report, Peace and Conflict, for
the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland. At the time, I remember reading that report and thinking, "Wow,
this is one of the hottest things I have ever held in my hands." I expected that evidence of a decline in war would trigger a sensation. Instead it received almost no
notice.

AND, CURRENT GLOBAL TRENDS ARE AGAINST WARFARE

Gregg Easterbrook, journalist, The End of War? THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 30, 2005, p. 18.
.
War "may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or
productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents," Keegan wrote.
Now there are 15 years of positive developments supporting the idea. Fifteen years is not all
that long. Many things could still go badly wrong ; there could be ghastly surprises in store. But, for the
moment, the trends have never been more auspicious: Swords really are being beaten into plowshares and
spears into pruning hooks. The world ought to take notice.
In his 1993 book, A History of Warfare, the military historian John Keegan recognized the early signs that combat and armed conflict had entered a cycle of decline

164

Kritik Answers

A2 Your Impact is Inevitable: 1AR

AND, EXTEND THE 2AC ANSWERS TO THE INEVITABILITY
DEBATE.
FIRST, THEIR EV ONLY SHOWS THAT LOW SCALE,
REGIONAL SKIRMISHES ARE INEVITABLE, NOT THE GREAT
POWER WARS OF THE 1AC. THEIR TRANSITION IS THE ONLY
RISK OF AN IMPACT
SECOND, WERE RUNNING CIRCLES AROUND THEM ON THE
UNIQUENESS QUESTION. EASTERBOOK 2005 SHOWS THAT
GLOBAL CONFLICT IS AT ITS LOWEST IN HISTORY
THIRD, YOU PUT EXTINCTION FIRST. THE RISK OF A
NUCLEAR WAR, WHICH SHATTERS THE MORAL FRAME.
CROSS-APPLY SCHELL 82
FOURTH, WAR IS DOWN
Gregg Easterbrook, journalist, The End of War? THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 30, 2005, p. 18.
Of course, 2001 was the year of September 11. But, despite the battles in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere that were ignited by Islamist terrorism and the
West's response, a second edition of Peace and Conflict, published in 2003, showed the total number of wars and armed conflicts continued to decline. A third edition

despite the invasion of Iraq and other outbreaks of

fighting, the overall decline of war continues. This even as the global
population keeps rising, which might be expected to lead to more war, not less.
of the study, published last week, shows that,

165

Kritik Answers

A2 Your Impact = Bare Life: 2AC (1/3)

FIRST, NO LINK We dont ascribe a quantitative value to
someones life, but only say that we shouldnt forcibly allow
them to die in a horrific way, allowing them the option to find
their own value.
SECOND, VALUE TO LIFE IS SUBJECTIVE MUST ALLOW
PEOPLE THE CHOICE TO FIND THEIR OWN VALUE AT ALL
COSTS AND RESIST EXTERNAL ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY IT
Schwartz 2004

[A Value to Life: Who Decides and How?

www.fleshandbones.com/readingroom/pdf/399.pdf]
Those who choose to reason on this basis hope that if the quality of a life can be measured then the answer to whether that
life has value to the individual can be determined easily. This raises special problems, however, because the idea of quality
involves a value judgement, and value judgements are, by their essence, subject to indeterminate relative factors such as
preferences and dislikes. Hence, quality of life is difficult to measure and will vary according to individual tastes, preferences
and aspirations. As a result,

no general rules or principles can be asserted that would simplify decisions about
the value of a life based on its quality. Nevertheless, quality is still an essential
criterion in making such decisions because it gives legitimacy to the possibility that
rational, autonomous persons can decide for themselves that their own lives either are
worth, or are no longer worth, living. To disregard this possibility would be to imply that no individuals can legitimately
make such value judgements about their own lives and, if nothing else, that would be counterintuitive. 2 In our case,
Katherine Lewis had spent 10 months considering her decision before concluding that her life was no longer of a tolerable
quality. She put a great deal of effort into the decision and she was competent when she made it. Who would be better placed
to make this judgement for her than Katherine herself? And yet, a doctor faced with her request would most likely be
uncertain about whether Katherines choice is truly in her best interest, and feel trepidation about assisting her. We need to
know which considerations can be used to protect the patients interests. The quality of life criterion asserts that there is a
difference between the type of life and the fact of life. This is the primary difference between it and the sanctity criterion
discussed on page 115. Among quality of life considerations rest three assertions: 1. there is relative value to life 2. the value
of a life is determined subjectively 3. not all lives are of equal value. Relative value The first assertion, that life is of relative
value, could be taken in two ways. In one sense, it could mean that the value of a given life can be placed on a scale and
measured against other lives. The scale could be a social scale, for example, where the contributions or potential for
contribution of individuals are measured against those of fellow citizens. Critics of quality of life criteria frequently name this
as a potential slippery slope where lives would be deemed worthy of saving, or even not saving, based on the relative social
value of the individual concerned. So, for example, a mother of four children who is a practising doctor could be regarded of
greater value to the community than an unmarried accountant. The concern is that the potential for discrimination is too
high. Because of the possibility of prejudice and injustice, supporters of the quality of life criterion reject this interpersonal
construction in favour of a second, more personalized, option. According to this interpretation, the notion of relative value is
relevant not between individuals but within the context of one persons life and is measured against that persons needs and
aspirations. So Katherine would base her decision on a comparison between her life before and after her illness. The value
placed on the quality of a life would be determined by the individual depending on whether he or she believes the current
state to be relatively preferable to previous or future states and whether he or she can foresee controlling the circumstances
that make it that way. Thus, the life of an athlete who aspires to participate in the Olympics can be changed in relative value
by an accident that leaves that person a quadriplegic. The athlete might decide that the relative value of her life is diminished
after the accident, because she perceives her desires and aspirations to be reduced or beyond her capacity to control.
However, if she receives treatment and counselling her aspirations could change and, with the adjustment, she could learn to
value her life as a quadriplegic as much or more than her previous life. This illustrates how it is possible for a person to adjust
the values by which they appraise their lives. For Katherine Lewis, the decision went the opposite way and she decided that a
life of incapacity and constant pain was of relatively low value to her. It is not surprising that the most vociferous protesters
against permitting people in Katherines position to be assisted in terminating their lives are people who themselves are
disabled. Organizations run by, and that represent, persons with disabilities make two assertions in this light. First, they
claim that accepting that Katherine Lewis has a right to die based on her determination that her life is of relatively little value
is demeaning to all disabled people, and implies that any life with a severe disability is not worth Write a list of three things
that make living. Their second assertion is that with proper help, over time Katherine would be able to transform her
personal outlook and find satisfaction in her life that would increase its relative value for her. The first assertion can be
addressed by clarifying that the case of Katherine Lewis must not be taken as a general rule. Deontologists, who are
interested in knowing general principles and duties that can be applied across all cases would not be very satisfied with this;

a case-based, contextsensitive approach is better suited. Contextualizing would permit freedom to act
within a particular context, without the implication that the decision must hold in general. So, in this case,
they would prefer to be able to look to duties that would apply in all cases. Here,

Katherine might decide that her life is relatively valueless. In another case, for example that of actor Christopher Reeve,

CONTINUED

166

Kritik Answers

A2 Your Impact = Bare Life: 2AC (2/3)

CONTINUED
the decision to seek other ways of valuing this major life change led to him perceiving his life as highly valuable, even if
different in value from before the accident that made him a paraplegic. This invokes the second assertion, that Katherine
could change her view over time. Although we recognize this is possible in some cases, it is not clear how it applies to
Katherine. Here we have a case in which a rational and competent person has had time to consider her options and has
chosen to end her life of suffering beyond what she believes she can endure. Ten months is a long time and it will have given
her plenty of opportunity to consult with family and professionals about the possibilities open to her in the future. Given all
this, it is reasonable to assume that Katherine has made a well-reasoned decision. It might not be a decision that everyone
can agree with but if her reasoning process can be called into question then at what point can we say that a decision is sound?
She meets all the criteria for competence and she is aware of the consequences of her decision. It would be very difficult to
determine what arguments could truly justify interfering with her choice. The second assertion made by supporters of the
quality of life as a criterion for decisionmaking is closely related to the first, but with an added dimension. This assertion

the value of the quality of a given life is a subjective

determination to be made by the person experiencing that life. The important addition here is
that the decision is a personal one that, ideally, ought not to be made externally by
another person but internally by the individual involved. Katherine Lewis made this decision for herself based on a
suggests that the determination of

comparison between two stages of her life. So did James Brady. Without this element, decisions based on quality of life
criteria lack salient information and the patients concerned cannot give informed consent. Patients must be given the

To ignore or overlook
patients judgement in this matter is to violate their autonomy and their freedom to
decide for themselves on the basis of relevant information about their future, and comparative consideration of their
opportunity to decide for themselves whether they think their lives are worth living or not .

past. As the deontological position puts it so well, to do so is to violate the imperative that we must treat persons as rational
and as ends in themselves.

THIRD, REFUSAL TO ASSIGN A VALUE TO LIFE RENDERS

LIFE VALUELESS
Phera.com 2005

[www.phera.com/value_of_life]
Refusal to assign any value to life often leads, ironically, to ''no'' value being
attached to life. So, treating an endangered human life, or even the value of Earth
itself, in economics formally as a commodity can be morally justified, in that risks
of failure to protect it, thus become costs.

FOURTH, NUCLEAR WEAPONS USE IS A HORROR ON PAR

WITH GENOCIDE BECAUSE OF HOW IT INDISCRIMINATELY
AND ABSOLUTELY DESTROYS INNOCENT LIFE
Evans 95

[Gareth, Ministor of Foreign Affairs, Australia, On the Legality of the Threat or Use of
Nuclear Weapons, Verbatim Excerpts of Oral Statements to the International Court of
Justice, October 30, disarm.igc.org/oldwebpages/icjquote.html, acc. 8-24-05//uwyo-ajl]
The right to self-defence is not unlimited. It is subject to fundamental principles of
humanity. Self-defence is not a justification for genocide, for ordering that there
shall be no enemy survivors in combat or for indiscriminate attacks on the civilian
population. Nor is it a justification for the use of nuclear weapons.
The fact remains that the existence of nuclear weapons as a class of weapons threatens the
whole of civilization. This is not the case with respect to any class or classes of
conventional weapons. It cannot be consistent with humanity to permit the
existence of a weapon which threatens the very survival of humanity.
There are some weapons the very existence of which is inconsistent with fundamental general principles of
humanity. In the case of weapons of this type, international law does not merely prohibit their threat or
use. It prohibits even their acquisition or manufacture, and by extension their possession. Such an attitude
has been manifested in the case of other types of weapons of mass destruction. Both the 1972 Biological
Weapons Convention and the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention do not merely prohibit the use of
biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, but prevent their very existence.

As was hideously demonstrated at Hiroshima, where a relatively minuscule atomic

bomb was detonated, and as the release of radiation by the Chernobyl disaster
showed to our horror, any use of nuclear weapons, anywhere at any time, would be

167

Kritik Answers
devastating and in no way comparable to any use, in whatever magnitude, of
conventional weapons

168

Kritik Answers

A2 Your Impact = Bare Life: 2AC (3/3)

FIFTH, FAILURE TO ACT IN THE FACE OF ANNIHILATION
RISKS TOTALITARIANISM BY DENYING INSTITUTIONAL
RESPONSIBILITY
Campbell 98

[David, Intl Relations Prof @ UM, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice
in Bosnia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 186]
The undecidable within the decision does not, however, prevent the decision nor avoid its urgency. As
Derrida observes, a just decision is always required immediately, right away. This necessary haste has
unavoidable consequences because the pursuit of infinite information and the
unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it
are unavailable in the crush of time. Nor can the crush of time be avoided, even by
unlimited time, because the moment of decision as such always remains a finite moment of urgency and
precipitation. The decision is always structurally finite, it aalways marks the interruption of the
juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it. That is why,
invoking Kierkegaard, Derrida, declares that the instant of decision is a madness.
The finite nature of the decision may be a madness in the way it renders possible the impossible, the
infinite character of justice, but Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly,
Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, although Derridas argument
concerning the decision has, to this pint, been concerned with an account of the procedure by which a
decision is possible, it is with respect to the ncessity of the decision that Derrida begins to formulate an
account of the decision that bears upon the content of the decision. In so doing, Derridas argument
addresses more directly more directly, I would argue than is acknowledged by Critchley the concern
that for politics (at least for a progressive politics) one must provide an account of the decision to combat
domination.
That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, that justice exceeds law and
calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinalbe cannot and should not serve as

alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or

a state, or between institutions or states and others. Indeed, incalculable justice
requires us to calculate. From where do these insistences come? What is behind, what is

animating, these imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the
other, a relationship that because of its undecidability multiplies responsibility, and the fact that left to
itself, the incalculable and given (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the
worst, for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation. The
necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty a duty that inhabits the instant of madness
and compels the decision to avoid the bad, the perverse calculation, even the worst. This is the duty
that also dwells with deconstructive thought and makes it the starting point, the at least
necessary condition, for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its
forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we recognize that Derrida names
the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences we recognize all too well without yet having
thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist
fanaticism.

169

Kritik Answers

A2 No Value to Life: 2AC (1/3)

FIRST, THIS ARGUMENT IS REPULSIVE People ascribe their
own value to life. Violently taking it from them is the worst form
of atrocity
SECOND, THERES ALWAYS A VALUE TO LIFE Even people
in the worst conditions find was of living beautifully
THIRD, THIS ISNT OFFENSE If someone finds their life
valueless, they can commit suicide. We at least give people who
want to live the choice
FOURTH, LIFE ONLY BECOMES VALUELESS WHEN IT IS
DECLARED AS SUCH [author is describing specific men who were in Auschwitz with him]
Victor Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Mans Search for
Meaning, 1946, p. 90-93
We have stated that that which was ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoners inner self was not so much the enumerated psychophysical causes as it was the

only the men who allowed their inner hold

on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camps degenerating
influences. The question now arises, what could, or should, have constituted this inner hold? Former prisoners, when writing or relating their experiences,
result of a free decision. Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that

agree that the most depressing influence of all was that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be. He had been given no date for his
release. (In our camp it was pointless even to talk about it.) Actually a prison term was not only uncertain but unlimited. A well-known research psychologist has
pointed out that life in a concentration camp could be called a provisional existence. We can add to this by defining it as a provisional existence of unknown limit.
New arrivals usually knew nothing about the conditions at a camp. Those who had come back from other camps were obliged to keep silent, and from some camps no
one had returned. On entering camp a change took place in the minds of the men. With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end. It was impossible

A man
who could not see the end of his provisional existence was not able to aim at an ultimate
goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his
inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar
to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end. The latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach.

position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work done on unemployed miners has
shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed timeinner time-which is a result of their unemployed state. Prisoners, too, suffered from this strange timeexperience. In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to
pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time-experience! In this connection we are
reminded of Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain, which contains some very pointed psychological remarks. Mann studies the spiritual development of people who
are in an analogous psychological position, i.e., tuberculosis patients in a sanatorium who also know no date for their release. They experience a similar existence
without a future and without a goal. One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later
that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had
already died. This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in
space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remoteout of reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the
normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life, that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man
who looked at it from another world. A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a
different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the

danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make

something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our provisional existence as
unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life;
everything in a way became pointless. Such people forget that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man
present of its reality there lay a certain

the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camps difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and
despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past.

meaningless.

Life for such people became

170

Kritik Answers

A2 No Value to Life: 2AC (2/3)

FIFTH, VALUE TO LIFE IS SUBJECTIVE MUST ALLOW
PEOPLE THE CHOICE TO FIND THEIR OWN VALUE AT ALL
COSTS AND RESIST EXTERNAL ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY IT
Schwartz 2004

[A Value to Life: Who Decides and How?

www.fleshandbones.com/readingroom/pdf/399.pdf]
Those who choose to reason on this basis hope that if the quality of a life can be measured then the answer to whether that life has value to the
individual can be determined easily. This raises special problems, however, because the idea of quality involves a value judgement, and value
judgements are, by their essence, subject to indeterminate relative factors such as preferences and dislikes. Hence, quality of life is difficult to measure
and will vary according to individual tastes, preferences and aspirations. As a result,
no general rules or principles can be asserted that would simplify decisions about the value of a life based on its quality. Nevertheless, quality is still an

persons can decide

for themselves that their own lives either are worth, or are no longer worth, living. To disregard this
essential criterion in making such decisions because it gives legitimacy to the possibility that rational, autonomous

possibility would be to imply that no individuals can legitimately make such value judgements about their own lives and, if nothing else, that would be
counterintuitive. 2 In our case, Katherine Lewis had spent 10 months considering her decision before concluding that her life was no longer of a
tolerable quality. She put a great deal of effort into the decision and she was competent when she made it. Who would be better placed to make this
judgement for her than Katherine herself? And yet, a doctor faced with her request would most likely be uncertain about whether Katherines choice is
truly in her best interest, and feel trepidation about assisting her. We need to know which considerations can be used to protect the patients interests.
The quality of life criterion asserts that there is a difference between the type of life and the fact of life. This is the primary difference between it and
the sanctity criterion discussed on page 115. Among quality of life considerations rest three assertions: 1. there is relative value to life 2. the value of a
life is determined subjectively 3. not all lives are of equal value. Relative value The first assertion, that life is of relative value, could be taken in two
ways. In one sense, it could mean that the value of a given life can be placed on a scale and measured against other lives. The scale could be a social
scale, for example, where the contributions or potential for contribution of individuals are measured against those of fellow citizens. Critics of quality
of life criteria frequently name this as a potential slippery slope where lives would be deemed worthy of saving, or even not saving, based on the
relative social value of the individual concerned. So, for example, a mother of four children who is a practising doctor could be regarded of greater
value to the community than an unmarried accountant. The concern is that the potential for discrimination is too high. Because of the possibility of
prejudice and injustice, supporters of the quality of life criterion reject this interpersonal construction in favour of a second, more personalized,
option. According to this interpretation, the notion of relative value is relevant not between individuals but within the context of one persons life and
is measured against that persons needs and aspirations. So Katherine would base her decision on a comparison between her life before and after her
illness. The value placed on the quality of a life would be determined by the individual depending on whether he or she believes the current state to be
relatively preferable to previous or future states and whether he or she can foresee controlling the circumstances that make it that way. Thus, the life
of an athlete who aspires to participate in the Olympics can be changed in relative value by an accident that leaves that person a quadriplegic. The
athlete might decide that the relative value of her life is diminished after the accident, because she perceives her desires and aspirations to be reduced
or beyond her capacity to control. However, if she receives treatment and counselling her aspirations could change and, with the adjustment, she
could learn to value her life as a quadriplegic as much or more than her previous life. This illustrates how it is possible for a person to adjust the values
by which they appraise their lives. For Katherine Lewis, the decision went the opposite way and she decided that a life of incapacity and constant pain
was of relatively low value to her. It is not surprising that the most vociferous protesters against permitting people in Katherines position to be
assisted in terminating their lives are people who themselves are disabled. Organizations run by, and that represent, persons with disabilities make
two assertions in this light. First, they claim that accepting that Katherine Lewis has a right to die based on her determination that her life is of
relatively little value is demeaning to all disabled people, and implies that any life with a severe disability is not worth Write a list of three things that
make living. Their second assertion is that with proper help, over time Katherine would be able to transform her personal outlook and find satisfaction
in her life that would increase its relative value for her. The first assertion can be addressed by clarifying that the case of Katherine Lewis must not be
taken as a general rule. Deontologists, who are interested in knowing general principles and duties that can be applied across all cases would not be
very satisfied with this; they would prefer to be able to look to duties that would apply in all cases. Here, a case-based, context-sensitive approach is
better suited. Contextualizing would permit freedom to act within a particular context, without the implication that the decision must hold in general.
So, in this case, Katherine might decide that her life is relatively valueless. In another case, for example that of actor Christopher Reeve, the decision
to seek other ways of valuing this major life change led to him perceiving his life as highly valuable, even if different in value from before the accident
that made him a paraplegic. This invokes the second assertion, that Katherine could change her view over time. Although we recognize this is possible
in some cases, it is not clear how it applies to Katherine. Here we have a case in which a rational and competent person has had time to consider her
options and has chosen to end her life of suffering beyond what she believes she can endure. Ten months is a long time and it will have given her
plenty of opportunity to consult with family and professionals about the possibilities open to her in the future. Given all this, it is reasonable to assume
that Katherine has made a well-reasoned decision. It might not be a decision that everyone can agree with but if her reasoning process can be called
into question then at what point can we say that a decision is sound? She meets all the criteria for competence and she is aware of the consequences of
her decision. It would be very difficult to determine what arguments could truly justify interfering with her choice. The second assertion made by
supporters of the quality of life as a criterion for decisionmaking is closely related to the first, but with an added dimension. This assertion suggests

the value of the quality of a given life is a subjective determination to

be made by the person experiencing that life. The important addition here is that the decision is a
personal one that, ideally, ought not to be made externally by another person but
that the determination of

internally by the individual involved. Katherine Lewis made this decision for herself based on a comparison between two stages of her life. So did
James Brady. Without this element, decisions based on quality of life criteria lack salient information and the patients concerned cannot give

To
ignore or overlook patients judgement in this matter is to violate their autonomy
and their freedom to decide for themselves on the basis of relevant information about their future, and comparative
informed consent. Patients must be given the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they think their lives are worth living or not.

consideration of their past. As the deontological position puts it so well, to do so is to violate the imperative that we must treat persons as rational and
as ends in themselves

171

Kritik Answers

A2 No Value to Life: 2AC (3/3)

SIXTH, NO VALUE TO LIFE RHETORIC UNDERMINES HOPE
FOR THE FUTURE. IT CREATES FALSE HOPE OF LIBERATION
FROM MEANINGLESSNESS WITHOUT ADDRESSING WHAT
WE ARE LIVING FOR. VOTE TO AFFIRM INTRINSIC VALUE
TO EXISTENCE [THIS EVIDENCE IS GENDER PARAPHRASED]
Victor Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Mans
Search for Meaning, 1946, p. 96-98
I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. F, my senior block warden, a fairly wellknown composer and librettist, confided in me one day: I would like to tell you something, Doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for
something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I would like to know when the
war would be over for me. You know what I mean, Doctorfor me! I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end.
And when did you have this dream? I asked. In February, 1945, he answered. It was then the beginning of March. What did your dream voice answer? Furtively
he whispered to me, March thirtieth. When F told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the
promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March twenty-ninth, F
suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March thirtieth, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became
delirious and lost consciousness. On March thirty-first, he was dead. To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus. Those who know how close the connection is

sudden loss of
hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friends death was that the
expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his bodys
resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell
between the state of mind of a manhis courage and hope, or lack of themand the state of immunity of his body will understand that the

victim to illnessand thus the voice of his dream was right after all. The observations of this one case and the conclusion drawn from them are in accordance with
something that was drawn to my attention by the chief doctor of our concentration camp. The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Years, 1945,
increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of
our food supplies or a change of weather or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again
by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous

any attempt to restore a mans inner

strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsches words, [One] He
who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how , could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and
influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died. As we said before,

psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a whyan aimfor their lives, in order to strengthen them
to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.
The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, I have nothing to expect from life any more. What sort of answer can one give to
that? What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men,

We needed to stop asking about the

meaning of life, and instead to thisnk of ourselves as those who were being questioned by
lifedaily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means
taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for
that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.

each individual.

SEVENTH, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST

HORRIBLE IMPACT IMAGINEABLE, PUTTING RIGHTS FIRST
IS PUTTING A PART OF SOCIETY BEFORE THE WHOLE
Schell 1982

(Jonathan, Professor at Wesleyan University, The Fate of the Earth, pages 136-137 uw//wej)
Implicit in everything that I have said so far about the nuclear predicament there has been a perplexity that I would now like to take up explicitly, for it
leads, I believe, into the very heart of our response-or, rather, our lack of response-to the predicament. I have pointed out that our species is the most

it does not go far

enough to point out this superior importance, as though in making our decision
about ex- tinction we were being asked to choose between , say, liberty, on the one hand, and
the survival of the species, on the other. For the species not only overarches but contains all
the benefits of life in the common world, and to speak of sacrificing the species for
the sake of one of these benefits involves one in the absurdity of wanting to de- stroy
something in order to preserve one of its parts, as if one were to burn down a house
in an attempt to redecorate the living room, or to kill someone to improve his character. ,but even to point out this
important of all the things that, as inhabitants of a common world, we inherit from the past generations, but

absurdity fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must
protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of
saying that extinction is unique not because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys mankind as the source of all possible human
subjects, and this, in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death, for one's own individual death is the end not of any object in life
but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, how- ever, places the mind in a quandary. One of-the confounding char- acteristics of
death-"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that, precisely because it removes the person himself rather than something in his life, it seems to
offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak "about" death at all, as. though death were a thing
situated some- where outside us and available for objective inspection, when the fact is that it is within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we are.
It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that death, as a fundamental element of our being, "thinks" in us and through us about whatever we
think about, coloring our thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives

172

Kritik Answers

No Value To Life Justifies Genocide

EUTHANASIA AND GENOCIDE IS JUSTIFIED BY THE
DEPLOYMENT OF THE RHETORIC OF NO VALUE TO LIFE
Richard Coleson, M.A.R., J.D., ISSUES IN LAW & MEDICINE, Summer, 1997
Euthanasia also was advocated in Germany. As early as 1895, a widely-used German medical
textbook made a claim for "the right to death." Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know:
The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 64
(1993). Immediately following World War I, the notion took greater root in the German
medical and legal professions, instigated largely by a publication by Professors Karl Binding
and Alfred Hoche of Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwertens Leben (Permitting the
Destruction of Unworthy Life) (1920). See 8 Issues in Law & Med. 221 (1992) (Patrick Derr
and Walter Wright, trans.) (copies of which have been lodged with the Court). What
transpired in Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s would unalterably change the debate
over the ethics and legality of physicians participating in ending the lives of their patients. In
that period, the lives of hundreds of thousands of terminally ill, incurably sick, and mentally
incompetent patients were terminated by German doctors--the elite of the profession in
Europe--in a program of "euthanasia" propagated both by acceptance of the " unworthy life"
thesis and by the imposition of National Socialist theories of eugenics derived from earlier
concepts developed by the German medical profession and intelligentsia. Michael Burleigh,
Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany 1900-1945 93-97, 273-277, 284-285
(1994); Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of
Genocide 44-79 (1986); Gallagher, By Trust Betrayed, supra at 74-95. In the ensuing
decades, the connection of medical killing in Nazi Germany to contemporary debates
regarding the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia has been a matter of great
controversy. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, supra at 291-98. [Footnote omitted] It is
clear, however, that those closest to these events saw some connection. The condemnation
of the "Nazi doctors" was universal and prompted great reflection on the question of
ensuring that their actions never be repeated. As one step, the world's physicians reaffirmed
the foundational ethical principle of their profession: that doctors must not kill. [Footnote
omitted] The cases before this Court are the most important juridical test since that time of
the meaning of that principle. For this reason alone, the experience which influenced so
much of what the world thinks today of the issue of euthanasia is relevant to the
deliberations of this Court. The acceptance by physicians of the notion of a "life not worthy
to be lived" under the "euthanasia" program was a cornerstone of the horror that was to
follow. Leo Alexander, Medical Science Under Dictatorship, 241 New Eng. J. Med. 39, 44
(1949). Without the willingness of doctors to participate, the euthanasia program would not
have occurred. Patrick Derr, Hadamar, Hippocrates, and the Future of Medicine: Reflections
on Euthanasia and the History of German Medicine, 4 Issues in Law & Med. 487 (1989).
This "cornerstone" principle persists today. The experience of the Netherlands (described in
the Brief of Amicus Curiae the American Suicide Foundation in No. 96-110) establishes that
the participation of physicians in killing their patients invariably rests upon, and propagates,
the notion of life unworthy of life. The writings of pro-euthanasia philosophers James
Rachels, Peter Singer, and John Harris [Footnote omitted] confirm this fact. While social
and political conditions in Western democracies obviously differ from those of post-World
War I and Nazi Germany, the consequences of legalizing physician-assisted suicide and
euthanasia will be no less dire.

173

Kritik Answers

No Value To Life Justifies Nazism

ALSO, THE ARGUMENT THAT CERTAIN CONDITIONS MAKE
LIFE NOT WORTH LIVING ACCEPTS THE PHILOSOPHICAL
PREMISE OF NAZI GERMANY STYLE MURDERS AND
CONCENTRATION CAMPS THAT RESPECT FOR LIFE DOES
NOT ENTAIL PRESERVING LIFE
Steven Neeley, Assistant Professor at Saint Francis, AKRON LAW REVIEW v. 28, Summer, 1994.
The final solution in the United States and other western societies will be unlike the final
solution in Nazi Germany in its details, but not unlike it in its horror. And I fear that some
who now live will experience this final solution. They will live to see the day they will be
killed. Variations of the "slippery-slope" argument as applied to suicide and euthanasia are
abundant. Beauchamp has argued, for example, that at least from the perspective of rule
utilitarianism, the wedge argument against euthanasia should be taken seriously.
Accordingly, although a "restricted-active-euthanasia rule would have some utility value"
since some intense and uncontrollable suffering would be eliminated, "it may not have the
highest utility value in the structure of our present code or in any imaginable code which
could be made current, and therefore may not be a component in the ideal code for our
society . . . . For the disutility of introducing legitimate killing into one's moral code (in the
form of active euthanasia rules) may, in the long run, outweigh the utility of doing so, as a
result of the eroding effect such a relaxation would have on rules in the code which demand
respect for human life. " Beauchamp then continues down a now-familiar path: If, for
example, rules permitting active killing were introduced, it is not implausible to suppose
that destroying defective newborns (a form of involuntary euthanasia) would become an
accepted and common practice, that as population increases occur the aged will be even
more neglectable and neglected than they now are, that capital punishment for a wide
variety of crimes would be increasingly tempting, that some doctors would have appreciably
reduced fears of actively injecting fatal doses whenever it seemed to them propitious to do so
. . . . A hundred such possible consequences might easily be imagined. But these few are
sufficient to make the larger point that such rules permitting killing could lead to a general
reduction of respect for human life.

174

Kritik Answers

Theres Always Value To Life

THERES ALWAYS VALUE TO LIFE
Victor Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Mans Search for
Meaning, 1946, p. 104
But I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned
the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. Again I quoted a
poetto avoid sounding like a preacher myselfwho had written, Was Dii erlebst, k,ann
keme Macht der Welt Dir rauben. (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take
from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may
have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it
into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind. Then I spoke of
the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades (who lay motionless,
although occasionally a sigh could be heard) that human life, under any circumstances,
never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and
dying, privation and death. I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the
darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope
but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not
detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in
difficult hoursa friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a Godand he would not expect
us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudlynot miserablyknowing
how to die.

THERES ALWAYS VALUE TO LIFE, EVEN WITH

TREMENDOUS SUFFERING
Victor Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Mans Search for
Meaning, 1946, p. 99-100
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his
task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering
he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in
his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. For us, as
prisoners, these thoughts were not speculations far removed from reality. They were the
only thoughts that could be of help to us. They kept us from despair, even when there
seemed to be no chance of coming out of it alive. Long ago we had passed the stage of asking
what was the meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining of some
aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced
the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying. Once the meaning of suffering
had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camps tortures by ignoring
them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become
a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities
for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to write, Wie viel ist
aufzuleiden! (How much suffering there is to get through!) Rilke spoke of getting through
suffering as others would talk of getting through work. There was plenty of suffering for
us to get through. Therefore, it was necessary to face up to the full amount of suffering,
trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need
to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the
courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. Shamefacedly some confessed occasionally
that they had wept, like the comrade who answered my question of how he had gotten over
his edema, by confessing, I have wept it out of my system.

175

Kritik Answers

A2 Communication Scholar
Framework: 2AC
MCCHESNEY CONCEDES THAT UNANTICIPATED
CONSEQUENCES MUST BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT
McChesney 96

[Robert W., U. of Wisconsin-Madison, The Internet and U.S. Communication PolicyMaking in Historical and Critical Perspective, Journal of Communication 46 (1), Winter,
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue4/mcchesney.html, acc. 9-30-06//uwyo-ajl]
All communication technologies have unanticipated and unintended effects, and one
function of policy-making is to understand them so we may avoid or minimize the
undesirable ones. The digitalization and computerization of our society are going to
transform us radically, yet even those closely associated with these developments express
concern about the possibility of a severe deterioration of the human experience as a result of
the information revolution (Deitch, 1994; Stoll, 1995; Talbott, 1995). As one observer notes,
"Very few of us-only the high priests-really understand the new technologies, and these are
surely the people least qualified to make policy decisions about them" (Charbeneau, 1994,
pp. 28-29). For every argument extolling the "virtual community" and the liberatory aspects
of cyberspace, it seems every bit as plausible to reach dystopian conclusions. Why not look
at the information highway as a process that encourages the isolation, atomization, and
marginalization of people in society? In fact, cannot the ability of people to create their own
community in cyberspace have the effect of terminating a community in the general sense?
In a class-stratified, commercially oriented society like the United States, cannot the
information highway have the effect of simply making it possible for the well-to-do to bypass
any contact with the balance of society altogether? These are precisely the types of questions
that need to be addressed and answered in communication policy-making and precisely the
types of questions in which the market has no interest (Chapman, 1995). At any rate, a
healthy skepticism toward technology should be the order of the day.

COMMUNICATION SCHOLARS HAVE TO CONSIDER

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
Sandgathe 2001

[Sharon, Engl Dept. @ Arizona, The Culture of Agriculture, February 27,

darkwing.uoregon.edu/~tns/session_6.htm, acc 9-30-06]
As a scholar of rhetoric, much of my work examines discourse in public arenas. I find public
constructions of agriculture to be a fascinating site for study because in agriculture people
must explicitly engage the interpenetration of nature and culture. Currently, a common way
to validate a particular vision of that interpenetration is to label a favored version of
agriculture with the highly prized signifier sustainable. In this discussion I will argue that
the shifting use of the term sustainable agriculture in public discourse reflects political
conflict over social identities, cultural values, and material practices. I will also examine how
discourses about nature, especially highly valued scientific discourses, are used to legitimate
the social agendas represented by sustainable agriculture, and what the political
consequences of that legitimization might be.

176

Kritik Answers

**Democratic Talk**
Democratic Talk Turn: 2AC (1/2)
TURN: DEMOCRATIC TALK
A. REFUSING TO ACT AS IF WERE THE GOVERNMENT
DESTROYS THE DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL
OF DEBATE
Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy:
Participatory Politics for a New Age)
Agenda-Setting. In liberal democracies, agendas are typically regarded as the province of elites -of committees, or executive officers, or (even) pollsters. This is so not simply because
representative systems delegate the agenda-setting function or because they slight citizen participation,
but because they conceive of agendas as fixed and self-evident , almost natural, and in this sense
incidental to such vital democratic processes as deliberation and decision-making. Yet a
people that does not set its own agenda, by means of talk and direct political exchange, not only

relinquishes a vital power of government but also exposes its remaining powers of
deliberation and decision to ongoing subversion. What counts as an "issue" or a "problem"
and how such issues or problems are formulated may to a large extent predetermine what
decisions are reached. For example, the choice between building a small freeway and a twelve-lane
interstate highway in lower Manhattan may seem of little moment to those who prefer to solve the
problems of urban transportation with mass rail transit. Or the right to choose among six mildly rightof-center candidates may fail to exercise the civic imagination of socialists. Nor is it sufficient to offer

a wide variety of options, for what constitutes an option-how a question is formulated-is as

controversial as the range of choices offered . Abortion is clearly an issue that arouses intense

public concern at present, but to say that it belongs on the public agenda says too little. The vital
question remains: How is it presented? In this form: "Do you believe there should be an amendment to
the Constitution protecting the life of the unborn child?" Or in this form: "Do you believe there should
be an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting abortions?" When asked the first question by a New
York Times-CBS poll, over one-half responded "yes," whereas when asked the second question only 29
percent said "yes .,,25 He who controls the agenda-if only its wording-controls the outcome. The battle
for the Equal Rights Amendment was probably lost because its enemies managed to place it on the
public agenda as calling for "the destruction of the family, the legitimization of homosexuality, and the
compulsory use of coed toilets." The ERA's supporters never succeeded in getting Americans to see it as
"the simple extension of the Constitution's guarantees of rights to women"-a goal that most citizens
would probably endorse. The ordering of alternatives can affect the patterns of choice as decisively as
their formulation. A compromise presented after positions have been polarized may fail; a
constitutional amendment presented at the tail end of the period of change that occasioned it may not
survive in a new climate of opinion. A proposal paired with a less attractive alternative may succeed
where the same proposal paired with some third option would fail. What these realities suggest is that

in a genuine democracy agenda-setting cannot precede talk or deliberation, and decision but
must be approached as a permanent function of talk itself. Relegating agenda-setting to
elites or to some putatively "natural" process is an abdication of rights and responsibilities.
Unless the debate about Manhattan's interstate freeway permits people to discuss their fundamental
priorities for mass transportation, energy, and ecology, it is a sham. Unless the debate over abortion
permits people to discuss the social conditions of pregnancy, the practical alternatives available to the
poor, and the moral dilemmas of a woman torn between her obligations to her own body and life and to
an embryo, such debate will treat neither pregnant women nor unborn babies with a reasonable
approximation of justice. For these reasons, strong democratic talk places its agenda at the

center rather than at the beginning of its politics. It subjects every pressing issue to
continuous examination and possible reformulation. Its agenda is, before anything else, its
agenda. It thus scrutinizes what remains unspoken, looking into the crevices of silence for
signs of an unarticulated problem, a speechless victim, or a mute protester. The agenda of a
community tells a community where and what it is. It defines that community's mutualism
and the limits of mutualism and draws up plans for pasts to be institutionalized or overcome
and for futures to be avoided or achieved. Far from being a mere preliminary of democracy,
agenda-setting becomes one of its pervasive, defining functions . 180-182

177

Kritik Answers

Democratic Talk Turn: 2AC (2/2)

B. THE IMPACT IS SLAVERY [THIS EV HAS BEEN GENDER
MODIFIED]
Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy:
Participatory Politics for a New Age)

Political animals interact socially in ways that abstract morals and metaphysics cannot account for.
Their virtue is of another order, although few theorists who have defended this claim have been called
everything from m realists to immoralists for their trouble. Yet Montaigne caught the very spirit of
social man when he wrote, "the virtue assigned to the affairs of the world is a virtue with many bends,
angles, and elbows, so as to join and adapt itself to human weakness; mixed and artificial, not straight,
clean, constant or purely innocent." If the human essence is social, then men and women have

to choose not between independence or dependence but between

citizenship or slavery. Without citizens, Rousseau warns, there will be neither
free natural men nor satisfied solitaries-there will be "nothing but debased
slaves, from the rulers of the state downwards." To a strong democrat, Rousseau's
assertion at the opening of his Social Contract that [an individual] is born free yet is
everywhere in chains does not mean that [an individual] is free by nature
but society enchains him [or her]. It means rather that natural freedom is
an abstraction, whereas dependency is the concrete human reality, and that
the aim of-politics must therefore be not to rescue natural freedom from
politics, but, to invent and pursue artificial freedom within and through
politics. Strong democracy aims not to disenthrall [individuals] but to
legitimate their dependency by means of citizenship and to establish their
political freedom by means of the democratic community. 216

178

Kritik Answers

Democratic Talk Turn: 1AR (1/3)

OUR TURNS ARE IMPORTANT BECAUSE THE KRITIK IS
UNLIKELY TO BRING ABOUT AN ENTIRELY CHANGED
WORLD THE PROCESS OF DEMOCRATIC TALK BRINGS US
TOGETHER AS A POLITICAL COMMUNITY WHERE WE CAN
ENVISION ALTERNATIVE FUTURES (RE)CREATING OUR
POWER AS POLITICALLY ACTIVE PARTICIPATING CITIZENS

MORE EV
Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy:
Participatory Politics for a New Age)

Liberal critics of participation, imbued with the priorities of privatism, will continue to
believe that the neighborhood-assembly idea will falter for lack of popular
response. "Voters," writes Gerald Pomper, "have too many pressing tasks, from making money to
making love, to follow the arcane procedures of government." If the successful and industrious will not
participate because they are too busy, and the poor and victimized will not participate because they are
too apathetic, who will people the assemblies and who will give to talk a new democratic life? But of
course people refuse to participate only where politics does not count-or

counts less than rival forms o private activity. They are apathetic because
they are powerless, not powerless because they are apathetic. There is no
evidence to suggest that once empowered, a people will refuse to
participate. The historical evidence of New England towns, community school boards,
neighborhood associations, and other local bodies is that participation fosters more
participation. 272

179

Kritik Answers

Democratic Talk Turn: 1AR (2/3)

RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW WE HAVE TO SET THE AGENDA
LEAVING THESE DUTIES UP TO THE ELITES AND THOSE IN
CONTROL ENSURES THAT WE WILL ALL LOSE OUR
SOVEREIGNTY WE HAVE TO DETERMINE WHAT
QUESTIONS ARE GOING TO BE ASKED AND WHAT FORM
THOSE QUESTIONS TAKE TAKING PROACTIVE ACTION
EVEN IF IT IS JUST COMMON DELIBERATION IN THIS ROOM
IS WHAT IS TRULY CRITICAL TO OUR OWN POLITICAL
EFFICACY AND PREVENTING THOSE IN POWER FROM
SETTING THE AGENDA FOR US
Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy:
Participatory Politics for a New Age)

If talk can give the dead back their voices, it can also challenge the paradigms

of the
living and bring fundamental changes in the meaning or valuation of
words. Major shifts in ideology and political power are always accompanied
by such paradigmatic-shifts in language usage-so much so that historians have
begun to map the former by charting the latter. The largely pejorative meaning that the
classical and early Christian periods gave to such terms as individual and privacy was
transformed during the Renaissance in a fashion that eventually produced the Protestant
Reformation and the ethics of commercial society. Eighteenth-century capitalism effected a
transvaluation of the traditional vocabulary of virtue in a manner that put selfishness and
avarice to work in the name of public goods. (George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty is merely
the last and least in a long line of efforts to invert moral categories.) The history of
democracy itself is contained in the history of the word democracy. The battle for selfgovernment has been fought over and over again as pejorative valuations of the term have
competed with affirmative ones (pitting Plato or Ortega or Lippmann or modern political
science against Machiavelli or Rousseau or Jefferson). The terms ochlocracy, mob rule,
tyranny of the majority, and rule-of the masses all reflect hostile constructions of
democracy; communitarianism, participationism, egalitarianism, and -it must be admittedstrong democracy suggest more favorable-constructions. Poverty was once a sign of moral
weakness; now it is a badge of environmental victimization. Crime once proceeded from
original now it is an escape from poverty. States' rights once bore the stigma of dishonor,
then signified vigorous sectionalism, then was a code word for racism, and has now become
a byword for the new decentralized federalism. Busing was once an instrument of equal
educational opportunity; now it is a means of destroying communities. The shifts in the
meaning of these and dozens of other key words mirror fundamental national shifts in
power and ideology. The clash of competing visions-of social Darwinism versus collective
responsibility and political mutualism, of original sin and innate ideas versus
environmentalism, of anarchism versus collectivism ultimately plays itself out on the

field of everyday language, and the winner in the daily struggle for meaning
may emerge as the winner in the clash of visions, with the future itself as the
spoils of victory. An ostensibly free citizenry that leaves this battle to elites,
thinking that it makes a sufficient display of its freedom by deliberating and
voting on issues already formulated in concepts and terms over which it has
exercised no control, has in fact already given away the greater part of its
sovereignty. How can such a citizenry -help but oppose busing if busing means the
wrecking of communities and only the wrecking of communities? How can it support the
right to abortion if abortion means murder, period? To participate in a meaningful
process of decision on these questions, self-governing citizens must participate

in the talk through which the questions are formulated and given a
180

Kritik Answers

Democratic Talk Turn: 1AR (3/3)

(Barber continues)

decisive political conception. The anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s

did just this, of course; it won no elections, it participated in no votes, and it
contributed to no legislative debates. But it radically altered how most
Americans saw the war and so helped bring it to an end. If language as a living,
changing expression of an evolving community can both encapsulate and challenge the past,
it also provides a vehicle for exploring the future. Language's flexibility and its

susceptibility to innovation permit [people] to construct their visions of the

future first in the realm of words, within whose confines a community can
safely conduct its deliberations. Language can offer new solutions to old
problems by altering, how we perceive these problems and can make new
visions accessible to traditional communities by the imaginative use (and
transvaluation) of familiar language. This-is the essence of public thinking ."
The process moves us perforce from particularistic and immediate considerations of our
own and our groups' interests, examined in a narrow temporal framework ("Will there be
enough gasoline for my summer vacation trip?" for example), to general and long-term
considerations of the nature of the communities we live in and of how well our life plans fit
in with that nature ("Is dependence on oil a symbol of an overly materialistic, insufficiently
self-sufficient society?" for example). In sum, what we call things affects how we do
things; and despite the lesson of Genesis, for mortals at least the future must be

named before it can be created. Language is thus always the crucial

battlefield; it conserves or liquidates tradition, it challenges or, champions
established power paradigms and it is the looking glass of all future vision. If
language is alive, society can grow; if it is dialectical, society can reconcile its partspast and future no less than interest and interest or class and class. As Jurgen Habermas has
understood, democracy means above all equal access to language, and strong

democracy means widespread and ongoing participation in talk by the

entire citizenry. Left to the media, the bureaucrats, the professors, and the
managers, language quickly degenerates into one more weapon in the
armory of elite rule. The professoriate and the literary establishment are all too willing
to capture the public with, catch phrases and portentous titles. How often in the past several
decades have Americans been made to see themselves, and thus their futures, through the
lens of a writer's book title? Recall The True Be liever, The Managerial Society, The End of
Ideology, The Other America, The Culture of Narcissism, The Greening of America, The
Totalitarian Temptation, The Technological Society, The Two Cultures, The Zero-Sum
Society, Future Shock. We are branded by words and our future is held hostage
to bestseller lists'.195-197

181

Kritik Answers

Debate Solves Democratic Talk: Ext

DEBATE SERVES AS A FORUM THROUGH WHICH WE CAN
ENGAGE IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
Watson, 04 (J.B. Watson, Assistant Professor of sociology and gerontology coordinator @

Stephen F. Austin State University, A Justification of the Civic Engagement Model, p. 73-74, Service
Learning: History, Theory, and Issues)
The civic engagement of ordinary citizens with voluntary associations, social institutions,
and government in local communities is a central feature of strong democracies. Further, a
fundamental feature of democratic governmental structure is its relationship to civil society,
defined as "voluntary social activity not compelled by the state" (Bahlmueller, 1997, p. 3).
Through voluntary participation in civil society associations at the local and regional level,
citizens pursue activities that potentially serve the public good. Through this rudimentary
civic engagement, citizens learn the attitudes, habits, skills, and knowledge foundational to
the democratic process-(Patrick, 1998). Unfortunately, in 1998 the National Commission on
Civic Renewal (NCCR) highlighted the declining quantity and quality of civic engagement at
all levels of American life. A number of other studies concur on the decline of involvement in
civic activities (Bahlmueller, 1997; McGrath, 2001; Putnam, 1995). This concern about the
nature and extent of civic engagement in the United States has impacted the debate on the
proper role of higher education in a democracy. Higher education institutions, as
transmitters of essential elements of the dominant culture, struggle with the development of
mechanisms to socialize the next generation about democratic values. A national debate has
emerged on the higher education response to this perceived need for revitalizing
constructive democratic engagement, building civil society, and increasing citizen
participation in government at all levels. Colleges and universities have responded with a
number of civic engagement initiatives, including university-community partnerships,
empirical studies of political engagement, community-based (collaborative) research, and
the development of new (or expanded) service-learning programs (Jacoby 2003).

A RENEWAL OF DEMOCRATIC TALK VIA COMMUNITY

BASED ORGANIZATIONS IS KEY TO CREATING A
FOUNDATION FOR DEMOCRACY- ALLOWING US TO
INFLUENCE THE POLITICAL REALM
Cohen 03--Professor of Political Science at Columbia University( Jean L., Civic Innovation in
America: Towards a Reflexive Politics, The Good Society 12.1 (2003) 56-62,

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/good_society/v012/12.1cohen.html)
Civic Innovation in America is a refreshing addition to what has become a growth industry
of writing on American civil society. Unlike the influential approach of Robert Putnam, this
is not a backward-looking lament about the decline of associational life, although Sirianni
and Friedland are aware of the worrisome signs of civic disaffection and citizen passivity in
the U.S. 1Yet they don't join neo-communitarian efforts to revive traditionalistic types of
"mediating institutions" in order to secure social integration. 2Although not adverse to
mobilizing old forms of social capitalsuch as congregation-based community organizations
within and across denominational linesthey are primarily interested in networks that
expand local organizing capacities for new purposes and with fresh democratic methods. 3
Indeed, the focus of Civic Innovation is on significant recent attempts "from below" to
reinvent and revitalize American democracy. Accordingly, the book points the reader to the
ongoing public work of citizens and the actual processes of civic innovation that have sprung
up in recent years. The authors maintain that: "Over the past several decades American
society has displayed a substantial capacity for civic innovation, and the future of our
democracy will depend on whether we can deepen and extend such innovation to solve
major public problems, and transform the way we do politics." 4Theirs is a forward-looking
approach: it highlights new forms of cooperative civic participation in civil society and
discusses the new modes of governance needed to support them.

182

Kritik Answers

Democratic Talk Key to Autonomy: Ext

THE DEMOCRATIC TALK THAT WE ARE CONDUCTING IS A
NECESSARY CONDITION FOR AUTONOMY GIVING UP
POLITICAL TALK OF WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ENSURES
THAT VALUES AND BELIEFS WILL BECOME OSSIFIED
Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy:
Participatory Politics for a New Age)

6. Maintaining Autonomy. Talk helps us overcome narrow selfinterest, but it plays an equally

significant role in buttressing the autonomy of individual wills that is essential to

democracy. It is through talk that we constantly reencounter, reevaluate, and repossess the
beliefs, principles, and maxims on the basis of which we exert our will in the political realm.
To be free, it is not enough for us simply to will what we choose to will. We must will what
we possess, what truly belongs to us. John Stuart Mill commented on the "fatal tendency of
mankind to leave all thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful." He ascribed to this tendency
"the cause of about half [men's] errors." Mindless convictions not only spawn errors, they turn

those who hold them into charlatans of liberty. Today's autonomously held belief is
tomorrow's heteronomous orthodoxy unless, tomorrow, it is reexamined and repossessed.
Talk is the principal mechanism by which we can retest and thus repossess our convictions,
which means that a democracy that does not institutionalize talk will soon be without
autonomous citizens, though men and women who call themselves citizens may from time to time
deliberate, choose, and vote. Talk immunizes values from ossification and protects the political
process from rigidity, orthodoxy, and the yoke of the dead past . This, among all the functions of
talk, is the least liable to representation, since only the presence of our own wills working on a value can
endow that value with legitimacy and us with our autonomy. Subjecting a value to the test of
repossession is a measure of legitimacy as well as of autonomy : forced knowingly to embrace
their prejudices, many men falter. Prejudice is best practiced in the dark by dint of habit or

passion. Mobs are expert executors of bigotry because they assimilate individual wills into a
group will and relieve individuals of any responsibility for their actions . It is above all the

imagination that dies when will is subordinated to instinct, and as we have seen, it is the imagination
that fires empathy. Values will, naturally, conflict even where they are thoughtfully embraced
and willed; and men's souls are sufficiently complex for error or even evil to dwell comfortably in the
autonomous man's breast. Autonomy is no guarantee against moral turpitude; indeed, it is its necessary
condition. But in the social setting, it seems evident that maxims that are continuously reevaluated

and repossessed are preferable to maxims that are embraced once and obeyed blindly
thereafter. At a minimum, convictions that are reexamined are more likely to change, to adapt
themselves to altered circumstances and to evolve to meet the challenges offered by
competing views. Political willing is thus never a one-time or sometime thing (which is the
great misconception of the social-contract tradition), but an ongoing shaping and reshaping of our
common world that is as endless and exhausting as our making and remaking of our
personal lives. A moment's complacency may mean the death of liberty; a break in political
concentration may spell the atrophy of an important value ; a pleasant spell of privatism may
yield irreversible value ossification. Democratic politics is a demanding business. Perhaps this is why
common memory is even more important for democracy than for other forms of political culture. Not
every principle of conduct can be tested at every moment; not every conviction can be exercised on
every occasion; not every value can be regarded as truly ours at a given instant. Thus remembrance and
imagination must act sometimes as surrogates for the actual testing of maxims. Founding myths and
the rituals associated with them (July 14 in France or August 1 in Switzerland), representative political
heroes who embody admired convictions (Martin Luther King or Charles de Gaulle), and popular oral
traditions can all revivify citizens' common beliefs and their sense of place in the political culture. These
symbols are no substitute for the citizenry's active reexamination of values through participation in
political talk, but they can and do supplement such talk through the imaginative reconstruction of the
past in live images and through the cultivation of beliefs that are not necessarily involved in a given
year's political business. 190-191

183

Kritik Answers

Democratic Talk Key to Checking Right:

Ext
FAILURE TO ENGAGE IN DEMOCRATIC TALK MEANS THE
POLITICAL REALM WILL BE DOMINATED BY THE FARRIGHT AND COLLAPSE INTO FASCISM, CAUSING WARS AND
TYRANNY
Rorty 98 (Richard, Stanford Philosophy Professor, Achieving Our Country, pp. 87-94)
if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in
in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an Orwellian world

If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and

the United States but

. In such a world, there
may be no supernational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Partynamely, the
international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwells Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off,
cosmopolitan professionalsLinds overclass, the people like you and me. The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party
are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need
people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the
pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and
the Right, to specialize in cultural issues.7 The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhereto keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95
percent of the worlds population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own
despair by media-created psuedo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear. Contemplation of this possible world
invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigatedand, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere

to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic

nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the
must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is

first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.8 The first response comes

comes naturally to members of trade

unions, and to the marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into rightwing populist movements. Union members in the United States have watched factory after factory close, only to reopen in Slovenia, Thailand, or
naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response

Mexico. It is no wonder that they see the result of international free trade as prosperity for managers and stockholders, a better standard of living for workers in
developing countries, and a very much worse standard of living for American workers. It would be no wonder if they saw the American leftist intelligentsia as on the
same side of the managers and stockholdersas sharing the same class interests. For we intellectuals, who are mostly academics, are ourselves quite well insulated, at
least in the short run, from the effects of globalization. To make things worse, we often seem more interested in the workers of the developing world than in the fate of

democracies are heading into a

Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional
governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book
our fellow citizens. Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized

The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even
trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workersthemselves

something will
crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a
strongman to vote forsomeone will assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salemen, and
desperately afraid of being downsizedare not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point,

postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis novel It Cant Happen Here may then be played out. For once such
a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler

the gains made in the past forty years by

black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come
back into fashion. The words nigger and kike will once again be heard in the workplace . All the sadism which the academic Left
has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly
chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that

educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of

my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make peace with the
international superrich, just as Hitler made with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke
military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the
country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the
American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left
selfishness. For after

channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossesed? It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth century, no longer have a Left. Since nobody
denies the existence of what I have called

national politics.

the cultural Left, this amounts to an admission that that Left is unable to engage in

It is not the sort of the Left which can be asked to deal with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those
consequences, the present cultural Left would have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor
unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The

the Left should put a moratorium on theory

. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the
Left should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and Whitman
first is that

might be achieved. In support of my first suggestion, let me cite a passage from Deweys Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses his exasperation with the
sort of sterile debate now going on under the rubric of individualism versus communitarianism. Dewey thought that all discussions which took this dichotomy
seriously suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want is light
upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of inquiry, the
traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another. Dewey was right to be exasperated
by sociopolitical theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a rightist maneuver, one
which supplies the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order.9 For such ascents are now more common on the Left than on the Right. The
contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and
novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique. When one of todays academic leftists says that some topic has been inadequately theorized, you
can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic
determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacans impossible
object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by problematizing familiar concepts. Recent attempts to subvert
social institutitons by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic

it is almost
impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one
might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate or a political strategy. Even though what these authors theorize
philosophizing at its worts. The authors of these purportedly subversive books honestly believe that the are serving human liberty. But

is often something very concrete and near at handa curent TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandalthey offer the most absract and barren explanations
imaginable

. These futile attempts to philosophize ones way into political relevance are a

184

Kritik Answers
symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial
approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical
hallucinations. These result in an intellec- tual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The
cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called "power." This is the name of what Edmund- son calls Foucault's "haunting
agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook."10

185

Kritik Answers

Restoring Public Sphere Solves

Oppression: Ext
RESTORING THE PUBLIC SPHERE FACILITATES AN
EMANCIPATORY PRAXIS OF OPEN COMMUNITY
Lakeland 93 (Paul, professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, Preserving The

Lifeworld, Restoring the Public Sphere, Renewing Higher Education, Cross Currents, Winter, Vol. 43
Issue 4, p488, 15p http://www.crosscurrents.org/lakeland2)
Habermas, then, is our third ally and resource. He describes the pathology of life in late
capitalist societies as the "colonization of the lifeworld by the system,"[4] and vests the hope
of movement toward a newly humane and democratic society in the "transformation of the
public sphere."[5] The former phrase expresses the conviction that distinctly human
patterns of communication and interaction, which are in principle open and even
emancipatory, are under threat, progressively squeezed to the margins of communal life by
the more instrumental or manipulative model of interactions appropriate to technology or to
impersonal systems. By "the public sphere," Habermas means first the empirically discerned
historical phenomenon of a community of discourse in which rational discussion of matters
of social and political import took place, and influenced the formation of public policy.
Secondly, he uses the term to point toward the (perhaps counterfactual) possibility of
creating something today that would serve to protect the lifeworld from the depredations of
the system or, more simply expressed, to preserve democracy in late capitalist society.
Habermas's view is not dissimilar to Frankl's. What Frankl saw epitomized by the Nazi "final
solution," namely, the systematic application of technology to eradicate the sense of
personal identity, Habermas sees as the logic of late capitalist, national security,
consumerist society. But where Frankl looks to inner spiritual resources to defeat these
annihilating pressures, Habermas turns to the dynamics of the speech-act. By so doing,
incidentally, he strengthens Freire's somewhat unfocused appeal to the "dialogical method"
and shows why it is so potentially revolutionary. For Habermas, the attempt to
communicate directly with other human beings rests on a set of mutual assumptions: there
is something comprehensible to be heard; the speaker is sincere; the speaker seeks truth; the
hearer will listen; and so on. Even someone who attempts to deceive another can only hope
to do so because the hearer will assume the speaker is acting according to the rules of open
communication. Thus, the communication community is oriented in principle towards the
"ideal speech situation," that is, a context of distortion-free discourse in which all have equal
access to the conversation, and all seek consensus on norms for action. Though such an ideal
speech situation may never exist, it operates regulatively to draw communication onward.
And what is assumed about the importance of truthfulness and sincerity, and about the
dignity of other speakers and hearers, makes communication, which is after all the
fundamental structure of human sociality, intrinsically emancipatory. The pathologies of
personal, communal, and political life become interpretable in terms of "systematically
distorted communication," and overcoming them becomes a matter of restoring the contexts
in which communicative praxis can occur.

186

Kritik Answers

Talk is Action: Ext

TALK IS ACTION IT MAKES AND REMAKES THE WORLD
IT DEFINES WHAT WE ARE AS A COMMUNITY, WHAT WE
WANT AND WHAT WE NEED
Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy:
Participatory Politics for a New Age)

Stripped of such artificial disciplines, however, talk

appears as a mediator of affection

and affiliation as well as of interest and identity, of patriotism as well as of
individuality. It can build community as well as maintain rights and seek
consensus as well as resolve conflict. It offers, along with meanings and significations,

silences, rituals, symbols, myths, expressions and solicitations, and a hundred other quiet and noisy
manifestations of our common humanity. Strong democracy seeks institutions that can give these things
a voice-and an ear. The third issue that liberal theorists have underappreciated is

the complicity of talk in action. With talk we can invent alternative futures,
create mutual purposes, and construct competing visions of community. Its
potentialities thrust talk into the realm of intentions and consequences and
render it simultaneously more provisional and more concrete than
philosophers are wont to recognize. Their failure of imagination stems in
part from the passivity of thin democratic politics and in part from the
impatience of speculative philosophy with contingency, which entails
possibility as well as indeterminateness. But significant political effects and
actions are possible only to the extent that politics is embedded in a world
of fortune, uncertainty, and contingency. Political talk is not talk about the world;
it is talk that makes and remakes the world. The posture of the strong democrat is thus
"pragmatic" in the sense of William James's definition of pragmatism as "the attitude of looking away
from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits,
consequences, facts." James's pragmatist "turns toward concreteness and adequacy, toward facts,
toward action, and toward power.... [Pragmatism thus] means the open air and possibilities of nature,
as against dogma, artificiality and the pretense of finality in truth." Strong democracy is

pragmatism translated into politics in the participatory mode. Although James

did not pursue the powerful political implications of his position, he was moved to write: "See already
how democratic [pragmatism] is. Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and
endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature." The active, future-

oriented disposition of strong democratic talk embodies James's instinctive sense

of pragmatism's political implications. Future action , not a priori principle,
constitutes such talk's principal (but not principled) concern. 177-178

187

Kritik Answers

**Performance**
A2 Performativity (1/2)
THE PERFORMANCE IS ALWAYS ALREADY TAKING PLACE.
THE EXISTENCE OF THE ROUND IS THE PERFORMANCE,
NOT SPECIFIC SPEECHES
Jessica Kulynych, Asst Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Polity, Winter,

1997, n2 p315(32)
We bring normativity to our performances as ethical principles that are themselves subject to resistance. By unearthing the contingency of the "self-evident,"

, the question is not should we resist (since resistance is always,

already present), but rather what and how we should resist . This notion of performativity is also important for
performative resistance enables politics. Thus

understanding the possibilities for innovation in Habermasian deliberative participation. Just as a protestor exposes the contingency of concepts like justice, a
dialogue exposes the limits and contingency of rational argumentation. Once we are sensitive to the performative nature of speech, language and discourse, then we

Deliberation must be theatrical: it is in the

. Indeed it is precisely the non-rational aspects
of deliberation that carry the potential for innovation. In his description of the poignant reminders of demonstration
Chaloupka recognizes that it is at the margins that the actual force of the demonstration
resides, no matter what happens at the microphone. The oral histories of demonstrations
(the next day over coffee) linger over the jokes and funny signs and slogans, the outrages
and improprieties, more than the speeches and carefully coherent position papers . (68)
can see that deliberative politics cannot be confined to the rational statement of validity claims.
performance of deliberation that that which cannot be argued for finds expression

PERFORMANCE IS ALWAYS CONTEXT-DEPENDENT. OUR

CRITICISM CAN ONLY BE EVALUATED IN THE CONTEXT OF
DEBATE
Jessica Kulynych, Asst Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Polity, Winter,

1997, n2 p315(32)
Consequently, a performative concept of political participation changes debates within the
traditional participation literature over the inclusion of protest activities and community
decisionmaking in the definition of political participation. While these debates have
generally been conducted on familiar terrain, justifying the inclusion of such activity by
delineating its impact on the distribution of goods, services, or political power by the
government, a performative concept of participation breaks down this distinction altogether.
(75) Because performative participation is defined by its relation to a set of normalizing
disciplinary rules and its confrontation with those rules, nothing can be categorically
excluded from the category of political participation. As Honig eloquently puts it, "not
everything is political on this (amended) account; it is simply the case that nothing is
ontologically protected from politicization, that nothing is necessarily or naturally or
ontologically not political."(76) Therefore, the definition of political participation is always
context dependent; it depends upon the character of the power network in which it is taken.
Political participation is not categorically distinguished from protest or resistance, but
rather the focus is on the disruptive potential of an action in a particular network of power
relations. To say that participation is context dependent means not only that any action is
potentially participation, but also that no particular action is necessarily a participatory act.
Housecleaning is a good example. The character of the power network in which one exists
defines housecleaning as a potential act of political participation. In her description of the
defensive strategies of Black women household workers, Bonnie Thorton Dill argues that the
refusal to mop the floor on hands and knees, or the refusal to serve an extra dinner,
constitutes an effective act of resistance.(77) It is not the act itself that is politically
definitive, but rather the context. Black domestic laborers, who in this context are
constructed as desperate, willing to do any type of work, and always immediately available
for service, resist that construction by acting as if they have other choices. Thus it is the
context of the domestic labor relationship that defines the repertoire of political actions.
Similarly, Jonathan Kozol describes poor welfare mothers living in the degrading conditions
of the South Bronx whose homes "no matter how besieged, are nonetheless kept spotless
and sometimes even look cheerful."(78) For women who are constructed as thoroughly
dependent, irresponsible, unfit, and unclean, cleaning the house takes on the character of
resistance; it becomes a political act. Housecleaning itself is not necessarily political, rather,

188

Kritik Answers
the disciplinary context of a gendered social welfare state gives political import to seemingly
banal, everyday activities.

189

Kritik Answers

A2 Performativity (2/2)
COALITIONS MUST PRECEDE VICTORY THROUGH
PERFORMANCE
Jessica Kulynych, Asst Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Polity, Winter,

1997, n2 p315(32)
A performative perspective on participation enriches our understanding of deliberative
democracy. This enlarged understanding can be demonstrated by considering the
examination of citizen politics in Germany presented in Carol Hager's Technological
Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the West German Energy Debate.(86) Her work
skillfully maps the precarious position of citizen groups as they enter into problemsolving in
contemporary democracies. After detailing the German citizen foray into technical debate
and the subsequent creation of energy commissions to deliberate on the long-term goals of
energy policy, she concludes that a dual standard of interpretation and evaluation is
required for full understanding of the prospects for citizen participation. Where traditional
understandings of participation focus on the policy dimension and concern themselves with
the citizens' success or failure to attain policy preferences, she advocates focusing as well on
the discursive, legitimation dimension of citizen action. Hager follows Habermas in
reconstituting participation discursively and asserts that the legitimation dimension offers
an alternative reason for optimism about the efficacy of citizen action. In the discursive
understanding of participation, success is not defined in terms of getting, but rather in terms
of solving through consensus. Deliberation is thus an end in itself, and citizens have
succeeded whenever they are able to secure a realm of deliberative politics where the aim is
forging consensus among participants, rather than achieving victory by some over others.

190

Kritik Answers

Performance is Commodified (1/2)

THEIR POETRY SUPPORTS THE CULTURE INDUSTRY. IT IS
MANUFACTURED DISSENT
Dr. Lee Spinks lectures in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Writing,
Politics, and the Limit: Reading J. H. Prynne's "The Ideal Star-Fighter," Intertexts, Fall 2000 v4 i2
p144(23)
It would be easy to conclude from passages like this that avant-garde styles of writing which
foreground the production of subject positions within the discursive configuration of a text
are necessarily subversive of established political order because they forestall the
"reconciliation of the general and particular, of the rule and the specific demands of the
subject matter" that underpins the systematic totality of the culture industry. This belief in
the inherently subversive effect of textual polyphony and difference underscores Easthope's
reading of modernist poetics. But the matter is not so simple. For as Adorno and
Horkenheimer demonstrate, incommensurable or "refractory material" is always and
everywhere implicated in a dialectical relationship with the "total process of production"
that it opposes (Adorno and Horkheimer xii). One of their more melancholy insights is that
the culture industry actively produces different images and styles in order to reassert the
absolute uniformity of its own authority. Novelty is all around us, from the "standardized
jazz improvisation to the exceptional film star whose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate
her originality" but what is individual here "is no more than the generality's power to stamp
the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such" (Adorno and Horkheimer 154). The
"accidental" or incommensurable detail is "accepted as such" because it can be endlessly
reproduced as a "house style" or "lifestyle practice" and, paradoxically, it is the capacity of
the culture industry to transform difference into a set of uniform discriminations that allows
a social body to be demarcated according to the sectional logic of politicians, advertisers and
marketing executives. Fredric Jameson makes exactly the same point when he observes that
what has happened in the contemporary or postmodern phase of monopoly capitalism is
"that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production
generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of producing ever more
novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now
assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and
experimentation" (Jameson 4-5). It is therefore inadequate to proclaim the ineluctable
emancipatory promise of incommensurable or refractory material because "capitalism also
produces difference or differentiation as a function of its own internal logic" (Jameson 406).

CHALLENGES TO CONFORMITY ONLY CEMENT THE OVERARCHING CONTROL OF THE DOMINANT LANGUAGE
Dr. Lee Spinks lectures in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Writing,
Politics, and the Limit: Reading J. H. Prynne's "The Ideal Star-Fighter," Intertexts, Fall 2000 v4 i2
p144(23)
The central claim of this essay is that these critical debates concerning the dialectic between
totality and difference in modern cultural production provide the most rewarding context
within which to discuss the relationship between textuality and politics in Prynne's poetry.
For Prynne's work takes as its subject the very status of writing, and the epistemological
practices writing both produces and brings into question, in a cultural sphere dominated by
the power of instrumental reason to enforce a principle of "equivalence" where "whatever
does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect" (Adorno and Horkheimer
6). The importance of style, or the mode of relation between thought and its representation,
to this question becomes apparent when we consider that the failure to challenge this
universal principle of equivalence means to accept that the "identity of everything with
everything else is paid for in that nothing may at the same time be identical with itself"
(Adorno and Horkheimer 12). Yet any challenge to this process of abstraction and exchange
based upon the formal autonomy or "difference" of style is vulnerable to Adorno's charge

191

Kritik Answers
that it is through difference and exchange "that non-identical individuals and performances
become commensurable and identical" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 146-47).

192

Kritik Answers

Performance is Commodified (2/2)

POETIC RESISTANCE IS DIRECTED BY THE CULTURE
INDUSTRY
Dr. Lee Spinks lectures in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Writing,
Politics, and the Limit: Reading J. H. Prynne's "The Ideal Star-Fighter," Intertexts, Fall 2000 v4 i2
p144(23)
Prynne's difficult and dialectical style in fact proposes two points of resistance to the
principle of equivalence enforced by instrumental rationality and the culture industry. Both
may be explicated by reference to Adorno's assertion that the work of art is a "fetish against
commodity fetishism" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 227). The fetishistic element within art,
according to Adorno, lies in its illusory claim that its value is integral to itself rather than an
effect of consumption and exchange. This insistence of the artwork upon its autonomy as a
source of value, and the cultivation of styles and modes of reference that place it at one
remove from the world around it, is often identified as the origin of the 'elitism' of modernist
art. But if we reconsider the entire question of modernist style in the context of the
remorseless conversion of use or human labor value into exchange value effected by late
capitalism, then the conviction of the modernist artwork that it conceals an autonomous and
non-exchang- eable source of value offers a challenge to prevailing political and cultural
conditions. For it is only by "persisting with its illusory claim to a non-exchangeable dignity"
argues Simon Jarvis, that "art resists the notion that the qualitatively incommensurable can
be made qualitatively commensurable" (Jarvis 117). This is the artwork's first point of
resistance to the principle of equivalence within commodity production. Yet it might still be
objected that far from challenging the commodification of culture, the autonomous
character of the artwork is instead produced by capitalism, which enables both art and
artistic labor to be alienated from any broader social or cultural purpose.

193

Kritik Answers

Performance Fails
FAITH IN PERFORMANCE IS NAVE AND FAILS TO CHANGE
POLITICS
Rothenberg & Valente 97

[Molly Anne, Assoc. Prof. English @ Tulane, & Joseph, Prof. @ Illinois, Performative Chic:
The Fantasy of a Performative Politics, College Literature 24: 1, February, ASP]
The recent vogue for performativity, particularly in gender and postcolonial studies,
suggests that the desire for political potency has displaced the demand for critical rigor.[1]
Because Judith Butler bears the primary responsibility for investing performativity with its
present critical cachet, her work furnishes a convenient site for exposing the flawed
theoretical formulations and the hollow political claims advanced under the banner of
performativity. We have undertaken this critique not solely in the interests of clarifying
performativity's theoretical stakes: in our view, the appropriation of performativity for
purposes to which it is completely unsuited has misdirected crucial activist energies, not
only squandering resources but even endangering those naive enough to act on
performativity's (false) political promise.
It is reasonable to expect any practical political discourse to essay an analysis which links its
proposed actions with their supposed effects, appraising the fruits of specific political labors
before their seeds are sown. Only by means of such an assessment can any political program
persuade us to undertake some tasks and forgo others. Butler proceeds accordingly: "The
task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed to repeat, and through a radical
proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable repetition itself"
(Gender Trouble 148). Here, at the conclusion to Gender Trouble, she makes good her
promise that subjects can intervene meaningfully, politically, in the signification system
which iteratively constitutes them. The political "task" we face requires that we choose "how
to repeat" gender norms in such a way as to displace them. According to her final chapter,
"The Politics of Parody," the way to displace gender norms is through the deliberate
performance of drag as gender parody.

194

Kritik Answers

**Link Answers: General**

A2 The Case is Apolitical/Has No
Theory
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE IS
FALSE BOTH FORMS OF POLITICAL ACTION INVOLVE AND
DEPEND ON THE OTHER
Homi K. Bhabha, Professor, University of Sussex, THE LOCATION OF CULTURE, 19 94, p. 21-22.
Committed to what? At this stage in the argument, I do not want to identify any
specific 'object' of political allegiance - the Third World, the working class, the
feminist struggle. Although such an objectification Of Political activity is crucial
and must significantly inform political debate, it is not the only option for those
critics or intellectuals who are committed to progressive political change in the
direction of a socialist society. It is a sign of political maturity to accept that there
are many forms of Political writing whose different effects are obscured when they
are divided between the 'theoretical' and the 'activist'. It is not as if the leaflet
involved in the organization of a strike is short on theory, while a speculative
article on the theory of ideology ought to have more practical examples or
applications. They are both forms of discourse and to that extent they produce
rather than reflect their objects of reference. The difference between them lies in
their operational qualities. The leaflet has a specific expository and organizational
purpose, temporally bound to the event; the theory of ideology makes its
contribution to those embedded political ideas and principles that inform the right
to strike. The latter does not justify the former; nor does it necessarily precede it. It
exists side by side with it - the one as an enabling part of the other - like the recto
and verso of a sheet of paper, to use a common serniotic analogy in the uncommon
context of politics.

195

Kritik Answers

**Alternative Answers: General**

Individual Action Fails
THE ALTERNATIVE ALONE WILL FAIL. THE NATURE OF
DISCOURSE AND DOMINANT RECONTEXTUALIZATION
PREVENTS INDIVIDUALS FROM SOLVING
D. Franklin Ayers

2005

The Review of Higher Education, 28.4, Neoliberal Ideology in Community College Mission
Statements: A Critical Discourse Analysis
Because discourses are determined by higher levels of social structuring, textssuch as
community college mission statementsand the discourses they represent are not created
entirely by individuals. Instead, individual producers of text can only choose among the
discursive options available at higher levels of social structuring. Because no ideology is
monolithic, multiple discourses exist and are available to producers of text, although
hegemonic discourses may make alternatives nearly imperceptible. Because discourses
reflect ideologies of groups with unequal power resources and because the producer of text
must choose among these discourses, he or she engages in a negotiation of power relations.
[End Page 534]
To the degree that powerful groups act upon discourses at various levels of social
structuring, their ideologies and world views gain authority. Dominant discourses
consequently determine the meanings assigned to social and material processes, and they do
this in ways that reinforce power inequities. One way that meanings may be determined is
through recontextualization (Fairclough, 1995). Recontextualization is a process in which
the discourse related to one social process dominates or colonizes the discourse related to
another social process.

196

Kritik Answers

Mann
THE CONTEXT OF DEBATE COOPTS THE CRITICISM SINCE IT
IS ANTICIPATED AND FOOTNOTED ALTERNATIVE TACTICS
WOULD BE NECESSARY FOR IT TO HAVE AN EFFECT
Paul Mann, professor of comparative literature at Pomona college, Masocriticism, 1999, pg. 106-107.
Without exception, all positions are oriented toward the institutional apparatus. Marginality
here is only relative and temporary: the moment black studies or womens stud ies or queer
theory conceives of itself as a discipline, its pri mary orientation is toward the institution.
The fact that the institution might treat it badly hardly constitutes an ethical privilege. Any
intellectual who holds a position is a function of this apparatus; his or her marginality is, for
the most part, only an operational device. It is a critical commonplace that the state is not a
monolithic hegemony but rather a constellation of disorganized and fragmentary agencies of
production. This is often taken as a validation for the political potential of marginal critical
movements: inside-outside relations can be facilely deconstructed, and critics can still
congratulate themselves on their resistance, but the contrary is clearly the case. The most
profitable intellectual production does not take place at the center (e.g., romance philology),
where mostly obsolete weapons are produced; the real growth industries are located
precisely on the self-proclaimed margins. It will be argued that resistance is still possible,
and nothing I propose here argues against such a possibility. I wish only to insist that
effective resistance will never be located in the position, however oppositional it imagines
itself to be. Resistance is first of all a function of the apparatus itself. What would seem to be
the transgressive potential of such institutional agencies as certain orders of gender
criticism might demonstrate the entropy of the institution, but it does nothing to prove the
counterpolitical claims of the position. Fantasies of resistance most of ten serve as mere
alibis for collusion. Any position is a state agency, and its relative marginality is a mode of
orientation, not an exception. Effective resistance must be located in other tactical forms

CRITICISM CAN NEVER BE MAINTAINED AND IS IGNORED

BECAUSE OF ITS PROLIFIC NATURE
Paul Mann, professor of comparative literature at Pomona college, Masocriticism, 1999, pg. 16-17.
The avant-garde, which always began in brilliant refusals and destructions, must in the end
abandon those economies that, with frightening efficiency, have put it to use, made it
instrumental, profited from it, developed ways to get a return even from negation, even from
the death drive itself. In the light of the sun of expenditure, such a culture seems the narrowest of misconceptions .
Imagine instead that the vast proliferation of writing, drawing, painting, performancenot just
what cultures have preserved for us through the filtration systems of their own values, but all writing, all music, and so on is the actual, lived field of culture; that culture is waste, expendi ture: productivity and destruction
without any exclusion or discrimination; that all of these works have been produced not so
that a few precious articles of value, the best that has been known and thought, can,
through a sort of reasoned brokerage, be conserved as culture per se, but so that they would
be destroyed; that what is most important about all of those poems and paintings and
constructions is precisely that the vast majority of them disappear even as they are born,
that they dismember and consume themselves without our ever knowing them, vanish in the
air, into the death they most desired, never to be remembered again. Imagine a writing that saw itself in
this light, a light that never shines on most of what we call culture, that never consigns itself to productive discourse but always escapes,
that is valuable only because it escapes, because it is elsewhere, nowhere. Or imagine a certain book: it arrives uncalled for, unpredicted,
perhaps in the mail, perhaps fallen from the sky, unmarked by a publishers apparatus, by advertising, even by an authors name; a book
made of white noise that erases itself as it goes along and everything you say for weeks is stolen from it; a book that you cut into pieces and
disseminate at random (on the street, on walls, through the mail) or that you burn without having read it and scatter the ashes to the four
winds; or imagine such a book that you never receive in the first place. Perhaps that is the useless book one must learn to write, that is the
only book one ever writes. Or perhaps it is precisely a book one cannot write, but only imagine, and in imagining it call it down upon ones
writing, to tear ones own writing apart. As this talk, this argument that began at cross-purposes and went nowhere, unravelling itself as it
proceeded, even now beginning to cease vibrating in the air, will soon vanish ,

leaving nothing but a fading imprint on

your memories, soon to be effaced as you turn toward more productive labors, and itself
only the trace of an expenditure whose disappearance it briefly betrayed

197

Kritik Answers

Power Vaccuum
POWER IS ZERO SUM THE ALTERNATIVE ONLY SHIFTS
POWER ELSEWHERE
John Mearsheimer, Professor at University of Chicago, 2001 (The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics p. 34)
Consequently, states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special
effort to maximize their share of world power. Specifically, they look for opportunities to alter the

balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential

rivals. States employ a variety of meanseconomic, diplomatic, and militaryto shift the balance of power in
their favor, even if doing so makes other states suspicious or even hostile. Because one states gain in
power is another states loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing
with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other
states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states
are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to survive. In
short, great powers have aggressive intentions.

198

Kritik Answers

**SPECIFIC K ANSWERS**
**Apocalyptic Rhetoric**
Perm Solvency
PERM: DO BOTH EVEN YOUR AUTHOR CONCEEDS THAT
APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC USED AWAY FROM RELIGIOUS
FORM IS KEY TO SPUR ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE- ITS
KEY TO AVOIDING TYRANNY
QUINBY in 1994
[Lee, Anti-Apocalypse,

http://www.dhushara.com/book/renewal/voices2/quin/quinby.htm //wyo-pinto]
I am not saying that this is all bad. Precisely because it is on tap in the United
States, it is possible for apocalyptic ideas to aid struggles for democracy by exciting
people toward activism. This is the force of Cornet West's warning about ,this
country's failures in creating a multiracial democracy: "Either we learn a r;ew
language of empathy and compassion, or the fire this time will consume us all. , But
even when apocalyptic imagery is used to fight racist suppressions of freedom, as
with West's allusion to James Baldwin's warning, it runs the risk of displacing
concrete political analysis. While advocating a new kind of leadership "grounded in
grass-roots organizing that highlights democratic accountability," West's insistence
that if we don't learn this lesson the fire will consume us all is the kind of hyperbole
that undermines his own earlier analysis of local devastation. People in positions of
privilege can, and clearly do, dismiss the threat to their own way of life as by and
large inaccurate.
At stake here are the relationships between power, truth, ethics, and apoca@pse. In
attempting to represent the unrepresentable, the unknowable-the End, or death par
excellence -apocalyptic writings are a quintessential technology of power/knowledge. They
promise the defeat of death, at least for the obedient who deserve everlasting life, and the
prolonged agony of destruction for those who have not obeyed the Law of the Father. One
does not have to succumb to apocalyptic eschatology to understand why end-time
propensities imperil democracy: the apocalyptic tenet of preordained history disavows
questionings of received truth, discredits skepticism, and disarms challengers of the status
quo. Appeals to the Day of judgment, the dawn of a New Age, even the dream of a cryogenic
"return" to life, put off the kinds of immediate political and ethical judgments that need to
be made in order to resist both overt domination and the more seductive forms of
disciplinary power operative in the United States today and fostered by the United States in
other countries.

199

Kritik Answers

Apocalyptic Rhetoric Good (1/3)

ONLY BY CONFRONTING THE APOCALYPSE CAN WE EXPOSE
THE CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE SYSTEM OF THE BOMB,
OUR APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC IS KEY
MODERN AMERICAN POETRY NO DATE
[from Thomas McClanahan's "Gregory Corso",

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/corso/bomb.htm //wyo-pinto]
Although it can be read as a polemic against nuclear war, "Bomb" is also an
examination of the loss of humanistic virtue. Additionally, it is a vehicle for
expressing Corso's developing epistemology. To know the world, for the younger
poet, is to recognize it as a Heraclitean continuum, an alteration of consciousness
that prefigures the way man understands himself and the world about him. Like
the bomb, powerful forces--whether they are generated by great religious prophets
or authentic poetic statement--provide the elemental energy that transforms
human consciousness. So Corso's poem is a paradoxical rendering of two points of
view: on the one hand it is about the destructive power of a weapon that can
annihilate mankind, while at the other extreme it concerns the positive force of
man's own potential to see the world from a new perspective.

CONFRONTING THE APOCALYPSE CAUSES SOCIAL

TRANCENDENCE- ITS THE ONLY WAY TO RESCUE PEOPLE
WINK in 2001

[Walter, nqa, Apocalypse Now? Christian Century, Oct 17,

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79514992
//wyo-pinto]

If that were the whole story about apocalyptic, many of us would want nothing to do with it.
That is not the whole story, however. There is a positive role for apocalyptic as well as its
better-known negative. The positive power of apocalyptic lies in its capacity to force
humanity to face threats of unimaginable proportions in order to galvanize efforts at self and
social transcendence. Only such Herculean responses can actually rescue people from the
threat and make possible the continuation of humanity on the other side. Paradoxically, the
apocalyptic warning is intended to remove the apocalyptic threat by acts of apocalyptic
transcendence.

200

Kritik Answers

Apocalyptic Rhetoric Good (2/3)

CONFRONTING THE APOCALYPSE CREATES A FEARLESS
FEAR THAT INCITES ACTION AGAINST WHAT IS SAID AS
INEVITABLE- THIS FEARLESS FEAR IS KEY TO ACTION AS
OPPOSED TO THE INACTION OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM- A
CALL FOR INACTION PARALYZES*****
WINK in 2001 [Walter, nqa, Apocalypse Now? Christian Century, Oct 17,

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79514992 //wyo-pinto]
Positive apocalyptic, by contrast, calls on our every power to avert what seems
inevitable. "Nothing can save us that is possible," the poet W. H. Auden intoned
over the madness of the nuclear crisis; "we who must die demand a miracle." And
the miracle we got came about because people like the physician Helen Caldicott
refused to accept nuclear annihilation. But she did it by forcing her hearers to
visualize the consequences of their inaction.
Imagination, says Anders, is the sole organ capable of conveying a truth so
overwhelming that we cannot take it in. Hence the bizarre imagery that always
accompanies apocalyptic. Optimists want to believe that reason will save us. They
want to prevent us from becoming really afraid. The anti-apocalyptist, on the
contrary, insists that it is our capacity to fear which is too small and which does not
correspond to the magnitude of the present danger. Therefore, says Anders, the
anti-apocalyptist attempts to increase our capacity to fear. "Don't fear fear, have
the courage to be frightened, and to frighten others too. Frighten thy neighbor as
thyself." This is no ordinary fear, however; it is a fearless fear, since it dares at last
to face the real magnitude of the danger. And it is a loving fear, since it embraces
fear in order to save the generations to come. That is why everything the antiapocalyptist says is said in order not to become true.
If we do not stubbornly keep in mind how probable the disaster is and if we do not
act accordingly, we will not be able to prevent the warnings from becoming true.
There is nothing more frightening than to be right. And if some amongst you,
paralyzed by the gloomy likelihood of the catastrophe, should already have lost
their courage, they, too, still have the chance to prove their love of man by heeding
the cynical maxim: "Let's go on working as though we had the right to hope. Our
despair is none of our business."

201

Kritik Answers

Apocalyptic Rhetoric Good (3/3)

WE MUST TAKE ACTION IN THE FACE OF THE REAL
APOCALYPSES- GLOBAL WARMING, THE OZONE HOLE,
WAR, POLLUTION, NUCLEAR WAR- THE THREATS WONT
GO AWAY ******
WINK in 2001 [Walter, nqa, Apocalypse Now? Christian Century, Oct 17,

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_7951
4992 //wyo-pinto]
It is not difficult to see in that warning perils that threaten the very viability of life on earth
today. Global warming, the ozone hole, overpopulation, starvation and malnutrition, war,
unemployment, the destruction of species and the rain forests, pollution of water and air,
pesticide and herbicide poisoning, errors in genetic engineering, erosion of topsoil,
overfishing, anarchy and crime, the possibility of a nuclear mishap, chemical warfare or allout nuclear war: together, or in some cases singly, these dangers threaten to "catch us
unexpectedly, like a trap." Our inability thus far to measure ourselves against these threats is
an ominous portent that apocalypse has already rendered us powerless.
Terrible as it was, the destruction of the World Trade Center was not an apocalypse. That
horror will slowly recede. Other acts of infamy may take place. But we can anticipate a time
when terrorism will decline. Nor are we helpless. We have the means to stop at least many,
perhaps even most, of the terrorist attacks hurled at us. But we can see the other side of this
catastrophe, when life feels normal again.
The threats to our very survival that I listed above, however, will not go away. They could
well spell the end of humanity, and even of most sentient life. This is the awful truth that we
have yet to recognize: We are living in an apocalyptic time disguised as normal, and that is
why we have not responded appropriately. If we are in the midst of the sixth great
extinction, as scientists tell us we are, our response has in no way been commensurate with
the danger. We Homo sapiens are witnessing the greatest annihilation of species in the last
65 million years, and our children may live to witness ecocide with their own eyes. So while
we are understandably preoccupied with terrorism, and must do everything necessary to
stamp it out, we must at the same time wake up to these more serious threats that could
effectively end life on this planet.

SOUTH AFRICA PROVES THAT OUR MODEL OF APOCALYPSE

WORKS- WE MUST INCITE ACTION
WINK in 2001 [Walter, nqa, Apocalypse Now? Christian Century, Oct 17,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79514992 //wyo-pinto]
BUT THE VERDICT is not yet in. It is late, but a positive response to the real
apocalypse of our time is still possible. Consider South Africa. When I was there in
the 1980s, it appeared that armed revolution was inevitable. Blacks were becoming
more desperate by the day. Teenage boys were confronting the police and army
without concern for their safety. Chaos was beginning to overtake the townships, as
children, outraged by the timorousness of their parents, seized the initiative
themselves. Whites were taking an increasingly hard line. It was a recipe for
disaster. The whole scene reeked of an apocalypse of the negative sort.
Then the most unexpected thing happened. The white government chose, under intense
internal and international pressure, to relinquish power, and negotiated with its former
black enemies a process that led to the election of a black president, a model constitution,
and relatively low casualties, considering the alternatives. No one to my knowledge
anticipated this turn of events. What had appeared as an inevitable (negative) apocalyptic
bloodbath turned out to have been a (positive) apocalyptic situation instead, thanks to the
"anti-apoca

202

Kritik Answers

**Badiou**
A2 Badiou: 2AC
EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE REQUIRES A
REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION, MEANING THAT
EVERY AFFIRMATION OF LIFE OCCURS AGAINS THE
BACKGROUND OF HUMN DEATH AND FINITUDE
Zizek '99

[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish
Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 153-4//uwyo-ajl]
It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis,
determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical restructuring of the analysand's
subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. Does not
Lacan himself provide a number of hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond
Law, using the very Pauline terms to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St
Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does not already posit a 'new

harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean for one. However,
this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is Lacan's contention that, in this
negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is confronted which is already
'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity, a negative gesture of
withdrawal, precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identifiction with a Cause:
negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic identification that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it, but is simultaneously obfuscated by it
and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what

'Death' stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of
the world', the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its
links with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate clean' that opens up the domain of the
symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier. Here,
Lacan parts company with St Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already was dead - that is to say, after Freud, one cannot directly
have faith in a Truth-Event;

every such Event ultimately remains a semblance obfuscating a

preceding Void whose Freudian name is death drive. So Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination
of the exact status of this domain beyond the rule of the Law. That is to say: like Lacan, Badiou delineates the contours
of a domain beyond the Order of Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the 'morbid' super ego
connection between Law and its transgressive desire. For Lacan, however, the Freudian topic of the death drive cannot
be accounted for in the terms of this connection: the 'death drive' is not the outcome of the morbid

confusion of Life and Death caused by the intervention of the symbolic Law. For Lacan, the
uncanny domain beyond the Order of Being is what he calls the domain 'between the two
deaths', the pre-ontologicalf domain of monstrous spectral apparitions, the domain that is
'immortal', yet not in the Badiouian sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but in
the sense of what Lacan calls lamella, of the monstrous 'undead' object-libido.18

203

Kritik Answers

Perm Solvency (1/3)

WE SHOULD COMBINE THE PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE
THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO SOLVE THE CASE WHILE
MAINTAINING AN AFFIRMATIVE CONCEPTION OF ETHICS
OUTSIDE THE BOUNDS OF THE STATE
Hallward, Lecturer in the French department @ Kings College, 2K2 (Peter BADIOU'S
POLITICS: EQUALITY AND JUSTICE,
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm)

At this point, the reader has to wonder if the OPs policy of strict non-participation in the
state really stands up. The OP declares with some pride that we never vote, just as in the
factories, we keep our distance from trade unionism (LDP, 12.02.95: 1).26 The OP
consistently maintains that its politics of prescription requires a politics of non-vote. But
why, now, this either/or? Once the state has been acknowledged as a possible figure of the
general interest, then surely it matters who governs that figure. Regarding the central public
issues of health and education, the OP maintains, like most mainstream socialists, that the
positive tasks on behalf of all are incumbent upon the state (LDP, 10.11.94: 1).27 That
participation in the state should not replace a prescriptive externality to the state is obvious
enough, but the stern either/or so often proclaimed in the pages of La Distance politique
reads today like a displaced trace of the days when the choice of state or revolution still
figured as a genuine alternative.

WE SHOULD COMBINE BADIOUS GENERIC CONCEPTION OF

BEING WITH OUR DESCRIPTION OF THE SPECIFIC, WHICH
DOESNT RESULT IN DEPICTION OF THE SINGULAR
Hallward, Lecturer in the French Department @ Kings College, 2K3 (Peter Badiou: A
Subject to Truth, P. 274)
At each point, the alternative to Badious strictly generic conception of things is

a more properly specific understanding of individuals and situations as

conditioned by the relations that both enable and constrain their existence. In
order to develop this alternative, it is essential to distinguish scrupulously between the
specific and what might be called the specified (Badious objectified).5 Actors are
specific to a situation even though their actions are not specified by it, just as a
historical account is specific to the facts it describes even though its assessment is not
specified by them. The specific is a purely relational subjective domain. The specified, by
contrast, is defined by positive, intrinsic characteristics or essences (physical, cultural,
personal, and so on). The specified is a matter of inherited instincts as much as of acquired
habits. We might say that the most general effort of philosophy or critique should

be to move from the specified to the specificwithout succumbing to the

temptations of the purely singular. Badiou certainly provides a most compelling
critique of the specified. But he hasat least thus far inadequate means of
distinguishing specified from specific. The result, in my view, is an ultimately
unconvincing theoretical basis for his celebration of an extreme
particularity as such.

204

Kritik Answers

Perm Solvency (2/3)

BADIOUS OWN WRITING CONCEDES THE NECESSITY OF
INCLUDING THE STATE WITHIN OUR POLITICAL FOCUS.
WHEN SOMETHING MUST BE DONE THAT ONLY THE STATE
CAN DO LIKE THE PLAN BADIOUS ETHICS FORCE US TO
DEMAND THE PLAN FROM THE STATE WHILE
MAINTAINING A PROPER DISTANCE TOWARDS IT THIS
ALLOWS THE PLAN TO FUNCTION AS A TRULY ETHICAL
COMMITMENT
Hallward, Lecturer in the French department @ Kings College, 2K2 (Peter BADIOU'S
POLITICS: EQUALITY AND JUSTICE,
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm)

Badious early and unequivocally hostile attitude to the state has considerably
evolved. Just how far it has evolved remains a little unclear. His conception of politics remains resolutely anti-consensual, anti-reWe know that

presentative, and thus anti-democratic (in the ordinary sense of the word). A philosophy today is above all something that enables people
to have done with the "democratic" submission to the world as it is (Entretien avec Alain Badiou, 1999: 2). But he seems more willing,
now, to engage with this submission on its own terms. La Distance politique again offers the most precise points de repre. On the one
hand, the OP remains suspicious of any political campaign for instance, electoral contests or petition movements that operates as a
prisoner of the parliamentary space (LDP, 19-20.04.96: 2). It remains an absolute necessity [of politics] not to have the state as norm.

their
separation need not lead to the banishment of the state from the field of political thought
(LDP, 6.05.93: 1).24 The OP now conceives itself in a tense, non-dialectical vis--vis with the state,
a stance that rejects an intimate cooperation (in the interests of capital) as much as it refuses any
antagonistic conception of their operation, any conception that smacks of classism. There is to no more
choice to be made between the state or revolution; the vis--vis demands the presence of the two terms and not
The separation of politics and state is foundational of politics. On the other hand, however, it is now equally clear that

the annihilation of one of the two (LDP, 11.01.95: 3-4). Indeed, at the height of the December 95 strikes, the OP recognised that the only
contemporary movement of dstatisation with any real power was the corporate-driven movement of partial de-statification in the
interests of commercial flexibility and financial mobility. Unsurprisingly, we are against this withdrawal of the state to the profit of capital,
through general, systematic and brutal privatisation. The

state is what can sometimes take account of people

and their situations in other registers and by other modalities than those of profit. The state
assures from this point of view the public space and the general interest. And capital does
not incarnate the general interest (LDP, 15.12.96: 11). Coming from the author of Thorie de la contradiction, these are
remarkable words.

205

Kritik Answers

Perm Solvency (3/3)

BADIOUS ETHICAL PROJECT NECESSITATES ENDLESSLY
RECONSTITUTING THE SOCIAL REALM TO OPEN IT UP TO
THE TRUTH-EVENT THE SPECIFIC DEMAND OF THE PLAN
CAN HAVE UNIVERSAL ETHICAL RESONANCE AND CAN
FORM THE BASIS OF A POLITICS OF TRUTH
Barker, Lecturer in Communications and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Philosophy @
Cardiff U, 2K2 (Jason, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, P. 146-48)
How does Balibars theory of the State constitution stand alongside Badious, and can we find any key areas of mutual agreement between
these two ex-Althusserians? The most general area of difference involves Balibars aporetic approach to the question of the masses.
Balibar refuses to see any principle underlying the masses conduct, since the latter are synonymous with the power of the State. Badiou,
on the other hand, regards the masses (ideally) as the bearers of the category of justice, to which the State remains indifferent (AM, 114).
Two divergent theories of the State, then, each of which is placed in the service of a distinctive ethics. With Balibar we have an ethics or
ethic in the sense of praxis of communication which encourages a dynamic and expanding equilibrium of desires where every opinion

With Badiou we have an ethics of truths

which hunts down those exceptional political statements in order to subtract
from them their egalitarian core, thereby striking a blow for justice against the
passive democracy of the State. Overall we might say that the general area of agreement lies in the fact that, in
has an equal chance of counting in the democratic sphere.

each case, democracy remains a rational possibility. In particular, for both Balibar and Badiou, it is love as an amorous feeling towards or
encounter with ones fellow man a recognition that the fraternal part that is held in common between human beings is somehow
greater than the whole of their differences which forges the social bond. However, on the precise nature of the ratio of this bond their
respective paths diverge somewhat. In Balibars case we are dealing with an objective illusion wherein one imagines that the love one feels
for an object (an abstract egalitarian ideal, say) is shared by others. Crucially, love in this sense is wholly ambivalent, wildly vacillating
between itself and its inherent opposite, hate.18 On this evidence we might say that a communist peace would be really indistinct from a
fascist one. Therefore, the challenge for Balibar is to construct a prescriptive political framework capable of operating without repression
in a utilitarian public sphere where the free exchange of opinions is more likely than not to result in the self-limitation of extreme views.

In Badious case what we are dealing with, on the other hand and what we have been dealing with more
or less consistently throughout this book is a subjective reality. The social contract is forever
being conditioned, worked on practically from within by the political
militants, in readiness for the occurrence of the truth-event. This is the
unforeseen moment of an amorous encounter between two natural
adversaries (a group of students mounting a boycott of university fees, for instance) which retrieves the latent
communist axiom of equality from within the social process. Here we have a
particular call for social justice (free education for all!) which strikes a chord with the
whole people (students and non-students alike). Crucially, love in this sense is infinite, de-finite, in
seizing back (at least a part of) the State power directly into the hands of the people.
Moreover, in this encounter between students and the university authorities there is an invariant connection (of communist hope) which is

the challenge is to
develop and deepen an ethical practice, not in any utilitarian or
communitarian sense since the latter would merely risk forcing a political
manifesto prematurely, perhaps giving rise to various brands of State-sponsored
populism9 but in the sense of a politics capable of combating repression; a
politics which, in its extreme singularity, holds itself open to seizure by Truth.
shared by all, and where any difference of opinion is purely incidental. Momentarily, at least. For Badiou,

206

Kritik Answers

Human Rights Solve

BADIOU IS WRONG ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS THEYRE A
CRUCIAL RALLYING POINT FOR ACTIVISTS AGAINST
OPPRESSION
Dews, Prof of Philosophy @ U of Essex, 2K4 (Peter, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the
Future of Philosophy, P. 109)
Badiou is not mistaken, of course, in suggesting that the discourse of human rights has come to
provide a crucial ideological cover for economic and cultural imperialism , not to mention outright
military intervention. No one doubts the murderous hypocrisy with which the Western powers, led by the US, have invoked the language of
human rights in recent years. But

'human rights' have also been a rallying call for many activists
around the globe. In the form of the Helsinki Accords, they were a major focus for the East European opposition in the years
leading up to 1989- They were equally important tactically for Latin America's struggle against the
dictatorships, and continue to provide a vital political point of leverage for many indigenous
populations, not to mention the Tibetans, the Burmese, the Palestinians . The United States, as is well
known, continues to refuse recognition to the recently established International Criminal Court, fearful, no doubt, that members of its own
armed forces, and perhaps of former administrations, could be amongst those arraigned before it.

207

Kritik Answers

Double Bind
BADIOU IS IN A DOUBLE-BIND: EITHER THERES NO WAY
TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN TRUE AND FALSE EVENTS
WHICH MEANS THE ALTERNATIVE CANT SOLVE, OR
SUBJECTS OF THE EVENT GO INTO IT WITH A
PRECONCEIVED NOTION OF THE EVENT, WHICH MAKES
TRUE FIDELITY IMPOSSIBLE
Hallward, Professor of French at Kings College, London, 2K4 (Peter, Think Again:
Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 15-16)

Badiou insists on the rare and

unpredictable character of every truth. On the other hand, we know that
every truth, as it composes a generic or egalitarian sampling of the situation, will proceed in such a way as
to suspend the normal grip of the state of its situation by eroding
the distinctions used to classify and order parts of the situation . Is
One implication of this last point is easily generalized.

this then a criterion that subjects must presume in advance or one that they come to discover in each case? If not the

if truth is entirely a matter of post-evental implication or

consequence, then there can be no clear way of distinguishing,
before it is too late, a genuine event (which relates only to the void of the situation, i.e. to
the way inconsistency might appear within a situation) from a false event (one that, like September 11th
or the triumph of National Socialism, reinforces the basic distinctions governing the situation). But if there
is always an initial hunch which guides the composition of a
generic set, a sort of preliminary or prophetic commitment to
the generic just as there is, incidentally, in Cohens own account of generic sets, insofar as this account
seeks to demonstrate a possibility implicit in the ordinary extensional definition of set25 then it seems
difficult to sustain a fully post -evental conception of truth. In short: is
former,

the initial decision to affirm an event unequivocally free, a matter of consequence alone? Or is it tacitly guided by the
criteria of the generic at every step, and thereby susceptible to a kind of anticipation?

208

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fractures Coalitions

BADIOUS ALTERNATIVE IS A DISASTROUS FORM OF
POLITICS BECAUSE THE SUBJECTS OF A TRUTH CAN NEVER
TRANSLATE THAT TRUTH TO THOSE HOSTILE TO THEIR
AGENDA, AND THUS CAN NEVER MAKE POLITICAL
COALITIONS
Hallward, Professor of French at Kings College, London, 2K4 (Peter, Think Again:
Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 17)

is it enough to explain the process of subjectivation, the

transformation of an ordinary individual into the militant subject of a uni versalizable cause, or truth, mainly through analogies with the process of
conversion? It is certainly essential to maintain (after Saint Paul) that anyone can become the militant of a truth, that truth is
not primarily a matter of background or disposition. If it exists at all, truth must be equally
indifferent to both nature and nurture, and it is surely one of the great virtues of Badious account of the
6. In a related sense,

subject that it, like Zizeks or Lacans, remains irreducible to all the forces (historical, social, cultural, genetic .. .) that shape the individual

the lack of any substantial explanation of

subjective empowerment, of the process that enables or inspires an
individual to become a subject, again serves only to make the account of
subjectivation unhelpfully abrupt and abstract. Isnt there a danger that by
disregarding issues of motivation and resolve at play in any subjective
decision, the militants of a truth will preach only to the converted? Doesnt
the real problem of any political organization begin where Badious
analyses tend to leave off, i.e. with the task of finding ways whereby a truth
will begin to ring true for those initially indifferent or hostile to its
implications?
or ego in the ordinary sense. On the other hand,

209

Kritik Answers

Divorcing Politics from State Bad

BADIOUS DESIRE TO SEPARATE POLITICS FROM THE STATE
MAKES POLITICS ITSELF IMPOSSIBLE
Bensaid, Prof @ the U of Paris VIII and leading member of the Ligue Commiuniste
Revolutionnaire, 2K4 (Daniel Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 99-100)
Yet in

Badiou, the intermittence of event and subject renders the very idea of politics
problematic. According to him, politics defines itself via fidelity to the event whereby the victims of oppression declare themselves.
His determination to prise politics free from the state in order to subjecrivize it, to deliver it from history in
order to hand it over to the event, is part of a tentative search for an autonomous politics of the
oppressed. The alternative effort, to subordinate politics to some putative meaning of history, which has ominous echoes in recent
history, is he suggests to incorporate it within the process of general technicization and to reduce it to the management of state affairs.
One must have the courage to declare that, from the point of view of politics, history as meaning or direction does not exist: all that exists
is the periodic occurrence of the a priori conditions of chance. However,

this divorce between event and history

(between the event and its historically determined conditions) tends to render politics if not
unthinkable then at least impracticable (PP 18).

BADIOUS ALTERNATIVE FAILS BECAUSE HES BLIND TO

POLITICAL POWER STRUCTURES HIS DEMAND TO
DIVORCE POLITICS FROM THE STATE MEANS IT CANT DEAL
WITH TODAYS MOST PRESSING PROBLEMS
Hallward, Professor of French at Kings College, London, 2K4 (Peter, Think Again:
Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 18-19)

to what extent can we abstract an exclusively political truth from matters relating
to society, history and the state? Take those most familiar topics of cultural politics: gender, sexuality and race. No doubt
Most obviously,

the greater part of the still incomplete transformation here is due to militant subjective mobilizations that include the anti-colonial wars of
liberation, the civil rights movement, the feminist movements, Stonewall, and so on. But has cumulative, institutional change played no

since under the current state

of things political authority is firmly vested in the hands of those with economic power, can
a political prescription have any enduring effect if it manages only to distance or suspend
the operation of such power? If a contemporary political sequence is to last (if at least it is to avoid
the usual consequences of capital flight and economic sabotage) must it not also directly entail a genuine
transformation of the economy itself, i.e. enable popular participation in economic decisions, community or workers
control over resources and production, and so on? In todays circumstances, if a political prescription is to
have any widespread consequence, isnt it essential that it find some way of bridging the gap
between the political and the economic? Even Badious own privileged example indicates the uncertain purity of
role in the slow movement towards racial or sexual indistinction, precisely? More importantly:

politics. The declaration of 18 March 1871 (which he quotes as the inaugural affirmation of a proletarian political capacity) commits the
Communards to taking in hand the running of public affairs,3 and throughout its short existence the Commune busies itself as much with

Is a sharp distinction between

politics and the state helpful in such circumstances? Do forms of discipline subtracted from
the state, from the party, apply in fact to anything other than the beginning of relatively
limited political sequences? Does the abstract ethical imperative, continue!, coupled with a
classical appeal to moderation and restraint ,38 suffice to safeguard the long-term persistence
of political sequences from the altogether necessary return of state-like functions (military,
matters of education, employment and administration as with issues of equality and power.

bureaucratic, institutional . . .)? To what extent, in short, does Badious position, which he presents in anticipation of an as yet obscure step
beyond the more state-centred conceptions of Lenin and Mao, rather return him instead to the familiar objections levelled at earlier
theories of anarchism?

210

Kritik Answers

**Baudrillard**
Baudrillard Destroys Social Change
(1/2)
BAUDRILLARDS ALTERNATIVE ALLOWS CONSERVATIVE
IDEOLOGICAL DISTORTION
Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff,
Wales, Whats Wrong with Postmodernism, 1990, p. 190-191. *Gender

modified

Baudrillards alternative is stated clearly enough: a hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the
imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only
for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference (p. 167). It is
a vision which should bring great comfort to government advisers, PR experts, campaign
managers, opinion-pollsters, media watch-dogs, Pentagon [spokespeople] spokesmen and
others with an interest in maintaining this state of affairs. Baudrillards imagery of orbital
recurrence and the simulated generation of difference should commend itself to advocates
of a Star Wars program whose only conceivable purpose is to escalate EastWest tensions
and divert more funds to the military-industrial complex. There is no denying the extent to
which this and similar strategies of disinformation have set the agenda for public debate
across a range of crucial policy issues. But the fact remains (and this phrase carries more
than just a suasive or rhetorical force) that there is a difference between what we are given to
believe and what emerges from the process of subjecting such beliefs to an informed critique
of their content and modes of propagation. This process may amount to a straightforward
demand that politicians tell the truth and be held to account for their failing to do so. Of
course there are cases like the IrangateContra affair or Thatchers role in events leading
up to the Falklands war where a correspondence-theory might seem to break down since
the facts are buried away in Cabinet papers, the evidence concealed by some piece of highlevel chicanery (Official Secrets, security interests, reasons of state, etc.), or the documents
conveniently shredded in time to forestall investigation of their content. But there is no
reason to think as with Baudrillards decidedly Orwellian prognosis that this puts the
truth forever beyond reach, thus heralding an age of out-and-out hyperreality. For one can
still apply other criteria of truth and falsehood, among them a fairly basic coherence-theory
that would point out the various lapses, inconsistencies, non-sequiturs, downright
contradictions and so forth which suffice to undermine the official version of events.
(Margaret Thatchers various statements on the Malvinas conflict especially the sinking of
the General Beigrano would provide a good example here.)29 It may be argued that the
truth-conditions will vary from one specific context to another; that such episodes involve
very different criteria according to the kinds of evidence available; and therefore that it is no
use expecting any form of generalised theory to establish the facts of this or that case. But
this ignores the extent to which theories (and truth-claims) inform our every act of rational
appraisal, from commonsense decisions of a day-to-day, practical kind to the most
advanced levels of speculative thought. And it also ignores the main lesson to be learnt from
Baudrillards texts: that any politics which goes along with the current postmodernist drift
will end up by effectively endorsing and promoting the work of ideological mystification.

211

Kritik Answers

Baudrillard Destroys Social Change

(2/2)
RELEGATING HUMAN SUFFERING TO THE REALM OF THE
SIGN AND SIMULATION IS JUST DISGUISED NIHILISM,
WHICH CRUSHES THE POSSIBILITY FOR EFFECTIVE
POLITICS
Kellner, Philosophy Chair @ UCLA, 89 (Douglas, Jean Baudrillard, P. 107-8)
Yet does the sort of symbolic exchange which Baudrillard advocates really provide a solution to the question of death? Baudrillards
notion of symbolic exchange between life and death and his ultimate embrace of nihilism (see 4.4) is probably his most un-Nietzschean

radically devalues life and focuses with a fascinated gaze on that

which is most terrible death. In a popular French reading of Nietzsche, his transvaluation
of values demanded negation of all repressive and life- negating values in favor of
affirmation of life, joy and happiness. This philosophy of value valorized life over death and
derived its values from phenomena which enhanced, refined and nurtured human life. In
Baudrillard, by contrast, life does not exist as an autonomous source of value, and the body
exists only as the caarnality of signs, as a mode of display of signification. His sign fetishism
erases all materialjty from the body and social life, and makes possible a fascinated
aestheticized fetishism of signs as the primary ontological reality. This way of seeing erases
suffering, disease, pain and the horror of death from the body and social life and replaces it
with the play of signs Baudrillards alternative. Politics too is reduced to a play of signs,
and the ways in which different politics alleviate or intensify human suffering disappears
from the Baudrillardian universe. Consequently Baudrillards theory spirals into a fascination
with signs which leads him to embrace certain privileged forms of sign culture and to reject
others (that is, the theoretical signs of modernity such as meaning, truth, the social, power and so on) and to pay less and
less attention to materiality (that is, to needs, desire, suffering and so on) a trajectory will ultimately lead
him to embrace nihilism (see 4.4). Thus Baudrillards interpretation of the body, his refusal of theories of sexuality which link
moment, the instant in which his thought

it with desire and pleasure, and his valorization of death as a mode of symbolic exchange which valorizes sacrifice, suicide and other
symbolic modes of death are all part and parcel of a fetishizing of signs, of a valorization of sign culture over all other modes of social
life. Such fetishizing of sign culture finds its natural (and more harmless) home in the fascination with the realm of sign culture which we
call art. I shall argue that Baudrillards trajectory exhibits an ever more intense aestheticizing of social theory and philosophy, in which the
values of the representation of social reality, political struggle and change and so on are displaced in favor of a (typically French) sign
fetishism. On this view, Baudrillards trajectory is best interpreted as an increasingly aggressive and extreme fetishizing of signs, which
began in his early works in the late 1 960s and which he was only gradually to exhibit in its full and perverse splendor as aristocratic
aestheticism from the mid-1970s to the present. Let us now trace the evolution of his fascination with art, a form of sign culture which
Baudrillard increasingly privileges and one which provides an important feature attraction of the postmodern carnival.

212

Kritik Answers

Alternative Masks Violence

FOCUS ON THE HYPER-REAL PRIVILEGES THE SIGNIFIER
OVER THE SIGNIFIED, NUMBING US TO ACTUAL VIOLENCE
Krishna 93

[Snakaran, Dept. Poli Sci @ Hawaii, Alternatives 18, 399]

By emphasizing the technology and speed in the Gulf War, endlessly analyzing the
representation of the war itself, without a simultaneous exposition of the ground realities,
postmodernist analyses wind up, unwittingly, echoing the Pentagon and the White House in
their claims that this was a clean war with smart bombs that take out only defense
installations with minimal collateral damage. One needs to reflesh the Gulf War dead
through our postmortems instead of merely echoing, with virilio and others, the
disappearance of territory or the modern warrior with the new technologies; or the
intertext connecting the war and television; or the displacement of the spectacle.
Second, the emphasis on speed with which the annihilation proceeded once the war began
tends to obfuscate the long build-up to the conflict and US complicity in Iraqi foreign and
defense policy in prior times. Third, as the details provided above show, if there was
anything to highlight about the war, it was not so much its manner of representation as the
incredible levels of annihilation that have been perfected. To summarize: I am not
suggesting that postmodern analysts of the war are in agreement with the Pentagons claims
regarding a clean war; I am suggesting that their preoccupation with representation, sign
systems, and with the signifier over the signified, leaves one with little sense of the
annihilation visited upon the people and land of Iraq. And, as the Vietnam War proved and
Schwartzkopf well realized, without that physicalist sense of violence war can be more
effectively sold to a jingoistic public.

213

Kritik Answers

Our Representations Solve

TURNMEDIA IMAGES REVEAL THEIR OWN ILLUSIONS
Jean Baudrillard, professor of philosophy of culture and media at Univ. or Paris, 1994,
Illusion of the End, pg. 60-61
And yet there will, nonetheless, have been a kind of verdict in this Romanian affair, and the
artificial heaps of corpses will have been of some use, all the same. One might ask whether
the Romanians, by the very excessiveness of this staged event and the simulacrum of their
revolution, have not served as demystifiers of news and its guiding principle. For, if the
media image has put an end to the credibility of the event, the event will, in its turn, have
put an end to the credibility of the image. Never again shall we be able to look at a television
picture in good faith, and this is the finest collective demystification we have ever known.
The finest revenge over this new arrogant power, this power to blackmail by events. Who
can say what responsibility attaches to the televisual production of a false massacre
(Timisoara), as compared with the perpetrating of a true massacre? This is another kind of
crime against humanity, a hijacking of fantasies, affects and the credulity of hundreds of
millions of people by means of television a crime of blackmail and simulation. What
penalty is laid down for such a hijacking? There is no way to rectify this situation and we
must have no illusions: there is no perverse effect, nor even anything scandalous in the
Timisoara syndrome. It is simply the (immoral) truth of news, the secret purpose
[destination] of which is to deceive us about the real, but also to undeceive us about the real.
There is no worse mistake than taking the real for the real and, in that sense, the very excess
of media illusion plays a vital disillusioning role. In this way, news could be said to undo its
own spell by its effects and the violence of information to be avenged by the repudiation and
indifference it engenders. Just as we should be unreservedly thankful for the existence of
politicians, who take on themselves the responsibility for that wearisome function, so we
should be grateful to the media for existing and taking on themselves the triumphant
illusionism of the world of communications, the whole ambiguity of mass culture, the
confusion of ideologies, the stereotypes, the spectacle, the banality soaking up all these
things in their operation. While, at the same time, constituting a permanent test of
intelligence, for where better than on television can one learn to question every picture,
every word, every commentary? Television inculcates indifference distance, scepticism and
unconditional apathy. Through the worlds becoming-image, it anaesthetizes the
imagination, provokes a sickened abreaction, together with a surge of adrenalin which
induces total disillusionment. Television and the media would render reality [le reel]
dissuasive, were it not already so. And this represents an absolute advance in the
consciousness or the cynical unconscious of our age.

214

Kritik Answers

Baudrillard is Wrong (1/2)

BAUDRILLARDS CRITIQUE IS EMPIRICALLY DENIED BY
THE GULF WAR
Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff,
Wales, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War, 19 92, p. 11.
How far wrong can a thinker go and still lay claim to serious attention? One useful test-case
is Jean Baudrillard, a cult figure on the current postmodernist scene, and purveyor of some
of the silliest ideas yet to gain a hearing among disciples of French intellectual fashion. Just
a couple of days before war broke out in the Gulf, one could find Baudrillard regaling
readers of The Guardian newspaper with an article which declared that this war would never
happen, existing as it did only as a figment of mass-media simulation, war-games rhetoric or
imaginary scenarios which exceeded all the limits of real-world, factual possibility.1
Deterrence had worked for the past forty years in the sense that war had become strictly
unthinkable except as a rhetorical phenomenon, an exchange of ever-escalating threats and
counter-threats whose exorbitant character was enough to guarantee that no such event
would ever take place. What remained was a kind of endless charade, a phoney war in which
the stakes had to do with the management of so-called public opinion, itself nothing more
than a reflex response to the images, the rhetoric and PR machinery which create the
illusion of consensus support by supplying all the right answers and attitudes in advance.
There would be no war, Baudrillard solemnly opined, because talk of war had now become a
substitute for the event, the occurrence or moment of outbreak which the term war had
once signified. Quite simply, we had lost all sense of the difference or the point of
transition between a war of words, a mass-media simulation conducted (supposedly) by
way of preparing us for the real thing, and the thing itself which would likewise take place
only in the minds and imaginations of a captive TV audience, bombarded with the same
sorts of video-game imagery that had filled their screens during the build-up campaign.

215

Kritik Answers

Baudrillard is Wrong (2/2)

BAUDRILLARDS CRITIQUE IS NAVE AND CONTRADICTORY,
DOES NOT CORRESPOND WITH REALITY, AND IS
NORMATIVELY USELESS
James Marsh, Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, 19 95, Critique, Action, and
Liberation, pp. 292-293
Such an account, however, is as one-sided or perhaps even more one-sided than that of
naive modernism. We note a residual idealism that does not take into account
socioeconomic realities already pointed out such as the corporate nature of media, their role
in achieving and legitimating profit, and their function of manufacturing consent. In such a
postmodernist account is a reduction of everything to image or symbol that misses the
relationship of these to realities such as corporations seeking profit, impoverished workers
in these corporations, or peasants in Third-World countries trying to conduct elections.
Postmodernism does not adequately distinguish here between a reduction of reality to image
and a mediation of reality by image. A media idealism exists rooted in the influence of
structuralism and poststructuralism and doing insufficient justice to concrete human
experience, judgment, and free interaction in the world.4 It is also paradoxical or
contradictory to say it really is true that nothing is really true, that everything is illusory or
imaginary. Postmodemism makes judgments that implicitly deny the reduction of reality to
image. For example, Poster and Baudrillard do want to say that we really are in a new age
that is informational and postindustrial. Again, to say that everything is imploded into
media images is akin logically to the Cartesian claim that everything is or might be a dream.
What happens is that dream or image is absolutized or generalized to the point that its
original meaning lying in its contrast to natural, human, and social reality is lost. We can
discuss Disneyland as reprehensible because we know the difference between Disneyland
and the larger, enveloping reality of Southern California and the United States.5 We can
note also that postmodernism misses the reality of the accumulation-legitimation tension in
late capitalism in general and in communicative media in particular. This tension takes
different forms in different times. In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, for example,
social, economic, and political reality occasionally manifested itself in the media in such a
way that the electorate responded critically to corporate and political policies. Coverage of
the Vietnam war, for example, did help turn people against the war. In the 1980s, by
contrast, the emphasis shifted more toward accumulation in the decade dominated by the
great communicator. Even here, however, the majority remained opposed to Reagans
policies while voting for Reagan. Human and social reality, while being influenced by and
represented by the media, transcended them and remained resistant to them.6 To the extent
that postmodernists are critical of the role media play, we can ask the question about the
normative adequacy of such a critique. Why, in the absence of normative conceptions of
rationality and freedom, should media dominance be taken as bad rather than good? Also,
the most relevant contrasting, normatively structured alternative to the media is that of the
public sphere, in which the imperatives of free, democratic, nonmanipulable
communicative action are institutionalized. Such a public sphere has been present in
western democracies since the nineteenth century but has suffered erosion in the twentieth
century as capitalism has more and more taken over the media and commercialized them.
Even now the public sphere remains normatively binding and really operative through
institutionalizing the ideals of free, full, public expression and discussion; ideal, legal
requirements taking such forms as public service programs, public broadcasting, and
provision for alternative media; and social movements acting and discoursing in and outside
of universities in print, in demonstrations and forms of resistance, and on media such as
movies, television, and radio.7

216

Kritik Answers

A2 Disaster Porn (1/3)

TURN: VIOLENCE IS INESCAPABLE. OUR VIOLENCE
ENABLES UNDERSTANDING MORE THAN IT INHIBITS.
REMEMBERING AND REPRESENTING VIOLENCE IS
ESSENTIAL TO AVERT THE DESTRUCTION OF THE OTHER.
REJECT THE CRITIQUES SILENCE.
Michael Eskin, Research Fellow and Lecturer, European Literature, Cambridge
University, Dialectical Anthropology, 24: 407-450, 1999, p. 391-6
Derrida allows nothing prior to language; since, in Derrida's s philosophy, everything is inscribed in
language, he places speech and language prior to ethics, prior to any possible ethical injunction.
Derrida's formulations owe a tremendous debt to several major epistemological shifts. of the early
twentieth century: Sapir's and Whorf's notion that language conditions thought, for example, or Lacan's
claims that both conscious and unconscious thought processes (and thus the subject) are structured by
language. Because for Derrida ethics is inscribed, along with everything else, in language, and because

for Derrida language is inherently violent in that it is always a reduction, a totalization, he

reaches the conclusion that even a Levinasian ethics cannot ever avoid violence: "One never
escapes the economy of war." The origin of this violence inherent in discourse is the act of
inscribing the other in the definitions and terms of the same : Predication is the first violence.
Since the verb to be and the predicative act are implied in every other verb, and in every common noun,
nonviolent language, in the last analysis, would be a language of pure invocation . . .purified of all
rhetoric [in Levinas' terms] . . . . Is a language free from all rhetoric possible? Derrida answers his own
question in the negative, affirming that "there is no phrase which is indeterminate, that is, which does
not pass through the violence of the concept. Violence appears with articulation." Foucault has
expressed this same sentiment, maintaining that "We must conceive discourse as a violence we do to
things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them." Naming and predication-two acts
essential to language-confine what is being described, and fix it in one's own terms . As we
shall see from an examination of Hiroshima non amour, memory works the same way, attempting
to enclose the past within determinate parameters, employing the same brand of totalization to
whose presence in language Derrida has gestured. Concern over the necessary violence of memory as
representation to the consciousness, as willed inscription in one's own terms of what is other because
past, is perhaps the most obvious point at which Derrida, Levinas, Duras, and Resnais converge, for the
impossibility of remembering an historical event as it was-of actually arriving at a clear understanding
of a past event by imaging it through memory, by re-presenting it to our memory-is a chronic
preoccupation of Hiroshima mon amour. Resnais confronted this dilemma as well in the process of
constructing Nuit et brouillard. Claiming historical authority over Auschwitz, or giving the

illusion that it is comprehensible, would only, in Resnais' opinion, "humaniz[e] the

incomprehensible terror," thereby "diminishing it," perhaps even romanticizing it; so,
unable to describe the violence, and unwilling to inscribe it, Resnais opted instead to
document our memory of it. Resnais carries no illusions that the past can be duplicated to any

significant degree, rendered for us now as it was then. Given the accepted generic constraints of a film,
he says, "it is absolutely absurd to think that in that space of time one can properly present
the historical reality of such a complex event. [Historical facts] were the bases for our `fiction,'
points of departure rather than ends in themselves." This explains what Leo Bersani has described as
Resnais' clear favoring of the word "imagination" over the word "memory" when referring to his own
films." However, in the case of Hiroshima mon amour, instead of filling in with imagination the details
between the historical "facts," the film throws its hands up at any effort to "remember" or "see" the
tragedy at Hiroshima. Thus, Hiroshima mon amour, in the words of one critic, turns out "to be a film
about the impossibility of making a documentary about Hiroshima"1' or, in Armes' more broadly
epistemologically oriented phrase, "a documentary on the impossibility of comprehending." Duras
reminds us of this in her synopsis of the screenplay: "Impossible de parler de HIROSHIMA. Tout ce
qu'on peut faire c'est de parler de l'impossibilite de parler de HIROSHIMA ( Impossible to speak of
HIROSHIMA. All one can do is speak of the impossibility of speaking of HIROSHIMA )." She
then drives the point home in Hiroshima mon amour's unforgettable opening sequence, as Okada
incessantly reminds Riva that she can never know Hiroshima's tragedy . Riva knows, for
example, that there were two hundred thousand dead and eighty thousand wounded, in nine

seconds; she can rattle off the names of every flower that bloomed at ground zero two weeks
after the bombing; she has been to the museum four times, seen the pictures, watched the
films. As if to accentuate the veracity of' Riva's learned data, Duras alerts the reader in a footnote to the
origin of the details, and there is hardly a more famous or traditionally reputable source on the
immediate aftermath of the bombing than John Mersey's Hiroshima. And yet, as one critic has
commented, "les images collees aux murs . . . sont incapables de faire revivre completement la realite du
fait (images pasted to walls . . . are incapabale of completely restoring the reality of the fact). "

217

Kritik Answers
Despite Riva's wealth of statistical (read: historically trustworthy) data, Okada is able to
refute her with confidence, "Tu n'as rien vu a Hiroshima (You saw nothing at Hiroshima)," and
the almost incantatory
continued

218

Kritik Answers

A2 Disaster Porn (2/3)

continued
repetition of this phrase strengthens its punch. Duras increases the effect by reminding us that the day of the bombing of Hiroshima, while a tragedy for Okada,
coincides with Riva's liberation from her horrifying wartime experience in Nevers, France. This fact forces the question: How can Riva ever understand as a tragedy an
event that corresponded with her own emotional rebirth and reclaiming of some measure of normalcy?

Okada points out that the

entire world was celebrating while Hiroshima smouldered in ashes. This fact forces another, similar question,
one that I myself must confront on reading or watching Hiroshima mon amour: How could the Westerners in the audience ever
expect to grasp the tragedy that they originally celebrated as the end of the war? These reminders have
The effect is even stronger on what Duras must have assumed would be a predominantly Western audience, when

their own Verfremdungseffekt further alienating the audience/reader from the history of Hiroshima, dispelling any lingering notion that historical tragedy can ever be

. Riva's optimism is almost infectious, though, and she indeed believes that she can master the history behind the leveling of Hiroshima.
She claims to know everything, and she is once again swiftly negated by the Japanese. She
fully comprehended

contents herself by concluding that, even if she does not know yet, ca s'apprend (one learns)."" She is not gifted with memory, though, as Okada reminds her and thus
all she can claim to know about Hiroshima is what she has "invente." This particular verbal exchange is highlighted by the fact that it is for the first time in the text
Riva's turn to use the word "rien," until this point a word uttered frequently and only by Okada: ELLS: Je n'ai rien invente. (SHE: I invented nothing.) LUI: Tu as tout
invente. (HE: You invented everything.) Proof of her inability to approach comprehension of Hiroshima arrives in the form of a laugh, when Riva asks her lover if he
was at Hiroshima the day of the bombing and he laughs as one would laugh at a child. She shows herself further distanced from the historical event by the manner in
which she sounds out the name of the city, "Hi-ro-shi-ma," as if it were-or rather because it is-radically foreign to her. (Later, in the same manner, Okada sounds out
Riva's youth, the story of which will always be unknown and incomprehensible to him: "Jeune-a-Ne-vers [ Young-in-Nevers].") Her memory of Hiroshima, created by
herself and inscribed in terms that she can understand from photographs taken by other people, is mere "illusion," truth several times removed. She remembers,

. Historical memory must be reductive,

though, and almost obsessively, because she knows that it is worse to forget
sometimes violently
so, according to a Derridean understanding of it, because it is always a form of representation and thus of predication. A less diplomatic statement made by Okada

one's memory only ever serves one's own purposes

goes so far as to suggest that

: "Est-ce que to avais remarque," he asks,
"que c'est toujours dans le meme sens que l'on remarque les chows? (Did you ever notice that one always notices things in the same way?)." We notice what suits us, in

However, just as language-the system of

-carries in its every use the violence inherent in its reductiveness,
we use it anyway, as it enables far more than inhibits. In Levinas's formulation, not only is
discourse our primary means of relating to and maintaining the other, but the absence of it,
silence, "is the inverse of language . . . a laughter that seeks to destroy language.
" Derrida accords with Levinas: "denying discourse" is "the worst violence," "the violence of the night
which precedes or represses discourse." Despite the violence that Riva's impulse toward
memory commits against any ideal or "objective" history, absolute forgetting is far more
dangerous; by any account, remembering and representing past violence must be seen as
a necessary evil, as a sort of metaphysically violent means of averting future
real, physical violence. Still, the partial forgetting of the unforgettable tragedy is inevitable, as John Ward points out in his treatment of
Resnais' films: "With the passage of time we become so insensitive to other people's suffering that
we can lie in the disused ovens of Auschwitz and have our photographs taken as souvenirs ."
the direction and sense which we prefer, and we notice it in the manner in which we can best use it.
representation par excellence

Duras' text also renders disturbing images of forgetting, of loubli. Riva confesses to her own struggle against ignorance: "mei aussi, j'ai essaye de lutter de toutes mes
forces contre l'oubli . . . . Comme toi, j'ai oublie (me too, I've tried to struggle with all my strength against forgetting . . . . Like you, I've forgotten). "During the third
part of Duras' script, at the staged demonstration against nuclear armaments, Okada seems far too preoccupied with taking Riva back to his family's house to care
about the demonstration, even if it is only a performance for a film. Immediately after explaining the appearance of the charred skin of Hiroshima's surviving children,
he informs her, "Tu vas venir avec moi encore une fois (You will come with me once again)." Remembering the bombing is quite obviously not a first priority for him.
There are other grim reminders of the forgetting in the reconstruction of Hiroshima and the importation of American culture. At one point, Riva and Okada enter a
nightclub called "Casablanca" -a strange immortalization of American pop culture in a city leveled by an American bomb less than two decades earlier. Moreover, the
Japanese man who tries to converse with Riva in the Casablanca gladly (and proudly, it seems) speaks the language of the conquerors, the bomb-droppers. The
attitude on display in this scene is reminiscent of one in John Hersey's account of the months following the bombing, in Hiroshima: [Dr. Fujiil bought [the vacant
clinic] at once, moved there, and hung out a sign inscribed in English, in honor of the conquerors: M. MUJII, M.D. MEDICAL & VENEREAL Quite recovered from his
wounds, he soon built up a strong practice, and he was delighted, in the evenings, to receive members of the occupying forces, on whom he lavished whiskey and

While there is certainly something to be said for not bearing a grudge, the speed
of the forgetting and forgiving seems unbelievable. Memory represents historical tragedy insufficiently, in violently subjective
practiced English.

reductions; we are never able to experience being there and can never know the event, can never have witnessed it firsthand. Thus, we forget. Duras' script clearly
stresses both the necessity and difficulty of remembering, but demonstrates, perhaps pessimistically, that we will veer slightly but inexorably toward l'oubli. And

once we forget, violence will erupt again.

219

Kritik Answers

A2 Disaster Porn (3/3)

THE CRITIQUE IS REDUCTIVE. THEY FORECLOSE THE
ESSENTIAL ABILITY TO MOBILIZE VIOLENCE AGAINST
VIOLENCE.
Michael Eskin, Research Fellow and Lecturer, European Literature, Cambridge University,
Dialectical Anthropology, 24: 407-450, 1999, p. 403-4
I have tried to demonstrate through this reading of Hiroshima mon amour that Resnais' and
Duras' text falls prey to the violence of historical memory and to the worse violence of
absolute oblivion. Strictly following a theoretical apparatus reconstructed from the thought
of Levinas and Derrida, Hiroshima mon amour seems to participate, through the apparently
deliberate reduction to race and place and event of two already allegorical and emblematic
characters, in the very violence which Resnais and Duras set out initially to document, the
most reductive of predications. The script trades in an economy of violence, dealing out the
abstractions and totalizations that are the seed of every Holocaust, that mark every
uninhabitable corner of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This conclusion seems to me, though, far
too conclusive, far too reductively critical and discomforting, far too dependant on a great
deal of interpretive faith, not unmerited but certainly not absolute, in the debate between
and formulations of Levinas and Derrida What I am trying gingerly to say is that our reading
should remain sensitive, attentive and open enough to discover those points at which the
theoretical scaffolding may fail us, points at which a Levinasian/Derridean reading seems to
stall; I believe a conclusive dismissal of Hiroshima mon amour as a text governed and
permeated by violence is probably one such moment. I would propose instead a different,
and hopefully more useful, reading of my reading of this well-intentioned script and film.
For, while Hiroshima mon amour is certainly guilty of the very violence it claims as its
object, it is likely from this portrayal and mobilizing of violence that the film
sees its greatest anti-violent gesture; all that is required is a return to Duras' stated
desire to avoid the banal describing of "l'horreur par l'horreur." Instead of horrifying us with
horror, as she refused to do, Duras' screenplay has shown us the humble beginnings of
horror: the total forgetting of past horrors, and the blatant inscribing of infinite Others
within the finitudes of the language of the Same. And in this, Duras and Resnais may have
succeeded, ultimately, in their declared mission to bring the horrifying tragedy of Hiroshima
back to life, to see it reborn, out of the ashes.

220

Kritik Answers

**Butler**
Butler Answers: 2AC (1/2)

221

Kritik Answers

Butler Answers: 2AC (2/2)

222

Kritik Answers

A2 Legal Categories Bad

BAILING ON LEGAL CHANGE FOR PARODIC PERFORMANCE
FAILS TO BREAK DOWN GENDER CATEGORIES AND
COLLAPSES INTO QUIETISM
Nussbaum 99 (Martha, Feb. 22, Professor of Parody, New Republic, Lexis)
Butler offer when she counsels subversion? She tells us to engage in parodic
performances, but she warns us that the dream of escaping altogether from the
oppressive structures is just a dream: it is within the oppressive structures that we must find little
spaces for resistance, and this resistance cannot hope to change the overall situation. And here lies a
dangerous quietism. If Butler means only to warn us against the dangers of fantasizing an idyllic world in
What precisely does

which sex raises no serious problems, she is wise to do so. Yet frequently she goes much further. She suggests that the
institutional structures that ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society, and the continued
inequality of women, will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to
find pockets of personal freedom within them. "Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I
have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers
existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially." In other words: I cannot
escape the humiliating structures without ceasing to be, so the best I can do is mock, and use the language of
subordination stingingly. In

Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or

less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or
institutional change. Isn't this like saying to a slave that the institution of
slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and subverting
it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited
defiance? Yet it is a fact that the institution of slavery can be changed, and was
changed-- but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It
was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance:
they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval. It is also a fact that the institutional
structures that shape women's lives have changed. The law of rape, still defective, has at least improved; the law of
sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist before; marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical
control over women's bodies. These things were changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as

Butler not only

eschews such a hope, she takes pleasure in its impossibility . She finds it exciting to
their answer, who thought that power, where bad, should, and would, yield before justice.

contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced
that she must remain such. She tells us--this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power-- that we all eroticize the
power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to be for that
reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change. Real change
would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad

parodic performance is not

so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But
here is where Butler's focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life,
becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate,
disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however
parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating,
and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their
bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some
enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure. Well,

individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But

when a major theorist tells women in desperate conditions that life offers them
only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it
much more power than it actually has.

223

Kritik Answers

**Biopolitics**
Agamben Answers: 2AC (1/6)
FIRST, NO LINK PLAN DOESNT TAKE A STANCE ON THE
BODILY SITUATION OF DETAINEES. IT ONLY STRIPS THE
EXECUTIVE OF ONE SOURCE OF CONTROL
SECOND, AGAMBENS ALTERNATIVE TO PLAN IS
PARALYZING AND DELINKS THE LAW AND JUSTICE,
ENABLING TOTALITARIANISM
Kohn 2006
[Margaret, Asst. Prof. Poli Sci @ Florida, Bare Life and the Limits of the Law,.Theory and Event, 9:2,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.2kohn.html, Retrieved 9-26-06//uwyo-ajl]
Is there an alternative to this nexus of anomie and nomos produced by the state of exception? Agamben invokes genealogy and politics as two interrelated avenues of
struggle. According to Agamben, "To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which
once claimed for itself the name of 'politics'." (88) In a move reminiscent of Foucault, Agamben suggests that breaking the discursive lock on dominant ways of seeing,

. Agamben clearly hopes that his theoretical

analysis could contribute to the political struggle against authoritarianism, yet he only offers
tantalizingly abstract hints about how this might work. Beyond the typical academic conceit that theoretical work is a
decisive element of political struggle, Agamben seems to embrace a utopianism that provides little guidance
for political action. He imagines, "One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their
canonical use but to free them from it for good." (64) More troubling is his messianic suggestion that "this studious
play" will usher in a form of justice that cannot be made juridical . Agamben might do well to
consider Hannah Arendt's warning that the belief in justice unmediated by law was one of
the characteristics of totalitarianism.
or more precisely not seeing, sovereign power is the only way to disrupt its hegemonic effects

It might seem unfair to focus too much attention on Agamben's fairly brief discussion of alternatives to the sovereignty-exception-law nexus, but it is precisely those
sections that reveal the flaws in his analysis. It also brings us back to our original question about how to resist the authoritarian implications of the state of exception

. For Agamben, the problem with the "rule of law" response

to the war on terrorism is that it ignores the way that the law is fundamentally implicated in
the project of sovereignty with its corollary logic of exception. Yet the solution that he endorses reflects a
similar blindness. Writing in his utopian-mystical mode, he insists, "the only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between
violence and law."(88) Thus Agamben, in spite of all of his theoretical sophistication, ultimately falls into the trap of hoping that
politics can be liberated from law, at least the law tied to violence and the demarcating
project of sovereignty.
without falling into the liberal trap of calling for more law

THIRD, PLAN IS NECESSARY FOR THE ALTERNATIVE

BECAUSE THE EXECUTIVE WILL STILL VIOLENTLY DETAIN.
THIS CREATES A DOUBLE BIND: EITHER THE END RESULT
OF THE ALT IS PLAN AND THERES NO LINK DIFFERENTIAL
OR IT DOES THE STATUS QUO AND DOESNT SOLVE
FOURTH, PERM RECOGNIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN
DEMOCRATIC INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION AND ENGAGE IN
THE RESISTANCE OF THE 1AC

224

Kritik Answers

Agamben Answers: 2AC (2/6)

FIFTH, PERM SOLVES BEST ACKNOWLEDGING THE
TENSION OF MODERNITY WHILE ENGAGING IN
DEMOCRATIC STRUGGLE ALLOWS POLITICS BEYOND THE
POLICE STATE IN OPPOSITION TO SOVEREIGNTY AND
EXCEPTION
Deranty 2004
[Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights, borderlands ejournal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-705//uwyo-ajl]

. If, with Rancire, we define politics not through the institution of sovereignty, but as a
continual struggle for the recognition of basic equality, and thereby strongly
distinguish politics from the police order viewed as the functional management of
communities (Rancire 1999), then it is possible to acknowledge the normative break
introduced by the democratic revolutions of the modern age without falling into a
one-sided view of modernity as a neat process of rationalisation . What should be stressed about
modernity is not primarily the list of substantive inalienable and imprescriptible human rights, but the equal entitlement
of all to claim any rights at all. This definition of politics must be accompanied by the parallel acknowledgment that the times
47

that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also produced the total negation of this principle. But this parallel claim does not

it points to a tension inherent in modern communities,

necessarily render the first invalid. Rather

between the political demands of equality and the systemic tendencies that structurally produce stigmatisation and exclusion.

One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without
renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics. As Rancire remarks, Foucaults late hypothesis is more
48.

about power than it is about politics (Rancire 2002). This is quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly
used is that of "biopower". As Rancire suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of

The
power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply
because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides
implicit recognition. Power includes by excluding, but in a way that might be
different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as
politics becomes problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive.

"agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical,

exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent

implicit recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that
politics can sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to
exclusion.

SIXTH, NO ALTERNATIVE AGAMBEN ISOLATES

SOVEREIGNTY AS INEVITABLY EXCLUSIONARY OF NONPOLITICAL LIFE, MEANING THERES NO WAY TO ESCAPE
THAT SYSTEM, RENDERING THEIR OFFENSE INEVITABLE

225

Kritik Answers

Agamben Answers: 2AC (3/6)

SEVENTH, OUR SPECIFIC USE OF BIOPOLITICS IS GOOD,
LEADING TO LIBERAL DEMOCRACY THAT SOLVES THEIR
VIOLENCE AND OPPRESSION CLAIMS
Dickinson, Prof @ University of Cincinnati, 2K4 (Edward Ross,

Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About

Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March)
the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the
practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakasble . Both are instances of the disciplinary
In short,

society and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states,
including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad

analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates

the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes .
Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite
different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful,
radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism),
the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder.
Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those
perspective. But that

cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can and historically does create compulsory

But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a
structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany.
Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and
participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures.
And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear,
historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have
generated a logic or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political
context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very
impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany. 90
Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such
regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its
expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of
them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be
analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At
the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of
biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at
odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes
of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems
are not opposites, in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very
different ways of organizing it. The concept power should not be read as a universal
stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social
orders are grey, are essentially or effectively the same. Power is a set of social relations, in
which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity.
And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive elements (like the various
elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different
strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to
one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in
modern societies create multiple modernities, modern societies with quite radically
differing potentials.
programs to enforce it.

EIGHTH, POWER IS ZERO SUM THE ALTERNATIVE ONLY

SHIFTS POWER ELSEWHERE
John Mearsheimer, Professor at University of Chicago, 2001 (The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics p. 34)
states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special effort to maximize their share of world power.
look for opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional
increments of power at the expense of potential rivals. States employ a variety of meanseconomic, diplomatic, and
militaryto shift the balance of power in their favor, even if doing so makes other states suspicious or even hostile . Because one states gain in
power is another states loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing
Consequently,

Specifically, they

226

Kritik Answers
with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other states in the system. Thus, the claim that states
maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to
survive. In short,

great powers have aggressive intentions.

227

Kritik Answers

Agamben Answers: 2AC (4/6)

NINTH, AGAMBEN ESSENTIALIZES THE STATE, IGNORING
THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND
TOTALITARIANISM
Heins, Vis Prof Poli Sci @ Concordia U and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt,
2K5 (Volker, Giorgio Agamben and the Current State of Affairs in Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Policy,
6 German Law Journal No. 5, May, http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=598)

Agamben is not interested in such weighing of costs and benefits because he assumes from
the outset that taking care of the survival needs of people in distress is simply the reverse
side of the modern inclination to ignore precisely those needs and turn life itself into a tool
and object of power politics. By way of conclusion, I will indicate briefly how his view differs from two other, often no less shattering critiques of
modern humanitarianism. Martti Koskenniemi warned that humanitarian demands and human rights are in danger of degenerating into "mere talk."[47] The recent
crisis in Darfur, Sudan, can be cited as an example for a situation in which the repeated invocation of human rights standards and jus cogens norms, like those
articulated in the Genocide Convention, might ultimately damage those norms themselves if states are unwilling to act on them.[48] This criticism implies that human
rights should be taken seriously and applied in a reasonable manner. Both David Kennedy and Oona Hathaway have gone one step further by taking issue even with
those who proved to be serious by joining treaties or engaging in advocacy. In a controversial quantitative study, Hathaway contended that the ratification of human
rights treaties by sets of given countries not only did not improve human rights conditions on the ground, but actually correlated with increasing violations.[49] In a
similar vein, David Kennedy radicalized Koskenniemi's point by arguing that human rights regimes and humanitarian law are rather part of the problem than part of
solution, because they "justify" and "excuse" too much.[50] To some extent, this is an effect of the logic of legal reasoning: marking a line between noncombatants and
combatants increases the legitimacy of attacking the latter, granting privileges to lawful combatants delegitimizes unlawful belligerents and dramatically worsens their
status. On the whole, Kennedy is more concerned about the dangers of leaving human rights to international legal elites and a professional culture which is blind for
the mismatch between lofty ideals and textual articulations on the one side, and real people and problems on the other side.[51] Whereas these authors reveal the
"dark sides" of overly relying on human rights talk and treaties, the moral fervor of activists or the routines of the legal profession, Agamben claims that something is
wrong with human rights as such, and that recent history has demonstrated a deep affinity between the protection and the infringement of these rights. Considered in
this light, the effort of the British aid organization Save the Children, for instance, to help children in need both in Britain and abroad after World War I faithful to
George Bernard Shaw's saying, "I have no enemies under seven"is only the flip side of a trend to declare total war on others regardless of their age and situation.
This assertion clearly goes far beyond the voices of other pessimists. Agamben's work is understandable only against the backdrop of an entirely familiar mistrust of

According to Agamben, democracy does not

threaten to turn into totalitarianism, but rather both regimes smoothly cross over into one
another since they ultimately rest on the same foundation of a political interpretation of life
itself.[52] Like Carl Schmitt, Agamben sees the invocation of human rights by democratic governments as well as the "humanitarian concept of humanity"[53] as
liberal democracy and its ability to cultivate nonpartisan moral and legal perspectives.

deceptive manouvers or, at least, as acts of self-deception on the part of the liberal bourgeois subject. The difference between Agamben and Schmitt lies in the fact that
Schmitt fought liberal democracy in the name of the authoritarian state, while Agamben sees democracy and dictatorship as two equally unappealing twins. Very

confronts us with a mode of thinking in vaguely felt resemblances

in lieu of distinctly perceived differences. Ultimately, he offers a version of Schmitt's theory of sovereignty that changes its political
valence and downplays the difference between liberal democracy and totalitarian dictatorshipa
difference about which Adorno once said that it "is a total difference. And I would say," he added, "that it
would be abstract and in a problematic way fanatical if one were to ignore this difference." [54]
much unlike Schmitt, the Italian philosopher

TENTH, DESIRE IS TOO DYNAMIC TO BE CONTAINED BY THE

SOVEREIGN ITS FLUDITY ENABLES BIOPOWER THAT
TRANSCENDS THE STATE OF EXCEPTION BY CREATING
NEW FORMS OF LIFE OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM ***
Neilson 2004
[Brett, University of Western Sydney, Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism, Contretemps 5, December
2004, www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyo-ajl]
Like Agamben, Hardt and Negri take as a point of departure the Foucauldian account of biopolitics as a system of rule that emerges at the beginning of the modern era
with the exercise of power over life itself. Importantly, however, they extend Foucaults argument by drawing on Gilles Deleuzes Postscript on the Society of Control.
Foucault describes the modern system of disciplinary rule that fixes individuals within institutions (hospitals, schools, prisons, factories, and so on) but does not

, Hardt and Negri trace the

emergence of a new mode of power that is expressed as a control that extends throughout
the consciousness and bodies of the populationand at the same time across the entirety of social relations.9 In so doing, they
succeed in consuming them completely in the rhythm of productive practices or productive socialization. By contrast

combine the Deleuzian emphasis on free-floating and mobile logics of control (data banking, risk management, electronic tagging, and so on) with an attention to the
productive dimension of biopower (living labour) derived from the work of exponents of Italian operaismo like Paolo Virno and Christian Marazzi. While Hardt and
Negri question the tendency of these thinkers to understand all contemporary forms of production on the horizon of communication and language, they are clearly
indebted to their notions of immaterial labour and general intellect (which in turn derive from a reading of the famous Fragment on Machines from Marxs

productive aspect of biopower that places Hardt and Negri at odds with Agamben on
bare lifea concept that, for them, excludes the question of labour from the field of theoretical observation. Thus, in a footnote, they comment
Grundrisse). It is this emphasis on the

critically on a line of Benjamin-inspired interpretations of Foucault (from Derridas Force of Law to Homo Sacer itself): It seems fundamental to us, however, that all
of these discussions be brought back to the question of the productive dimension of the bios, identifying in other words the materialist dimension of the concept
beyond any conception that is purely naturalistic (life as zo) or simply anthropological (as Agamben in particular has a tendency to do, making the concept in effect
indifferent).10 With this identification of what Agamben calls indistinction as indifference (indifference to productive power of cooperation between human minds

, Agambens philosophical
specification of the negative limit of humanity displays behind the political abysses that
modern totalitarianism has constructed the (more or less heroic) conditions of human passivity.11 The apparatus of the
sovereign ban condemns humanity to inactivity and despair. By contrast, Hardt and Negri claim that bare life
must be raised up to the dignity of productive power. Rather than reducing humanity to
mere living matter, the exceptional power of the modern state becomes effective at precisely the moment when
and bodies), Hardt and Negri voice their most severe reservations about the concept of bare life. For them

228

Kritik Answers
social cooperation is seen no longer the result of the investment of capital but an autonomous power, the a priori of every act of
production.12 Try as it may to relegate humanity to minimal naked life (or zo), the modern constituted order cannot destroy
the enormous creativity of living labour or expunge its powers of cooperative production.

229

Kritik Answers

Agamben Answers: 2AC (5/6)

ELEVENTH, AGAMBEN MISUNDERSTANDS THE SHIFTS IN
SOVEREIGNTY, PAPERING OVER INSIDIOUS VIOLENCE
Hardt & Dumm 2000
[Michael & Thomas, Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael
Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire, Theory & Event 4:3, Muse//uwyo-ajl]

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.

TWELFTH, AGAMBENS USE OF THE CAMP CONFLATES

VICTIM WITH OPPRESSOR, PREVENTING US FROM
HOLDING PERPETRATORS RESPONSIBLE AND DESTROYING
ANY ETHICAL OBLIGATION TO ACT SINCE WE POSIT
EVERYONE AS THE VICTIM
Sanyal, Assist Prof of French @ UC Berkeley, 2K2 (Debarati, A Soccer Match in Auschwitz:
Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism, Representations, Issue 79, Caliber)

Agambens radicalization of Levis

gray zone has even more disturbing consequences for understanding the relations of power
within the camps. The unstable boundary between oppressor and oppressed in the gray zone
is radicalized in Agambens account such that the two positions appear to be reciprocal and
convertible: It seems, in fact, that the only thing that interests him [Levi] is what makes judgement impossible: the gray zone in
Beyond the problems inherent in a transhistorical treatment of shame and complicity,

which victims become executioners and executioners become victims (Remnants, 17).18 While Agamben nowhere suggests that

his emphasis on the camps as sites for a potentially

endless circulation of guilt nevertheless takes the convertibility of victims and executioners
as a structural given. Primo Levi, however, was at pains to emphasize that this convertibility
was a politically expedient fiction designed to erase the difference between victim and
executioner by forcing Jews to participate in the murder and cremation of their own. He also stressed the singular, unimaginable
strain such a predicament must have exerted upon the SK. To transform such a charged, ambiguous lived reality
into a formal conception of convertibility has disturbing ethical consequences. It suggests
that the perpetrators too, by virtue of occupying this zone of radical inversion and
participating in the traumatic conditions of camp life, could be perceived as victims. The fallacy
perpetrators and victims truly did exchange positions,

of this structural reciprocity, however, is refuted by Levi in a cautionary preface to his discussion of the Sonderkommando: This mimesis,
this identification or imitation or exchange of roles between oppressor and victim, has provoked much discussion. . . . I do not know, and it
does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that the murderers existed, not only in
Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation
or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth. (Drowned, 50)

The conceptualization of the gray zone as a transhistorical and trans-subjective site of

culpability, in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims, thus
conflates the positions of Muslims, Prominents, Kapos, and SS in a gesture that reaches beyond the
concentration camp experience to include us in a general condition of traumatic
culpability. This blurring of subject positions leads to a vision of inescapable guilt, in which
we are always already collectively steeped in the eliminationist logic that led to the
concentration camp and continue unknowingly to perpetuate its violence. But just as this vision
posits an ever-encroaching web of complicity, it also, paradoxically, proposes an infinitely elastic notion of
victimhood. If we are obscurely complicit with the logic of the soccer match, the irrealization of violence in daily life,
we are also comparably violated by the historical trauma of the camps. The generalization of
complicity and victimization not only dismantles the historical specificity of the camps and
the survivors testimonies. It also, more disturbingly, coopts the figure of the victim as an
other who is but an avatar of ourselves, a point I will address in a moment.

230

Kritik Answers

Agamben Answers: 2AC (6/6)

THIRTEENTH, THEORY IS IRRELEVENT ABSENT SPECIFIC
APPLICATION MUST COMBINE THEORY AND PRACTICE
FOR A PHILOSOPHY AS LIFE
Foucault 82
[Michel, God, Politics and Ethics: An Interview, The Foucault Reader, Trans. Catherine Porter, Ed.
Paul Rabinow, 373-4//uwyo-ajl]
M.F. That's right. When Habermas was in Paris, we talked at some length, and in fact I was quite struck by his observation of the extent to which the
problem of Heidegger and of the political implications of Heidegger's thought was quite a pressing and important one for him. One thing he said to me

After explaining how Heidegger's thought

indeed constituted a political disaster, he mentioned one of his professors who was
a great Kantian, very well-known in the '30s, and he explained how astonished and disappointed he had been when, while looking
through card catalogues one day, he found some texts from around 1934 by this illustrious Kantian that were thoroughly Nazi in
orientation.
has left me musing, and it's something I'd like to mull over further.

I have just recently had the same experience with Max Pohlenz, who heralded the universal values of Stoicism all his life. I came across a text of his
from 1934 devoted to Fiihrertum in Stoicism. You should reread the introductory page and the book's closing remarks on the Fuhrersideal and on the
true humanism constituted by the Volk under the inspiration of the leader's direction-Heidegger never wrote anything more disturbing. Nothing in
this condemns Stoicism or Kantianism, needless to say.

there is a very tenuous "analytic" link between a

philosophical conception and the concrete political attitude of someone who is appealing to it; the
"best" theories do not constitute a very effective protection against disastrous
political choices; certain great themes such as "humanism" can be used to any end
whatever-for example, to show with what gratitude Pohlenz would have greeted Hitler.
I do not conclude from this that one may say just anything within the order of theory, but, on the contrary, that a demanding,
prudent, "experimental" attitude is necesary; at every moment , step by step, one must
confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is. I have never
But I think that we must reckon with several facts:

been too concerned about people who say: "You are bor-rowing ideas from Nietzsche; well, Nietzsche was used by the Nazis, therefore. . ."; but, on the

I have always been concerned with linking together as tightly as possible the
historical and theoretical analysis of power relations, institu-tions, and knowledge, to the
movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question in reality . If I have
insisted on all this "practice," it has not been in order to "apply" ideas, but in order to put them to the test and modify them. The key to the
Personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced
from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophicallife, his ethos.
other hand,

Among the French philosophers who participated in the Resistance during the war, one was Cavailles, a historian of mathematics who was interested

None of the philosophers of engagement- Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,

did a thing.

in the development of its internal structures.

Merleau-Ponty-none of them

FOURTEENTH, EVEN IF THE LAW WAS ORIGINALLY

FOUNDED ON VIOLENCE, IT NOW OPERATES IN A NONVIOLENT WAY
Deranty 2004
[Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights, borderlands
e-journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc
1-7-05//uwyo-ajl]

this strategic use of the decisionistic tradition is that it does not do justice to the
complex relationship that these authors establish between violence and normativity, that is, in the end
the very normative nature of their theories. In brief, they are not saying that all law is violent, in essence or
in its core, rather that law is dependent upon a form of violence for its foundation.
Violence can found the law, without the law itself being violent. In Hobbes, the social
contract, despite the absolute nature of the sovereign it creates, also enables
individual rights to flourish on the basis of the inalienable right to life (see Barret-Kriegel
29. The problem with

2003: 86).
30. In Schmitt, the decision over the exception is indeed "more interesting than the regular case", but only because it makes the regular case possible.
The "normal situation" matters more than the power to create it since it is its end (Schmitt 1985: 13). What Schmitt has in mind is not the
indistinction between fact and law, or their intimate cohesion, to wit, their secrete indistinguishability, but the origin of the law, in the name of the
law. This explains why the primacy given by Schmitt to the decision is accompanied by the recognition of popular sovereignty, since the decision is
only the expression of an organic community. Decisionism for Schmitt is only a way of asserting the political value of the community as homogeneous
whole, against liberal parliamentarianism. Also, the evolution of Schmitts thought is marked by the retreat of the decisionistic element, in favour of a
strong form of institutionalism. This is because, if indeed the juridical order is totally dependent on the sovereign decision, then the latter can revoke
it at any moment. Decisionism, as a theory about the origin of the law, leads to its own contradiction unless it is reintegrated in a theory of institutions
(Kervgan 1992).

Agamben sees these authors as establishing a circularity of law and

violence, when they want to emphasise the extra-juridical origin of the law, for the laws
31. In other words,

sake. Equally, Savignys polemic against rationalism in legal theory, against Thibaut and his philosophical ally Hegel, does not amount to a recognition
of the capture of life by the law, but aims at grounding the legal order in the very life of a people (Agamben 1998: 27).

For Agamben, it

231

Kritik Answers
, the origin and the essence of the law are synonymous, whereas the authors he
relies on thought rather that the two were fundamentally different.
32. Agamben obviously knows all this . He argues that it is precisely this inability of the decisionists to hold on to their key
insight, the anomic core of norms, which gives them the sad distinction of accurately describing an evil order . But this reading does
not meet the objection to his problematic use of that tradition.
seems

232

Kritik Answers

#2 Alternative Kills Liberation: 1AR

(1/2)
EXTEND THE 2AC KOHN 2006 EV
First Agambens alternative is so abstract that it offers no mean
of liberation. Delinking the law and justice enables unchecked
power that allows totalitarian violence, flipping their argument.
SECOND, RIGHTS ARE CRITICAL TO HUMYN DIGNITY-AGAMBENS ALTERNATIVE FAILS BECAUSE:
1. IGNORES THE VALUE OF RIGHTS IN RESISTING
EXPLOITATION
2. FOSTERS GESTURAL POLITICS THAT CANNOT ADDRESS
THE PROBLEMS OF THE OPPRESSED
Frances Daly, Research Fellow, Philosophy Department, Australian National University,
The non-citizen and the concept of human rights, BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL v. 3 n. 1,
2004, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm .
, Agamben

27. Certainly
calls for making all residents of extraterritorial space (which would include both citizen and non-citizen) as existing within a position
of exodus or refuge, and in this we can perhaps see some basis for resistance. A position of refuge, he argues, would be able to "act back onto" territories as states and
'perforate' and alter' them such that "the citizen would be able to recognize the refugee that he or she is" (Agamben, 2000: 26). In this Agamben directs our attention
usefully to the importance of the refugee today both in terms of the plight of refugees and their presence in questioning any assumption about citizen rights, and also
in placing the refugee, or "denizen" as he says using Tomas Hammar's term, as the central figure of a potential politics (Agamben, 2000: 23). But he also

reduces the concepts of right and the values they involve to forms of State control, eliding all
difference within right and thereby terminating an understanding of the reasons for a
disjuncture between legality and morality and of an existing separation of rights from the
ideal of ethicality, in which liberation and dignity exist to be realized beyond any form of
contract.
28. It is always possible to suppose that a self-fashioned potentiality is simply available to us, and in some senses it is, but not because a type of theory merely posits
the social and the historical as completely open to our manipulation or 'perforation'. Likewise, we cannot merely assume that changing 'forms of life' necessarily
amount to types of refusal. Such a claim would only make sense if it were put forward on the basis of an appreciation of an impulse to freedom from particular types of
constraint and oppression. It would also require a sense of how this impulse takes place within a variety of conditions, some of which might be easily altered and some
of which might not. In the absence of an engaged sense of what this impulse means, and of the context in which elements of freedom and unfreedom do battle, it is

Agamben
merely presumes that a strategy by which we all identify as refugees will renew a politics and
thereby end the current plight of the refugee, as if no other reality impinges on this
identification. This is also assumed on the basis that the State in Agamben's theorizing, the abstraction of an allencompassing, leviathan State is equally, readily and easily liable to perforation. This contradiction is
indicative of a wider problem where what we encounter is a form of critique that is oddly
inappropriate to the type of issue it addresses.
29. Much can be said in criticism of the doctrine of right, of the limited nature of the understanding of freedom and
impossible to speculate on the nature of the subjectivity or potentiality which might be emerging or which might be in stages of decomposition.

rights in documents on rights, of the assumption of the place of citizen rights as the locus of the fundamental rights of the human, and most significantly, the absence

But what must be stated, I feel, is that it would be a

serious impoverishment of the ethical problem that we currently face to deny any potential
value of rights in carrying forth traces of an impetus towards human dignity, of the ideals of
freedom and equality, and to thus reduce rights to what might be termed an absolute
politics. Rights cannot be reduced to citizenship rights as if the ideas of rights and
citizenship are coterminus. What most critically needs to be understood is, firstly, why
values of freedom and equality have such a limited and fragile place within conditions of such inordinate
legalism, and, secondly, what the absence of freedom, which the cause of human rights
inevitably suggests, means for the installation of any such rights. Without such an
understanding we are left with a gestural politics that contains a posture of radicalism but
one which fails to connect the aspirations of those who are struggling to achieve elementary
rights with a vision of a world that could accord them a degree of dignity. To acknowledge
this is not to be seduced by concepts of right or law, but is rather to refuse the denial of a
radical questioning of the possibilities with which a discourse presents us . Benjamin's
understanding of a genuinely messianic idea is something that is "not the final end of
historical progress, but rather its often failed and finally accomplished interruption" (Benjamin,
of any sense of the undetermined nature of what being might mean.

233

Kritik Answers
We find this in values that resist exploitation and assaults upon human dignity. And
it is this realm that currently requires urgent, emphatic and significant renewal.
1974: 1231).

234

Kritik Answers

#2 Alternative Kills Liberation: 1AR

(2/2)
RATIONAL, INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS ARE GOOD ONLY WAY TO
PREVENT FUTURE HOLOCAUSTS
Robert Tracinski, Received his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from the University of
Chicago and studied with the Objectivist Graduate Center and Editorial Director of the Ayn Rand
Institute, Why It Can Happen Again, Ayn Rand Institute, April 22, 20 03,
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7888&news_iv_ctrl=1021, UK: Fisher
Most people avoid these stark implications by retreating to a compromise between selfsacrifice and self-interest. Calls for sacrifice are proper, they say, but should not be taken
"too far." The Fascists condemned this approach as hypocrisy. They took the morality of
sacrifice to its logical conclusion. They insisted, in the words of Italian Fascist Alfredo
Rocco, on "the necessity, for which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice,
even up to the total immolation of individuals." And the Nazis certainly practiced what
Rocco preached. A central goal of the concentration camps, wrote survivor Bruno
Bettelheim, was "to break the prisoners as individuals, and to change them into a docile
mass." "There are to be no more private Germans," one Nazi writer declared; "each is to
attain significance only by his service to the state." The goal of National Socialism was the
relentless sacrifice of the individual: the sacrifice of his mind, his independence, and
ultimately his person. A free country is based on precisely the opposite principle. To
protect against what they called the "tyranny of the majority," America's Founding Fathers
upheld the individual's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The implicit
basis of American government was an ethics of individualism--the view that the individual is
not subordinate to the collective, that he has a moral right to his own interests, and that all
rational people benefit under such a system. Today, however, self-sacrifice is regarded as
self-evidently good. True, most people do not want a pure, consistent system of sacrifice, as
practiced by the Nazis. But once the principle is accepted, no amount of this "virtue" can
ever be condemned as "too much." We will not have learned the lessons of the Holocaust
until we completely reject this sacrifice-worship and rediscover the morality of
individualism.

235

Kritik Answers

#5 Perm: 1AR
EXTEND THE PERM. RECOGNIZING MODERNITYS
PROBLEM WITH EXCLUSION WHILE USING DEMOCRATIC
STRUGGLE ENABLES A CONTESTATION OF DIGNITY THAT
CHALLENGES THE EXCEPTION, AS SHOWN BY DERANTY
2004
ALSO, SOVEREIGNTY MUST BE USED STRATEGICALLY
CRITIQUE CAN BE SIMULTANEOUS
Lombardi, Assoc Prof of Political Science @ Tampa, 96 (Mark Owen, Perspectives on ThirdWorld 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 problemsolving. 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.

THE PERM USES POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT TO AVOID THE

ESSENTIALISM OF THE SOVEREIGN AND AGAMBENS
ALTERNATIVE BY USING CONTINGENCY TO CHALLENGE
THE ATROCITY THAT BOTH MAKE INEVITABLE
Deranty 2004
[Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights, borderlands
e-journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc
1-7-05//uwyo-ajl]

49. This proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agambens reduction of the
overcoming of the classical conceptualisation of potentiality and actuality to the
single Heideggerian alternative. Instead of collapsing or dualistically separating
potentiality and actuality, one would find in Hegels modal logic a way to articulate
their negative, or reflexive, unity, in the notion of contingency. Contingency is
precisely the potential as existing, a potential that exists yet does not exclude the
possibility of its opposite (Hegel 1969: 541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an
ontology of contingency that recognises the place of contingency at the core of
necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real
vindicates Hegels claim that the impossible should not be opposed to the actual.
Instead, the possible and the impossible are only reflected images of each other
and, as actual, are both simply the contingent. Auschwitz should not be called
absolute necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute contingency. The absolute
historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency,
which, if true, would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its
threat. Its absolute necessity in fact harbours an indelible core of contingency, the
locus where political intervention could have changed things, where politics can
happen. Zygmunt Baumans theory of modernity and his theory about the place
and relevance of the Holocaust in modernity have given sociological and

236

Kritik Answers
contemporary relevance to this alternative historical-political logic of contingency
(Bauman 1989).

237

Kritik Answers

#5 Perm: Ext
AMBIGUOUS MODERNITY THAT ACKNOWLEDGES
INCOMPLETION PROVIDES THE TOOLS FOR RESISTING
OPPRESSION
Deranty 2004
[Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights, borderlands
e-journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc
1-7-05//uwyo-ajl]

50. In the social and historical fields, politics is only the name of the contingency
that strikes at the heart of systemic necessity. An ontology of contingency provides
the model with which to think together both the possibility, and the possibility of
the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and the
contingency of catastrophe as logically entailing the possibility of its opposite.
Modernity is ambiguous because it provides the normative resources to combat the
apparent necessity of possible systemic catastrophes. Politics is the name of the
struggle drawing on those resources.
51. This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to
rights. Modern subjects are able to consider themselves autonomous subjects
because legal recognition signals to them that they are recognised as full members
of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in
modernity is precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand
real political struggles, as fights for rights. We can see now how this account needs
to be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines the apparent
necessity of the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know that their rights are
granted only contingently, that the possibility of the impossible is always actual.
This is why rights should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply that they
should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as
contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be
the reason for constant political vigilance.

238

Kritik Answers

#7 Good Biopower: 1AR (1/2)

AGAMBEN IS WRONG BIOPOWER DOESNT CAUSE
EXCEPTION OR VIOLENCE, BUT MAINTAINS LIFE
Ojakangas 2005

[Mike, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Impossible Dialogues on Bio-Power:

Agamben and Foucault, Foucault Studies 2 (5-28), www.foucaultstudies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf, acc. 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl]
In fact, the history of modern Western societies would be quite incomprehensible without taking into account that there exists a form of power which

The effectiveness of bio-power can be

seen lying
precisely in that it refrains and withdraws before every demand of killing, even though these demands would derive fr
refrains from killing but which nevertheless is capable of directing peoples lives.

om the demand of justice. In biopolitical societies, according to Foucault, capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crim
e itself than the monstrosity of the criminal: One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others.
However, given that the right to kill is precisely a sovereign right, it can be argued that the bio-political societies analyzed by Foucault were not entirely biopolitical. Perhaps, thereneither has been nor can be a society that is entirely bio-political. Nevertheless, the fact is that present-

European societies have abolished capital punishment. In them, there are no longer excep
tions. It is the very right to kill that has been called into question. However, it is not called into question becau
se of enlightened moral sentiments, but rather because of the deployment of bio-political thinking and practice.
day

For all these reasons, Agambens thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the fundamental bio-political paradigm of the West, has to be corrected.

The bio-political paradigm of the West is not

the concentration camp, but, rather, the present-day welfare society and, instead of homo sacer
, the paradigmatic figure of the bio-political society can be seen, for example, in the middleclass Swedish social-democrat. Although this figure is an object and a product of the huge biopolitical machinery, it does not mean that he is permitted to kill without committing homicide. Actually, the fact that he eventually dies, seems to be his greatest crim
e against the machinery. (In bio-political societies, death is not only something to be hidden away, but, also, as Foucault stresses, the most shameful thing of all.
) Therefore, he is not exposed to an unconditional threat of death, but rather to an unconditional retreat of all dying. In fact, the biopolitical machinery does not want to threaten him, but to encourage him, with all its material and spiritual capacities, to live healthily, to live long and to live happily
even when, in biological terms, he should have been dead longago.
This is because biopower is not bloody power over bare life for its own sake but pure power over all
life for the sake of the living. It is not power but the living, the condition of all life individual as well
as collective that is the measure of the success of bio-power.

BIOPOLITICS IS NOT THE PROBLEM IN AND OF ITSELF ITS

BIOPOLITICS DEPLOYED IN TOTALITARIANS SOCIETIES
WHICH IS BAD OUR STRENGTHENING OF DEMOCRATIC
STRUCTURES SOLVES THEIR IMPACT
Dickinson, Prof @ University of Cincinnati, 2K4 (Edward Ross,

Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About

Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March)
In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucaults ideas have fundamentally directed
attention away from institutionally centered conceptions of government and the state . . . and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of
power and its microphysics.48 The broader, deeper, and less visible ideological consensus on technocratic reason and the ethical

But the power-producing effects in Foucaults

microphysical sense (Eley) of the construction of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of an entire institutional
apparatus and system of practice ( Jean Quataert), simply do not explain Nazi policy.50 The destructive
dynamic of Nazism was a product not so much of a particular modern set of ideas as of a
particular modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrous potential of those
ideas. What was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, which
occurred everywhere in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments and
disciplines were organized and used, and the external constraints on them. In National Socialism, biopolitics was
shaped by a totalitarian conception of social management focused on the power and
ubiquity of the vlkisch state. In democratic societies, biopolitics has historically been
constrained by a rights-based strategy of social management . This is a point to which I will return shortly.
unboundedness of science was the focus of his interest.49

For now, the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the state. A comparative framework can help us to clarify
this point. Other

states passed compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s indeed, individual states in the
Yet they did not proceed to the next steps adopted by
National Socialism mass sterilization, mass eugenic abortion and murder of the defective. Individual figures in, for
example, the U.S. did make such suggestions. But neither the political structures of democratic states nor
their legal and political principles permitted such policies actually being enacted . Nor did the scale
of forcible sterilization in other countries match that of the Nazi program. I do not mean to suggest that such
United States had already begun doing so in 1907.

239

Kritik Answers
programs were not horrible; but in a democratic political context they did not develop the
dynamic of constant radicalization and escalation that characterized Nazi policies.

240

Kritik Answers

#7 Good Biopower: 1AR (2/2)

BIOPOLITICS DOESNT CAUSE ATROCITY
Ojakangas 2005

[Mike, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Impossible Dialogues on Bio-Power:

Agamben and Foucault, Foucault Studies 2 (5-28), www.foucaultstudies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf, acc. 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl]
For Foucault, the coexistence in political structures of large destructive
mechanisms and institutions oriented toward the care of individual life was
something puzzling: It is one of the central antinomies of our political
reason. However, it was an antinomy precisely because in principle the
sovereign power and bio-power are mutually exclusive. How is it possible
that the care of individual life paves the way for mass slaughters? Although
Foucault could never give a satisfactory answer to this question, he was
convinced that mass slaughters are not the effect or the logical conclusion of
bio-political rationality. I am also convinced about that. To be sure, it can be
argued that sovereign power and bio-power are reconciled within the modern
state, which legitimates killing by bio-political arguments. Especially, it can be
argued that these powers are reconciled in the Third Reich in which they
seemed to coincide exactly. To my mind, however, neither the modern
state nor the Third Reich in which the monstrosity of the modern state is
crystallized are the syntheses of the sovereign power and bio-power, but,
rather, the institutional loci of their irreconcilable tension. This is, I believe,
what Foucault meant when he wrote about their demonic combination.

241

Kritik Answers

#9 Essentialism: 1AR (1/2)

EXTEND 2AC NUMBER 3, HEINS 2005 EVIDENCE. GROUP IT.
THE CRITICISM ESSENTIALIZES OPPRESSION BY
COLLAPSING DEMOCRACY AND TOTALITARIANISM INTO A
SINGLE TRANSCENDENT ENTITY, DESTROYING CRTICISIM
OF DIFFERENT FORMS OF OPPRESSION
ALSO, THAT TAKES OUT THEIR IMPACT BECAUSE
AGAMBENS TRANSHITORICAL ARGUMENT CONFLATES
DIFFERENT HISTORICAL ERAS. GLOBAL CAPITAL IS MORE
DECENTRALIZED THAN FASCISM, MAKING THEIR
TERMINAL OFFENSE IMPOSSIBLE.
IT ALSO PROVES THAT THE PERM SOLVES BEST BECAUSE
WE CAN ENGAGE IN CRITICISM OF THE SHORTCOMINGS OF
RIGHTS, WHILE STILL PROVIDING THE MECHANISMS
NECESSARY TO PREVENT FULL SCALE FASCISM
AGAMBEN ESSENTIALIZES INTERNMENT INTO A
TRANSHISTORICAL ENTITY, PREVENTING TESTIMONY
NECESSARY TO MOBILIZE AGAINST DIVERSE FORMS OF
OPPRESSION AND TO CRITICIZE THE SHORTCOMINGS OF
WESTERN RIGHTS DISCOURSE FROM WITHIN ***
Deranty 2004
[Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights, borderlands ejournal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-705//uwyo-ajl]

11. 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.

242

Kritik Answers

#9 Essentialism: 1AR (2/2)

AND, AGAMBENS FOCUS ON LANGUAGE IGNORES HOW
HISTORICAL CONDITIONS HAVE CHANGED, PREVENTING
RESISTANCE TO OPPRESSION
Wark 2004

[McKenzie, Re: <nettime> Agamben: No to Bio-Political Tattooing, posted to

nettime mailing list, January 27, amsterdam.nettime.org/ListsArchives/nettime-l-0401/msg00092.html, acc 1-7-2004//uwyo-ajl]
What never occurs to Agamben is to inquire into the historical rather than
philological -- conditions of existence of this most radical challenge to the state.
Agamben reduces everything to power and the body. Like the Althusserians, he too
has dispensed with problem of relating together the complex of historical forces. In
moving so quickly from the commodity form to the state form, the question of the
historical process of the production of the abstraction and the abstraction of
production disappears, and with it the development of class struggle.

AGAMBENS TRANSHISTORICAL MODEL OF BIOPOWER

COLLAPSES HISTORY, IGNORING ITS CONTEXTUAL
FUNCTION
Panagia 99

[Davide, The Sacredness of Life and Death: Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and the Tasks
of Political Thinking, Theory & Event 3:1, Muse//uwyo-ajl]
What emerges through the logic of the paradox of sovereignty is an event Agamben calls the
zone of indistinction. In the suspension of the rule through the state of exception, what we
are presented with is a complex plateau where such philosophically distinct categories as
state of nature and law, outside and inside, exception and rule flow through one another to
the point of literal indistinction. On Agamben's account, the operation of sovereignty
abandons individuals whenever they are placed outside the law and in so doing, exposes and
threatens them to a sphere where there is no possibility of appeal. (Agamben, p. 29) What is
crucial for Agamben's entire project, then, is to point out how the zone of indistinction
collapses the possibility of making distinctions - which is to say further, to point out how
political philosophy finds the limit of thinking in the paradox of sovereignty. In the sphere of
indistinction, we cannot think as if distinctions operated as they might in everyday life.6.
The political point here is, I think, insightful and worth pursuing. What makes this insight
problematic, however, is Agamben's treatment of history and the status of homo sacer
therein. Part of the task of this book is to ascertain how the category of homo sacer is a
specifically historical category. This is evident in Agamben's constant referral to ancient
Roman legal documents as well as his exploration of the reappearance of homo sacer
throughout history. But it is precisely the possibility that homo sacer is something that
occurs 'throughout history' that makes Agamben's analysis at times difficult to swallow. At
the purely conceptual level, one might be willing to accept the meta claim that Agamben
seems to be making. But Agamben does not want to limit himself to the conceptual level. He
wants to insist on the material dimension of homo sacer and the actuality of this category in
contemporary life. There is thus a substantial tension between the particularity of homo
sacer as a material instance of modern politics and the trans-historical category of homo
sacer as a category constituted by the paradox of sovereignty and the state of indistinction.

243

Kritik Answers

#9 Essentialism: Ext
AGAMBEN CONFLATES DIFFERENT HISTORICAL PERIODS
INTO A SINGULAR AND STABLE TRANSHISTORICAL
BIOPOLITICS THAT NEVER EXISTED, MEANING NONE OF
THEIR HISTORICAL IMPACTS APPLY
Wark 2004

[McKenzie, Re: <nettime> Agamben: No to Bio-Political Tattooing, posted to

nettime mailing list, January 27, amsterdam.nettime.org/ListsArchives/nettime-l-0401/msg00092.html, acc 1-7-2004//uwyo-ajl]
Eugene asks about Georgio Agamben. Below is a short note on him. I find his writings on the state les
interesting and useful than his return to the question of commodity fetishism, which is a refreshing
revisiting of a neglected concept. On the state, his approach seems more philological than

historical. By not bringing his thinking on the commodity and on the state more
closely together, one is not really given much of a handle on how developments in
the commodity form may have transformed the state. 'Biopower' becomes a vague,
transhistorical notion in Agamben. Agamben is one of the few contemporary thinkers to try to think
*past* Debord's Society of the Spectacle, which I think is still an untranscended horizon in its matching of
political and theoretical intransigence. And so in the note below I concentrate on his handling of Debord.

AND, NAZISM AND CONTEMPORARY DECENTRALIZED

CONTROL FUNCTION DIFFERENTLY
Neilson 2004

[Brett, University of Western Sydney, Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics,

Capitalism, Contretemps 5, December 2004,
www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyoajl]
Negris ruse in this review is to suggest that the permanent state of exception specified by the first
Agamben describes the new condition of global Empire. But he counters Agamben on his own terms,
charging that it is inaccurate to fix everything that happens in the world today onto

static and totalitarian horizon, as under Nazism. Such an equation, for Negri, is
anachronistic and inaccurate, since it conflates the fascist rule of the twentieth
century with contemporary modes of decentralized global control. With implicit
reference to the first chapter of Stato di Eccezione, where Agamben describes the current world situation as
global civil war (a term initially used by both Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt), Negri questions the
notion of a sovereign ban that renders constituent and constituted power indistinct:
But things are differentif we live in a state of exception it is because we live
through a ferocious and permanent civil war, where the positive and negative clash: their
antagonistic power can in no way be flattened onto indifference. 18 There can be no
doubt that Stato di Eccezione finds Agamben writing of a positive counterpower that breaks the connection
of violence to law posited by Schmitts exceptionalist model of sovereignty. For Schmitt, the state of
exception exists only as a means of maintaining and restoring the constituted sovereign order. By contrast,
Agamben follows the argument of Benjamins Critique of Violence, which posits a divine or revolutionary
violence that intercedes upon the struggle of constituent and constituted power, breaking the connection of
violence to law that, in the final instance, undergirds their interrelation. By opening the possibility of a
power that operates in complete independence from the law, Agamben claims, Benjamin specifies the
nature of the violence that pertains in the permanent state of exception. Furthermore, by virtue of the
influence of his essay, Benjamin provokes the negative reaction of Schmitt, whose entire political theory
can be read as a fearful response to the prospect of an exception that does not return to the norm. This is
not to claim, however, that Stato di Eccezione affirms Negris equation of constituent violence with living
counterpower. Rather the Benjaminian violence celebrated by Agamben remains separate from the whole
complex of constituent and constituted power, both interceding upon them with an energy that makes the
paradigm of modern sovereignty obsolete and, in so doing, maintaining them in indistinction.

244

Kritik Answers

#10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness:

1AR (1/2)
EXTEND 2AC NEILSON 2004 EV. GROUP IT.
FIRST, THE NEG POSITS BIOPOWER AS AN ALL
ENCOMPASSING NEGATIVE STRUCTURE THAT CO-OPTS ALL
RESISTANCE, WHICH RENDERS US UNABLE TO INTERVENE
BECAUSE EVERY MOVE IS SHUT OFF IN ADVANCE,
DOOMING US TO ENDLESS ATROCITY. THE BETTER
ALTERNATIVE IS TO USE BIOPOWER AGAINST ITSELF. PURE
DESIRE EXPLODES THE SYSTEMS COORDINATES,
UNDERMINING ITS FOUNDATIONS FROM WITHIN
SECOND, THIS TAKES OUT ALL OF THE INTERNALS TO
THEIR OFFENSE BECAUSE THE 1AC USES A DIFFERENT
KIND OF BIOPOWER THAN AGAMBEN IS CRITICIZING BY
APPROPRIATING IT AGAINST ITSELF, RATHER THAN USING
IT TO EXCLUDE NON-POLITICAL LIFE
THIRD, AGAMBENS MODEL OF BIOPOLITICS CREATES
POWERLESSNESS, SUBVERTING RESISTANCE
Hardt & Dumm 2000
[Michael & Thomas, Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael
Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire, Theory & Event 4:3, Muse//uwyo-ajl]

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.

245

Kritik Answers

#10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness:

1AR (2/2)
FOURTH, AGAMBENS CONCEPTION OF POWER IS
POLITICALLY DISABLING BECAUSE IT REDUCES EVERY
RESISTANCE TO AN ALL PERVASIVE POWER STRUCTURE
ONLY VIEWING IT AS AN EXPLOSION OF DESIRE ALLOWS
US TO SUBVERT THE SOVEREIGN BY ALLOWING
BIOPOWERS OWN PRODUCTIVITY TO DESTROY ITSELF
Neilson 2004

[Brett, University of Western Sydney, Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism,

Contretemps 5, December 2004,
www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyo-ajl]
How then can Negri maintain that constituent power and sovereignty are opposites, separate even in the
absoluteness to which both lay claim? Already in Il potere constituente, three years before the publication
of Homo Sacer, Negri fends off the argument that reduces constituent power to an infinite void of
possibilities or the presence of negative possibilities. For him, the crucial question is the relation between
potentiality (potenza) and power (potere). He recognizes
in the definition of potentiality that runs from Aristotle and the Renaissance and from Schelling to
Nietzsche
a metaphysical alternative between absence and power, between desire and possession, between
refusal and domination.8

Far from opening a zone of indistinction, Negri believes this alternative to open a
choice, at least when it is not closed off by the dogma that reduces power to a
pre-existing physical fact, finalized order, or dialectical result. And the philosophical conduit

of this opening is the great current of modern political thought, from Machiavelli to Spinoza to Marx, which
understands constituent power as an overflowing expression of desire, an

absence of determinations, and a truly positive concept of freedom and democracy.

For Negri, the danger of Agambens thought lies not in its Aristotelian rigour or formal elegance
but in its inability to open a panorama of revolutionary struggle that can
oppose the modern order of sovereignty and the transcendental ideal of power that backs it up.
As long as constituent power remains caught in the paradox of sovereignty and the
constituted order produces bare life as the limit condition of an exception that has
become the rule, there can be no hope of questioning the transcendentalism
of sovereign power or imagining a form of political conduct that remains free of the
impositions of the modern state. Thus it is the concept of bare life that becomes the primary
object of Negris critique of Agambens understanding of sovereignty. This much is clear in Empire, where
Negri and his co-author Michael Hardt distance themselves from the notion of bare life.

246

Kritik Answers

#10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness:

Ext (1/3)
CRITICISM OF BIOPOLITICS OBSCURES THE CONTROL OF
LIFE, JUSTIFYING THE STATUS QUO
Virno 2002

[Paolo, Paolo Virnos criticism of Agamben, www.generationonline.org/p/fpagamben1.htm, acc. 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl]

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
Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no political vocation. Then,

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

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.
sufficient base for founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the

THEIR ALTERNATIVE ENSURES THE PERPETUAL

REPLICATION OF SOVEREIGNTY ONLY WORKING
THROUGH THE SPECIFIC PRACTICES OF SOVEREIGNTY CAN
SUCCEED ATTEMPTS TO MOVE AWAY FROM IT OUTSIDE
OF THE STATE REPRODUCE SOVEREIGN POWER
Walker, Prof of International Relations @ Arizona State U, 2K2 (RBJ, Reframing
the International, P. 3-5)

247

Kritik Answers

#10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness:

Ext (2/3)
AND, THE NEGATIVITY OF BARE LIFE NEUTRALIZES
REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL WHICH IS TOO DYNAMIC TO
BE CONSTRAINED BY POWER, AS IS PROVEN BY
HISTORICAL STRUGGLES
Neilson 2004

[Brett, University of Western Sydney, Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism,

Contretemps 5, December 2004,
www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyo-ajl]
In these articulations with Hardt, Negris disagreement with Agamben stems from
an equation of constituent power with living labour and a refusal to ground
ontology
in the condition of bare life. If, in Empire, this quarrel with Agamben is relatively
marginal (confined to footnotes and passing comments), it assumes prominence in
a
subsequent essay, Il mostro politico. Nuda vita e potenza. In this piece, which
traces
the philosophical and historical consequences of eugenics (from classical Greece to
contemporary biotechnology), the concept of bare life is understood as an
ideological
device for neutralizing the transgressive potentiality of human existence. Here
Negris
criticism of Agamben is more rhetorical and direct:
Were the Vietnamese combatants or the blacks who revolted in the ghettos naked?
Were the workers or the students of the 1970s naked? It doesnt seem so if you look
at photos. At least if the Vietnamese werent denuded by napalm or the students
hadnt decided to give witness naked as a sign of their freedom. 13
Human struggle, by this account, cannot be held ransom to the
biopolitical machine that
produces bare life. Even in the case of the Nazi camps, Negri contends, it is
mistaken to
equate bare life with powerlessness. The mussulmani (or denuded concentration
camp
victims) of whom Agamben writes in Remnants of Auschwitz (1999) are humans
before
they are naked. And to make bare life an absolute and assimilate it to the horrors of
Nazism is a ruse of ideology:
Life and death in the camps represents nothing more than life and death in the
campsan episode of the civil war of the twentieth century, a horrific spectacle of
the destiny of capitalism and the ideological masking of its will, of the capitalist
motive against every instance of liberty. 14
For Negri, the concept of bare life denies the potentiality of being. Like Hobbess
Leviathan, which promotes a vision of life as subjugated and unable to resist, the
theory of
bare life represents a kind of foundation myth for the capitalist state. It is a
cry of weakness
that constructs the body as a negative limit and licenses a nihilistic view of
history. More
pointedly, bare life is the opposite of Spinozan potential and corporeal joy.15
With this
statement, Negri reaches the nub of his disagreement with Agamben. As an
alternative
to the Aristotelian notion of potentiality (as intrinsically and paradoxically
connected to

248

Kritik Answers
the act), he poses the Spinozan vision of potentiality (potenza) as the unstoppable
and
progressive expansion of desire (cupiditas). By this view, fully developed by Negri
in
The Savage Anomaly, the construction of politics is a process of permanent
innovation.
Desire is the determinant force of the constitution of the sociala creative project
that
is continually reopened and defined as absolute in this reopening. At once
conflictual
and constituent, desire in this analysis functions without lack and provides the
basis for
an absolute democracy that reaches beyond modern political representation.

249

Kritik Answers

#10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness:

Ext (3/3)
EACH EXERCISE OF POWER IS CO-PRODUCTIVE WITH ITS
OWN IMMANENT RESISTANCE THAT USES IT AS ITS
TARGET, ALLOWING BETTER SUBVERSION THAN AN
ISOLATED REJECTION FROM THE OUTSIDE
Foucault 78

[Michel, God, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I, trans. Robert

Hurley, New York City: Random House, Vintage Books Edition, 95-6//uwyo-ajl]
-Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this
resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Should it be said
that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it, there is no absolute
outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? Or
that, history being the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of history, always emerging
the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of
power relationships. Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of
resistance:
these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations.
These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence
there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or
pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of
them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others
that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, ram-pant, or violent; still others
that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only
exist in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are
only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an
underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat.
Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous prin-ciples; but neither are
they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in
relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite. Hence
they too are distributed in irregular fash -ion: the points, knots, or focuses of
resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobiliz-ing
groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body,
certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. Are there no great radical
ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is
dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a
society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing
across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off
irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of
power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and
institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of
resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless
the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution
possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional
integration of power relationships.

250

Kritik Answers

A2 Neilson Conclude Negative: 1AR

FIRST, NO HE DOESNT. HE ONLY SAYS THAT NEITHER
AUTHOR TAKES THE OTHER SERIOUSLY ON CERTAIN
POINTS, WHICH IS NON-RESPONSIVE TO THE ARGUMENT
THAT WERE MAKING
SECOND, EVEN IF AGAMBEN AVOIDS OUR ARGUMENT, THE
NEGATIVE CRITICISM DOESNT BECAUSE IT STILL POSITS
POWER AS BEING SO TOTAL THAT EVERY ACTION GETS COOPTED, PREVENTING PRODUCTIVE RESISTANCE. CROSSAPPLY NEILSON

251

Kritik Answers

#11 Agamben Misunderstands

Sovereignty: 1AR
THEIR PICTURE OF THE CAMP OBSCURES THE DAILY
VIOLENCE OF SOVEREIGNTY
Hardt & Dumm 2000
[Michael & Thomas, Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael
Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire, Theory & Event 4:3, Muse//uwyo-ajl]

TD: In that regard, my sense is that you both recognize the power of Giorgio Agamben's
argument in Homo Sacer concerning the extraordinary violence of sovereignty at the end of
modernity and yet you seek to overcome what may (not too unjustly) be thought of as a
terrifying passivity that his position could result in.14.
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.

BIOPOWER DOESNT EMERGE FROM THE SOVEREIGN, BUT

FROM SOCIAL RELATIONS THAT ARE BEYOND PLAN
Lazzarato no date

[Maurizio, From Biopower to Biopolitics, Trans. Ivan A. Ramirez,

www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/lazzarato_biopolitics.pdf, acc 1-7-05//uwyo-ajl]
Foucault needs a new political theory and a new ontology to describe
the new power relations expressed in the political economy of forces. In
effect, biopolitics are grafted and anchored upon a multiplicity of
disciplinary [de commandemant et d'obissance] relations between forces,
those which power coordinates, institutionalizes, stratifies and targets, but
that are not purely and simply projected upon individuals. The fundamental
political problem of modernity is not that of a single source of sovereign
power, but that of a multitude of forces that act and react amongst each
other according to relations of command and obedience. The relations
between man and woman, master and student, doctor and patient, employer
and worker, that Foucault uses to illustrate the dynamics of the social body
are relations between forces that always involve a power relation. If power,
in keeping with this description, is constituted from below, then we need an
ascending analysis of the constitution of power dispositifs, one that begins
with infinitesimal mechanisms that are subsequently invested, colonized,
utilized, involuted, transformed and institutionalized by ever more general
mechanisms, and by forms of global domination.
Consequently, biopolitics is the strategic coordination of these power
relations in order to extract a surplus of power from living beings. Biopolitics
is a strategic relation; it is not the pure and simple capacity to legislate or
legitimize sovereignty. According to Foucault the biopolitical functions of
coordination and determination concede that biopower, from the moment
it begins to operate in this particular manner, is not the true source of
power. Biopower coordinates and targets a power that does not properly
belong to it, that comes from the outside. Biopower is always born of

252

Kritik Answers
something other than itself.

253

Kritik Answers

#11 Agamben Misunderstands

Sovereignty: Ext (1/2)
AGAMBEN IS WRONG. BIOPOWER IS DISPERSED THROUGH
SOCIETY, MAKING RESISTANCE POSSIBLE AND
UNDERMINING SOVEREIGN POWER
Lazzarato no date

[Maurizio, From Biopower to Biopolitics, Trans. Ivan A. Ramirez,

www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/lazzarato_biopolitics.pdf, acc 1-7-05//uwyo-ajl]
Agamben

2. Giorgio
, recently, in a book inscribed explicitly within the research being undertaken on the concept of biopolitics, insisted that
the theoretical and political distinction established in antiquity between zoe and bios, between natural life and political life, between man as a living
being [simple vivant] whose sphere of influence is in the home and man as a political subject whose sphere of influence is in the polis, is now nearly
unknown to us. The introduction of the zoe into the sphere of the polis is, for both Agamben and Foucault, the decisive event of modernity; it marks a

is this impossibility of
distinguishing between zoe and bios, between man as a living being and man as a political subject, the product
of the action of sovereign power or the result of the action of new forces over which
power has no control? Agambens response is very ambiguous and it oscillates
continuously between these two alternatives. Foucaults response is entirely
different: biopolitics is the form of government taken by a new dynamic of forces
that, in conjunction, express power relations that the classical world could not have
known. Foucault described this dynamic, in keeping with the progress of his research, as the
emergence of a multiple and heterogeneous power of resistance and creation that
calls every organization that is transcendental, and every regulatory mechanism
that is extraneous, to its constitution radically into question. The birth of biopower
and the redefinition of the problem of sovereignty are only comprehensible to us on
this basis. Foucaults entire work leads toward this conclusion even if he did not coherently explain
the dynamic of this power, founded on the freedom of subjects and their capacity to act upon the conduct of others, until the end of his life .
radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of classical thought. But

POWER ISNT STATE-CENTERED OR INSTITUTIONAL BUT

RATHER, A MULTIPLICITY OF DISPERSED SOCIAL FORCES
Foucault 78
[Michel, God, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I, trans. Robert
Hurley, New York City: Random House, Vintage Books Edition, 92-3//uwyo-ajl]
Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowl-edge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power. But the

word power is apt to lead to a number of misunderstandings-misunderstandings with re-spect to its

nature, its form, and its unity. By power, I do not mean "Power" as a group of institutions and
mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state . By power, I do
not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form
of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domi-nation exerted by
one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The
analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the
state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the
outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power
must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations
immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process
which, through ceaseless strug-gles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in
one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the con-trary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and
lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystalliza-tion is embodied in the state apparatus, in the

. Power's condi-tion of possibility,

formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies

or in any case the viewpoint
which permits one to understand its exercise, even in its more "peripheral" effects, and which also makes it possible to use its mech-anisms as a grid

must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point,

in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and de -scendent forms
would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of
their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The
omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced
from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is
of intelligibility of the social order,

everywhere; not because it em-braces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. and "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert,
and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that I;ests on each of them and seeks in
turn to arrest their move-ment. One needs to be nominalistic, 110 doubt:

power is not an institution, and not a

254

Kritik Answers
structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attrib-utes to a complex strategical situation in a
particular society.

255

Kritik Answers

#11 Agamben Misunderstands

Sovereignty: Ext (2/2)
BIOPOWER OCCURS IN THE SHIFT TO POPULAR
ADMINISTRATION AND ISNT LOCATED IN THE SOVEREIGN
Foucault 78

[Michel, God, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I, trans. Robert

Hurley, New York City: Random House, Vintage Books Edition, 135-7//uwyo-ajl]
For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and
death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria potestas that granted the father of the
Roman family the right to "dispose" of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given them life,
so he could take it away. By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classi-cal theoreticians, it
was in a considerably diminished form. It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign over
his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and un-conditional way, but only in cases where the
sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he were threatened by external
enemies who sought to over-throw him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately wage war, and
require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without "directly proposing their death," he was
empowered to "expose their life": in this sense, he wielded an "indirect" power over them of life and death.
I But if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws, then he could exercise a direct

power over the offender's life: as punishment, the latter would be put to death.
Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute privilege: it was
conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in
seeing it as the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defend his life
even if this meant the death of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested with
the formation of that new juridical being, the sovereign?2 ln any case, in its modern form-relative and
limited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life and death is a dlissymmetrical one.
The sovereigm exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining
from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The

right which was formulated as the "power of life and death" was in reality the right
to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical
form must be re-ferred to a historical type of society in which Power was exercised
mainly as a means of deduction (prelewement), a subtraction meclhanism, a right to appropriate

a portion of the wealth, a tax: of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on. the subjects.
Power in this instance was essentially a riglht of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it
culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.

Since the classical age the West has undergome a very profound transformation of
these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" hasl tended to be no longer the major form of power but
merelly one element among others, wlorking to incite, reinforce, control" monitor, optimize, and organize
the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering

them, rather than one Idedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or
destroying them. There has been a Parallel shift in the right of death, (or at least a tendency to align
itself with the exigencies of a life-adminis-tering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that
was based on the right of the sovereign is now mamifested as simply the reverse of
the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or deveIop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as
they have been since the nineteenth century, and, all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such
holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what
accounts for part of its force and the cynicisom with which it has so greatly expanded its limits -now

presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life,
that endeawors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to Iprecise controls
and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no Ronger waged in the name of a sovereign who must be
defended; they are waged on 1behalf of the existence of everyone:; entire popula-tions are mobilized for the
purpose of wholes:ale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as
manage:rs of life and survival, of bodies amd the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so
many wars, causing so' many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology
of wars bias caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiattes them
and the one that terminaltes them are in fact increa:singly informed by the naked questtion of survival. The
atomilc situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is
the underside of the power to guarantee an irudividual's con-tinued existence. The principle underlying
tbie tactics of bat-tle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle
that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical
existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If
genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent returm of the ancient right
to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the largescale phenomema of population.

256

Kritik Answers

#13 Praxis: 1AR

PROTEST ISNT ENOUGH MUST LINK IT TO PRACTICE AND
DEMANDS ON THE STATE OR WE LAPSE INTO POLITICAL
PARALYSIS IN THE FACE OF OPPRESSION
Foucault 82
[Michel, God, Politics and Ethics: An Interview, The Foucault Reader, Trans.
Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 377//uwyo-ajl]
Q. And this is hard to situate within a struggle that is already under way, because
the lines are drawn by others. . . . M.F. Yes, but I think that ethics is a practice;
ethos is a manner of being. Let's take an example that touches us all, that of
Poland. If we raise the question of Poland in strictly political terms, it's clear that
we quickly reach the point of saying that there's nothing we can do. We can't
dispatch a team of para- troopers, and we can't send armored cars to liberate
Warsaw. I think that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I think we also agree
that, for ethical reasons, we have to raise the problem of Poland in the form of a
nonacceptance of what is. happening there, and a nonacceptance of the passivity of
our own governments. I think this attitude is an ethical one, but it is also political;
it does not consist in saying merely, "I protest," but in making of that attitude a
political phenomenon that is as substantial as possible, and one which those who
govern, here or there, will sooner or later be obliged to take into account.

257

Kritik Answers

#14 Liberalism Doesnt Cause

Exception: 1AR
AGAMBEN HAS NO JUSTIFICATION FOR THE
INDISTINCTION BETWEEN THE FOUNDING AND
CONTINUED OPERATION OF THE LAW
Deranty 2004
[Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights, borderlands ejournal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-705//uwyo-ajl]

grounding in the political is just the result of a theoretical decision,

35. But this

and the
alternatives should be confronted more explicitly. This lack of a substantial engagement with other legal alternatives becomes obvious a few pages

Agamben

later, when
analyses once more the specific problem of the application of the law. When he writes that "in the case of the juridical
norm, the reference to the concrete case supposes a "process" that always implies a plurality of subjects, and that culminates in the last instance in the
enunciation of a sentence, that is to say, a statement whose operative reference to reality is guaranteed by institutional powers" (Agamben 2003: 69),

simply formulates a classical distinction that can receive an entirely different

treatment with no less plausibility. A recent philosophical solution to the gap
between justification and application has been famously given by Habermas (1990 and 1996). Chapters 5
he

and 6 of Between facts and norms in particular provide an excellent overview of plausible alternatives to Schmitts decisionistic theory of adjudication,
from Kelsen to Critical Legal Studies.

Agamben cannot simply use the fact that "the application of a norm is not
contained in it" as leading directly to the theory of the state of exception, since from
the very same premise another form of political grounding of the legal could be
advanced, one, for instance, that focuses on intersubjectivity and the institutionalisation
of dissensus. The "violence" that realizes the statement is not necessarily "without logos". For Schmitt, it draws its authority from the
36. But then

political, that is, the logos of the polis as ethnos; for another tradition, it would do so from the logos of intersubjectively constituted and essentially
contested institutions

RIGHTS ONLY JUSTIFY EXCLUSION IF THEYRE ABSTRACT

MODERNITY DISTILLS THEM INTO UNIVERSAL
CITIZENSHIP PREVENTING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION
Deranty 2004
[Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights, borderlands ejournal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-705//uwyo-ajl]

. Agamben

17
quotes Arendts critical conclusion: the conception of human rights, 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

fails to quote
the very next line, which makes all the difference: "The world found nothing sacred
in the abstract nakedness of the human being" (Arendt 1966: 299).
18. What Arendt means is that only when they are realised in a political "commonwealth" do
human rights have any meaning. They are an abstraction otherwise. More important
than the right to freedom or the right to justice is "the right to have rights", that is,
to be the member of a political community. Arendt therefore asserts the opposite of
what Agamben wants to say: she believes that the political solution lies in what he considers to be a
fiction, namely the citizen. Her point is that when man and citizen come apart, we realise that man never really existed as
a subject of rights. This is the exact opposite of Agamben for whom the citizen is
just a travesty.
other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human (Arendt 1966: 299; Agamben 1998: 126). But he

19. Despite this opposition, Agamben borrows Arendts critical interpretation of the French revolution and modernity in general, even though this

human rights lose all significance if

they are not reinscribed within a political community that transforms them into
constitutional principles, and the American constitution also defines a clear link between individual freedom and a political order
interpretation itself is not beyond doubt. The French declaration makes it clear that

whose goal is freedoms protection. Yet, Agamben reads the first article of the Declaration of 1789, "all men are born and remain free and equal in

.
Birth here refers not to nationality, but simply to the fundamental fact of the
equality of all human beings in right. The term effectuates the radical break with
ancient and absolutist natural law, a break that is synonymous with legal modernity. In ancient natural law, rights were
associated with the social position or the notion of a perfect cosmic order underpinned by God .
rights" as proof that modern sovereign power applies to bare life, here in the form of birth (Agamben 1995: 128). But this seems disingenuous

258

Kritik Answers

Agamben Collapses the State

AGAMBENS ALTERNATIVE MAKES NO SENSE ON A PUBLIC
LEVEL THE NET RESULT IS COMMUNITIES AT WAR WITH
THE STATE WHICH WOULD COLLAPSE THE STATE
Cmiel, Prof of Cultural History @ Iowa, 96 (Kenneth, The Fate of the Nation and the Withering of
the State, American Literary History, Spring, P. 196, http://alh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/8/1/184)
If community cannot be a closed thing, if it is forever open to the potentially new, then the
dream of a national community is simply impossible. In Agamben's community, the idea of
something being "un-American" makes no sense, for there is no defining essence in a
"whatever singularity." Yet Agamben is also aware that capitalism and the state will
continue. Indeed, he recognizes that after the fall of Communism, they are sweeping the globe. Politics, in the future, Agamben argues,
will not be community building but the perpetual project of communities against the state, "a struggle between the State and the non-State
(humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization" (84). I

doubt Agamben's
new community is actually coming. It remains far from clear that communities without
identities are emerging anywhere except in the febrile imaginations of a few philosophers . It is
not that I dislike the dream. It is for me the most attractive dream there is. It is that I am skeptical that such "whatever
singularities" are possible on more than the level of personal behavior. Politics is too clunky
for such subtlety. Even the new social movements seem far more down-to-earth and prone
to defining themselves than Agamben's theorizing. Politics , alas, xdemands more leaden
language. Still, the image of the state fighting communities is one worth pondering. Its distance from earlier welfare state thinking
could not be more dramatic. Instead of the state embodying the will of the nation, we have a picture of
numerous communities at war with the state. It is, and I say this with no relish, a far more plausible
picture of our emerging politics than Walzer's happy pluralism. Just think of insurance companies, Perotistas,
and gay and lesbian activistsall communities distrustful of the state, all committed to
struggling with the state. Agamben does not ask what this perpetual warfare will do to government. Like Walzer, he
assumes that the state will trudge on as before. Yet if this warfare between humanity and the
state is constant, is it not plausible to surmise that hostility to the state will become
permanent? With the fiction that the state embodies the nation's will dying, who will defend
the state? Who will keep it from becoming the recipient of increasing rancor and from being
permanently wobbly? Isn't that a good way of understanding recent politics in the US? And as
for Agamben's own Italy the past decade has revealed a public far more disgusted with the state than even in America.

259

Kritik Answers

**Foucault**
Foucault Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, PLAN IS NECESSARY FOR THE ALTERNATIVE
BECAUSE IT CHALLENGES A MORE VIOLENT FORM OF
UNILATERAL BIOPOWER. THIS CREATES A DOUBLE BIND:
EITHER THE END RESULT OF THE ALT IS PLAN AND
THERES NO LINK DIFFERENTIAL OR IT DOES THE STATUS
QUO AND DOESNT SOLVE
SECOND, PERM: DO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE OUR
ADVOCACY IS THE FIRST TEMPORARY EXPRESSION OF THE
CRITIQUE ALTERNATIVE. REFORM IS NECESSARY TO
ENGAGE THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Foucault, French Sociologist, 1988

(Michel, On Criticism in Michel Foucault: Politics Philosophy Culture Interviews and

other writings 1977- 1984)
D.E. You mean it will be possible to work with this government?
FOUCAULT: We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against . After all, it is possible
to face up to a government and remain standing. To work with a govern ment implies neither
subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and yet be restive . I even believe that the two things go
together.
D.E. After Michel Foucault the critic, are we now going to see Michel Foucault the reformist? After all, the reproach was often made that the criticism made by
intellectuals leads to nothing.
FOUCAULT First Ill answer the point about that leads to nothing. There are hundreds and thousands of people who have worked for the emergence of a number of
problems that are now on the agenda. To say that this work produced nothing is quite wrong. Do you think that twenty years ago people were considering the
problems of the relationship between mental illness and psychological normality, the problem of prison, the problem of medical power, the problem of the
relationship between the sexes, and so on, as they are doing today?
Furthermore, there are no reforms as such. Reforms are not produced in the air, independently of those who carry them out. One cannot not take account of those who
will have the job of carrying out this transformation.
And, then, above all, I believe that an opposition can be made between critique and transformation, ideal critique and real transformation.
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar,
unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.
We must free ourselves from the sacrilization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and in human
relations as thought. Thought exists independently of systems and structures of discourse. It is something that is often hidden, but which always animates everyday
behavior. There is always a little thought even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits.

Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things
are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing
criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult .
In these circumstances, criticism (and radical criticism) is absolutely indispensable for any transformation. A transformation that remains within the same mode of
thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjusting the same thought more closely to the reality of things can merely be a superficial transformation.

as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them,
transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible.
On the other hand,

It is not therefore a question of there being a time for criticism and a time for transformation, nor people who do the criticism and others who do the transforming,

the work of
deep transformation can only be carried out in a free atmosphere, one constantly agitated by
a permanent criticism.
those who are enclosed in an inaccessible radicalism and those who are forced to make the necessary concessions to reality. In fact I think

D.E. But do you think the intellectual must have a programmatic role in this transformation?

A reform is never only the result of a process in which there is conflict

FOUCAULT
, confrontation, struggle,
resistance
To say to oneself at the outset: what reform will I be able to carry out? That is not, I believe, an aim for the intellectual to pursue. His role, since he works specifically in
the realm of thought, is to see how far the liberation of thought can make those transformations urgent enough for people to want to carry them out and difficult
enough to carry out for them to be profoundly rooted in reality.

It is a question of making conflicts more visible, of making them more essential than mere
confrontations of interests or mere institutional immobility. Out of these conflicts, these confrontations, a new power
relation must emerge, whose first, temporary expression will be a reform . If at the base there has not been
the work of thought upon itself and if, in fact, modes of thought, that is to say modes of action, have not been altered, whatever the project for reform, we know that it
will be swamped, digested by modes of behavior and institutions that will always be the same.

THIRD, NO LINK PLAN DOESNT EXERCISE POWER OVER

THE BODIES AT GUANTANAMO. IT ONLY OVERRULES ONE
ASPECT OF DETAINMENT
260

Kritik Answers

Foucault Answers: 2AC (2/3)

FOURTH, NO IMPACT FOUCAULT DOESNT SAY THAT
BIOPOWER IS NECESSARILY BAD, BUT THAT ITS
DANGEROUS. PLAN IS AN INSANTIATION OF POWER
CREATING ITS OWN RESISTENCE, CHALLENGING VIOLENCE
FIFTH, DEMANDS ON THE STATE ARE MORE EFFECTIVE
THAN RADICAL REJECTION THEIR ALTERNATIVES FEAR
OF COOPTION PARALYZES POLITICAL PRAXIS ONLY
THROUGH THE DEMANDS OF THE PLAN CAN WE CHANGE
THE SYSTEM
Zizek, Senior Researcher @ Libjulian, Slovenia, 98
The dialectical tension between the vulnerability and invulnerability of the system also enables us to denounce the ultimate racist and/or
sexist trick, that of 'two birds in the bush instead of a bird in hand": when women demand dimple equality, quasi -"feminists" often pretend
to offer them "much more" (the role of the warm and wise "conscience of society/'elevated above the vulgar everyday competition and
struggle for domination...)- the only proper answer to this offer, of course. Is "no, thanks! Better is the enemy of the good! We do not want
more, just equality!" Here, at least, the last lines in Now Voyager ("why reach for the moon. When we. Can have the stars?") Are wrong. It is
homologous with the Native American who wants to become integrated into the predominant "white" society, and a politically correct
progressive liberal endeavors to convince him that he is thereby renouncing his very unique prerogative, the authentic native culture and

A modest demand of
the excluded group for the full participation at the society's universal rights is much more threatening
for the system than the apparently much more "radical" rejection of the predominant social
values" and the assertion of the superiority of one's own culture. For a true feminist, Otto Weininger's assertion that, although women
tradition- no thanks, simple equality is enough, I also wouldn't mind my part of consumerist alienation! ...

are "ontologically false." lacking the proper ethical stature, they should be acknowledged the same rights as men in public life, is infinitely
more acceptable than the false elevation of' women that makes them 'too good" for the banality of men's rights. Finally, the point about

is not that every opposition, every attemot at subversion is automatically "co-opted."

On the contrary, the very fear of being co-opted that makes us search for more and more
radical, "pure" attitudes, is the supreme strategy of suspension or marginalization. The point is rather that
true subversion is not always where it seems to be sometimes. A small distance is much more explosive for the
system that an ineffective radical rejection. In religion. A small heresy can be more threatening
than an outright atheism or passage to another religion; for a hardline Stalinist, a Trotskyite
is infinitely more threatening than a bourgeois liberal or social democrat. As Le Carre put it, one
true revisionist in the Central Committees is worth more than thousand dissidents outside
it. It was easy to dismiss Gorbachev for aiming only at improving the system, making it more
efficient - he nonetheless set in motion its disintegration . So one should also bear in mind the obverse of the
inherent transgression

inherent transgression: one is tempted to paraphrase Freuds claim from the Ego and the Id that man is not only much more immoral than
he believes, but also much more moral than he knows - the

system is not only infinitely more resistant and invulnerable than it may
infinitely more vulnerable (a
small revision etc. Can have large unforeseen catastrophic consequences).
appear (it can co-opt apparently subversive strategies, they can serve as its support), it is also

SIXTH, FOUCAULDIAN CRITIQUE DENIES AGENCY BY

IGNORING ANY SOCIAL JUSTICE OR USEFUL HUMAN
ACTION
Anthony Cook, Associate Professor at Georgetown Law, NEW ENGLAND LAW REVIEW, Spring,
1992
Unless we are to be trapped in this Foucaultian moment of postmodern insularity, we must resist the temptation to sever description from explanation. Instead, our

values should act as

magnets that link our particularized struggles to other struggles and more global critiques of
power. In other words, we must not, as Foucault seems all too willing to do, forsake the possibility of more universal
narratives that, while tempered by postmodern insights, attempt to say and do something about the oppressive
world in which we live. Second, Foucault's emphasis on the techniques and discourses of knowledge
that constitute the human subject often diminishes, if not abrogates, the role of human agency.
Agency is of tremendous importance in any theory of oppression, because individuals are
not simply constituted by systems of knowledge but also constitute hegemonic and counterobjective should be to explain what we describe in light of a vision embracing values that we make explicit in struggle. These

261

Kritik Answers
hegemonic systems of knowledge as well. Critical theory must pay attention to the ways in
which oppressed people not only are victimized by ideologies of oppression but the ways
they craft from these ideologies and discourses counter-hegemonic weapons of liberation.

262

Kritik Answers

Foucault Answers: 2AC (3/3)

SEVENTH, NO ALTERNATIVE FOUCAULDIAN POWER IS SO
ALL ENCOMPASSING THAT NO BREAK FROM CO-OPTATION
IS POSSIBLE
EIGHTH, FOUCAULT MISUNDERSTANDS POWER LIBERAL
SOCIETY IS SUBSTANTIVELY DIFFERENT FROM
INTERNMENT
Walzer, Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies & Former Professor at
Harvard, 1983 (Michael, The Politics of Michel Foucault, Dissent, Fall)
For it is Foucault's claim, and I think he is partly right, that the discipline of a prison, say,

represents a continuation and intensification of what goes on in more ordinary places -and
wouldn't be possible if it didn't. So we all live to a time schedule, get up to an alarm , work to a
rigid routine, live in the eye of authority, are periodically subject to examination and inspection.
No one is entirely free from these new forms of social control. It has to be added, however,
that subjection to these new forms is not the same thing as being in prison: Foucault tends
systematically to underestimate the difference, and this criticism , which I shall want to develop,
goes to the heart of his politics.

NINTH, THEIR TOTALIZING CRITICISM OF POWER

PREVENTS REFORMWE MUST USE THE STATE FOR
INCREMENTAL ENDS.
James D. Faubian, professor of anthro @ Rice University, Michel Foucault: Power,
Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume 3, 1994, p. xxxi-xxxii
Foucault wanted, then, to move both the descriptive and prescriptive functions of political
analysis away from the juridico-discursive language of legitimation. To try to put the
matter as simply as possible: he does not think that all power is evil or all government
unacceptable, but does think that theorems claiming to confer legitimacy on power or
government are fictions; in a lecture of 1979, he expresses sympathy with the view of earlier
political skeptics that civil society is a bluff and the social contract a fairy tale. This does
not mean that the subject matter of political philosophy is evacuated, for doctrines of
legitimation have been and may still act as political forces in history. But his analytic quarrel
with legitimation theory is that it can divert us from considering the terms in which modern
government confers rationality, and thus possible acceptability, on its activity and practice.
This is the main reason why he argues political analysis is still immature, having still not cut
off the kings head.1o The deployment and application of law is, for Foucault, like everything
else, not good or evil in itself, capable of acting in the framework of liberalism as an
instrument for economizing and moderating the interventions of governmental power,
necessary as an indispensable restraint on power in some contexts, uses, and guises; it is to
be resisted as an encroaching menace in others. In his governmentality lectures, Foucault
investigates the evolution, from the era of the police states through the development of
parliamentary liberal government, of the ambiguous and dangerous hybridization of law
with a rationality of security and with new theories of social solidarity and social defense.
This historical analysis and diagnosis informs Foucaults commentary on the civil liberties
politics of seventies France, with its distinctive contemporary recrudescence of raison detat
and the police state. But at the same time, in a way we tend not to think of as typically
French, he dryly mocked and debunked the excesses of what he called state phobiathe
image of the contemporary state as an agency of essential evil and limitless despotism. The
state, he said, does not have a unitary essence or indeed the importance commonly ascribed
to it: what are important to study are the multiple governmental practices that are exercised
through its institutions and elsewhere. (In a lecture describing the seventeenth-century
theory of raison detat, Foucault characterized it as a doctrine of the permanent coup

263

Kritik Answers
detata piquant choice of phrase, because it had been the title of a polemical book written
against de Gaulle by Francois Mitterrand. We know that Foucault did not share the view,
common in the French Left, of de Gaulles government as an antidemocratic putsch with
crypto-fascistic tendencies. The Left, he also suggested, should expect to win elected power
not by demonizing the state (never a very convincing platform for a socialist party) but by
showing it possessed its own conception of how to govern.

264

Kritik Answers

#2 Perm: 1AR
PERM SOLVES BEST - MICROPOLITICS AND LARGER
STRUGGLES AGAINST OPPRESSION SHOULD BE COMBINED,
CREATING A RADICAL REFORMISM IN OPPOSITION TO
TOTALIZING POLITICS
May 93

[Todd, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the
Thought of Michel Foucault, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993,
118//wfi-ajl]
The risk of a totalizing theory of politics is that it will unsuspectingly promote what
it struggles against, because it is ignorant of oppressions at the micropolitical level.
The alternative to this, though, is not a bourgeois reformism but what one critic has
called a "radical reformism" (Gandal 1986, p. 122). This radical reformism
recognizes both that a change of power which comes solely at the top hazards a
repetition of the old forms of domination and that not just any small reform will
change micropolitical domination. Instead, what the radical reformist seeks are
changes at the micropolitical level which actually change the relations of power
between groups. Those changes involve very different types of struggle, depending
upon the situation of the groups involved. They cannot be cast in a common form
or be reduced to a common goal. But they possess a solidarity that derives from a
complementarity investing all struggles against domination under capitalism. I ,
Micropolitical struggles do not replace the struggle against exploitation, and no one
of them can be substituted for the others. What binds them is the recognition that
in the modern epoch power operates in many and diffuse ways, and that to end the
domination of such power is a matter of many independent but mutually
reinforcing struggles both at the micropolitical and the macropoliticallevel. And
thus, there is a need for the kinds of analyses which are situated not in the region of
general political theory, but in the domains of struggles which occur both beneath
and across that region. "I am attempting. . . apart from any totalization-which
would be at once abstract and limiting-to open up problems that are as concrete
and general as possible, problems that approach politics from behind and cut
across societies on the diagonal, problems that are at once constituents of our
history and constituted by that history" (Foucault 1984b, pp. 375-76).

265

Kritik Answers

Juxtaposition Solves: 1AR (1/2)

WE SHOULD JUXTAPOSE FOUCAULDIAN CRITICISM IN
OPPOSITION TO THE IDEAS HE CRITICIZES
Cook 92

[Anthony E., prof at Georgetown School of Law, New England Law Review, 1992, LN//wfiajl]
Thus, Foucault has prompted an entirely different approach to social criticism.
Rejecting modernist attempts to develop master narratives in the fashion of Hegel,
Marx, and Kant, Foucault instructs us to "develop action, thought, and desires by
proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and to prefer what is positive and
multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over
systems." n14 "Believe," he advises us, "that what is productive is not sedentary but
nomadic." n15

JUXTAPOSITION OF INCOMPATIBLE IDEAS AVOIDS THE

PROBLEMS OF TRADITIONAL THEORY AND ENABLES A
PROCESS OF CONSTANT CRITICISM
Marcus '98
[George E., Professor of Anthro at Rice University, Ethnography through Thick
and Thin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, 186-7//uwyo-ajl]
The postmodern notions of heterotopia (Foucault), juxtapositions, and the blocking
together of incommensurables (Lyotard) have served to renew the long-neglected
practice of comparison in anthropology, but in altered ways. Juxtapositions do not
have the obvious meta-logic of older styles of comparison in anthropology (e.g.,
controlled comparisons within a cultural area or "natural" geographical region);
rather, they emerge from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose
controus are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making
an account which has different, complexly connected real-world sites of
investigation. The postmodern object of study is ultimately mobile and multiply
situated, so any ethnography of such an object will have a comparative dimension
that is integral to it, in the form of juxtapositions of seeming incommensurables or
phenomena that might conventionally have appeared to be "world apart."
Comparison reenters the very act of ethnographic specificity by a postmodern
vision of seemingly improbably juxtapositions, the global collapsed into and made
and integral part of a parallel, related local situations rather than something
monolithic and external to them. This move toward comparison as heterotopia
firmly deterritorializes culture in ethnographic writing and simulates accounts of
cultures composed in a landscape for which there is as yet no developed theoretical
comparison

266

Kritik Answers

Juxtaposition Solves: 1AR (2/2)

JUXTAPOSING FOUCAULDIAN ACCOUNTS OF POWER WITH
TRADITIONAL SOVEREIGN MODELS EXPOSES
DISCIPLINARY RELATIONS
Boyle 97

[James, Prof. Law at Washington College of Law, Foucault in Cyberspace:

Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hardwired Censors, University of Cincinatti Law
Review, Fall, LN//wfi-ajl]
From the point of view of this Article, one of Foucault's most interesting
contributions was to challenge a particular notion of power, power-as-sovereignty,
and to juxtapose against it a vision of "surveillance" and "discipline." n21 At the
heart of this project was a belief that both our analyses of the operation of political
power and our strategies for its restraint or limitation were inaccurate or
misguided. In a series of essays and books Foucault argued that, rather than the
public and formal triangle of sovereign, citizen, and right, we should focus on a
series of subtler private, informal, and material forms of coercion organized around
the concepts of surveillance and discipline. The paradigm for the idea of
surveillance was the Panopticon, Bentham's plan for a prison constructed in the
shape of a wheel around the hub of an observing warden. At any moment the
warden might have the prisoner under observation through a nineteenth century
version of the closed-circuit TV. n22 Unsure when authority might in fact be
watching, the prisoner would strive always to conform his behavior to its presumed
desires. Bentham had hit upon a behavioralist equivalent of the superego, formed
from uncertainty about when one was being observed by the powers that be. The
echo of contemporary laments about the "privacy-free state" is striking. To this,
Foucault added the notion of discipline-crudely put, the multitudinous private
methods of regulation of individual behavior ranging from workplace time-andmotion efficiency directives to psychiatric evaluation. n23

267

Kritik Answers

#5 Demands on the State Good: 1AR

(1/4)
OUR DEMAND TURNS THE TABLES ON THE BIOPOLITICAL
APPARATUS. WE UTILIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN
FREEDOM AND CONTROL TO ARTICULATE A SERIES OF
DEMANDS WHICH ARE A STRATEGIC REVERSAL OF POWER
RELATIONS
Campbell, Prof of IR @ Newcastle U, 98 (David, Writing Security, September 1, P. 203-5)
The answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. I suggested above in a tentative way how we might think differently about some issues

Were those possibilities explored, the boundaries of American

identity and the realm of the political would be very different from that which currently
predominates, for the distinction between what counts as normal and what is thus
pathological would have been refigured. Besides, the evident differences in emergent discourse of danger
pertinent to United States Foreign Policy.

demonstrates how even those articulations with the most affinity do not mechanically reproduce a monolithic identity. Of course, the
pursuit of new possibilities through different interpretations is often strongly contested. Even recommendations to redirect political
practices so as to confront new challenges sometimes do not escape old logic. For example, the effort to address environmental issues
within the parameters of international relations and nation security often involves simply extending the old registry of security to cover his
new domain. Usually signified by the appropriation of the metaphor of war to a new problem, this is evident in some of the literature that
advocates the importance of global cooperation and management to counter environmental degradation, where ecological danger often
replaces fading military threats as the basis of an interpretation designed to sustain sovereignty. 35 Yet as I noted in Chapter 7,

As a
danger that can be articulated in terms of security strategies that are de-territorialized,
involve communal cooperation, and refigure economic relationships, the environment can
serve to enframe a different rendering of the political. Recognizing the possibility of rearticulating danger
environmental danger can also be figured in a manner that challenges traditional forms of American and western identity.

leads us to a final question: what modes of being and forms of life could we or should we adopt? To be sure, a comprehensive attempt to
answer such a question is beyond the ambit of this book. But it is important to note that asking the question in this way mistakenly implies

the extensive and intensive nature of the relations of

power associated with the society of security means that there has been and remains a not
inconsiderable freedom to explore alternative possibilities. While traditional analyses of
power are often economistic and negative, Foucaults understanding of power emphasizes
its productive and enabling nature. 36 Even more important, his understanding of power
emphasizes the ontology of freedom presupposed by the existence of disciplinary and
normalizing practices. Put simply, there cannot be relations of power unless subjects are in the first instance free: the need to
that such possibilities exist only in the future. Indeed,

institute negative and constraining power practices comes about only because without them freedom would abound. Were there no
possibility of freedom, subjects would not act in a way that required containment so as to effect order. 37 Freedom, though, is not the

because it is only through power that subjects exercise their agency,

freedom and power cannot be separated. As Foucault maintains: At the very heart of the power relationship, and
absence of power. ON the contrary,

constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it
would be better to speak of an agonism of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle: less of a face-toface confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation. 38 The political possibilities enable by permanent
provocation of power and freedom can be specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the bio-power discussed
above. In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in western nations have been increasingly directed towards modes
of being and forms of life such that sexual conduct has become an object of concern, individual health has been figured as a domain of
discipline, and the family has been transformed into an instrument of government the ongoing agonism between those practices and the
freedom of the counter demands drawn from those new fields of concern. For example, as the state continues to prosecute people
according to sexual orientation, human rights activist have proclaimed the right of gays to enter into formal marriages, adopt children, and
receive the same health and insurance benefits granted to their straight counterparts. These

claims are a consequence of

the permanent provocation of power and freedom in biopolitics, and stand as testament to
the strategic reversibility of power relations: if the terms of governmental practices can be
made into focal points for resistances, then the history of government as the conduct of
conduct is interwoven with the history of dissenting counter-conducts Indeed, the emergence of the
state as the major articulation of the political has involved an unceasing agonism between those in office and those they rule. State
intervention in everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the state and new
claims upon the state. In particular, the core of what we now call citizenship consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and
ruled in the course of there struggle over means of state action, especially in the making of war. In more recent times, constituencies
associated with womens, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also issued claims on society. These resistances are
evidence that the break with the discursive / non discursive dichotomy central to the logic of interpretation underlining this analysis is (to
put in conventional terms) not only theoretically licensed; it is empirically warranted.. Indeed, expanding the interpretive imagination so
as to enlarge the categories through which we understand the constitution of the political has been a necessary precondition for making
sense of Foreign Policys concern for the ethical borders of identity in America. Accordingly, there are manifest political implications that
flow from theorizing identity. As Judith Butler concluded: The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather it
establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.

268

Kritik Answers

#5 Demands on the State Good: 1AR

(2/4)
FOUCAULT'S MODEL OF POWER DOOMS EVERY
RESISTANCE TO INEVITABLE CO-OPTATION BECAUSE OF A
LACK OF SUBJECTIVITY ANTAGONISM EXCEEDS ITS
POSITIVE HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS AND CAN BREAK THE
POWER CYCLE BY USING THE EDIFICE'S EXCESS AGAINST
ITSELF
Zizek '99
[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass,
The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso,
1999, 256-7//uwyo-ajl]
Against Butler, one is thus tempted to emphasize that Hegel was well aware of the retroactive process by
means of which oppressive power itself generates the form of resistance is not this very
paradox contained in Hegel's notion of positing the presuppositions, that is, of how the activity of positingmediating does not merely elaborate the presupposed immediate-natural Ground, but thoroughly
transforms the very core of its identity? The very In-itself to which Chechens endeavour to return is already
mediated-posited by the process of modernization, which deprived them of their ethnic roots.

This argumentation may appear Eurocentrist, condemning the colonized to repeat

the European imperialist pattern by means of the very gesture of resisting it
however, it is also possible to give it precisely the opposite reading. That is to say: if we ground our
resistance to imperialist Eurocentrism in the reference to some kernel of previous ethnic
identity, we automatically adopt the position of a victim resisting modernization, of a
passive object on which imperialist procedures work. If, however, we conceive our resistance as
an excess that results from the way brutal imperialist intervention disturbed our previous self-enclosed
identity, our position becomes much stronger, since we can claim that our resistance
is grounded in the inherent dynamics of the imperialist system that the imperialist
system itself, through its inherent antagonism, activates the forces that will bring
about its demise. (The situation here is strictly homologous to that of how to ground feminine
resistance: if woman is 'a symptom of man', the locus at which the inherent antagonisms of the patriarchal
symbolic order emerge, this in no way constrains the scope of feminine resistance but provides it with an
even stronger detonating force.) Or to put it in yet another way the premise according to
which resistance to power is inherent and immanent to the power edifice (in the sense
that it is generated by the inherent dynamic of the power edifice) in no way obliges us to draw the
conclusion that every resistance is co-opted in advance, including in the eternal game
Power plays with itself the key point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of
resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process

which leads to its own ultimate downfall.

It seems that such a notion of antagonism is what Foucault lacks: from the fact that every
resistance is generated ('posited') by the Power edifice itself, from this absolute inherence of resistance to
Power, he seems to draw the conclusion that resistance is co-opted in advance, that it cannot seriously
undermine the system that is, he precludes the possibility that the system itself, on

account of its inherent inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no
longer able to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In
short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that
although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is as such absolutely
inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. (the philosophical point to be made here is that
this is the fundamental feature of the dialectical-materialist notion of 'effect': the effect can 'outdo' its
cause; it can be ontologically 'higher' than its cause.) One is thus tempted to reverse the Foucauldian notion
of an all-encompassing power edifice which always-already contains its transgression, that which allegedly
eludes it: what if the price to be paid is that the power mechanism cannot even control itself, but has to rely
on an obscene protuberance at its very heart? In other words: what effectively eludes the

controlling grasp of Power is not so much the external In-itself it tries to dominate
but, rather, the obscene supplement which sustains its own operation.
And this is why Foucault lacks the appropriate notion of the subject: the subject is by
definition in excess over its cause, and as such it emerges with the reversal of the
repression of sexuality into the sexualization of the repressive measures
themselves. This insufficiency of Foucault's theoretical edifice can be discerned in the way, in his early

269

Kritik Answers
History of Madness, he is already oscillating between two radically opposed views: the view that madness
is not simply a phenomenon that exists in itself and is only secondarily the object of discourses, but is itself
the product of a multitude of (medical, legal, biological...) discourses about itself; and the opposite view,
according to which one should 'liberate' madness from the hold exerted over it by these discourses , and 'let
madness itself speak'.

270

Kritik Answers

#5 Demands on the State Good: 1AR

(3/4)
FOUCAULT IGNORES THE WAY THAT THE POWER EDIFICE
IS SPLIT FROM WITHIN AND HOW THE ITS DISAVOWED
FOUNDATION CAN UNDERMINE IT
Zizek '97

[Slavoj, The Game, The Plague Fantasies, NYC: Verso, 1997, 26-7//uwyo-ajl]
We are now in a position to specify the distinction between the Foucauldian
interconnection between Power and resistance, and our notion of `inherent
transgression'. Let us begin via the matrix of the possible relations between Law
and its transgression. The most elementary is the simple relation of externality, of
external opposition, in which transgression is directly opposed to legal Power, and
poses a threat to it. The next step is to claim that transgression hinges on the
obstacle it violates: without Law there is no transgression; transgression needs an
obstacle in order to assert itself. Foucault, of course, in Volume I of The History of
Sexuality, rejects both these versions, and asserts the absolute immanence of
resistance to Power. However, the point of `inherent transgression' is not only that
resistance is immanent to Power, that power and counter-power generate each
other; it is not only that Power itself generates the excess of resistance which it can
no longer dominate; it is also not only that - in the case of sexuality - the
disciplinary `repression' of a libidinal investment eroticizes this gesture of
repression itself, as in the case of the obsessional neurotic who derives libidinal
satisfaction from the very compulsive rituals destined to keep the traumatic
jouissance at bay.
This last point must be further radicalized: the power edifice itself is split from
within: in order to reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has to rely on an
inherent excess which grounds it - to put it in the Hegelian terms of speculative
identity, Power is always-already its own transgression, if it is to function, it has to
rely on a kind of obscene supplement. It is therefore not enough to assert, in a
Foucauldian way, that power is inextricably linked to counter-power, generating it
and being itself conditioned by it: in a self-reflective way, the split is alwaysalready mirrored back into the power edifice itself, splitting it from within, so that
the gesture of self-censorship is consubstantial with the exercise of power.
Furthermore, it is not enough to say that the `repression' of some libidinal content
retroactively eroticizes the very gesture of `repression' - this `eroticization' of
power is not a secondary effect of its exertion on its object but its very disavowed
foundation, its `constitutive crime', its founding gesture which has to remain
invisible if power is to function normally. What we get in the kind of military drill
depicted in the first part of Full Metal Jacket, for example, is not a secondary
eroticization of the disciplinary procedure which creates military subjects, but the
constitutive obscene supplement of this procedure which renders it operative.
Judith Butler27 provides a perfect example of, again, Jesse Helms who, in his very
formulation of the text of the anti-pornography law~ displays the contours of a
particular fantasy - an older man who engages in sadomasochistic sexual activity
with another, younger man, preferably a child - which bears witness to his own
perverted sexual desire. Helms thus unwittingly brings to light the obscene
libidinal foundation of his own crusade against pornography.

271

Kritik Answers

#5 Demands on the State Good: 1AR

(4/4)
THE INNER LAW OF THE SUBJECT EMERGES FROM THE
FAILURE OF THE EXTERNAL LAW, ALLOWING THE SUBJECT
TO DISRUPT DISCIPLINARY POWER
Zizek '99

[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass,
The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso,
1999, 279-80//uwyo-ajl]
Butler's elaboration of the logic of melancholic identification with the lost object in
fact provides a theoretical model which allows us to avoid the ill-fated notion of the
'internalization' of externally imposed social forms: what this simplistic notion of
'internalization' misses is the reflexive turn by means of which, in the emergence of
the subject, external power (the pressure it exerts on the subject) is not simply
internalized but vanishes, is lost: and this loss is internalized in the guise of the
'voice of conscience', the internalization which gives birth to the internal space
itself:
In the absence of explicit regulation, the subject emerges as one for whom power
has become voice, and voice, the regulatory instrument of the psyche . . . the
subject is produced, paradoxically, through this withdrawal of power, its
dissimulation and fabulation of the psyche as a speaking topos.
This reversal is embodied in Kant, the philosopher of moral autonomy, who
identifies this autonomy with a certain mode of subjection, namely, the subjection
to even the humiliation in the face of the universal moral Law. The key point here is
to bear in mind the tension between the two forms of this Law: far from being a
mere extension or internalization of the external law, the inner Law (Call of
Conscience) emerges when the external law fails to appear, in order to compensate
for its absence. In this perspective, liberation from the external pressure of norms
embodied in one's social conditioning (in the Enlightenment vein) is strictly
identical to submission to the unconditional inner Call of Conscience. That is to
say: the opposition between external social regulations and internal moral Law is
that between reality and the Real: social regulations can still be justifted (or
pretend to be justified) by objective requirements of social coexistence (they belong
to the domain of the 'reality principle'); while the demand of the moral Law is
unconditional, brooking no excuse 'You can, because you must!', as Kant put it. For
that reason, social regulations make peaceful coexistence possible, while moral Law
is a traumatic injunction that disrupts it.. One is thus tempted to go a step further
and to invert once more the relationship between 'external' social norms and the
inner moral Law: what if the subject invents external social norms precisely in
order to escape the unbearable pressure of the moral Law? Isn't it much easier to
have an external Master who can be duped, towards whom one can maintain a
minimal distance and private space, than to have an ex-timate Master, a stranger, a
foreign body in the very heart of one's being? Doesn't the minimal definition of
Power (the agency experienced by the subject as the force that exerts its pressure
on him from the Outside, opposing his inclinations, thwarting his goals) rely
precisely on this externalization of the extimate inherent compulsion of the Law, of
that which is 'in you more than yourself? This tension between external norms and
the inner Law, which can also give rise to subversive effects (say, of opposing public
authority on behalf of one's inner moral stance), is neglected by Foucault.

272

Kritik Answers

#6 Nihilism (Cook): 1AR (1/2)

THEY ARE IN A DOUBLE BIND EITHER FOUCAULT IS A
NIHILIST OR THE ALTERNATIVE DOESNT SOLVE
Hicks, Prof and Chair of Philosophy at Queens College of the CUNY, 2K3 (Steven V., Nietzsche,

Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond, Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed. Alan
Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, p. 109, Questia)
Here Foucault seems less interested in defining a purpose for incitation and struggle than underscoring its potential creativity: bringing into the struggle as much

Given his belief that even our modern discourses of liberation,

rights, and humanism are all deeply entangled in the inarticulable and inescapable
background web of power practices, Foucault's only option to passive nihilism seems to be
the perpetuation and amelioration of the conditions that make struggle itself possible 77 And
this political task of promoting the pathos of struggle functions as an alternative to the
ascetic ideal: creating and maintaining many sites of resistance to the numerous forms of
domination, exploitation, and subjectification present in the social and political body . 78
Admittedly, the pathos of struggle has a strong (and from a Nietzschean perspective, a possibly suspect) negative
component: struggling against any system of constraints or technologies of power that
prevent individuals (affected by the systems) from having the possibility of altering them
or the means of modifying them. 79 As an ethico-political ideal, the pathos of struggle would call for
the negation of all political, social, and cultural conditions that preclude the possibility of
struggling to change these conditions. As Foucault writes, perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against
gaiety, lucidity and determination as possible. 76

nonconsensuality. 80 But it would also contain an affirmative component as well, a struggle for something: Minimally, it will be a struggle for the establishing of
conditions in which self-creation is made possible, in which the assertion of individuality and otherness is viable. 81 As with Nietzsche's alternative ideals (of
recurrence and will to power), the final trajectory of the pathos of struggle remains undetermined. It can't tell us beforehand what our goals should be, only that
(a) the conditions of their conception and articulation must remain polymorphous and unhierarchical, and that (b) whatever they are, they should remain rooted
in gratitude and service to life a joyful creative, and self-constituting engagement rather than resentment against it. 82 But as with Nietzsche's nonascetic
ideals, the pathos of struggle might also supply some affirmative content as well: the doing of what is necessary to affirm your creative freedom and enhance the
ongoing process of self-definition and social definition (within the constraints of not excluding or disempowering the viable other). For example, overcome the
oppression of your present situation if it prevents you from getting a sufficient sense of power and effectiveness in relation to life except by devaluing life. 83 In a

we might view
Foucault as attempting to instill an agonistic education a will to struggle within an
overarching aesthetics of lifeto prepare the ground for, and manifest, our creative
freedom. 84 According to Foucault, glimpses of freedom and creation of the self as a work of art are
prompted by continuous acts of resistance and political struggle that serve to loosen the hold
of those vast matrices of disciplinary power and technologies of the body that threaten to
overwhelm and homogenize us (cf. HS, 2,:io-n). 85 As Foucault sees it, then, a will to struggle, an
aesthetic agonism, becomes the defining characteristic and alternate (nonascetic) ideal that
allows us to best live out our unresolved existencesurrounded by ubiquitous, inescapable
power arrangements and tottering on the abyss of nihilism.
manner somewhat reminiscent of Schiller's attempt to instill an aesthetic education in humanity to promote political freedom,

FOUCAULT IS FASCINATING, AND IRRELEVANT TO PUBLIC

POLICY
McClean

01

David E.
, New School University, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, Presented at the 20
Annual Conference of the Society for the
Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm.

Or we might take Foucault who, at best, has provided us with what may reasonably be
described as a very long and eccentric footnote to Nietzsche (I have once been accused, by a Foucaltian true believer,
of "gelding" Foucault with other similar remarks). Foucault, who has provided the Left of the late 1960s through the present with such notions as
"governmentality," "Limit," "archeology," "discourse" "power" and "ethics," creating or redefining their meanings , has made it overabundantly
clear that all of our moralities and practices are the successors of previous ones which derive
from certain configurations of savoir and connaisance arising from or created by,
respectively, the discourses of the various scientific schools. But I have not yet found in
anything Foucault wrote or said how such observations may be translated into a political
movement or hammered into a political document or theory (let alone public policies) that
can be justified or founded on more than an arbitrary aesthetic experimentalism. In fact,
Foucault would have shuddered if any one ever did, since he thought that anything as grand
as a movement went far beyond what he thought appropriate. This leads me to mildly
rehabilitate Habermas, for at least he has been useful in exposing Foucault's shortcomings
in this regard, just as he has been useful in exposing the shortcomings of others enamored with the abstractions of various Marxian-Freudian social
critiques.

273

Kritik Answers

#6 Nihilism (Cook): 1AR (2/2)

RESISTANCE DOESNT REQUIRE REJECTION OF
DISCIPLINARY PRACTICES, ONLY THEIR INTERROGATON
May 93

[Todd, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and

Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1993, 125//wfi-ajl]
Resistance in contemporary society does not require the complete abandonment of
psychology. What it does require is an understanding of the ways in which
psychology has contributed to our present, particularly the dangers it poses and the
damages it has fostered in that present. It is indeed important for us to get free of
psychology. But to get free of psychology is not necessarily to abandon it. It is to
understand its hold on us, theoretically and practically, and to be able to make
choices about what place, if any, we want it to have in our future. If Foucault's last
works on Greek and Roman sexuality were not written in order to offer concrete
alternatives to contemporary methods of self-formation, neither is the idea of
experimentation which motivated them an implicit advocacy of the complete
abandonment of psychology. They are an attempt to understand who we are and
what our present is like, by reference to histories of practices rather than to the
unfolding of truths or falsehoods.

REJECTING DISCIPLINE CREATES NEW FORMS OF UTOPIAN

DOMINATION ONLY ANALYZING HOW POWER
CONSTITUTES KNOWLEDGE ALLOWS RESISTANCE
Cook 92
[Anthony, Associate Professor of Law @ Georgetown, Hangs out with Gingrich,
New England Law Review, LN//wfi]
Third, Foucault's intervention at these localized sites of domination is not a mere
seizing of power that replaces one utopian vision with another that is likely to be as
dominating as its predecessor when based on the same techniques and knowledge
systems embedded in the displaced system. Instead, Foucault's intervention has a
theoretical dimension that is of primary importance. He
wants first and foremost to challenge the specific ways in which knowledge is
produced and constituted. That is, he wants to explore the ways in which we are
socialized into seeing the world and its possibilities in a certain way and dismissing
other visions as "unreasonable" or "impossible." We must understand the extent to
which we all carry around in our heads fascist, [*759] racist, homophobic, and
sexist constructs that are produced and reproduced by received discourses of
knowledge that are inextricably connected to the exercise of power and domination
of certain groups. When this is realized, the possibility of building around rather
than on these constructs is enhanced. All of this, I believe, is good.

274

Kritik Answers

#10 Reformism Good: 1AR

FOUCAULT IGNORES JURIDICAL POWER AS A KEY SOURCE
OF VIOLENCE FOR THE CONSTITUTIONAL STATE. WE CAN
STRATEGICALLY REFORM THE LAW AND USE THE
EXTENSION OF RIGHTS TO HEDGE AGAINST POWER
FOUCAULT HIMSELF WAS ENGAGED IN THESE VERY SAME
POLITICAL LIKE THE AFF
Habermas, Permanent Visiting Prof @ Northwestern U, 87 (Jrgen, The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity, P. 289-291)
Foucault begins by analyzing the normative language game of rational natural law in connection with the latent functions that the
discourse on authority has in the age of Classicism for the establishment and the exercise of absolutist state power. The sovereignty of the
state that has a monopoly on violence is also expressed in the demonstrative forms of punishment that Foucault depicts in connection with
the procedures of torture and ordeal. From the same functionalist perspective, he then describes the advances made by the Classical
language game during the reform era of the Enlightenment. They culminate, on the one hand, in the Kantian theory of morality and law
and, on the other hand, in utilitarianism. Interestingly enough, Foucault docs not go into the fact that these in turn serve the revolutionary
establishment of a constitutionalized slate power, which is to say, of a political order transferred ideologically from the sovereignty of the
prince to the sovereignty of the people. This kind of regime is, after all, correlated with those normalizing forms of punishment that

Because Foucault filters out the internal aspects of the

development of law, he can inconspicuously take a third and decisive step: Whereas the
sovereign power of Classical formations of power is constituted in concepts of right and law,
this normative language game is supposed to be inapplic able to the disciplinary power of the
modern age; the latter is suited only to empirical, at least nonjuridical, concepts having to do with
the factual steering and organization of the behavioral modes and the motives of a population
rendered increasingly manipulable by science: "The procedures of normalization come to be ever more constantly
constitute the proper theme of Discipline and Punish.

engaged in the colonization of those of the law. I believe that all this can explain the global functioning of what I would call a society of

the complex life-context

of modern societies as a whole can as a matter of fact be less and less construed in the
natural-law categories of contractual relationships. However, this circumstance cannot jus tify the strategic decision (so full of consequences for Foucault's theory) to neglect the development of
normative structures in connection with the modern formation of power . As soon as Foucault
takes up the threads of the biopolitical establishment of disciplinary power, he lets drop the threads of the legal
organization of the exercise of power and of the legitimation of the order of domination.
Because of this, the ungrounded impression arises that the bourgeois constitutional state is
a dysfunctional relic from the period of absolutism. This uncircumspect leveling of culture and politics to immediate substrates of the application of violence explains the ostensible gaps in his presentation. That his history of modern
penal justice is detached from the development of the consti tutional state might be defended
on methodological grounds. The theoretical narrowing down to the system of carrying out
punishment is more questionable. As soon as he passes from the Classical to the modern age, Foucault pays no
attention whatsoever to penal law and to the law governing penal process. Otherwise, he
would have had to submit the unmistakable gains in liberality and legal security, and the
expansion of civil-rights guarantees even in this area, to an exact interpretation in terms of
the theory of power. However, his presentation is utterly distorted by the fact that he also filters out of the history of
penal practices itself all aspects of legal regulation. In prisons, indeed, just as in clinics, schools,
and military installations, there do exist those "special power relationships" that have by no
means remained undisturbed by an energetically advancing enactment of legal rights
Foucault himself has been politically engaged for this cause. This selectivity does not take anything away,
from the importance of his fascinating unmasking of the capillary effects of power. But his generalization, in terms of the
theory of power, of such a selective reading hinders Foucault from perceiving the phenomenon actually
in need of explanation: In the welfare-state democracies of the West, the spread of legal
regulation has the structure dilemma, because it is the legal means for securing freedom that themselves endanger the
freedom of their presumptive beneficiaries. Under the premises of his theory of power, Foucault so levels down the
complexity of societal modernization that the disturbing paradoxes of this process cannot
even become apparent to him.
normalization."33 As the transition from doctrines of natural law to those of natural societies shows, 34

275

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Body Cannot Be a Site of

Resistance
FOUCAULT PLACES AGENCY WITHIN THE BODY WHICH
OFFERS LITTLE CHANCE FOR RESISTANCE.
Kenneth Rufo, Rhetoric and Power: Rethinking and Re-linking, ARGUMENTATION AND
ADVOCACY v. 40 n. 2, Fall 2003, ASP.
The grounds on which Foucault believed such a liberation to be possible are problematic
given that power is always already a relational domination. Therein lies his emancipatory
failure; as Murphy (1995, p. 7) notes: "The oxymoron of an 'active subject' has been the
Achilles' heel of any project, such as critical rhetoric, influenced by Foucault." If all are
produced as subjects, then to whom and from whom can we speak? Certainly, Foucault's
body is not the only agency within the "body of discourse" or the "body politic." The
placement of agency within the body offers little chance of resistance, for even the body is
constituted within the discursive realm. As Kevin Olson (1996, p. 32) explains, speaking of
punk rockers' attempt to cast off the social norm:
We cannot claim ... that such power is mobilized from the body or that the source of
resistance arises from some innate corporeal rebellion. It is difficult to imagine a property of
the body that could constitute an alternative to the structuring force of power, since there is
no sense in which we can say that bodies are 'elastic' or that they can resist the impression of
power ... the idea of resistance to the effects of power is incoherent in the terms Foucault
uses to discuss it. His analysis fails to explain how the body can resist power or take on a
structure not completely determined by disciplinary regimes.

276

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Cannot Escape Subjectivity

YOUR METHODOLOGY IS BANKRUPT BECAUSE IT STILL
PRIVILEGES THE NOTION OF A SUBJECT AS A UNITARY
ACTOR
Jon Simons, professor of political philosophy and feminist theory @ the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICAL, 1995, p. 25-26
Moreover, Foucaults analysis of the systematic arrangement of the elements of discourse3
leads him to conclude that the figure of Man was the effect of a change in the fundamental
arrangements of knowledge. The existence of Man is contingent on the rules of regulation
and systematic relations that constitute the modern episteme. Humanism presupposes the
existence of Man, who for Foucault is a figure of discourse which appeared only at the end of
the eighteenth century. The startling implication of this is that [i]f those arrangements were
to disappear .. . then one can certainly wager that Man would be erased, like a face drawn in
sand at the edge of the sea (1973b: 387). Indeed, Foucault suggests that the modern
episteme is coming to an end, having exhausted the possible constellations of theory
available between the three sets of doubles (l972a: 70). Humanism is a failed philosophical
project because it takes Man to be its foundation for knowledge, whereas he is one of its
effects. Foucault not only declares the demise of the modern episteme but aims to contribute
to it. What Foucault was trying to achieve in his archaeological discourse was his (in)famous
decentring that leaves no privilege to any centre, especially the subject (1972a: 205).
Foucault argues that Man, the subject or the author cannot be considered as the foundation,
origin or condition of possibility of discourse. Rather, the subject, and especially the author,
can be defined as an element within a discursive field, a particular space from which it is
possible to speak or write and which must be filled if the discourse is to exist (1972a: 956).
For example, the subject of a discourse such as medicine is a function of legal rights, criteria
of competence, institutional relations and professional hierarchy. Doctors can only operate
as the subjects of medical discourse if they speak from the correct institutional sites: the
hospital, laboratory, the professional journal. They also have different roles depending on
the object of discourse they speak about, sometimes observing, sometimes questioning,
listening or seeing, which also vary with the institutional site they are in. Since, in relation to
medical discourse, we find a variety of subject roles in different positions, it is concluded
that discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing,
speaking subject, but ... a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his
discontinuity with himself may be determined (1972a: 545). Discourses of knowledge
should not be analysed as unities by reference to psychological individuality or to the
opinions of a particular person (63, 70).

277

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Geneologies Dont Produce

Change
GENEALOGIES, ALTHOUGH INTERESTING, DONT
GENERATE POLITICAL CHANGETHEY JUST LEAD US
DOWN AN ENDLESS PATH OF QUESTIONS
Michel Foucault, SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED: LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE
1975-1976, 2003, p. 3-4.
So what was I going to say to you this year? That Ive just about had enough; in other words,
Id like to bring to a close, to put an end to, up to a point, the series of research projects
well, yes, researchwe all talk about it, but what does it actually mean?that weve been
working on for four or five years, or practically ever since Ive been here, and I realize that
there were more and more drawbacks, for both you and me. Lines of research that were very
closely interrelated but that never added up to a coherent body of work, that had no
continuity. Fragments of research, none of which was completed, and none of which was
followed through; bits and pieces of research, and at the same time it was getting very
repetitive, always falling into the same rut, the same themes, the same concepts. A few
remarks on the history of penal procedure; a few chapters on the evolution, the
institutionalization of psychiatry in the nineteenth century; considerations on sophistry or
Greek coins; an outline history of sexuality, or at least a history of knowledge about sexuality
based upon seventeenth-century confessional practices, or controls on infantile sexuality in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; pinpointing the genesis of a theory and knowledge
of anomalies, and of all the related techniques. We are making no progress, and its all
leading nowhere. Its all repetitive, and it doesnt add up. Basically, we keep saying the same
thing, and there again, perhaps were not saying anything at all. Its all getting into
something of an inextricable tangle, and its getting us nowhere, as they say. I could tell you
that these things were trails to be followed, that it didnt matter where they led, or even that
the one thing that did matter was that they didnt lead anywhere, or at least not in some
predetermined direction. I could say they were like an outline for something. Its up to you
to go on with them or to go off on a tangent; and its up to me to pursue them or give them a
different configuration. And then, weyou or Icould see what could be done with these
fragments. I felt a bit like a sperm whale that breaks the surface of the water, makes a little
splash, and lets you believe, makes you believe, or want to believe, that down there where it
cant be seen, down there where it is neither seen nor monitored by anyone, it is following a
deep, coherent, and premeditated trajectory.

278

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Remains Enmeshed in Power

EVEN IN SELF-EXAMINATION, WE ARE STILL ENSNARED BY
THE WEB OF CONSTITUTIVE POWER
Jon Simons, professor of political philosophy and feminist theory @ the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICAL, 1995, p. 36
Analysis at self-formation contributes to a broader social critique. Modern subjection of the
insane took the form of an ethical self-recognition. In Tukes asylum, the inmates were made
to feel guilty for the negligence which led to their loss of reason. They became aware of
themselves as guilty, as objects of punishment and therapy and as unequal to their keepers,
who had not exceeded their liberty but submitted it to the reason of morality and reality. It
was through awareness of themselves as objects that the mad were restored to awareness of
themselves as responsible subjects, capable of restraining their own behaviour rather than
being restrained by the paternal authority of the asylum. The asylum. . . organized. . . guilt. .
. for the madman as a consciousness of himself (1965: 24750). On a grander scale, the
definition of European Man, identified with his reason, can be drawn by its opposition to the
experience of madness, now understood as mental illness. That form of human selfrecognition and type of subjecting thought puts in question . . . the limits rather than the
identity of a culture (xiii). We are limited to the identities in which we recognize ourselves
as ethical as well as scientific beings.

279

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Praxis

THEORY IS IRRELEVENT ABSENT SPECIFIC APPLICATION
MUST COMBINE THEORY AND PRACTICE FOR A
PHILOSOPHY AS LIFE
Foucault 82

[Michel, Politics and Ethics: An Interview, The Foucault Reader, Trans.

Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 373-4//wfi-ajl]
Q. There is much talk in America these days comparing your work to that of Jurgen
Habermas. It has been suggested that your work is more concerned with ethics and
his with politics. Habermas, for example, grew up reading Heidegger as a politically
disastrous heir of Nietzsche. He associates Heidegger with German neoconservatism. He thinks of these people as the conservative heirs of Nietzsche and
of you as the anarchistic heir. You don't read the philosophical tradition this way at
all, do you?
M.F. That's right. When Habermas was in Paris, we talked at some length, and in
fact I was quite struck by his observation of the extent to which the problem of
Heidegger and of the political implications of Heidegger's thought was quite a
pressing and important one for him. One thing he said to me has left me musing,
and it's something I'd like to mull over further. After explaining how Heidegger's
thought indeed constituted a political disaster, he mentioned one of his professors
who was a great Kantian, very well-known in the '30s, and he explained how
astonished and disappointed he had been when, while looking through card
catalogues one day, he found some texts from around 1934 by this illustrious
Kantian that were thoroughly Nazi in orientation.
I have just recently had the same experience with Max Pohlenz, who heralded the
universal values of Stoicism all his life. I came across a text of his from 1934
devoted to Fiihrertum in Stoicism. You should reread the introductory page and
the book's closing remarks on the Fuhrersideal and on the true humanism
constituted by the Volk under the inspiration of the leader's direction-Heidegger
never wrote anything more disturbing. Nothing in this condemns Stoicism or
Kantianism, needless to say.
But I think that we must reckon with several facts: there is a very tenuous
"analytic" link between a philosophical conception and the concrete political
attitude of someone who is appealing to it; the "best" theories do not constitute a
very effective protection against disastrous political choices; certain great themes
such as "humanism" can be used to any end whatever-for example, to show with
what gratitude Pohlenz would have greeted Hitler.
I do not conclude from this that one may say just anything within the order of
theory, but, on the contrary, that a demanding, prudent, "experimental" attitude is
necesary; at every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking
and saying with what one is doing, with what one is. I have never been too
concerned about people who say: "You are bor-rowing ideas from Nietzsche; well,
Nietzsche was used by the Nazis, therefore. . ."; but, on the other hand, I have
always been concerned with linking together as tightly as possible the historical
and theoretical analysis of power relations, institu-tions, and knowledge, to the
movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question in reality. If I
have insisted on all this "practice," it has not been in order to "apply" ideas, but in
order to put them to the test and modify them. The key to the Personal poetic
attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced
from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophicallife, his ethos.
Among the French philosophers who participated in the Resistance during the war,
one was Cavailles, a historian of mathematics who was interested in the
development of its internal structures. None of the philosophers of
engagement-Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty-none of them did a thing.

280

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Praxis

GIVING UP ON RESISTANCE THROUGH AGENCY ALLOWS
OPPRESSION TO REMAIN DOMINANT ONLY THE PERM
SOLVES
Cook 92

[Anthony, Associate Professor of Law @ Georgetown, Hangs out with Gingrich,

New England Law Review, LN//wfi]
Several things trouble me about Foucault's approach. First, he nurtures in many
ways an unhealthy insularity that fails to connect localized struggle to other
localized struggles and to modes of oppression like classism, racism, sexism, and
homophobia that transcend their localized articulation within this particular law
school, that particular law firm, within this particular church or that particular
factory.
I note among some followers of Foucault an unhealthy propensity to rely on rich,
thick, ethnographic type descriptions of power relations playing themselves out in
these localized laboratories of social conflict. This reliance on detailed description
and its concomitant deemphasis of explanation begins, ironically, to look like a
regressive positivism which purports to sever the descriptive from the normative,
the is from the ought and law from morality and politics.
Unless we are to be trapped in this Foucaultian moment of postmodern insularity,
we must resist the temptation to sever description from explanation. Instead, our
objective should be to explain what we describe in light of a vision embracing
values that we make explicit in struggle. These values should act as magnets that
link our particularized struggles to other struggles and more global critiques of
power. In other words, we must not, as Foucault seems all too willing to do, forsake
the possibility of more universal narratives that, while tempered by postmodern
insights, attempt to say and do something about the oppressive world in which we
live.
Second, Foucault's emphasis on the techniques and discourses of knowledge that
constitute the human subject often diminishes, if not abrogates, the role of human
agency. Agency is of tremendous importance in any theory of oppression, because
individuals are not simply constituted by systems of knowledge but also constitute
hegemonic and counter-hegemonic systems of knowledge as well. Critical theory
must pay attention to the ways in which oppressed people not only are victimized
by ideologies of oppression but the ways they craft from these ideologies and
discourses counter-hegemonic weapons of liberation.

PROTEST ISNT ENOUGH MUST LINK IT TO PRACTICE AND

DEMANDS ON THE STATE OR WE LAPSE INTO POLITICAL
PARALYSIS IN THE FACE OF OPPRESSION
Foucault 82

[Michel, God, Politics and Ethics: An Interview, The Foucault Reader, Trans.
Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 377//wfi-ajl]
Q. And this is hard to situate within a struggle that is already under way, because
the lines are drawn by others. . . .
M.F. Yes, but I think that ethics is a practice; ethos is a manner of being. Let's take
an example that touches us all, that of Poland. If we raise the question of Poland in
strictly political terms, it's clear that we quickly reach the point of saying that
there's nothing we can do. We can't dispatch a team of para- troopers, and we can't
send armored cars to liberate Warsaw. I think that, politically, we have to recognize
this, but I think we also agree that, for ethical reasons, we have to raise the problem
of Poland in the form of a nonacceptance of what is. happening there, and a
nonacceptance of the passivity of our own governments. I think this attitude is an

281

Kritik Answers
ethical one, but it is also political; it does not consist in saying merely, "I protest,"
but in making of that attitude a political phenomenon that is as substantial as
possible, and one which those who govern, here or there, will sooner or later be
obliged to take into account.

282

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Suspicion

ALTS SUSPICION FORECLOSES UPON PRODUCTIVE ACTION
James D. Faubian, Professor, Anthropology, Rice University, MICHEL FOUCAULT: POWER,
ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT 1954-1984 Volume 3, 1994, p. xviii-xix
One of the key clarifying points Foucault makes is that what is most interesting about links
between power and knowledge is not the detection of false or spurious knowledge at work in
human affairs but, rather, the role of knowledges that are valued and effective because of
their reliable instrumental efficacy. Foucault often uses the French word savoira term for
knowledge with connotations of know-how (a way to make a problem tractable or a
material manageable)for this middle sort of knowledges, which may fall short of rigorous
scientificity but command some degree of ratification within a social group and confer some
recognized instrumental benefit. The reason the combining of power and knowledge in
society is a redoubtable thing is not that power is apt to promote and exploit spurious
knowledges (as the Marxist theory of ideology has argued) but, rather, that the rational
exercise of power tends to make the fullest use of knowledges capable of the maximum
instrumental efficacy. What is wrong or alarming about the use of power is not, for Foucault,
primarily or especially the fact that a wrong or false knowledge is being used. Conversely,
power and the use of knowledge by power are not guaranteed to be safe, legitimate, or
salutory because (as an optimistic rationalist tradition extending from the Enlightenment to
Marxism has inclined some to hope) the knowledge that guides or instrumentalizes the
exercise of power is valid and scientific. Nothing, including the exercise of power, is evil in
itselfbut everything is dangerous. To be able to detect and diagnose real dangers, we need
to avoid equally the twin seductions of paranoia and universal suspicion, on the one hand,
and the compulsive quest for foundationalist certainties and guarantees, on the otherboth
of which serve to impede or dispense us from the rational and responsible work of careful
and specific investigation.

283

Kritik Answers

**Benjamin**
Benjamin Answers: 2AC
BENJAMIN IS GOOD FOR AESTHETICS, BAD FOR POLICY
McClean

01

David E.
, New School University, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, Presented at the 20
Annual Conference of the Society for the
Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm.

Cavell meant this reflection to be taken non-pejoratively because he seems to take Benjamin
more seriously as an aesthetician and literary metaphysician (in Rorty-speak, as a "strong
poet") than as a serious, social commentator with good ideas. Keeping Benjamin and his
cohorts in the box of aesthetics and metaphysics is, I believe, good intellectual policy for
social critics seeking to be relevant. They should be cited for seasoning and not for meat.
Yet I am not at all convinced that anything I have described is about to happen, though this essay is written to help force the issue, if only a little bit. I am
convinced that the modern Cultural Left is far from ready to actually run the risks that come
with being taken seriously and held accountable for actual policy-relevant prescriptions.
Why should it? It is a hell of a lot more fun and a lot more safe pondering the intricacies of
high theory, patching together the world a priori (which means without any real
consideration of those officers and bureaucrats I mentioned who are actually on the front
lines of policy formation and regulation). However the risk in this apriorism is that both the
conclusions and the criticisms will miss the mark, regardless of how great the minds that are
engaged. Intellectual rigor and complexity do not make silly ideas politically salient, or less
pernicious, to paraphrase Rorty. This is not to say that air-headed jingoism and conservative rants about republican virtue aren't equally silly and pernicious.
But it seems to me that the new public philosopher of the Political Left will want to pick better yardsticks with which to measure herself.

284

Kritik Answers

**Chaloupka**
Chaloupka Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, TURN EVEN IF NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARENT
CONTROLLABLE, PLAN SOLVES SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED
ACTIONS THAT CAUSE THEIR USE
SECOND, CHALOUPKA DOESNT UNDERSTAND IR. NUCLEAR
WEAPONS ONLY REMAIN TEXTUAL BECAUSE DETERRENCE
WORKS. OUR SCENARIOS INDICATE A BREAKDOWN ON
MAD THAT ACTUALIZES NUCLEAR WAR.
THIRD, PERM: TO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE. THE
CRITIQUE ALONE IS A FALSE CHOICE THAT DOOMS
ACTIVISM
Sankaran

Krishna, Professor of Political Science, U of Hawaii, Alternatives 1993, v. 18. p. 400-1

The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either indulges in
total critique, delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed to nostalgic,
essentialist unities that have become obsolete and have been the grounds for all our
oppressions.
In offering this dichotomous choice, Der Derian replicates a move made by Chaloupka in his
equally dismissive critique of the move mainstream nuclear opposition, the Nuclear Freeze
movement of the early 1980s, that, according to him, was operating along obsolete lines,
emphasizing facts and realities, while a postmodern President Reagan easily
outflanked them through an illusory Star Wars program (See KN: chapter 4)
Chaloupka centers this difference between his own supposedly total critique of all sovereign
truths (which he describes as nuclear criticism in an echo of literary criticism) and the more
partial (and issue based) criticism of what he calls nuclear opposition or antinuclearists
at the very outset of his book. (Kn: xvi) Once again, the unhappy choice forced upon the
reader is to join Chaloupka in his total critique of all sovereign truths or be trapped in
obsolete essentialisms.
This leads to a disastrous politics, pitting groups that have the most in common (and need to
unite on some basis to be effective) against each other. Both Chaloupka and Der Derian thus
reserve their most trenchant critique for political groups that should, in any analysis, be
regarded as the closest to them in terms of an oppositional politics and their desired futures.
Instead of finding ways to live with these differences and to (if fleetingly) coalesce against
the New Right, this fratricidal critique is politically suicidal. It obliterates the space for a
political activism based on provisional and contingent coalitions, for uniting behind a
common cause even as one recognizes that the coalition is comprised of groups that have
very differing (and possibly unresolvable) views of reality. Moreover, it fails to consider the
possibility that there may have been other, more compelling reasons for the failure of the
Nuclear Freeze movement or anti-Gulf War movement. Like many a worthwhile cause in our
times, they failed to garner sufficient support to influence state policy. The response to that
need not be a totalizing critique that delegitimizes all narratives.
The blackmail inherent in the choice offered by Der Derian and Chaloupka, between
total critique and ineffective partial critique, ought to be transparent. Among other things,
it effectively militates against the construction of provisional or strategic essentialisms in
our attempts to create space for activist politics. In the next section, I focus more widely on
the genre of critical international theory and its impact on such an activist politics.

FOURTH, TURN DEBATE ISNT A TRAGIC PERSPECTIVE ON

NUCLEAR WAR ITS A COMICAL GAME IN WHICH WE
THROW AROUND SCENARIOS THAT WE TAKE WITH A
285

Kritik Answers

GRAIN OF SALT, OVERCOMING THE PERSPECTIVE

CHALOUPKA CRITICIZES

286

Kritik Answers

Chaloupka Answers: 2AC (2/3)

FIFTH, NO LINK CHALOUPKA IS CRITICIZING ANTINUCLEARISTS WHO DEFEND UNSPEAKABILITY. THE 1AC IS
AN EXPLICITY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THE TEXTUAL
SPEAKABILITY OF NUKES
SIXTH, CLAIMING THAT NUKES ARE ONLY TEXTUAL
ERASES THE HISTORY OF FOURTH WORLD NUCLEAR
VIOLENCE
Masahide Kato, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, 19 93, Alternatives vol. 18,
p. 339
, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear
catastrophe has never been the unthinkable single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of
reptetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars
have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by rendering them as mere
preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of nuclear
explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the
First World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the real of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be
Thus

observed even in Stewart Fiths Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of nuclear testing in the Pacific:
Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere were global in effect. The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which
we all depend for our survival and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going to battle against nature itself.

AND, THAT LEGITIMIZES NUCLEAR VIOLENCE

Masahide Kato, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, 19 93, Alternatives vol. 18,
p. 339
, the problematic
division/distinction between the nuclear explosions and the nuclear war is kept intact. The
imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the subject (we) is
located higher than the real of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This
ideological division/heirarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing processes of the
destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of nuclear violence are
obliterated and hence legitimatized.
Although Firths book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of nuclear testing in the Pacific

SEVENTH, IMAGINING NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION IS A

PROJECT OF SURVIVAL THEIR ALTERNATIVE CREATES
REPRESSION AND DENIAL WHICH MAKES NUCLEAR WAR
MORE LIKELY
Lenz, Science and Policy Professor at SUNY, 90 (Nuclear Age Literature For Youth, p. 9-10)
all people have difficulty
grasping the magnitude and immediacy of the threat of nuclear arms and this psychological unreality is a
basic obstacle to eliminating that threat. Only events that people have actually experienced can have true emotional
A summary of Franks thought in Psychological Determinants of the Nuclear Arms Race notes how

impact. Since Americans have escaped the devastation of nuclear weapons on their own soil and nuclear weapons poised for annihilation
in distant countries cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched, we

find it easy to imagine ourselves immune

to the threat. Albert Camus had the same phenomenon in mind when he wrote in his essay Neither Victims nor Executioners of the
inability of most people really to imagine other peoples death (he might have added or their own). Commenting on Camus, David P.
Barash and Judith Eve Lipton observed that this

distancing from deaths reality is yet another aspect of our

insulation from lifes most basic realities. We make love by telephone, we work not on matter but on machines, and
we kill and are killed by proxy. We gain in cleanliness, but lose in understanding. If we are to heed Camuss call to refuse to be
either the victims of violence like the Jews of the Holocaust, or the perpetrators of it like the Nazi executioners of
the death camps, we must revivify the imagination of what violence really entails. It is here , of course,

287

Kritik Answers
that the literature of nuclear holocaust can play a significant role. Withou t either firsthand experience
or vivid imagining, it is natural, as Frank points out, to deny the existence of death machines and
their consequences. In psychiatric usage denial means to exclude from awareness, because letting [the
instruments of destruction] enter consciousness would create too strong a level of anxiety or other painful emotions. In most life-

adapting ourselves to nuclear

fear is counterproductive. We only seal our doom more certainly . The repressed fear, moreover, takes a
threatening situations, an organisms adaptation increases chances of survival, but ironically,
psychic toll.

288

Kritik Answers

Chaloupka Answers: 2AC (3/3)

EIGHTH, CRITICIZING REPRESENTATIONS OF NUCLEAR
PRESENCE DOESNT PRECLUDE THE NEED FOR CONCRETE
ACTION
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, Truth, Politics, and Postmodernism,
Spinoza Lectures, 1997, p. 51-2
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very
important meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida

the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the
writers who are labeled `post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good
experimentalist social democrats when it comes to actual political activity . I suspect, for example, that Gray,
usually replies that

Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist
philosophers have gotten a bad name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like `impossible; `self-contradictory' and
`unrepresentable'. They have helped create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more

. I am
all for getting rid of the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and
unrepresentability is counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the
generally, to the `metaphysics of presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible

metaphor of things being accurately represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for
philosophers, and we would be better off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate

Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls

a full presence beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity
will not have changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from
representation' was never a fruitful way to describe intellectual progress.
"

psychoanalysis. All that we have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss

We have been given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress
has been made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political program . Since Darwin we have come to suspect
which the Enlightenment offered.

that whether such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky.

NINTH, MEDIA IMAGES PLAY THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF

REVEALING THEIR OWN ILLUSIONS
Jean Baudrillard, professor of philosophy of culture and media at Univ. or Paris, 1994,
Illusion of the End, pg. 60-61
And yet there will, nonetheless, have been a kind of verdict in this Romanian affair, and the
artificial heaps of corpses will have been of some use, all the same. One might ask whether
the Romanians, by the very excessiveness of this staged event and the simulacrum of their
revolution, have not served as demystifiers of news and its guiding principle. For, if the
media image has put an end to the credibility of the event, the event will, in its turn, have
put an end to the credibility of the image. Never again shall we be able to look at a television
picture in good faith, and this is the finest collective demystification we have ever known.
The finest revenge over this new arrogant power, this power to blackmail by events. Who
can say what responsibility attaches to the televisual production of a false massacre
(Timisoara), as compared with the perpetrating of a true massacre? This is another kind of
crime against humanity, a hijacking of fantasies, affects and the credulity of hundreds of
millions of people by means of television a crime of blackmail and simulation. What
penalty is laid down for such a hijacking? There is no way to rectify this situation and we
must have no illusions: there is no perverse effect, nor even anything scandalous in the
Timisoara syndrome. It is simply the (immoral) truth of news, the secret purpose
[destination] of which is to deceive us about the real, but also to undeceive us about the real.
There is no worse mistake than taking the real for the real and, in that sense, the very excess
of media illusion plays a vital disillusioning role. In this way, news could be said to undo its
own spell by its effects and the violence of information to be avenged by the repudiation and
indifference it engenders. Just as we should be unreservedly thankful for the existence of
politicians, who take on themselves the responsibility for that wearisome function, so we
should be grateful to the media for existing and taking on themselves the triumphant
illusionism of the world of communications, the whole ambiguity of mass culture, the
confusion of ideologies, the stereotypes, the spectacle, the banality soaking up all these
things in their operation. While, at the same time, constituting a permanent test of
intelligence, for where better than on television can one learn to question every picture,
every word, every commentary? Television inculcates indifference distance, scepticism and

289

Kritik Answers
unconditional apathy. Through the worlds becoming-image, it anaesthetizes the
imagination, provokes a sickened abreaction, together with a surge of adrenalin which
induces total disillusionment. Television and the media would render reality [le reel]
dissuasive, were it not already so. And this represents an absolute advance in the
consciousness or the cynical unconscious of our age.

290

Kritik Answers

**CLS**
CLS Answers: 2AC (1/4)
FIRST, TURN WE EXPOSE THE FLAWS IN EX PARTE
QUIRIN, SOLVING BETTER THROUGH HISTORICAL
ANALYSIS
SECOND, CRITIQUE DOESNT SOLVE THERES NO REASON
POINTING OUT FLAWS IN THE SYSTEM WILL LEAD TO A
HUGE MINDSET SHIFT. THE LAW WILL STILL
UNILATERALLY DETAIN ENEMY COMBATANTS. PREFER
OUR SPECIFIC TRIBE AND KATYAL EV
THIRD, TURN- UPHOLDING LEGAL PRINCIPLES PROVES
THE LAWS FRAUDULENCE AND HOLDS IT ACCOUNTABLE
Vclav Havel, playwright, political prisoner, and president elect of Czechoslovakia, 19 86 (Living in
Truth, p. 137-38)
A persistent and never-ending appeal to the laws not just to the laws concerning human
rights, but to all laws does not mean at all that those who do so have succumbed to the
illusion that in our system the law is anything other than what it is. They are well aware of
the role it plays. But precisely because they know how desperately the system depends on it
on the noble version of the law, that is they also know how enormously significant
such appeals are. Because the system cannot do without the law, because it is hopelessly tied
down by the necessity of pretending the laws are observed, it is compelled to react in some
way to such appeals. Demanding that the laws be upheld is thus an act of living within the
truth that threatens the whole mendacious structure at its point of maximum mendacity.
Over and over again, such appeals make the purely ritualistic nature of the law clear to
society and to those who inhabit its power structures. They draw attention to its real
material substance and thus, indirectly, compel all those who take refuge behind the law to
affirm and make credible this agency of excuses, this means of communication, this
reinforcement of the social arteries outside of which their will could not be made to circulate
through society. They are compelled to do so for the sake of their own consciences, for the
impression they make on outsiders, to maintain themselves in power (as part of the systems
own mechanism of self-preservation and its principles of cohesion), or simply out of fear
that they will be reproached for being clumsy in handling the ritual. They have no other
choice: because they cannot discard the rules of their own game, they can only attend more
carefully to those rules. Not to react to challenges means to undermine their own excuse and
lose control of their mutual communications system. To assume that the laws are a mere
facade, that they have no validity and that therefore it is pointless to appeal to them would
mean to go on reinforcing those aspects of the law that create the facade and the ritual. It
would mean confirming the law as an aspect of the world of appearances and enabling those
who exploit it to rest easy with the cheapest (and therefore the most mendacious) form of
their excuse. I have frequently witnessed policemen, prosecutors or judges if they were
dealing with an experienced Chartist or a courageous lawyer, and if they were exposed to
public attention (as individuals with a name, no longer protected by the anonymity of the
apparatus) suddenly and anxiously begin to take particular care that no cracks appear in
the ritual. This does not alter the fact that a despotic power is hiding behind that ritual, but
the very existence of the officials anxiety necessarily regulates, limits and slows down the
operation of that despotism.

291

Kritik Answers

CLS Answers: 2AC (2/4)

FOURTH, PERM DO BOTH. FIGHTING WITHIN THE
SYSTEM BY PRETENDING THAT WE CAN CHANGE IT IN
SPITE OF ITS LIMITATIONS PRODUCES A MORE EFFECTIVE
CLS THAT ENGAGES IN PRAXIS
Sparer 84

[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights, Legal
Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies
Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
From this background, Gordon traces an emerging "interpretative" Critical legal theory that emphasizes the role of legal doctrine in "belief-systems that people have
externalized and allowed to rule their lives." n121 It is "belief systems" that count, even though "many constraints on human social activity," such as finite resources,
do exist. Given these belief systems, not even the "organization of the working class or capture of the state apparatus will automatically" produce conditions which lead
to "the utopian possibilities of social life." He then concludes:

, this does not mean that people should stop trying to organize the working class or to
influence the exercise of state power; it means only that they have to do so pragmatically and
experimentally, with full knowledge that there are no deeper logics of historical necessity . . . .
Yet, if the real enemy is us -- all of us, the structures we carry around in our heads, the limits on our imagination -- where can we even begin? Things seem
to change in history when people break out of their accustomed ways of responding to
domination, by acting as if the constraints on their improving their lives were not real and
that they could change things; and sometimes they can, though not always in the way they
had hoped or intended; but they never knew they could change them at all until they tried. n122
Gordon's conclusion is profound. But it contradicts the view that a negative attack on liberal legal
doctrine is the key path to a liberated future. n123 People break out of their accustomed ways
of responding to [*558] domination by acting as if they could change things. "Acting as if they could
Of course

change things" does not mean confining scholarly endeavor to negative doctrinal analysis, even though negative doctrinal analysis may be one helpful step towards

. Acting means struggling for and living a different way, even if only "experimentally," and this
requires praxis, theory which guides and is in turn influenced by action. n124 Yet the whole of Gordon's piece, until his conclusion, is an exposition which
acting

becomes a polemic -- almost an apology -- for the negative Critical analysis which constitutes virtually the sole response to the practitioners' yearning for helpful
theory

FIFTH, SPECIFIC SOLVENCY TRUMPS PREFER OUR TRIBE

AND KATYAL EV SHOWING THAT OVERRULING QUIRIN
CREATES EFFECTIVE DUE PROCESS RIGHTS
SIXTH, HERES MORE EV INDETERMINACY MEANS YOU
HAVE TO EVALUATE THE EMPIRICAL JUSTIFICATION OF
OUR SOLVENCY CLAIMS
Hasnas 95

[John, JD & PhD Phil @ duke, Asst. prof. Bus Ethics @ Georgetown, Back to the Future,
45 Duke L.j. 84, October, LN//uwyo-ajl]
I have suggested that this greatly overstates what the indeterminacy argument actually
implies. Rather, the proper inference to draw from a demonstration that the law is
indistinguishable from politics is that the cases in which the law should be employed to
reform society are limited to those in which the desired reforms can be effectively realized
through political action. The insight the legal realists provided long ago was that to identify
these cases, one must undertake the pragmatic examination of how the law works in practice
relative to alternative methods of social control. Thus, there is a need for empirical
investigation to determine how the expected outcomes of collective political action compare
with those of politically unrestrained individuals functioning in a market environment.
Further, to be valid, this investigation must compare like with like; it must compare what
can reasonably be achieved
[*131] through real-world political processes staffed by less than perfect human beings with
what is likely to result from unrestrained human interaction in the flawed markets that
actually exist, not the utopian results of an ideal political system with those of imperfect,
real-world markets. Because this is the case and because the Crits have resisted undertaking

292

Kritik Answers
such investigations, I have argued that they have missed the point of the indeterminacy
argument, and that if this argument is in fact correct, the way forward into our
jurisprudential future lies in a return to the uncompleted project of the realists.

293

Kritik Answers

CLS Answers: 2AC (3/4)

SEVENTH, EXPERIENTIAL DECONSTRUCTION:
ORGANIC INTELLECTUALS MUST CONTEXTUALIZE
CRITICISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SPECIFIC OPPRESION,
STRATEGICALLY USING HEGEMONIC NORMS TO CREATE
THEIR ALTERNATIVE ****
Cook 90
[Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, Beyond Critical Legal Studies, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl]

Because he appreciated the dialectic of theory and the broad-based confrontational

strategies of socially transformative action, King stands as the paradigmatic organic intellectual of twentieth-century
American life. King's method and practice offer direction to progressive scholars concerned about the exclusionary, repressive, and non-communal dimensions of
American life.
[*1013] Gramsci's conception of the organic intellectual provides a useful framework for understanding the thought of King and what it has to offer CLS. The organic
intellectual brings philosophy to the masses, not for the merely instrumental purposes of unifying them, "but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc

Gramsci's organic
intellectual struggles to transform those who are oppressed as a means of transforming the
conditions under which they are oppressed. n79 Gramsci understands domination in terms of both coercion and consent, the latter
which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups." n78

constituting what he refers to as hegemony. Under his formulation, hegemony consists, then, of "[t]he 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the
population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group." n80 Gramsci argues that "this consent is 'historically' caused by the
prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production." n81 Thus, oppression is not
only physical and psychological but also cultural. n82

King, like Gramsci's organic intellectual, empowered his community through a practical effort to bridge the
gap between theory and lived experience. King's work consisted of four interrelated activities. First, he used
theoretical deconstruction to free the mind to envision alternative conceptions of
community. Second, he employed experiential deconstruction to understand the liberating
dimensions of legitimating ideologies like liberalism and Christianity, dimensions easily ignored by the
abstract, ahistorical, and potentially misleading critiques that rely exclusively on theoretical
deconstruction. Third, he used the insights gleaned from the first two activities to postulate
an [*1014] alternative social vision intended to transform the conditions of oppression under
which people struggle. Drawing from the best of liberalism and the best of Christianity, King
forged a vision of community that transcended the limitations of each and built upon the
accomplishments of both. Finally, he created and implemented strategies to mobilize people to
secure that alternative vision. I refer to this multidimensional critical activity as "philosophical praxis."
Although many critical theorists engage primarily in theoretical deconstruction, and some appreciate certain forms of experiential deconstruction, n83 few have

reconstructive theorizing and

socially transformative struggle. n84 These dimensions of critical activity directly confront the material
conditions of oppression whereas the preoccupation with deconstructing theory does not.
King went further than these critical theorists by examining the subtle and complex ways in
which consent was shaped, while fully appreciating the role of state and private coercion in
legitimating authority in the lives of the oppressed.
This Part examines how King filtered his theoretical deconstruction of hegemonic theologies through
his knowledge of the history and experience of oppression, and thereby made that theoretical
deconstruction richer, more contextual, and ready to engage the existential realities of
oppression. The interplay between King's theoretical and experiential deconstruction is best illustrated by reference to the African-American Church -- the
embraced either a full experiential deconstruction or the third and fourth dimensions of philosophical praxis --

institution providing the organic link between philosophy and the masses, theory and praxis. n85
My analysis proceeds in four steps. First, I examine how African-American religion served at once to legitimate slave society, delegitimize that society, and inform
alternative visions of community. Second, I examine King's use of theoretical deconstruction and illustrate its dependence on the historic mission of the AfricanAmerican Church. Like a true organic intellectual engaged in a philosophical praxis, King used theoretical deconstruction to illustrate the possibilities [*1015] of his
reconstructive vision and the centrality of social struggle in realizing that vision. Third, I discuss King's experiential deconstruction, his unwillingness to be distracted

the combination of theoretical and experiential

deconstruction results in a more contextual framework -- one more appreciative of the
conditions of choice within which authority is legitimated and challenged through
reconstructive vision and struggle.
by the reified abstractions of theoretical deconstruction. Finally, I show how

294

Kritik Answers

CLS Answers: 2AC (4/4)

EIGHTH, LIBERALISM IS INEVITABLE AND NECESSARY TO
ACCOMPLISH CLSS LIBERATORY GOALS
Sparer 84

[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights, Legal
Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies
Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
The thrust of CLS critique is devoted, in turn, to the exposure of the contradictions in liberal philosophy and law. This strand of the Critical legal critique is quite

, the critique lends itself to

exaggeration. This observation may be appreciated by considering what happens when Critical legal theorists themselves make
tentative gestures at the social direction in which we should move. Such gestures, even from
the most vigorous critics of liberalism, do not escape from liberalism and, indeed, liberal rights
theory. Nevertheless, those gestures have great merit, particularly because of their use of liberal
rights. For example, Frug, while expounding his vision of the city as a site of localized power and participatory democracy, attacks liberal theory and its dualities
as an obstacle to his vision. n19 At the same time, without [*518] acknowledging the significance of what he is doing, Frug relies on the liberal
image of law and rights to defend the potential of his vision. He writes:
It should be emphasized that participatory democracy on the local level need not mean the tyranny of the
majority over the minority. Cities are units within states, not the state itself; cities, like all individuals and entities within the state, could be
powerful and makes a much-needed contribution. In my view, however, it suffers from two general problems. First

subject to state-created legal restraints that protect individual rights. Nor does participatory democracy necessitate the frustration of national political objectives by

. The liberal
image of law as mediating between the need to protect the individual from communal
coercion and the need to achieve communal goals could thus be retained even in the model
of participatory democracy. n20
local protectionism; participatory institutions, like others in society, could still remain subject to general regulation to achieve national goals

295

Kritik Answers

#4 Permutation: 1AR (1/2)

WE MUST RECOGNIZE THE LIMITATIONS OF LAW WHILE
USING IT AS A STRATEGY FOR SURVIVAL.
Ruthann Robson, Professor of Law, CUNY Law School, New York, Lesbian (Out)law, 1992, p.
89-90
Yet these legal strategies can also afford concrete improvements as we live our lives within
the dominant culture. They can even make us validate our own experiences because they
have been recognized by the law. Within our own communities, theories, and relationships,
the implementation of equality in the form of antidiscrimination rules of law
would bring out change. Gone would be the Latina Lesbian Caucus, womenonly space,
sliding scales, anthologies of older lesbians. If we accepted the rule of law as the rule of
lesbianism, we would not discriminate between lesbians and nonlesbians. For many of us,
this is unacceptable. I am not proposing that we must either totally adopt
antidiscrimination discourse into all facets of our lives, or we must totally abandon
it as a legal strategy. Such a duality is a false one. We are not hypocritical,
inconsistent, or contradictory if we recognize antidiscrimination as a potential
strategy for legal change, yet recognize its limitations. Our desires are as complex
as we are. Concepts such as equality and antidiscrimination cannot fulfill our desires. Yet
we can use these legal notions to effect the type of legal change that can
facilitate our survival. Our formidable task is strategizing, theorizing, and actualizing our
own desires against a legal background of discrimination, all the while resisting our own
domestication.

REJECTION FAILS- MUST COMBINE THE PLAN AND THE

ALTERNATIVE
HUTCHINSON AND MONAHAN 84

(Allan and Patrick, Asst Prof @ NYU and Asst Prof @ Ottawa U, January, 36 Stan. L. Rev.
199, CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES SYMPOSIUM: Law, Politics, and the Critical Legal
Scholars: The Unfolding Drama of American Legal Thought, MosE)
The development and implementation of such an enlarged notion of legal doctrine would
require a complete restructuring of the existing order. Unger, of course, is not blind to this.
With a truly grand sweep, he drafts the essential framework of such a society; he
substantiates and formalizes the "structure of no-structure." He envisages the establishment
of a "rotating capital fund" n150 to finance individual projects and to effect a
decentralization of production and exchange. The legal counterpart of this notion would be
"the disaggregation of the consolidated property right." n151 Yet Unger recognizes that some
regime of rights would be necessary for his proposals to succeed. n152 He therefore suggests
the creation of four kinds of rights: immunity rights which give individuals the power to
resist interference and domination by any other individual or organization, including the
state; destabilization rights which entitle individuals to demand the disruption of
established institutions and forms of social practice; market rights which give a conditional
claim to divisible portions of social capital, in place of the existing absolute property rights;
and solidarity rights which foster mutual reliance, loyalty, and communal responsibility.
Such arrangements, according to Unger, need not be established all at once, but can be
introduced gradually. n153 Unger finds this scheme attractive because it accommodates
continuing conflict between transitory factions of society; it allows [*233] "history itself
[to] become a source of moral insight." n154

296

Kritik Answers

#4 Permutation: 1AR (2/2)

REFORM INSTITUTIONS FROM THE INSIDE. ITS THE ONLY
WAY TO SOLVE AND PRESERVE DEMOCRACY
Thomas F. McInerney III, Associate, Dorsey & Whitney LLP, New York, Creighton Law Review,
31 Creighton L. Rev. 805, May, 1998
Herein lies the normative turn in Habermas' thought. He claims that not only has this new
paradigm in law emerged, but also that such new understanding of law and politics must be
guided by an understanding of the limits of human reason, of which an intersubjective, or
discourse-oriented approach to rationality, entails. n240 Communicative, and hence
intersubjective, rationality provides the means of reassessing modernist legal institutions in
light of a proceduralist reconstruction of law and democracy. n241 As such, his discourse
theory provides a critical tool to evaluate existing political, legal, and social institutions.
Such a critical program need not advocate the elimination of current institutions, but can
build on the principles on which such institutions are based. It may thus be used to
reinterpret existing traditions and institutions to realize a certain kinetic power for
reinvigorating democracy. n242 This rather thin normative argument requires only the
critical reappraisal of legal and political institutions in accordance with the discourse
principle in an attempt to implement the principle in existing practice. After mapping the
earlier paradigms, Habermas makes the descriptive claim that a new paradigm has emerged
to replace the traditional liberal-bourgeois paradigm and welfare-bureaucratic [*832]
paradigm. n238 This new paradigm attempted to overcome the inadequacy of the previous
orders. It represents a departure from modernism and can be termed a post-modern
paradigm. Unlike modernist ideologies, the post-modern paradigm arises from an
intersubjective n239 notion of rationality. No longer can political and legal decisions be
considered the product of a singular will within this paradigm but, instead, must be viewed
as a consensus-oriented process of decision-making involving communication by and among
all concerned participants. Under this paradigm, law must be understood procedurally. This
normative stance may at first appear inconsistent. On the one hand, Habermas asks that we
accept his descriptive claims that a new post-modern paradigm has emerged. On the other
hand, he claims that we must adopt a proceduralist view of law and an intersubjective notion
of reason. Because our current political and legal systems are not to be abandoned
completely, Habermas intends his communicative sense of rationality to be more completely
realized in the existing legal order. n243 Habermas does not conceive the possibility of
realizing such changes in existing institutions as problematic. He [*834] argues that through
a process of reification, we have come to believe, incorrectly in his view, that existing social
and political institutions are fixed entities which cannot undergo change. n244 Rights, such
as freedom of speech, although justified by appeal to modernist ideals when implemented
originally, have taken on new meaning within this new paradigm. As such, these rights
become essential to the more complete realization of intersubjective rationality and
communicative decision-making. n245 Having established the methodological basis upon
which Habermas's theory is founded, attention may be given to more foundational aspects
to the theory beginning with his under standing of communicative action. n243. Put in
critical theoretical terms, The critical enterprise must now be a critique of the inherent
potential for reaction within the existing power structure - i.e., the question is not one of
dismantling the structure and replacing it by another, but rather one of buttressing the
existing power structure against the threat looming from the right - whether the political,
the economic, or the religious right.

297

Kritik Answers

#7 Experiential Deconstruction Turn:

1AR
BLACK CHRISTIANITY PROVES OUR ARG READING THE
INSTITUTION AGAINST ITSELF ALLOWS
COUNTERHEGEMONIC FREEDOM
Cook 90
[Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, Beyond Critical Legal Studies, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl]

2. The Role of Religion in the Delegitimation of Authority. -- Although the use of religion as
an instrument of social control often necessitated oversight by white masters, n101 strict
enforcement was not maintained, and slaves often met separately for religious services,
including weekly and Sunday evening services. n102 It was within the freedom provided for
religious worship that Africans began to assert some control over how the void created by
the disintegration of their historical identity and community would be filled. In this small
space of freedom, an alternative conception of community was defined and the history of a
new American people began to emerge. African-American religion and its primary vehicle of
expression, the African-American Church, supplied the needed catalyst for the
reconstruction of community destroyed by slavery. n103
To the surprise and fear of many whites, slaves transformed an ideology intended to
reconcile them to a subordinate status into a manifesto of their God-given equality. n104
This deconstruction was both revolutionary and pragmatic in nature. The Africans'
appropriation of conservative evangelicalism as a bulwark against the degradation and
countless microaggressions of slavery proved that there were alternate interpretations of the
text that supposedly justified their subjugation. Slaves demonstrated that scripture was
subject to an alternative interpretation that called for the eradication of the very social
structure evangelicals sought to legitimate. n105 In short, slaves deconstructed ideology
through their struggles against oppression.
Although slavemasters and evangelicals attempted to limit the transmission of counterhegemonic interpretations of scripture, their [*1019] efforts met with limited success.
African gospel preachers and slaves who learned to read against their masters' wishes (and,
many times, against state law as well) were determined to read the Bible in light of their own
experiences. Many slaves realized that the message of submission, docility, and absolute
obedience to the master was a distorted picture of the Bible's eternal truths. n106

STRUGGLE IS A CATALYST FOR MAKING RIGHTS

DETERMINATE, DISMANTLING OPPRESSION
Cook 90
[Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, Beyond Critical Legal Studies, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl]

Unlike some CLS scholars, King understood the importance of a system of individual rights.
CLS proponents have urged that rights are incoherent and indeterminate reifications of
concrete experiences; they obfuscate, through the manipulation of abstract categories,
disempowering social relations. n158 King, on the other hand, understood that the
oppressed could make rights determinate in practice; although "law tends to declare rights
-- it does not deliver them. A catalyst is needed to breathe life experience into a judicial
decision." n159 For King, the catalyst was persistent social struggle to transform the
oppressiveness of one's existential condition into ever closer approximations of the ideal.
The hierarchies of race, gender, and class define those conditions, and the struggle for
substantive rights closes the gap between the latter and the ideal of the Beloved Community.
Under the pressures of social struggle, the oppressed can alter rights to better reflect the
exigencies of social reality -- a reality itself more fully understood by those engaged in
transformative struggle.
King's Beloved Community accepted and expanded the liberal tradition of rights. King
realized that notwithstanding its limits, the liberal vision contained important insights into
the human condition. For those deprived of basic freedoms and subjected to arbitrary acts of
state authority, the enforcement of formal rights was revolutionary. African-Americans

298

Kritik Answers
understood the importance of formal liberal rights and demanded the full enforcement of
such rights in order to challenge and rectify historical practices that had objectified and
subsumed their existence.

299

Kritik Answers

A2 Religious Institution Rationalized

Oppression: 1AR
FIRST, OUR 2AC COOK EV PRE-EMPTS THIS. INSTITUTIONS
MAINTAINED HEGEMONY BY NOT CONTEXTUALIZING
THEMSELVES IN TERMS OF ACTION AGAINST OPPRESSION.
PLAN SOLVE BY ENGAGING SUBORDINATION
SECOND, THIS IS A DISAD TO THE ALT. PRAXIS IS
NECESSARY TO AVOID CO-OPTATION
Cook 90
[Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, Beyond Critical Legal Studies, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl]

King's synthesis of pragmatic and revolutionary evangelicalism was most powerfully

expressed in his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail." n151 Conservative evangelicalism's
dichotomy between the spiritual and the secular caused many religious leaders, just as in the
days of slavery, to continue to oppose any interpretation of Christianity demanding that
equality before God in the spiritual realm also be embodied in the legal and social relations
defining the secular realm. These leaders still offered patience as a panacea for the pain of
persecution and the joys of an afterlife as an answer for the sufferings of this life. If
integration was the will of God, He and not humans would change people's hearts in His
own way and time. Be patient, they urged, and wait on the Lord. n152 King discerned the
hegemonic role of this theology and boldly challenged the injustice to which it gave rise
wherever he encountered it. To those who urged that nonviolent, [*1033] direct action was
"unwise and untimely," King sharply retorted:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the
oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a
direct action movement that was "well-timed," according to the timetable of those who have
not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the words
"Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost
always meant "Never." . . . We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday,
that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." n153
King expressed his great disappointment with this otherworldly orientation of the white
Church:
In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches
stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.
In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have
heard so many ministers say, "Those are social issues with which the gospel has no real
concern," and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely
otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred
and the secular. n154
Thus, King spent his life leading African-Americans into direct confrontation with
oppressive institutions and practices. Through direct action the African-American
community exposed the contradictions and violence endemic to American society. In this
way, the civil rights movement King led was itself a powerful form of experiential
deconstruction, one that provided fertile ground for a new vision of community in America.

300

Kritik Answers

#8 Liberalism Good Turn: 1AR

CLS FORECLOSES STRATEGIC LIBERALISM, DESTROYING
LIBERATORY MOVEMENTS AND REINFORCING
OPPRESSION
Cook 90
[Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, Beyond Critical Legal Studies, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl]

ther are some liberating

as well as legitimating aspects of the line-drawing or boundary-setting enterprise we critique. Democratic
socialism, the American Revolution, the African-American civil rights movement, and other
social movements were based, in part, on the liberating dimensions of liberal theory. Failing to
recognize this, some scholars unwittingly fall into too simplistic an analysis of the problem and its
possible solutions. When we appreciate the liberating dimension of ideology, revealed by experiential deconstruction, we might conclude that there are
Second, when we adopt this more contextual and experiential approach to understanding oppression, we will realize that

many dimensions of the present system that are good and quite enabling.
Thus, although I share critical methods, I question the conclusions of CLS. The CLS critique rightly points out that we need not accept oppressive institutions and
practices as unalterable expressions of truth, because the premises on which they are based are contradictory and indeterminate at best. The critique suggests,
therefore, that we are free to envision and construct alternative forms of community that represent a more accurate or at least more plausible conception of human
nature -- one believed to be fundamentally good, which may replace "our pervasive alienation and fear of one another with something more like mutual trust." n74 But

From this
optimistic view, one might envision emerging a quite oppressive community in which
groups, behind the guise of love and mutual dependency, legitimate [*1011] behavior that is
more oppressive than anything imagined by Hobbes' sovereign. When, therefore, CLS proponents argue that
liberalism's public-private dichotomy undermines a society's transformative potential, we should also ask how and when does it advance those efforts. Indeed , if
CLS' primary concern is one of legitimation and power, it is important to ask under what
conditions the liberal discourse of rights may be strategically delegitimizing and
substantively empowering.
should we be so certain that this optimistic view of human nature is clearly more liberating than the insights provided by Hobbes or Locke?

EVEN IF THEYRE RIGHT, WE SHOULD STILL FIGHT FOR

RIGHTS TO MAKE A HUMANE SOCIETY THE ALTERNATIVE
IS ETHICAL ABDICATION
Sparer 84

[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights, Legal
Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies
Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
My point is that both liberal and radical theory (including Critical legal theory) must balance competing values. Of course, the same problem affects any statement of

. There is no way of generalizing a resolution of all potentially contradictory values in

This impossibility, however, does not necessarily implicate the virtues of and need
for rights themselves. Nor does it mean that we should not struggle to alter the political and
social context in which rights operate or to win preference for certain rights over others.
The significance of the CLS overemphasis on and exaggeration of contradictions is that it increases the tendency on
the part of some Critical legal theorists to emphasize negative critique because they are
overwhelmed by the very deficiencies they criticize in liberal legal theory . n21 At the same time, some
Critical legal theorists lose an appreciation [*519] of the potential contribution of rights, a potential
contribution which coexists with their negative potential. Exaggeration thereby promotes an "undialectical" approach despite Critical theory's emphasis on dialectics .
"rights" as well
all situations.

CLS DISEMPOWERS BY IGNORING THE LIBERATORY

POTENTIAL OF LIBERALISM
Kimberl Crenshaw, et al, Professor of Law, Columbia University, Critical Race Theory, Ed.
Kimberl Crenshaw et al, 1995, p. 110-111
Finally, in addition to exaggerating the role of liberal legal consciousness and
underestimating that of coercion, CLS scholars also disregard the transformative potential
that liberalism offers. Although liberal legal ideology may indeed function to mystify, it
remains receptive to some aspirations that are central to black demands; it may also
perform an important function in combating the experience of being excluded and
oppressed. This receptivity to black aspirations is crucial, given the hostile social world that
racism creates. The most troubling aspect of the critical program, therefore, is that trashing

301

Kritik Answers
rights consciousness may have the unintended consequences of disempowering the racially
oppressed while leaving white supremacy basically untouched.

302

Kritik Answers

No Links (1/2)
YOUR ARGUMENT ASSUMES THE WRONG LIBERAL
LEGALISM- THE AFF HAS A COMMITMENT TO NEUTRALITYWE CAN NEVER ACHIEVE WHAT YOUR ALTERANTIVE CALLS
FOR
ALTMAN 90

(Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal
Critique, Pg. 102-103) PHM
This chapter has examined three important lines of argument in the CLS literature. All three
attempt to establish that liberal theory is internally inconsistent, and all three claim that the
inconsistency arises from the liberal embrace of pluralism, neutrality, and the rule of law.
The central contention of these arguments is that it is impossible to satisfy both the
demands of legality and those of neutrality in a context of moral, religious, and political
pluralism. I found that the three main lines of argument deployed to support such a
contention are all wanting. The arguments rest to a large degree on a confused
understanding of the liberal commitment to neutrality. In addition, the more radical CLS
arguments rest on a seriously inadequate understanding of linguistic meaning. Once those
confusions and inadequacies are remedied, it becomes clear that the requirements of legality
and neutrality can be met in a pluralist context.

NO LINK- SOCIAL REALITY IS NOT CONSTITUED BY LAWMULTIPLE ALTERNATE FACTORS

ALTMAN 90

(Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal
Critique, Pg. 151) PHM
To join the issue with the rule conception, one must deny the claim that socially meaningful
behavior must be explained by reference to social rules. This denial became more and more
frequent in the 1960s and 1970s. The view became widespread that social rules must be
explained by reference to individual presocial motivation. According to this view, rules do
not constrain and channel individual behavior at all or do so only in sporadic and marginal
ways. By and large, rules are resources and instruments that individuals manipulate to get
what they want or think good, and what they want or think good, at the most fundamental
level, is not determined by social rules. Rules exert no power (or little power) of their own
over individual thought, desire, and action; they are mere words. Nonetheless, rules can be
invoked by those who wield power to rationalize their actions and even to convince those
over whom they exercise power that their subordination is right and proper. Let us call this
the instrumentalist view of social rules. Edgerton summarizes the influence of this view on
contemporary thinking:
In most social theory today, rules are seen as ambiguous, flexible, contradictory, and
inconsistent; they are said seldom to govern the actions of people, much less to mold these
people by being internalized by them. Instead, they serve as resources for human
strategies.4

303

Kritik Answers

No Links (2/2)
NO LINK- LIBERAL LEGAL PHILOSOPHY DOESNT SAY THAT
LAW SOLVES ALL OUR PROBLEMS, BUT THAT IT IS BETTER
THAN DOING NOTHING- YOU MUST WIN EVERY INSTANCE
OF LAW IS BAD
ALTMAN 90

(Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal
Critique, Pg. 200) PHM
In the course of criticizing liberal legal philosophy, Robert Gordon has argued against "the
kind of rule fetishism that supposes salvation comes through rules, rather than through the
social practices that the rule makers try to symbolize and crystallize."65 It should now be
apparent that Gordon's criticism of liberalism in this regard rests on several misconceptions.
First, liberal theory does not promise salvation through legal rules; what it promises is a
society that does a better job of protecting people from intolerance, prejudice, and
oppression than it would if law was dispensed with. Second, Gordon poses a false
dichotomy: Protection must be attempted either through rules (presumably he has legal
rules in mind) or through the nonlegal practices of society. The soundest version of liberal
theory will reject this dichotomy and argue that protection from intolerance, prejudice, and
oppression requires both legal rules and at least some complementary social practice.

304

Kritik Answers

Turns: Ricoeur
CLS CREATES AN EXTREME LEGAL HERMEUTICS OF
SUSPICION, PREVENTING ANY LEGAL REFORM
Hasnas 95

[John, JD & PhD Phil @ duke, Asst. prof. Bus Ethics @ Georgetown, Back to the Future,
45 Duke L.j. 84, October, LN//uwyo-ajl]
the irrationalists offer no specific program for legal reform.

Unlike the mainstream Crits,

n83 This is because, as their
designation
[*104] suggests, they believe that reason is impotent to resolve legal and moral issues. Heavily influenced by the philosophy of Richard Rorty n84 and the
deconstructionist school of literary criticism associated with Jacques Derrida, n85 the irrationalists believe that objective knowledge is impossible. Following Rorty,
they reject the correspondence theory of truth that holds that a statement is true when it is an accurate representation of an underlying reality. n86 They assert that
since it is impossible "to step outside our skins--the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism--and compare ourselves with
something absolute," n87 reality is socially constructed, i.e., the result of social practices that "embody contingent choices concerning how to organize the thick texture
of the world in consciousness." n88 Thus, the irrationalists adopt the coherence theory in which "the meaning of words are not determined by external referents, but

This, however, implies that "the attempt

to fix the meaning of an expression leads to an infinite regress," n90 and hence, that "meaning is ultimately
instead by their coherence with other words or judgments within our total body of knowledge." n89

indeterminate." n91 Since this is true generally, it obviously must be true within the legal realm as well. n92 Therefore, for the irrationalists, the indeter- [*105]
minacy of the law is merely a consequence of the inherent indeterminacy of human language. n93

This philosophical position, which has been described as radical subjective idealism, n94 leads the irrationalists to
embrace an extreme form of epistemic skepticism in which "it is impossible to say anththing
true about the world." n95 This, of course, entails a commitment to ethical relativism such
that "any action may be described as right or wrong, good or bad ." n96 Thus, for the irrationalists, reason is
irrelevant to our normative pursuits. Since there are no objective moral or legal truths, reason cannot help us
find them: "Legal and moral questions are matters to be answered by experience, emotion, introspection, and conversation, rather than by logical proof." n97
Hence,
when judges decide cases, they should do what we all do when we face a moral decision. We identify a limited set of alternatives; we predict the most likely
consequences of following different courses of action; we articulate the values that are important in the context of the decision and the ways in which they conflict
[*106] with each other; we see what relevant people (judges, scholars) have said about similar issues; we talk with our friends; we drink enormous amounts of coffee;
we choose what to do. n98

SKEPTICISM STOPS SOCIAL CHANGE THEIR PARANOIA

FORECLOSES UPON REVOLUTION
Berman 2001
[Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, LN]

, one might view this as a positive development. One might think people
should stop being lulled into a false sense of believing that the rhetoric of public life
really matters. If people began to view such rhetoric as a construction of
entrenched power, so the argument might go, they would form the nucleus of a
truly revolutionary political movement.
I doubt that such an eventuality is likely to occur. Moreover, I am not sure that a culture
of suspiciousness is the most effective way to seek political (or personal) change anyway.
Of course

Suspicious analysis seeks to expose the dangers of our enchantment with reason or truth or collectivity, but there are dangers that arise from
relentless disenchantment as well. As [*123] Richard K. Sherwin has observed,

Without the means of experiencing more profound enchantments , without communal rituals
those beliefs
ultimately lose their meaning and die... . Forms of enchantment in the service of
deceit, illicit desire, and self-gratification alone must be separated out from forms of enchantment
in the service of feelings, beliefs, and values that we aspire to affirm in light of the self, social, and legal realities they help to
and social dramas through which the culture's deepest beliefs and values may be brought to life and collectively reenacted,

construct and maintain. 112

305

Kritik Answers

Turns: Judicial Oppression

THE ALTERNATIVE FREES JUDGES FROM LEGAL RULES,
ALLOWING UNCHECKED OPPRESSION
Solum 87

[Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical
Dogma, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl]
This is not the place for extended consideration of this conception of freedom. I do wish,
however, to make an observation [*500] about its implications: the sort of freedom brought
about by acceptance of the strong indeterminacy thesis disassociates internal critique from
programmatic social change. This radical sort of freedom might enable individual legal
adjudicators, practitioners, and scholars to undergo "conversions," liberating them from the
constraints of doctrine. But the nature of such a liberation is ambiguous. It is hardly clear
that liberating those who wield legal power from the "mistaken" belief that legal doctrine
constrains their actions will have a progressive effect. If the mystification thesis is correct,
then acceptance of the indeterminacy thesis also will awaken those in power to the fact that
legality is no barrier to repression. n111
Singer recognizes the argument that "if we let judges do just what they want, they would
inevitably exercise judicial power in oppressive ways," and responds:
But people do not want just to be beastly to each other. To suppose so is to ignore facts.
People want freedom to pursue happiness. But they also want not to harm others or be
harmed themselves. The evidence is all around us that people are often caring, supportive,
loving, and altruistic, both in their family lives and in their relations with strangers.
It is also not true that, if left to do "just what they like," government officials will necessarily
harm us or oppress us. They may do these things if that is what they want to do. But it is
simply not the case that all government officials admire Hitler and Stalin and use them as
role models. n112
It is possible that all that stands between us and a progressive system of justice is the
elimination of the myth that legal rules constrain judges, but the violent lessons of human
history place a heavy burden of persuasion on those who make that claim. Singer's view is
profoundly optimistic.

306

Kritik Answers

Turns: Criticism Perpetuates Capitalism

THEIR CRITIQUE OF THE LAW PREVENTS SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION NECESSARY TO CREATE SOCIALISM
Johnson 84

[Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely
Want To Be Radical? 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
I have already described Critical legal scholarship as ambivalent in its diagnosis of our social
and personal ills, and, of course, uncertainty of diagnosis leads to uncertainty in the
prescription of a remedy. There is a further problem with the remedy itself, and the vacuity
of Critical scholarship when faced with the task of proposing remedies stems partly from a
reluctance to come to grips with this problem. The issue can be put quite simply: If we
assume that leftist political movements aim to create "socialism," and that "socialism"
means something like individual self-determination within an ethic of cooperation, does this
goal imply a centralization or a decentralization of power?
Not many years ago socialism meant nationalization -- ownership and control of the
economy by the national government. But government management of industry and
agriculture has been tried on a large scale in many countries, and the results have not been
exactly what the pioneers of socialism had hoped. Inequalities of wealth have no doubt been
reduced, but the bureaucratic state provides no cure for alienation, competitive
individualism, greed, power-seeking, or other ills previously associated with capitalism.
Furthermore, bureaucracies operate "by the book," and therefore even the most benign
bureaucracy is inherently hostile to individual selfdetermination. Anyone with experience in
public employment cannot fail to be aware of this fact.
To escape the rigidity of bureaucracy, socialists must reduce the scale of economic and
political organizations. Hence, they have been interested in worker control of individual
factories, in small-scale cooperatives, and in semi-independent local geographical units
where social cooperation might flourish. But how is a decentralized socialist [*285] society
to prevent those small-scale units from adopting antisocialist policies? Some localities are
sure to set up new hierarchies, or to refuse to share the wealth with the disadvantaged or the
unproductive.If local units are permitted to trade with each other, market forces will again
begin to operate. Unless there is pervasive control by a national bureaucracy, what is to
prevent self-governing economic units from turning capitalist and attracting most of the
movable capital and the most ambitious people?
It is not for me to say whether socialists should prefer the rigidities of bureaucracy or the
risks of autonomy, but any socialist or "radical" author who evades the dilemma or attempts
to straddle it is peddling sheer fantasy. Neither will it do to propose that a "balance" be
struck between national and local authority. Power will inevitably gravitate to the authority
that does the balancing.

307

Kritik Answers

Turns: Law Key to Solving Atrocity

TRASHING THE LAW DESTROYS OUR BEST MEANS OF
PROTECTING THE WEAK AGAINST THE STRONG, ALLOWING
FOR ENDLESS OPPRESSION AND ATROCITY
Hegland 85
[Kenney, Prof. of Law @ Arizona, Goodbye to Deconstruction, 58 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1203, July, ln//uwyoajl]

I fear deconstruction because people might come to believe in it, come to believe that
the Rule of Law is a hoax masking illegitimate power. I believe this would be a bad thing. I offer, in support, one war story
So, what are these chips?

and one literary quote.

In the summer of 1965, I went south as a member of the Law Student Civil Rights Research Council. I worked with attorney C.B. King in Albany, Georgia. That
summer there were many civil rights marches, and the police often refused to protect the demonstrators. I recall sitting in a Federal District Court with C.B. King and
listening to the judge tell a rural sheriff, "The law requires you to protect the demonstrators. If you don't, I have no choice but to hold you in contempt." Be this
illusion, I would not blithely dispel it.

Law can protect the weak from the strong. Economic and racial minorities would be in a
worse condition in a deconstructed world, for our southern sheriff would argue, "The only
reason I must protect them folks is to protect their first amendment rights, and the only reason they have
first amendment rights is to get their voices heard, and, what with television being what it is , I can assure them of a much larger
audience by turning my dogs on them." Right on, Sheriff! n38
[*1220] A character in Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons, argues that he would "cut down every law in England" to get the Devil. n39 Sir Thomas More
responds:
And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you -- where would you hide, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from
coast to coast . . . and if you cut them down . . . d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? n40
I realize that one war story and one literary quote will not prove the need for the Rule of Law. I realize there are counter examples and, indeed, conflicting images: "In
Heaven there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb," Grant Gilmore assures us, while "[i]n Hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be

, the issue of the importance of the Rule of Law ultimately resolves

itself into a vision of human nature. Morton Horwitz has written that to see the Rule of Law as an "unqualified human good" is to
"succumb to Hobbesian pessimism" and to embrace a "conservative doctrine." n42 One hates to admit to being suspicious,
fearful and, perhaps, even mean-spirited. Yet, we live in a century that has produced Hitler
and Stalin.
Perhaps now is not the time to dump the Rule of Law.
meticulously observed." n41 No doubt

"Goodbye to Deconstruction" -- I stole the title. In 1936 Fred Rodell of Yale wrote a delightful essay, "Goodbye to Law Reviews." n43 Mostly he pokes fun at the
pomposity of law reviews.
There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is style. The other is content. That, I think, about covers the ground. [*1221] . . . [I]t seems to be a
cardinal principle of law review writing and editing that nothing may be said forcefully and nothing may be said amusingly. This, I take it, is in the interest of
something called dignity. n44
Rodell's ultimate point goes, however, to content. And in this he is quite serious.

. With law as the only alternative to force as a

means of solving the myriad problems of the world, it seems to me that the articulate among
the clan of lawyers might, in their writings, be more pointedly aware of those problems, might
recognize that the use of law to help toward their solution is the only excuse for the law's
existence, instead of blithely continuing to make mountain after mountain out of tiresome
technical molehills. n45
Articulate deconstructionists, instead of blithely denying the existence of the mountain with
tiresome epistemology, might better devote their obvious talents to making it more
habitable. n46
I do not wish to labor the point but perhaps it had best be stated once in dead earnest

THE ALTERNATIVE TO LAW IS A WORLD WHERE THERE IS

NO ORDER AND PEOPLE DO WHAT THEY WANT- JUSTIFIES
EVEN WORSE ATROCITIES THAN YOUR IMPACT
ALTMAN 90

(Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal
Critique, Pg. 128) PHM
Consider the legal duty to aid a person to whom one owes no contractual or statutory
obligation. The traditional common law rule is that there is no legal duty to aid such a
person (a "stranger"). But there are a series of rules that qualify and carve out exceptions to
the traditional rule. Thus, there is a rule that if the actions of the defendant helped to create
the dangerous situation in which the plaintiff found himself, the defendant may have had a
duty to render aid.32 There is a rule that if the plaintiff and the defendant stand in some
"special relationship," there may be a duty to render aid, even if there is no statute or valid
contract between the two requiring the aid.33

308

Kritik Answers

309

Kritik Answers

Turns: Law Key to Solving Exploitation

LAW ALLOWS A COLLECTION OF RULES TO SETTLE
SOCIETAL PROBLEMS LIKE VIOLENCE- THE ALTERNATIVE
HOMOGONIZES IDENTITY AND ELIMINATES PROTECTION
FROM THE ADVANTAGED
ALTMAN 90

(Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal
Critique, Pg. 192-193) PHM
"Let it be conceded that law typically operates at a higher level of abstraction than other
social rules, at least in a liberal society that exhibits moral, religious, and political pluralism.
The law there will often exclude considerations that would be viewed as relevant from the
perspective of a certain ethical system, religious doctrine, or political morality. If it did not,
legal reasoning could not be clearly distinguished from unconstrained moral inquiry and
political choice. Moreover, the liberal conception of the rule of law requires that public and
private power be regulated by norms that are generalizable across situations and can be
applied in a regularized, predictable manner. This again requires that certain aspects of a
case be deliberately disregarded in the name of predictability. Where institutions cannot
presuppose that all officials share the same set of background moral, religious, and political
ideas, the authoritative norms that they lay down cannot regularly call for highly contextsensitive judgments without threatening the regularity, predictability, and perhaps even the
stability of the system.
Liberal law, then, does require a high level of abstraction, in the sense that it sometimes
prescribes a deliberate disregard for certain particulars of a case that could be quite relevant
to a decision if one were involved in more context-sensitive moral or political deliberation.
Thus, the liberal should concede that legal reasoning will often take place at a significantly
higher level of abstraction than context-sensitive normative deliberation. But he will
contend that there are two very good arguments for institutions that regulate power in
accordance with reasoning that proceeds at a relatively high level of abstraction, given a
context of moral, religious, and political pluralism. First, it settles the terms of social life in a
way that allows us to avoid reopening fundamental questions about society and human life
every time a conflict or dispute breaks out. This liberates our energies from constant moral
and ideological battles and enables us to pursue vigorously other aims: commercial,
scientific, artistic, and so forth. Second, legal abstraction can materially assist in protecting
people from intolerance and prejudice: When the Jew, the black, or the homosexual is
regarded as "just anybody" by the existing system of legal rules, he or she is protected from
the inclinations of intolerance and prejudice that could well playa role in more contextsensitive modes for regulating public and private power. Let us examine the CLS response to
each of these liberal arguments.

RULE OF LAW IS THE ONLY OPTION IN A WORLD OF THE

NATION-STATE- THE ALTERNATIVE ALLOWS THE
PRIVELEDGED TO EXPLOIT THE DISADVANTAGED
ALTMAN 90

(Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal
Critique, Pg. 200-201) PHM
Morton Horwitz has correctly pointed out that the rule of law can constrain not only
oppressive and misguided uses of power but also benevolent and beneficial ones.66 Whether
the rule of law is to be prized, then, hinges on the question of whether there is a greater need
to confine through the rule of law the intolerant and oppressive impulses of humans or to
liberate the tolerant and benevolent impulses from the constraints of legality. I do not
believe that there is an a priori answer to this question. To that extent, Horwitz is quite right
to say that it is a mistake to characterize the rule of law as an "unqualified human good," a

310

Kritik Answers
characterization made by E. P. Thompson.67 However, the sorry human history of
persecution, prejudice, and intolerance over the past several centuries makes one conclusion
inescapable: Within the context of the nation-state and over the foreseeable future, the need
to confine the impulses of intolerance and oppression with the requirements of legality will
continue to be far greater than the need to liberate the impulses of of tolerance and
benevolence from the restrictions of the rule of law. 68

311

Kritik Answers

Turns: Rights Good (1/4)

RIGHTS ALLOW RESISTANCE, EMPOWERMENT AND
RECONFIGURING OF LAW OUTSIDE THE LEGAL SYSTEM
Martha Minow, Professor of Law, Harvard University, Yale Law Journal, Interpreting Rights: An
Essay for Robert Cover, pg L/N 1987
Before drawing on these interpretive themes, I should try to clarify what I mean by "rights,"
an overused word in legal, philosophical, and political debates. Defining "rights" is a difficult
task because there is considerable ambiguity in the meanings invoked in the debates about
rights, and because much ink has been spilled by legal and political theorists on this subject.
One meaning is the formally announced legal rules that concern relationships among
individuals, groups, and the official state. "Rights" typically are the articulation of such rules
in a form that describes the enforceable claims of individuals or groups against the state.
n25 [*1867] Yet a second meaning will become important in this essay. "Rights" can give rise
to "rights consciousness" so that individuals and groups may imagine and act in light of
rights that have not been formally recognized or enforced. Rights, in this sense, are neither
limited to nor co-extensive with precisely those rules formally announced and enforced by
public authorities. Instead, rights represent articulations -- public or private, formal or
informal -- of claims that people use to persuade others (and themselves) about how they
should be treated and about what they should be granted. I mean, then, to include within
the ambit of rights discourse all efforts to claim new rights, to resist and alter official state
action that fails to acknowledge such rights, and to construct communities apart from the
state to nurture new conceptions of rights. Rights here encompass even those claims that
lose, or have lost in the past, if they continue to represent claims that muster people's hopes
and articulate their continuing efforts to persuade. Consciousness, or cognizance, of rights,
then, is not simply awareness of those rights that have been granted in the past, but also
knowledge of the process by which hurts that once were whispered or unheard have become
claims, and claims that once were unsuccessful, have persuaded others and transformed
social life. The connections between past and future claims of rights are voiced through
interpretations of inherited understandings of rights. Interpretation engages lawyers and
nonlawyers in composing new meanings inside and outside of legal institutions. Charges
against new rights express opposition to this interpretive process.

312

Kritik Answers

Turns: Rights Good (2/4)

RIGHTS ARE PART OF THE DECONSTRUCTIVE ENTERPRISE
THEY OVERLOOK THE FACT THAT RIGHTS DEMANDS ARE
MADE BY SPECIFIC OPPRESSED GROUPS THAT USE THEIR
DEMANDS TO CALL INTO QUESTION SOCIETYS DOMINANT
IDEOLOGIES
Goldfarb, Associate Law Professor at Boston College, 92 (Phyllis, A DIVERSITY OF

INFLUENCE: From the Worlds of "Others": Minority and Feminist Responses to Critical Legal Studies,
New England Law Review, Spring, 26 New Eng.L. Rev. 683)
Because some CLS scholars have focused narrowly on legal consciousness as the predominant ideological
support of civil society, they view appeals to legal consciousness -- through rights rhetoric, for example -- as ultimately legitimating
the prevailing social conditions and as fundamentally counterproductive to meaningful social change. n23 This argument is not
without merit in the terms in which it is phrased. Nevertheless, it overlooks the fact that challenges captured in abstract
rights language are presented, not by generic groups, but by specific groups with identifiable histories
whose relationship to the social order may influence the way in which others perceive their
rights claims. African-Americans acquired a place in American society through chattel slavery which persists in the form of an entrenched race hierarchy
that denies recognition of African-Americans' full humanity. Against this backdrop, African-Americans' assertions of rights have
been a radical challenge to social arrangements, a challenge containing sufficient threat at various historical moments to
provoke violent resistance. n24 One must first appreciate the central ideological importance of racism in American society in order to fully comprehend the radical

Civil rights claimants, who understood experientially the

were not likely to underestimate the challenge posed to the
traditional social order by their assertion of mainstream equality . n26 As Crenshaw suggests, [*692] people of
color knew that when powerful elements in society had defined particular racial characteristics as
conclusive proof of inferiority, an equality claim was a potent assault on these collective
psychological structures. n27 By proclaiming the unthinkable -- that people understood to be
inferior were entitled to equality -- the civil rights movement, through simple assertion of
rights routinely granted to whites, began delegitimating the ideology of race consciousness.
In a powerful deconstructive move, the reified abstractions harbored by masses of white
Americans concerning the characteristics attributed to African-Americans were thrown
into question by African-Americans' assertion of mainstream equality . n28 Crenshaw and others suggest that
the feature of this story that African-Americans continue to need most to deconstruct is the racist imagery, not the rights imagery. n29 Liberal legal
notions, such as rights, represent strategies to be deployed in this deconstructive
enterprise. n30 The recognition of African-Americans as rights-bearers, as members of the
American community, transformed the experience of race oppression . In Patricia Williams' words: [*693]
Rights imply a respect which places one within the referential range of self and others,
which elevates one's status from human body to social being. For blacks , then, the attainment
of rights signifies the due, the respectful behavior, the collective responsibility properly
owed by a society to one of its own. n31 The civil rights movement reinforced one ideological
support of American society -- legal consciousness -- to undermine another ideological support of
American society -- race consciousness. As Crenshaw explains, the effect of the latter ideology had been to isolate African-Americans so effectively that
no other route to social power was available. Only by playing the logic of the two prevailing ideologies against
one another, applying the language of rights to the situation of African-Americans, could
the movement hope to achieve any progress at all. The contradiction between American
legal mythology and the systemic treatment of African-Americans created the only room
within which the racially subordinated could maneuver . n32 The weight of daily oppression
created an urgency that impelled African-Americans to seize the only viable opportunity for
change that presented itself . n33
nature of nonwhites' claims to equal rights in a context of deeply-felt white supremacy. n25
intransigent daily realities of their own race domination,

313

Kritik Answers

Turns: Rights Good (3/4)

RIGHTS EXPOSE OPPRESSION AND GIVE SILENCED VOICES
A FORUM FOR RECOGNITION
Martha Minow, Professor of Law, Harvard University, Yale Law Journal, Interpreting Rights: An
Essay for Robert Cover, pg L/N 1987
What, then, is the equality signaled by rights discourse? The equality registered by rights
claims is an equality of attention. The rights tradition in this country sustains the call that
makes those in power at least listen. Rights -- as words and as forms -- structure attention
even for the claimant who is much less powerful than the authorities, and for individuals
and groups treated throughout the community as less than equal. n70 The interpretive
[*1880] approach construes a claim of right, made before a judge, as a plea for recognition
of membership in a community shared by applicant and judge, much as reader and author
share the world of the text. n71 The language of rights voices an individual's desire to be
recognized in tones that demand recognition. n72 Rights discourse implicates those who use
it in a form of life, a pattern of social and political commitment. n73 Which claims will
persuade, and how? With what consequences for prior and subsequent claims? Which
claims, indeed, will be recognized as even deserving communal attention? n74 These are
difficult and persistent questions in a community committed to rights discourse. There is a
risk that those points of view that have been silenced in the past will continue to go unheard,
and will be least adaptable to the vocabulary of preexisting claims. These are issues for
struggle, and some struggles may well take place beyond rights discourse, beyond language.
Some people may feel so shut out that the appeal to a communal commitment to rights
makes no sense to them. Nonetheless, an interpretive conception of rights is a way to take
the aspirational language of the society seriously n75 and to promote change by reliance on
inherited traditions. It is a way to challenge those who want to close the doors now that
some of the previously excluded have fought and found their way in. n76 [*1881] The
metaphors of interpretation and conversation enable a conception of community
connections forged through the exchange of words in the struggle for meaning. n77 In a
powerful novel about contemporary South Africa, Nadine Gordimer's Rosa Burger responds
to a critic of liberalism by saying: I'm not offering a theory. I'm talking about people who
need to have rights -- there -- in a statute book, so that they can move about in their own
country, decide what work they'll do and what their children will learn at school. . . . People
must be able to create institutions -- institutions must evolve that will make it possible in
practice. That utopia, it's inside . . . without it, how can you . . . act? n78 The use of rights
discourse affirms community, but it affirms a particular kind of community: a community
dedicated to invigorating words with power to restrain, so that even the powerless can
appeal to those words. It is a community that acknowledges and admits historic uses of
power to exclude, deny, and silence -- and commits itself to enabling suppressed points of
view to be heard, to make covert conflict overt. n79 Committed to making available a
rhetoric of rights where it has not been heard before, this community uses rights rhetoric to
make conflict audible and unavoidable, even if limited to words, or to certain forms of
words. n80 If there is [*1882] conflict experienced in the introduction of rights rhetoric to a
new area, it is over this issue: Should the normative commitment to restrain power with
communal dedication reach this new area? The power in question may be public or private.
For example, with children's rights, large disagreements persist over whether and how
communal limits should constrain the exercise of private, especially parental, power. n81
Children's rights may enlarge state power over both children and adults, not simply
recognize children's pre-existing autonomy. n82 But it is the meaning of autonomy, and its
relation to rights, that claims attention next.

314

Kritik Answers

Turns: Rights Good (4/4)

DEMANDS OUTSIDE OF RIGHTS RHETORIC FAIL
DEMANDING RIGHTS MAY REIFY THE DOMINANT SYSTEM
BUT ARE THE ONLY TO PROTECT THE LIVES AND LIBERTY
OF THE OPPRESSED
Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, RACE, REFORM,
AND RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN
ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW, Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331)

Rights discourse provided the ideological mechanisms through which the conflicts of federalism, the
power of the Presidency, and the legitimacy of the courts could be orchestrated against Jim Crow . Movement leaders used these tactics
to force open a conflict between whites that eventually benefited Black people. Casting racial issues in the moral and legal rights
rhetoric of the prevailing ideology helped create the political controversy without which the
state's coercive function would not have been enlisted to aid Blacks. Simply critiquing the
ideology from without or making demands in language outside the rights discourse would have
accomplished little. Rather, Blacks gained by using a powerful combination of direct action ,
mass protest, and individual acts of resistance, along with appeals to public opinion and the courts couched in
the language of the prevailing legal consciousness. The result was a series of ideological and
political crises. In these crises, civil rights activists and lawyers induced the federal government to
aid Blacks and triggered efforts to legitimate and reinforce the authority of the law in ways
that benefited Blacks. Simply insisting that Blacks be integrated or speaking in the language of "needs" would have endangered the lives of those who
were already taking risks -- and with no reasonable chance of success. President Eisenhower, for example, would not have sent federal
troops to Little Rock simply at the behest of protesters demanding that Black schoolchildren
receive an equal education. Instead, the successful manipulation of legal rhetoric led to a crisis of
federal power that ultimately benefited Blacks. n192 Some critics of legal reform movements seem to
overlook the fact that state power has made a significant difference -- sometimes between
life and death -- in the efforts of Black people to transform their world. Attempts to harness
the power of the state through the appropriate rhetorical/legal incantations should be
appreciated as intensely powerful and calculated political acts . In the context of white supremacy, engaging
in rights discourse should be seen as an act of self-defense . This was particularly true because the state could not
assume a position of neutrality regarding Black people once the movement had mobilized people to challenge the system of oppression: either the coercive mechanism
of the state had to be used to support white supremacy, or it had to be used to dismantle it. We know now, with hindsight, that it did both. n193

LIBERAL LEGAL THEORY INTEGRATES NON-LEGAL

SOLUTIONS AS A COMPANION TO LAW- THERE IS NO
NORMATIVE VIEW INHERENT IN OUR REPRESENTATIONS
AND ONLY THE AFF CAN CREATE A FRAMEWORK FOR
RIGHTS
ALTMAN 90

(Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal
Critique, Pg. 101-102) PHM
In addition, it would be a distortion of liberal theory to suggest that it has no place for
nonlegal modes of social regulation, such as mediation. Liberals can and do acknowledge the
value of such nonlegal mechanisms in certain social contexts and can consistently allow a
place for them in liberal society. And those who reject the rule of law can argue in the
political arena for extending the role of such informal mechanisms. Of course, a liberal state
could not allow the antinomians to eradicate legal institutions; in that sense, one might say
that the liberal rule of law is not neutral. But the kind of political neutrality which the liberal
defends does not aim to guarantee that any normative view has an opportunity to remake
society wholly in its vision. It does guarantee an opportunity to negotiate and compromise
within a framework of individual rights, and there is no reason why those who defend
nonlegal modes of social regulation cannot seize the opportunity under a liberal regime to
carve out a significant role for nonlegal modes of social regulation within the liberal state.

315

Kritik Answers
The liberal version of political neutrality demands that antinomians have such an
opportunity, but there is nothing remotely inconsistent in liberal thought in making that
demand or prohibiting anti legalism from going so far as to destroy all legal institutions.

316

Kritik Answers

Turns: Alternative Causes Rights

Rollback
THE ALTERNATIVES DIALECTICAL CONCEPTION OF RIGHTS
PUTS ALL GUARANTEES AT RISK, JEOPARDIZING
LIBERATION
Sparer 84

[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights, Legal
Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies
Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
Kennedy, however, adds a second reason for agreeing with Klare [*525] rather than Lynd:
"[T]he left doesn't need a counter-theory that ends with rights" because "our program for
the future must emerge dialectically from our past, rather than as a deduction from it." n38
This point causes me some concern. Kennedy is no longer talking about rights theory but
about rights themselves. His refusal to develop a counter-theory which "ends" with rights is
due not merely to the inadequacy of rights alone to protect and imprve the workers'
situation; that could be achieved by making clear that much more is needed, even for the
adequate functioning of the rights themselves. Rather, his refusal is based on a disavowal of
an ongoing (one might say "principled") commitment to rights. n39
What "our program for the future" is must emerge "dialectically" (rather than as a
"deduction" from our past). Does this mean that Kennedy's "future program" may not
include the right of working people to organize? This very possibility is why -- given the
deductions from past history and present experience discussed later in this essay -- some of
us feel it is appropriate to make a principled commitment to the legal right of working
people to organize and engage in concerted activities, just as we would make a commitment
to the right to dissent. We cannot trust future programs that emerge "dialectically," but
which are not based on at least limited deductions from our past.

317

Kritik Answers

Turns: Minorities
CLS DISEMPOWERS MARGINALIZED GROUPS WHO USE
LEGAL DISCOURSE IN TRANSFORMATIVE WAYS
Phyllis Goldfarb, Associate Professor, Boston College Law School, New England Law Review,
Spring, 1992, 26 New Eng.L. Rev. 683
Viewed through Minow's eyes, rights talk represents a demand for public airing that makes
pre-existing conflicts "audible and unavoidable." It is a "process by which hurts that once
were whispered or unheard have become claims, and claims that once were unsuccessful,
have persuaded others and transformed social life." Rights, Minow argues, can remake
relationships; in relating her view, Minow helps us remake our relationship to rights. This
transformative approach to rights, adopted by movements of the disempowered, is a view
that feminist scholars and scholars of color have urged proponents of Critical Legal Studies
to embrace. The foregoing descriptions comprise content-oriented critiques of certain CLS
theories. Feminists and minorities would offer a methodological critique as well, a critique
rooted in sensitivity to the methods by which one builds theory. Each has implicitly and
explicitly criticized certain CLS literature for its contextual failures, its inattention to the
specific ways that diverse groups of people experience society and feel its impact in their
everyday lives. Each would contribute to CLS a theory-building epistemology grounded in
political struggle, attentive to the conditions in which people live, and inclusive of the
perspectives they express. The infusion of these diverse perspectives, especially from the
voices of the disempowered, and attention to political practice are likely to affect CLS
theories. For feminists and critical race scholars, this infusion of voices and involvement in
practice represent a moral and epistemological imperative for a transformative project
aimed at reducing hierarchy.

318

Kritik Answers

Turn: Working in System Good (1/2)

THERES NO ALTERNATIVE TO RIGHTS STRATEGIES THAT
WILL SOLVE DEMANDS CAN ONLY BE MADE USING THE
INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC OF THE PRESENT SYSTEM
DEMANDS FOR RIGHTS CREATE INSTITUTIONAL CRISES
THAT CAUSE REAL REFORMS
Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, RACE, REFORM, AND

RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW,

Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331)

The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications
for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling , even though it may be proper to assail belief
structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable

trashing offers no idea of how to avoid the negative

consequences of engaging in reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we
imagine the wrong world when we think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world
where legal protection has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is
that, although Critics criticize law because it functions to legitimate existing
institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating function that has made
law receptive to certain demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for
and relatively indeterminate. Furthermore,

liberation leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the

focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric

seems to suggest that, once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists
a more productive strategy for change , one which does not reinforce existing patterns of domination.
Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated, and it is difficult to imagine that racial
world that it embodies. Yet Critics offer little beyond this observation. Their

minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367] excellent account of the civil rights movement,

popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and a

challenge to that logic. n137 People can only demand change in ways that
reflect the logic of the institutions that they are challenging . n138 Demands for
change that do not reflect the institutional logic -- that is , demands that do not
engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be ineffective .
n139 The possibility for ideological change is created through the very process
of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis. Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by
challenging an institution internally , that is, by using its own logic against it . n140
Such crisis occurs when powerless people force open and politicize a
contradiction between the dominant ideology and their reality . The political consequences
[*1368] of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. n141 Yet, because the
adjustment is triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent
contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion
from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology.

Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology , civil rights protestors
exposed a series of contradictions -- the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the
practice of absolute racial subordination. Rather than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil rights

By seeking to
restructure reality to reflect American mythology , Blacks relied upon and ultimately
benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by
granting formal rights . Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wres
protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the "rights" that citizenship entailed.

319

Kritik Answers

Turn: Working in System Good (2/2)

WEVE GOT TO WORK THROUGH THE SYSTEM TO CHANGE
IT.
Andrew Sullivan, Editor of the New Republic, Virtually Normal, 1995, p. 88-91
Moreover, a cultural strategy as a political strategy is a dangerous one for a minority-and a
small minority at that. Inevitably, the vast majority of the culture will be at best
uninterested. In a society where the market rules the culture, majorities win the culture
wars. And in a society where the state, pace Foucault actually does exist, where laws are
passed according to rules by which the society operates, culture, in any case, is not enough.
It may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. To achieve actual results, to end persecution of
homosexuals in the military, to allow gay parents to keep their children, to provide basic
education about homosexuality in high schools, to prevent murderers of homosexuals from
getting lenient treatment, it is necessary to work through the, very channels Foucault and
his followers revile. It is necessary to conform to certain disciplines in order to reform them,
necessary to speak a certain language before it can say something different, necessary to
abandon the anarchy of random resistance if actual homosexuals are to be protected. As
Michael Walzer has written of Foucault, he 11 stands nowhere and finds no reasons, Angrily
he rattles the bars of the iron cage. But he has no plans or projects for turning the cage into
something more like a human home." The difficult and compromising task of interpreting
one world for another, of reforming an imperfect and unjust society from a criterion of truth
or reasoning, is not available to the liberationists. Into Foucault's philosophical anarchy they
hurl a political cri de coeur. When it eventually goes unheard, when its impact fades, when
its internal nihilism blows itself out, they have nothing left to offer. Other homosexuals,
whose lives are no better for queer revolt, remain the objects of a political system which the
liberationists do not deign to engage. The liberationists prefer to concentrate-for where else
can they go?-on those instruments of power which require no broader conversation, no
process of dialogue, no moment of compromise, no act of engagement. So they focus on
outing, on speech codes, on punitive measures against opponents on campuses, on the
enforcement of new forms of language, by censorship and by intimidation. Insofar, then, as
liberationist politics is cultural, it is extremely vulnerable; and insofar as it is really political,
it is almost always authoritarian. Which is to say it isn't really a politics at all. It's a strange
confluence of political abdication and psychological violence.

320

Kritik Answers

Indeterminacy False (1/4)

THE LAW REASONABLY GUIDES IMPLIMENTATION EVEN IN
HARD CASES
Solum 87

[Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical
Dogma, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl]
What then is the truth about indeterminacy? There is certainly room for dispute, but as
practical boundaries for the debate, three conclusions are firm. First, legal doctrine
underdetermines the results in many, but not all, actual cases. That is to say that aside from
the easiest cases, aspects of the outcome are rule-guided but not rule-bound. For example, in
the most routine cases, the amount of a traffic fine or of a damage award may vary within
some range. Second, although there may be some cases in which the result is radically
underdeterminate, in the sense that any party could "win" under some valid interpretation
of legal doctrine, it does not follow that the doctrine itself is indeterminate over all cases. For
example, the three-pronged test for impermissible state establishment of religion,
articulated in Lemon v. Kurtzman, n97 is often criticized as highly underdeterminate. But, in
spite of any uncertainty about some applications of the Lemon test, we can be quite sure that
a court applying the Lemon test would strike down any law giving parochial school teachers
a pay raise out of state funds. n98 Third, it is pure nonsense to say that legal doctrine is
completely indeterminate even with respect to very [*495] hard cases. Even in the hardest
hard case, legal doctrine limits the court's options. One of the parties will receive a
judgment, not some unexpected stranger; the relief will be related to the dispute at hand and
will not be a declaration that Mickey Mouse is the President of the United States.

EVIDENCE OF INDETERMINACY IS FLAWED: SELECTION

BIAS
Solum 87

[Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical
Dogma, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl]
Furthermore, one of the primary criteria for inclusion in a casebook may be indeterminacy
itself: practically indeterminate cases may be useful pedagogically because they can be used
to illustrate both the methods and limits of formal legal reasoning as well as the role of
principle and policy. The generalization that the law is practically indeterminate may thus
stem from the predominance of such examples in the materials with which legal scholars
work on a daily basis. n104
Finally, critical legal scholars have a strong practical motive for belief in the indeterminacy
thesis. If one believes that the rules are strongly determinate, but fundamentally wrong, one
is left with very little room to maneuver within the limited horizons of legal scholarship. The
notion that it is possible to achieve radical results working with the existing body of legal
doctrine -- because the seeming constraints are illusory -- has powerful attraction for those
committed to social change, but whose professional lives are confined to the academy and
not the capitol buildings.

321

Kritik Answers

Indeterminacy False (2/4)

INDETERMINACY IS AN UNPROVABLE FARCE THE LAW IS
ONLY UNDERDETERMINED AND USUALLY WORKS
Solum 87

[Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical
Dogma, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl]
[*475] This confusion between indeterminacy and underdeterminacy is also reflected in Duncan Kennedy's definition of formalism in his early essay, Legal
Formality: "The essence of rule application, as I have defined it above, is that it is mechanical. The decision process is called rule application only if the actor resolutely

Kennedy has defined rule application

in such a way that only a completely determined decision will count as a decision that is not
indeterminate. The difficulty with this definition is that legal rules (or, more broadly, doctrines) can significantly constrain
outcomes even if they do not mechanically determine them.
My general argument against the internal skeptic's defense is that underdeterminacy is not the same as indeterminacy and
limits himself to identifying those aspects of the situation which, per se, trigger his response." n47

that a case need not be indeterminate to be hard. With all this in mind, I can agree with critical scholars that there are some cases that appear easy on their surface but
are actually hard. But the internal skeptics believe that by demonstrating that easy cases are hard cases, they have also demonstrated that the law is indeterminate. At
this stage in the argument, I part company with these advocates of indeterminacy.

, the internal skeptic cannot demonstrate that all law is indeterminate through
conventional legal argumentation. The first reason is conceptual: if a decision is not determinate, it does
not follow that it is also not underdeterminate and, therefore, indeterminate. Neither does it follow that
For two principal reasons

because a case is hard, it is indeterminate. Even if all seemingly easy cases were actually hard cases, it would not follow that the law is indeterminate with respect to all
these cases -- although it would follow that the law is less determinate than we might have thought. Hard cases can be very hard, even if their results are not
completely indeterminate. I submit further that even the hardest of hard cases are merely underdetermined by the law, not indeterminate. But I defer discussion of
this point until later in this essay.

there
are at least some very easy cases that are completely determinate . For example, if I were sued by Gore Vidal for
slander on the basis of the first paragraph of this [*476] article, the only possible outcome would be a verdict for me. A skeptic might respond
that it is possible to think of an argument suggesting that I should lose the case, or that the
judge could simply rule against me without explanation. But it is simply incredible to say
that any such argument or arbitrary ruling would be considered acceptable by the legal
profession. That is, this sort of defense of indeterminacy is not internal to the law. It may, however, have some critical bite -- a matter I turn to in the
The second reason internal skepticism cannot prove complete indeterminacy is rooted in the standards implicit in the practice of acceptable legal argument:

following discussions of external skepticism and the epiphenomenalist defense.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF CASES ARE DETERMINATE YOU

JUST DONT HEAR ABOUT THEM
Hegland 85
[Kenney, Prof. of Law @ Arizona, Goodbye to Deconstruction, 58 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1203, July, ln//uwyoajl]

Let us return to the mundane -- can legal doctrines determine the outcome of specific legal
controversies? I think the acne case establishes, at least in theory, that legal rules and
doctrines can determine outcomes and that they can constrain judicial discretion and
immunize decisions from subjective preference. But even if I have won my quarrel
theoretically, I have not done much to save the legal order if all I have shown is that legal
doctrine determines outcome only in what I must now concede to be the most ridiculous of
hypotheticals. What of the real world of judges, lawyers and clients? Does doctrine
determine outcome there?
My sense is that legal doctrines determine the outcomes in most cases. I do not believe this
is due to the litigants' lack of imagination or resources. It is because doctrines are not
mirages; they have real substance and are what they appear to be.
Law professors teach the difficult cases of the casebooks, read the novel cases of the advance
sheets, and fret over "major" Supreme Court decisions. Law professors overestimate the
degree of legal uncertainty. I teach a course in contracts, and last summer I took a week to
read every appellate decision in my home state dealing with that subject over the last several
years. It is, by and large, boring stuff: "The rule is X, the facts are Y, and therefore we hold
for the plaintiff." I realize that in the process of writing an opinion an uncertain case may
become certain. Nonetheless, in most of the opinions I read, there was simply no sign of
doctrinal uncertainty: seldom were there dissenting opinions, seldom were cases
distinguished, and seldom did the court discuss "social policy" to convince the reader that
the legal doctrine should apply. Typically, the doctrine was recited and then applied. It was a
long week.

322

Kritik Answers
Now it may be that, for some dark or benign purpose, the judges of Arizona are out to
hoodwink us, or for perhaps some climatic reason, Arizona lawyers have been made dumb
and their clients poor. But, if my reading of the cases is fair, I think that as an empirical
matter the deconstructionists have some explaining to do -- and it will not do to simply
assert, rather than prove, that Sun-Belt lawyers lack imagination and resolve.

323

Kritik Answers

Indeterminacy False (3/4)

INDETERMINACY DOES NOT MEAN WE CANNOT MAKE
REASONABLE PREDICTIONS
Robert Gordon, Professor of Law, Stanford University, Stanford Law Review, January, 1984,
36 Stan. L. Rev. 57,
The other argument rests, I think, on a misunderstanding of what the Critics mean by
indeterminancy. They don't mean -- although sometimes they sound as if they do -- that
there are never any predictable causal relations between legal forms and anything else. As
argued earlier in this essay, there are plenty of short- and medium-run stable regularities in
social life, including regularities in the interpretation and application, in given contexts, of
legal rules. Lawyers, in fact, are constantly making predictions for their clients on the basis
of these regularities. The Critical claim of indeterminacy is simply that none of these
regularities are necessary consequences of the adoption of a given regime of rules. The rulesystem could also have generated a different set of stabilizing conventions leading to exactly
the opposite results and may, upon a shift in the direction of political winds, switch to those
opposing conventions at any time.

YOUR INDETERMINACY ARGUMENT ASSUMES THE PAST

DONT MANIFEST IN FUTURE DECISIONS- PAST MISTAKES
GUIDE FUTURE- ADDITIONALLY, YOUR ARGUMENT THAT
LAW CANNOT HAVE A POSITIVE EFFECT IS WRONG- POWER
DISTRIBUTION PROVES
ALTMAN 90

(Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal
Critique, Pg. 177-178) PHM
Ultra-theory relies, in fact, upon a seriously flawed conception of social reality and rests
upon several fallacious inferences. We may begin the criticism of it with a point to which I
have already alluded, concerning the issue of whether the social past can control the social
future. The CLS ultra-theorist correctly believes that the social past can never guarantee the
character of the social future. It is never a necessary truth that the social world will continue
to turn in the way it has been turning up to now. However, ultra-theorists fallaciously infer
from this that the social past cannot control the social future, that social rules cannot
constrain and channel human social behavior and thought. This inference is a fallacy
because control is always a matter of degree; it may never reach the point of constituting a
necessary connection between past and future, but it does not follow that there is no control.
35
CLS ultra-theorists have been led astray here by an ill-conceived reliance on the
metaphysical categories of contingency and necessity. They reason that the social future is
contingent, that it does not have to be a certain way; in particular, it does not have to be a
repetition of the social past. They fallaciously conclude that the social past can exert no
control over the social future. Underlying this fallacious inference is the mistaken belief that
there can be a relation of control between x and y only if x's prescription that y behave in a
certain way necessarily leads to y behaving in that way.
Moreover, the ultra-theorist's view that control requires necessary connections contradicts
his own view that one individual can control another. Recall that the CLS ultra-theorist
denies that social rules have the power to control the behavior and thought of individuals
but that he simultaneously affirms that individuals (e.g., slaveowners) can control other
individuals (e.g., their slaves). Yet the ultra-theorist argument explaining why rules cannot
control individuals also defeats the possibility of individuals controlling other individuals.
Nothing makes it impossible for slaves to revolt, for workers to rebel, for the oppressed to
rise up. The ultra-theory argument would force one to conclude that masters exert no
control over slaves, bosses no control over workers, the oppressors no control over the
oppressed. These conclusions are flatly inconsistent with the claims of CLS ultra-theorists,

324

Kritik Answers
in addition to being wholly implausible. The conclusion to draw from the fact that the
oppressed can revolt at any time is not that the oppressors do not exert control over them
but that the control is not total. And exactly the same conclusion should be drawn about
social rules: The fact that such rules can be trashed at any moment does not show that they
exert no control, only that the control is not total.

325

Kritik Answers

Indeterminacy False (4/4)

EVEN IF THEYRE RIGHT, THAT ONLY MEANS THAT
JUSTIFICATIONS ARE DISPARATE LEGAL OUTCOMES ARE
STILL DETERMINATE
Solum 87

[Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical
Dogma, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl]
I pause now to examine this argument in some detail. It is easy to agree that existing legal rules are not fully determined by any unified and consistent social theory.
Even if we had a fully satisfactory theory justifying the broad outlines of the modern state, it would be hard to argue that any such theory required a particular set of

it does not follow from this admission that critical

scholars have made out a case for complete indeterminacy of justification. Some specific legal rules
may necessarily follow from a broad social theory; many legal rules may be incompatible with a given theory.
[*467] Moreover, indeterminacy of justification does not entail indeterminacy in a set of legal rules.
n16 A number of competing theories could be used to justify or critique a wide range of legal
doctrines, while the legal doctrines themselves nonetheless would constrain the outcome of
particular cases. n17 For example, one could make consequentialist arguments for and against the doctrine of promissory estoppel, while the doctrine
legal rules, much less the precise set of rules we have now. However,

itself remained determinate in application. Of course, if (as is often the case) the justification for a rule is used to guide its application, indeterminacy of justification
will lead to greater indeterminacy of legal outcomes. n18

326

Kritik Answers

A2 Language Makes Law

Indeterminate: 2AC
LINGUISTIC INDETERMINACY CAN GO EITHER WAY,
CANCELLING OUT ANY EFFECT ON THE LAW
Solum 87

[Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical
Dogma, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl]
But the difficulty with appealing to Wittgenstein's skeptical paradox is that it costs the
indeterminacy thesis its critical bite. Wittgenstein makes the following observation:
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every
course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can
be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so
there would be neither accord nor conflict here. n56
Thus, we may admit the paradox but reject its significance because it has no consequences
for human conduct. Like other skeptical paradoxes, it has no existential force. As Saul
Kripke puts it, "It holds no terrors in our daily lives." n57
My argument, therefore, relies on the distinction between logical and practical possibility.
This distinction can be illuminated by a brief discussion of an analogous problem with
epistemological skepticism. An epistemological skeptic might claim that we can never really
know anything. An anti-skeptic might respond with an [*479] example of an "easy case" of
knowledge: you know that you are currently sitting in a chair and reading this peculiar
article. The skeptic might respond by raising a skeptical possibility: for all you know you are
only a brain in a vat being manipulated by an evil scientist to think you are sitting and
reading this essay, when in fact you are doing neither of these things. n58
Very roughly, it is my view that rule-skepticism can be shown to be toothless for the same
reason that this sort of epistemological skepticism is toothless: worrying about being a brain
in a vat will not have any effect on what you do. Likewise, worrying about rule-skepticism
will not have any effect on the way cases are decided. The skeptical possibilities invoked by
both rule-skepticism and epistemological skepticism are not practical possibilities, and only
practical possibilities affect the way one acts.

327

Kritik Answers

CLS Recreates Oppression (1/2)

TURN- CLS CONFLATES AND CREATES OPPRESSION; WE
MUST CRITICIZE FROM THE OPPRESSEDS PERSPECTIVE
Anthony Cook Professor of Law, Critical Race Theory, Ed. Kimberl Crenshaw et al, 1995, p. 8990
The third problem with the CLS critique is that it threatens to conflate the unique
histories of the various forms of alienation and oppression engendered by the
subconscious acceptance and assimilation of liberal ideology. the experiences of racism
and sexismto name but twoare certainly related to the way individuals
experience liberalism as oppressive but cannot be reduced to that experience.
Therefore, exploration of the various histories of oppression, often ignored by
CLSs account can provide an essential basis for any reconstructed community.
Finally, deconstruction should ultimately lead to a reconstructive vision, which will involve
some line-drawing and boundary-setting. CLS should not only explain why liberalisms
boundary-setting is problematic; it must also suggest how to redraw those boundaries to
satisfy other goals. I believe CLS too often falls victim to a myopic preoccupation with the
limited role of theoretical deconstruciton and a too narrowly tailored experiential
deconstruction that focuses exclusively on how individuals experience liberalism.
Hegemonic ideologies are never maintained by logical consistencey alone; knowledge of the
full range of conditions under which they remain oppressed, exposes new problems and
possibilities. When one begins to contemplate how alternative visions of community might
look and be implemented, one must consider carefully the view from the bottom
not simply what oppressors say but how the oppressed respond to what they
say. The view from the bottom may offer insights into why individuals accept their
subordinate status in society despite the illogic and inconsistency of the dominant ideology.

328

Kritik Answers

CLS Recreates Oppression (2/2)

TRASHING THE LEGAL SYSTEM LEAVES OPPRESSION
INTACT AND RESULTS IN REAL WORLD SUFFERING THE
RISK OF OUR IMPACT IS WORSE THAN THEIRS
Goldfarb, Associate Law Professor at Boston College, 92 (Phyllis, A DIVERSITY OF

INFLUENCE: From the Worlds of "Others": Minority and Feminist Responses to Critical Legal Studies,
New England Law Review, Spring, 26 New Eng.L. Rev. 683)
Some CLS theories imply that the use of rights rhetoric by people of [*694] color to try to remove some of the harshest manifestations of racial domination
exemplifies a false legal consciousness or a counterproductive faith in the power of liberalism to produce social change. n34 Certain critical race theorists have
responded that this implication stems from a misapprehension of the options for genuine social struggle open to the socially, economically and politically

The decision to pursue a rights strategy may well represent a

conscious and critical assessment of the constraints imposed by the
conditions of racial subjugation . n36 The denial of this possibility may itself represent a form of false consciousness. n37 As
Crenshaw observes: "In the context of white supremacy, engaging in rights discourse
should be seen as an act of self-defense ." n38 [*695] Richard Delgado suggests that rights can
protect minorities from those who, in the absence of legal sanctions, would
feel freer to act upon racist impulses . n39 Although certain CLS scholars despair of the vision of atomized individuals that
underlies rights language, n40 Delgado states that minorities, who regularly experience the intrusions of oppression, value the
distance that rights place between themselves and others . n41 Such distance
offers a measure of safety from race-based violence, contempt and abuse.
In the sort of informal community that some CLS writers prize, a community operating by fluid and flexible
exercises of discretion unbounded by rights and rules , n42 Delgado wonders
what structures would protect minorities from racist behavior . n43 For minorities, Delgado
indicates, abandoning formality may mean abandoning security, making the
informal community a setting of disproportionate vulnerability for people
of color. n44 These different attitudes about rights and rule structures are vividly portrayed in a story related by Patricia Williams. In renting an apartment in
dispossessed. n35

New York City, Williams insists on a conventional lease to demonstrate her trustworthiness, while Peter Gabel, her white male colleague, demonstrates his
trustworthiness by avoiding a lease and engaging in an informal conversational transaction. n45 Williams rejects the CLS critique of legalism and formality not
because it is inaccurate, but because it voices a single perspective that grows from a particular social experience, ignoring the experiences of other social groups. n46
Her conclusion is that we should not abandon rights language for all purposes, but that we should "listen intently to each other," to "bridge the experiential distance"
between us, n47 and to "attempt to become multilingual in the semantics of each others' rights-valuation." n48 Robert Williams also ties differential rights-valuation
to the social experiences of different social groups. Williams asserts that CLS theory [*696] has underestimated peoples of color when it worries that they have come
to believe in the "truth" of rights rather than in the simple instrumental character of attaining rights. n49 From the standpoint of the empowered, Williams observes,

from the standpoint of the subordinated, rights

have a more palpable reality: One cannot experience the pervasive, devastating reality of a "right," . . . except in its absence. One must first
rights represent abstract, metaphysical concepts, but

be denied that seat on the bus, one must see the desecration of one's tribe's sacred lands, one must be without sanitary facilities in a farm field, to understand that a
"right" can be more than a concept. A right can also be a real, tangible experience. . . . What else could a right be other than an abstraction to someone who has never
had their abstractions taken away or denied. . . . Arising from the historical experience of peoples of color in United States society "concepts" such as "rights" or
"justice" assume a life of their own in an experiential sense. It is in this struggle for the tangible benefits of these "concepts" that peoples of color mobilize themselves
to forge their own discourse. Unavoidably and irredeemably derivative in part of the majority society's discursive practices . . . . this type of discourse which finds its
genesis in the historical struggles of peoples of color strategically employs those concepts, such as "rights," which speak most directly and forcefully to the prejudices

many people of color

reject the CLS critique of rights consciousness in its present form. They view the CLS emphasis on delegitimating
legal ideology as a project that relinquishes too much, since appeals to
legal ideology represent one of the only strategies that has effectively
elicited a response to the desperate needs of subordinated people . Minority scholars
of the dominant culture. n50 Because differences in rights-valuation grow out of their different social experiences,

seem to read CLS rights critiques simply as cautionary tales about the dangers of engaging liberal ideology, while they continue to make realistic decisions, given the

Debunking legal ideology may indeed meet the

needs of those who experience oppression primarily in terms of feelings of
alienation from community. People of color, however, have often chosen
another strategy, for regardless of the status of legal consciousness, they
have identified racism as an ideology more threatening to their lives
limited array of options, to risk such engagement.

329

Kritik Answers

CLS is Nihilistic
CLS COLLAPSES INTO NIHILISM
Johnson 84

[Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely
Want To Be Radical? 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
The seemingly sophisticated tendency of Critical scholars to see "politics" at the root of every
practice is also unsatisfying. Politics deals with the accommodation and adjustment of
claims backed by power, and to see nothing but politics in law is to adopt the claim of
Thrasymachus that justice is the will of the stronger. n110 That amounts to nihilism, which
is a coherent position only if one is prepared to accept the implication that might makes
right. It is clear that the Critical scholars do not want to accept that implication, which, after
all, would make them very wrong indeed. They want to escape the impasse of nihilism by
liberating themselves from an inherited burden of false consciousness that makes hard
choices seem inevitable.

330

Kritik Answers

No Alternative (1/2)
CLS HAS NO HARD REFERENCE, PREVENTING THE
CONSTRUCTION OF A REALISTIC ALTERNATIVE
Johnson 84

[Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely
Want To Be Radical? 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
The second major problem with a purely negative use of Marxism is that criticism itself is
meaningless without a standard of reference, whether express or implied. Critical scholars
who describe "capitalist" society as oppressive or hierarchical are like New Yorkers who
speak of Cleveland as being in the "West." Contemporary capitalist society may be
oppressive and hierarchical judged by some ideal standard and yet have less oppression and
hierarchy than most or even all other societies that have ever existed. Critical legal writing
systematically evades the question, "Compared to what?"
My point is not that one always has to propose an alternative [*261] when one criticizes,
but rather that failure to specify the standard of reference robs the criticism of meaning.
When Critical scholars say that life in a capitalist society is alienating, I do not know if they
mean that this is true because of some particular characteristic of capitalist society or
because life in every known from of society is alienating. If the latter is the case, then
blaming alienation on capitalism is absurd.
In a word, the relationship of Critical legal though to Marxism or any other ideological
position is obscure. Without a firm ideological basis the Critical viewpoint is itself obscure,
and indeed it is not easy to explain how Critical scholarship differes from "liberal" or
"traditional" scholarship, except in its greater obscurity. n42 Liberal scholarship itself is
strongly Critical, and may even have prepared the way for nihilism by undermining so much
that had seemed certain.

THE CRITICAL LEGAL ALTERNATIVE IS SO VAGUE THAT IT

JUSTIFIES MAINTAINING THE STATUS QUO
Johnson 84

[Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely
Want To Be Radical? 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
There is no mystery about what the Critical legal scholars are against: They are against
capitalism, liberalism, and illegitimate hierarchy. It is much harder to say what they are for.
In fact, Critical legal writing has practically nothing to suggest in the way of a positive
political program. For a movement that claims to be political, this is truly an astonishing
vacuum. At the 1981 Yale Symposium on Legal Scholarship, for example, Duncan Kennedy
called for "utopian speculation," "dreaming up the ways we think things might be better
than they are," because radicals need to ask, " What would we do with power, anyway?" n89
On the same occasion, Alan Freeman chided his colleagues for failing to follow through on
the radical implications of their papers. The most he could propose himself, however, was
that radicals should escape from liberal thinking by incorporating "insights from other
methods: structuralism, phenomenology, advanced Marxist thought, radical empiricism,
and comparative methods." n90 Roberto Mangabeira Unger concluded his book Law in
Modern Society by observing that the solution to the conflict between personal autonomy
and community "could be fully worked out only with the help of a metaphysics we do not yet
possess." n91 Whatever may have been their authors' intentions, the political [*282]
implications of these messages seem concervative to me. If we not only don't know how to
get there from here, but also don't know where "there" is, doesn't it follow that we should
stay here until more information comes along?

331

Kritik Answers

No Alternative (2/2)
CLS HAS NO ALTERNATIVE, REPLACING POLITICAL ACTION
WITH USELESS DREAMING
Johnson 84

[Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely
Want To Be Radical? 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
The Critical scholars sincerely want to be radicals: Indeed, some of them formed their
standards of right and wrong in a counterculture that associated radical politics with
goodness itself and identified liberalism with "selling out." They are also aware that the
existing legal order is not as securely founded upon reason as some people like to pretend.
Unfortunately, they do not have a radical alternative to propose. Their strategy in this
awkward situation is to retreat into a mystical utopianism that is couched in political
language but in fact has little to do with politics. The "incoherence" of liberalism is their
incoherence, its "failure" their failure. Critical legal writing provides a way of sounding like a
radical when you don't know how to be one.

THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO LAW- IT IS THE MOST

COHERENT WAY TO SETTLE SOCIAL ISSUES
ALTMAN 90

(Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal
Critique, Pg. 119) PHM
There are serious problems with this CLS view of the implications of the patchwork thesis.
Even if there are incompatible principles that underlie different segments of doctrine, it
does not follow that the judge is free to choose which principle to rely on in deciding a case.
Recall from the discussion in chapter 2 that our legal culture incorporates a convention that
requires that cases be decided in a way that provides the greatest degree of logical coherence
with the settled rules and decisions. Suppose that in most cases a decision relying on a
particular principle fits better with the settled materials than one relying on a competing
principle. The supposition is not inconsistent with the patchwork thesis, but if it is true, then
it would be wrong to claim, as Dalton does, that equally forceful legal arguments could be
given for both sides in almost any case. The better legal argument would be the one that
displays the better fit with the settled decisions and norms, and the law itself would be
highly determinate, even if the patchwork thesis were true.

CLS HAS NO RECONSTRUCTIVE VISION

Anthony Cook Professor of Law, Critical Race Theory, Ed. Kimberl Crenshaw et al, 1995, p. 8990
The third problem with the CLS critique is that it threatens to conflate the unique histories
of the various forms of alienation and oppression engendered by the subconscious
acceptance and assimilation of liberal ideology. the experiences of racism and sexismto
name but twoare certainly related to the way individuals experience liberalism as
oppressive but cannot be reduced to that experience. Therefore, exploration of the various
histories of oppression, often ignored by CLSs account can provide an essential basis for any
reconstructed community. Finally, deconstruction should ultimately lead to a reconstructive
vision, which will involve some line-drawing and boundary-setting. CLS should not only
explain why liberalisms boundary-setting is problematic; it must also suggest how to redraw
those boundaries to satisfy other goals. I believe CLS too often falls victim to a myopic
preoccupation with the limited role of theoretical deconstruciton and a too narrowly tailored
experiential deconstruction that focuses exclusively on how individuals experience
liberalism. Hegemonic ideologies are never maintained by logical consistencey alone;
knowledge of the full range of conditions under which they remain oppressed, exposes new
problems and possibilities. When one begins to contemplate how alternative visions of

332

Kritik Answers
community might look and be implemented, one must consider carefully the view from the
bottomnot simply what oppressors say but how the oppressed respond to what they say.
The view from the bottom may offer insights into why individuals accept their subordinate
status in society despite the illogic and inconsistency of the dominant ideology.

333

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Elitism

THE ALTERNATIVE IS ELITIST SELF-PRESERVATION,
SHORT-CIRCUITING ANY RADICAL POTENTIAL
White 84

[G. Edward, Critical Legal Studies Symposium: The Inevitability of Critical Legal Studies,
36 Stan. L. Rev. 649, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
. In calling for the transformation of social institutions, they
were calling for the transformation of a world in which they have been comfortable and
prominent. Few of the designated beneficiaries of their cells for change share their close
identification with a hierarchical educational system in which the most prestigious members of the hierarchy get the fewest
The Critical theorists therefore cannot have it both ways

apparent demands made on their time. How many members of the oppressed classes would applaud a world in which persons designated law professors got paid
rather well for teaching five hours a week, or perhaps not at all? How many would be inclined to think that persons living that kind of life have any idea what it means
to be oppressed? And while some Critical theorists might willingly work one month out of a year as janitors or secretaries, others might not like to have their salaries

. There are powerful forces of self-preservation

operating to retard the impact of transformative proposals, and when one adds to those
forces a newly emergent skepticism about the wisdom of elites, one can readily imagine a
scenario in which Critical legal scholars preach their transformative proposals to audiences
wearing headsets.
equalized even with other law professors, let alone with maintenance workers

CRITICAL LEGAL THEORY IS INSULATED WITHIN THE

ACADEMY, REINSCRIBING CAPITAL
Johnson 84

[Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely
Want To Be Radical? 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
nothing is more vulnerable to a Marxist critique than the CLS movement itself. Most
of these scholars are law professors at prestigious universities, predominantly at Harvard and Stanford; such a
career implies acceptance by the legal intellectual establishment. From this platform they
preach a sort of nihilistic utopianism, a most unconvincing doctrine that in no way threatens
the existing order of society. Their visibility at the elite universities lends credibility to the
image of neutrality and tolerance that the Ruling Hegemony wishes to project. Their
rhetoric reassures law students that the only alternatives to the present system are
"utopian." The obvious Marxist explanation of the CLS movement is that it permits a few harmless academic leftists to
adopt a radical pose, while receiving good salaries and excellent fringe benefits for serving
the interests of the capitalists. n54
The irony is that

YOUR ALTERNATIVE HAS BEEN FRACTURED- CLS IS ONLY

COMPREHENSIBLE WITHIN ELITE CIRLCES AND IT IS DEAD
NEASCU 00

(Dana, Former Asst. Corporate Counsel, 8 J.L. & Pol'y 415, CLS stands for Critical Legal
Studies, if Anyone Remembers, MosE)
Critical Legal Studies ("CLS"), n1 which started as a Left movement within legal academia, n2 has undergone so many [*416]
changes, that one may liken it to products of pop culture, such as the television cartoon
show, South Park. n3 South Park features a character named Kenny, totally unlike any other cartoon hero, tragic or otherwise. Like Kenny,
who is an outsider and who speaks a language unintelligible to all except, astonishingly, his
classmates, CLS no longer seems to possess a voice comprehensible to anyone outside its
own small circle. Kenny, unlike all other cartoon figures, dies in every episode. n4 Significantly, often Kenny's death has been
self-inflicted - though not necessarily intentional - when, for instance, he ignores warnings
of imminent danger. Like Kenny, CLS has suffered many often self-inflicted injuries. Like South
Park, generally, CLS is certainly colorful, but often little more than that and, as in the cartoon, except for the certainty of Kenny's death and later resurrection, there
seems more flash than substance in its existence. We are left to guess whether CLS will prove to be as resilient after apparent death, as Kenny

334

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Fractures Movement

YOUR ALTERNATIVE FAILS- FRACTURED LEFT
NEASCU 00

(Dana, Former Asst. Corporate Counsel, 8 J.L. & Pol'y 415, CLS stands for Critical Legal
Studies, if Anyone Remembers, MosE)
As a result of this array of dissenting and conflicting interests, CLS has been left with no
cohesive voice, and it appears now as a mere witness to the powerless atomization of an
emasculated radical Left discourse. This atomization may have promoted certain group
solidarities, and possibly offered short term relief. But, despite CLS's influence on legal
discourse, it never seemed able to attain even a partially-unified leftist discourse. This
failure might be the cause of mutual estrangement among all of its "members" - or at least a
failure to offer a common core - that eventually risks oblivion for the movement as a whole.
In response, CLS now must rediscover its voice in the legal community, even though the old
leftist habits and texts have far less luster and glitter than fashionable literary theories.

335

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Indeterminacy Kills

Criticism
CLSS FOCUS ON INDETERMINACY NEUTRALIZES CRITICISM
OF THE LAW, PREVENTING THE CREATION OF A NEW
ORDER
Solum 87

[Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical
Dogma, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl]
Far from enabling a progressive transformation of legal practice, the
indeterminacy thesis, at least the strong version, disempowers the critique of legal ideology that critical
scholars hope will facilitate emancipatory social change. Seen in broad terms, their critique has two parts. First, the
But this appeal is superficial.

mystification thesis will unveil the structures of domination masked by legal doctrine. Second, the indeterminacy thesis will explain how domination circumvents the
apparent autonomy of the law and frees legal actors from the apparent constraints imposed by the existing rules. Thus, mystification and indeterminacy are the
intellectual foundations both for a program of external critique that will reveal the law to the layman for what it is, and for an internal critique through which
progressive legal actors will freely use legal practice to achieve emancipatory ends.

the strong indeterminacy thesis undercuts, rather than advances, the projects of
both internal and external critique. Because the strong indeterminacy thesis calls for
disengagement from the form and conventions of discourse that makes legal practice
possible, the thesis blunts an internal critique of the law. Stanley Cavell puts the point as follows:
My contention is that

The internal tyranny of convention is that only a slave of it can know how it may be changed for the better, or know why it should be eradicated. Only masters of a
game, perfect slaves to that project, are in a position to establish conventions which better serve its essence. This is why deep revolutionary changes can result from
attempts to conserve a project, to take it back to its idea, keep it in touch with its history. To demand that the law be fulfilled, every jot and tittle, will destroy the law as
it stands, if it has moved too far from its origins. Only a priest could have confronted his set of practices with its origins so deeply as to set the terms of Reformation.
n105
Cavell's idea can be put into a legal context by examining the critical legal theory of Roberto Unger. Unger identifies "deviationalist doctrine" as the positive alternative
for legal scholarship. The project of deviationalist doctrine must maintain "the minimal characteristics of doctrine" that is "the willingness to take the extant [*499]
authoritative materials as starting points." n106 Like the Reformation, Unger's program acknowledges the structure from which it hopes to deviate. The indeterminacy

. If there is a measure of determinacy in the

law, and legal discourse and reasoning are more than mere apologies for domination, then Unger's deviationalist doctrine begins
with a flawed, but at least functional, language with which to embark on the creation of a
more humane legal order. But if the law is indeterminate, and legal reasoning a sham, then
they cannot serve as the raw material for constructing a body of doctrine with emancipatory
potential -- deviationalist doctrine itself would be incapable of effecting real change. Instead,
the social order would remain governed by the underlying ideology or political and
economic forces -- and if the forces were to change, then the doctrine would not need to do so. Under the strong indeterminacy thesis, legal doctrine
thesis, however, undercuts the project of deviationalist doctrine at its starting point

becomes "a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it," and so it "is not part of the mechanism." n107

336

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Historical Record of

Marxism
MARXISMS LONG HISTORY OF BLOODSHED AND
OPPRESSION DELEGITIMIZES THE FOUNDATION OF THEIR
ALTERNATIVE CLAIMS
Johnson 84

[Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely
Want To Be Radical? 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
A similar uncertainty about the cause of our ills is reflected in the uneasy relationship
between Critical legal scholarship and Marxism. Some of the articles from the CLS
movement are explicitly Marxist, and the movement as a whole employs Marxist jargon and
methods of analysis. Marxist remedies, however, are rarely recommended. Although they do
not dwell upon the point, the Critical scholars seem to be aware of the consistently horrible
record of Marxist regimes n31 -- the slave labor camps, the mass deportations, the
suppression [*258] of labor unions, the denial of freedom of conscience, the bureaucratic
rigidity, the personality cults. They appear to recognize that refugee traffic between Marxist
and non-Marxist societies is a one-way affair.
Understandably, even radical scholars in a sophisticated intellectual community hesitate to
embrace such an inviting target for "Critical" scrutiny by others. This ambivalence can lead
to amusing equivocations.The prolific Mark Tushnet, for example, pays Marxism the
compliment of saying that it "generates the central position to which all theories of
knowlede respond," n32 and he has tried his hand at sketching a Marxist analysis of
American public law. n33 But we must not assume that Tushnet is therefore a Marxist, for
he has also written that he "uses Marxism" merely as a "rhetorical mode" to show that he
realizes that those in positions of power will not peacefully relinquish those positions when
the time comes, and to demonstrate that he is a real radical and not just another reformer
like John Hart Ely or Lawrence Tribe. n34 How a rhetorical mode can generate a central
position to which all theories must respond is not explained.
What Tushnet and other Critical legal scholars seem to like about Marxism is its doctrine of
historical contingency, its insistence that "all knowledge is a social product and thus that
knowledge can have no transcendent validity." n35 This "Critical" side of Marxism is useful
for attacking "capitalism" or "liberalism" (although it could be equally useful in undermining
Marxism itself), n36 and as such it can [*259] be detached from the Marxist program of
party dictatorship. Marxism as a practical revolutionary program is attrative mainly to those
who, like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, n37 believe that the important thing is to feed the
hungry and that human liberty is worth sacrificing to that end. The Critical scholars are well
aware that man does not live by bread alone. Their primary concern is for social equality, for
abolition of hierarchies of power. n38 Marxist dictatorship is no solution to that problem.
But discarding the vulnerable positive program of Marxism generates at least two further
difficulties, neither of which has been adequately addressed in any of the Critical legal
literature with which I am familiar. First, how are we to judge the validity of a Marxist
critique of capitalist society if Marxism is so wrong in its positive program? There is an
analogy here to the predicament of psychoanalytic theory that the efficacy of psychoanalysis
as a form of treatment has been strongly called into question. n39 Conceivably the Freudian
theories of the personality might be true even if treatment based on those theories has no
special power to cure, but the power to cure has always been an important argument for the
truth of the theory. n40 The failure of Marxism as a remedy for exploitation and oppression
is so spectacular as to call into question its central doctrines, [*260] including the premise
that economic or political institutions are to blame for our psychological and spiritual ills.
How are we to verify or falsify a Marxist or Marxist-style analysis? Critical legal scholarship
seems to rule the question out of order. We are entitled to be suspicious, especially since
Critical Theory appeals so powerfully to the egotism of disaffected intellectuals like the CCLS
members by granting them special insight and a pivotal role in history. n41

337

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Non-Rights Strategies

Bad
NON-RIGHTS STRATEGIES FAIL BECAUSE DOMINANT
SOCIETY CAN MORE EASILY IGNORE DEMANDS NOT MADE
FROM WITHIN THE DOMINANT RIGHT DISCOURSE
Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, RACE, REFORM, AND

RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW,

Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331)
Rights have been important . They may have legitimated racial inequality, but they have also been the means by
which oppressed [*1385] groups have secured both entry as formal equals into the dominant
order and the survival of their movement in the face of private and state repression . The dual role
of legal change creates a dilemma for Black reformers. As long as race consciousness thrives, Blacks will often have to rely on rights rhetoric when it is necessary to
protect Black interests. The very reforms brought about by appeals to legal ideology, however, seem to undermine the ability to move forward toward a broader vision

Critics are correct in

observing that engaging in rights discourse has helped to deradicalize and co-opt the challenge.
Yet they fail to acknowledge the limited range of options presented to Blacks in a context
where they were deemed "other," and the unlikelihood that specific demands for inclusion
and equality would be heard if articulated in other terms . This abbreviated list of options is itself contingent upon the
ideological power of white race consciousness and the continuing role of Black Americans as "other." Future efforts to address racial
domination, as well as class hierarchy, must consider the continuing ideology of white race
consciousness by uncovering the oppositional dynamic and by chipping away at its
premises. Central to this task is revealing the contingency of race and exploring the connection between white race consciousness and the other myths that
of racial equality. In the quest for racial justice, winning and losing have been part of the same experience. The

legitimate both class and race hierarchies. Critics and others whose agendas include challenging hierarchy and legitimation must not overlook the importance of

until
whites recognize the hegemonic function of racism and turn their efforts toward
neutralizing it, African-American people must develop pragmatic political strategies -- selfconscious ideological struggle -- to minimize the costs of liberal reform while maximizing its utility. A primary
revealing the contingency of race. Optimally, the deconstruction of white race consciousness might lead to a liberated future for both Blacks and whites. Yet,

step in engaging in self-conscious ideological struggle must be to transcend the oppositional dynamic in which Blacks are cast simply and solely as whites' subordinate
"other." n200 The dual role that rights have played makes strategizing a difficult task. Black people can afford neither to resign themselves to, nor to attack frontally,

The subordinate position of Blacks in this society makes it

unlikely that African-Americans will realize gains through the kind of direct challenge to the
legitimacy of American liberal ideology that is now being waged by Critical scholars. On the other hand, delegitimating [*1386] race
the legitimacy and incoherence of the dominant ideology.

consciousness would be directly relevant to Black needs, and this strategy will sometimes require the pragmatic use of liberal ideology. This vision is consistent with
the views forwarded by theoreticians such as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Antonio Gramsci, and Roberto Unger. Piven and Cloward observe that
oppressed people sometimes advance by creating ideological and political crisis, but that the form of the crisis-producing challenge must reflect the institutional logic
of the system. n201 The use of rights rhetoric during the civil rights movement created such a crisis by presenting and manipulating the dominant ideology in a new

Challenges and demands made from outside the institutional logic would
have accomplished little because Blacks, as the subordinate "other," were already perceived
as being outside the mainstream . The struggle of Blacks, like that of all subordinated groups, is a struggle for inclusion, an attempt to
and transformative way.

manipulate elements of the dominant ideology to transform the experience of domination. It is a struggle to create a new status quo through the ideological and
political tools that are available. Gramsci called this struggle a "War of Position" and he regarded it as the most appropriate strategy for change in Western societies.

direct challenges to the dominant class accomplish little if ideology plays such
a central role in establishing authority that the legitimacy of the dominant regime is not
challenged. Joseph Femia, interpreting Gramsci, states that "the dominant ideology in modern capitalist societies is highly institutionalized and widely
internalized. It follows that a concentration on frontal attack, on direct assault against the bourgeois state ('war of movement' or 'war
of manoeuvre') can result only in disappointment and defeat ." n202 Consequently, the challenge in such societies is to create a
According to Gramsci,

counter-hegemony by maneuvering within and expanding the dominant ideology to embrace the potential for change. Gramsci's vision of ideological struggle is

rather than
discarding liberal legal ideology, we should focus and develop its visionary undercurrents :
echoed in part by Roberto Unger in his vision of deviationist doctrine. Unger, who represents another strand of the Critical approach, argues that,

[T]he struggle over the form of social life, through deviationist doctrine, creates opportunities for experimental revisions of social life in the direction of the ideals we
defend. An implication of our ideas is [*1387] that the elements of a formative institutional or imaginative structure may be replaced piecemeal rather than only all at

Liberal ideology embraces communal and liberating visions along with the
legitimating hegemonic visions . Unger, like Gramsci and Piven and Cloward, seems to suggest that the strategy toward
meaningful change depends on skillful use of the liberating potential of dominant ideology .
once. n203

338

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Praxis (1/3)

CLSS FOCUS ON THEORY ALIENATES ITSELF FROM SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS, MAINTAINING DOMINATION
Sparer 84

[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights, Legal
Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies
Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to
change it." n108 The commitment to theory which contributes to, and in turn is informed
and developed by, social practice concerned with changing the world, is a theme
occasionally encountered in Critical legal writing. n109 In this essay, I use [*553] the word
"praxis" to refer to such a unity of theory and action. n110 The need for praxis should be selfevident to scholars such as those in Critical studies, whose view is that domination and
exploitation of human beings characterizes our social life, since mere tinkering with a legal
system misleads us. Therefore, fundamental transformation of social relations, including
those involved in the production process, is necessary. Richard Flacks, a sociologist, puts it
this way:
[I]t seems urgent for academic radicals and Marxists to develop a more reflexive
understanding of the implications for anc relevance of their intellectual work to political
practice. It may be a characteristic of late capitalism that even Marxism can become nothing
more than a token in the game of professional achievement. n111
Despite such a warning, the practical relationship of Critical legal theory to social movement
and struggle in the United States today is, at best, very limited. Neither lawyers nor political
activists receive much enlightenment from Critical legal theory with regard to their actual
work. Nor is Critical legal theory itself much affected by the practical work of such people.
While there are exceptions to these generalizations, n112 the absence of praxis in current
Critical legal work seems to be one of its most marked features. Gordon, a Critical legal
theorist, writes:

THE ALTERNATIVE IS REDUCTIONISTIC AND MIRED IN

THEORY, PREVENTING THE ORGANIZATION OF
MOVEMENTS AGAINST OPPRESSION
Sparer 84

[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights, Legal
Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies
Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
Gabel is entirely right when he insists on understanding people and social relations in the
real, concrete, specific world in which they exist. But surely that part of the concrete world
he summarizes with such eloquence is not "the social totality within which the psyche is
formed." At least a fair number of people do have experience with a more genuine, personal
love. Some people do seek something better in "work" than "mechanical functioning," at
least when they are assured of a job to support their existence. People, at least a fair number,
are frequently dissatisfied with the "packaged emptiness" on which they spend their wages.
n126
I agree with Karl Klare when he writes: "I regard as inaccurate the view that . . . it is possible
to describe the working class as in any sense satisfied with current standards of living in
either the material or cultural aspects." n127 But if this is so, then it should be possible to
struggle now over the conditions which Gabel describes. Nevertheless, neither Gabel's work
nor that of most other Critical legal theorists provides theory that can aid such struggle.
Indeed, it does not even recognize the need for new directions in scholarship which [*560]
would aid such struggle. In the course of constant efforts at delegitimation, some Critical
legal theorists begin to think and talk about "the law" as if it were no more than litigation,
doctrines, and case outcomes -- precisely the narrow view of most conventional legal
theorists. Critical theorists rarely conceive of legal strategies to employ outside the

339

Kritik Answers
courtroom for the purpose of building social movement.Somehow, the affirmative
relationship of law to social movement becomes lost. n128

340

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Praxis (2/3)

DELEGITIMIZING THE LAW CREATES HELPLESSNESS,
DRIVING ACTIVISTS AWAY FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Sparer 84

[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights, Legal
Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies
Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
Therein lies the source of the real sadness (a word more accurate here than "cynicism") of
some Critical legal theorists who are also [*573] law school teachers. In some respects, of
course, what we address here is essentially a continuation of the praxis issue discussed in
the last part. But it is more. The Critical legal professors are not only scholars; they are also
teachers.The people they teach are, in the main, not going to be scholars. They are going to
be practitioners. Do the Critical legal professors have anything to say to these students -except that they assume the students will discover in their practice those successful methods
of change which the teachers not only have not found but do not care to seek? The more
logical assumption, by far, is that such law teaching will be simply one more law school
factor in the decisions of students once concerned with social change to pursue corporate
careers. What, after all, can the student do as a lawyer in the face of monumental,
overpowering, and all-pervasive injustice other than pursue the same buck that everybody
else does?
The radical law teacher's responsibility is not simply to expose doctrinal incoherencies and
build historical accounts. It is to point the way to a different kind of practice, one which
utilizes that historical account. The practice needed is not one which focuses primarily on
the law school, however much change in the law school is needed. It is a practice located
"out there," in the world outside the law school, where injustice, legal procedures and
programs, incipient protest, and social movement constantly intermingle. n174
[*574] The radical teacher's responsibility is to study such practice, analyze its conditions,
and demonstrate it, if need be, by personal example. When I say the "radical law teachers's"
responsibility, I do not mean, of course, the responsibility of each and every law teacher who
professes a radical faith. Not everybody does everything. I do mean that it is central to the
tasks of radical law teachers, just as are the activities and study Freeman espouses. Without
at least a collegial relation to those engaged in social movement practice and theory, the
radical teacher will lead more students away from, rather than into, the social struggle to
reconstruct our world by democratizing our civil life.

CLS IS CUT OFF FROM PRACTICE, PREVENTING

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
Sparer 84

[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights, Legal
Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies
Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
Critical legal scholarship contributes so little to those engaged in social change
efforts and learns so little from social change practice is its deeply held belief that delegitimation of liberal legal scholarship
(which includes virtually all scholarship outside the Critical legal camp) is the principal contribution that it can make to
significant change. The reasoning is that only by breaking the hold that current liberal thinking has on our minds can we [*556] even begin to create a
The first reason that

vision of the sort of society towards which we should be struggling. Because the principal ideological support of our current social structure is liberalism, exposing that
ideology is the obvious task for scholars seeking to end the oppression and domination that characterize present society.
Not all Critical legal theorists subscribe to this formulation. Kennedy, for example, is insistent that "the critique of liberal legalism is only a small contribution to a
valid strategy of legal leftism." n115 He seeks "a unity of theory and practice" and has some specific suggestions as to what scholars might do in the law schools

This silence
results because Kennedy and many other Critical scholars agree with the crux of Freeman's formulation. They do
not see what else theory can effectively do, and thus they concentrate on the inadequacies of
liberal doctrines (broadly defined) and on the ways liberal ideology rationalizes the way things are. n117 But the situation remains unsatisfactory, and I
themselves. n116 But even he has little to say about theory's use in transformative social struggle in the world outside the law schools.

cannot help but believe that some of the same Critical legal scholars who justify the divorce of theory from the world of social struggle know this. They know this even
when they seek to evade it.

341

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Praxis (3/3)

CLS CANT CHALLENGE THE DOMINANT LOGIC
Kimberl Crenshaw, et al, Professor of Law, Columbia University, Critical Race Theory, Ed.
Kimberl Crenshaw et al, 1995, p. 111
The CLS emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation leads to the conclusion
that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces not only the
discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet CLS scholars offer
little beyond this observation: their focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest
that once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists a more productive strategy for
change, one that does not reinforce existing patterns of domination. Unfortunately, no such
strategy has yet been articulated, and it is difficult to imagine that racial minorities will ever
be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their
excellent account of the civil rights movement, popular struggles are a reflection of
institutionally determined logic and a challenge to that logic. People can demand change
only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging. Demands for
change that do not reflect the institutional logicthat is demands that do not engage and
subsequently reinforce the dominant ideologywill probably be ineffective.

ABSENSE OF A PROGRAM MEANS CLS CAN NOT HELP THE

OPPRESSED
Harlon Dalton, Professor of Law, Yale University, Critical Race Theory, Ed. Kimberl Crenshaw et
al, 1995, p. 80
After acknowledging the practitioner/theorist split, Gordon observes: It is not not at all
that the practitioners are against theory. (Remember, practitioners equals people of
color.) They are hungry for theory that would help make sense of their practices; that
would order them meaningfully into larger patterns of historical change or structures of
social action; that would help to resolve the perpetual dilemma of whether it is or is not a
contradiction in terms to be a radical lawyer, whether one is inevitably corrupted by the
medium in which one works, whether ones victories are in the long run defeats or ones
defeats victories; or that would suggest what tactics, in the boundless ocean of meanness
and constraint that surround us, to try next. I want to affirm that Gordons is a fair and
accurate description both of practitioners and of people of color. We hunger for theory. But,
as Gordon goes on to point out, there is the lingering and widespread suspicion within the
CLS movement that the theorists do not hunger for praxis. And it is this absence of a
positive program on the part of many in CLS (with some quite notable exceptions), and
indeed the disdain for program by some, that is one of the central difficulties that people of
color have with the Critical Legal Studies movement. I think that this difficulty is rooted in
biography, in specific history, in what Cornel West refers to as genealogy.

342

Kritik Answers

A2 Thats Not Our Indeterminacy

Thesis: 1AR
FIRST, THE NEGS GENERALIZED LINKS PROVE THEY USE
THE STRONG INDETERMINACY THESIS. THATS THE ONLY
WAY THEY CAN SHOW THAT PLAN IS BAD WITHOUT
SPECIFIC EV.
SECOND, THE STRONG THESIS IS ENDEMIC TO CLS
Solum 87

[Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical
Dogma, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl]
The strong version of the indeterminacy thesis claims that all cases are "hard" cases or, more
precisely, that in every case any result can be derived from the preexisting legal doctrine.
Although some critical scholars have explicitly rejected the strong indeterminacy thesis,
contemporary critical legal scholarship still abounds in [*471] assertions that the law is
radically indeterminate. In a recent article, for example, Clare Dalton writes, "doctrinal
inconsistency necessarily undermines the force of any conventional legal argument, and . . .
opposing arguments can be made with equal force. . . . [L]egal argumentation disguises its
own inherent indeterminacy. . . . [L]egal doctrine is unable to provide determinate answers
to particular disputes." n38 Giradeau Spann also affirms the strong version of the thesis:
"[T]he characteristics of [legal] doctrine that made it indeterminate in Chadha will make it
indeterminate in all other cases as well." n39 Likewise, Charles Yablon claims that "[t]he
experienced advocate knows that the doctrinal regime is sufficiently complex that there will
always be some set of authoritative materials which, through skillful manipulation of the
level of specificity and characterization of the facts, he can declare to be 'controlling' of the
case at bar" in a way that supports "any position a client wishes to maintain." n40

343

Kritik Answers

A2 Reification: 2AC
REIFICIATION ISNT INTRINSICALLY BAD ITS A
NECESSARY TOOL TO PREVENT FUTURE DOMINATION
Sparer 84

[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights, Legal
Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies
Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
But is it bad to "reify"? In Marxist thinking, to reify a concept such as a right is to invest it
with qualities over and above those of the particular human beings who created or use it. It
is as if the right had a life of its own. It exists independently of the particular social setting
from which it came and continues regardless of the conscious choices of the people in a later
setting.
Reification, as a general proposition, can have serious and negative consequences but not all
"reifying" is necessarily bad. It is true that when we characterize a certain legal right as
"universal" or "inalienable," we are reifying it. But this may have a legitimate purpose. For
example, we may fear that some group may in the future dominate our society and attempt
to stifle all dissent. We should protect as best we can against such an event by today
acknowledging that dissent is a human value that needs protection. In so doing, we reify the
legal right to dissent in order to protect the human right of self-expression and free
conscience. We should do the same with certain rights of working people. In spite of the
difficulties of drawing a "coherent" line as to what is "inalienable" and what is not, concern
for the human values of free conscience and mutual association, coupled with a deduction
from history about what happens in the absence of such legal rights, justifies such an effort.
n42

344

Kritik Answers

A2 Rights Tradeoff: 2AC

THE POLITICAL RIGHTS OF PLAN ARENT ZERO SUM THEY
SPILLOVER AND CREATE MORE PROTECTIONS FOR
EVERYONE
Sparer 84

[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights, Legal
Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies
Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
In this manner, Marx develops the perspective, deeply imbedded in contemporary Critical
legal thinking, that the "inalienable rights" of each person, articulated in our Declaration of
Independence and [*530] the Constitution, are rights which subtract from those of other
persons or, at best, separate people from one another. n53 Even Lynd, in his dipute with
Kennedy over liberal rights and the workers' struggles, seems to accept this point of view.
n54
While it is easy to understand how one person's right to separately possess property limits
another person's separate possession of property, I fail to see how one person's exercise of,
for example, free speech and dissent necessarily limits another person's. Quite the contrary;
the exercise of these latter rights can increase the next person's ability to exercise them. It is
not the social legitimization which flows from the formal recognition of rights thast inhibits
transformative, humanizing social struggle. Many factors impede such struggle. But rights
such as free speech and dissent protect the ability of groups of people -- including working
people -- to change their society, better their group situation, and expand their human
freedom.

345

Kritik Answers

A2 Feminist Jurisprudence: 2AC

ESSENTIALIST FEMINISM REINFORCES GENDER
STEREOTYPES THROUGH VALORIZATION OF WOMENS
DIFFERENCES, HARMING OURSELVES AND OUR
LISTENERS, AND KILLING THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER
OF THEIR CRITIQUE.
Iris Marion Young, Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh,
Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory, 19 90,

p. 89-90

Within the context of antifeminist backlash, the effect of gynocentric feminism may be
accommodating to the existing structure. Gynocentric feminism relies on and reinforces
gender stereotypes at just the time when the dominant culture has put new emphasis on
marks of gender difference. It does so, moreover, by relying on many of those aspects of
women's traditional sphere that traditional patriarchal ideology has most exploited and that
humanist feminists such as Beauvoir found most oppressive--reproductive biology,
motherhood, s domestic concerns. Even though its intentions are subversive, such renewed
attention to traditional femininity can have a reactionary effect on both ourselves and our
listeners because it may echo the dominant claim that women belong in a separate sphere.
Humanist feminism calls upon patriarchal society to open places for women within those
spheres of human activity that have been considered the most creative, powerful, and
prestigious. Gynocentric feminism replies that wanting such things for women implies a
recognition that such activities are the most humanly valuable. It argues that in fact,
militarism, bureaucratic hierarchy, competition for recognition, and the instrumentalization
of nature and people entailed by these activities are basic disvalues.24
Yet in contemporary society, men still have most institutionalized power, and gynocentric
feminism shows why they do not use it well. If feminism turns its back on the centers of
power, privilege, and individual achievement that men have monopolized, those men will
continue to monopolize them, and nothing significant will change. Feminists cannot
undermine masculinist values without entering some of the centers of power that foster
them, but the attainment of such power itself requires at least appearing to foster those
values. Still, without being willing to risk such co-optation, feminism can be only a moral
position of critique rather than a force for institutional change.
Despite its intention, I fear that gynocentric feminism may have the same consequence as
the stance of moral motherhood that grew out of nineteenth century feminism a
resegregation of women to a specifically women's sphere, outside the sites of power,
privilege, and recognition. For me the symptom here is what the dominant culture finds
more threatening. Within the dominant culture a middle-aged assertive woman's claim to
coanchor the news alongside a man appears considerably more threatening than women's
claim to have a different voice that exposes masculinist values as body-denying and selfish.
The claim of women to have a right to the positions and benefits that have hitherto been
reserved for men, and that male dominated institutions should serve women's needs, is a
direct threat to male privilege. While the claim that these positions of power themselves
should be eliminated and the institutions eliminated or restructured is indeed more radical,
when asserted from the gynocentric feminist position it can be an objective retreat.
Gynocentrisms focus on values and language as the primary target of its critique contributes
to this blunting of its political force. Without doubt, social change requires changing the
subject, which in turn means developing new ways of speaking, writing, and imagining.
Equally indubitable is the gynocentric feminist claim that masculinist values in Western
culture deny the body, sensuality, and rootedness in nature and that such denial nurtures
fascism, pollution, and nuclear games. Given these facts, however, what shall we do? To this
gynocentrism has little concrete answer. Because its criticism of existing society is so global
and abstract, gynocentric critique of values, language, and culture of masculinism can
remove feminist theory from analysis of specific institutions and practices, and how they
might be concretely structurally changed in directions more consonant with our visions.

346

Kritik Answers

A2 Fem K of Intl Law: 2AC

FEMINISM HAS NO ALTERNATIVE TO INTERNATIONAL LAW
Hilary Charlesworth, Professor and Director of the Centre for International and Public Law,
Faculty of Law, Australian National University, April, 19 99, The American Journal International Law
93 A.J.I.L. 379
[*379] I have mixed feelings about participating in this symposium as the feminist voice. On
the one hand, I want to support the symposium editors' attempt to broaden the standard
categories of international legal methodologies by including feminism in this undertaking.
On the other hand, I am conscious of the limits of my analysis and its unrepresentativeness
-- the particularity of my nationality, race, class, sexuality, education and profession shapes
my outlook and ideas on international law. I clearly cannot speak for all women participants
in and observers of the international legal system. I also hope that one day I will stop being
positioned always as a feminist and will qualify as a fully fledged international lawyer. My
reservations are also more general because presenting feminism as one of seven rival
methodological traditions may give a false sense of its nature. The symposium editors'
memorandum to the participants encouraged a certain competitiveness: we were asked,
"Why is your method better than others?" I cannot answer this question. I do not see
feminist methods as ready alternatives to any of the other methods represented in this
symposium. Feminist methods emphasize conversations and dialogue rather than the
production of a single, triumphant truth. n1 They will not lead to neat "legal" answers
because they are challenging the very categories of "law" and "nonlaw." Feminist methods
seek to expose and question the limited bases of international law's claim to objectivity and
impartiality and insist on the importance of gender relations as a category of analysis. The
term "gender" here refers to the social construction of differences between women and men
and ideas of "femininity" and "masculinity" -- the excess cultural baggage associated with
biological sex.

FEMINISM MUST SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF THE

DOMINANT ORDER TO SUCCEED
Hilary Charlesworth, Professor and Director of the Centre for International and
Public Law, Faculty of Law, Australian National University, April, 19 99, The American
Journal International Law 93 A.J.I.L. 379
[*380] The philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out that feminist theorizing typically
requires an unarticulated balance between two goals. Feminist analysis is at once a reaction
to the "overwhelming masculinity of privileged and historically dominant knowledges,
acting as a kind of counterweight to the imbalances resulting from the male monopoly of the
production and reception of knowledges" and a response to the political goals of feminist
struggles. n2 The dual commitments of feminist methods are in complex and uneasy
coexistence. The first demands "intellectual rigor," investigating the hidden gender of the
traditional canon. The second requires dedication to political change. The tension between
the two leads to criticism of feminist theorists both from the masculine academy for lack of
disinterested scholarship and objective analysis and from feminist activists for co-option by
patriarchal forces through participation in male-structured debates. n3 Feminist
methodologies challenge many accepted scholarly traditions. For example, they may clearly
reflect a political agenda rather than strive to attain an objective truth on a neutral basis and
they may appear personal rather than detached. For this reason, feminist methodologies are
regularly seen as unscholarly, disruptive or mad. They are the techniques of outsiders and
strangers. Just as nineteenth-century women writers used madness to symbolize escape
from limited and enclosed lives, n4 so twentieth-century feminist scholars have developed
dissonant methods to shake the complacent and bounded disciplines in which they work. At
the same time, most feminists are constrained by their environment. If we want to achieve
change, we must learn and use the language and methods of the dominant order.

347

Kritik Answers

348

Kritik Answers

**CRT**
CRT Answers: 2AC (1/4)
FIRST, NO LINK WE DONT CLAIM TO USE THE LAW TO
END RACISM. WE JUST CREATE DUE PROCESS RIGHTS
SECOND, THE ALTERNATIVE IS WORSE BECAUSE IT
ABDICATES TO THE STATUS QUO, MAGNIFYING RACISM BY
PROVIDING NO DUE PROCESS RIGHTS
THIRD, LIBERAL LEGALISM IS TRANSFORMATIVE
TRASHING LEAVES OPPRESSION INTACT
Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT:
TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW, Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331)

There are difficulties ,

in attempting to use Critical themes and ideas to understand the civil rights movement and to
describe what alternatives the civil rights constituency could have pursued, or might now pursue. While Critical
The Critics offer an analysis that is useful in understanding the limited transformative potential of antidiscrimination rhetoric.
however,

scholars claim that their project is concerned with domination, few have made more than a token effort to address racial domination specifically, and their work does
not seem grounded in the reality of the racially oppressed. This deficiency is especially apparent in critiques that relate to racial issues. Critical scholars have criticized
mainstream legal ideology for its tendency to portray American society as basically fair, and thereby to legitimate the oppressive policies that have been directed
toward racial minorities. Yet Critical scholars do not sufficiently account for the effects or the causes of the oppression that they routinely acknowledge. The result is
that Critical literature exhibits the same proclivities of mainstream scholarship -- it seldom speaks to or about Black people. The failure of the Critics to incorporate

this failure leads to

an inability to appreciate fully the transformative significance of the civil rights movement in
mobilizing Black Americans and generating new demands . Further, the failure to consider the reality of those most
racism into their analysis also renders their critique of rights and their overall analysis of law in America incomplete. Specifically,

oppressed by American institutions means that the Critical account of the hegemonic nature of legal thought overlooks a crucial dimension of American life -- the
ideological role of racism itself. Gordon, Freeman, Tushnet, and Gabel fail to analyze racism as an ideological pillar upholding American society, or as the principal
basis for Black oppression. The Critics' failure to analyze the hegemonic role of racism also renders their prescriptive analysis unrealistic. In the spirit of Alan

if
trashing is the only path that might lead to a liberated future, Black people are unlikely to
make it to the Critics' promised land . n97 The Critics' commitment to trashing is premised on a notion that people are mystified by
Freeman's declaration, Critics often appear to view the trashing of legal ideology "as the only path that might lead to a liberated future." n96 Yet [*1357]

liberal legal ideology and consequently cannot remake their world until they see how contingent such ideology is. The Critics' principal error is that their version of
domination by consent does not present a realistic picture of racial domination. Coercion explains much more about racial domination than does ideologically induced
consent. n98 Black people do not create their oppressive worlds moment to moment but rather are coerced into living in worlds created and maintained by others.
Moreover, the ideological source of this coercion is not liberal legal consciousness, but racism. If racism is just as important as, if not more important than, liberal
legal ideology in explaining the persistence of white supremacy, then the Critics' single-minded effort to deconstruct liberal legal ideology will be futile. Finally, in

Critics also disregard the

transformative potential that liberalism offers. Although liberal legal ideology may indeed function to mystify, it
remains receptive to some aspirations that are central to Black demands, and may also
perform an important function in combating the experience of being excluded and
oppressed. n99 This receptivity to Black aspirations is crucial given the hostile social world that racism creates. The most troubling aspect of the Critical
program, therefore, is that "trashing" rights consciousness may have the unintended consequence of
disempowering the racially oppressed while leaving white supremacy basically [*1358]
untouched. These difficulties are discussed below as they relate to the critiques of Gordon, Freeman, and Tushnet. I. Gordon: The Underemphasis on
addition to exaggerating the role of liberal legal consciousness and underestimating that of coercion,

Coercion. -- Robert Gordon's explanation of ideological domination illustrates how an exclusive focus on consent leaves gaping holes in his reader's understanding of
hegemony. Gordon writes that beliefs are "the main constraints upon making social life more bearable." n100 Yet how can others understand the fact that Black
people, although unable to bring about a world in which they fully participate, can imagine such a world? Clearly, something other than their own structure of thought
prevents Blacks from changing their world. This fact suggests that a more complete explanation of domination requires that coercion and consent be considered

The coercive power of the state operates to suppress some groups , particularly when there is consensus
Racism serves to single out Blacks as one of these groups
"worthy" of suppression. n101 Gordon, however, does not offer any way to understand this. If his exclusive focus on ideological domination is to be
together.

among others that such coercion is warranted.

taken literally, one is left believing that Black Americans are unable to change their world because they accept the dominant ideology and thus cannot imagine an
alternative existence. Yet to say that the beliefs of Black Americans have boxed them into a subordinate existence because of what they believe is to ignore the history
of coercive racial subordination. Indeed, it would be difficult for Blacks, given the contradiction between American fiction and Black American reality, to believe as

The most significant aspect of Black oppression seems to be

what is believed about Black Americans , not what Black Americans believe. Black people are boxed in
largely because there is a consensus among many whites that the oppression of Blacks is
legitimate. This is where consensus and coercion can be understood together: ideology convinces one group that the coercive domination of another is
legitimate. It matters little whether the coerced group rejects the dominant ideology [*1359] and
can offer a competing conception of the world; if they have been labeled "other" by the
dominant ideology, they are not heard . n103 Blacks seem to carry the stigma of "otherness ," which
effectively precludes their potentially radicalizing influence from penetrating the dominant
consciousness. n104 If this is the case, then Blacks will gain little through simply transcending their own belief structures. The challenge for
Blacks may be to pursue strategies that confront the beliefs held about them by whites . For Blacks,
such strategies may take the form of reinforcing some aspects of the dominant ideology in
attempts to become participants in the dominant discourse rather than outsiders defined ,
objectified, and reified by that discourse. In this sense, the civil rights movement might be considered
much of the American mythology as whites do. n102

349

Kritik Answers
as an attempt to deconstruct the image of "the Negro" in the white mind. By forcing the
political system to respond to Black demands, Blacks rejected images of complacency and
docility that had been invoked by some whites to dismiss Black demands . n105

350

Kritik Answers

CRT Answers: 2AC (2/4)

FOURTH, PREFER OUR SPECIFIC SOLVENCY TRIBE AND
KATYAL INDICATE THAT PLAN CHALLENGES CURRENT
DETAINMENT PRACTICES
FIFTH, PERM DO BOTH
COMBINING MODERN NORMATIVE LEGAL THEORY WITH
CRT ENABLES RESISTANCE AGAINST ENDEMIC RACISM
Harris 94
[Angela P., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, The Jurisprudence of Reconstruction, 82 Calif. L. Rev. 741, July, LN//uwyo-ajl]

CRT's commitment to the liberation of people of color - and the project of critical social science (generally) and
normative legal scholarship (in particular) as a way to further that liberation - suggest a faith in
certain concepts and institutions that postmodernists lack. When race-crits tell modernist stories, they assume that "people of color" describes a coherent
category with at least some shared values and interests. They assume that the idea of "liberation" is meaningful - that racism is
something that can one day somehow cease to exist, or cease to exert any power over us. Modernist narratives assume a "real"
reality out there, and that reason can bring us face to face with it. And modernist narratives have faith that once
enough people see the truth, right action will follow: that enlightenment leads to empowerment, and that empowerment leads to emancipation.

people of color and whites live in the same perceptual

and moral world, that reason speaks to us all in the same way despite our different
experiences, and that reason, rather than habit or power, is what will motivate people. Modernist narratives also can be profoundly romantic. They imagine
Modernist narratives, then, are profoundly hopeful. They assume that

heroic action by a formerly oppressed people rising up as one, "empowered" to be who they "really" are or choose to be, breathing the thin and bracing air of freedom.

faith in
reason and truth and belief in the essential freedom of rational subjects have enabled people
of color to survive and resist subordination. n63 Political modernism, more generally, has been a
powerful force in the lives of subjugated peoples; as a practical matter, politically liberal
societies are [*754] vastly preferable to the alternatives. n64 A faith in reason has
sustained efforts to educate people into critical thinking and to engage in debate rather than
violence. n65 The passionate and constructive energy of modernist narratives of emancipation is also grounded in a moral faith: that human beings are created
This optimism and romanticism, though easy to caricature, cannot be easily dismissed. As Patricia Williams and Mari Matsuda have pointed out,

equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights; that oppression is wrong and resistance to oppression right; that opposing subjugation in the name of liberty,
equality, and true community is the obligation of every rational person. In its modernist moments,

CRT aims not to topple the

Enlightenment, but to make its promises real. n66

SIXTH, THIS ISNT OFFENSE THE FACT THAT WE CANT

SOLVE EVERY PROBLEM DOESNT MEAN WE SHOULDNT DO
SOMETHING
SEVENTH, DE-POLITICIZATION OF LAW FAILS- MEANS A
SEPERATION OF LAW AND POLITICS THAT CREATS A
STRUGGLE FOR STATE POWER- THIS MAKES THE ALT
POWER-DRIVEN AS OPPOSED TO DRIVEN FOR SOCIAL
PROGRESS
ALFIERI ET AL 98

(Anthony, Law Prof and Director @ U Miami Law, Spring, BOOK REVIEW: Black And
WhiteCritical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, La Raza Law Journal, l/n, MosE)
At bottom, the conflicts within CRT and the attacks upon it emanate from CRT's own
growing antipathy toward the traditional civil rights discourse that animates liberal race
reform. To Critical Race theorists, liberal faith in a court-driven, technocratic eradication of
racial bias is misplaced. n33 Faith in the rationality of progressive law reform, they argue,
rests on principles of neutrality, objectivity, and value-free reasoning. Obtaining a set of
nonideological, regulative principles, however, requires a depoliticization of the legal
process. Depoliticization, in turn, compels the separation of law and politics. When
pushed outside the domain of liberal theory, CLS teaches, the conceptual separation of law

351

Kritik Answers
and politics collapses in the raw, delegitimating competition for state power. n34 Because of
this material inseparability, the depoliticization of law and the liberal state fails. In this way,
the CRT politics of race represents a complex variant of the CLS politics of law: powerdriven, instrumental, and value-laden.

352

Kritik Answers

CRT Answers: 2AC (3/4)

EIGHTH, EXPERIENTIAL DECONSTRUCTION:
ORGANIC INTELLECTUALS MUST CONTEXTUALIZE
CRITICISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SPECIFIC OPPRESION,
STRATEGICALLY USING HEGEMONIC NORMS TO CREATE
THEIR ALTERNATIVE ****
Cook 90
[Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, Beyond Critical Legal Studies, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl]

Because he appreciated the dialectic of theory and the broad-based confrontational

strategies of socially transformative action, King stands as the paradigmatic organic intellectual of twentieth-century
American life. King's method and practice offer direction to progressive scholars concerned about the exclusionary, repressive, and non-communal dimensions of
American life.
[*1013] Gramsci's conception of the organic intellectual provides a useful framework for understanding the thought of King and what it has to offer CLS. The organic
intellectual brings philosophy to the masses, not for the merely instrumental purposes of unifying them, "but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc

Gramsci's organic
intellectual struggles to transform those who are oppressed as a means of transforming the
conditions under which they are oppressed. n79 Gramsci understands domination in terms of both coercion and consent, the latter
which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups." n78

constituting what he refers to as hegemony. Under his formulation, hegemony consists, then, of "[t]he 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the
population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group." n80 Gramsci argues that "this consent is 'historically' caused by the
prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production." n81 Thus, oppression is not
only physical and psychological but also cultural. n82

King, like Gramsci's organic intellectual, empowered his community through a practical effort to bridge the
gap between theory and lived experience. King's work consisted of four interrelated activities. First, he used
theoretical deconstruction to free the mind to envision alternative conceptions of
community. Second, he employed experiential deconstruction to understand the liberating
dimensions of legitimating ideologies like liberalism and Christianity, dimensions easily ignored by the
abstract, ahistorical, and potentially misleading critiques that rely exclusively on theoretical
deconstruction. Third, he used the insights gleaned from the first two activities to postulate
an [*1014] alternative social vision intended to transform the conditions of oppression under
which people struggle. Drawing from the best of liberalism and the best of Christianity, King
forged a vision of community that transcended the limitations of each and built upon the
accomplishments of both. Finally, he created and implemented strategies to mobilize people to
secure that alternative vision. I refer to this multidimensional critical activity as "philosophical praxis."
Although many critical theorists engage primarily in theoretical deconstruction, and some appreciate certain forms of experiential deconstruction, n83 few have

reconstructive theorizing and

socially transformative struggle. n84 These dimensions of critical activity directly confront the material
conditions of oppression whereas the preoccupation with deconstructing theory does not.
King went further than these critical theorists by examining the subtle and complex ways in
which consent was shaped, while fully appreciating the role of state and private coercion in
legitimating authority in the lives of the oppressed.
This Part examines how King filtered his theoretical deconstruction of hegemonic theologies through
his knowledge of the history and experience of oppression, and thereby made that theoretical
deconstruction richer, more contextual, and ready to engage the existential realities of
oppression. The interplay between King's theoretical and experiential deconstruction is best illustrated by reference to the African-American Church -- the
embraced either a full experiential deconstruction or the third and fourth dimensions of philosophical praxis --

institution providing the organic link between philosophy and the masses, theory and praxis. n85
My analysis proceeds in four steps. First, I examine how African-American religion served at once to legitimate slave society, delegitimize that society, and inform
alternative visions of community. Second, I examine King's use of theoretical deconstruction and illustrate its dependence on the historic mission of the AfricanAmerican Church. Like a true organic intellectual engaged in a philosophical praxis, King used theoretical deconstruction to illustrate the possibilities [*1015] of his
reconstructive vision and the centrality of social struggle in realizing that vision. Third, I discuss King's experiential deconstruction, his unwillingness to be distracted

the combination of theoretical and experiential

deconstruction results in a more contextual framework -- one more appreciative of the
conditions of choice within which authority is legitimated and challenged through
reconstructive vision and struggle.
by the reified abstractions of theoretical deconstruction. Finally, I show how

353

Kritik Answers

CRT Answers: 2AC (4/4)

NINTH, YOUR ALTERNATIVE IS FOCUSED ON A
BLACK/WHITE DICHOTOMY- THIS STOPS COALITIONAL
POLITICS AND CREATES A COMPETITIVE DRIVE AMOUNG
THE DISENFRANCHISED FOR ATTENTION
HUTCHINSON 2K4

(Darren, Prof @ Wash College, August, 53 Am. U.L. Rev. 1187, American University Law
Review, MosE)
A third area of critical race innovation involves multiracial politics. Internal critics have
argued that racial discourse in the United States fixates upon black/white racial issues,
thereby marginalizing Latino, Native American, and Asian American experiences. n95
Empirically, this observation is indisputable. Race theorists lack a full understanding of the
breadth of racial injustice. The inclusion of the experiences of Latinos, Native Americans,
and Asian Americans in racial discourse can improve CRT in several ways. First, a
multiracial discourse permits a full accounting of the problem of racial inequality and allows
for the construction of adequate remedies for racial subordination. n96 Although all people
of color suffer racism, often in similar ways, racial hierarchies impact communities of color
in diverse ways. A narrow focus on black/white subjugation severely limits the reach of
antiracist remedies.
The black/white paradigm also prevents persons of color from engaging in coalition politics.
n97 By treating racism as a problem that affects blacks primarily (or exclusively), racial
discourse in the United States divides persons of color who could align to create formidable
political forces in the battle for racial justice.
Binary racial discourse also causes persons of color to compete for the attention of whites, as
marginalized racial groups treat racial justice as a [*1201] zero-sum game. n98 Instead
of recognizing the pervasiveness and complexity of racial injuries, binary racial discourse
leads to the tyranny of oppression ranking and to competing demands for centrality in a
marginalized space of racial victimization.

354

Kritik Answers

#5 Perm: 1AR
WORKING WITHIN THE SYSTEM ALLOWS US TO TAKE IT
DOWN- EDUCATION IS PROOF THAT WE CAN EFFECTIVELY
FIGHT RACISM
LADSON-BILLINGS 99

(Gloria, Prof @ U Wisconsin-Madison, Race isRace isnt, Pg. 23) PHM

Examples of pedagogical countermoves are found in the work of both Chicago elementary
teacher Marva Collins and Los Angeles high school mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante.
Although neither Collins nor Escalante is acclaimed as a "progressive" teacher, both are
recognized for their persistence in believing in the educability of all students. Both remind
students that mainstream society expects them to be failures, and prod them to succeed as a
form of counterinsurgency. Their insistence on helping students achieve in the "traditional"
curriculum represents a twist on Audre Lorde's notion that one cannot dismantle the
master's house with the master's tools. Instead, they believe one can only dismantle the
master's house with the master's tools.

355

Kritik Answers

**Cuomo**
Preventing Nuke War Is a Prerequisite
to Positive Peace
PREVENTING NUCLEAR WAR IS THE ABSOLUTE
PREREQUISITE TO POSITIVE PEACE
Folk, Prof of Religious and Peace Studies at Bethany College, 78 (Jerry, Peace

Educations Peace Studies : Towards an Integrated Approach, Peace & Change, Vol. V, No. 1, Spring, P.
58)
Those proponents of the positive peace approach who reject out of hand the work of researchers and
educators coming to the field from the perspective of negative peace too easily forget that the
prevention of a nuclear confrontation of global dimensions is the prerequisite for all other
peace research, education, and action. Unless such a confrontation can be avoided there will
be no world left in which to build positive peace. Moreover, the blanket condemnation of all such
negative peace oriented research, education or action as a reactionary attempt to support and reinforce
the status quo is doctrinaire. Conflict theory and resolution, disarmament studies, studies of the
international system and of international organizations, and integration studies are in themselves
neutral. They do not intrinsically support either the status quo or revolutionary efforts to
change or overthrow it. Rather they offer a body of knowledge which can be used for either purpose
or for some purpose in between. It is much more logical for those who understand peace as
positive peace to integrate this knowledge into their own framework and to utilize it in
achieving their own purposes. A balanced peace studies program should therefore offer the student
exposure to the questions and concerns which occupy those who view the field essentially from the point of view of
negative peace.

356

Kritik Answers

Negative Peace Key to Positive Peace

NEGATIVE PEACE IS A PRECONDITION FOR POSITIVE PEACE
VIOLENCE IS SOMETIMES NECESSARY TO ACHIEVE THESE
GOALS
Sandole, Professor of Conflict Resolution and International Relations
at George Mason U, 96 (Dennis J. D., Conflict Resolution, USIA Electronic Journals, Vol. 1,
No. 19, December, usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/1296/ijpe/pj19sand.htm)

Negative peace, however, does not go far enough; it is one part -- albeit, often an essential part -- of a larger process that
is rarely attempted -- and if attempted, rarely achieved -- by traditional diplomacy. The remaining part consists of " positive peace":
the elimination of the underlying structural causes and conditions that have given rise to the violent conflict which negative peace
processes seek to contain. To put it simply, negative

peace deals with symptoms of underlying problems -"putting out fires" -- while positive peace deals with the underlying, "combustible" problems
themselves. Why doesn't traditional diplomacy deal with positive peace? One reason is that diplomats are trained in dispute
settlement -- reaching agreements about how to establish negative peace -- without, good intentions to the contrary, necessarily addressing
the underlying problems that gave rise to the disputes that are being settled. Hence, negotiations to end wars or to control or reduce
armaments, resulting in treaties or other agreements, are efforts to halt or manage actual or threatened violence resulting from conflicts
without necessarily dealing with their underlying, deep-rooted causes and conditions. [CONTINUES] The stage has been set for this:
NATO, under U.S. leadership, established the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991 and the Partnership for Peace in 1994, to reach
out to, and collaborate with, its former Warsaw Pact adversaries. These developments are a powerful sign that the Cold War is over and
therefore, by implication, that nations are undergoing a shift from a narrow world view based on national security to a comprehensive one
based on common security. Hence, the United States and its security partners are conceptually able to move beyond negative into positive
peace. What this will entail in Bosnia is for the United States and its NATO and other partners to remain there long enough to ensure that
negative peace holds. At the same time, they should work with international governmental and nongovernmental (including conflict

With secure
negative peace as a point of departure, positive peace in Bosnia begins with the reconstruction of
resolution) organizations, and with the conflicting parties, to pursue, achieve, and maintain positive peace.

the country. But lest the United States and its partners repeat the failure of the European Union to achieve positive peace in the Bosnian
city of Mostar through substantial investments in rebuilding Mostar's infrastructure, this reconstruction must reflect a comprehensive
peacebuilding strategy -- reconciliative as well as physical -- over a period of time. Some frameworks that could be useful in guiding U.S.led activities in this regard are: the "contingency model" of Ron Fisher and Loraleigh Keashly, which matches an intervention with the
intensity of a given conflict, and then follows up with other interventions designed to move the parties toward positive peace; the "multitrack framework" of IMTD's Ambassador John McDonald and Louise Diamond, which combines the resources of nongovernmental
conflict resolution practitioners with those of the business and religious communities, media, funders, and others as well as governmental
actors, in the pursuit of positive peace; and my own design for a "new European peace and security system" which combines elements of

by expanding their
options to include cooperative processes geared to positive peace as well as competitive
processes associated with negative peace, the United States and its partners will enhance
their prospects for success in dealing with the deep-rooted intrastate ethnic and other
conflicts that seem to be the dominant form of warfare in the post-Cold War world.
Intervening in such conflicts may mean "taking casualties," particularly in cases where one
party is attempting to impose a genocidal "final solution" on another, as in Rwanda or
Bosnia. In such situations, the use of an appropriate amount of force to achieve negative peace may
be a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of positive peace. We should not , in such cases, allow
the U.S. experience in Somalia to prevent us from acting. Genocide in Rwanda or Bosnia does, sooner or later, affect the
these and other frameworks within the context of the OSCE. There is a working hypothesis implicit in all this:

interests of the United States and others. The use of such extreme violence to "resolve" conflicts anywhere in the world is not only morally

The implicit
emphasis here on early warning and early action is part of the gist of conflict resolution:
being proactive instead of reactive. A proactive approach to problem solving worldwide is in the U.S. national interest.
reprehensible, but constitutes a model for others to emulate, perhaps increasing the costs of dealing with it later on.

This means, among other things, pursuing a bipartisan U.S. foreign policy to avoid the necessity of having to issue unrealistic timelines in
any future deployment of forces, plus paying the massive U.S. debt to the United Nations so that the United States can more credibly and
effectively lead in the debate over U.N. reform as well as in efforts to craft effective international responses to problems worldwide.

357

Kritik Answers

Absolutism Bad
ABSOLUTIST REJECTIONS ARE ULTIMATELY
UNPRODUCTIVE WE MUST EMBRACE THE DIFFERENCES
IN PEACE THEORY IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE COMMON GOALS
Folk, Prof of Religious and Peace Studies at Bethany College, 78 (Jerry,

Peace Educations Peace Studies : Towards an Integrated Approach, Peace & Change, Vol. V, No. 1,
Spring, P. 59)
The conflicting positions held by various researchers , educators, and activists in the peace studies field
can be seen as complementary rather than contradictory. Tensions, disagreements, and
arguments of considerable intensity are unavoidable and indeed desirable in this as in other fields of endeavor. Such
dialectical tensions ensure a depth and breadth of perception which one position alone could
not produce. Truth is often paradoxical, and therefore a dialectical approach to it is most
appropriate. Antagonisms insure that the dialectic is kept alive. They introduce a third
dimension into one's understanding of truth and preserve it from petrification and sterility.
Therefore, premature closures, mutual excommunications, and fixations on a particular but
incomplete position or approach should be avoided. On the other hand, there may indeed be some fringe groups
or persons in the field who, by the ultimate and legalistic commitment to a particular approach or ideology and
the absolute rejection of any other ideas or approaches, call their legitimacy as peace researchers, educators
or activists into question. An absolutistic commitment to the status quo would be one example.
Absolutistic and rigid commitments to the capitalist, Marxist or liberal democratic systems might be
another. Rigid and fanatic loyalty to a particular revolutionary or reformist tradition or to the reformist
or revolutionary tradition itself would be a third. None of the approaches or positions with regard to peace studies which this
paper discusses, however, are identical with any of these ideological orientations. Moreover, it is time particularly in the peace studies
field, that the ultimate value commitments of individuals and groups be given more weight than their
politics and philosophical preferences. The preference of one individual or group for Marxist
socialism might be based on precisely the same value commitments which have led another to
prefer liberal democracy. In summary, a well-balanced peace studies program ought to involve researchers,
educator and activists. At all three levels, it ought to include some participants who approach the field primarily from
the standpoint of negative peace and others who approach it using primarily the positive peace
paradigm. Among the latter group some should be highly sympathetic to the radical revolutionary tradition and others more in
sympathy with the reformist approach of liberal democracy. Moreover, through the structure and interactions of the program
not only the tension and conflicts but also the positive interrelationships between these various groups
ought to become visible. A program structured according to such principles would admittedly be difficult to construct and even
more difficult to administer. It would, however, be more that merely comprehensive. It would be a microcosm of the
world and therefore a laboratory in which to experiment with the actual building of creative
peace among groups and individuals of the most divergent persuasions.

358

Kritik Answers

**Deep Ecology**
Permutation Solvency: 2AC
HUMAN INTERFERENCE IS INEVITABLE ECOPRAGMATISM INTEGRATES DISPARATE ENVIRONMENTAL
APPROACHES, BETTER SOLVING ANTHRO BY UNITING
HUMAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL WELL-BEING
Mintz 2004

[Joel A., Prof. law @ Nova Southeastern University, Some Thoughts on the Merits of
Pragmatism as a Guide to Environmental Protection, 31 B.C. Envtl Aff. L. Rev. 1, LN//uwyoajl]
Environmental pragmatism is a relatively new direction in modern philosophy. n34 A product of the late 1980s and 1990s, it attempts
to connect the precepts and methods of philosophical pragmatism to the solution of real
environmental issues. n35
The most comprehensive collection of essays by environmental pragmatists may be found in Environmental Pragmatism, edited by Andrew Light and Eric Katz. n36
In their introduction to this work, Light and Katz accurately observe that environmental pragmatism refers to "a cluster of related and overlapping concepts," as
opposed to a single view. n37 They note that it may take at least four distinct forms:
(1) examinations into the connection between classical American philosophical pragmatism and environmental issues; (2) the articulation of practical strategies for
bridging gaps between environmental theorists, policy analysts, activists, and the public; (3) theoretical investigations into the overlapping normative bases of specific
environmental organizations and movements in order to provide grounds for the convergence of activists on policy choices; and (4) general arguments for theoretical
and meta-theoretical moral pluralism in environmental normative theory. n38
What all of the environmental pragmatist approaches share, however, is a rejection of the view that "adequate and workable environmental ethics must embrace nonanthropocentrism, holism, moral monism, and, perhaps, a commitment to some form of intrinsic value." n39
[*7] For Kelly Parker, the principal insight of environmental pragmatism is that " the human sphere is embedded at every point
in the broader natural sphere, that each inevitably affects the other in ways that are often
impossible to predict, and that values emerge in the ongoing transactions between humans and environments." n40 Parker defines environment as

"the field where experience occurs, where my life and the lives of others arise and take place." n41 He believes that pragmatism commits us to treating all places where

, people are encouraged to

"restructure our social institutions" so that the public is afforded "a real voice in determining
the kinds of environments we inhabit." n43
Like Parker, Sandra B. Rosenthal and Rogene A. Buckholz also emphasize the organic unity of the individual embedded in his or her environment. n44 To them ,
human beings are biological creatures, part of, and continuous with, nature. n45 In light of this, the
philosophical argument over anthropocentrism is meaningless since no real line may be
drawn between human and environmental well-being. n46 Rosenthal and Buckholz see the "systematic focus" of
experience unfolds, i.e., all environments, with "equal seriousness." n42 Moreover, under Parker's pragmatic approach

pragmatism as being on "science as method, or as lived through human activity, on what the scientist does to gain knowledge." n47 Humans exist in the world as
active experimenters who create knowledge and formulate ethical values by integrating "potentially conflicting values and viewpoints." n48
Another leading environmental pragmatist, Bryan G. Norton, also advocates a pluralistic approach. n49 In Norton's opinion:
The goal of seeking a unified, monistic theory of environmental ethics represents a misguided mission, a mission that was formulated under a set of epistemological

The search for a "Holy Grail" of unified theory in

environmental [*8] values has not progressed towards any consensus regarding what
inherent value in nature is, what objects have it, or what it means to have such a value. n50
and moral assumptions that harks back to Descartes and Newton. . . .

Norton's expressed preference is for the integration of multiple values on three "scales" of human concern and valuation: (1) locally developed values that reflect the
preferences of individuals; (2) community values that protect and contribute to human and ecological communities; and (3) global values, which express a hope for
the long-term survival of our species. n51 As Norton views it:
A good environmental policy will be one that has positive implications for values associated with the various scales on which humans are in fact concerned, and also
on the scales on which environmentalists think we should be concerned if we accept responsibility for the impacts of our current activities on the life prospects and
options--the "freedom" of future generations. n52

One particularly provocative aspect of environmental pragmatic thought is its desire for
compatibilism, i.e., a philosophical framework within which competing environmental
theories may be compatible in practice. n53 Andrew Light is an advocate for this view. n54 Light contrasts the views of social ecologists
and materialists, such as Murray Bookchin and Herbert Marcuse, n55 who view environmental degradation as presupposed by a capitalist economy, and ontologists,
including "deep ecologists" like Arne Naess, n56 whose focus is on reform of the self, and one's relationship with the non-human world, as expressed in individual
identity. n57 To harmonize these mutually antagonistic schools of environmental thought, Light proposes a pragmatic "principle of tolerance." n58 [*9] Under it,
theorists and practitioners are required to communicate a "straightforward public position" that endorses the considerations on which they agree, and the practices
best suited to meeting their mutually desired goals, while leaving some questions that divide them to private dispute. n59

359

Kritik Answers

Permutation Solvency: 1AR

HUMAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL INTEREST ARENT
MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE PLAN PROTECTS BOTH, CREATING
A LESS VIOLENT WORLD
Schroeder 2003

[Christopher, Prof. Law and Pub Policy Studies & Dir. Public Law @ Duke, Environmental
Protection as a Jurisdynamic Experience: Prophets, Priests, and Pragmatists, 97 Minn. L.
Rev. 1065, April, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Sorting out the competing source-of-value claims made within the broad literature of
environmental philosophy and ethics would force a greater detour here than I can make.
Instead, I will simply provide three observations to lend some support to the view that a
critical stance toward business as usual regarding the environment and a pragmatic
approach to values need not be opposed to one another. First, Deep Ecologists and others
who voice the prophetic message have an established record of extended and detailed
investigations into ways that we might satisfy human needs through methods that are much
less resource consumptive than the current status quo. They order such investigations in
significant part because they recognize that satisfying human needs does indeed have a
significant value. A large part of the prophetic project seeks ways to accommodate both a
high degree of human need satisfaction and environmental protection, not always to
denigrate the former. Prophets think that society's current balance between the two is out of
kilter, but they need not think that the two do not have to be balanced at all. The "doing
more with less" movement, soft energy paths, hydrogen-based fuel cells, recycling - these
and other such efforts are not [*1085] merely strategic efforts to reduce amoral or nonmoral opposition to the moral hegemony of environmentalism. Instead, they are efforts to
accommodate competing moral values.

THE PROBLEM OF SHALLOW ECOLOGY ISNT

ANTHROPOCENTRISM, BUT A SHORT-TERM FOCUS
SHOULD COMBINE QUALIFIED ANTHROPOCENTRISM WITH
BROADER CONCERN FOR THE HUMAN WORLD OVERCOMES
THIS
Grey 93

[William, Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, Anthropocentrism and Deep

Ecology, Australian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 71, no 4, 1993,
www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/pubs/anthropocentrism.html, acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
That we habitually assume characteristically anthropocentric perspectives and values is
claimed by deep ecologists to be a defect. And as a corrective to this parochialism, we are
invited to assume an "ecocentric" (Rolston 1986, Callicott 1989) or "biocentric" (Taylor
1986) perspective. I am not persuaded, however, that it is intelligible to abandon our
anthropocentric perspective in favour of one which is more inclusive or expansive. We
should certainly abandon a crude conception of human needs which equates them (roughly)
with the sort of needs which are satisfied by extravagant resource use. But the problem with
so-called "shallow" views lies not in their anthropocentrism, but rather with the fact that
they are characteristically short-term, sectional, and self-regarding. A suitably enriched and
enlightened anthropocentrism provides the wherewithal for a satisfactory ethic of obligation
and concern for the nonhuman world. And a genuinely non-anthropocentric view delivers
only confusion.

360

Kritik Answers

Anthro Good/Inevitable (1/3)

DEEP ECOLOGY ISOLATES US FROM NATURE, REINSCRIBES
ANTHROPOCENTRISM ANTHRO COMBINED WITH A
HOLISTIC PERSPECTIVE SOLVES BEST BY ALLOWING
BETTER VALUING OF HUMANS AND NATURE
Grey 93

[William, Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, Anthropocentrism and Deep

Ecology, Australian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 71, no 4, 1993,
www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/pubs/anthropocentrism.html, acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
There are several very plausible elements in the concerns of deep ecology. First,
there is the worry about the effects of unconstrained human interference in natural
systems impoverishing and degrading them. Human interference and human action is often contrasted with the wisdom of natural cycles and
natural development. Contrast the violence of a strip-mined hillside, or a clear-felled forest with the tranquil majesty of a climax ecosystem such as a

.
A second worry focuses on the way that we tend to treat humans and human
activity in isolation from, rather than as a part of nature . This is often characterized as an atomistic
tropical rain forest or a coral reef. "Nature knows best", it is said

conception of humans as discrete and separate interacting units, in contrast to the holistic organic conception of organisms as nodes in complex biotic
webs. The sharp separation between humanity and nature is said to be one of the characteristic deficiencies of shallow thought, which is often
accompanied by the denial that the nonhuman world possesses intrinsic value.
A third common worry concerns the extremely short-term view which people commonly take about the consequences of their actions. <466>

There is an obvious tension which arises when attempting to rectify the first two
worries at the same time. For extolling the virtues of the natural, while at the same
time vilifying the man-made or artificial, depends on a distinction between the natural
and the artificial which the stress on a continuity between human and nonhuman
(the focus of the second worry) undermines. On the one side there is emphasis on continuity and dependency, and on the other on
distinctness and separation. It seems that, while we are a part of nature, our actions are nevertheless unnatural.

deep ecologists often risk lapsing into an incoherence, from which

they are able to save themselves (as I will illustrate) with the help of a little covert
anthropocentrism. Or putting the point another way, a suitably enriched (non-atomistic)
conception of humans as an integral part of larger systems that is, correcting the misconception of
humanity as distinct and separate from the natural world means that anthropocentric concern for our own
well-being naturally flows on to concern for the nonhuman world. If we value
ourselves and our projects, and part of us is constituted by the natural world, then
these evaluations will be transmitted to the world.
This is one of the points where

ANTHROPOCENTRISM IS NOT ONLY INEVITABLE, BUT

NECESSARY TO STOP THE COMING GREAT AGE OF
EXTINCTION
Grey 93

[William, Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, Anthropocentrism and Deep

Ecology, Australian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 71, no 4, 1993,
www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/pubs/anthropocentrism.html, acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
If the concerns for humanity and nonhuman species raised by advocates of deep ecology are expressed as concerns about the fate of the planet, then

From a planetary perspective, we may be entering a phase of mass

extinction of the magnitude of the Cretaceous. For planet earth that is just another
incident in a four and a half billion year saga. Life will go onin some guise or other. The arthropods, algae and
the ubiquitous bacteria, at least, will almost certainly be around for a few billion years more . And with luck and good
management, some of the more complex and interesting creatures, such as
ourselves, may continue for a while longer as well. Of course our present disruptive
and destructive activities are, or should be, of great concern to us all. But that is a quite
properly human concern, expressing anthropocentric values from an
anthropocentric perspective. Life will continue; but we should take steps to
maintain and preserve our sort of living planet; one that suits us and, with a few
exceptions, our biotic co-existents.
I will illustrate the way that allegedly non-anthropocentric points of view incorporate a covert
anthropocentrism with some representative examples which, I believe, reveal the inevitability of
these concerns are misplaced.

361

Kritik Answers
anthropocentrism and show that it is not necessarily something to be deplored.
Anthropocentrism is natural and inevitable, and when properly qualified turns out
to be perfectly benign. The first illustration concerns a proposal to develop a non-anthropocentric basis for value by grounding it in
the naturalness of an historical process.

362

Kritik Answers

Anthro Good/Inevitable (2/3)

HUMAN INTERVENTION IS INEVITABLE, ITS A QUESTION
OF THE MERITS OF ACTION, NOT A QUESTION OF WHETHER
TO ENGAGE IN IT OR NOT
Bookchin 95

[Murray, Social Ecologist, Philosophy of social ecology, 139//uwyo]

363

Kritik Answers

Anthro Good/Inevitable (3/3)

HUMAN INTERVENTION IN NATURE IS INEVITABLE
Bookchin 95

[Murray, Social Ecologist, Philosophy of social ecology, 131//uwyo]

364

Kritik Answers

Human Intervention Good

HUMAN ACTIVITY CAN POSITIVELY AFFECT ECOLOGY
SOCIETY IS THE ONLY MEANS OF RESOLVING THE CRISIS
Bookchin 89

[Murray, Social Ecologist, Remaking Society, 17//uwyo]

365

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Justifies Ecocide (1/2)

THE ALTERNATIVE SIMPLIFIES NATURE, CAUSING
INACTION THAT MAKES ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION,
NUCLEAR WAR, AND EXTINCTION INEVITABLE
Bookchin 87

[Murray, social ecologist, The modern crisis, 108//uwyo]

366

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Justifies Ecocide (2/2)

DEEP ECOLOGY REINSCRIBES ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND
MAMMAL CHAUVINISM AND DESTROYS ANY FOUNDATION
OF NATURAL VALUE
Grey 93

[William, Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, Anthropocentrism and Deep

Ecology, Australian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 71, no 4, 1993,
www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/pubs/anthropocentrism.html, acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
Finally, I consider the "ecocentric" approach advocated, for example, by J. Baird
Callicott (1989), which is another attempt to develop a non-anthropocentric basis
for value. This "deep" approach, inspired by Aldo Leopold (1949), on examination
also reveals covert anthropocentrism. For example, in "On the Intrinsic Value of
Nonhuman Species" Callicott explores various grounds on which we might extend
moral consideration to nonhuman individuals. One particular line which he
explores, and revealingly rejects is "holistic rationalism". Goodness, on this view, is
identified above all with the objective harmony of the biosphere as a whole, which
"exemplifies or embodies the Good" (Callicott 1989, p. 142). Since species serve the
good of the biotic whole (which is quite independent of human interest) we have a
non-anthropocentric justification for species preservation. But individual species,
from this perspective, are transitional components of developmental stages of the
planet's evolutionary odyssey:
The Age of Reptiles came to a close (for whatever reason) to be followed by the Age
of Mammals. A holistic rationalist would not regret the massive die-off of the late
Cretaceous because it made possible our yet richer mammal-populated world. The
Age of Mammals may likewise end. But the "laws" of organic evolution and of
ecology (if any there be) will remain operative. In time speciation would occur and
species would radiate anew. Future "intelligent" forms of life may even feel
grateful, if not to us then to their God (or the Good), for making their world
possible. The new Age (of Insects, perhaps) would eventually be just as diverse,
orderly, harmonious and stable and thus no less good than our current ecosystem
with its present complement of species.
With friends like the holistic rationalists, species preservation needs no enemies.
(Callicott 1989, p. 142)
This passage is revealing. Note the characterization of the Age of Mammals as
"richer" than the Age of Reptiles. As mammal chauvinists we might agree, but it is
not clear on what grounds Callicott can justify the claim. It is also easy to agree that
our demise, and the demise of the ecosystem which currently supports us, would be
a matter of regret. But clearly it would be regrettable because of a decidedly
anthropocentric set of values, interests and perceptionsif Callicott really eschews
such concerns entirely, the grounds on which his regret is based are deprived of
any foundation.

367

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Reinscribes

Anthropocentrism (1/2)
THE ALTERNATIVE INSERTS HUMAN JUDGMENT IN PLACE
OF ECOLOGICAL INTEREST, ALLOWING FOR
TOTALTIARIANISM
Bobertz 97

[Bradley C., Book Review: Of Nature and Nazis, 22 Colum. J. Envtl. L. 353, LN//uwyoajl]
The
argument that natural objects can possess their own interests strikes Ferry as "one of the
most absurd forms of anthropomorphism." n100 We cannot "think like a mountain," to use Aldo
Leopold's famous phrase, n101 because, quite obviously, we are not mountains. Recalling Sierra Club v. Morton, n102 the famous standing
case involving a proposal to construct a ski resort in California's Mineral King valley, Ferry claims that environmentalists "always suppose
that the interests of objects (mountains, lakes and other natural things) are opposed to development. But how
do we know? After all, isn't it possible that Mineral King would be inclined to welcome a ski
slope after having remained idle for millions of years?" n103 Yet few people, including the writers Ferry labels as deep
ecologists, would disagree with the fact that recognizing value in natural objects is an act of human cognition.
Apart from the political dangers Ferry associates with deep ecology, he believes the philosophy suffers from a fundamental self-contradiction.

Perhaps a person suffering from profound psychosis might claim the ability to understand how a mountain "thinks," but the writers Ferry criticizes do not advance
8540*379 such bizarre claims. n104 For deep ecologists and environmental ethicists, phrases such as "think like a mountain" are metaphorical and heuristic, not
literal and agenda-setting.

a far graver problem with deep ecology lies in its appeal to those who might
translate a nature-centered ideology into coercive political action. By promoting the idea
that nature has intrinsic value, deep ecologists necessarily promote an antihuman,
antitechnology, and antimodern worldview, Ferry believes. If we assert that humans are merely "part" of the natural order, our
According to Ferry,

position in that order must be a humble one:

The entire Cosmos may well be assigned a positive coefficient higher than that of humankind itself, since in the hierarchy of beings it constitutes the primary
condition: nature can do without men, but not vice versa, which is why the idea of a "preference for nature" finds itself gradually legitimized as all in all the most
logical metaphysical horizon of deep ecology. n105

DEEP ECOLOGY REINSCRIBES ANTHROPOCENTRIC VALUES

Bookchin 94

[Murray, Social ecologist, Which way for the ecology movement? 3//uwyo]

368

Kritik Answers

369

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Reinscribes

Anthropocentrism (2/2)
THE ALTERNATIVE FALLS BACK INTO RESOURCE
CALCULATION, DESTROYING ENVIRONMENTAL
PROTECTION
Cross 89

[Frank B., Assoc. Prof. Bus Law @ Texas, Natural Resource Damage Valuation, 42 Vand.
L. rev. 269, March, LN//uwo-ajl]
Yet those who ascribe to the intrinsic value of nature may themselves oppose the monetary
measurement of that value. Some deep ecologists, for example, are uncomfortable with the
capitalist system's [*294] focus on private property. n122 For these ecologists, relying on
economics is "technocratic" and the root of environmental degradation; monetary natural
resource damages contribute to the problem rather than the solution. n123 These people
refuse to place a monetary value on nature, finding that the very effort demeans the
underlying worth of nature. n124 Their refusal leaves the law only two options:
Economically valuing natural resources at zero or at infinity. The former alternative
inevitably creates an incentive to destroy the resources that the naturalist seeks to protect.
n125 The latter is transparently unworkable, as it suggests that the death of a single fly
provides grounds for bankrupting the largest corporations. n126 While it is indisputably
difficult to assess the monetary value of natural objects, the effort should be made.
Otherwise, "treating the problem as an inherent incapacity of analysis to incorporate the
intangible can only retard the needed development of these important abilities." n127 No
persuasive methodologies, however, objectively and reliably ascertain the intrinsic worth of
natural resources.

370

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: 2AC

DEEP ECOLOGY RISKS CO-OPTATION BY GENOCIDAL
FASCISTS
A)SCARE-MONGERING GETS HIJACKED
B)SUBORDINATION OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS
C) ANTI-RATIONAL ALTERNATIVE
Smith 2003

[Kev, Greenpepper, Ecofascism: Deep Ecology and Right-Wing Co-optation,

Synthesis/Regeneration 32, http://www.greens.org/s-r/32/32-13.html, acc 10-4-06//uwyoajl]
It is striking how many traits the Wandervgel have in common with the Deep Ecology
movement. In particular, their self-conception that they were a non-political response to a
deep cultural crisis, favoring direct emotional experience over social critique and action. In
the same paper, Janet Biehl states, When respect for nature comes to mean reverence, it
can mutate ecological politics into a religion that Green Adolfs can effectively use for
authoritarian ends. In Britain, a wing of the National Front issues the cry, Racial
preservation is Green! while in the United States, white supremacist Monique Wolfing
remarks that animals and the environment, are in the same position as we are. Why would
we want something created for ourselves and yet watch nature be destroyed? We work hand
in hand with nature and we should save nature along with trying to save our race.
The key question is whether supporters of Deep Ecology are vulnerable to absorption by farright groups in the same way that the Wandervgel were. The main fear for this happening
lies in Deep Ecology's demonization of reason. Deep Ecology sees reason as endemic to
human-centered worldviews that have produced the ecological crisis. Alternatively, Deep
Ecology promotes intuition as equal or even superior to reason. As a result Deep Ecology is
subject to the dangers represented by earlier anti-rational and intuitionist worldviews that,
once carried over into the political realm, have produced anti-human and even genocidal
movements. Peter Staudenmaier fears that this is perhaps, the unavoidable trajectory of
any movement which acknowledges and opposes social and ecological problems but does
not recognize their systemic roots or actively resist the political and economic structures
which generate them.
Deep Ecology, as a philosophy, seems to be both systematically and morally problematic.
Where Deep Ecology theories have gone wrong is in the extreme reaction to perceived
centuries of human exploitation of nature and the dominance of rationalist thought. The
primacy of intuitive thought means that it lacks the self-analysis that normally acts as a
safety check to prevent straying onto moral thin ice. These factors then serve to prevent an
accurate picture of the ecological crisis from emerging. The role of personal consciousnessraising on both rational and intuitive levels should be complementary rather than
competitive. In the manner of the classic circularity of extreme left and right thought, Deep
Ecology has the potential to find itself back at the totalitarian starting point it intended to
usurp.

371

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: 1AR

(1/2)
EXCESS REVERENCE FOR NATURE DE-SENSITIZES US TO
HUMAN AGENCY, A PROCESS THAT WAS INSTRUMENTAL IN
NAZISM
Bookchin 94

[Murray, Social Ecologist, Which way for the ecology movement? 41//uwyo]

372

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: 1AR

(2/2)
DEEP ECOLOGYS DOGMATIC FOCUS CREATES HUMAN
PREJUDICE AND NAZISM
Bookchin 94

[Murray, Social ecologist, Which way for the ecology movement? 7-8//uwyo]

373

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: Ext (1/2)

TURN: THE NAZIS USED NATURE STORIES TO JUSTIFY
GENOCIDE
ONEILL IN 95
Sadhbh, researching an MA thesis on ecophilosophy at UCD, DEEP ECOLOGY
AND FEMINISM: TO THE WORLD AND BACK, 1995, p.
http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/zine/imb95/ecofemin.htm.
Most recently, a member of Earth First! in Ireland wrote in Common Ground that
no qualitative difference exists between the Jewish holocaust and the "ecoholocaust" currently underway. That sort of comparison is made, mind, in the spirit
of biospherical egalitarianism as formulated by Naess. Despite the many
indications from evolutionary biology and the science of ecology that nature really
does, in rather different ways to human beings, posit values, make choices, pursue
ends and so on, to equate the tragedy we are inflicting on nature with the horror
that we are capable of inflicting on our own fellow species is nothing short of
fascism. There are many examples of how the Nazis, for instance, used naturalistic
myths and ecology to justify oppression and systematic murder in the interests of
nature.

NAZI GERMANY JUSTIFIED IMPERIALIST EXPANSION INTO

EASTERN EUROPE ECOLOGICALLYPROTECTING THE
ENVIRONMENT FROM THE PEOPLE WHO WERE POLLUTING
IT
STAUDENMAIER IN 98

(Peter, anarchy theorist, Professor for the Institute for Social Ecology, Fascist
Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents,
February 1998,
http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html)
Darr was one of the party's chief "race theorists" and was also instrumental in
galvanizing peasant support for the Nazis during the critical period of the early
1930s. From 1933 until 1942 he held the posts of Reich Peasant Leader and Minister of
Agriculture. This was no minor fiefdom; the agriculture ministry had the fourth largest
budget of all the myriad Nazi ministries even well into the war. 38 From this position Darr

was able to lend vital support to various ecologically oriented initiatives. He played
an essential part in unifying the nebulous proto-environmentalist tendencies in
National Socialism: It was Darr who gave the ill-defined anti-civilization, antiliberal, anti-modern and latent anti-urban sentiments of the Nazi elite a foundation
in the agrarian mystique. And it seems as if Darr had an immense influence on the
ideology of National Socialism, as if he was able to articulate significantly more clearly than
before the values system of an agrarian society contained in Nazi ideology and -- above all -to legitimate this agrarian model and give Nazi policy a goal that was clearly oriented toward
a far-reaching re-agrarianization.39 This goal was not only quite consonant with

imperialist expansion in the name of Lebensraum, it was in fact one of its primary
justifications, even motivations. In language replete with the biologistic metaphors
of organicism, Darr declared: "The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral
right to take back as much land in the East as is necessary to establish a harmony
between the body of our Volk and the geopolitical space."40 Aside from providing
green camouflage for the colonization of Eastern Europe , Darr worked to install
environmentally sensitive principles as the very basis of the Third Reich's agricultural policy.
Even in its most productivist phases, these precepts remained emblematic of Nazi doctrine.
When the "Battle for Production" (a scheme to boost the productivity of the agricultural
sector) was proclaimed at the second Reich Farmers Congress in 1934, the very first point in

374

Kritik Answers
the program read "Keep the soil healthy !" But Darr's most important innovation was the
introduction on a large scale of organic farming methods, significantly labeled
"lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise," or farming according to the laws of life. The term points
up yet again the natural order ideology which underlies so much reactionary ecological
thought. The impetus for these unprecedented measures came from Rudolf Steiner's
anthroposophy and its techniques of biodynamic cultivation. 41

375

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: Ext

(2/2)
ABSOLUTE PROTECTION OF THE ECOSYSTEM IS UNSTABLE
IGNORES SOCIETY, COLLAPSES TO FACISM AND
BARBARISM
STAUDENMAIER IN 98
(Peter, anarchy theorist, Professor for the Institute for Social Ecology, Fascist
Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents,
February 1998,
http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html)
As noted above, this failure most commonly takes the form of a call to "reform
society according to nature," that is, to formulate some version of 'natural order' or
'natural law' and submit human needs and actions to it. As a consequence, the
underlying social processes and societal structures which constitute and shape
people's relations with their environment are left unexamined. Such willful
ignorance, in turn, obscures the ways in which all conceptions of nature are
themselves socially produced, and leaves power structures unquestioned while
simultaneously providing them with apparently 'naturally ordained' status. Thus
the substitution of ecology for clear-sighted social-ecological inquiry has
catastrophic political repercussions, as the complexity of the society-nature
dialectic is collapsed into a purified Oneness. An ideologically charged 'natural
order' does not leave room for compromise; its claims are absolute. For all of these
reasons, the slogan advanced by many contemporary Greens, "We are neither right
nor left but up front," is historically naive and politically fatal. The necessary
project of creating an emancipatory ecological politics demands an acute awareness
and understanding of the legacy of classical ecofascism and its conceptual
continuities with present-day environmental discourse. An 'ecological' orientation
alone, outside of a critical social framework, is dangerously unstable. The record of
fascist ecology shows that under the right conditions such an orientation can
quickly lead to barbarism.

DEEP ECOLOGISTS ENDORSE INHUMAN POLICIES AND

HUMAN SUFFERING
TOKAR IN 90
Brian, Author of The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future, August
1990,New Internationalist, http://www.newint.org/issue210/eco.htm
A major controversy began when Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman was
quoted in an interview by deep ecologist Bill Devall making some shockingly
misanthropic statements in the name of deep ecology and Earth First! Deep
ecologists claim overpopulation as the underlying cause of ecological crisis and
advocate population reduction. Foreman took this one step further, advocating
forced sterilizations, ending food aid to starving people (particularly, at the time, in
Ethiopia), and sealing US borders against refugees from the wars in Latin America.
To Foreman, such measures were ways to let nature seek its own balance, and
prevent more destruction of our wilderness, more poisoning of our water and
air.

376

Kritik Answers

A2 Were Not Fascists: 1AR

IRRELEVENT THEIR PROGRAM WILL BE CO-OPTED BY
OTHERS FOR FASCIST ENDS
Smith 2003

[Kev, Greenpepper, Ecofascism: Deep Ecology and Right-Wing Co-optation,

Synthesis/Regeneration 32, http://www.greens.org/s-r/32/32-13.html, acc 10-4-06//uwyoajl]
There are two reasons why I find such a statement from a moderate Deep Ecologist
worrying. The first is that it misses the point that you do not necessarily have to be a
fascist in order to propagate right-wing ideology. Secondly, it still places the issue of
population control ahead of the issue of how resources are unevenly distributed among the
global population. It is astonishing how many environmental groups (and not just Deep
Ecologists; the mainstream Dutch environmental group Milieu Defensie is a depressing
recent example) still rate population growth over the systematic over-consumption of the
industrialized world. This misinforms the person on the street, reinforcing fears that their
stably populated Western country may be overrun by the teeming dark-skinned multitudes
of the Third World. Such scare-mongering plays directly into the hands of the new right and
lends inadvertent support to calls for stricter border controls.
We would do well to examine the example of the Wandervgel, a youth movement that arose
in Germany during the first three decades of the 20th Century. Peter Staudenmaier, coauthor of the paper Ecofascism: Lessons From The German Experience, characterizes this
movement as a hodge-podge of counter-cultural elements, blending neo-Romanticism,
Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a ... search for authentic,
non-alienated social relations. Their back-to-the-land emphasis spurred a passionate
sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered. Although some sectors of the
movement gravitated towards various forms of emancipatory politics, most of the
Wandervgel were eventually absorbed by the Nazis.

377

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Justifies State/Capitalism

BIOCENTRISM PREVENTS OPPOSITION TO CAPITALISM AND
THE STATE BECAUSE IT SHUNS FOCUS ON SOCIAL
PROBLEMS
Bookchin 95

[Murray, Social ecologist, Philosophy of social ecology, 133//uwyo]

378

Kritik Answers

Deep Ecology Creates Suffering

DEEP ECOLOGY SUBORDINATES ALL VALUES TO NATURE,
CREATING RACISM AND HUMAN SUFFERING
Green Fuse 2006

[Deep Ecology Critique, June, http://www.thegreenfuse.org/deepcrit.htm, acc. 10-406//uwyo-ajl]

Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! which claims to draw inspiration from deep ecology,
has made several deeply misanthropic comments.
"It is rather painful to read about some of the positions taken by the Foreman faction in
the E.F! Journal: for example, Foreman arguing that even a nuclear war would not be that
damaging to the Earth and would hasten the end of industrial society... and his remarks
elsewhere that we should "allow Ethiopians to starve"; Christopher Manes suggesting that
one solution to overpopulation would be to dismantle the medical technology designed to
save lives, and of AIDS as Nature's solution to overpopulation; and Reed Noss writing of
genetic "deep ecology elite" as a "chosen people" out to save the Earth (pp. 64, 68, 83-84,
92-3,101-3).
George Sessions, Book Review: Martha Lee, Earth First!. Trumpeter: 13, 4 (1996)
Sessions adds that if such comments claim to draw on deep ecology they show a
misunderstanding of its philosophy.
Murray Bookchin comments:
"They are barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones and outright social
reactionaries who offer a vague, formless often self contradictory and invertebrate
[movement] and a kind of crude eco-brutalism similar to Hitler's. Deep ecologists feed on
human disasters, suffering and misery...[and are guilty of thinking which]...legitimates
extremely regressive, primitivistic and even highly reactionary notions."

379

Kritik Answers

Case Comes First

MUST ADDRESS EXIGENT ISSUES BEFORE ADDRESSING
PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE ON NATURE
Bookchin 94

[Murray, Social Ecologist, Which way for the social ecology movement? 1//uwyo]

380

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Bad Activism

ANTHROPOCENTRISM IS SO INGRAINED THAT THE
ALTERNATIVE IS IMPOSSIBLE
Cross 89

[Frank B., Assoc. Prof. Bus Law @ Texas, Natural Resource Damage Valuation, 42 Vand.
L. rev. 269, March, LN//uwo-ajl]
Perhaps the argument over the intrinsic worth of natural resources is largely pointless.
Political realists contend that concern for inherent animal welfare lacks public credibility.
Whatever the metaphysical basis for nature's intrinsic value, the advocates of this position
risk being considered impractical and fuzzy-headed, if not outright crackpots. Their
arguments are treated with more ridicule than respect. n136 Perhaps these critics are partly
correct. As long as government is making the legal rules and as long as only humans vote,
the concerns of nature never will be reflected directly in our nation's governmental policy.
Most environmental laws enacted to date focus on protecting people's [*296] interest in the
natural environment. n137 Nature's influence on people may be felt in a myriad of ways, but
legislation is not among them. Inasmuch as the question is phrased in public policy terms,
the answer must come from humans alone. n138
Indeed, the terminology from a discussion of natural resources seems antithetical to
intrinsic valuation. The term "resource" implies usefulness to man. n139 Similarly, "value"
may require a human subject to express a preference regarding the natural object. n140
Remove the human subject, and the concept of value loses meaning. n141 The legal
valuation of natural resources is a human undertaking that is limited inescapably to human
understanding and choice.
Of course, one may be persuaded that nature has intrinsic value for which government
should account. Enlightened human preference thus may capture at least a portion of
intrinsic value, but the preference is predicated necessarily on an informed human
understanding of intrinsic value, not on the value itself. n142 This recognition also helps
defeat the antidemocratic and elitist features potentially existing in concepts of intrinsic
value. n143

THE ALT FAILS: RESOURCE-VIEW OF NATURE IS TOO

ENTRENCHED
McCullough 95

[Edwin r., solo practice in Chicago, JD Loyola, Through the Eye of a Needle, 10 J. Envtl. L.
& Litig. 389, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Though deep ecology presents a utopian vision of the future, its prospects are about as dim
as are the prospects of Weiss' intergenerational equity theory. Weiss' theory is more
mainstream and is backed by a vast body of law, which is distilled into well-drafted
introductory principles. Deep ecology offers strong simple statements for new legal and/or moral principles and offers a fundamentally different
worldview for the future. The principles of deep ecology, however, offer us tools for improving environmental law now. Indeed, some of the principles of deep ecology,
though not expressed in name, have been adopted by other environmentalists.
Two environmental writers, law professor, Earl Finbar Murphy, n111 and conservation biologist, David W. Ehrenfeld, n112 discussed various aspects of ecology with
anthropocentric logic before deep ecology became a familiar notion. They independently arrived at the same point; nonhuman life has value independent of human
activity. This is another way of stating the first principle of the deep ecology platform. [*420]
Dr. Ehrenfeld's article, The Conservation of Non-Resources, begins with the idea of conservation being identified with the preservation of natural resources. The term,
resource, can be defined narrowly as the reserve of commodities that has an appreciable money value to man, either directly or indirectly. Ehrenfeld points out that
over the years, conservationists increasingly have been preoccupied with preservation of natural features, species, communities, and ecosystems - items which are not

is the endangered Houston toad, an animal with no

demonstrated or conjectural resource value to man. n113
He observes that due to the dominant worldview, species and communities that lack
economic value are not easily protected. Thus, a "value" must be discovered by which the
non-resource can metamorphose into a resource. n114 He notes the practical political
weakness of concocting a "value" for a non-resource; this kind of value is not as appealing as
those backed by the promise of a short-term economic gain. He notes that "when everything
is called a resource, the word loses all meaning - at least in our value system." n115 From a
conservation viewpoint, it may become quite risky to find economic values for nonresources.
conventional resources. His example of a non-resource

381

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Premodern Society

Bad
PRE-MODERN SOCIETY IS MORE DESTRUCTIVE TO THE
EARTH
Green Fuse 2006

[Deep Ecology Critique, June, http://www.thegreenfuse.org/deepcrit.htm, acc. 10-406//uwyo-ajl]

Deep ecology sometimes appears to idealize a the society of indigenous hunter-gatherer
tribes, but in reality many primitive tribes are not especially ecocentric.
Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade writes:
"...many peoples past and present living close to nature have all too often been blindly
destructive of their environment. While many indigenous societies have a great reverence
for nature, there are also both non-Western and Western peasant and nomadic cultures that
have overgrazed and overcultivated land, decimated forests, and where population pressures
have been severe, killed off animals needlessly and indifferently."

382

Kritik Answers

Asteroid Turn
ANTHROPOCENTRISM IS NECESSARY TO STOP NATURAL
PHENOMENA LIKE ASTEROID COLLISIONS AND ICE AGES,
WHICH THREATEN MASS EXTINCTION ON A SCALE MUCH
MORE THREATENING TO THE BIOSPHERE AND
BIODIVERSITY THAN HUMAN ACTIVITY EMPIRICALLY
PROVEN BY THE GREAT EXTINCTIONS OF THE PAST
Grey 93

[William, Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, Anthropocentrism and Deep

Ecology, Australian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 71, no 4, 1993,
www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/pubs/anthropocentrism.html, acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
Robert Goodin has proposed a "moderately deep" theory of value, according to which what imparts value to an outcome is the naturalness of the
historical process through which it has come about (Goodin 1991, p. 74). Putting aside the problem, mentioned above, that the distinction between

the deliverances of natural historical

processes are not necessarily benign, nor ones which should command our approval. The traumatic
disruptions to the planet brought about by natural forces far exceed anything which
we have been able to effect. Consider, first, what Lovelock (1979) has called the worst
atmospheric pollution incident ever: the accumulation of that toxic and corrosive
gas oxygen some two billion years ago, with devastating consequences for the then predominant anaerobic life forms.
Or the Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago, which wiped out the large reptiles, the
then dominant life forms. Or the Permian extinction some 225 million years ago, which
eliminated an estimated 96 per cent of marine species. Like the eruption of Mt St Helens, these were
what is natural and what is cultural (or technological, or artefactual) is problematic,

natural events, but it is implausible to suppose that they are to be valued for that reason alone.
There is of course an excellent reason for us to retrospectively evaluate these great planetary disruptions positively from our current position in
planetary history, and that is that we can recognise their occurrence as a necessary condition for our own existence. But what could be more

mass extinctions are awful for those who are

caught up in them.
Suppose that astronomers detect a modest asteroid or comet , say five or ten kilometres diameter, on
collision course with planet Earth [8]. The impending collision would be perfectly natural all right,
and cataclysmic enough to do to us what another one rather like it probably did to
the dinosaurs. Such periodic disruptive events are natural all right, though they probably destroy most of
anthropocentric than that? However, as Gould has pointed out,

the then extant large life forms. These times of renewal provide opportunities for smaller, flexible organisms to radiate opportunistically into vacated
niches, and life goes on. From a biocentric or ecocentric perspective there is little doubt that our demise would provide comparable opportunities for

Should we, in <470>such circumstances, step aside so that evolution

can continue on its majestic course? I think not, and I think further that interference with the
natural course of events, if it could be effected, would be no bad thingat least from our point of view and in
development which we currently prevent.

terms of our interests, which it is quite legitimate to promote and favour.

Suppose again that we are entering one of the periodic epochs of reduced solar
energy flux. An ice age is imminent, with massive disruptions to the agriculturally
productive temperate zones. However suppose further that by carefully controlled emissions of
greenhouse gases it would be possible to maintain a stable and productive
agriculture. No doubt this would be to the detriment of various arctic plant and animal species, but I do not think that such interference,
though "unnatural" would be therefore deplorable. Nature in and of itself is not, I suggest, something to be valued independently of human interests.

modifying our natural environment, we would be following

the precedent of three billion years of organic evolution, since according to the Gaia hypothesis of
Lovelock (1979), the atmosphere and oceans are not just biological products, but biological
constructions.
Other natural propertiessuch as biodiversity, beauty, harmony, stability, and integrityhave been
proposed to provide a non-anthropocentric basis for value. But unless we smuggle
in some anthropocentric bearings, they fare no better than the property of being
the outcome of a natural process in providing an intuitively plausible ordering of
better and worse states of the world. For example, if biodiversity is taken as a basic value-giving characteristic, then the
It could be argued moreover that in thus

state of the planet just after the Cambrian explosion (about 570 million years ago) would be rated much more highly than the world of the present, as
it was far richer in terms of the range and diversity of its constituent creatures. Most biology textbooks recognize between twenty and thirty extant
animal phylathe phylum being the fundamental design plan of an organism (and the second broadest classification, following 'kingdom', in
biological taxonomy). Yet the Burgess Shale, one small quarry in British Columbia dating back some 530 million years, contains the remains of fifteen

In terms of
basic diversity, a far greater range of radically different anatomical types existed at
that epoch of evolutionary development.
to twenty organisms so unlike one another, or anything now living, as to each constitute a separate phylum (Gould 1989).

383

Kritik Answers

HIV Turn
DEEP ECOLOGY PREVENTS US FROM FIGHTING VIRII LIKE
HIV AND SMALLPOX OUT OF RESPECT FOR VIRAL
AUTONOMY
Grey 93

[William, Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, Anthropocentrism and Deep

Ecology, Australian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 71, no 4, 1993,
www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/pubs/anthropocentrism.html, acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
There are a number of problems with such a permissive criterion of moral
considerability. One is that there are conflicts of interest between goal-directed
entities, and something needs to be said about how these are to be resolved.
Smallpox and HIV no doubt have their own viral autonomy (as well as being the
products of natural historical processes), but for all that it is perfectly legitimate to
disregard their interests when they conflict with our own. Yet it is hard to see how a
decision to deny them a place in the scheme of things can be defended except by
appeal to a value system which favours human interests. Plumwood allows that in
casting the moral net widely we will have to "make distinctions for appropriate
treatment within each class of items" (p. 147). It seems reasonable to suspect that
human standards of appropriateness will be brought to bear to settle cases where
such conflicts arise.

NEW WAVE OF SUPER VIRII LIKE AIDS WILL USE HUMAN

TRAVEL TO CAUSE EXTINCTION
Leibovich 97

[Lori, staff, X stands for eXtinction: Interview with Frank Ryan, M.D., a prominent
physician, Salon, Newsreal, March 1997,
www.salon.com/march97/news/news2970321.html, Acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
And "Virus X" is one of them? What is "Virus X"?
The title of my book, "Virus X," means a virus that threatens human extinction. The
X stands for "eXtinction." I should add that most of the book is devoted to less
terrible, scary but interesting, scenarios. But it would be foolish not to face the
worst-case scenario, which I discuss in the book.
There were fears that AIDS might fit that description. Is it because of international
transportation and ease of travel that these viruses have become so threatening?
Yes. Human behavior has greatly changed the natural goal posts with regard to the
threat of new plague viruses. Take AIDS, for example. According to my hypothesis,
in the past a band of hunters might have been bitten or scratched by chimpanzees
harboring the virus; the result would have been a lethal attack localized to the
hunter band -- or at worst their home village.
Today, thanks to the global village, a new plague virus could perambulate the globe
at the speed of a passenger jet. Then a new step in the plague scenario would take
place in the massively populated cities -- they would become viral "amplification
zones."

384

Kritik Answers

African AIDS Outweighs

HIV INFECTION THREATENS THE EXTINCTION OF THE
AFRICAN CONTINENT
KRQE News 2002

[Associated Press, Africans are Faced with Extinction by AIDS, August 28, 2002,
100777.com/doc/205 acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
The disease will undermine the continent's social and economic stability, with the
biggest increases in early deaths coming among people who are in their 30s, 40s
and 50s, when they should be at their most productive, and will leave a population
of AIDS orphans in its wake, the conference was told.
In five African countries, deaths will outstrip births by 2010, meaning falling
populations.
"Unfortunately, many African countries are only beginning to see the impact of
high levels of HIV prevalence," said the Census Bureau's Karen Stanecki.
"By 2010, we project that life expectancies in these countries will be back to levels
that have not been seen since the 19th century."
The Census Bureau's "middle-case scenario," which assumes that the epidemic will
begin to level off in Africa over the next eight years, predicts the average life
expectancy in Botswana and Mozambique will drop to just 27 years.
"We are faced with extinction," said Dr. Banu Khan, head of the National AIDS Coordinating Agency in Botswana.

THE DEVASTATION OF THE AIDS VIRUS IN AFRICA IS A

MANIFESTATION OF GLOBAL APARTHEID OPPOSITION TO
ALL DEVALUATION OF BLACK LIFE IS THE MOST
IMPORTANT DISCURSIVE STEP IN FIGHTING RACISM AND
COLONIALISM
Deen 2001

[Thalif, Staff, Rights: Caste, Drugs, AIDS have Racism Links, Say US Groups, Inter Press
Service, August 23, 2001, www.aegis.com/news/ips/2001/IP010807.html , acc 8-3004//uwyo-ajl]
Meanwhile, the Washington-based NGO Africa Action said that the global AIDS
pandemic must be seen as a matter of international racism.
"The AIDS crisis - whose epicentre is Africa - is the harvest for an international
system of global apartheid, where the consequences of racism, slavery and
colonialism have, five centuries on, impoverished the African continent and left it
on its own to combat the worst plague in human history." AIDS, it said, is the black
plague. So while AIDS is a global threats that knows no borders and does not
discriminate by race, it is mainly killing black people.
Africa Action said the racism conference should recognise that the resolution of the
global AIDS pandemic is directly dependent upon the international fight against
racism.
"It is the devaluation of black life that has enabled the Western world to turn its
eyes away from this global health crisis," it added. "Of all of the struggles against
racism that we will discuss in Durban, none has farther reaching consequences for
the immediate future of our common humanity."

385

Kritik Answers

Singularity Turn
HUMAN TECHNOLOGY IS A COMPONENT OF NATURAL
COSMOLOGICAL EVOLUTION RESISTING
ANTHROPOCENTRISM BLOCKS THE SINGULARITY
NECESSARY TO SOLVE ALL WORLDLY PROBLEMS
Glasser 2006

[Micah J., Independent Philosopher, Cosmological Deep Ecology and the Singularity,
Event Horizon, January 25,
http://technoeventhorizon.blogspot.com/2006/01/cosmological-deep-ecology-and.html,
acc. 10-4-06//uwyo-ajl]
Man is a part of a system. As Man evolves both biologically and technologically so does that system. The system I am talking about is our environment and that
environment is the entire Cosmos. Of course the most important part of that environment is the earth itself.

Some ecologists and environmentalists seem to view man and his technology as something over and against
nature. This position couldn't be further from the truth. Both man and his technology are outgrowths of nature. Nature is
not a thing that is static, that, if it wasn't for man and his technology, would be pristene. Nature is a part of the ever
changing Flux and as such it is always in motion and ever changing. The history of the Cosmos is a history of
extraordinary change and complexification. As the Cosmos unfolds new properties emerge. Two of those
properties, at this late stage of cosmological development, are intelligent life and technology.
Are we to believe that the emergence of intelligent life in the Cosmos is merely an accident a contingent epiphenomena and that its purpose as a component of that
vast system is merely to destroy itself no sooner than it emerges? I find such gross pessimism to be both ill founded and, ultimately, misanthropic.
The truth of the matter is that, even though as individuals we may be self-determined, the Cosmos, of which we are an inextricable part, is determined. This

the exponential technological evolution that leads to singularity is a

natural part of the cooling and development of the Cosmos. This does not mean that human civilization can abandon
all pretenses of responsibility, but what it does mean is that as our civilization approaches technological singularity our
true nature will become manifest. We will, at that point, be denuded. The inconceivable technological
power unleashed by the event of the singularity will empower man to fulfill that which he most fundamentally
determination indicates to me that

desires, or in other terms, technological singularity will be the point at which man bears the fruit that was latent in the seed which is man.
In any case what ever happens will be a natural occurrence that is no more capable of being controlled than is the gravitational constant or the speed limit of light

386

Kritik Answers

**Deleuze and Guattari**

Perms
THE 1AC IS A SLOW EXPERIMENT; EVEN IF IT FAILS TO
LIBERATE US, IT IS BETTER THAN THE NEGATIVES FAST
REJECTION AND OVERDOSE, WHICH LEADS TO COLLAPSE
AND DEATH
Gilles Deleuze, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris; and Felix Guattari,
psychoanalyst, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 160-161
You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep
small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own
systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you
to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to
respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You dont reach the BwO, and its plane of
consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those
emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their
organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily
dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several
ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but
nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is
always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you
free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions,
then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even
dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratifiedorganized, signified, subjectedis not the
worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or
suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it
should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers,
find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible
lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out
continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It
is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight,
causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a
BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole diagram, as opposed to still signifying and
subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in
us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage
within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the
plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of
desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little
machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines. Castaneda
describes a long process of experimentation (it makes little difference whether it is with
peyote or other things): let us recall for the moment how the Indian forces him first to find a
place, already a difficult operation, then to find allies, and then gradually to give up
interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment lines of experimentation,
becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place,
necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals,
tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not my body without organs,
instead the me (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form,
crossing thresholds).

387

Kritik Answers

Alternative Increases Oppression

IN PRACTICE THEIR ALTERNATIVE WILL FURTHER
TYRANNICAL CONTROL AND GENOCIDE
Richard Barbrook, coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of
Westminster, 8/27/1998, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l9808/msg00091.html, accessed 3/3/03
Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically joined this attack against the concept of historical progress. For them, the 'deterritorialisation' of urban society was the solution
to the contradiction between participatory democracy and revolutionary elitism haunting the New Left. If the centralised city could be broken down into 'molecular
rhizomes', direct democracy and the gift economy would reappear as people formed themselves into small nomadic bands. According to Deleuze and Guattari,
anarcho-communism was not the 'end of history': the material result of a long epoch of social development. On the contrary, the liberation of desire from semiotic
oppression was a perpetual promise: an ethical stance which could be equally lived by nomads in ancient times or social movements in the present. With enough
intensity of effort, anyone could overcome their hierarchical brainwashing to become a fully-liberated individual: the holy fool.<21> Yet, as the experience of

rhetoric of unlimited freedom contained a deep desire for ideological

control by the New Left vanguard. While the nomadic fantasies of A Thousand Plateaus were being composed,
one revolutionary movement actually did carry out Deleuze and Guattari's dream of destroying the city. Led by
a vanguard of Paris-educated intellectuals, the Khmer Rouge overthrew an oppressive regime installed
by the Americans. Rejecting the 'grand narrative' of economic progress, Pol Pot and his organisation instead
tried to construct a rural utopia. However, when the economy subsequently imploded, the regime
embarked on ever more ferocious purges until the country was rescued by an invasion by neighbouring Vietnam. Deleuze and
Guattari had claimed that the destruction of the city would create direct democracy and
libidinal ecstasy. Instead, the application of such anti-modernism in practice resulted in tyranny and
genocide. The 'line of flight' from Stalin had led to Pol Pot.
Frequence Libre proved, this

DELEUZE AND GUATTARI'S BELIEF IN TRANSFORMATION

THROUGH FREEDOM FROM DIALECTICAL OPPOSITION
FAILS THE FIGURES AND INSTITUTIONS WHICH COULD
CREATE THIS FREEDOM ARE REAPPROPRIATED BY
CONTEMPORARY OPPOSITIONAL POLITICS, FORECLOSING
EXITS FROM THE EXISTING POLITICAL SYSTEM
Mann, Prof of English at Pomona, 95 (Paul, Stupid Undergrounds, PostModern Culture 5:3,
Project MUSE)

Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot
protect itself from the order of fashion. Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive
ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and
Guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very people who would take them most
seriously. By now, any given work from the stupid underground's critical apparatus is liable to be tricked out with smooth spaces, war-machines, n - 1s, planes
of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations, strewn about like tattoos on the stupid body without organs. The nomad is already
succumbing to the rousseauism and orientalism that were always invested in his figure;
whatever Deleuze and Guattari intended for him, he is reduced to being a romantic outlaw,
to a position opposite the State, in the sort of dialectical operation Deleuze most despised.
And the rhizome is becoming just another stupid subterranean figure. It is perhaps true that
Deleuze and Guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this dialectical
reconfiguration (one is reminded of Breton's indictment against Rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, Claudel's recuperation of him as a proper
Catholic), but no vigilance would have sufficed in any case. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is
evidence that, in real time, virtual models and maps close off the very exits they indicate.
The problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth spaces, BwOs, etc., are at one
and the same time theoretical-political devices of the highest critical order and merely
fantasmatic, delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus perhaps an instance of the
all-too-proper blurring of the distinction between criticism and fantasy . In Deleuze-speak, the stupid
underground would be mapped not as a margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site determined strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or less
hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, n-dimensional intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a "space" (if one only had
the proverbial nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering the conceptual in
spatial terms) as a liquid, colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g., "cyberspace"). What is at stake, however, is not
only the topological verisimilitude of the model but the fantastic possibility of nonlinear passage, of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines
occupying finite social space. In the strictest sense, stupid philosophy. Nomad thought is prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already
mapped and dominated by nomad, rhizomatic capital (the political philosophy of the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its critiques, but one can
always pretend otherwise). It is this very fantasy, this very narcissistic wish to see oneself projected past the frontier into new spaces, that abandons one to this
economy, that seals these spaces within an order of critical fantasy that has long since been overdeveloped, entirely reterritorialized in advance. To pursue
nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost the game. Nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the dialectic and no project is more hopeless;

388

Kritik Answers
the stupid-critical underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back on itself. It is not yet time to abandon work that so deeply challenges our
intellectual habits as does that of Deleuze and Guattari, and yet, before it has even been comprehended, in the very process of its comprehension, its fate seems secure.
One pursues it and knows that the pursuit will prove futile; that every application of these new topologies will only serve to render them more pointless. The stupid
optimism of every work that takes up these figures is, by itself, the means of that futility and that immanent obsolescence. One must pursue it still.

389

Kritik Answers

Deleuze Bad (General)

DELEUZIAN PERSPECTIVISM COLLAPSES INTO
NEOCONSERVATIVE SUPPORT FOR THE STATUS QUO
BECAUSE IT DOESNT PROVIDE A SOLID POINT OF
CRITICISM OF OPPRESSION
Zerzan no date

[John, primitivist, The catastrophe of postmodernism, the Athenaeum Reading Room,

www.evans-experimentalism.freewebspace.com/zerzan01.htm, acc 1-15-05]
The dilemma of postmodernism is this: how can the status and validity of its
theoretical approaches be ascertained if neither truth nor foundations for
knowledge are admitted? If we remove the possibility of rational foundations or
standards, on what basis can we operate? How can we understand what the society
is that we oppose, let alone come to share such an understanding? Foucault's
insistence on a Nietzschean perspectivism translates into the irreducible pluralism
of interpretation. He relativized knowledge and truth only insofar as these notions
attach to thought-systems other than his own, however. When pressed on this
point, Foucault admitted to being incapable of rationally justifying his own
opinions. Thus the liberal Habermas claims that postmodern thinkers like
Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard are `neoconservative' for offering no consistent
argumentation to move in one social direction rather than another. The pm
embrace of relativism (or `pluralism') also means there is nothing to prevent the
perspective of one social tendency from including a claim for the right to dominate
another, in the absence of the possibility of determining standards.

390

Kritik Answers

D & G Exclude Women

D & G EXCLUDE WOMEN
Alice Jardine, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, 19 84,
http://substance.arts.uwo.ca/44/04jard44.html, accessed 2/21/03
"sexuality itself" which is
the ultimate, uncontrollable becoming, when it can manage to escape immediate
Oedipalization. ("Sexuality passes through the becoming-woman of /the/ man and the becoming-animal of the human" [MP, p. 341].) But also because,
as "introductory power," "Woman" is both the closest to the category of "Man" as majority,
and yet she remains a distinct minority. D + G explain that the notions of majority and minority here should not be opposed in any
Why then do D + G privilege the word woman? First, as they explain through a series of unanalyzed stereotypes, because it is

purely quantitative way: "Let us suppose that the constant or standard is Manany white-male-adult-city-dweller-speaking a standard language-Europeanheterosexual (the Ulysses of Joyce or of Ezra Pound). It is obvious that "the Man" has the majority, even if he is less numerous than the mosquitoes, children, Blacks,
peasants, homosexuals . . . etc." (MP, p. 133). The problem is not to gain, or accede to, the majority, but to become a minority; and this is particularly crucial for
women if they desire to remain radical, creative, without simply becoming (a) Man: The only becoming is a minority one. Women, regardless of their number, are a
minority, definable as a state or sub-set; but they only create by rendering possible a becoming, of which they do not have the ownership, into which they themselves
must enter, a becoming-woman which concerns all of mankind, men and women included. (MP, p. 134) The woman who does not enter into the "becoming woman"
remains a Man, remains "molar," just like men: Woman as a molar entity must become woman, so that man as well may become one or is then able to become one. It
is certainly indispensable that women engage in molar politics, in terms of a conquest which they conduct from their organization, from their own history, from their
own subjectivity: "We as women . . ." then appears as the subject of the enunciation. But it is dangerous to fall back upon such a subject, which cannot function without
drying up a spring or stopping a flood. The Song of life is often struck up by the driest women, animated by resentment, by the desire for power and by cold
mothering.... (MP, p. 339) That is, woman (with her obligatory connotations: "transparent force, innocence, speed," [MP, p. 354] is what Man (both men and women:
"virility, gravity," [MP, p. 354]) must become. There must be no "becoming man" because he is always already a majority. "In a certain way, it's always 'man' who is the

Man is always the

subject of any becoming, even if "he" is a woman. A woman who is not a "woman-become" is a
Manand a subject to that extent and to that extent only. Woman is never a subject but a limit a border
of and for Manthe "becoming woman" is l'avenir de l'homme tout entier the future of all Mankind. For D + G,
She is what the entire world must become if Man men and womenis truly to disappear. But to the
extent that women must "become woman" first (in order for men, in D + G's words, to "follow her
example"), might that not mean that she must also be the first to disappear? Is it not possible that the process of
"becoming woman" is but a new variation of an old allegory for the process of women becoming
obsolete? There would remain only her simulacrum: a female figure caught in a whirling sea of male
configurations. A silent, mutable, head-less, desire-less, spatial surface necessary only for
His metamorphosis? Physicists say: Holes are not the absence of particles, but particles going faster than light. Flying anuses, rapid vaginas, there is
subject of a becoming.... A woman has to become woman, but in a becoming-woman of all of mankind" (MP, p. 357). That is,

no castration. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux Most important theorists have a repertory of exemplary fictions, fictions that they call upon frequently
to interact with their specific theories in creative if predictable ways. Between the scene of Lacanian psychoanalysis and that of Lol V. Stein's ravishing, for example,
the privileged rapport is one of repetition: for Lacan, Marguerite Duras understood and repeated his teachings without him.19 Or, between the invagination of
Derrida's ecriture and that of the narrator in Maurice Blanchot's L'Arret de mort, what is privileged is the process of mime: for Derrida, Blanchot understood his
writings with him, inseparably. 20 D + G's exemplary fiction writers include Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, Pierre Klossowski, and Michel Tournierto mention only a
few. What all of these writers' texts share with those of D + G is the surface quality of their figures: the privileged modality of relationship between the configurations
of Deleuzian becoming and those of fiction is allegory. This is made most clear through Deleuze's essay on Tournier's 1967 novel, Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique.
21 There it is no longer a question of whether Duras's Lol, as hysterical body, is or is not a subject of narrative; of whether Blanchot's J. and N., as organs of a
hysterical text, are or are not simply new angles for modernity. For here it is a question of Speranza, a true Body-without-Organs: a woman who is not a woman but a
female figure (an island), a space to be unfolded, molded, into new configurations for the metamorphosis of Man. In t, we first stumble across Robinson just after he
has been shipwrecked on his island. Finding himself completely alone, the Only and perhaps Last Man on this island, he first succumbs to depression, evasion,
infantile panicleaving himself exposed, helpless. For Deleuze, this signals Man's first steps outside of intersubjectivity: "What happens when others are lacking in the
structure of the world? There only reigns the brutal opposition of the sun and the earth, of an insupportable light and an obscure abyss . . ." (LS, p. 355). To avoid loss
of self, however, this twentieth-century Robinson first tries the old solutions. He creates for himself a task: he spends months, perhaps years, perhaps even decades
the length of time does not matterbuilding a new boat-structure in which he might escape. But once the vessel is completed, it is too large, too heavy, and too
cumbersome for him to push to the sea towards freedom. Robinson succumbs, once again, to the deepest depressionand, indeed, abjection: He kept eating, his nose
to the ground, unspeakable things. He went underneath himself and rarely missed rolling in the soft warmth of his own excrement.... He moved about less and less,
and his brief movements always brought him back to the wallow. There he kept losing his body and delivering himself of its weight in the hot and humid surroundings
of the mud, while the noxious emanations of the stagnating waters clouded his mind. (VLP, p. 38) Haunted by his lost sister (the one who died young), his mother
(sometimes cold but always self-sacrificing), his wife (left behind in old England), Robinson-the-Man has a brush with what the Man calls insanity. And so, as a Man,
Robinson decides that he must henceforth master both himself and the island if he is to survive. He sets about building a kingdom: he creates a calendar; he invents a
way to write; he builds a house, cultivates the land. He names the island Speranza and realizes that now, in time and mastery, she is his slave. Woman is, therefore, no
longer absent from Man's adventures, even though he remains outside of inter-subjectivity: Besides, it seemed to him, when looking a certain way at the map of the
island which he had sketched approximately, that it could represent the profile of a headless female body, a woman, yes, seated with her legs folded under her, in a
posture within which it would have been impossible to sort out what there was of submission, of fear, or of simple abandonment. This idea crossed his mind, then it
left him. It would come back. (VLP, p. 46)22 In spite of various humiliations, depressions, and disappointments, Robinson continues his mastery over Speranza. A
decisive step is the introduction of time into this one-Man kingdom with a kind of primitive clock. In the "future," Robinson succumbs to his former states of abjection
within the space of Speranza only when that clock of progress stops. Slowly, however, and in spite of his frenzied, productive activity, Robinson realizes that his
relationship with "himself" is changing. His "self," in fact, can no longer exist in a world without the Other. Robinson is ready to lose his Self, his Manhood: "Who I?
The question is far from being pointless. It isn't even insoluble. Because if it's not him, it must be Speranza. There is from here on a flying I which will sometimes
alight on the man, sometimes on the island, and which makes of me, in turn, one or the other" (VLP, pp. 88-89).

391

Kritik Answers

A2 Life is Carbon
THE AFF IS WRONG THE HUMN BODY ISNT LIMITED TO
CARBON, BUT IS SILICONIC IN THE MACHINIC WAY IT
EMERGES FROM INTERSUBJECTIVE FLOWS LIKE
COMMUNICATION AND CAPITAL, INDICATING MEANING TO
LIFE BEYOND THE MATTER THAT COMPOSES US
Beddoes no date

[Diane J., Material gadget, Breeding Demons: A critical enquiry into the
relationship between Kant and Deleuze with specific reference to women,
Transmat, www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Beddoes/BD7s4.htm, acc 1-15-05]
Deleuze notes that biologists have often questioned why life is effected through
carbon, rather than through silicon, and goes on to say that la vie des machines
modernes passe par le silicium (the life of modern machines runs through silicon).
[377] This is where becoming-women moves, where money released from capital
moves, where life becomes non-organic, nature becomes a thinking machine,
infinities of tiny demons leap, effecting a co-ordinated and fluid movement,
eroding the statues of power, the historical . Becoming-woman moves towards
becoming-imperceptible, but women do not dissolve or disappear in that
movement: it is rather than life itself becomes mobile, because it is not longer in
the womb nor arranged in the organisms which emerge from them, but instead
becomes a movement, a cycle that turns on its hinges. Humans are no longer the
privileged class, but the surrogate reproductive machinery of a machinic phylum
which is passing across into a different base, in a movement which effects the
conjunction of teleology and mechanism, and transforming the nature of
intelligence.

HUMAN IDENTITY IS MORE THAN CARBON ITS CODED BY

COMMUNICATION FLOWS, THAT RECOGNITION IS
NECESSARY TO RESIST CAPITALIST ALIENATION
Brassier 2001

[Ray, Doctoral candidate at University of Warwick, Alien Theory: The Decline of

Materialism in the Name of Matter, Doctoral Thesis, April,
www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Brassier/ALIENTHEORY.pdf, acc 1-1405//uwyo]
Yet it is a failure which transcendental scepticism may yet help
circumvent through the Alien-subjects unilateralising force-(of)-thought; an
intrinsically sceptical force which constitutes an instance of a priori cognitive
resistance to those epistemic norms and informational codes via which a
triumphant World-Capitalism maintains the structural isomorphy between
material power and informational force, thereby ensuring its quasitranscendental
dominion over all cognitive experience. A transcendental
scepticism agrees with eliminative naturalism: human beings are simply
carbonbased
information processing machines. But it also recognises the necessity of
cross-pollinating that assessment born of evolutionary reductionism with
transcendental insight; an insight which consists in radicalising and generalising
Marxs identification of the material infrastructure as the ultimate determinant
for the ideological superstructure315: World-Capitalism is now the global
megamachine determining a priori the cognitive parameters within which the
phenomenological micromachinery of organically individuated sapience
operates. By acknowledging the fact that political intervention can no longer

afford to ignore this insight; by recognising that empirical agency alone is

392

Kritik Answers
incapable of circumventing capitals all-encompassing universality as WorldCapitalism, transcendental scepticism constitutes an instance of a priori
political resistance.

393

Kritik Answers

A2 Death Doesnt Destroy Being: 2AC

(1/2)
FIRST, EVEN IF DEATH DOESNT KILL BEING, IT DOES
ANNIHILATE CONSCIOUSNESSES THAT ARE COMPOSED OF
PRECISE COMBINATIONS OF ENERGY AND MATTER,
MEANING THAT DEATH EXTINGUISHES THOUGHT
PROCESSES THAT PEOPLE ARE ATTACHED TO, MEANING
THAT FORCED DEATH IS VIOLENT AND UNDESIRABLE
SECOND, THIS IGNORES THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION IN
CREATING HUMAN IDENTITY. WERE MORE THAN THE
MATTER OF OUR PARTS, BUT CREATE MEANING THROUGH
COMMUNICATIVE PROCESSES, SOMETHING DESTROYED BY
DEATH
THIRD, CARBON ATOMS ARENT THE KEY COMPONENT OF
LIFE, COMPLEX INFORMATION PROCESSING IS, MEANING
THAT DEATH CAUSES ANNIHILATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Tipler 94
[Frank J., Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, The Physics of
Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New
York: Doubleday, 1994, 124-5//uwyo-ajl]
IN ORDER TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER LIFE can continue to exist forever, I
shall need to define "life" in physics language. I claim that a "living being" is any
entity which codes information (in the physics sense of this word) with the
information coded being preserved by natural selection. Thus "life" is a form of
information processing, and the human mind-and the human soul-is a very
complex computer program. Specifically, a "person" is defined to be a computer
program which can pass the Turing test, which was discussed in Chapter II.
This definition of "life" is quite different from what the average person-and the
average biologist-would think of as "life." In the traditional definition, life is a
complex process based on the chemistry of the carbon atom. However, even
supporters of the traditional definition admit that the key words are "complex
process" and not "carbon atom." Although the entities everyone agrees are
"alive" happen to be based on carbon chemistry, there is no reason to believe that
analogous processes cannot be based on other systems. In fact, the British
biochemist A. G. Cairns-Smith! has suggested that the first living beings--':our
ultim:ate ancestors-were based on metallic crystals, not carbon. If this is true, then
if we insist that living beings must be based on carbon chemistry, we would be
forced to conclude that our ultimate ancestors were not alive. In Cairns-Smith's
theory, our ultimate ancestors were self-replicating patterns of defects in the
metallic crystals. Over time, the pattern persisted, but was transferred to another
substrate: carbon molecules. What is important is not the substrate but the pattern,
and the pattern is another name for information.
But life of course is not a static pattern. Rather, it is a dynamic pattern that persists
overtime. It is thus a process. But not all processes are alive. The key feature of the
"living" patterns is that their persistence is due to a feedback with their
environment: the information coded in the pattern continually varies, but the
variation is constrained to a narrow range by this feedback. Thus life is, as I stated,
information preserved by natural selection.

394

Kritik Answers

A2 Death Doesnt Destroy Being: 2AC

(2/2)
FOURTH, EVEN IF THERE ARE OTHER POSSIBILTIES AFTER
DEATH, THE IDENTITIES THAT WERE ATTACHED TO WILL
BE EXTINGUISHED BECAUSE CONSCIOUSNESS COMES
FROM INFORMATION PROCESSSING THAT REQUIRES
PARTICULAR SEQUENCES OF QUANTUM STATES TO OCCUR
Tipler 94

[Frank J., Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, The Physics of

Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New
York: Doubleday, 1994, 221-3//uwyo-ajl]
The Bekenstein Bound follows from the basic postulates of quantum theory
combined with the further assumptions that (1) the system is bounded in energy,
and (2) the system is bounded, or localized, in space. A rigorous proof of the
Bekenstein Bound would require quantum field theory, but it is easy to describe in
outline why quantum mechanics leads to such a bound on the information coded in
a bounded region. In essence, the Bekenstein Bound is a manifestation of the
uncertainty principle. Recall that the uncertainty principle tells us that there is a
limit to the precision with which we can measure the momentum of a particle and
its position. More precisely, the uncertainty principle says that the location of a
point in phase space-a concept I defined in Chapter III-cannot be defined more
closely thal1 Planck's constant h. Since a system's state is defined by where it is
located in phase space, this means that the number of possible states is less than or
equal to the size of the phase space region the system could be in, divided by the
size of the minimum phase space size, Planck's constant. (I've given a mathematical
expression of this argument in the Appendix for Scientists.) This state counting
procedure, based on there being an absolute minimum size h to a phase space
interval, is an absolutely essential method of quantum statistical mechanics. We
have already used it in Chapter III to prove the almost periodicity of a bounded
quantum system. It is confirmed by the thousands of experiments which have been
based on this counting method.9 In high energy particle physics, any calculation of
the "cross section" requires counting the possible number of particle initial and
final states, and the above state counting method is used.lO The cross section,
which is the measure of how many particles scatter in a particular direction when
they collide in particle accelerators, is the basic quantity tested in particle physics.
The Bekenstein Bound on the number of possible states is thus confirmed by the
correctness of the calculated cross sections. In summary, the Bekenstein Bound on
the total information that can be coded in a region is an absolute solid conclusion
of modern physics, a result as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.
One can also use the Bekenstein Bound to deduce an upper bound to the rate of
information processing. The time for light to cross a sphere of a given diameter is
equal to the diameter of the sphere divided by the speed of light. Since a state
inside the sphere cannot completely change until a signal has time to travel trom
one side to the other, the rate of information processing is bounded above by the
above Bekenstein Bound divided by this time interval. Putting in the numbers
(details in the Appendix for Scientists), we calculate that the rate of state change is
less than or equal to 4 X 1051 bits per second, multiplied by the mass of the system
in kilograms. That is, the rate of information processing possible for a system
depends only on the mass of the system, not on its spatial size or on any other
variable. So a human being of mass 100 kilograms cannot change state more
rapidly than about 4 X 1053 times per second. This number is of course enormousand in fact a human will probably change state much, much more slowly than thisbut it's finite.

395

Kritik Answers

A2 Life is Meaningless Because the Sun

Will Go Out: 2AC
FIRST, THERES NO WARRANT FOR WHY THE DEATH OF
OUR PLANET IN BILLIONS OF YEARS MAKES LIFE THAT
EXIST NOW MEANINGLESS. EACH INDIVIDUALS CREATES
CONTINGENT VALUE FOR THEIR LIFE THROUGH
COMMUNICATION AS DEMONSTRATED BY THE HABERMAS
EVIDENCE AND TO FORCE DEATH UPON THEM BECAUSE OF
AN EVENT IN THE UNFATHOMABLE FUTURE IS REPUGNANT
SECOND, HUMANITY WILL ADAPT TO THE DESTRUCTION
OF ITS HABITAT BY INEVITABLY PROGRESSING TO A TYPE
III CIVILIZATION
Kaku 95
[Michio, Prof. of theoretical physics at the City College, NY, Hyperspace: A
Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10 th
Dimension. New York: Ancor Books, March, 281//uwyo-ajl]
Taking the larger view of the development of civilization, Dyson also believes that,
at the current rate of development, we may attain Type I status within a few
centuries. He does not believe that making the transition between various types of
civilizations will be very difficult. He estimates that the difference in size and power
separating the various types of civilizations is roughly a factor of 10 billion.
Although this may seem like a large nuimber, a civilization growing at the sluggish
rate of 1 percent per year can expect to make the transition between the various
civilizations within 2,500 years. Thus it is almost guaranteed that a civilization can
steadily progress toward Type III status.

THIRD, THIS OUTWEIGHS ALL OTHER ARGUMENTS

BECAUSE 20TH CENTURY GENOCIDE DEMONSTRATES THE
SHEER HORROR OF EXTERMINATING LIFE
Tipler 94
[Frank J., Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, The Physics of
Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New
York: Doubleday, 1994, 11-12//uwyo-ajl]
I shall obtain a hold on this future reality by focusing attention on the physics
relevant to the existence and behavior of life in the far future. I shall provide a
physical foundation for eschatology-the study of the ultimate future--by making the
physical assumption that the universe must be capable of sustaining life
indefinitely; that is, for infinite time as experienced by life existing in the physical
universe. All physical scientists should take this assumption seriously because we
have to have some theory for the future of the physical universe--since it
unquestionably exists-and this is the most beautiful physical postulate: that total
death is not inevitable. All other theories of the future necessarily postulate the
ultimate extinction of everything we could possibly care about. I once visited a Nazi
death camp; there I was reinforced in my conviction that there is nothing uglier
than extermination. We physicists know that a beautiful postulate is more likely to
be correct than an ugly one. Why not adopt this Postulate of Eternal Life, at least as
a working hypothesis? I shall show in Chapter n that the universe is in fact capable

396

Kritik Answers
of sustaining life at least another million trillion years. Specifically, I shall
demonstrate that it is technically feasible for life to expand out from the Earth and
engulf the entire universe, and that life must do so if it is to survive.

397

Kritik Answers

**Derrida**
A2 Deconstruction
DERRIDEAN DECONSTRUCTION PREVENTS POLITICAL
STRATEGIZING
Crawford, Prof of Humanities and Comparative Lit @ U of Minnesota, 90 (Claudia, Nietzsche
as Postmodernist?, Ed. Clayton Koelb, P. 197)

398

Kritik Answers

A2 New International (1/2)

THERE IS ZERO MEANS TO ACTUALIZE THEIR
ALTERNATIVE DERRIDA DECONSTRUCTS HIMSELF TO
DEATH
Eagleton, Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester, 99 (Terry, Marxism
without Marxism, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx,
edited by Michael Sprinker)
There is an exasperating kind of believer who holds what he does until he meets someone else who holds the same. At this point, confronted with the bugbear of an

Derrida, who like many a

appears to feel (it is a matter of sensibility rather than reasoned conviction) that the dominant is ipso facto
demonic and the marginal precious per se. One condition of the unthinking postmodern equation of the
marginal with the creative, apart from a convenient obliviousness to such marginal groups as Fascists, is the rolling back of political
movements which are at once mass and oppositional . The mark of a genuine radical is a hearty desire to stop having to be
`orthodoxy', he starts nervously to retract, or at least to qualify. There is more than a touch of this adolescent perversity in
postmodernist

so obdurately oppositional, a sentiment one can hardly imagine as dear to the heart of a deconstructionist. If one takes the point of James Joyce's retort to an
invitation to return to a newly independent Irish republic - `So as to be its first critic?' - one also registers the self-indulgence. Derrida has now taken Marxism on
board, or at least dragged it halfway up the gangplank, because he is properly enraged by liberal-capitalist complacency; but there is also something unavoidably
opportunist about his political pact, which wants to exploit Marxism as critique, dissent, conveniently belabouring instrument, but is far less willing to engage with its

What he wants

is a Marxism without Marxism

positivity.
, in effect,
, which is to say a Marxism on his own coolly appropriative
terms. `We would be tempted to distinguish this spirit of the Marxist critique ... at once from Marxism as ontology, philosophical or metaphysical system, as
"dialectical materialism", from Marxism as historical materialism or method, and from Marxism incorporated in the apparatuses of party, State, or workers'
International.' It would not be difficult to translate this into the tones of a (suitably caricatured) liberal Anglicanism: we must distinguish the spirit of Christianity
from such metaphysical baggage as the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, organized religion, the doctrine of the resurrection, the superstition of the Eucharist
and the rest. Or: one would wish to distinguish the spirit of deconstruction from the dreary intellectual paraphernalia of `writing', `difference', `trace', organized
journals and conventions, formal reading groups, movements to install the teaching of philosophy in French schools and so on. It is entirely possible to approve of the

If Derrida thinks, as he appears to do, that

there can be any effective socialism without organization , apparatuses and reasonably well-formulated doctrines and
programmes, then he is merely the victim of some academicist fantasy which he has somehow mistaken for an
spirit of the Huns, with all its admirable robustness, while deploring what they actually got up to.

enlightened anti-Stalinism. (He has, in fact, no materialist or historical analysis of Stalinism whatsoever, as opposed to an ethical rejection of it, unlike many more

he is hardly concerned with an effective socialism at all.

Deconstruction, with its preoccupation with slippage, failure, aporia, incoherence, not-quiteness, its suspicion of the achieved, integral or controlling, is
a kind of intellectual equivalent of a vaguely leftish commitment to the underdog, and like all
such commitments is nonplussed when those it speaks up for come to power. Poststructuralism dislikes success, a stance which allows it some superbly
orthodox currents of Marxism.) The truth is that

illuminating insights into the pretensions of monolithic literary texts or ideological self-identities and leaves it a mite wrong-footed in the face of the African National

Derrida's indifference to almost all of the actual historical or theoretical manifestations of

Marxism is a kind of empty transcendence - a typically deconstructie trumping of some alternative position which leaves one's own
Congress.

case invulnerable only in proportion to its contentlessness. Much the same can be said of his curiously empty, formalistic messianism, which voids this rich theological
tradition of its content and retains its ghostly impulse only, somewhat akin to the Kafka who (as Walter Benjamin remarks) is left with nothing but the transmissible

The critical, negative passion of his politics in this book is one which
ought rightly to embarrass every academic radical for whom deconstruction is a sexy form of
common-or-garden scepticism , or yet another way of keeping the literary canon alive by plodding through it yet again, this time with a scalpel in hand.
forms of a tradition which has dwindled to nothing.

Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the `end of
ideologies' and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no
degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on
the earth. This is not the kind of thing that is likely to go down well in Ithaca or Irvine, where they learnt long ago that ideology had ended and the great emancipatory

And what does Derrida counterpose , in the very next paragraph, to the dire
condition he so magnificently denounces? A `New International', one `without status, without title, and without name ...
without party, without country, without national community ...' And, of course, as one gathers elsewhere in the book, without organization , without
ontology, without method, without apparatus. It is the ultimate poststructuralist fantasy: an opposition without
anything as distastefully systemic or drably `orthodox' as an opposition, a dissent beyond all formulable discourse, a
promise which would betray itself in the act of fulfilment, a perpetual excited openness to the Messiah who had better
not let us down by doing anything as determinate as coming. Spectres of Marxism indeed . 85-87
discourses run thankfully aground.

399

Kritik Answers

A2 New International (2/2)

THEIR CALL FOR DEMOCRACY TO COME IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE THEIR CHANGE IS JUST REFORMISM
THEY END UP CRUSHING THE REVOLUTION THAT SOLVES
BETTER
Lewis, member of the International Socialist Organization & Spanish Professor at the University of Iowa, 99 (Thomas, The
Politics of Hauntology in Derridas Specters of Marx, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx,
edited by Michael Sprinker)

New forms of struggle and especially new agents of social change, it is claimed, must either be found or theorized into
existence. Hence, the perceived need arises for something on the order of Derrida's New
International `without common belonging to a class'. I argued above that the contemporary working class includes both `blue collar' and `white collar'
workers, and that the internationalization of capitalism has created a growing international working class. I thereby sought to contest the claim that the working class
is increasingly smaller and irrelevant as a social force. I also indicated that divisions among the working class along lines of gender, race, nationality and sexual
orientation have traditionally been the object of intense activity and theoretical discussion within Marxism. While recognizing the formidable obstacles encountered, I

it is possible to overcome such divisions through common struggle . Finally, I argued that only
the working class - that is, individuals who may embody a number of specific identities but who act collectively on the basis of their shared interests as
workers - possesses the structural capacity both to bring down capitalism and to create socialism. On this view, it
emphasized that

is both theoretically and politically necessary to affirm the working class as the primary agent of social transformation. Derrida's SM provides a stinging indictment of

SM also
presents an elaborate case for reform socialism over and against revolutionary socialism . This
case is based on what, in a friendly spirit, might be termed a `misreading' of the Russian Revolution. Moreover, the main tenet of the case is
the repudiation of the notion that the working class remains central to the project of
winning socialism. Among the more astounding dimensions of SM, therefore, surely must figure the social contexts in which the book appears.
Derrida suggests a reformist road to socialism precisely at the end of a period in which the
political and moral hollowness of traditional social democracy could not be in greater
evidence. Socialist parties all over Western Europe, but particularly in France, Spain, Italy and Germany, have failed to preserve - much less extend - the gains
the contemporary world system, as well as a serious critique of recently published apologies for capitalism. As I have endeavored to show, however,

for workers once embodied in the so-called `welfare state' (Anderson and Camiller 1994; Ross and Jensen 1994; Camiller 1994; Abse 1994; and Padgett and Paterson
1994). These same Socialist parties have not just collaborated with but in numerous instances have actually initiated the attacks on workers, immigrants and the poor.
As if all that were not enough, European social democracy has signally failed to organize an effective movement from below against the resurgence of Fascism and neoFascism. Everything that can be said in criticism of Europe's Socialist parties equally applies to the Democratic Party in the us. An openly capitalist party, the us
Democratic Party advertises itself as the friend of workers and minorities, relying on its image as a `lesser evil' to secure electoral victories. Throughout the ReaganBush years, however, Democraticcontrolled congresses signally failed to challenge the basic premises and policies of Reaganism. Even today, when faced with a
cynically selfstyled `Republican Revolution', disagreements between Republicans and Democrats concern only how fast and how deep to cut social programs. If
Republicans demand $270 billion in Medicare cuts, for example, Democrats respond by demanding $145 billion. The logic and necessity of slashing social programs
are never questioned .24 Similarly, the Democrats collude with Republicans on issues of racism and immigration. Clinton, as much as any Republican, has contributed
to the false stereotyping of the recipients of public assistance as African-American `welfare queens'. And, while many Democrats are on record as deploring
Proposition 187 as a legal measure, nearly all Democrats concede to Republicans that an immigration `problem' exists. Thus, the Clinton administration has recently

Derrida's proposal for a New

International represents in part a call to return to the values of `authentic' reform socialism. In the us, Derrida's
beefed up the number of border cops and ordered harsher treatment of undocumented workers. No doubt

proposal represents a call to return to genuinely `progressive' values. The bankruptcy of European social democracy, as well as the vicissitudes of the American

Yet two points remain, each suggesting that

attempts to revive reform socialism waste energies . First, the European Socialist parties which eventually found themselves
Democratic Party, does indeed create political openings in which the socialist Left can and must seek to rebuild.

authoring and imposing austerity measures on workers and minorities started out long ago with sterling anti-capitalist principles. Good intentions are not enough in
this regard, however, since politics and the economy are separated in capitalist society, and the latter wields greater clout. Second, transformed by the discipline
demanded by international capitalism, these nominally `socialist' parties occupy several of the very governments against which workers are presently demonstrating

Reform socialism has little to offer workers today

in large numbers.
. Callinicos has cogently summarized the current crisis in
Europe in this way: `a major recession which has highlighted longer term weaknesses of European capitalism; a withdrawal of popular support from the mainstream
political parties; and the resort to forms of political and social action which, consciously or unconsciously, tend to escape the limits of liberal bourgeois politics' (1994,
9). Soon after the publication of SM in France, for example, the country was rocked by militant strikes and demonstrations lasting almost nine months between fall
1993 and summer 1994: Air France workers; 1,000,000 French citizens marching against plans to privatize sectors of education; fishing workers; farmers; hundreds
of thousands of French workers marching several times against unemployment and austerity decrees; tens of thousands of students marching, building barricades and
burning fires in protest against tuition hikes and the uncertain, potentially dismal future they face. Even as the recession seemed to be coming to an end in Europe, the
anger of French workers and students exploded again in fall 1995 - this time with sufficient force to sustain a three-week strike in the public sector. Importantly, in the
Air France strike, the anti-privatization campaign in education, the fight against changes in the universities and the recent public sector strike, real concessions were
wrested from the state. None of this renewed workers' activity, nor the fact that victories can be claimed, provides strong support for SMs assertions that barricades
and working-class militancy are out of fashion. In the us, too, polls show today that Americans are more skeptical about their government and its political parties than
at any time in memory. A wave of militant demonstrations followed the 1994 congressional elections that gave Gingrich and the `Contract With America' a majority in
the Senate and House of Representatives. Massive marches on Washington in support of gay rights, women's rights and civil rights have also taken place since the
1994 elections. The number of strikes, moreover, as well as the number of production hours lost and workers participating in strikes, increased significantly in 1994.
And no one who spent any time during the early 90s in Decatur, Illinois or Detroit, Michigan can have any doubts about the willingness of us workers to fight back.
Both areas - which include the struggle of locked-out Staley Workers in Decatur and striking newspaper workers in Detroit - have been accurately referred to as `war

In every
part of the globe political developments during recent years have been characterized by
their speed and volatility. It is important, however, to emphasize the still uneven and ambiguous character of the emerging challenge to the
existing order: `It has begun to liberate forces - in the shape of renewed workers' resistance to
capitalist attacks - which could unleash another upturn in the European [and us, my insertion] class
struggle. But it has also given an opening to elements of barbarous reaction that had been confined to the political margins since 1945' (Callinicos 1994, 37).
Nothing guarantees the growth of the Left as a result of the major struggles that look likely to occur over the next few years. The same political
vacuum which creates opportunities for the Left is also creating, at least at this juncture,
opportunities for the Right : `As yet there is no clear cut direction to events that would mark a decisive shift either to the right or to the left. But
zones'. The violence routinely used by state and local cops has been fiercely answered by the militancy and stamina of workers and their families.

the dynamic evolution of the crisis since 1989 gives no reason for thinking that the situation will remain so open' (Callinicos 1994, 36-7). In time, events will show
whether their future directionality owes more to the subjective agency of the Left in this period - or to the Right. That is why the question of socialist organization
stands at the forefront of debate among the Left today. Derrida's SM, with its call for a New International, should be discussed as a serious contribution to this debate.
Nevertheless, SM's 'hauntological politics' must be firmly rejected as incapable of answering the demands of our time. `The time is out of joint': Derrida repeatedly
works this line from Hamlet in order to suggest that socialist revolution is impossible because of the meta physical limitations of Marxism .25 Our present time may
indeed be `out of joint', but it is not so because of bad metaphysics.

Greater instabilities in an already crisis-prone system,

400

Kritik Answers
deepening anger among the world's exploited and oppressed, and sharper divisions both
within and among national and international ruling classes - these developments make our
time one in which classical Marxism and its tradition of revolution from below have much
more to offer than hauntology does in the international struggle for a democratic socialist
society. 157-161

401

Kritik Answers

**Discourse Kritiks (General)**

Discourse Kritik Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, NO LINK THEY CANT PROVE THAT OUR RHETORIC
WAS ARTICULATED WITH THE INTENT OF
MARGINALIZATION
SECOND, LABEL POLITICS MISIDENTIFY THE CAUSE OF
PREJUDICE IN AGGRESSIVITY, SO THE NEW SYMBOL FILLS
IN THE SAME ROLL
APPROPRIATIONS OF OLD LABELS RECONCEIVE THEIR
MEANING
Zizek 97
[Slavoj, Moving away from the darkness, The Plague of Fantasies, New York: Verso, 1997, 111-2//uwyoajl]
In his formidable Fear in the Occident,7 Jean Delumeau draws attention to the unerring succession of atutudes in a medieval city infested by plague: first, people
ignore it and behave as if nothing terrible is really going on; then they withdraw into privacy, avoiding contact with each other; then they start to resort to religious
fervour, staging processions, confessing their sins, and so on; then they say to themselves 'What the hell, let's enjoy it while it lasts!', and indulge passionately in orgies
of sex, eating, drinking and dancing; finally, they return to life as usual, and again behave as if nothing terrible is going on. However, this second 'life as usual' does not
occupy the same structural role as the first: it is, as it were, located on the other side of the Moebius band, since it no longtt signals the desperate attempt to ignore the

Does not the same go for the gradual

replacement of (sexually, racially...) aggressive with more 'correct' expressions, like the
chain nigger - Negro - black - African American or crippled - disabled - bodily challenged? This replacement
functions as a metaphorical substitution which potentially proliferate and enhances the very
(racist, etc.) effect it tries to banish, adding insult to injury. In analogy to Delumeau, one should therefore claim
that the only way actually to abolish the hatred-effect is, paradoxically, to create the
circumstances in which one can return to the first link in the chain and use it in a nonaggressive way -like following the patterns of 'life as usual' the second time in the case of plague. That is to say: as long as the
expression 'crippled' contains a surplus, an indelible mark, of aggressivity this surplus will
not only be more or less automatically transferred on to any of its 'correct' metaphorical
substitutes, it will even be enhanced by dint of this substitution. The strategy of returning to
the first link, of course, is risky; however, the moment it is fully accepted by the group
targeted by it, it definitely can work. When radical African-Americans call each other 'niggers', it is wrong to dismiss this strategy as a
mere ironic identification with the aggressor; rather, the point is that it functions as an autonomous act of dismissing the aggressive sting .
reality of plague, but, rather its exact opposite: resigned acceptance of it . . . .

THIS HAS TWO IMPLICATIONS

IT MOOTS ALL OF THEIR OFFENSE BECAUSE THE MEANING
OF A LABEL IS RECONCEPTUALIZED AND REINSCRIBED
IT FLIPS THEIR TURN, PROLIFERATING THE OPPRESSION
THAT IT TRIES TO SOLVE
THIRD, SPEAKING ERRORS ARE INEVITABLE AND GOOD
BECAUSE THEY PROVIDE A LOCUS FOR CONSTANT
CRITICISM, SOMETHING THE NEG BY ITSELF PRECLUDES
Alcoff 92

[Linda, Prof. of Feminist Studies at the University of Syracuse, The Problem of Speaking for
Others, Cultural Critique, Winter 91-2, 22//uwyo]
it is both morally and politically objectionable to structure ones actions around the
desire to avoid criticism, especially if this outweighs other questions of effectivity. In some cases perhaps the motivation is not so much to avoid
criticism as to avoid errors, and the person believes that the only way to avoid errors is to avoid all speaking for others. However , errors are
unavoidable in the theoretical inquiry as well as political struggle, and moreover they
But surely

402

Kritik Answers
often make contributions. The desire to find an absolute means to avoid making errors
comes perhaps not from a desire to advance collective goals but a desire for personal
mastery, to establish a privileged discursive posotion wherein one cannot be undermined or challenged and thus is master
of the situation. From such a position ones own location and positionality would not require
constant interrogation and critial reflection ; one would not hae to constantly engage
in this emotionally troublesome endeavor and would be immune from the interrogaton of
others. Such a desire of rmastery and immunity must be resisted.

403

Kritik Answers

Discourse Kritik Answers: 2AC (2/3)

FOURTH, THE CRITICISM ASSUMES STABLE SPEECH ACTS,
PREVENTING US FROM TAKING BACK HURTFUL WORDS
AND COLLAPSING INTO A JURIDICAL MODEL OF STABLE
SUBJECTIVITY THAT KILLS ACTIVISM
Judith Butler, Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley, Performativity and
Performance, Ed. Parker and Sedgwick, 1995, p. 204
That words wound seems incontestably true, and that hateful, racist, misogynist,
homophobic speech should be vehemently countered seems incontrovertibly right. But does
understanding from where speech derives its power to wound alter our conception of what it
might mean to counter that wounding power? Do we accept the notion that injurious speech
is attributable to a singular subject and act? If we accept such a juridical constraint on
thought - the grammatical requirements of accountability - as a point of departure, what is
lost from the political analysis of injury when the discourse of politics becomes fully reduced
to juridical requirements?? Indeed, when political discourse is collapsed into juridical
discourse, the meaning of political opposition runs the risk of being reduced to the act of
prosecution. How is the analysis of the discursive historicity of power unwittingly restricted
when the subject is presumed as the point of departure for such an analysis? A clearly
theological construction, the postulation of the subject as the causal origin of the
performative act is understood to generate that which it names; indeed, this divinely
empowered subject is one for whom the name itself is generative.

FIFTH, LANGUAGE DOESNT HAVE A DETERMINATE EFFECT

WORDS ARE EMPTY ABSENT CONTEXT, MEANING OUR
RHETORIC CAN BE READ IN A HETERODOX MANNER TO
CHALLENGE VIOLENCE
SIXTH, PERM, DO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE.
REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE DOESNT PRECLUDE THE
NEED FOR CONCRETE ACTION
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, Truth, Politics, and Postmodernism,
Spinoza Lectures, 1997, p. 51-2
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very
important meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida

the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the writers who are
post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good experimentalist social
democrats when it comes to actual political activity. I suspect, for example, that Gray, Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found
usually replies that
labeled `

ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist philosophers have gotten a bad
name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like `impossible; `self-contradictory' and `unrepresentable'. They have helped
create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more generally, to the `metaphysics of

I am all for getting rid of

the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and unrepresentability is
counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the metaphor of things being accurately
presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible.

represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for philosophers, and we would be better
off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate representation' was never a fruitful way

Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls "a full presence
beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity will not have
changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from psychoanalysis. All that we
to describe intellectual progress.

have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss which the Enlightenment

We have been given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress has been
made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political program. Since Darwin we have come to suspect that whether
such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky .
offered.

404

Kritik Answers

Discourse Kritik Answers: 2AC (3/3)

SEVENTH, CRITIQUES OF SPEECH PRODUCES A
REACTIONARY POLITICS IN WHICH CHANGE IS FOCUSED
ON LANGUAGE DIRECTLY TRADING OFF WITH EFFORTS TO
REFORM THE SOCIOECONOMIC ROOT CAUSES OF
INJUSTICE
Brown, Professor Political Science UC Berkeley, 2K1
(Wendy, Politics Out of History, pg. 35-37)

hate speech
regulations, and the debates about them, usurp the discursive space in which one might have
offered a substantive political response to bigoted epithets, his point also applies to prohibitions against questioning from within
selected political practices or institutions. But turning political questions into moralistic ones as speech codes of any sort do
not only prohibits certain questions and mandates certain genuflections, it also expresses a
profound hostility toward political life insofar as it seeks to preempt argument with a legis lated and enforced truth. And the realization of that patently undemocratic desire can only and always convert emancipatory aspirations into
Speech codes kill critique, Henry Louis Gates remarked in a 1993 essay on hate speech.14 Although Gates was referring to what happens when

reactionary ones. Indeed, it insulates those aspirations from questioning at the very moment that Weberian forces of rationalization and bureaucratization are quite
likely to be domesticating them from another direction. Here we greet a persistent political paradox: the moralistic defense of critical practices, or of any besieged
identity, weakens what it strives to fortify precisely by sequestering those practices from the kind of critical inquiry out of which they were born. Thus Gates might

identity-based institutions, born of

social critique, invariably become conservative as they are forced to essentialize the identity
and naturalize the boundaries of what they once grasped as a contingent effect of histori cally specific
social powers.
But moralistic reproaches to certain kinds of speech or argument kill critique not only by displacing it with
arguments about abstract rights versus identity-bound injuries, but also by configuring political injustice and political righteousness as a
problem of remarks, attitude, and speech rather than as a matter of historical, political-economic, and
cultural formations of power. Rather than offering analytically substantive accounts of the forces of injustice or injury, they condemn the
have said, Speech codes, born of social critique, kill critique. And, we might add, contemporary

manifestation of these forces in particular remarks or events. There is, in the inclination to ban (formally or informally) certain utterances and to mandate others, a
politics of rhetoric and gesture that itself symptomizes despair over effecting change at more significant levels. As vast quantities of left and liberal attention go to
determining what socially marked individuals say, how they are represented, and how many of each kind appear in certain institutions or are appointed to various
commissions

, the sources that generate racism, poverty, violence against women, and other elements of social injustice remain
unaddressed

relatively unarticulated and

. We are lost as how to address those sources; but rather than examine this loss or disorientation, rather than bear
the humiliation of our impotence, we posture as if we were still fighting the big and good fight in our clamor over words and names. Dont mourn, moralize.

EIGHTH, REJECTING DISCOURSE DOES NOTHING AND

LEAVES ATTITUDES UNCHANGED.
Kelly, 12/98

Peace Review

One might ask, in "listening" to violent language and to the people who use it, whether we are actually condoning such language. This is far from the case. To listen is

When I listen to a person who, for example, uses sexist language, I am not lending
my approval to sexist language. Instead, what I am saying is that the person behind the
language, and my desire to make a connection with that person, are more important than
the sexist language. If I refuse to listen to the person who uses sexist language, then I might
prevent one particular case where sexist language is used. But I do nothing to overcome the
person's sexist attitudes. She will continue to use sexist language long after I am out of sight. But if I give her a voice, if I show her respect, if I try
not to pass judgment.

to take her seriously as a person, then In the future pershapes she will be more apt to take what I say about sexism seriously. If she knows that sexist language bothers
me, then perhaps she will be less likely to use it around me.

405

Kritik Answers

Newspeak Turn: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC ZIZEK 97 EVIDENCE. THEIR ARGUMENT
IS PREMISED ON A MISUNDERSTANDING OF COGNITION
WORDS DONT HAVE INTRSINSIC MEANINGS BUT CONVEY
INFORMATION THROUGH METAPHOR. WHEN YOU
REPLACE ONE WORD WITH ANOTHER, THE NEW WORD
CONTAINS AN IMPLICIT REFERENCE TO THE
CONNOTATIONS OF THE OLD WORD. THE DISCRIMINATORY
SURPLUS MEANING GETS TRANSFERRED TO ALTERNATIVE
LABELS AND PATRONIZING AGGRESSIVITY IS MAGNIFIED
IN THE GUISE OF AN ILLUSORY CHANGE
THIS HAS THREE IMPLICATIONS
IT DESTROYS ALL THEIR OFFENSE OUR LANGUAGE ISNT
ANY WORSE THAN THE RECONCEPTION
IT FLIPS THEIR IMPACT THEY ENHANCE THE LABELS
SUBJECTIVE MEANING BY REINSCRIBING ITS VIOLENCE
RETURNING TO THE FIRST LINK IN THE SIGNIFYING CHAIN
IS THE ONLY WAY TO DESTROY ITS AGGRESSIVE STING,
EXPOSING THE SOURCE OF VIOLENT MEANING
CANT SEEK TO CHANGE CONCEPTS BY SUBSTITUTING
WORDS THIS ONLY MASKS THE EXISTENCE AND USE OF
THOSE CONCEPTS AND GUARANTES THAT THEY WILL
REAPPEAR IN THE NEW WORDS. SHOULD USE THE
ORIGINAL WORDS TO HIGHLIGHT THEIR INDETERMINATE
INADEQUACY
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 48//uwyo-ajl]
In this light, to begin to use again terms and concepts which had seemed to be theoretically
proscribed (the author, the subject, reality, sexual and cultural identity, the universal) is not
necessarily to betray a reactionary or a nostalgic desire for 'presence'; on the contrary, what
the critical insights of post-structuralism (more specifically, deconstruction) reveal is not
only the possibility but the imperative that such terms continue to be used. There are no
others - and if there were, they would by definition not only be liable to but would comprise
exactly the same catachrestic abuses

406

Kritik Answers

#2 Newspeak Turn: Ext (1/5)

SELF-CENSORSHIP MAINTAINS THE VIOLENT IDEOLOGY OF
THE STATUS QUO BY CREATING A DISTANCE BETWEEN
POLITICAL APPEARANCES AND THE DISAVOWED OBSCENE
HATRED THAT SUPPORTS THEM
Zizek '97

[Slavoj, Jazz, The Plague of Fantasies, NYC: Verso, 1997, 25//uwyo-ajl]

The key point not to be missed here is how this fragile coexistence of extreme and violent
homophobia with a thwarted - that is, publicly unacknowledged, `underground' homosexual libidinal economy bears witness to the fact that the discourse of the military
community can operate only by censoring its own libidinal foundation. At a slightly different
level, the same goes for the practice of hazing (the ceremonial beating up and humiliating of
the US Marines by their elder peers: sticking theii, medals directly on to their breast skin,
etc.): when the public disclosure of these practices (somebody secretly shot them on video
and made the tape public) caused such an outrage, what disturbed the public was not the
practice of hazing itself (everybody was aware that things like this were going on) but the
fact of rendering it public. Outside the confines of military life, do we not encounter a strictly
analogous self-censoring mechanism in contemporary conservative populism, with its sexist
and racist bias? Recall the election campaigns of Jesse Helms, in which the racist and sexist
message is not publicly acknowledged (on the public level, it is sometimes even violently
disavowed), but is instead inarticulated `between the lines', in a series of double-entendres
and coded allusions. The point is that this kind of self-censorship (not openly admitting
one's own fundamental message) is necessary if, in the present ideological~conditions,
Helms's discourse is to remain operative: if it were to articulate its racist bias directly, in a
public way, this would make it unacceptable in the eyes of the predominant political
discursive regime; if it were effectively to abandon the self-censored coded racist message, it
would endanger the support of its targeted electoral body. Conservative populist political
discourse is therefore an excellent example of a power discourse whose efficiency depends
on the mechanism of self-censorship: it relies on a mechanism which is operative only in so
far as it remains censored. Against the image, ever-present in cultural criticism, of a radical
subversive discourse or practice `censored' by Power, one is even tempted to claim that
today, more than ever, the mechanism of censorship intervenes predominantly to enhance
the efficiency of the power discourse itself.

POLITICALLY CORRECT SIGNIFER REPLACEMENT ALLOWS

NEW, AGGRESSIVE FORMS OF DISCRIMINATORY
HUMILIATION IN THE GUISE OF DISTANCE
Zizek '99

[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish
Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 253-4//uwyo-ajl]
Take politically correct probing into hate speech and sexual harassment: the trap into which
this effor falls is not only that it makes us aware of (and thus generates) new forms and
layers of humiliation and harassment (we learn that 'fat', 'stupid', 'short-sighted' . . . are to
be replaced by 'weight-challenged', etc.); the catch is, rather, that this censoring activity
itself, by a kind of devilish dialectical reversal, starts to participate in what it purports to
censor and fight is it not immediately evident how, in designating somebody as 'mentally
challenged' instead of 'stupid', an ironic distance can always creep in and give rise to an
excess of humiliating aggressivity one adds insult to injury, as it were, by the
supplementary polite patronizing dimension (it is well known that aggressivity coated in
politeness can be much more painful than directly abusive words, since violence is
heightened by the additional contrast between the aggressive content and the polite surface
form...). In short, what Foucault's account of the discourses of discipline and regulate
sexuality leaves out of consideration is the process by means of which the power mechanism
itself becomes eroticized, that is, contaminated by what it endeavours to 'repress'. It is not
enough to claim that the ascetic Christian subject who, in order to fight temptation,
enumerates and categorizes the various forms of temptation, actually proliferates the object

407

Kritik Answers
he tries to combat; the point is, rather, to conceive of how the ascetic who flagellates in order
to resist temptation finds sexual pleasure in this very act of inflicting wounds on himself.

408

Kritik Answers

#2 Newspeak Turn: Ext (2/5)

PAPERING OVER A TOUCHY SUBJECT IS THE TRIUMPH OF
FANTASY
Stavrakakis '99

[Yannis, Teaching Fellow at the University of Essex, Lacan and the Political, New York City:
Routledge, 1999, 88-9//uwyo-ajl]
In this regard, Lacan is extremely clear. Through this fantasy modern society returns to a
state of myth:
How is one to return, if not on the basis of a peculiar (special) dis-course, to a prediscursive
reality? That is the dream - the dream be-hind every conception (idea) of knowledge. But it
is also what must be considered mythical. There's no such thing as a prediscursive re-ality.
Every reality is founded and defined by a discourse.
(XX: 32)
In opposition to such a 'regressive' attitude, Lacanian theory promotes a return to the
founding moment of modernity. Recognising the irreducible character of impossibility, the
constitutivity of the real as expressed primarily in the failure of our discursive world and its
continuous rearticulation through acts of identification, far from being a postmodern move, reveals the truly
modern character of the Lacanian project; instead of a postmodern mysticism it leads to a
reorientation of science and knowledge. Recognising the constitutivity of the real does not
entail that we stop
symbolising; it means that we start trying to incorporate this recognition within the
symbolic itself, in fact it means that since the symbolic entails lack as such, we abstain from
covering it over with fantasmatic constructs - or, if one accepts that we are always trapped
within the field of fantasy, that we never stop traversing it. The guiding principle in this kind
of approach is to move beyond fantasy towards a self-critical symbolic gesture recognising
the contingent and transient character of every symbolic construct. This is a scientific
discourse different from the reified science of standard modernity.

THE REPLACEMENT OF OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE WITH NEW

SIGNIFIERS IS EVEN WORSE, UNDERESTIMATING THE GAP
BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND THE CONSCIOUS REGULATION
OF ITS EFFECTS AND ENSURING THAT ANY RESOLUTION IS
ARBITRARY
Zizek 99

[Slavoj, Steelers Linebacker, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology,
New York: Verso, 1999, 332-3//uwyo-ajl]
In all these domains, the difJerend seems to be irreducible - that is to say, sooner or later we find ourselves in a grey zone whose mit cannot be dispelled,.by the
application of some single universal rule. Here we encounter a kind of counterpoint' to the 'uncertainty principe' of quan-tum physics; there is, for example, a

Confronted with
such a dubious statement, a 'politically correct' radical a priori tends to believe the
complaining victim
(if the victim experienced it as harassment, then harassment it was. . .), while a diehard orthodox liberal tends to
believe the accused (if he sincerely did not mean it as harassment, then he should be acquitted. . .). The point, of course, is that this undecidability is
structural and unavoid-able, since it is the big Other (the symbolic network in which victim
and offender are both embedded) which ultimately 'decides' on meaning, and the order of the big Other is, by definition, open; nobody can
structural difficulty in determining whether some comment was actually a case of sexual harassment or one of racist hate speech.

dominate and regulate its effects.

That is the problem with replacing aggressive with 'politically correct' expressions: whan one
replaces 'short-sighted' with 'visually challenged', tone can never be sure that this
replacement itself will not generate new effects of patronizing and/or ironic offensiveness,
all the more humiliating inasmuch as it is masked as benevolence. The mistake of this
'politically correct' strategy is that it underestimates the resistance of the Ianguage we
actually speak to the conscious regulation of its effects, epecially effects that involve Fower
relations. So to resolve the deadlock, one convenes a committee to formulate, in an
ultimately arbitrary way, the precise rules of conduct. It is the same with medicine and 'biogenetics (at what point does an
acceptable and even desirable genetic experiment or intervention turn into unacceptable manipulation?), in the application of universal hum all rights (at what point
does the protection 0f the victim's rights turn into an imposition of Western values?), in sexual mores (what is the proper, non-patriarchal procedure of seduc-tion?),
not to mention the obvious case of cyberspace (what is the status of sexual harassment in a virtual community? How does one distinguish between 'mere words' and
'deeds'?). The work of these committees is caught in a symptomal vicious cycle: on the one hand, they try to legitimate their decisions by reference to the most

409

Kritik Answers
advanced scientific ,knowledge (which, in the case of abortion, tells us that a foetus does not yet possess self-awareness and experience pain; which, in the case of a
mortally ill person, defines the threshold beyond which euthanasia is the only meaningful solution); on the other hand, they have to evoke some non-scientific ethical
criterion in order to direct and posit a limitation to inherent scientific drive.

410

Kritik Answers

#2 Newspeak Turn: Ext (3/5)

CLEANSING IDEOLOGY FROM LANGUAGE IS A CRY FOR
HELP A LONGING FOR FANTASMIC HARMONY EMBODIED
IN A THROATY GROAN
Stavrakakis '99

[Yannis, Teaching Fellow at the University of Essex, Lacan and the Political, New York City:
Routledge, 1999, 114-5//uwyo-ajl]
We can also approach this constitutive play between possibility and iInpossibility through
the example of communication. What Lacan argues, and here his difference from Habermas
is most forcefully demonstrated, is that "it is exactly because total communication is
impossible, because it is exposed as an impossible fantasy, that communication itself
becomes possible. Lacan
starts from the assumption that communication is always a failure: moreover, that it has to
be a failure, and thats the reason we keep on talking. If we understood eachother, we would
all remain silent. Luckily enough, we dont understand each other, so we keep on talking
(Verhaeghe, 1995: 81)
The utopian fantasy of a perfect universal language, a language common to all humanity,
was designed to remedy this lack in communication insofar as it is caused by the different
idioms and languages in use (Eco, 1995: 19). The perfect language was conceived as the final
solution to this linguistic cbfusion, the confusio linguarum, which inscribed an irreducible
lack at the heart of our symbolic universe, showing its inability to represent the real. It
entailed a fantasmatic return to a pre-confusion state in which a perfect language existed
between Adam and God. This was a language that mirrored reality, an isomorphic language
which had direct and unmediated access to the essence of things: 'In its original form..
.language was an absolutely certain and transparent sign for things, because it resembled
them. The names of things were lodged in the things they designatedThis transparency
was destroyed at Babel as a punishment for men. (Foucault, 1989: 36). Human imagination
never stopped longing for that lost/impossible state when language, instead of the agency of
castration, was the field of a perfect harmony; hence all the attempts to construct a perfect
language, to realise fantasy: Umberto Eco in his Search for the Perfect Language recounts
the history of all these attempts within European culture, from St. Augustine's fantasy, in
which the distance between object and symbol is annulled,17 up to Dante, a priori
philosophical languages and Esperanto. This history is, of course, a genealogy of falures, the
history of the insistence on the realisation of an impossible dream, a dream, however,
that was designed as a perfect solution to the inherent division of the social. As Eco points
out, linguistic confusion is conceived as standing at the root of religious and political
division, even of difficulties in economic exchange (Eco, 1995: 42-3). In that sense-;-the
achievement of perfect communication is articulated as the perfect solution to all these
problems. This is clearly a utopian problematic. Alas, as Antonio Gramsci points out in his
text 'UniversaL Language and Esperanto', no advent of a universal language can be planned
in advance:
the present attempts at such a language belong only in the realm of Utopia: they. are the
product of the same mentality that wanted Falangists and happy colonies. In history and
social life nothing is fixed, rigid and final. There never will be... this flow of molten vol-canic
matter, burns and annihilates the Utopias built on arbitrary acts and vain delusions such as
those of a universal language and of Esperanto.

411

Kritik Answers

#2 Newspeak Turn: Ext (4/5)

THE IMPACT PRESUMES STATIC REFERENCE, WHICH IS
EITHER A NAVE MISTAKE OR A VISIOUS LIE
Seshadri-crooks 2000

[Kalpana, Asst prof engl boston college, Desiring Whiteness, NYC: Routledge, 141-2//uwyoajl]
Racial identity, too, I would like to suggest - Le., words like black and white, when used as
nouns - works like names. 10 That is, they are rigid designators - they are signifiers that have
no signified. They establish a reference, but deliver no connotations or meaning whatsoever.
We can, of course, reasonably argue that race does not exist insofar as the identity of a
person as "black" or "white" is contingent upon a cluster of concepts that are them-selves
too protean to be able to uphold anything like a necessary truth. We can cite historical
evidence to show that groups that were once considered white are no longer classified as
such for this or that reason, etc. But as my discussion in Chapter 1 specified, arguments
leveled at race theory are highly ineffectual and possess insufficient explanatory power. Thus
rather than lapse into the historicist argument, it may be more productive to view racial
color designators as operating not unlike proper names. The proper name is neither wholly
one's own (Le., we are all named by others) nor is it mean-ingful. One inhabits the name as
the reference of oneself, and as Kripke asserts, it bears no relation to a set of properties that
establish either its meaning or its reference: Nixon is Nixon, or as he says, quoting Bishop
Butler, "everything is what it is and not another thing" (Kripke 1982: 94). Is this not true for
"black" and "white"? If someone is designated as one or the other, there is a necessary truth
to that designation, but does it mean? What would be the cluster of concepts that could
establish such an identity? Even in identity statements such as "blacks are people of African
descent" or "whites are people of European descent," though the predicates supposedly
define and give the meaning of black and white, establishing the necessity of these concepts
in every counter-factual situation will not be possible if only because national designations,
and the notion of descent, are historically volatile and scientifically invalid respectively. No
set of qualitative descrip-tions can establish black or white identity across all possible
worlds, but we cannot therefore say that black and white do not exist, which is the error that
a number of critical race theorists fall into. As Kripke says,
it is not how the speaker thinks he got the reference, but the actual chain of communication,
which is relevant. ... Obviously the name is passed on from link to link. But of course not
every sort of causal chain reaching from me to a certain man will do for me to make a
reference. There may be a causal chain from our use of the term "Santa Claus" to a certain
historical saint, but still the children, when they use this, by this time probably do not refer
to that saint. ... It seems to me wrong to think we give ourselves some properties which
somehow qualitatively uniquely pick out an object and determine our reference in that
manner.(Kripke 1982: 93-4)

412

Kritik Answers

#2 Newspeak Turn: Ext (5/5)

FOCUSING ON LANGUAGE UNDERESTIMATES PREJUDICE
SYMBOLIC CONTROL ONLY BEGS THE QUESTION OF
UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVATION
Lane 98

[Chrisopher, English Professor at Emory, Savage Ecstacy: Colonialism and the Death
Drive, The Psychoanalysis of Race, 1998//uwyo-ajl]
The repercussions of Fanons Hegelianism are nonetheless acute. While Fanon complains of
being sealed into thingness (218) by white racism, he also aims toward mastery of
language because it affords remarkable power (18). On one level, we can appreciate why
linguistic mastery is threatening to white racism. However, Fanon also avows, at the
beginning of Black Skin, White Masks, that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other (17).
Ironically, Fanon is at his most Lacanian here, for he clarifies that we cannot limit the
tyranny of prejudce to intentional racism; nor can we simply defeat it by mastery of
language: The signifier raises a further, generic dimension of alienation that implicates
men and women of all races while exceeding their capacity for symbolic control. This is
surely why Fanon claims The Other will become the mainstail of [the white mans ]
preoccupations and his desires(170), and why he states of the black man, The goal of his
behavior will be The Other (in the guise of the white man) (154).

DIALOGUE OVER LABELS WITH A FIXED GOAL OF

EMPOWERMENT AS A KNOWN AND STABLE END
GUARANTEES HEGEMONIC REGIMES OF TRUTH MORE
DISCURSIVELY VIOLENT THAN THE ORIGINAL
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 87-9//uwyo-ajl]
The disavowal of political representation, combined with the seduc -tiveness of a 'political'
ideology of absolute sincerity, is one explanation for the appeal of the Communitarian
agenda. Another is (ii) the fetishization of specificity. Etzioni favours localized as opposed to centralized legislation, and
informal as opposed to formal structures of law enforcement. Thus divorce, the principal 'threat' to family life (a tautologous diagnosis that resembles John Major's
cosmetic proposals to solve the problem of 'yobbery'), should be not banned or condemned, but discouraged.98 Similarly 'hate' (in the form of racism or sexism, for

of the 'discussions' initiated following

incidents of campus racism is voyeuristic, almost pornographic in its attention to episodic
detail. One has a sense of salivation, more bloodthirsty than at any seventeenth-century
public evisceration, and of tri-umphalism over the ritual punishment of the guilty parties:
humiliation by workshop.
example) is best coun-tered not by legislation but by 'dialogue' and 'education'. Etzioni's account

The next evening the [offended] women organized a meeting with some students in the same dormitory and discussed the matter. They were joined by a supportive
professor. Several white people made it clear that they were deeply embarrassed. The session was followed up by more forums, a press conference, and a seminar at
the law school. These dis-cussions, in turn, triggered a campus-wide debate on the issues at hand. The local newspapers also took note. The article in the campus
news-paper included an apology from the person who had put up the form in the first place. The four women said that toward the end they no longer felt like victims
but rather 'empowered'.99
The Communitarian citizen, then, fills the gaps left by the skeletal legal framework, makes 'complete' a legislative structure which must refrain from explicit
adjudication on its own account. By maintaining instead a 'hands-off' policy of implicit governance, Communitarianism proposes an ethos of unwritten rules of

. A society of unwritten -that is,

not legally binding - laws is assumed to be freer; in fact, as we can see, the tacit legislature
of Communitarianism effects a far more thorough and indeed repressive policing of the
individual. The figure who arouses the most sympathy in Etzioni's story is the quitevobviously cynical student who, as his college campus succumbed o the
behav-iour, under the sign of 'empowerment', which are no less powerful and effective because they are implicit

viral effect of a positivistic 'anti-racist' consensus, took to emblazoning his notebooks and the walls of his room with swastikas. 'The work of education is never done,'
says Etzioni, a little sinisterly. Clearly not education but rather the problematic of Dostoevsky's man underground is the issue here: the necessity to prove that one is 'a
man and not a prig in a .barrelorgan:. The dawning Influence of Commumtanamsm in British political life IS a symptom of the 'epidemic of consensus' identified by
Baudrillard as a millenarian phenomenon, and of the fear of violence - political, semiotic, historical-identified by Hegel as a crisis of healthy 'philosophical
scepticism.

413

Kritik Answers

#4 Censorship Bad Turns: 1AR

THE REFUSAL TO REAPPROPRIATE EXCLUSIONARY
LANGUAGE IS POLITICALLY PARALYZING DOGMATISM
Butler, Chair of the Rhetoric Department at U.C.-Berkley, 97 (Judith, Excitable
Speech, P. 162)

dogmatism appears as well in the effort to circumscribe speech that injures, excites, threatens,
and offends. Whether it is the censorship of particular kinds of representation or the
circumscription of the domain of public discourse itself, the effort to tighten the reins on
speech undercuts those political impulses to exploit speech itself for its insurrectionary
effects. The intellectual opposition to questions that destabilize a sense of reality seems a mundane academic case in point. To question a
Such

term, a term like "the subject" or "universality," is to ask how it plays, what investments it bears, what aims it achieves, what alterations it

The changeable life of that term does not preclude the possibility of its use. If a term
becomes questionable, does that mean it cannot be used any longer, and that we can only use
terms that we already know how to master? Why is it that posing a question about a term is considered the same
undergoes.

as enact ing a prohibiti on agai nst use? Why is it that we sometimes do feel that if a term is dislodged of its prior and known
contexts, that we will not be able to live, to survive, to use language, to speak for ourselves? What kind of guarantee does this effort to refer
the speech act back to its originating context exercise, and what sort of terror does it forestall? Is it that in the ordinary mode, terms arc
assumed, terms like "the subject" and "universality," and the sense in which they "must" be assumed is a moral one, taking the form of

Are we not paralyzed by a fear of

the unknown future of words that keeps us from interrogating the terms that we need to live,
and of taking the risk of living the terms that we keep in question?
an imperative, and like some moral interdictions, a defense against what terrifies us most?

DISALLOWING MODIFICATION IGNORES THE POTENTIAL

FOR RE-APPROPRIATION BY RE-ITERATING THE USEFUL
CONCEPTS OF THOSE WE CRITICIZE FOR THEIR
EXCLUSIONS
Judith Butler, Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, The Psychic Life Of
Power: Theories In Subjection, 1997, p. 93.
For Foucault, the subject who is produced through subjection is not produced at an instant
in its totality. Instead, it is in the process of being produced, it is repeatedly produced (which
is not the same as being produced anew and again). It is precisely the possibility of a
repetition which does not consolidate that dissociated unity, the subject, but which
proliferates effects which undermine the force of normalization. The term which not only
names, but forms and frames the subjectlet us use Foucaults example of homosexuality-mobilizes a reverse discourse against the very regime of normalization by which it is
spawned.

414

Kritik Answers

#4 Censorship Bad Turns: Ext (1/4)

GENDER STUDIES PROVE REDEPLOYMENT GOOD
Jerry Muller, Coming Out Ahead, First Things, August 1993(accessed online)
Butler holds to the Foucaultian axioms that power is ubiquitous and that it is only power
which establishes truth. She concludes that "power can be neither withdrawn nor refused,
but only redeployed. Indeed, in my view, the normative focus for gay and lesbian practice
ought to be on the subversive and parodic redeployment of power rather than on the
impossible fantasy of its full-scale transcendence." The "redeployment" of power, in this
case, means that those with the power of interpretation use their power to subvert the belief
that there is anything "natural" about sexual identity, desire, and conduct, and to break the
normative link between biological endowment, behavior, and sexual object. "The loss of
gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilizing
substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory
heterosexuality of their central protagonists: 'man' and 'woman.'" Within this agenda,
transitive and intermediate forms of sexual identity acquire a special significance. Drag,
cross-dressing, and butch/femme lesbian identities, Butler writes, all serve to "parody" the
notion of a nature-based gender, and reveal that cultural gender does not flow naturally and
inevitably from anatomical sex, but rather is a socially learned role (performance) with no
essential link to anatomy. "Parodic proliferation," she declares, "deprives hegemonic culture
and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities."

SUPPRESSING LANGUAGE BECAUSE IT IS OFFENSIVE

PRESERVES ITS INJURIOUS MEANING ONLY BY USING
THE LANGUAGE CAN SPACE BE OPENED TO RECONSTRUCT
A MORE HUMANE MEANING
Kurtz and Oscarson, Members of National Council of Teachers of English Conference on
College Composition and Communication, 2K3 (Anna and Christopher, BookTalk: Revising the
Discourse of Hate, ProQuest)

Butler also argues that the daily, repeated use of words opens a space for another,
more empowering kind of performance. This alternative performance , Butler insists, can be "the
occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an original subordination for another
purpose, one whose future is partially open" (p. 38). To think of words as having an "open"
future is to recognize that their authority lies less in their historical than in their present
uses; it is to acknowledge that people can revise the meaning of words even as we repeat
them; it is to embrace the notion that the instability of words opens the possibility that we
can use them to (re)construct a more humane future for ourselves and others. Because words
can be revised, Butler contends that it would be counterproductive simply to stop using
terms that we would deem injurious or oppressive. For when we choose not to use offensive
words under any circumstance, we preserve their existing meanings as well as their power to
injure. If as teachers, for instance, we were simply to forbid the use of speech that is hurtful to LGBT students we would be effectively
denying the fact that such language still exists. To ignore words in this way, Butler insists, won't make them
go away. Butler thus suggests that we actually use these words in thoughtful conversation in
which we work through the injuries they cause (p. 1.02). Indeed, Butler insists that if we are to reclaim
the power that oppressive speech robs from us, we must use, confront, and interrogate
terms like "queer." We must ask how such terms affect both the speaker and the subject, what the purpose of their use is, and how their
meaning can be altered to empower those whom they name. Thus, as Butler helps us see, language is violence, but only if
we allow it to be. She encourages us to believe that words can take on new meanings-ones
which forbid stasis, challenge our habits, and open the possibility that teachers and students might be
able to create spaces for learning in which everyone feels safe.
However,

415

Kritik Answers

#4 Censorship Bad Turns: Ext (2/4)

REGULATING SPEECH MAKES RE-APPROPRIATING SPEECH
IMPOSSIBLE ONLY BY USING LANGUAGE CAN
RESIGNIFICATION OCCUR
Fleche, Assist Prof of English @ Boston College, 99 (Anne, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative, Theatre Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3, October, Project Muse)

Excitable Speech might seem surprising to readers of Butler's previous work. Having argued, in Gender Trouble and Bodies That

Butler now argues that to

speak is not quite the same as to act. For Butler the conservative conflation of speech and act is neither
Matter, that bodies and subjects are constructed in the cultural forms that articulate them,

performative nor, in her sense of the word, constructionist, because it argues for a notion of free speech that presumes an
unconstrained, sovereign subject. Butler considers this problem and its possible remedies in her analyses of Supreme Court
decisions, anti-pornography arguments, and the policy against homosexuals in the military. In every instance, she complicates
the relation of speech to act, by introducing fantasy, linguistic instability, and temporality, arguing against censorship and the
legal redress of hate speech and for its critical re-articulation. The key move in the analysis comes in the opening chapter, "On
Linguistic Vulnerability," where Butler deconstructs the relation of the body to speech. Working from texts by Toni Morrison and
Shoshana Felman, Butler argues that language and the body are neither strictly separable nor simply the same, but speak
together, as it were, to produce the effect known as the social speaking subject. Thus verbal threats, for example, are also, in
some way, bodily ones: "[T]he body is the blindspot of speech, that which acts in excess of what is said, but which also acts in and
through what is said" (11). Once the body/speech relation is deconstructed, censorship, with its assumptions of causality between

because speech
threatens, delivers and delays, it opens up a future of options. It is the gap between speech and conduct
word and act, becomes even more troubling. Butler finds promise in this problem, arguing that,

she wants to emphasize. In theatrical terms, this is the gap in which Brecht sees the actor intervening--in his view performance is

Butler's notion of performativity,

sometimes understood as the ability of language to produce what it names , is nearly the opposite of
referentiality: it is an effect of representation that cannot wholly be controlled. Performativity is what gives a
future to the name in name-calling. In the process of coming out, for example,
homosexuality is named but never fully defined: while coming out "renders homosexuality discursive," Butler
emphasizes, "it does not render discourse referential . . . . [I]t is important not to close the gap between the
performative and the referential" (125). To close this gap is to leave no remedy for hate speech
short of state intervention, and the state is certainly not neutral. Butler points out that the Supreme
not referential, but a social gest, playful and capable of change. Indeed

Court has tended to protect racist behavior as speech, while restricting pornographic literature. In censoring pornography, the

the
policy against gays in the military assumes that to identify oneself as a homosexual is to act
upon another person in a homosexual way, to make such an identification "contagious," as
Butler puts it. And yet, in a case of cross burning, the Supreme Court found that when he burned a cross
in front of a black family's house, a white teenager was expressing a "viewpoint" in the "free
marketplace of ideas" (53). These decisions imply that language should not have power to do
what it says, but that the state, in regulating speech, should. When speech becomes injurious
act in some cases and remains free speech in others, it is clear that a theory of speech, and
not a legal remedy, is what is most urgently needed. Consequently, Butler opposes linguistic determinism
and the "anti-intellectualism" of the academy's efforts to return to "direct" speech. Language is politically and socially
useful, she argues, precisely to the extent that it is "excitable"--by which she means "out of control", in play,
"performative:" "Indeed, the act-like character of certain offensive utterances may be precisely what
keeps them from saying what they mean to say or doing what it is they say " (72). Language is
court appears to agree with feminist arguments that pornographic representation is a discriminatory act. Similarly,

neither fully social nor fully semantic but socially performed and cited, interpellating a body and a social self while excluding
"impossible" bodies, selves and speech. In a brief reference to the argument elaborated in her book The Psychic Life of Power

Butler counters the legal arguments for restricting hate speech with Foucault's "less
notion of power as an effect, produced through multiple forces. Foucault's idea of power
eliminates the sovereign, accountable subject (or state) that speech regulation seeks to restore. It is power, Butler argues,
that makes speech into censorship, by legislating what counts. Thus, not all social forms are
simply censored, tainted or unusable: the terms of legibility produce the possibility of
breaking silence, of thwarting exclusion, and of acting "with authority without being
authorized" (157), as in the civil disobedience of Rosa Parks. [End Page 348] Rather than offer prescriptions,
Butler uses her own writing to illustrate the power of resignification. In her rhetorical readings of Supreme
(also 1997),
legal"

Court decisions, for example, the justices' words become surprisingly rich and suggestive. She is herself an expert resignifier.
Resignifying words, Butler acknowledges, does not take away their hurt. She does think that sometimes people should be
prosecuted for injurious speech and that universities might need to regulate speech--but should do so only when they have "a

Excitable Speech asks

whether regulation makes it easier or harder to reappropriate speech, and why we fear to take the
story to tell" about its harmful effects. She is not opposed to all speech regulation. But
exciting risk of language, where a threat might also be a promise.

416

Kritik Answers

#4 Censorship Bad Turns: Ext (3/4)

REGULATING LANGUAGE DESTROYS THE HOPE OF TRUE
EMANCIPATION WE MUST BE ABLE TO RESIGNIFY
DEROGATORY TERMS TO DEFUSE THEIR INJURIOUS
ABILITIES
Disch, Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Minnesota, 99 (Lisa, Judith
Butler and the Politics of the Performative, JSTOR)

Judith Butler's longstanding political concern has been to discern what in the structure of subjectivity makes it so difficult to
shift from moralized to politicized mobilization and so easy to fall into identity politics and the poli tics of scapegoating. In The
Psychic Life of Power, she analyzes the psychic and social process of subject formation to disclose the investments that stand in
the way of "the development of forms of differentiation [that could] lead to fundamentally more capacious, generous, and

In Excitable Speech, she rebuts the

work of the theorists who introduced hate speech into the legal arsenal. Whereas they share
her premise that we are linguistic beings, Butler charges that in advocating speech codes,
censorship, and other regulatory approaches to linguistic injury, hate speech theorists
destroy "something fundamental about language and, more specifically, about the subject's
constitution in language" (ES, 27). Butler proposes to counter injurious speech with "subver sive resignification": the insubordinate use of a derogatory term or authorita tive convention
to defuse its power to injure and to expose "prevailing forms of authority and the exclusions
by which they proceed" (ES, 157-58). These two books are especially important for answering the charge that
poststructuralist critics of humanism demolish political agency when they take issue with autonomy. Butler's theory of
"insurrectionary" speech acts opens up the possibility of an agency that does not fantasize
"the restoration of a sovereign autonomy in speech" but, rather, plays our dependency on
sanctioned forms of address into an everyday resistance (ES, 145,15). Insurrectionary speech
does considerable theoretical work to break the impasse between autonomy and
determinism that stalls many discussions of political agency in "postliberatory times" (The
'unthreatened' bearings of the self in the midst of community" (CR, 140).

Psychic Life of Power [PL], 18). And although this contribution is significant, it may strike some readers as incom plete. Butler is
more attentive to examples where dominant institutions (such as the courts and the military) have subversively resignified
potentially insurrectionary initiatives (such as hate speech) than she is to instances where per formative agency has

the "politics of
the performative" is a politics of insurrection. First, I offer a brief summary of Butler's concepts "heterosexual
transformed the status quo. Even if Butler's own exam ples do not establish it as such, I will argue that

matrix," "heterosexual melancholy," and "gender performativity," as these are indispensable to appreciating her recent
writings.

CENSORSHIP WILL BE COOPTED BY CONSERVATIVE

ELEMENTS TO DESTROY MINORITY RIGHTS INSTEAD
LANGUAGE SHOULD BE USED TO SUBVERT THE
CONVENTIONAL MEANINGS OF THE WORDS
Nye, Prof of Philosophy @ U of Wisconsin Whitewater, 99 (Andrea, Excitable Speech: A Politics of
the Performative; In Pursuit of Privacy: Law, Ethics, and the Rise of Technology, JSTOR)

Excitable Speech and In Pursuit of Privacy will appeal to very different audiences. Judith Buder is a theorist's theorist whose mastery of the complex intellectual
gyrations of poststructuralism and postmodernism will be daunting to all but an initiated few, while Judith Wagner DeCew is a legal scholar who uses traditional
reviews of case law and standard techniques of rational argument to make her point. Nevertheless, they ask the same important questionIn promoting the rights of
women, to what extent should feminists call for state action? and they give the same negative answer: Not very far at all. Butler's concern is with recent
controversies surrounding regulation of "hate language," specifically decisions that broadly interpret the "fighting words 55 doctrine, which makes certain uses of
speech unprotected under the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. She argues against Catharine MacKinnon 5s claim that pornography is subject to
government intervention because it is action that effectively silences women. DeCew, on the other hand, defends a broad view of the "right to privacy 55 that protects
not only private information but also individual decision making from state interference. Their methods in making these points could not be more different. Butler
works meticulously through a dense thicket of the analytic speech act theory of John Austin, the structuralist and poststructuralist theories of Jacques Derrida and
Pierre Bourdieu, psychoanalytic constructions in the style of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and German critical theory to conclude that state regulation of hate

Once the state has the power to legislate what can be said and not said , she arthat power will be coopted by conservative elements to defeat liberal causes and minority
rights. State power will also curtail the freedom of speech of private individuals that is the
very basis for effective antidotes to derogatory name calling . DeCew, however, painstakingly reviews the legal and
language should be resisted.
gues,

philosophical history of privacy rights as well as current debates about its scope and status before she takes on the question of whether feminists have any interest in
preserving a private sphere. For DeCew, too, a major target is MacKinnon, specifically her argument that leaving alone the privacy of home and family means leaving
men alone to abuse and dominate women. DeCew argues that decisions that protect the use of sexually explicit materials in the home, consensual sex practices in
private, and personal decisions about abortion are in the interest of women as well as men, even though in some cases, such as wife beating, there may be overriding

For
Butler, the danger is that the state becomes arbiter of what is and is not permissible speech,
allowing rulings that the erection of burning crosses by the Ku Klux Klan is protected speech
but that artistic expressions of gay sexuality or statements of gay identity are actions rather
than speech and so are not protected. The danger DeCew sees is that once the right to privacy is denied or narrowly defined, the state
considerations that justify state intervention. Both authors argue persuasively for a more careful look at the dangers lurking behind calls for state action.

can, on the grounds of immorality, move into women's personal lives to interfere with sexual expression, whether homosexual or heterosexual, or with the right to
choose an abortion established in Roe v. Wade. Both DeCew and Butler, however, provide alternative remedies for the admitted harm that state action is intended to
redress. For DeCew, the right to privacy is not absolute; like freedom, it can be overridden by other rights thus the state can intervene in domestic abuse cases

417

Kritik Answers
Given
the postmodern view that the subject can never magisterially use a lan guage with fixed
meanings according to clear intentions, it is always pos sible to subvert the conventional
meanings of words. What is said as a derogatory slur "nigger," "chick," "spic," or "gay," for example can be
"resignified," that is, returned in such a manner that its conventional meaning in practices of
discrimination and abuse is subverted. Butler gives as examples the revalorization of terms like "black" or "gay," the satirical citation of
because of the physical harm being done. Butler's remedy for harmful hate language is more deeply rooted in postmodern theories of the speaking subject.

racial or sexual slurs, reappropriation in street language or rap music, and expressions of homosexual identity in art depicting graphic sex. These are expressions that
any erosion in First Amendment rights might endanger.

418

Kritik Answers

#4 Censorship Bad Turns: Ext (4/4)

LANGUAGE CRITIQUES UNDERMINE THE FREE-PLAY OF
DIALOGUE NECESSARY FOR EDUCATION
Matthew Roskoski

and Joe Peabody, A Linguistic and Philosophical Critique of

Language Arguments, 1991,

http://debate.uvm.edu/Library/DebateTheoryLibrary/Roskoski&Peabody-LangCritiques, accessed
10/17/02
As Brennan notes, the mandate "to inculcate moral and political values is not a general
warrant to act as 'thought police' stifling discussion of all but state-approved topics and
advocacy of all but the official position." (Brennan 577). Not only does the first amendment
create a moral or deontological barrier to language "arguments", the principles it defends
also create a pragmatic barrier. The free and sometimes irreverent discourse protected by
the first amendment is essential to the health and future success of our society. History has
borne out the belief that the freedom to challenge convictions is essential to our ability to
adapt to change. As Hyde and Fishman observe, university scholars must be allowed to
"think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable"
because "major discoveries and advances in knowledge are often highly unsettling and
distasteful to the existing order." This leads them to conclude that "we cannot afford" to
impose "orthodoxies, censorship, and other artificial barriers to creative thought" (Hyde &
Fishman 1485). Given the rapid pace of political and technological change that our society
faces, and given that debates often focus around the cutting edge of such changes, the
imposition of linguistic straitjackets upon the creative thought and critical thinking of
debaters would seem to uniquely jeopardize these interests. This is not just exaggerated
rhetoric, nor is it merely our old debate disadvantages in new clothes. Hyde & Fishman's
claims have been repeatedly validated by historical events. Had Elie Wiesel debated in
Germany, a "Zionist language" argument would not have been unlikely. As Bennett Katz has
argued, The essentiality of freedom in the community of American Universities is almost
self-evident... To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and
universities would imperil the future of our Nation... Teachers and students must always
remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding;
otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die. (Katz 156).

419

Kritik Answers

#7 Discourse Focus Trades off with

Action: 1AR
LANGUAGE CRITIQUES ARE COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE FOR
PROGRESSIVE POLITICS
David Foster Wallace, Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona College and MacArthur Fellow,
Atlantic Monthly, April 2001, p. 54-55.
There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the
dialect of progressive reform but is in factin its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms
of social equality for social equality itselfof vastly more help to conservatives and the U.S.
status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political
conservative who opposed taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be
delighted to watch PCE progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a
poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "preprosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive
legislation or higher marginal tax rates on corporations. (Not to mention that strict codes of
egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes
offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy leads to actual political change rather
than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE functions as a form of censorship, and
censorship always serves the status quo.)

FOCUSING ON HOW WE TALKED ABOUT THE ISSUE, RATHER THAN HOW TO

DEAL WITH IT, TRADES OF WITH ACTIVISM AND DESTROYS THE ABILITY TO
FORM COALITIONS
Ward Churchill, Keetoowah Cherokee, 25+ year member of the American Indian Movement and
Professor, Indigenous Studies, University of Colorado Boulder. FROM A NATIVE SON, 19 96 p. 460.
There can be little doubt that matters of linguistic appropriateness and precision are of
serious and legitimate concern. By the same token, however, it must be conceded that such
preoccupations arrive at a point of diminishing return. After that, they degenerate rapidly
into liabilities rather than benefits to comprehension. By now, it should be evident that
much of what is mentioned in this article falls under the latter category; it is, by and large,
inept, esoteric, and semantically silly, bearing no more relevance in the real world than the
question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Ultimately, it is a means to
stultify and divide people rather than stimulate and unite them. Nonetheless, such issues
of word choice have come to dominate dialogue in a significant and apparently growing
segment of the Left. Speakers, writers, and organizers or persuasions are drawn, with
increasing vociferousness and persistence, into heated confrontations, not about what
theyve said, but about how theyve said it. Decisions on whether to enter into alliances, or
even to work with other parties, seem more and more contingent not upon the prospect of a
common agenda, but upon mutual adherence to certain elements of a prescribed vernacular.
Mounting quantities of a progressive time, energy, and attention are squandered in
perversions of Maos principle of criticism/self-criticism now variously called process,
line sharpening, or even struggle in which there occurs a virtually endless stream of
talk about how to talk about the issues. All of this happens at the direct expense of actually
understanding the issues themselves, much less doing something about them. It is
impossible to escape the conclusion that the dynamic at hand adds up to a pronounced
avoidance syndrome, a masturbatory ritual through which an opposition nearly paralyzed by
its own deeply felt sense of impotence pretends to be engaged in something meaningful. In
the end, it reduces to a tragic delusion at best, cynical game playing or intentional disruption
at worst. With this said, it is only fair to observe that its high time to get off this nonsense,
and on with the real work of effecting positive social change.

420

Kritik Answers

#7 Discourse Focus Trades off with

Action: Ext
PUNISHING LANGUAGE TRADES OFF WITH MORE
EFFECTIVE SOCIAL CHANGE
Matthew Roskoski

and Joe Peabody, A Linguistic and Philosophical Critique of

Language Arguments, 1991,

http://debate.uvm.edu/Library/DebateTheoryLibrary/Roskoski&Peabody-LangCritiques, accessed
10/17/02
Previously, we have argued that the language advocates have erroneously reversed the
causal relationship between language and reality. We have defended the thesis that reality
shapes language, rather than the obverse. Now we will also contend that to attempt to solve
a problem by editing the language which is symptomatic of that problem will generally trade
off with solving the reality which is the source of the problem. There are several reasons why
this is true. The first, and most obvious, is that we may often be fooled into thinking that
language "arguments" have generated real change. As Graddol and Swan observe, "when
compared with larger social and ideological struggles, linguistic reform may seem quite a
trivial concern," further noting "there is also the danger that effective change at this level is
mistaken for real social change" (Graddol & Swan 195). The second reason is that the
language we find objectionable can serve as a signal or an indicator of the corresponding
objectionable reality. The third reason is that restricting language only limits the overt
expressions of any objectionable reality, while leaving subtle and hence more dangerous
expressions unregulated. Once we drive the objectionable idea underground it will be more
difficult to identify, more difficult to root out, more difficult to counteract, and more likely to
have its undesirable effect. The fourth reason is that objectionable speech can create a
"backlash" effect that raises the consciousness of people exposed to the speech. Strossen
observes that "ugly and abominable as these expressions are, they undoubtably have had the
beneficial result of raising social consciousness about the underlying societal problem..."
(560).

421

Kritik Answers

#8 Alternative Fails: 1AR

CRITICISMS OF LANGUAGE FAIL WE CANNOT
OBJECTIVELY DETERMINE WHETHER CERTAIN WORDS
ARE GOOD OR BAD. WE CAN ONLY USE LANGUAGE AS A
TOOL NOT AS AN ACCURATE PICTURE OF THE WORLD
Rorty, Prof of Philosophy at Stanford, 82 (Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism,
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/index.htm)

This Davidsonian way of looking at language lets us avoid hypostatising Language in the way
in which the Cartesian epistemological tradition, and particularly the idealist tradition which built upon Kant,
hypostatised Thought. For it lets us see language not as a tertium quid between Subject and
Object, nor as a medium in which we try to form pictures of reality, but as part of the
behaviour of human beings. On this view, the activity of uttering sentences is one of the
things people do in order to cope with their environment . The Deweyan notion of language as tool rather than
picture is right as far as it goes. But we must be careful not to phrase this analogy so as to suggest that
one can separate the tool, Language, from its users and inquire as to its "adequacy" to
achieve our purposes. The latter suggestion presupposes that there is some way of breaking
out of language in order to compare it with something else. But there is no way to think
about either the world or our purposes except by using our language. One can use language
to criticise and enlarge itself, as one can exercise one's body to develop and strengthen and enlarge it, but one cannot see language-as-a-whole in
relation to something else to which it applies, or for which it is a means to an end. The arts and the sciences, and philosophy as their self-reflection and integration,
constitute such a process. of enlargement and strengthening. But Philosophy, the attempt to say "how language relates to the world" by saying what makes certain

It is the impossible attempt to step

outside our skins-the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and
self-criticism-and compare ourselves with something absolute. This Platonic urge to escape
from the finitude of one's time and place, the "merely conventional" and contingent aspects
of one's life, is responsible for the original Platonic distinction between two kinds of true
sentence. By attacking this latter distinction, the holistic "pragmaticising" strain in analytic
philosophy has helped us see how the metaphysical urge -common to fuzzy Whiteheadians and razor-sharp
"scientific realists"-works. It has helped us be sceptical about the idea that some particular science
(say physics) or some particular literary genre (say Romantic poetry, or transcendental philosophy) gives us
that species of true sentence which is not just a true sentence, but rather a piece of Truth
itself. Such sentences may be very useful indeed, but there is not going to be a Philosophical explanation of this utility. That explanation, like the
sentences true, or certain actions or attitudes good or rational, is, on this view, impossible.

original justification of the assertion of the sentence, will be a parochial matter-a comparison of the sentence with alternative sentences formulated in
the same or in other vocabularies. But such comparisons are the business of, for example, the physicist or the poet, or perhaps of the philosopher - not of
the Philosopher, the outside expert on the utility, or function, or metaphysical status of Language or of Thought. The Wittgenstein-Sellars-QuineDavidson attack on distinctions between classes of sentences is the special contribution of analytic philosophy to the anti-Platonist insistence on the
ubiquity of language. This insistence characterises both pragmatism and recent "Continental" philosophising. Here are some examples: Man makes the
word, and the word means nothing which the man has not made it mean, and that only to some other man. But since man can think only by means of
words or other external symbols, these might turn around and say: You mean nothing which we have not taught you, and then only so far as you address
some word as the interpretant of your thought. . . . . . . the word or sign which man uses is the man himself Thus my language is the sum-total of myself;
for the man is the thought. (Peirce) Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at
one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. (Derrida) . . . psychological nominalism, according to which all
awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities-indeed, all awareness even of particulars-is a linguistic affair .
(Sellars) It is only in language that one can mean something by something. (Wittgenstein) Human experience is essentially linguistic. (Gadamer) . . . man is in the
process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon. (Foucault) Speaking about language turns language almost inevitably
into an object . . . and then its reality vanishes. (Heidegger) This chorus should not, however, lead us to think that something new and exciting has recently been

They are
saying that attempts to get back behind language to something which "grounds" it, or which
it "expresses," or to which it might hope to be "adequate," have not, worked. The ubiquity of
language is a matter of language moving into the vacancies left by the failure of all the
various candidates for the position of "natural starting-points" of thought, starting-points
which are prior to and independent of the way some culture speaks or spoke . (Candidates for such
discovered about Language-e.g., that it is more prevalent than had previously been thought. The authors cited are making only negative points.

starting-points include clear and distinct ideas, sense-data, categories of the pure understanding, structures of prelinguistic consciousness, and the like.)
Peirce and Sellars and Wittgenstein are saying that the regress - of interpretation cannot be cut off by the sort of "intuition" which Cartesian
epistemology took for granted. Gadamer and Derrida are saying that our culture has been dominated by the notion of a "transcendental signified" which,
by cutting off this regress, would bring us out from contingency and convention and into the Truth. Foucault is saying that we are gradually losing our
grip on the "metaphysical comfort" which that Philosophical tradition provided-its picture of Man as having a "double" (the soul, the Noumenal Self)
who uses Reality's own language rather than merely the vocabulary of a time and a place. Finally, Heidegger is cautioning that if we try to make
Language into a new topic of Philosophical inquiry we shall simply recreate the hopeless old Philosophical puzzles which we used to raise about Being or
Thought. This last point amounts to saying that what Gustav Bergmann called "the linguistic turn" should not be seen as the logical positivists saw it-as
enabling us to ask Kantian questions without having to trespass on the psychologists' turf by talking, with Kant, about "experience" or "consciousness."

analytic
philosophy of language was able to transcend this Kantian motive and adopt a naturalistic,
behaviouristic attitude toward language. This attitude has led it to the same outcome as the
"Continental" reaction against the traditional Kantian problematic , the reaction found in Nietzsche and
That was, indeed, the initial motive for the "turn,"" but (thanks to the holism and pragmatism of the authors I have cited)

Heidegger. This convergence shows that the traditional association of analytic philosophy with tough-minded positivism and of "Continental" philosophy with tender-

The pragmaticisation of analytic philosophy gratified the logical

positivists' hopes, but not in the fashion which they had envisaged. it did not find a way for
Philosophy to become "scientific," but rather found a way of setting Philosophy to one side.
minded Platonism is completely misleading.

This post-positivistic kind of analytic philosophy thus comes to resemble the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida tradition in beginning with criticism of Platonism and
ending in criticism of Philosophy as such. Both traditions are now in a period of doubt about their own status. Both are living between a repudiated past and a dimly
seen post-Philosophical future.

422

Kritik Answers

423

Kritik Answers

Holocaust Trivialization Answers: 2AC

(1/3)
1. NO LINK WE DONT ASSERT THAT AN EVENT WILL
OCCUR THAT IS IDENTICAL THE HOLOCAUST, BUT SHOW
THE POTENTIAL FOR ATROCITIES TO OCCUR IN THE
FUTURE BASED ON HISTORICAL EXAMPLES, SUCH AS THE
ONE PERPETRATED IN NAZI GERMANY
2. TURN - REJECTION OF HOLOCAUST RHETORIC
DEPOLITICIZES IT AND RESULTS IN FURTHERING OF
VICTIMIZATION, IGNORING THIRD WORLD VIOLENCE, AND
THE FAILURE OF RADICAL POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
Zizek 2001

[Slavoj, Go away, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, 2001, New York: Verso, 2001, 678//uwyo]
, this very depoliticization of the Holocaust,
its elevation into the properly sublime Evil, the un'touchable Exception beyond the reach of
'normal' political discourse, can also be a political act of utter cynical manipulation, a
political intervention aiming at legitimizing a certain kind of hierarchical political relation.
First, it is part of the postmodern strategy of depoliticization and/or victimization. Second, it
disqualifies forms of Third World violence for which Western states are (co) responsible as minor in
comparison with the Absolute Evil of the Holocaust. Third, it serves to cast a shadow over every rad -ical political
project - to reinforce the Denkverbot against a radical political imagination: 'Are you aware that what you propose leads ultimately to the Holocaust?' In short:
notwithstanding the unquestionable sincerity of some of its proponents , the 'objective' ideologico-political content of the
depoliticization of the Holocaust, of its ele-vation into the abyssal absolute Evil, is the political pact of aggressive
Zionists and Western Rightist anti-Semites at the expense oftoday's radical political
possibilities. In it, Israeli expansionism towards Palestinians para-doxically joins hands with the Western anti-Semite's avoidance of the concrete analysis of
the political dynamics of anti-Semitism -of how this same dynamics is today pursued by other means (or, rather, with other goals, displaced on to other targets ).
Are these not the terms that designate the Lacanian encounter of the Real? However

3. ENDORSING THE UNIQUENESS OF THE HOLOCAUST

IMPLICITLY DENIES OTHER HISTORICAL GENOCIDES,
MAKING FUTURE GENOCIDE INEVITABLE
Stannard 96

[David E., Prof. Am Studies @ Hawaii, Uniqueness as Denial, Is the Holocaust Unique?
Ed. Rosenbaum, 197]
In addition to the damage that is inherent tin the cultural violence of genocide denial there is the matter of the future dangers that it promotes. As Roger Smith, Eric

:
Where scholars deny genocide, in the face of decisive evidence that it has occurred, they contribute to a false
consciousness that can have the most dire reverberations. Their message, in effect, is:
murderers did not really murder; victims were not really killed, mass murder requires no confrontation,
no reflection, but should be ignored, glossed over. In this way scholars lend their considerable authority to the acceptance of this ultimate
human crime. More than that, they encourage indeed invite a repetition of that crime from virtually
any source in the immediate or distant future. By closing their minds to truth, that is, such
scholars contribute to the deadly psychohistorical dynamic in which unopposed genocide
begets new genocides.
Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton recently have written regarding the continuing denial of the Armenian holocaust

This, of course, is one of the great and justified fears that Jews long have harbored regarding the threat of Holocaust denial that it invites repetition and anti-Jewish

when advocates of the allegedly unique suffering of the Jews during the
Holocaust themselves participate in denial of other historical genocides and such denial is
inextricably interwoven with the very claim of uniqueness they thereby actively participate
mass violence and killing. But

424

Kritik Answers
in making it much easier for those other genocides to be repeated. And, in the case of genocides against the native
peoples of the Americas, not to be repeated but to continue. As, indeed, they are at this very moment. For never, really, have they stopped .

425

Kritik Answers

Holocaust Trivialization Answers: 2AC

(2/3)
4. OUR COMPARISONS DONT DENY THE UNIQUENESS OF
THE SHOAH, OUR COMPARISON OF THE DIFFERENCES AND
SIMILARITIES PRECLUDES SUCH A BLANKET ATTITUDE
AND DEMONSTRATES HOW EASY IT IS FOR NORMAL
PEOPLE TO LAPSE INTO ATROCITY
Lifton & Markusen 90

[Robert, Psych prof at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Eric, Researcher at Danish
Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The Genocidal Mentality, 9-11//uwyo]
It is neither easy nor pleasant to invoke the Nazis for comparison with gorups within our
own democratic society. Our image of the Nazis tends to be that of thugs murderers, an
image they did much to earn. But students of Nazi genocide have long stressed what recent
work on the Nazi doctors has confimred: namely, that ordinary Germans became involved in
killing, people who had previously shown no particular inclination toward violence. These
findings are especially troubling because they bring the Nazis closer to the rest of us. We are
much more comfortable viewing them as a separate tribe of demons. But the painful truth is
that, they are more part of our century, more involved in historical and psychological
questions that still bedevil us, than we have wished to acknowledge. In our present
genocidal predicament, responsibility lies in seeking to draw form the Nazi project lessions
that might head off the ultimate nuclear Auschwitz.
To use the Nazis comparatively in this manner is in no way to deny the uniqueness of their
Holocaust. No other historical genocide has been so systematically carried out against an
entire people, even to attempt to round up Jews from virtually all over the weorld in order to
kill them. We therefore reject the revisionist position of some German historians to the
effect that the Holocaust is just one of the many examples of cruelty that dominate human
history, and should be given no special emphasis. We would, in fact, insist upon stressing
differences or disanalogies between the Nazi and nuclear situations. As Charles S. Maier
explains, while exploring similar quesitons, Comparison is a dual process that scrutinizes
two or more systems to learn what elements they have in common and what elements
distinguish them. It does not assert identity; it does not deny unique components.
The most fundamental difference, of course, is that Nazi mass killing is a matter of historical
record, so that (as one observer put it) even if nuclear-weapons arrangements are viewed as
an Auschwitz waiting to happen, no one is being gassed or cremated. The distinction is
between the actual and the potential. Another fundamental difference has to do with intent.
The Nazis killed designated victimes primarily Jews, but also Gypsies, Poles, Russians,
mental patients, and homosexuals. In contrast, the stated nuclear intent is to prevent war,
and the killing would take place only with a failure of that structure of deterrence. Still
another difference is the reality of a dangerous adversary: the Jews posed no threat to the
Nazis, but the Soviets pose a real military threat to us. And many more differences would
emerge with a fuller exploration of the complexities of German history. There is a final,
sobering difference having ot do with victimizers and victims. There was a clear-cut
distinction between the Nazis themselves as perpetrators and those they decided to kill. In
the nuclear case, should the weapons be used, there will be no such distinctions: everybody
would become a victim. At Nuremberg, after the Second World War, there was an attempt to
hold individuals and groups accountable for their role in killing. There can be no nuclear
Nuremberg; hope lies only in establishign responsibility for genocide prior to its occurring
responsibility for participating in a genocideal system and a genocidal process.

426

Kritik Answers

Holocaust Trivialization Answers: 2AC

(3/3)
5. PROHIBITING COMPARISONS BETWEEN THE HOLOCAUST
AND OTHER HISTORICAL OCCURRENCES PUTS US IN AN
IMPOSSIBLE POSITION OF NOT BEING ALLOWED TO
REFLECT ON IT, PLAYING INTO THE HANDS OF HOLOCAUST
DENIERS
Zizek 2001

[Slavoj, Prof. @Inst. Of Sociology, U. of Ljubliana, Repeating Lenin, 2001,

www.lacan.com/replenin.htm Acc. 8-20-04]
In a closer analysis, one should exhibit how the cultural relativism of the "right-to-narrate"
orientation contains its own apparent opposite, the fixation on the Real of some trauma
which resists its narrativization. This properly dialectical tension sustains today's the
academic "holocaust industry." My own ultimate experience of the holocaust-industry police
occurred in 1997 at a round table in the Centre Pompidou in Paris: I was viciously attacked
for an intervention in which (among other things) I claimed, against the neoconservatives
deploring the decline of faith today, that the basic need of a normal human being is not to
believe himself, but to have another subject who will believe for him, at his place - the
reaction of one of the distinguished participants was that, by claiming this, I am ultimately
endorsing the holocaust revisionism, justifying the claim that, since everything is a
discursive construct, this includes also the holocaust, so it is meaningless to search for what
really happened there... Apart from displaying a hypocritical paranoia, my critic was doubly
wrong: first, the holocaust revisionists (to my knowledge) NEVER argue in the terms of the
postmodern discursive constructionism, but in the terms of very empirical factual analysis:
their claims range from the "fact" that there is no written document in which Hitler would
have ordered the holocaust, to the weird mathematics of "taking into account the number of
gas ovens in Auschwitz, it was not possible to burn so many corpses." Furthermore, not only
is the postmodern logic of "everything is a discursive construction, there are no direct firm
facts" NEVER used to deflate the holocaust; in a paradox worth noting, it is precisely the
postmodern discursive constructionists (like Lyotard) who tend to elevate the holocaust into
the supreme ineffable metaphysical Evil - the holocaust serves them as the untouchablesacred Real, as the negative of the contingent language games.26
The problem with those who perceive every comparison between the holocaust and other
concentration camps and mass political crimes as an inadmissible relativization of the
holocaust, is that they miss the point and display their own doubt: yes, the holocaust WAS
unique, but the only way to establish this uniqueness is to compare it with other similar
phenomena and thus demonstrate the limit of this comparison. If one does not risk this
comparison, of one prohibits it, one gets caught in the Wittgensteinian paradox of
prohibiting to speak about that about which we cannot speak: if we stick to the prohibition
of the comparison, the gnawing suspicion emerges that, if we were to be allowed to compare
the holocaust with other similar crimes, it would be deprived of its uniqueness...

427

Kritik Answers

A2 Representation Links (1/4)

REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE DOES NOT PRECLUDE THE
NEED FOR CONCRETE ACTION
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, Truth, Politics, and Postmodernism,
Spinoza Lectures, 1997, p. 51-2
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very
important meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida

the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the writers who are
post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good experimentalist social
democrats when it comes to actual political activity. I suspect, for example, that Gray, Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found
usually replies that
labeled `

ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist philosophers have gotten a bad
name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like `impossible; `self-contradictory' and `unrepresentable'. They have helped
create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more generally, to the `metaphysics of

I am all for getting rid of

the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and unrepresentability is
counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the metaphor of things being accurately
presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible.

represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for philosophers, and we would be better
off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate representation' was never a fruitful way

Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls "a full presence
beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity will not have
changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from psychoanalysis. All that we
to describe intellectual progress.

have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss which the Enlightenment

We have been given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress has been
made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political program. Since Darwin we have come to suspect that whether
such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky .
offered.

FOCUS ON REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE WORSENS REAL

VIOLENCE
Elana Gomel, Tel-Aviv University, Written in Blood: Serial Killing and Narratives of Identity, Post
Identity, Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 1999, p. 24-25, http://ids.udmercy.edu/pi/2.1/PI21_2470.pdf, accessed 1/28/02
ONE CAN START WITH FOUCAULTS famous and endlessly circulated statement in The Order of Things: It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to
think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear as soon as this knowledge has
discovered a new form. (xxiii) Man the Universal Subject, a cookie-cutter mold of (post)technological identity, stamping out simulacra of individuality. But why should
we be comforted and experience relief at the thought of his imminent dissolution? Perhaps because, at least from Adorno on, the subject of reason has also been

the Enlightenment has been reconceptualized as the

universal killer, armed with the most potent of weaponsrepresentation. In their Introduction to the
identified as the subject of violence. The universal Man of

collection typically entitled Violence of Representation Armstrong and Tennenhouse offer the basic formula of this approach: The violence of representation is the
suppression of difference (8). In this particular reading of Foucault the discursive constructedness of identity is directly responsible for corporeal violence inflicted by
some (post)modern subjects upon others. In his recent book Serial Killerr and in the series of articles that preceded it Mark Seltzer applies this insight to the
fascinating and grisly phenomenon of serial killing, variously identified also as stranger killing and sometimes lust murder. For Seltzer the enigma of the serial

The serial killer, I will be arguing, is in part defined by

such a radicalized experience of typicality within. Simply put, murder by numbers (as serial
murder has been called) is the form of violence proper to statistical persons . (30-1) Violence of
representation, representation of violence and violence per se smoothly link into an
unbroken chain, leading from statistics to mayhem and from typology of subjects to fingertyping of putrefying bodies. My goal in this essay is
to put a hitch into this chain, to question the easy fit between discursive moulds of identity and the individual self-experience of serial killers,
and to suggest that represenration may be not so much the cause of violence as a post factum
defence against it. I do not imply, however, that violence in general or serial murder in particular are totally free from the constraints of discourse or that
killers personality consists in an experience of typicality at the level of the subject

the identity of the serial killer is not constructed using the building blocks of cultural narratives (though the narratives in question are more variegated than Seltzer

the serial form of violence is conditioned not so much by the

monolithic coherence of representation as by its breakdown. The violent behavior of a serial killer is not a direct
suggests). Rather, I would claim that

outcome of any social construction but a random, causeless choice which is retrospectively incorporated into a generic narrative of identity. The repeated ritualistic
violence, then, becomes a means of reinforcing this identity but achieves precisely the opposite, its complete disintegration. Rather than being generated by
representation, corporeal violence offers a resistance to it.

428

Kritik Answers

A2 Representation Links (2/4)

THEY MISUNDERSTAND COGNITION - IDENTIFICATION
WITH IMAGES OF DOMINATION UNDERMINES
RELATIONSHIPS OF SUBORDINATION
Krips '99

[Henry, Professor of Communication at the Pitt, Fetish: an erotics of culture, Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 1999, 5-6//uwyo-ajl]
Arguments against linking the cultural and psychic realms also seem apposite in criticizing
MacKinnon's claim that there exists a direct causal connection between pornography and a
psychic characteristic of its male consumers, namely sexual aggression. At a theoretical
level, her argument fails to take into account Freud's point that identification with a
phantasy figure flows readily across gender lines. For example, in the Dora case, Freud argues
that Dora's behavior manifests an unconscious desire for Frau K., her father's lover and suitor's wife.
For Freud her desire does not indicate any sexual instability. Instead, through an identification with her
father's desire, it signals an unconscious paternal identification. In other words, for Freud the

significant aspect of Dora's phantasy is not the sexual content of the desire but rather the
paternal position from which she engages with it. By parity of reasoning, it follows that quite
"normal" male readers of porn may identify with the position of woman victim rather than
male aggressor, in which case their aggressive tendencies cannot be reinforced in the
simplistic way that MacKinnon suggests.3 In short, as Laura Kipnis points out, neither the
biology nor gender of readers of Hustler magazine determines the form of their
identification with its pornographic materials, let alone forces them into a common psychic
response (Kipnis 1996, 196). In the same way, one may argue, gender-swapping phantasy games
played by Net users do not indicate their gender instability. On the contrary. one might turn the
argument around and conclude that the preponderance of biological males among Net users suggests
that even when playing at being a woman, they are engaging in a "boys' game."

429

Kritik Answers

A2 Representation Links (3/4)

THEIR CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATIONS IS UTOPIAN,
BECAUSE REPRESENTATION CAN NEVER BE PERFECT RECOGNIZING THAT OUR REPRESENTATIONS ARE
IMPERFECT OPENS US THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ETHICAL
RELATIONSHIP TO OTHERS
Colebrook,"Questioning Representation", 2000
a strain of nostalgia and utopianism runs through both forms of antirepresentationalism: both the desire to return to a world that is lived as present, rather than
subjectively re-presented, and the desire to overcome all commitments to presence in the celebration of a [End Page 59]
As I've already suggested,

differential, non-autonomous and post-human writing. If the concept of representation generates the consistent incoherence of a real that is then represented and a

, we have to ask ourselves whether we can cleanse thought of the risky

vocabulary of representation, whether we can return to the lived immediacy of pre-modern pre-subjective mutual recognition, or whether we
subject who then represents

can paste over our Cartesian separation and think a world that is not written by us but that writes itself. Is the representational antinomy or paradox an accident and is
it curable?
We might consider post-Kantian anti-representationalism as an increasing anti-subjectivism. Talk of schemes, representations, constructions, and paradigms does
generate notions of what these schemes are schemes of. To talk of representation as a construction, schematization or structuration also implies that there is one who
constructs, or that there is (to use Nietzsche's phrase) a doer behind the deed (Nietzsche 1967, 45). Representation presents us with what Michael Dummett refers to
as the danger of falling back into psychologism (1993, 129).
How possible is it to overcome these illusions and to remain within representation without appealing to what is, or, more important, without demanding autonomy?
Perhaps representation in both its epistemological and ethical/political senses is valuable precisely for the contradictions and tensions it presents for thought.
Consider, to begin with, knowledge as representation and the possibility that we might no longer trouble ourselves with an ultimate foundation for our
representations, and this because any attempt to do so would bring us up against our own representational limit. In Realism with a Human Face, Hilary Putnam
distinguishes between two broad readings of Wittgenstein's notion that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. The first response to such a predicament
would be to rule out as nonsensical any attempt to think outside my world. The second response, favored by Putnam, would be that this recognition brings us up
against the very notion that my world is my world (Putnam 1990, 28). While we have no appeal or foundation that lies outside representation, we sustain a
philosophical question in the face of this inability. We might say, then, that rather than be ruled out of court as a nonsensical illusion, representation functions as a
useful antinomy. The idea that our world is always a represented world renders us both responsible for that world, at the same time as we recognize our separation or
non-coincidence with the world.
And this might be how we can retrieve a notion of autonomy through representation in the second, ethical, sense. As I have already suggested, autonomy need not be
defined as the feature of pre-social or pre-linguistic [End Page 60] moral individuals. Rather, to take an act of speech as autonomous is to see it as not grounded in a
pre-given, law, nature or being. Thus the "subject" on this account would not be a substantive entity that authors its own meaning fully, but would be effected through
acts of representation. Why save a notion of subjective autonomy? Think of the converse situation: a world of writing effects, disowned speech acts, performances
without performers or moves in a game without players. Such a world imagines that it is possible to have a form of speech that does not carve out a point of view, that
is not located in a way of being, that presents no resistance to perpetual coming and self-invention. It is a world in which the representational illusion is disavowed, a
world in which speech takes place without the reifying error that I imagine myself as one who speaks. The idea that there is a writing, speaking or language that
represents and that can't be owned by subjects does, quite sensibly, challenge the idea that what we say is a straightforward representation of some pre-linguistic

what such an idea of a radically anonymous writing in general precludes is

the autonomy effects generated through processes of representation . Just as cultural studies--we are told-meaning or ownness. But

dreams of a world in which truth claims, foundations and representational claims are no longer made, and just as Richard Rorty imagines a world of ironists who
accept their language games as nothing more than games and themselves as nothing more than players (Rorty 1989, 80), so the attempt to think beyond autonomy
imagines a world in which what I say is not taken as issuing from the intention of some reified, congealed and illusory notion of man. But we might think of autonomy
alongside the antinomy of representation. To take demands as autonomous is to recognize them as both ungrounded, as well as being demands for a certain
grounding. If what I say makes a claim for autonomy, then it is both owned as what I say (and thereby institutes me as a subject), at the same time as the claim for
autonomy separates this saying from any pre-given subject. To be autonomous, a claim would have to be more than a determined expression of a subject; it would
have to have its own positive, singular and effective force. As Kant argued, true autonomy could not be thought of as issuing from a natural ground; but once we think
an autonomous law this generates the regulative idea (but not knowledge) of a subject from whom this law has issued.
Consider this antinomy in terms of some of the typical approaches to representation in popular culture--in particular, in popular feminism. It is widely asserted that
women are subordinated to alien domains of representation. Eating disorders are explained by referring to the non-representative nature of bodies in the media (Wolf
1990); pornography is [End Page 61] criticized as a misrepresentation of women as passive and compliant sexual objects (Dworkin 1982); and, in general, the notion
of stereo-type functions throughout feminism and other critical movements to suggest that subjects suffer from alien representations. This critical approach to alien,

representations more often than not issues in the demand for more accurate, authentic
or autonomous representations. In its simplest forms, the diagnosis of certain practices as a form of
representational violence is tied to the demand for an overcoming of the representational
divide. This demand would supposedly be met by more realistic images of women, by non-patriarchal or nonimposed or stereotypical

objectifying erotica, and through the freeing of women from the representational closure of the beauty myth. What is demanded, in short, is that the subject be
continuous with representations: that there might be a public domain of representation that is at one with one's inner being, where subjects would not regard
themselves as extrinsic to, or belied by, a general representational norm.
However, it is just this demand for non-separation from representation that sustains the problem, and part of this problem lies in not addressing the predicament of

. The idea of a representation that would not be alien to my being would only be
possible on two counts: either by resisting the necessary discontinuity of representation and insisting on the
possibility of a proper or essential representation, or by imagining that we could do away with being altogether, such
autonomy

that representation would not be seen as discontinuous or alien to any pre-presentational thing. These two possibilities might be cashed out as follows. On the one
hand, we could achieve a social domain of complete mutual recognition (perhaps something like the Greek polis or the bourgeois public sphere) in which the
individual is thoroughly at one with the social whole. There would be no need for a demand for representation precisely because what functioned as a normative
representation of the individual would already be thoroughly normal. The domain of representation would be entirely proper, not an alienation of my being, but its
adequate expression. On the other hand, the representational scar might be healed by a radical resistance to representation in general: the refusal of all norms,
stereotypes or reified concepts of the individual. This would issue in the pulverization of the representational domain, a multiplication of images, writing effects,
simulacra or texts without author, identity or subject.
On both these accounts, what is resisted, refused or targeted as a symptom is autonomy: the idea of a self or subject outside the domain of representation. In the first
model of recognition, autonomy is lamented as a [End Page 62] symptom of a public/private divide that has alienated the subject from socially recognizable being.
For, it is argued, I need only demand autonomy in a world that already seems set over against me, in a world that is not fully my world. In the second antirepresentational model of proliferating simulacra or the virtual, what is resisted is the idea that there is an autonomous subject who represents (or is represented).
There is, rather, nothing other than representation; and this means that, strictly speaking, we are no longer talking about representation. In both these cases, one
imagines a continuity with the world, a non-separation of representation such that the horrors of anthropologism are resisted: life is not subordinated to some alien,
imposed, or externally given notion of man.

continued

430

Kritik Answers

A2 Representation Links (4/4)

continued
what gets lost in this post-representational utopia (or retrieval of the pre-representational polity) is the
predicament of autonomy and its attendant responsibility. If we acknowledge an essential separation of representation, then we also have to
allow the question of who represents or what is demanding representation. The error of not doing so would be
anthropomorphism: a failure to recognize that experiencing a world is always experiencing
it in a certain way, from a certain point of view, and through a certain form of life. This does not entail substantive subjectivism - the idea that the world
But

is given to some pre-given subject. But the world is given in a certain way, and this establishes a position with regard to the world. Acknowledging this minimal form
of ownness or location of knowledge therefore entails that we cannot think of the world as writing itself, giving itself or offering itself in a dispersed, anonymous or
continuous representation. The idea of autonomy enables us to think the point or determination of the world's representation: autonomy, not in the sense of giving

the dream of a pre-representational world in which

disavows the extent to which this common good, as
common, must already have separated itself from the immediacy of any single experience. If
oneself a law, but in recognizing an effected lawfulness of the self. By contrast,
all human beings recognized themselves in a common good,

we think of autonomy as a responsibility for the essential separation of representation, then we bring back a fruitful tension.

To represent oneself is to submit to a trans-individual

system of language, signification or representation. But any such representational scheme can never be fully
disowned, rendered anonymous, collective, inhuman or fully dispersed beyond all subjectivity. Rather, the act of representation institutes autonomy, or places
The idea of autonomous representation is, perhaps, an oxymoron.

a self in a point of view. Autonomy ought not to be [End Page 63] defined in terms of a being that is then expressed. Rather, the procedure of autonomy is a
recognition that there is no foundational being other than its continual institution through a representation that dislocates itself from a prior presence. If we do not
recognize that representation effects an autonomy that it can then be seen to belie, if we try to overcome this scar of representation, then we do so at the expense of
forgetting what it is to think. In short, we attack the error of anthropologism--the idea of a general human subject who represents us all--with the error of
anthropomorphism: the idea of a world that is fully and adequately given, without representation, separation or the contribution of thought

REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE IS NOT THE SAME AS

ACTUAL VIOLENCE
Elana Gomel, Post Identity, Winter 1999
http://ids.udmercy.edu/pi/2.1/PI21_24-70.pdf
The universal Man of the Enlightenment has been reconceptualized as the universal killer,
armed with the most potent of weaponsrepresentation. In their Introduction to the
collection typically entitled Violence of Representation Armstrong and Tennenhouse offer
the basic formula of this approach: The violence of representation is the suppression of
difference (8). In this particular reading of Foucault the discursive constructedness of
identity is directly responsible for corporeal violence inflicted by some (post)modern
subjects upon others. In his recent book Serial Killers and in the series of articles that
preceded it Mark Seltzer applies this insight to the fascinating and grisly phenomenon of
serial killing, variously identified also as stranger killing and sometimes lust murder. For
Seltzer the enigma of the serial killers personality consists in an experience of typicality at
the level of the subject:
The serial killer, I will be arguing, is in part defined by such a radicalized experience of
typicality within. Simply put, murder by numbers (as serial murder has been called) is the
form of violence proper to statistical persons. ( 301)
Violence of representation, representation of violence and violence per se smoothly link into
an unbroken chain, leading from statistics to mayhem and from typology of subjects to
fingertyping of putrefying bodies. My goal in this essay is to put a hitch into this chain, to
question the easy fit between discursive moulds of identity and the individual selfexperience of serial killers, and to suggest that representation may be not so much the cause
of violence as a post factum defence against it.
I do not imply, however, that violence in general or serial murder in particular are totally
free from the constraints of discourse or that the identity of the serial killer is not
constructed using the building blocks of cultural narratives (though the narratives in
question are more variegated than Seltzer suggests). Rather, I would claim that the serial
form of violence is conditioned not so much by the monolithic coherence of representation
as by its breakdown

431

Kritik Answers

A2 Indigenous Peoples Labels Bad:

2AC
CAN APPROPRIATE FLAWED RHETORIC OF OTHERS IN
ORDER TO CHALLENGE IT AS LONG AS OUR OWN RHETORIC
IS LIBERATORY
Pewewardy 99

[Cornel, Professor of Education at University of Kansas, Multicultural Educaiton, Vol 6 No

3, Spring 1999, 6//uwyo-ajl]
Previous research focusing on aboriginal peoples in the United States have used American
Indian, Indian, and Native American as the nomenclature for this population. This article
subverts this traditiona by instead using the terms Indigenous Peoples and First Nations
People. These terms are capitalized because they are proper nouns (particular persons) and
not adjectives (words describing nouns). It is also capitalized to signifiy and recognize the
cultural heterogeneity and political sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples in the western
hemisphere (Yellow Bird, personal communication, 1997). In this respect, the consciousness
of the oppressor transforms Inidgenous identity into a commodity of its domination and
disposal (Freire, 1997). Ceasing to call Indigenosu Peoples American Indians is more than
an attempt at political correctness. It is an act of intellectual liberation and it is a correction
to a distorting narrative of imperialist discovery and progress that has been maintained far
too long by Europeans and Euro-Americans. Thus, American Indian and Indian are
sometiems used interchangeably in the vernacular of this article only when trying to make a
point in an attempt to liberate and combat linguistic hegemony, which is both a direct and
indrect power block to the identity of Indigenous Peoples (Yellow Bird, personal
communication, 1997).

FOCUSING ON LABELS FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES REIFIES

NON-INDIGENOUS RIGHTS TO LAND AND DEFLECTS
LEGITIMATE CRITICISM, CREATING MORE
DISEMPOWERMENT
dErrico 98

[Peter, Prof of Legal Studies at University of Massachusettes/Amherst, Native American

Studies A Note on the Name, www.umass.edu/nativestudies/name.html, April 1998, acc
9-20-04//uwyo-ajl]
Concern for political correctness focused more on appearances than reality. As John Trudell
observed at the time, "They change our name and treat us the same." Basic to the treatment
is an insistence that the original inhabitants of the land are not permitted to name
themselves. As an added twist, it seems that the only full, un-hyphenated Americans are
those who make no claim of origin beyond the shores of this land. Many of these folk assert
that they are in fact the real "native" Americans.

432

Kritik Answers

EPrime Answers: 2AC (1/3)

EPRIME EXISTS ONLY AS A LINGUISTIC TOOL- IT IS NOT AN
INSTRUMENT OF POWER
WILSON NO DATE

[Robert Anton, nqa, http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm ]

Another concern I hear from people involves a false belief that those who advocate the use of
E-prime wish to change the English language through some form of coercion, or lawful
action. Folks, E-prime serves as a linguistic tool, not as an instrument of power. I know of no
advocate of E-prime, including its inventors, who desire to change the history of literature or
to force people to use E-prime. Almost all of the works of literature, poetry, and religious
scripture contain abundant uses of non-E-prime and I've yet to meet an E-prime advocate
who wishes to change that.

EPRIME EXCLUDES ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF LANGUAGEUSING EPRIME IS CENSORSHIP

FRENCH 1992

[James D, Computer Programmer that writes a lot about linguistics and semantics including
articles published in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Top Ten Arguments Against Eprime,
Et Cetera, http://learn-gs.org/library/etc/49-2-french.pdf //wyo-pinto]
THE CLAIM THAT E-Prime has an inherent, beneficial effect on
a person's writing ability seems highly questionable, considering
that E-Prime deliberately eliminates a whole class of
statements from the language, resulting in fewer alternatives .
The English writer can use all of the statements available to
the E-Prime writer, plus a whole class of statements containing
the verb "to be." The greater variety of available wordings
should make the English writer's efforts more interesting
to read, not less. (Any bad writing that occurs because of the
over-use of the verb "to be" - a common failing - can be
more easily overcome by simply cutting back on one's use of
"to be," rather than resorting to E-Prime .)

YOUR CONFLICT CLAIMS ARE BULLSHIT- CONTEXT SOLVES

THE LINKS TO YOUR ARGUMENT
FRENCH 1992

[James D, Computer Programmer that writes a lot about linguistics and semantics including
articles published in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Top Ten Arguments Against Eprime,
Et Cetera, http://learn-gs.org/library/etc/49-2-french.pdf //wyo-pinto]
The harmful effects that may result from the use of the isofidentity and the is-of-predication are often ameliorated by
the context, and so the need to eliminate all such statements
from our language is not as great as the advocates of E-Prime
apparently assume. It is one thing to say, "The rose is red" in
a flat statement of "fact"; it is quite another to say, "The rose is
red to me." If in response to the question, "What does John
Jones do for a living?" I answer, "He's a professor," there
seems to be little that a general semanticist should quarrel
with, given that the response is occurring within the context
of asking what the man does for a living, a context that greatly
affects the meaning of the answer .

433

Kritik Answers

EPrime Answers: 2AC (2/3)

NO BENEFIT TO EPRIME- IT SHUTS OFF LANGUAGE
FRENCH 1992

[James D, Computer Programmer that writes a lot about linguistics and semantics including
articles published in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Top Ten Arguments Against Eprime,
Et Cetera, http://learn-gs.org/library/etc/49-2-french.pdf //wyo-pinto]
The range of perfectly acceptable "to be" statements covers
a vast expanse, and includes asymmetrical relations, e.g., "Mt.
McKinley is higher in elevation than Mt . Shasta"; negation,
"The map is not the territory" ; location, "Oakland is on the
west coast" ; auxiliary, "It is raining," "I am going to the store,"
etc.; and possibly many other unidentified forms, e.g., "I am
aware of that ." These forms must be sacrificed when adopting
E-Prime, at considerable cost for no proven benefit .

TO BE KEY TO PROGRESS
FRENCH 1992

[James D, Computer Programmer that writes a lot about linguistics and semantics including
articles published in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Top Ten Arguments Against Eprime,
Et Cetera, http://learn-gs.org/library/etc/49-2-french.pdf //wyo-pinto]
There may be considerable benefits to humankind in the
use of the verb "to be" that the formulations of general semantics
do not take into consideration . We know that one of
the best languages for time-binding is mathematics, a language
that relies heavily on the notion of equivalence and
equality. "Y = Z" seems quite similar in form to "John Jones
is that professor." Mathematicians do not ascribe content to
their languages, however, whereas English speakers frequently
confuse language and "reality ." For the purposes of
time-binding and progress, it may be better to keep "to be" in
the language - but cut the link between identity-in-thelanguage
and identification-in-our-reactions (by training ourselves
in general semantics) - rather than to take a meat-axe
to the verb "to be ."

434

Kritik Answers

EPrime Answers: 2AC (3/3)

EPRIME STOPS THE HUMAN RACE FROM ADVANCING AND
SHUTS OFF INDIVIDUAL AGENCY
FRENCH 1992

[James D, Computer Programmer that writes a lot about linguistics and semantics including
articles published in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Top Ten Arguments Against Eprime,
Et Cetera, http://learn-gs.org/library/etc/49-2-french.pdf //wyo-pinto]
The phrase "the natural order of evaluation," as a general
semantics formulation, refers to the process of moving from
lower orders of abstraction to higher; from, for example, the
notions of test-taking, attending classes, and reading textbooks,
to the generalized notion of "student ." A civilization
advances when it can move from the idea of individual trees
to that of "forest." Korzybski claimed that the capacity to produce
higher and higher abstractions leads to a general consciousness
of abstracting, which he described as "the very key
to further human evolution ." (Science and Sanity, 3rd ed.,
p.xxi) E-Prime tends to make the expression of higher orders
of abstraction more difficult; instead of describing someone
as a student, for example, the E-Prime speaker is more likely
to say, "She attends classes at the university," or some such
thing. That sort of forced return to lower orders of abstraction
may have drawbacks that the advocates of E-Prime have
not examined . It would seem more in line with the timebinding
of the human race, to leave the individual free to
choose the appropriate order of abstraction in the given case,
rather than to erect a structure that forces him or her to lower
orders. Of course, many individuals do neglect the lower
orders of abstraction in their talking and reacting, but training
in general semantics may be a better prescription for that
malady than E-Prime .

435

Kritik Answers

EPrime Bad (Jack Attack!)

EPRIME IS AN INSUFFICIENT ACTIVIST MOVE THE STATIC
NATURE OF THE TO BE VERB IS RECREATED BETWEEN
THE LINES
Burroughs '69

[William S., amazing writer and junkie, The Job, 199//uwyo]

Consider now the human voice as a weapon. To what extent can the unaided human voice duplicate effects that can be done with a tape recorder? Learning to speak
with the mouth shut, thus displacing your speech, is fairly easy. You can also learn to speak backwards which is fairly difficult. I have seen people who can repeat

IS IT
POSSIBLE TO ACTUALLY SCRAMBLE SPEECH? A FAR-REACHING BIOLOGIC WEAPON CAN BE FORGED FROM A NEW
what you are saying after you and finish at the same time. This is a most disconcerting trick, particularly when practiced on a mass scale at a political rally.

LANGUAGE. In fact such a language already exists. It exists as Chinese, a total language closer to the multi-level structure of experience, with a script derived from
hieroglyphs, more closely related to the objects and areas described. The equanimity of the Chinese is undoubtedly derived from their language being structured for
greater sanity. I notice the Chinese, wherever they are, retain the written and spoken language, while other immigrant peoples will lose their language in two

. THE AIM OF THE PROJECT IS TO BUILD A LANGUAGE IN WHICH CERTAIN

FALSIFICATIONS INHERENT IN ALL EXISTING WESTERN LANGUAGES WILL BE
INCAPABLE OF FORMULATION. The follow-falsifications to be deleted from the proposed language.
The IS of identity. You are an animal. You are a body. Now whatever you may be you are not an "animal," you are not a "body," because these are
verbal labels. The IS of identity always carries the implication of that and nothing else, and it also
carries the assignment of permanent condition. To stay that way. All naming callling presupposes
the IS of identity. The concept is unnecessary in a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian and in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun IS
in the sky, sun in sky suffices. The verb to be can easily be omitted from any language and the followers
of Count Korzybski have done this, eliminating the verb to be in English. HOWEVER, IT IS
DIFFICULT TO TIDY UP THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BY ARBITRARY EXCLUSION OF
CONCEPTS WHICH REMAIN IN FORCE SO LONG AS THE UNCHANGED LANGUAGE IS
SPOKEN"
generations

436

Kritik Answers

**Fear Bad**
A2 Fear of Death Bad: 2AC (1/5)
1. NO LINK THEIR EVIDENCE IS DESCRIPTIVE OF PEOPLE
WHO ARE OBSESSED WITH DEATH IN THE PAST AND NOT
ADVOCACY OF POLICIES THAT ACTUALLY PREVENT
FUTURE VIOLENCE, LIKE THE 1AC
2. NOT COMPETITIVE THE 1AC DOESNT ARGUE, ON FACE,
THAT DEATH IS A BAD THING. THEY ASSUMED THAT FOR
THEMSELVES, WHICH PROVES THAT FEAR OF DEATH IS
INEVITABLE
3. GOOD FEAR OF DEATH IS DISTINCT FROM IRRATIONAL
FEAR IT ALLOWS US TO REDUCE DANGER, LIVE
ETHICALLY, AND PREPARE FOR A PEACEFUL DEATH ON
OUR OWN TERMS
Gyatso 2003

[Geshe Kelsang, fully accomplished meditation master, internationally renowned spiritual

teacher who can show us from his experience how to begin our spiritual paths, author, Fear
of Death, Tharpa Publications, www.tharpa.com/background/fear-of-death.htm, acc 1026-04//uwyo-ajl]
Generally, our fear of death is an unhealthy and unrealistic fear-we don't want to die, so we
ignore the subject, deny it, or get morbidly obsessed by it and think that life is meaningless.
However, right now we cannot do anything about dying, so there is no point fearing death
itself. What kind of fear is useful?
A healthy fear of death would be the fear of dying unprepared, as this is a fear we can do
something about, a danger we can avert. If we have this realistic fear, this sense of danger,
we are encouraged to prepare for a peaceful and successful death and are also inspired to
make the most of our very precious human life instead of wasting it.
This "sense of danger" inspires us to make preparations so that we are no longer in the
danger we are in now, for example by practicing moral discipline, purifying our negative
karma, and accumulating as much merit, or good karma, as possible.
We put on a seat belt out of a sense of danger of the unseen dangers of traffic on the road,
and that seat belt protects us from going through the windshield. We can do nothing about
other traffic, but we can do something about whether or not we go through the windscreen if
someone crashes into us.
Similarly, we can do nothing about the fact of death, but we can seize control over how we
prepare for death and how we die. Eventually, through Tantric spiritual practice, we can
even attain a deathless body.

437

Kritik Answers

A2 Fear of Death Bad: 2AC (2/5)

4. EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE REQUIRES A
REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION, MEANING THAT
EVERY AFFIRMATION OF LIFE OCCURS AGAINS THE
BACKGROUND OF FEAR OF DEATH
Zizek '99

[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass,
The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso,
1999, 153-4//uwyo-ajl]
It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of
psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the
radical restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious
cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. Does not Lacan himself provide a
number of hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law,
using the very Pauline terms to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is
not that of St Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does not
already posit a 'new harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the
slate clean for one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks,
because it is Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate
clean', something (a void) is confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival
of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal,
precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identifiction with a Cause: negativity
functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic identification - that
is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it, but is simultaneously obfuscated
by it and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour
of Death: what 'Death' stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly
life, but the 'night of the world', the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of
subjectivity, the severing of its links with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate clean'
that opens up the domain of the symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New
Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier. Here, Lacan parts company with St Paul and Badiou: God not only
is but always-already was dead - that is to say, after Freud, one cannot directly have faith in a Truth-Event ;

every such
Event ultimately remains a semblance obfuscating a preceding Void whose
Freudian name is death drive. So Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination of the exact
status of this domain beyond the rule of the Law. That is to say: like Lacan, Badiou delineates the contours
of a domain beyond the Order of Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the 'morbid' super
ego connection between Law and its transgressive desire. For Lacan, however, the Freudian topic of the
death drive cannot be accounted for in the terms of this connection: the 'death drive' is not the

outcome of the morbid confusion of Life and Death caused by the intervention of
the symbolic Law. For Lacan, the uncanny domain beyond the Order of Being is
what he calls the domain 'between the two deaths', the pre-ontologicalf domain of
monstrous spectral apparitions, the domain that is 'immortal', yet not in the
Badiouian sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but in the sense of
what Lacan calls lamella, of the monstrous 'undead' object-libido.18

438

Kritik Answers

A2 Fear of Death Bad: 2AC (3/5)

5. FEAR OF DEATH MOTIVATES HEROIC PROTECTION OF
OTHERS, ALLOWING US TO TRANSCEND OUR ISOLATION
TOWARDS A LIBERATORY ETHICS OF LOVE AND JUSTICE
FOR THE OPPRESSED
Greenspan 2004

[Miriam, Psychotherapist who understands the Chakras, Excerpt, Healing through the
Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair, May 11, 2004,
www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/excerpts/bookreview/excp_5513.html, Acc 10-2604//uwyo]
"Fear is a very powerful emotion. When you feel fear in your body, it's helpful to relate to it
as
an energy that can be mobilized for life. It may feel like a constriction in your chest, throat,
or abdomen. Breathe through it without judgment and allow yourself to feel it as a very
strong force. If you pray for help, you can begin to expand this energy we call 'fear' and use it
for healing and transformation.
"In this regard, we can take our model from the heroes of Flight 93 who. realizing that they
were bound for death, stormed the plane and brought it down without hitting a civilian
target. One cannot even imagine being able to do this without fear. Fear for the lives of
others was the energy that mobilized them to do something meaningful with their last
moments of life. Some of these people said good-bye to their husbands and wives and
wished them happiness before they left this earth. They had found some peace in their last
moments, peace in the midst of turbulence. And they found it through their last wish, which
they heroically put into action: to help others live.
"Perhaps there is nothing that can redeem the dead but our own actions for the good. This is
a time to find out what we want to do for the world and do it. And, as every trauma survivor
knows, this is the way to make meaning out of pain, perhaps the most effective way: to draw
something good out of evil. The heroes of September 11 point us to the choice we each have:
to help create a state of global peace and justice that we, like they, will not see before we die.
It is in giving ourselves to this vision, out of love for this world that we inhabit together, that
we stand a chance of transcending the human proclivity to damage life. And that we honor
those we have brought into this world and who must inherit it. . . .
"Our only protection is in our interconnectedness. This has always been the message of the
dark emotions when they are experienced most deeply and widely. Grief is not just "my"
grief; it is the grief of every motherless child, every witness to horror in the world. Despair is
not just "my" despair; it is everyone's despair about life in the twentyfirst century. Fear is
not just 'my' fear; it is everyone's fear of anthrax, of nuclear war, of truck bombs, of
airplane hijackings, of things falling apart, blowing up, sickening and dying.
"If fear is only telling you to save your own skin, there's not much hope for us. But the fact is
that in conscious fear, there is a potentially revolutionary power of compassion and
connection that can be mobilized en masse. This is the power of fear. Our collective fear,
which is intelligent, is telling us now: Find new ways to keep this global village safe. Find
new forms of international cooperation that will root out evil in ways that don't create more
victims and more evil. Leap out of the confines of national egos. Learn the ways of peace.
Find a ceremony of safety so that not just you and I but all of us can live together without
fear."

439

Kritik Answers

A2 Fear of Death Bad: 2AC (4/5)

6. INACTION LEADS TO POWERLESSNESS AND AN ENDLESS
CYLE OF DESPAIR WORSE THAN FEAR ONLY ACTION
AGAINST NUCLEAR VIOLENCE CAN OVERCOME IT
Sandman & Valenti 86

[Peter M. & Joann M., Scared stiff or Scared into Action, Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, January 1986, 12-6//uwyo]
The main obstacle to action, writes Frank, is neither apathy nor terror but simply a
feeling of helplessness. To combat it, I have perhaps overemphasized the small signs that
antinuclear activities are at last beginning to influence the political process.(19)
Helplessness, hopelessness, futility, and despair are words one hears even more often than
fear from the barely active and the formerly active. And like fear, these emotions can easily
lead to psychic numbing. Those who feel powerless to prevent nuclear war try not to think
about it; and it serves the needs of those who do not wish to think about nuclear war to feel
powerless to prevent it. Messages of hope and empowerment, however, break this vicious
circle.
The label hope, as we use it, subsumes a wide range of overlapping concepts: for
example, optimism, a sense of personal control and efficacy, confidence in methods
and solutions, a sense of moral responsibility, and a vision of the world one is
aiming for.
It is well established (and hardly surprising) that hope is closely associated with
willingness to act. Activism appeals most to people who feel positive about both the
proposed solution and their personal contribution to its achievement. Over the long
term, this means that antinuclear organizers must communicate a credible vision of
a nuclear-free world. Meanwhile, they must offer people things to do that seem
achievable and worthwhile. The nuclear-weapons-freeze campaign attracted
millions of new activists in 1982 because it offered credible hope. By 1985 many of
those millions could no longer ground their hope in the freeze; some found other
approaches and some returned to inactivity.
Most social psychologists today see the relationship between hope and action as
independent of fear or other feelings. For example, Kenneth H. Beck and Arthur
Frankel conclude that three cognitions (not emotions) determine whether people
will do something about a health risk: recognizing the danger as real, believing the
recommended plan of action will reduce the danger, and having confidence in their
ability to carry out the plan. (20)

440

Kritik Answers

A2 Fear of Death Bad: 2AC (5/5)

7. DENIAL OF FEAR CAUSES POWERLESSNESS THAT
MAINTAINS THE PARANOIAC POSTURES OF NATIONALISM,
NUCLEARISM, AND STATE VIOLENCE FEAR OF
DESTRUCTION MOTIVATES US TO OVERCOME THOSE
DIVISIONS
Gleisner 83

[John, consultant psychiatrist at the North Western Regional Health Authority in Greater
Manchester, active in the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, The enemy within,
new internationalist 121, March, www.newint.org/issue121/enemy.htm, acc 10-2604//uwyo]
The noted sociologist and psychologist Gregory Bateson drew an analogy between nuclear
deterrence and drug addiction: the fix (new weapon) gives a sense of wellbeing that
gradually fades only to require a bigger fix. What the two also have in common is a powerful
dose of denial. Denial of the danger of nuclear war underlies government thinking on
defense. The publics denial may be less strong, but they are hampered in their
understanding by a pervading sense of powerlessness, which in turn leads to more denial:
nuclear war may well happen. But not to me.
Our thinking cannot change without combatting denial and projection the mechanisms of
the psychological war machine. Logical argument in the face of paranoia is as ineffective as
with a person in the grips of a psychotic episode. Emotion is whats needed emotion
directed appropriately. Fear of nuclear war and its effects are legitimate and appropriate and
can lead to reappraisal of the old fear the Russian threat. Another method of penetrating
denial is to look for the absurdity in the whole upside-down logic of the old them-us thought
structure.
Confronting denial and projection can be painful, disorienting and can leave one feeling
powerless. But another new belief network is gaining ground. The peace movement is at last
building another way of thinking that can sway governments as countless people are daring
to reject the old them-us psychology. But the question is: can we develop this new way of
thinking in time to avert catastrophe?

8. FEAR OF DEATH IS NECESSARY TO PREVENT GENOCIDE

AND EXTINCTION
Beres, PhD at Princeton, 96 (Louis Rene, No Fear, No Trembling Israel, Death and
the Meaning of Anxiety, www.freeman.org/m_online/feb96/beresn.htm)

Fear of death, the ultimate source of anxiety, is essential to human survival. This is true not only for
individuals, but also for states. Without such fear, states will exhibit an incapacity to
confront nonbeing that can hasten their disappearance . So it is today with the State of Israel. Israel suffers
acutely from insufficient existential dread. Refusing to tremble before the growing prospect of collective disintegration - a forseeable
prospect connected with both genocide and war - this state is now unable to take the necessary steps toward collective survival. What is
more, because death is the one fact of life which is not relative but absolute, Israel's blithe unawareness of its national mortality deprives

confronting death can give the

most positive reality to life itself. In this respect, a cultivated awareness of nonbeing is central to each state's pattern of
potentialities as well as to its very existence. When a state chooses to block off such an awareness , a choice
currently made by the State of Israel, it loses, possibly forever, the altogether critical benefits of "anxiety ." There is, of
its still living days of essential absoluteness and growth. For states, just as for individuals,

course, a distinctly ironic resonance to this argument. Anxiety, after all, is generally taken as a negative, as a liability that cripples rather
than enhances life. But anxiety is not something we "have." It is something we (states and individuals) "are." It is true, to be sure, that
anxiety, at the onset of psychosis, can lead individuals to experience literally the threat of self-dissolution, but this is, by definition, not a
problem for states. Anxiety stems from the awareness that existence can actually be destroyed , that
one can actually become nothing. An ontological characteristic, it has been commonly called Angst, a word related to anguish (which
comes from the Latin angustus, "narrow," which in turn comes from angere, "to choke.") Herein lies the relevant idea of birth trauma as
the prototype of all anxiety, as "pain in narrows" through the "choking" straits of birth. Kierkegaard identified anxiety as "the dizziness of
freedom," adding: "Anxiety

is the reality of freedom as a potentiality before this freedom has

materialized." This brings us back to Israel. Both individuals and states may surrender freedom in the hope of
ridding themselves of an unbearable anxiety. Regarding states, such surrender can lead to a rampant and delirious
collectivism which stamps out all political opposition. It can also lead to a national self-delusion which augments

441

Kritik Answers
enemy power and hastens catastrophic war. For the Jewish State, a lack of pertinent anxiety, of the positive aspect of
Angst, has already led its people to what is likely an irreversible rendezvous with extinction.

442

Kritik Answers

#3 Good Fear of Death: 1AR (1/2)

PLAN SOLVES BY EMBRACING AN ETHIC OF UNIVERSAL
SYMPATHY WE CAN COME TO TERMS WITH OUR OWN
DEATH BY ALLEVIATING THE SUFFERING OF OTHERS
Schulz, Professor of Philosophy @ Tubigen U, 2K (Walter, Continental Philosophy Review 33, P.
483-485)

It is significant that the death of others is thematized neither by Scheler nor by Heidegger and Sartre. These thinkers begin their analyses
of death always from the self that is in each case mine as an isolated individual. The meaning that the death of others has for me is not
regarded by them. The centering of the death problem in the question of ones own death may be conditioned by the hegemony of the
principle of interiority in the epoch of Christian metaphysics, whose secularized form is existential philosophy. This is factically a

one may not, when one wants to comprehend the whole problem
of death, look only ahead towards ones own death. However, it is this shall once more be expressly
exhibited just as necessary, to go against the other extreme which confronts us in modern
sociological observations of images of death. Its characteristic is that it thematizes only
death, more exactly: the dying of others. This modern approach blocks so we think from its point of view the
constriction of the problematic. Thus,

complex of questions in an almost stronger way than the existentialist perspective, insofar as here the fact is excluded along with
disregarding his own death that man is a self-understanding and as such fears death. In opposition to the one-sidedness of both either

one ought to treat the phenomenon of death

dialectically; that is, to refer to the facts, that man following Kierkegaard is himself and the same time his species. In The
thematizing only my death or observing only the dying of others

Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard brought to our attention the meaning of this complex in relation to history. Every individual for himself
takes as his point of departure his history and advances the history of the species which, however, represents its own dimension. This
means that the individual can just as little be released from universal history as the latter can be released from the individual, whereby the
individuals history and the history of the species can exhibit not only different tendencies, but also both make it possible to experience in

This
dialectical approach, which has still in no way been philosophically estimated in its universal meaning, now says in our
context we are here pulling together our argumentation my death as an individual and death in general,
which occurs to the human species, must not be thought without the other . My death appears to me
as the essential, and at the same time I do in fact know that my death is only a special case of death in general. This dialectic, from
which a mediation appears possible between existential introspection and sociological extrospection, becomes first concrete
through the insertion of a mediating determination between my death and death in general.
This mediating determination is the death of other men or women, which , existentially and
sociologically regarded, can in fact become relevant for me in thoroughly different degrees and
under the most differentiating respects. None of these three determinations dyingness in general, the death of others
relation to one another a different evaluation: one can lose oneself in universal history or over-emphasize ones own singularity.

and my death are, however, posited for themselves, rather all of them are to be mediated with the other. The structure of this mediation
shall be made more clear by way of example in the brevity required here. The general determination of dyingness and transitoriness
becomes for me first and foremost tangible and concrete in the death of others. It becomes in no way superfluous through this
concretization. It remains essential as a background determination, and that means it indicates the possibility of my death. The
observation of death, more exactly, the dying of others, is certainly the only real experience of death. But in this extrospection the possible
relation to my death comes into play and plays along always already more or less concealed, because the other and myself are subjugated
to the same destiny of dying. Vice versa: the passing into death or more simply said: the thought, I myself must die, which comes over the
aging human being becomes a little more tolerable in dialectically looking away from myself, that means in view of the universal lot of
dying, that itself only appears in stark reality, when we actually see humans dying and observe the uncanny change from life to death in

beings
actually die, not only a few, rather all of them, each and every one of us , when it is his turn. This
order to cite an interpretation of Max Schur on Freuds sentence from the work Reflections upon War and Death: Human

dialectic - in which I look away from myself to others or from others to myself, uniting us under the universal lot of transitoriness is no
solution to the problem of death, not even a recipe against the fear of death. But the possibility of a resigned acquiesce that stands opposite
both tendencies at work today the

struggle against violent death over against the help for the dying
indicates certainly here that they can be taken up in their positivity without falling into the
illusion that death can be abolished and that the fear of death is an archaic remnant and in
itself irrational. Both these tendencies find their foundation in the thought of a universal
sympathy that binds me to all things living. This sympathy actualizes itself as sympathy,
which means as a return behind selfishness in all its forms. This return is identical with the
immediate recognition that the other is equal to me insofar as he is also a living thing, which
must expire and become nothing. This connectedness between human beings that reveals
itself in the light of the common determinateness of death retains in its ground that is, in
the thought of universal transitoriness the form of negativity. But it also refers to the fact
that the individual does not have to stare spellbound at his own imminent end. Rather if
surely also to a small degree only the individual is able to think beyond his death in view of
the task common to everyone, reducing suffering within the world in the face of death.

443

Kritik Answers

#3 Good Fear of Death: 1AR (2/2)

HEALTHY FEAR OF DEATH PREVENTS SHORT-TERM WORSE
FORMS OF DEATH, MOTIVATING ACTION FOR A BETTER
LIFE
Gyatso 2003

[Geshe Kelsang, fully accomplished meditation master, internationally renowned spiritual

teacher who can show us from his experience how to begin our spiritual paths, author, Fear
of Death, Tharpa Publications, www.tharpa.com/background/fear-of-death.htm, acc 1026-04//uwyo-ajl]
According to Buddhism, there is unhealthy fear and healthy fear. For example, when we are
afraid of something that cannot actually harm us - such as spiders - or something we can do
nothing to avoid - such as old age or being struck down with smallpox or being run over by a
truck - then our fear is unhealthy, for it serves only to make us unhappy and paralyze our
will.
On the other hand, when someone gives up smoking because they are afraid of
developing lung cancer, this is a healthy fear because the danger is real and there
are constructive steps they can take to avoid it. We have many fears-fear of
terrorism, fear of death, fear of being separated from people we love, fear of losing
control, fear of commitment, fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of losing our job,
the list is never-ending! Many of our present fears are rooted in what Buddha
identified as "delusions" - distorted ways of looking at ourself and the world around
us. If we learn to control our mind, and reduce and eventually eliminate these
delusions, the source of all our fear-healthy and unhealthy-is eradicated. However,
right now we need the healthy fear that arises from taking stock of our present
situation so that we can resolve to do something about it. For example, there is no
point in a smoker being scared of dying of lung cancer unless there is something
that he or she can or will do about it, i.e. stop smoking. If a smoker has a sufficient
fear of dying of lung cancer, he or she will take steps to kick the habit. If he prefers
to ignore the danger of lung cancer, he will continue to create the causes of future
suffering, living in denial and effectively giving up control.
Just a smoker is vulnerable to lung cancer due to cigarettes, it is true that at the
moment we are vulnerable to danger and harm, we are vulnerable to ageing,
sickness, and eventually death, all due to our being trapped in samsara the state
of uncontrolled existence that is a reflection of our own uncontrolled minds. We are
vulnerable to all the mental and physical pain that arises from an uncontrolled
mind-such as the pains that come from the delusions of attachment, anger, and
ignorance.
We can choose to live in denial of this and thereby give up what control we have, or
we can choose to recognize this vulnerability, recognize that we are in danger, and
then find a way to avert the danger by removing the actual causes of all fear (the
equivalent of the cigarettes) - the delusions and negative, unskillful actions
motivated by those delusions. In this way we gain control, and if we are in control
we have no cause for fear. A balanced fear of our delusions and the suffering to
which they inevitably give rise is therefore healthy because it serves to motivate
constructive action to avoid a real danger. We only need fear as an impetus until we
have removed the causes of our vulnerability through finding spiritual, inner refuge
and gradually training the mind.

444

Kritik Answers

#4 Repression Turn: 1AR (1/3)

EXTEND THE ZIZEK 99 CARD. THERES NO SUCH THING AS
A PURE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE. EVERY TIME YOU SAY THAT
SOMETHINGS GOOD, BETWEEN THE LINES YOURE SAYING
THAT SOMETHING ELSE, LIKE DEATH, IS BAD BECAUSE THE
UNCONSCIOUS STAIN OF YOUR OWN MORTALITY IS IN THE
BACKGROUND OF EVERY ACTION THAT YOU TAKE,
WHETHER ITS EXPLICT OR NOT. THEIR YES TO LIFE IS
AN IMPLICIT NO TO THE SAME DEATH THAT WERE SAYING
IS BAD. FEAR OF FINITUDE IS STILL CONTAINED IN ALL OF
THEIR ARGUMENTS, REPRESSED BENEATH THE SURFACE
OF THEIR WORDS, MEANING THAT IT EMERGES IN EVEN
WORSE FORMS THAT YOU CANT INTERROGATE BECAUSE
YOUVE MADE THEM INVISIBLE, TURNING THE CRITICISM.
THIS MEANS WELL WIN THE UNIQUENESS FOR OUR TURNS
BECAUSE SOME FORM OF ANXIETY FROM DEATH IS
INEVITABLE IN ALL DISCOURSE, THE ONLY QUESTION IS OF
WHETHER THOSE REPRESENTATIONS INTERROGATE THE
FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY OF POLITICAL REALITY BY
ACKNOWLEDING OUR INEVITABLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE
TRAUMA OF DEATH THATS INHERENTLY REPRESSED BY
THE SYMBOLIC. THERES ONLY A RISK OF THE
ALTERNATIVE MASKING FEARS INFLUENCE.

445

Kritik Answers

#4 Repression Turn: 1AR (2/3)

THEORETICAL DISTANCE FROM OUR OWN LIKELIHOOD OF
DEATH IS AN ATTEMPT TO PHANTASMICALLY ERASE THE
ANXIETY THAT IT CAUSES, MASKING HOW IT AFFECTS OUR
DAILY ACTIVITY IN COVERT WAYS
Park 2001

[James, Philosopher, Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety & Death, 4th ed.,

www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/XP181.html, acc 10-26-04//uwyo-ajl]
The 'fear of death' is a composite experience encompassing:
(1) the abstract, objective, external, empirical fact of biological death;
(2) our personal, subjective, emotional fear of ceasing-to-be,
which arises from our awareness of our own finitude, and
(3) our ownmost ontological anxiety,
our Existential Predicament disguised as the fear of ceasing-to-be.
This least understood and most repressed existential dimension of death,
which has also been called "being-towards-death"
and "the anxiety-of-nonbeing",
will be the central focus of this phenomenological investigation.
Whenever "death" is mentioned, we think first of biological death,
but this tendency to focus exclusively on the objective, terminal fact of dying
may well be a trick of thought designed to protect us
from noticing our fear of ceasing-to-be or our even deeper ontological anxiety.
We have other protective techniques as well:
religious illusions, philosophical desensitization, and diversionary small-talk.
Most of these distracting ploys amount to seeing death exclusively
as an objective event, which befalls all plants, animals, and people eventually.
All such attempts to picture and talk about death as a fact
are (at least in part) attempts to evade the two deeper dimensions of death
by interpreting death only from the point of view of a spectator.
Even our scholarly symposia about death
are often designed to provide an objective understanding of death.
Such approaches keep death outside of ourselves
a phenomenon we know about only as observers, never as participants.

446

Kritik Answers

#4 Repression Turn: 1AR (3/3)

ONLY DIRECTLY ADDRESSING THE ANXIETY PROVOKED BY
FINITUDE BY OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGING ITS INFLUENCE
CAN TRAVERSE THAT MASKING PROCESS, ALLOWING US TO
COME TO TERMS WITH DEATHS HOLD OVER US
Park 2001

[James, Philosopher, Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety & Death, 4th ed.,

www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/XP181.html, acc 10-26-04//uwyo-ajl]
But it will be more difficult to separate the deeper dimensions of death: our
terrifying fear of ceasing-to-be and our underlying ontological anxiety. If we probe
even below our personal fear of ceasing-to-be-in-the-world, we may discover the
cause of much of our evasive talk and deceptive posturing; we may pull the covers
off our trembling, naked ontological anxiety. If we find ways to look deeply into
ourselves, exposing even our most clever tricks of thought, then not only will we
begin truly to fear our own deaths, but we may even confront our underlying
ontological anxiety.
This ontological anxiety is obscurely felt by all of us as a subjective awareness
drifting up from our inner depths, a pervasive haunting of our whole being, which
we are reluctant to confront because we have no easy way to handle it. This
continuous inner state-of-being is not the result of the fact of dying; it is not worry
arising from the inevitability of actual death. Rather, our ontological anxiety is the
deepest truth of our existence, obviously deeper than the external, objective,
empirical fact of biological death, but even deeper than our inward, subjective,
personal fear of ceasing-to-be. Our ontological anxiety does not arise from the fact
of death, but much of our concern about death arises from our ontological anxiety!
(This paradoxical statement should become clear in the next 70 pages.)
If our ontological anxiety truly grips us, we can go either of two possible ways:
(1) We can organize our lives around this all-pervasive 'threat', courageously
embracing our ontological anxiety, moving ourselves toward "Authentic Existence".
Or (2) we can be freed from our ontological anxiety after having fully acknowledged
it (and attained some Authenticity), thereby coming into the new inner state-ofbeing "Existential Freedom".

447

Kritik Answers

#5 Fear is Key to Love: 1AR

LOVE AND FEAR ARE COMPATIBLE FEAR IS NECESSARY
TO PROTECT LOVED ONES
Sandman and Valenti, Prof of Human Ecology @ Rutgers and Preeminent Risk
Communications Expert, 86 (Peter and JoAnn, Scared stiff or scared into action , Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, January 1986, P. 1216, http://www.psandman.com/articles/scarstif.htm)
Love Anger without love soon becomes sterile or uncontrolled, while love without anger can still inspire a movement. But there is no need
to choose; love and anger are compatible. Nothing could better symbolize anger than the powerful bolt-cutters with which the Greenham
Common women routinely destroy the fence surrounding the cruise missile site. Nothing could better symbolize love than the webs of
twine and ribbon and memorabilia with which they decorate the same fence. We suspect it is this combination the anger not rancid, the

Love is compatible with fear as

are more affected by fear appeals targeted at
their loved ones than by those aimed at themselves. Ironically, one of the classic studies
from the early 1960s tried to persuade citizens to support community fallout shelters; strong
fear appeals threatening family safety worked better than threats to the individual .(17) But love is
not compatible with psychic numbing. Just as numbness interferes with the ability to love freely, so active
love drives away the numbness. Antinuclear activists almost universally report that they remain active less for themselves
love not languid that has captured the imaginations of peace activists around the world.
well. As we suggested earlier, some evidence indicates that people

than for those they love, and that without love they could not stay with the fight. This is not to suggest that these activists are more loving
than their neighbors, only that their love helps them stay active and that their activism is a powerful expression of love. It is relevant that

Just as activists rely on love to

keep them going, one can mobilize the uninvolved by talking about the people, places, and
values one holds dear and encouraging listeners to do the same. Something or someone to
fight for is as indispensable to activism as something or someone to fight against.
the children of activists are far more confident of their futures than most children.(18)

448

Kritik Answers

#6 Inaction Turn: 1AR

POLICY ACTION AGAINST NUCLEAR WAR SPURS RADICAL
CHANGE TOWARDS A POLITICS OF PEACE AND LOVE
Sandman & Valenti 86

[Peter M. & Joann M., Scared stiff or Scared into Action, Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, January 1986, 12-6//uwyo]
While people are most likely to take action against nuclear war when they feel angry, loving,
and hopeful rather than terrorized into numbness, it is also true that action against nuclear
war tends to liberate peoples anger, love, and hope. The growth of commitment is circular,
in other words, with feelings, understandings, and behaviors alternating in complex
patterns; action, however, is likely to begin the process.
The notion that behavior is as much a cause as a result of feeling, attitude, and knowledge is
commonplace among clinicians, who often urge clients to try new behaviors as a way of
breaking patterns and opening a path to new understanding. It is familiar ground also for
social psychologists and provides the foundation for one of psychologys most robust
persuasion models, Leon Festingers theory of cognitive dissonance, whereby behavior
triggers an effort to regain consistency by finding information and building attitudes to
support the behavior itself. (23)
This theory makes sense of what petition-circulators have universally observed: that people
are more likely to read the literature they are offered after signing than before. If before
signing they experience the literature as an unwelcome prod, after signing (out of politeness,
perhaps) they need the literature to justify their new behavior.
The lesson for the antinuclear movement is clear: Any experience such as signing
petitions, wearing buttons, or going to rallies however partial or even irrelevant
its motivation can provide a reason to consider the issues more deeply, and this
consideration can launch a cycle of incrementally increasing commitments to
peace.

449

Kritik Answers

#7 Fear Solves War: 1AR

FEAR OF NUCLEAR WAR IS CRITICAL TO PREVENTING ALL
OUT STATE VIOLENCE AND WAR
Futterman 94

[J.A.H., fortysomething male, enjoys classical, folk, bluegrass, jazz, some rock, &
some rap, self-identifies as a Lutheran Jewpiscopalian, and watches Iron Chef,
Obscenity and Peace: Meditations on the Bomb, Virtual Church of the Blind
Chihuahua, www.dogchurch.org/scriptorium/nuke.html, acc. 10-26-04//uwyo]
I could say that if I didn't do it, someone else would, but that answer was rejected
at Nuremberg. (It's also a better reason to leave the weapons program than to stay.)
I continue to support the nuclear weapons business with my effort for many
reasons, which I discuss throughout this piece. But mostly, I do it because the fear
of nuclear holocaust is the only authority my own country or any other has
respected so far when it comes to nationalistic urges to make unlimited war. As
William L. Shirer states in his preface to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(Touchstone Books, New York, 1990),
"Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the
tradition of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the
empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia.
The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden
invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile, and of rockets which can
be aimed to hit the moon."
Now this contrasts with the argument of those who would "reinvent government"
by putting up bureaucratic roadblocks to maintaining the reliability of the US
nuclear arsenal through research and testing. They reason that if the reliability of
everyone's nuclear arsenals declines, everyone will be less likely to try using them.
The problem is that some "adventurer-conqueror" may arise and use everyone's
doubt about their arsenals to risk massive conventional war instead. An
expansionist dictatorship might even risk nuclear war with weapons that are
simpler, cruder, less powerful, much riskier (in terms of the possibility of
accidental detonation) but much more reliable than our own may eventually
become without adequate "stockpile stewardship."[14]
But the inhibitory effect of reliable nuclear weapons goes deeper than Shirer's
deterrence of adventurer-conquerors. It changes the way we think individually and
culturally, preparing us for a future we cannot now imagine. Jungian psychiatrist
Anthony J. Stevens states, [15]
"History would indicate that people cannot rise above their narrow sectarian
concerns without some overwhelming paroxysm. It took the War of Independence
and the Civil War to forge the United States, World War I to create the League of
Nations, World War II to create the United Nations Organization and the European
Economic Community. Only catastrophe, it seems, forces people to take the wider
view.
Or what about fear? Can the horror which we all experience when we contemplate
the possibility of nuclear extinction mobilize in us sufficient libidinal energy to
resist the archetypes of war? Certainly, the moment we become blas about the
possibility of holocaust we are lost. As long as horror of nuclear exchange remains
uppermost we can recognize that nothing is worth it. War becomes the impossible
option. Perhaps horror, the experience of horror, the consciousness of horror, is
our only hope. Perhaps horror alone will enable us to overcome the otherwise
invincible attraction of war."
Thus I also continue engaging in nuclear weapons work to help fire that worldhistorical warning shot I mentioned above, namely, that as our beneficial
technologies become more powerful, so will our weapons technologies, unless
genuine peace precludes it. We must build a future more peaceful than our past, if
we are to have a future at all, with or without nuclear weapons a fact we had
better learn before worse things than nuclear weapons are invented. If you're a
philosopher, this means that I regard the nature of humankind as mutable rather
than fixed, but that I think most people welcome change in their personalities and

450

Kritik Answers
cultures with all the enthusiasm that they welcome death thus, the fear of
nuclear annihilation of ourselves and all our values may be what we require in
order to become peaceful enough to survive our future technological
breakthroughs.[16]

451

Kritik Answers

Spectacle of Death Good (1/4)

DEATH IMAGERY AFFIRMS LIFE AND OPENS UP THE
POSSIBILITY OF CHANGE
Fox, Philosophy Professor at Queens, 85 (Michael Allen, Nuclear War: Philosophical Perspectives,
ed. Fox and Groarke, p. 127)

Security is
a degree of stress and uncertainty with which we can
cope and remain mentally healthy. For security, understood in this way, to become a feature of our
lives, we must admit our nuclear fear and anxiety and identify the mechanisms
that dull or mask our emotional and other responses. It is necessary to realize that we cannot
There remains but one choice: we must seek a reduction of world tensions, mutual trust, disarmament, and peace.35
not the absence of fear and anxiety, but

entrust security to ourselves, but, strange as it seems and however difficult to accept, must entrust it to our adversary Just as the safety and
security of each of us, as individuals, depends upon the good will of every other, any one of whom could harm us at any moment, so the

The disease
for which we must find the cure also requires that we continually come face to
face with the unthinkable in image and thought and recoil from it. 36 In this manner we can break its hold over us
and free ourselves to begin new initiatives. As Robert J. Lifton points out, confronting massive death helps
us bring ourselves more in touch with what we care most about in life. We
[will then] find ourselves in no way on a death trip, but rather responding
to a call for personal and professional actions and commitments on behalf
of that wondrous and fragile entity we know as human life .
security of nations finally depends upon the good will of other nations, whether or not we willingly accept this fact.

452

Kritik Answers

Spectacle of Death Good (2/4)

DEATH IS OMNIPRESENT. THE SPECTACLE IS THE ONLY
WAY ONE CAN EVEN BEGIN TO COME TO TERMS WITH
DEATH
Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, M.D. Pathologist, Children's Memorial Hospital, Confronting the
Margin, June 2, 2000, http://seeingthedifference.berkeley.edu/gonz-crussi.html, accessed 1/23/03
What one may actually perceive in the spectacle of death depends on the individual. Seeing
is invariably in the eye of the beholder. I shall briefly refer to two styles of seeing that I may
call "culturally dependent," for lack of a better term. In the traditional Mexican culture,
which is permeated by a strong current of Indian naturalism, death is something very
concrete. I am not an anthropologist, but this much I can say from my subjective
impressions during my youth: death in Mexico is always embodied. Death is this cadaver,
right here. It is something that may be palpated, touched, weighed, turned around. I was
always impressed by the directness with which the survivors addressed the cadaver during a
funeral ceremony in the lower socio-economic strata. There is much display of emotion, and
the bereaved talk to the deceased. It is a new form of relationship. The survivors speak to the
dead person: they reproach him for having left this world; they remind him of the joys and
sorrows that they shared together; they make confessions, grant absolutions or admit having
wronged him; and they promise him that they will remember him forever. They talk to him,
not at him. I am sure that, if these addresses were only monologues, they were the kind of
monologue that absolutely required the presence of the cadaver as mediator of the
monologizing. The present-absent is much more present than absent, if I may thus express
this unique status. In other words, the corporeal reality of the departed is strongly felt. It is a
powerful sign that propitiates the illusion that the dead are still with us. Death is primarily a
presence. When the dead are deprived of their corporal wrappings--the flesh, the nerves,
the arteries (by now utterly superfluous)--there remains the skeleton. The skeleton is the
almost universal emblem of death. But because it is eminently tangible and concrete--solid,
stone-like--it has had a great career in Mexico. In the Mexican culture, the symbolic
skeleton, the calavera, is not only felt, palpated, and even played with, but is also tasted, in
the form of the sugar skulls that are consumed on All Souls Day, the day of the dead. For it is
not only recent death that has a presence. Death is recurrently present, eminently present in
the mind, at least on All Souls Day, the Dia de los Muertos, the "Day of the Dead," year after
year. It is otherwise for cultures in which death is primarily an absence or a disappearance.
In one philosophical tradition of Anglo-American culture, the living person is easily
destroyed. Recall that John Locke says that personal identity is "inseparable from thinking,"
a mere consciousness displaying unity across time. And David Hume saw the person as "a
train of perceptions" glued together by certain relations. Consciousness must attach itself to
an animal body, or, as we say today more specifically, to a functioning brain. But body and
brain were secondary, and in a sense irrelevant. Consciousness alone conferred identity.
Consciousness alone embodied the essence of personhood. But if the person is merely a
precarious bundle of mental activities, the dead person must be flimsier yet. The "Great
Iceberg of Cotton Wool" of which Henri Michaux speaks in one of his poems, can erase all
traces of the person. Death thus becomes an erasure, that is to say a disappearance, an
absence, or a mere attribute of the insubstantial mind, of the fleeting consciousness, like the
person itself. Not a concrete osseous framework--as is the Mexican skeleton, the calavera-but a wholly immaterial entity. Defined as an absence, it absented itself. Because it could not
be seen, it ended up suffering the fate announced in the popular saying "Out of sight, out of
mind." It was proscribed, and it became the Unmentionable. To finish these comments, I
wish to say that I believe there is a parallel between the death-related Mexican naturalism,
and--strange to recount--certain ideas that I have found in the pages of Russian novelists. It
has been remarked that Tolstoy never approached death as a philosophical problem. He
never seems to be looking for comprehensive concepts, conclusions, or intellectual
approaches to death. He is not striving to create a philosophy of death; he is merely
describing the experience of living beings. Since death cannot be understood,
conceptualized, reduced to system, or dealt with syllogistically, the only thing left is to look
at it. Such is the gist of the Mexican attitude. The gaze will not penetrate to the essence of
the problem. It will barely skim its surface, but that is all we can do. And this is what Tolstoy
does: to describe tirelessly, to evoke every detail of the external corporeality of death, to all
the minutiae. Read the last pages of Ivan Ilyich, to find there a recreation of every sensory

453

Kritik Answers
impression, the sounds, the sights, the odors that impressed a child. Vladimir Jankelevitch
points out that this is one constant throughout the whole Tolstoyan work. He revels in the
details, in the concrete particularities.

454

Kritik Answers

Spectacle of Death Good (3/4)

THE SPECTACLE OF DEATH IS EMBEDDED IN AMERICAN
CONSCIOUSNESS. THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHETHER
DEATH CAN BE LEVERAGED TO FORCE RECOGNITION OF
OUR COMPLICITY AS IN VIETNAM, OR IF IT IS VIRTUALIZED
AND USED TO JUSTIFY DOMINANCE. SPEAKING DEATH
AGAINST FURTHER NUCLEAR VIOLENCE ROBS IT OF ITS
ABILITY TO PACIFY
Walter Davis, Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche After 9-11, July 29, 2002,
http://goinside.com/02/7/death.html, accessed 1/23/03
For if we found ourselves abject objects of the others wrath at Pearl Harbor we now had a
way to bring about a complete and lasting transformation of that situation. Projective
identification finds in the Bomb a way to take everything weak and vulnerable in oneself and
invest it in an other who is reduced to an object of contempt and obliteration. The resulting
mania banishes any threat of a return of depressive anxieties. In the Bomb the manic triad
triumph, contempt, and dismissal (Klein, 1957) celebrates its Sabbath.
Metapsychologically, the transformation is complete and can be schematized thus: abjection
reversed; blockage overcome; aggression unbound. Narcissistic grandiosity thereby finds the
fullest possible expansion; the perfect phallic mirror in the mushroom cloud rising above the
spectacle as proof of the Bombs power to compel submission to its will. Evacuation
attains an exorcism of an unprecedented ordera psychotic attack on linking (Bion 1959)
that is totalizing in its scope and that scoffs at all humanistic considerations. Thanatos in
the bomb achieves the condition Freud feared: a condition in which death has been fully
eroticized. Pleasureor jouissanceunder the Bomb equals releasing a destructiveness
that voids all inner tensions in an aggression that has the blessing of the super-ego, an
aggression that feels righteous. As confirmation consider this, but one example among
many: Navy Day, October, 1945, a crowd of 120,000 gather in the Los Angeles Coliseum to
celebrate a simulated reenactment of the Bombing of Hiroshima, complete with a
mushroom cloud that rises from the fifty yard line to the joyful cheers of that rapt throng
(Boyer, 1985). The first Super-Bowl. The society of the spectacle (Debord,1994) here
announces its truth as a mass audience cums to the ritual that confers on it a lasting,
ghostly identity: the howl of joy that rises as a hymn of praise to the burgeoning cloud is the
new American collectivity in Hosanna before the image of its inhumanity as it blossoms
before them, big with the future. A History Lesson From which follows a quick tour of
the underside of American history from 1945 to the present. The debacle of Vietnam. The
error: the image came home to roost. With the evening news America each night supped full
with horror. The lesson: no more images. The solution: Iraq, the Nintendo war, a war
represented on TV as a video game. No images of the 100,000 Iraqui dead entered the
American conscience to trouble our sleep. Instead, with victory the proclamation of George
H. Bush : Weve finally put an end to Vietnam syndrome. The lesson of history learned
the son now deploys it globally in a war where, he informs us, much will happen that we
will never get to hear about or see. Extremes meet: the image is banished but the promise of
global action is affirmed. George W. Bush is an apt pupil. He knows that in order to resolve
the trauma of 9-11 he must satisfy an outraged public by finding a way to repeat the
psychological operations perfected in Hiroshima. He knows that nothing less than a global
war against terrorism will suffice. But he also knows that the pleasure of the image must
be replaced by another kind of satisfaction, one appropriate to the information age, an age in
which pleasure has itself become virtual. Subjects formed by what is today perhaps the
primary relationship, the relationship to the computer, dance to the subtext, heeding the
command to enjoy our symptom (Zizek,1989). For it is now possible to imagine and
experience scorched-earths as so many blips on a computer screen with disavowal already in
place and pleasure assured in a jouissance that is one with Thanatos: the reduction of the
human to the statistical and the boundless power one feels in manipulating, at the speed of
light, a world so rendered into ones hands. The society of the spectaclea society that
needed Hiroshima and Navy Day in the L.A. Coliseumis replaced by the society of the
virtual. The post-modern subject has entered a condition of bliss, the hegemony of
Thanatos assured by the sacrifice of the image. Mass carnage grows apace: over a million

455

Kritik Answers
Iraqui civilians have now died as a result of our sanctions; more civilians (collateral
damage) have now died in Afghanistan as a result of our bombings than perished at the
WTC. But the knowledge of these things has become virtual, disembodied, imageless and
thus is already fading, leaving no residue in the national consciousness.

456

Kritik Answers

Spectacle of Death Good (4/4)

THEIR EVIDENCE DESCRIBES THE WAY DEATH IS
PERCEIVED IN THE STATUS QUO. WE CALL THAT INTO
QUESTION BECAUSE IT WEDS US TO THE PSYCHE THAT
DROPPED THE BOMB. REFUSING TO ENGAGE THE IMAGE
OF VIOLENCE WROUGHT BY THE BUSH DOCTRINE LETS
AMERICA GET AWAY WITH EXPLOITATION.
Walter Davis, Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche After 9-11, July 29, 2002,
http://goinside.com/02/7/death.html, accessed 1/23/03
What, then, are the possibilities of healing and renewal that we can derive from an
awareness of the tragic complexities of 9-11 and its aftermath? A responsible reply must
begin with the recognition that it was through us that terror on a global scale first came into
the world; and that we remain its primary global practitioner. For an internalization of
that fact delivers a death-blow to the belief that catharsis and renewal require the
reassertion of adolescent myths about ourselves and our place in history. Historical
memory must become instead the process of creating a tragic culture: one for whom
memory is conscience and not hagiography; one for whom the past weighs like a nightmare
precisely because it has not been constituted. That is the true meaning of Hiroshima.
Ground-zero haunts us not because we feel guilt about it but because we dont. Which is
why, whenever we are traumatized, we repeat the psychological operations we perfected in
Hiroshima in a progressive self-reification that we remain powerless to reverse as long as
we refuse to internalize what actually happened on 8-6-45. But to do that we must begin
the long, hard task of rooting out everything in our culture that weds us to the psyche that
dropped the bomb. Such an effort requires, moreover, that we free ourselves from our own
liberal, mental health myth: the belief, articulated by Lifton (Lifton and Mitchell, 1995)
that admitting error assures renewal through the power of the American protean self to
reclaim the ideals that make American history the story of inevitable progress. What
Hiroshima teaches us, on the contrary, is that history remains irreversible in its tragic
consequences until we find our own equivalent of Gandhis ethic: that the way out of hell is
one that sustains trauma and depressive mourning as the destiny of historical subjects who
know that reversal begins only when we are willing to plumb the depths of our collective
disorder. A tragic understanding of history assures us no catharsis, no renewal, no
guarantees. What it offers instead is the realization that to sustain and deepen the trauma is
our only hope. (7) For the alternative is truly horrifying: the Bush doctrine a blank
check for whatever carnage will be needed to satisfy our blood-lust and to preserve our
right to ravage the planets resources. Because one fact above all others is, as Marx would
say, determinative in the last instance of what is going on in the world today. 5% of the
worlds population consume 25% of its resourcesand they do so by exerting control over
the destiny of other countries. Bin Laden is a symptom, a nostalgic religious fanatic, but his
fanaticism derives from a condition that is actual. In Rio de Janeiro, at the one ecological
conference he attended, George H. Bush delivered a proclamation even more chilling than
his crowing about Vietnam syndrome: The American way of life is not negotiable. As
long as that dogma remains in place there will be many more ground-zeroes.

457

Kritik Answers

**Empire**
Movements Fail
HARDT AND NEGRI PROVIDE NO MECHANISM FOR THE
CREATION OF SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THE
FACT THAT CLASS OPPRESSION ALREADY EXISTS AND HAS
BEEN GETTING WORSE FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS MEANS
THAT IT EITHER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED BY NOW OR IT
WONT HAPPEN
Cox, Prof of Sociology @ National U of Ireland, 2K1 (Lawrence, Social Movements and Empire,
Rethinking Marxism Vol. 13, No. 3-4)

458

Kritik Answers

Alternative Causes Violence

ACTUAL ENDORSEMENT OF THEIR ALTERNATIVE WOULD
CAUSE A VIOLENT BACKLASH PROVES THAT THEIR CALL
IS HOLLOW
Zizek, Fellow @ Institute for Sociology @ Ljubljana, 2K1 (Slavoj, Have Michael Hardt and

Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the 21 st Century, Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 13
No. 3-4)

459

Kritik Answers

Alternative is False Radicalism

THEIR IMPOSSIBLE DEMAND IS MADE IN ORDER TO
RETAIN THE SEMBLANCE OF RADICALISM WITHOUT
ACTUALLY HAVING TO RISK TAKING RADICAL ACTIONS
Zizek, Fellow @ Institute for Sociology @ Ljubljana, 2K1 (Slavoj, Repeating Lenin,
http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm)

My personal experience is that practically all of the "radical" academics silently count on the
long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as
their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing
they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life
environment of the "symbolic classes" in the developed Western societies. Their excessive
Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus
ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual
whose hidden logic is: "Let's talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change
to make it sure that nothing will really change!" Symptomatic is here the journal October: when you ask one of the
editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, THAT October - in this way, one can
indulge in the jargonistic analyses of the modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is
somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past ... With regard to this radical chic, the first
gesture towards the Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game in a straight way, and
are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the

pseudo-radical academic Leftists

adopt towards the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain, while their own radicality
ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obliges no one to anything determinate.
who

460

Kritik Answers

Capitalism is Sustainable
HARDT AND NEGRIS ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE
INSTABILITY OF CAPITALISM ARE WRONG THE KRITIK
WILL FAIL
Kimball, Managing Editor of New Critierion, 2K1 (Roger, The new antiAmericanism, The New Critierion, Vol. 20, No. 2, October,
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/oct01/empire.htm)

I suspect that part of the reason Empire is such a hit in the academy is its superior insulation. Hardt and Negri have sealed every point of

The single greatest embarrassment to Marxist theory has

always been the longevity of capitalism. It was supposed to implode from internal
contradictions long ago. But here it is 2001 and capitalism is still going strong and making the world richer
ingress: no hint of reality is allowed to seep in.

and richer. Attempting to explain this is the greatest test of a Marxists ingenuity. Here is how Hardt and Negri handle the problem: As we
write this book and the twentieth century draws to a close, capitalism is miraculously healthy, its accumulation more robust than ever.
How can we reconcile this fact with the careful analyses of numerous Marxist authors at the beginning of the century who point to the

They offer three

hypotheses for this imponderable situation. One, that capitalism has reformed itself and so
is no longer in danger of collapse (an option they dismiss out of hand). Two, that the Marxist
theory is right except for the timetable: Sooner or later the once abundant resources of nature will run out. Three
well, it is a little difficult to say what the third hypothesis is. It has to do, they say, with the idea that capitalisms
expansion is internal rather than external, that it subsumes not the noncapitalist
environment but its own capitalist terrain that is, that the subsumption is no longer formal but real. I wont
attempt to explain this for the simple reason that I havent a clue about what it means. Is there any important option
they have neglected? Could it, just possibly, be that the careful analyses of numerous Marxist
authors was just plain wrong? This is a possibility apparently too awful to contemplate, for Hardt and Negri never raise it.
imperialist conflicts as symptoms of an impending ecological disaster running up against the limits of nature?

THE ALT FAILS EMPIRE WILL NOT OVERSHOOT AND

CAPITALISM WILL NOT COLLAPSE ON ITSELF
Kimball, Managing Editor of New Critierion, 2K1 (Roger, The new anti-Americanism, The

New Critierion, Vol. 20, No. 2, October, http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/oct01/empire.htm)

Empire is based on a
laughably tiny idea, and one that is also old and wrong. The idea, again, is Marxs idea about
the inevitable collapse of capitalism. It seemed big once upon a time. It is now as thoroughly
discredited as an historical or political idea can be. Hardt and Negri gussy up Marx with a
formidable panoply of New Age rhetoric about globalization. But the creaking you hear as
you make your way through the book is the rusty grinding of the dialectic: it goes nowhere, it
means nothing, but it keeps creaking along.
Eakins is also wrong to suggest that Empire may represent the Next Big Idea. This is mainly because

461

Kritik Answers

Resistance Fails
RESISTANCE FROM THE MULTITUDES WILL FAIL 9/11
PROVES THAT ACTS OF RUPTURE WILL BE RECUPERATED
Passavant and Dean, Assoc Profs of Political Science @ Hobart and William College,
2K2 (Paul and Jodi, Representation and the Event, Theory and Event, Vol. 5, No. 4)

462

Kritik Answers

Alternative = Oppression
CALLS FOR UNITY EXCLUDE MARGINALIZED POSITIONS
HARDT AND NEGRIS VISION OF THE MULTITUDE WILL
OPPRESS AND IGNORE DISADVANTAGED VOICES WE
SHOULD FIGHT CAPITALISM FROM THE INSIDE
Rofel, Prof of Anthropology @ UC Santa Cruz, 2K1 (Lisa, Discrepant Modernities and Their
Discontents, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Vol. 9, No. 3, Project Muse)

Why can we not dream of flexible alliances and articulations?

On one level Hardt and Negri would certainly agree. Their vision of rhizomatic politics inspired by Deleuze and
Guattari leaves room for a wide variety of alliances. Yet I find their dream of a common language frightening.
Who will establish the proper grammar of this language? Who will set the communicative
import of terms? What of those who wish to speak in multiple tongues? They traipse over
the issue of translation as if it were merely a pragmatic dilemma rather than , as many scholars have
shown, a question of power. For those who live on the sexual margins , for example, the dream of
the multitude brings not hope but fear. What reassurances do Hardt and Negri offer that the
recent history of degraded existence for those forced out of the multitude in the name of
sexual respectability will not be repeated in their version of unity? Can we not dream of
fighting capitalism through articulations and alliances of variously identified subjects? Can
we not dream of fighting capitalism in the manner, for example, of those who have fought AIDS?
AIDS activism has addressed the mutual imbrication of power in the endless relays between
expert discourse and institutional authority, between medical truth and social regulation,
and between popular knowledge practices and struggles for survival. AIDS activism has thus
multiplied the sites of political contestation to include immigration policy, public health
policy, the practice of epidemiology and clinical medicine, the conduct of scientific research, the operation of the insurance and
pharmaceutical industries, the role of the media, the decisions of rent-control boards, the legal definition of family, and ultimately
the public and private administration of the body. It is unsettling that Hardt and Negri do not discuss these
politics. Why must they dismiss them as merely about co-optation? Hardt and Negri have
missed the enormous body of work that has shown that we do not have to pit class against
other identities but, rather, can conceive of class in a manner that does not implicitly make
the class subject a white, masculine, Euro-American subject. If bodies do matter, then Hardt
and Negri still have a long way to go.
Why must we be forced into a dream of unity?

17

463

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fractures Other Movements

HARDT AND NEGRIS ALTERNATIVE IS EXPLICITLY
GROUNDED IN A DENIAL OF THE ABILITY OF MOVEMENTS
TO COMMUNICATE AND MAKE ALLIANCES THEY DENY
THE LOCALIZED EFFORTS OF REAL RESISTANCE
MOVEMENTS AND TRY TO SUBSTITUTE THE IMPOSSIBLE
MODEL OF THE MULTITUDE
Cox, Prof of Sociology @ National U of Ireland, 2K1 (Lawrence, Social Movements and Empire,
Rethinking Marxism Vol. 13, No. 3-4)

464

Kritik Answers

Alternative Causes Terrorism

HARDT AND NEGRIS STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE
FORCLOSE ANY POLITICAL NEGOTIATION
INTELLECTUALLY ENDORSING THE KRITIK CAUSES
TERRORISM
Kimball, Managing Editor of New Critierion, 2K1 (Roger, The new anti-Americanism, The

New Critierion, Vol. 20, No. 2, October, http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/oct01/empire.htm)

Empire is a contemporary redaction of the radicalism and anti-Americanism of the 1960s. It is the intellectual
rationalization of attitudes whose practical effects were demonstrated so vividly on
September 11. Books like Empire are not innocent academic inquiries. They are incitements to violence
and terrorism. This is something that Antonio Negri, at any rate, understands perfectly well. Emily Eakin described
Negri as a flamboyant Italian philosopher and suspected terrorist mastermind who is serving a 13-year prison
sentence in Rome for inciting violence during the turbulent 1970s.

465

Kritik Answers

**Exceptionalism (USC)**
Exceptionalism Answers: 2AC
FIRST NO LINK PLAN NEVER POSITS GUANTANAMO AS A
SITE OF EXCEPTION OR CLAIMS TO LIBERATE DETAINEES
FROM SOVEREIGNTY, MEANING THERES NO RISK OF
MASKING POWER
SECOND, WE SOLVE THE IMPACT THEIR NOLL EV
ASSUMES THAT EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION HAPPENS
AND THAT WE DEFINE IT AS NOT BEING AN HR VIOLATION,
WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE PLAN CREATES GENEVA
ADHERENCE
THIRD, THEIR AUTHOR CONCLUDES AFF AGAMBENS
ALTERNATIVE IS PARALYZING AND DELINKS THE LAW AND
JUSTICE, ENABLING TOTALITARIANISM
Kohn 2006
[Margaret, Asst. Prof. Poli Sci @ Florida, Bare Life and the Limits of the Law,.Theory and Event, 9:2,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.2kohn.html, Retrieved 9-26-06//uwyo-ajl]

Is there an alternative to this nexus of anomie and nomos produced by the state of
exception? Agamben invokes genealogy and politics as two interrelated avenues of struggle.
According to Agamben, "To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to
law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the
name of 'politics'." (88) In a move reminiscent of Foucault, Agamben suggests that breaking
the discursive lock on dominant ways of seeing, or more precisely not seeing, sovereign
power is the only way to disrupt its hegemonic effects. Agamben clearly hopes that his
theoretical analysis could contribute to the political struggle against authoritarianism, yet he
only offers tantalizingly abstract hints about how this might work. Beyond the typical
academic conceit that theoretical work is a decisive element of political struggle, Agamben
seems to embrace a utopianism that provides little guidance for political action. He
imagines, "One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects,
not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good." (64)
More troubling is his messianic suggestion that "this studious play" will usher in a form of
justice that cannot be made juridical. Agamben might do well to consider Hannah Arendt's
warning that the belief in justice unmediated by law was one of the characteristics of
totalitarianism.
It might seem unfair to focus too much attention on Agamben's fairly brief discussion of
alternatives to the sovereignty-exception-law nexus, but it is precisely those sections that
reveal the flaws in his analysis. It also brings us back to our original question about how to
resist the authoritarian implications of the state of exception without falling into the liberal
trap of calling for more law. For Agamben, the problem with the "rule of law" response to
the war on terrorism is that it ignores the way that the law is fundamentally implicated in
the project of sovereignty with its corollary logic of exception. Yet the solution that he
endorses reflects a similar blindness. Writing in his utopian-mystical mode, he insists, "the
only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and
law."(88) Thus Agamben, in spite of all of his theoretical sophistication, ultimately falls into
the trap of hoping that politics can be liberated from law, at least the law tied to violence and
the demarcating project of sovereignty.

466

Kritik Answers

FOURTH, THIS ISNT OFFENSE, ITS A BAD PMN PLAN

CREATES COMPARATIVELY MORE DUE PROCESS, SOLVING
OUR INTERNATIONAL PERCEPTION ADVANTAGES
[READ YOUR AGAMBEN ANSWERS]

467

Kritik Answers

**Feminism**
Feminism Answers: 2AC (1/2)
DECLARING SEXUAL INTELLIGIBILITY IS AN ACT OF
BODILY ADMINISTRATION AND ESTABLISHES A CATEGORY
OF EXPENDABLE LIFE.
Judith Butler, Johns Hopkins University, Sexual Inversions, Foucault and the Critique of
Institutions. 1993; mac//sam
How does this inversion from early to late modern power affect Foucault's discussion of yet
another inversion, that between sex and sexuality) Within ordinary language we sometimes
speak, for instance, of being a given sex, and having a certain sexuality, and we
even presume for the most part that our sexuality in some way issues from that
sex, is perhaps an expression of that sex, or is even partially or fully caused by
that sex. Sexuality is understood to come from sex, which is to say that the
biological locus of 11 sex' in and on the body is somehow conjured as the
originating source of a sexuality that, as it were, flows out from that locus,
remains inhibited within that locus, or somehow takes its bearings with respect
to that locus. In any case, "sex" is understood logically and temporally to precede
sexuality and to function, if not as its primary cause, then at least as its necessary
precondition.
However, Foucault performs an inversion of this relation and claims that this
inversion is correlated with the shift from early to late modern power. For
Foucault, "it is apparent that the deployment of sexuality, with its different strategies,
was what established this notion of 'sex'."' Sexuality is here viewed as a
discursively constructed and highly regulated network of pleasures and bodily
exchanges, produced through prohibitions and sanctions that quite literally
give form and directionality to pleasure and sensation. As such a network or
regime, sexuality does not emerge from bodies as their prior cause; sexuality
takes bodies as its instrument and its object, the site at which it consolidates,
networks, and extends its power. As a regulatory regime, sexuality operates
primarily by investing bodies with the category of sex, that is, making bodies
into the bearers of a principle of identity. To claim that bodies are one sex or the
other appears at first to be a purely descriptive claim. For Foucault, however, this claim is
itself a legislation and a production of bodies, a discursive demand, as it were,
that bodies become produced according to principles of heterosexualizing
coherence and integrity, unproblematically as either female or male. Where
sex is taken as a principle of identity, it is always positioned within 11 held of two
mutually exclusive and fully exhaustive identities; one is either male or female,
never both at once, and never neither one of them.
Foucault writes
the notion of sex brought about a fundamental reversal; it made it possible to invert
the representation of the relationships of power to sexuality, causing the latter
to appear, not in its essential and positive relation to power, but as being
rooted in a specific and irreducible urgency which power tries as best it can to
dominate; thus the idea of "sex" makes it possible to evade what gives "power"
its power; it enables one to conceive power solely as law and taboo.'
For Foucault, sex, whether male or female, operates as a principle of identity that
imposes a fiction of coherence and unity on an otherwise or unrelated set of
biological functions, sensations, pleasures. Under the regime of sex, every
pleasure becomes symptomatic of "sex,"
"sex" itself functions not merely as the biological ground or cause of
but as that which determines its directionality, a principle of
teleology or destiny, and as that repressed, psychical core that furnishes c clues
to the interpretation of its ultimate meaning. As a fictional imposition of uniformity,
sex is "an imaginary point" and an "artificial unity, but as fictional and as artificial,
the category wields enormous power ' Although Foucault does not quite claim it, the
science of reproduction produces intelligible "sex" by imposing a compulsory

468

Kritik Answers
heterosexuality on the description of bodies. One might claim that sex is here
according to a heterosexual morphology.
The category of "sex" thus establishes a principle of intelligibility for human beings,
which is to say that no human being can be taken to be is human, unless that
being is fully and coherently marked by sex And yet it would not capture
Foucault's meaning merely to claim that there are humans who are marked by
sex and thereby become intelligible. The point is stronger: to qualify as
legitimately human, one must be coherently sexed. The incoherence of sex is
precisely what marks off the abject and the dehumanized from the recognizably
human.

469

Kritik Answers

Feminism Answers: 2AC (2/2)

470

Kritik Answers

Feminism Answers: 2AC (3/3)

471

Kritik Answers

A2 Feminism: 1AR
FEMINIST IDENTITY CATEGORIES ARE CONSTITUTED BY
NORMALIZATION ONLY QUESTIONING THEM CAN
PROVIDE FREEDOM FROM GENDER SUBORDINATION
Butler 95

[Judith, Prof of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, Contingent Foundations, Feminist

Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, New York: Routledge, 50//wfi-ajl]
Paradoxically, it may be that only through releasing the category of women from a
fixed referent that something like "agency" becomes possible. For if the term
permits of a resignification, if its referent is not fixed, then possibilities for new
configurations of the term become possible. In a sense, what women signify has
been taken for granted for too long, and what has been fixed as the "referent" of the
term has been "fixed," normalized, immobilized, paralyzed in positions of
subordination. In effect, the signified has been conflated with the referent, whereby
a set of meanings have been taken to inhere in the real nature of women
themselves. To recast the referent as the signified, and to authorize or safeguard
the category of women as a site of possible resignifications is to expand the
possibilities of what it means to be a woman and in this sense to condition and
enable an enhanced sense of agency.

FEMINISMS STABLE FEMININE SUBJECT NORMALIZES

IDENTITY, VIOLENTLY MARGINALIZING THE PEOPLE IT
CLAIMS TO DEFEND, REINSCRIBING OPPRESSION ***
Butler 99

[Judith, prof. of rhetoric at UC Berkeley, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999, 7-8//wfi-ajl]
My suggestion is that the presumed universality and unity of the subject of
feminism is effecitvely undermined by the constraints of the representational
discourse in which it functions. Indeed,
the premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless
category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category.
These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory consequences of that
construction, even when the construction has been elaborated for emancipatory
purposes. Indeed, the fragmentation within feminism and the paradoxical
opposition to feminism from women whom feminism claims to represent suggest
the necessary limits of identity politics. The suggestion that feminism can seek
wider representation for a subject that it itself consturcts has the ironic
consequence that feminist goals risk failure by refusing to take account of the
constitutive powers of their own representational claims. This problem is not
ameliorated through an appeal to the category of women for merely strategic
purposes for which they are intended. In this case, exclusion itself might qualify as
such an unintended yet consequential meaning. By conforming to a requirement of
representational politics that feminism articulate a stable subject, feminism thus
opens itself to charges of gross misrepresentation.

472

Kritik Answers

White Feminism Bad: 1AR

473

Kritik Answers

474

Kritik Answers

**Gift**
A2 The Gift: 2AC (1/4)
YOUR AUTHORS CONCEDE THAT WE SHOULDNT ABANDON
ATTEMPTS TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE OR
THAT WE CANT EVER TAKE POLITICAL ACTION
Arrigo & Williams, Their Authors from the Califonria School of Professional
Psychology, 2K (Bruce & Christopher, The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the
Gift of the Majority On Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Search for Equality, Journal of
Contemporary Criminal Justice, Volume 16, Number 3, August)

With regard to the (im)possibility of a legally imposed equality in search of a

transformative justice, we (as social and political beings) must go beyond what is
consciously imaginable, calculable, and knowable. We must go beyond the realm of
recognized possibility. This article does not assume the position , as some critics of
Derrida may suggest, that, given the ruse of the gift, affording minority
populations opportunity to attain equality should therefore be discarded
entirely (see Rosenfeld, 1993, on the dilemmas of a Derridean and deconstructive
framework for affirmative action). This article is far from a right-wing cry for

cessation of those undertakings that would further the cause of equality in

American society. This article is also not a statement of despair , a skeptical
and nihilistic pronouncement on the (im)possibility of justice (Fish, 1982) in which we
are all rendered incapable of establishing a provisional, deconstructive political
agenda for meaningful social change and action .

THEIR ARGUMENT IS THAT THE STATE SHOULD NEVER

TAKE ANY ACTION AND THEY ABANDON ALL LAWS IN
WHICH CASE THEY LINK TO ALL OF OUR STATE GOOD
ARGUMENTS AND ALL OF OUR ANARCHY BAD ARGUMENTS
THEIR ALTERNATIVE IN THIS CASE INCREASES HUMAN
SUFFERING AND ABANDONS STRATEGIES THAT CAN CHIP
AWAY AT STATE POWER
Chomsky, Renowned Political Activist & Linguistics Professor at MIT, 4-24-2K
(Noam, Talking 'Anarchy' With Chomsky, By David Barsamian,
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000424/chomsky)

Comment on an African proverb that perhaps intersects with what we're talking about: "The master's tools
will never be used to dismantle the master's house ." If this is intended to
mean, don't try to improve conditions for suffering people, I don't agree.
It's true that centralized power , whether in a corporation or a government, is not going to
willingly commit suicide. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't chip away at
it, for many reasons. For one thing, it benefits suffering people. That's something that
always should be done, no matter what broader considerations are . But even from the
point of view of dismantling the master's house, if people can learn what power they have when they work together, and if they can see dramatically at just what point

The alternative to that is to sit

in academic seminars and talk about how awful the system is .
they're going to be stopped, by force, perhaps, that teaches very valuable lessons in how to go on.

475

Kritik Answers

A2 The Gift: 2AC (2/4)

TURN: GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENTS
LITTLE A: THEIR ALTERNATIVE RELIES ON AND DEMANDS
THE CREATION OF A WORLD BASED ON DERRIDAS
CONCEPTION OF DEMOCRACY TO COME IF THEY SAY IT
DOESNT THEY DONT SOLVE ANY OF THE KRITIK.
Arrigo & Williams, Their Authors from the Califonria School of Professional Psychology,
2K (Bruce & Christopher, The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the Gift of the Majority On
Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Search for Equality, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice,
Volume 16, Number 3, August)

What we do suggest, however, is simply the following: That political and/or legislative attempts at
empowerment (as they currently stand) are insufficient to attain the deconstructive and discursive condition of equality for minority citizen groups
(Collins, 1993). More significant, we contend that construction of these initiatives as Derridean gifts advance , at best, fleeting
vertiginous moments of inequality and injustice. Still further, we recommend the (im)possible ; that which, at first
blush, admittedly delivers no pragmatic value for social analysts. Our invitation is for a fuller, more complete
displacement of equality and initiatives pertaining to it such that there would be no giving for its own sake; that giving would not be
construed as giving, but as the way of democratic justice (i.e., its foreseeabilitywould be [un]conscious, its recognizability would be with[out] calculation). If we are
able to give without realizing that we have done so, the possibility of reciprocation, reappropriation, and the economy of narcissism and representation are abruptly
interrupted and perhaps indefinitely stalled. This form of giving more closely embodies the truth of human existence; that which betters life for all without regard for

this justice
both of and beyond the calculable economy of the law (Derrida, 1997), requires a
different set of principles by which equality is conceived and justice is rendered. What would this
differential treatment, neither promoting nor limiting those who are other in some respect or fashion. This re-presentation of equality,

difference entail? Howwould it be embodied in civic life? In the paragraphs that remain, our intent is to suggest some protean guidelines as ways of identifying

A cultural politics of difference

grounded in an affirmative postmodern frameworkwould necessarily
prevail (Arrigo, 1998a; Henry&Milovanovic, 1996). In this more emancipatory, more liberatory vision, justice would be rooted in contingent universalities
thework that lies ahead for the (im)possibility of justice and the search for aporetic equality.

(Butler, 1992; McLaren, 1994). Provisional truths, positional knowledge, and relational meanings would abound (Arrigo, 1995). New egalitarian social relations,
practices, and institutions would materialize, producing a different, more inclusive context within which majority and minority sensibilities would interact (Mouffe,
1992). In otherwords, the multiplicity of economic, cultural, racial, gender, and sexual identities that constitute our collective society would interactively and mutually
contribute to discourse on equality and our understanding of justice. These polyvalent contributions would signify a cut in the fabric of justice, a text that pretends to

Equality on these terms would become an

ethical, fluid narrative: an anxiety-ridden moment of suspense (Derrida, 1997, pp. 137-138) cycling toward the
possibility of justice. For Derrida (1997), this is the moment of undecidability .
be a whole (i.e., the whole of democratic justice) (Derrida, 1997, p. 194).

The cacophony of voices on which this aporetic equality would be based would displace any fixed (majoritarian) norms that would otherwise ensure an anterior,

the undecidable, as an essential ghost (Derrida, 1994), would be

lodged in every decision about justice and equality (Desilva Wijeyeratne, 1998). For
Derrida (1997), this spectral haunting is the trace, the differance .19 It is the
avenir or that which is to come. The avenir is the event that exceeds
calculation, rules, and programs: It is the justice of an infinite giving (Desilva
fortified, anchored justice. Instead,

Wijeyeratne, 1998, p. 109). It is the gift of absolute dissymmetry beyond an economy of calculation (Derrida, 1997). This is what makes justice, and the search for

it is the very (im)possibility of justice

itself that renders the experience, and the quest for equality, amovement
toward a destination that is forever deferred, displaced, fractured, and
always to come.
equality, an aporia: It is possible only as an experience of the impossible. However,

476

Kritik Answers

A2 The Gift: 2AC (3/4)

LITTLE B: THEIR DISCURSIVE CALL FOR THE DEMOCRACY
TO COME DIVERTS REAL WORLD MOVEMENTS FROM MORE
EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS AND UNDERMINES THEIR POWER
Bedggood, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Auckland, 99 (David, Saint

Jacques: Derrida and the Ghost of Marxism, Cultural Logic, located at: http://eserver.org/clogic/22/bedggood.html)

in his misappropriation of Marx, Derrida offers the young idealists of today a brand of
anarchism they can consume in the belief that their actions constitute a rebellion for
"democracy" and "emancipation" against the dehumanising norms and conventions that
alienate them. Just as Stirner's "association of egoists" was a figment of his "Thought", Derrida's new International has the potential
to divert a new generation of alienated youth into discursive acts against the symptomatic
phrases rather than the materialist substance of capitalist crisis . 72. In his response to his critics who deride the idea of an
71. So

"international" without class he replies: Whenever I speak of the New International in Specters of Marx, emphasising that, in it, solidarity or alliance should not depend, fundamentally and in the final analysis,
on class affiliation, this in no wise signifies, for me, the disappearance of "classes" or the attenuation of conflicts connected with "class" differences or oppositions (or, at least, differences or oppositions based
on the new configurations of social forces for which I do in fact believe that we need new concepts and therefore, perhaps new names as well) . . . the disappearance of power relations, or relations of social
domination . . . . At issue is, simply, another dimension of analysis and political commitment, one that cuts across social differences and oppositions of social forces (what one used to call, simplifying,
"classes"). I would not say that such a dimension (for instance, the dimension of social, national, or international classes, or political struggles within nation states, problems of citizenship or nationality, or
party strategies, etc.) is superior or inferior, a primary or a secondary concern, fundamental or not. All that depends, at every instant, on new assessments of what is urgent in, first and foremost, singular
situations and of their structural implications. For such an assessment, there is, by definition, no pre-existing criterion or absolute calculability; analysis must begin anew every day everywhere, without ever
being guaranteed by prior knowledge. It is on this condition, on the condition constituted by this injunction, that there is, if there is, action, decision and political responsibility -- repoliticization.108 73. In

the term "international" is a mystique. It covers for a nihilistic cult. Its Marxist meaning
is inverted; just as messianicity is messianism without a given messiah -- because everyone is one's own messiah. There is no prior knowledge that can
guide any collective action because that pre-anything (society, religion, etc.) is spectral, is the unfilled "void". There are
only irreducible acts which individuals perform at any given moment by personally
attempting to calculate, on the spot as it were, which of many "dimensions" or "forces" immediately
concern them, "responsibly" and in the name of "justice " (whose gift?). If there is one name to apply to this contingent conjunction of
other words,

"forces" which tries to "name" the "new" it is as I have argued above, performativity.109 Moreover, as I set out to prove, Derrida's performativity is the idealist philosophical license for the political/social

we
could not get a better prescription for "demobilising" and "depoliticising" the masses in the
face of the current world crisis of capitalism .
concept of reflexivity as developed by Soros and Giddens to express their abstract understanding of the 'structure-agency' problem in the new global economy.110 Teamed-up, as performo-reflexivity,

477

Kritik Answers

A2 The Gift: 2AC (4/4)

AND, THE FAILURE OF ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENTS
CAUSES EXTINCTION
Shiva, Physicist & Ecologist and Director of the Research Foundation for Science
Technology and Natural Resource Policy, 12-12- 99 (Vandana, The Historic Significance of
Seattle, located at: http://flag.blackened.net/global/1299arshiva.htm)

The failure of the W.T.O Ministerial meeting in Seattle was a historic watershed, in more than one way. Firstly, it
has demonstrated that globalisation is not an inevitable phenomena which must be accepted at all costs but a
political project which can be responded to politically . 50,000 citizens from all walks of life and all parts of the world were
responding politically when they protested peacefully on the streets of Seattle for four days to ensure that there would be no new
round of trade negotiations for accelerating and expanding the process of globalisation. Trade Ministers from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean were
responding politically when they refused to join hands to provide support to a "contrived" consensus since they had been excluded from the negotiations being
undertaken in the "green room" process behind closed doors. As long as the conditions of transparency, openness and participation were not ensured, developing

. The rebellion
on the streets and the rebellion within the W.T.O. negotiations has started a new
democracy movement - with citizens from across the world and the governments of the
South refusing to be bullied and excluded from decisions in which they have a rightful
share. Seattle had been chosen by the U.S to host the Third Ministerial conference because it is the home of Boeing and Microsoft, and symbolises the corporate
countries would not be party to a consensus. This is a new context and will make bulldozing of decisions difficult in future trade negotiations

power which W.T.O rules are designed to protect and expand. Yet the corporations were staying in the background, and proponents of free-trade and W.T.O were
going out of their way to say that W.T.O was a "member driven" institution controlled by governments who made democratic decisions. The refusal of Third World
Governments to rubber-stamp decisions from which they had been excluded has brought into the open and confirmed the non-transparent and anti-democratic
processes by which W.T.O rules have been imposed on the Third World and has confirmed the claims of the critics. W.T.O has earned itself names such as World
Tyranny Organisation because it enforces tyrannical anti-people, anti-nature decisions to enable corporations to steal the world's harvests through secretive,
undemocratic structures and processes. The W.T.O institutionalises forced trade not free trade, and beyond a point, coercion and the rule of force cannot continue.
The W.T.O tyranny was apparent in Seattle both on the streets and inside the Washington State Convention centre where the negotiations were taking place. Non
violent protestors including young people and old women, labour activists and environmental activists and even local residents were brutally beaten up, sprayed with
tear gas, and arrested in hundreds. The intolerance of democratic dissent, which is a hallmark of dictatorship, was unleashed in full force in Seattle. While the trees
and stores were lit up for Christmas festivity, the streets were barricaded and blocked by the police, turning the city into a war zone. The media has referred to the
protestors as "power mongers" and "special interest" groups. Globalisers, such as Scott Miller of the U.S. Alliance for Trade Expansion said that the protestors were
acting out of fear and ignorance. The thousands of youth, farmers, workers and environmentalists who marched the streets of Seattle in peace and solidarity were not
acting out of ignorance and fear, they were outraged because they know how undemocratic the W.T.O is, how destructive its social and ecological impacts are, and how
the rules of the W.T.O are driven by the objectives of establishing corporate control over every dimension of our lives - our food, our health, our environment, our
work and our future. When labour joins hands with environmentalists, when farmers from the North and farmers from the South make a common commitment to say
"no" to genetically engineered crops, they are not acting in their special interests. They are defending the common interests and common rights of all people,
everywhere. The divide and rule policy, which has attempted to put consumers against farmers, the North against the South, labour against environmentalists had

the broad based citizens campaigns stopped a new

did launch their own millennium round of
democratisation of the global economy . The real Millennium Round for the W.T.O is the beginning of a new democratic debate about
the future of the earth and the future of it's people. The centralized, undemocratic rules and structures of the
W.T.O that are establishing global corporate rule based on monopolies and monocultures
need to give way to an earth democracy supported by decentralisation and diversity. The
rights of all species and the rights of all people must come before the rights of corporations
to make limitless profits through limitless destruction. Free trade is not leading to freedom. It is
leading to slavery. Diverse life forms are being enslaved through patents on life, farmers
are being enslaved into high-tech slavery, and countries are being enslaved into debt and
dependence and destruction of their domestic economies . We want a new millennium based on economic democracy
not economic totalitarianism. The future is possible for humans and other species only if the principles
of competition, organised greed, commodification of all life, monocultures, monopolies and
centralised global corporate control of our daily lives enshrined in the W.T.O are replaced by the
principles of protection of people and nature, the obligation of giving and sharing diversity,
and the decentralisation and self-organisation enshrined in our diverse cultures and
national constitutions. A new threshold was crossed in Seattle - a watershed towards the
creation of a global citizen-based and citizen-driven democratic order . The future of the World Trade
failed. In their diversity, citizens were united across sectors and regions. While
Millennium Round of W.T.O from being launched in Seattle, they

Organisation will be shaped far more by what happened on the streets of Seattle and in the non-governmental (NGO) organisation events than by what happened in

The rules set by the secretive World Trade Organisation violate

principles of human rights and ecological survival . They violate rules of justice and sustainability. They are rules
of warfare against the people and the planet. Changing these rules is the most important
democratic and human rights struggle of our times. It is a matter of survival .
the Washington State Convention Centre.

478

Kritik Answers

Anti-Globalization Turn: 1AR (1/2)

EXTEND OUR ANTI-GLOBALIZATION TURN: THEIR
ALTERNATIVE IS PREMISED ON DERRIDAS POSTMODERN
CONCEPTION OF THE NEW INTERNATIONAL AND
DEMOCRACY TO COME. THEIR DISCURSIVE CALL FOR
THESE STRUCTURES DEMOBILIZIE AND DEPOLITICIZE
REAL WORLD MOVEMENTS THAT ARE NECESSARY BRING
DOWN THE WALLS OF SOVEREIGNTY AND HEGEMONY.
THEIR ALTERNATIVE IS TOO IDEALISTIC IT FORSAKES
ORGANIZATION AND ALLIANCES THAT ARE NEEDED TO
SOLVE. THE IMPACT IS RAMPANT EXPANSION OF
GLOBALIZATION WHICH CAUSES EXTINCTION.
OUR ARGUMENTS FLIPS THE ALTERNATIVE EVILS WILL
CONTINUE TO EXIST IN THEIR WORLD BUT THE
DEMOCRACY TO COME WILL UNDERMINE ANY WAY TO
SOVLE THEM THIS ANSWERS ALL OF THEIR OFFENSE
ABOUT CHANGING THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS
Froment-Meurice, Professor of French at the University of Vanderbilt, 2K1 (Marc,
Specters of M, Parallax, Volume 7, Number 3)

the sense of the new International

Without (sans) is
. This untimely link new alliance without alliance, messianism
without messianism, without content is a relationless relation, without belonging or pertaining, or, better yet, what I call departing/disowning (de partenance). It is
the party of the partyless and the a-political although it is not a third way opening between the two traditional parties (conservative or progressive, right or left);
above all it is not a gathering, an assembly of whoever happens to be unhappy with traditional politics, with the democratic system based on alternation (even if this
points to a blatant lie, since most of the time it all boils down to the same: new heads simply alternate with old heads). Nor is it a matter of assembling all those who

is to assemble and gather

individuals but to recognize that the option of community vs.
individualism plays the same game , based on the same conception of the modern subject as
autonomous and autarkic. U.S. society offers good evidence for this: it is everything except a society, while displaying a most
are uninterested in politics or who seek an alternative way free radicals in the margins. In general, the point precisely

depressing show of people obsessed by community whatever it may be: it starts with the neighborhood or the churches, not to mention family and its values, of

Essentially there has never been a more

destructive myth than that of the individual who associates with others to
form a we that is nothing but a facade or may even be completely
factitious. First and this should be the starting point there is no individual who cannot be infinitely divided. Should there be only one, the individual is
course. Yet there has never been a more dissociated and divided society.

never one, except materially, if I may say so, although nearly every part of the body is replaceable nowadays (not to mention the sex). And now here is we, of this new
International (which has never existed and thus is not new in the sense that we speak of a new car model): it (we) should not designate a community to which we
belong except in terms of that to which we do not belong: not a family, not a nation, not a party, not a sex, not a language, and so on everything and anything,

Yet surely if we belong to nothing at all, it will not take anyone long
to notice that we are nothing at all an abstraction, a ghost, even more so than the clouds of ideology and also that we
stretching it to the limit.

cannot help but belong de facto to a language, for instance: just as the International(e) was written in French. But that didnt stop it from becoming the Soviet
anthem until Stalin replaced it with his anthem, with its clear nationalist resonance. An untimely link is a link nonetheless, or rather an alliance an engagement,
complete with a commitment and a (diamond) ring. But this alliance does not rely on any positive contents for its definition, or on the items of a program to be carried
out. That might imply that this alliance does not commit to anything only to witnessing itself (herself, alliance being feminine): like language said by Holderlin
(quoted by Derrida in Specters) to have been given to human beings so that they can bear witness to what they are: speaking beings, first and foremost. Having quoted
precisely the same fragment by Holderlin, I called this circularity deposition: What man [the human being] is he receives it from the word, and this being is being the
witness of the word or its warden answering for it. Deposition is what one might call such circularity: to be the depositary of Being and making a deposition for its
manifestness in speaking the received language.8 But it is important always to underscore, as Derrida does, that Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task9 ;
that the human being has to be, like Dasein. (Have / to [a / a` ]: have as in have to. . . and not possess such is the sense of the ownmost in Heidegger. At least in
one of several Heideggers, the one I address in that he speaks to me.) Further, a language has to be learned, starting with ours, the one we owe it to (so) to speak; the
one we owe ourselves to, inasmuch as it has given us its word, given not as a fact but as a promise. Such circularity without origin constitutes a ring: infinite circulation
of meaning, stopping nowhere (this would translate into the concept of God if God could be a concept and therefore nowhere a God or nowhere as God). What I also
call langagement gives the formal structure of language (in quotation marks: the concept of formality is just meant to prevent any positive content from keeping its
countenance): its transmissibility (or translatability) precisely prohibits any closure and thus any appropriation without remainder in one unique and universal
language. To the very extent that the promise (the gift of language, of the word as given word) is not incarnated in any determined language just as there cannot
really be any country corresponding to the Promised Land10 to that (de-ceptive) extent the idiom bears witness to this infinite engagement: it (the idiom) is the
witness that, at the heart of that which allows the circulation of meaning, there is some resistance. The idiom will not yield to translatability unabridged and integral,
and likewise the new International attests to the existence or occurrence in the bosom of universal westernization the merchandising of the planet now called
globalization of some thing that resists any appropriation insofar as this thing is not actually a thing and, deep down, is nothing at all or is this nothing without

This
sketchy alliance is spectral, first of all. It haunts the home like nihilism , described by Nietzsche
which, as it happens, no whole or totalization is possible (thus impossible: no totalization is able to totalize nothing or a bunch of spectres).

as the uncanniest, most unheimlich of guests. I need not really mention again how it all starts and what ushers in the Specters, namely that it is Marx himself who
speaks of the specter of communism.1 1 But I will mention it because

this starting point also conditions the nature

479

Kritik Answers
of the new alliance and in this sense communism is not only not dead, it
also cannot die: to the extent that a spectre cannot ever be anything except dead surviving inasmuch as it is chased, hounded, warded of, professed
dead at last, for good, once and for all.

Continues

480

Kritik Answers

Anti-Globalization Turn: 1AR (2/2)

No one, perhaps, has paid enough attention to the oppositional dialectics that result from this apparition of the specter. Not only are the powers of old Europe forming a Holy Alliance in order to ward off this
spectre, the Communists also have to come out and manifest themselves, perhaps first and foremost, since they are henceforth a recognized player or power, in order to crush the fiction or hallucination of the
communist specter (even if they owe their recognition to him). Communists must get up an erection well rendered by the first two lines of the International(e) in French, repeating Debout, Arise and
they have to get up, lift, pick up, sublate (Hegels Auf hebung is the lever) the wicked specter, a specter who is, uncannily enough, communist. Communists must manifest themselves as such, being communist
beings: as the spectres negation. But does this not make them run the risk of disabling what made communism such a formidable, uplifting power, namely that it appeared only as a spectre, a hallucination? Its
a thousand times easier to fight against real (manifest) powers than against thin air. In the same spirit, Heidegger describes Angst exactly as a fear of nothing: related to nothing special, only to being as a
whole. All this points to why I have never had a need to be anti-communist also known as a swine, said Sartre: yet communists managed to be so even more so than the most bigoted anti-communists.
Besides, the latter the reactionaries of the Holy Alliance were the ones most directly touched by the fall of communism. Suddenly they lost their entire raison detre, became unable to oppose anything, and
therefore in these well-lubricated dialectics haunting Marxism they could no longer pose or recognize themselves in their opponents negation. Am I saying that now, now that communist beings have virtually
vanished (except for a handful of survivors), communist Being is going to make a comeback, come back to spook us like Marxs spectre in old Europe, except that this time everyone in the whole world would
be affected the globalized world said to be opposed by the new International? I am actually asking whether the question has any meaning: without any beings to embody it and have it materialize, how to
speak of a pure communist Being? Does it not make it all fall back into the ontotheological clouds Marx denounced for being ideological superstitions (pure spirit, bodyless Holy Ghost)? But also how not to see
that, by defining the new International in terms of an opposition (an opposition, simply, to reality), one repeats and sublates Hegels specter haunting (the various) Marxism(s), driving it (them) to its (their)
demise and/or end(s), each time and whatever the attempts to cut the theory from what makes it work (for instance in the invention of a so-called epistemological shift thanks to which true scientific Marxism

The need urgent and challenging to conceive the struggle in

terms that do not call for opposition , of classes for instance, is plain. Is class struggle nothing but the same old song echoing? Has it outlived its given time,
its usefulness? But that still doesnt entitle anyone to be so naive (full of counterfeit or rather interested naivete) and proclaim , urbi
et orbi, that there is no struggle left , nothing but the euphoria of a classless society. The struggle is lasting, the fight goes on,
even if the last fight (It is the last fight / The International(e) / Shall be the human race (all of humankind) [Cest la lutte finale / LInternationale /
might be cut off from its stubborn sprite without which it could not even pretend to be true)?

Sera le genre humain]) is also a struggle for the end of fighting. (Unlike the Marseillaise, the International(e) has no warmongering and nationalist strain but delivers a vibrant call to abolish all discipline and

Whoever proclaims that there should be nothing but the International(e) as the whole of
seems to give in to a dangerous or at least idealistic utopia: the ends of the new Alliance , deep down,
are the dissociation of any (interest) group, including the association of the International, by the same token (Let us band together: that is its motif, if I may repeat it;
encourage deserters.)

humankind in the future

with an us possible only if it is opposed to them).

481

Kritik Answers

Anti-Globalization Movements Up Now

(1/2)
ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENTS ARE STRONGER THAN
EVER THEY SOLVE BECAUSE THEY ARE ORGANIZED AND
BROAD BASED
LA Times 11-24-2K2
Authorities on development issues, including some of globalization's stalwart defenders, say the
movement in this country has broadened, matured and become more influential in the
33 months since Seattle. "The movement is getting much more sophisticated, even the
activists in the streets," said Nancy Birdsall, a former World Bank official who heads the Center for Global Development in Washington.
"It's gone from anti-globalization to alternative globalization to managing
globalization." Development experts credit activist pressure at least in part for a
range of developments, including a decision by the World Bank to give poor countries a bigger voice in developing poverty-reduction plans
and agreement by the World Trade Organization to give top priority to the needs of poor countries in the round of worldwide trade talks launched last year.
Globalization critics denounce some of those initiatives as inadequate. But if nothing else, they represent an acknowledgment that wealthy nations and their financial
institutions cannot afford to appear indifferent to global injustice. "They won the verbal and policy battle," said Gary Hufbauer, a pro-globalization economist at the
Institute for International Economics in Washington. "They did shift policy. Are they happy that they shifted it enough? No, they're not ever going to be totally happy,

Experts see evidence of the movement's growing influence

in other arenas. Several high-profile economists , including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, have
endorsed some of the specific criticisms and objectives of the movement . Their
because they're always pushing."

critique was reinforced by growing evidence of the failure of "Washington consensus" formulas to foster growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The issue of Third
World debt relief resonated with a much wider audience when Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill and Irish rock star Bono jointly toured some of sub-Saharan Africa's
poorest countries. Many development experts point to Jubilee 2000, the Third World debt-relief group whose work has been championed by Bono, as the non-

Jubilee 2000 had a tremendous

impact in mobilizing focus and political support for the decisions that were
eventually made," said Mats Karlsson, the World Bank's vice president for external affairs. The result, he said, "is a very radical debt relief program
government organization with perhaps the most influence over public policymaking. "

that is now being implemented country by country." Other groups have had an effect too. Oxfam, the London-based relief organization, made waves with a report
stating that more trade liberalization, if managed properly, is the best prescription for reducing world poverty. The International Labor Organization has convened a

All of the major organizations have

grown enormously more powerful and effective . The only thing that's shrunk is the street protests," said
Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. " The movement hasn't lost
momentum at all. It just shifted to a different set of tactics." For every
organization involved in what some call the "movement of movements,"
there have also been smaller but symbolically important victories . Jubilee USA's
high-profile working group to assess the social implications of globalization. "

crusade has been joined by a remarkably wide range of organizations, from conservative evangelical churches to the San Francisco 49ers football team. For the World
Bank Bond Boycott, which hopes to generate the kind of financial pressure that helped end apartheid, a big turning point was the Milwaukee City Council's 13-1 vote
this spring to join the campaign. "We've seen a huge shift," said boycott coordinator Neil Watkins. "When we started in 2000, there's no way we could have even

Leaders say the movement's evolving profile reflects a

deliberate decision to tone down the increasingly provocative street
mobilizations staged outside meetings of the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization and other global institutions. Although authorities said the
talked to the city of Milwaukee."

vast majority of participants were peaceful, small groups of Black Bloc anarchists and other extremists were giving the protests a violent edge. In Seattle, their antics
contributed to $2 million in property damage and 500 arrests. Then came Sept. 11. Public revulsion for terrorism and heightened concern about security created even
more ambivalence within the movement about the merits of street mobilizations. Anti-globalization groups had been planning a Seattle-size protest at the fall 2001
meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Washington, but the sessions were canceled shortly after Sept. 11. When the institutions held their spring meetings here in
April, only 1,000 or so protesters rallied outside their headquarters. "After 9/11, the U.S. movement obviously reevaluated its tactics and its tone," said Lori Wallach,
who has directed Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch operation since 1990. "But even before 9/11, there was a strategy judgment that we needed to diversify the ways

the movement's current level of energy and

engagement far exceeds what prevailed during the struggle over
ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement .
in which we organized and mobilized." Wallach said

482

Kritik Answers

Anti-Globalization Movements Up Now

(2/2)
STATUS QUO MOVEMENTS SOLVE GLOBALIZATION
ORGANIZATION IS CRITICAL
Workers Power Global 2K1 ([anti] capitalisim: from resistance to revolution,
Workers Powers Action Guide To the Anti-Capitalist Movement, June, located at:
http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/anticap0.html)

We are present at a turning point in history . From Seattle to Genoa. In less than two years the anti-globalisation
movement has travelled a long and spectacular journey . Washington, Melbourne, Prague, Seoul, Nice, Quebec, Barcelona
to name only a few cities have seen major demonstrations against corporate exploitation and environmental destruction as well as against the hollowing out of

the movement has got bigger and ever

more clearly targeted on the real enemy: the capitalist system . Since Seattle, tens of thousands of police,
democracy by the governments of G8 and their pliant international agencies. Along the way,

innumerable rounds of tear gas, batons, steel perimeter fences, vicious police dogs, exclusion orders, sealed borders, closed airports, blockaded roads, midnight raids

the movement is growing

all have been deployed by the capitalist governments to stop our voices being heard. But
despite all that. Seattle, 30
November, was a defining moment when the movement became conscious of its power. But it did not come from nowhere. Years of grassroots collective action in the
USA culminated in Seattle. Students had been at the heart of it, campaigning against the unleashing of corporate depravity that marked politics in the Clinton years. A
new generation of activists on campuses across the USA and Canada became politicised by the invasion of the mind-snatchers as the big corporations made their move
to take over of education. Faced with the hubris of money, student politics moved on from the politics of identity and introspection to anti-corporatism - to stem and
turn back the agents of Nike, Coca-Cola and McDonalds dressed up as educationalists. Heavy-handed attempts at censorship or blackmail in the face of criticism of the
big brand names only radicalised them more. They investigated the operations of the big corporations away from their campuses and found that the money used to
bribe their administrators was sucked out of sweatshop labour in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and China the one-dollar-a-day impoverished billions of the
Third World. Seattle put it all together. As Manning Marable said: "The demonstrations in Seattle showed that growing numbers of Americans are recognising that all
of these issues Third World sweatshops, the destruction of unions, deteriorating living standards, the dismantling of social programs inside the US are actually
interconnected." But the campus campaigns in the USA were only one strand of the emerging anti-globalisation movement. The Zapatista uprising on New Years Day
1995 in the Chiapas region of Mexico was a rebellion against land hunger and violent autocracy and for indigenous rights and the end of the countrys enslavement to

Tens of thousands of new and old activists rallied to their call to

support them and to open up many fronts of struggle against imperialism . A Zapatista internationalism
US companies, exploitation and foreign debt.

was born in the Laconda rainforests and quickly formed cross-currents with the North American and then European anti-capitalists. Another strand that emerged in
the 1990s was the radicalisation of some NGOs. In Britain, 1997 and 98 saw Jubilee 2000 mobilise 70,000 and 50,000 respectively to demand the G7 cancel the debts
of the Third World. In the South, many of the smaller, more independent,1 NGOs who were closer to the suffering caused by government and business alike signed up
to the anti-globalisation movement. Paradoxically, the "privatisation" of healthcare and famine relief removed the shackles of apolitical humanitarianism and allowed
a generation of NGO workers to become overtly radical. But by far the biggest component of the emerging world anti-globalisation movement has been the millions of
workers who have taken to the streets and gone on strike to resist the many attacks on them which originated in IMF "structural adjustment programmes" during the
1980s and 1990s. The IMF has engineered cuts in health and education programmes, let rip state controlled prices for foodstuffs and fuel and downsized the public

tens of millions have fought back time and again in South Asia, West Africa and
Latin America. Sometimes they have won concessions. But often they have been betrayed
by reformist and nationalist leaders. All too often they have not received active solidarity from trade unionists and leftists in the North. Yet, until the
mid-1990s, we were in an era of rearguard actions against the sweeping tide of
globalisation and neo-liberalism. US imperialism swept all before it in the wake of its victory in the Cold War. As Walden Bello noted, this era peaked with
the founding of the World Trade Organization in 1994-95, the apogee of capitalism in the era of globalization. But it spawned a
movement against itself and this connected with other movements . Success in stalling the Multilateral
sector workforce. But

Agreement on Investment (MAI) gave it confidence. Then came the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, which Bello has called the Stalingrad of the IMF when it
became clear that the IMF itself, with its prescription for capital account liberalization, helped create the crisis, and with its cure of tight money and tight budgets,
converted a financial crisis into economic collapse in Thailand, Indonesia, and Korea. Across the WTO, IMF and finally the World Bank a complete crisis of
legitimacy set in during the closing years of the 20th century. Their defensiveness and confusion only emboldened the movement against them, leading to the turning

The broadening of the anti-globalisation movement has been accompanied since

by its ideological deepening, in particular a growing sense of practical internationalism
and conscious anti-capitalism. The phenomenon of summit-hopping is one expression of this, as is the proliferation of counter-conferences
point that was Seattle.
then

and teach-ins with representatives from all over the world. The massive anti-Davos summit in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001, gathered toghether all wings of

The movement of one no and many yeses intensified the debate

around alternative visions and programmes for a world free from exploitation and
oppression and what alliances and tactics are necessary to get there . That is welcome. But the course of the
the anti-globalisation movement.

movement itself has posed the question of which way forward? far more directly than any forum could. The buzz of success is giving way to a sharp debate over
goals, strategy and tactics. After the Gothenburg violence we are hearing loud pleas for moderation and compromise from a self-appointed layer of go-betweens in the
movement. All they ever wanted was a place at the negotiating table - and their support for protests that put them there has to be understood in the light of that. Susan
George, an early icon of the movement who praised it last year for "doing more in one year than all her books have down in the last 25 years" was quick to condemn
plainly and clearly the protestors action on the streets of Gothenburg because violence is invariably the game of our adversary.even in the case of provocation, even
when the police is responsible for having opened hostilities Even those that proclaim to be revolutionary buckle under the pressure of bourgeois denuciation of street
violence. The Socialist Party in Sweden a so-called Trotskyist group - denounced those responsible for attacking police and property for scar[ing] the life out of the
population in Gothenburg. They criticise several so called left organisations that still refuse to resolutely distance themselves from a direction which is totally
stillborn . . Instead of total repudiation and contempt these organisations try to fish in the swamps of political street violence, said the Swedish section of the Fourth
international. The Swedish SP counterposes work in mass movements to street violence. The fact is, effective mass protest has always been met with police violence.
The fact is that those who denounce violence do not share our goal or that of hundreds of thousands of youth today: to smash the apparatus of capitalist repression
that keeps our movement down and guarantees the continued rule of the big corporations. Christophe Aguiton, leader of ATTAC, anxious also to distance himself from
the violence at Gothenburg, claims that the coalition of peaceful forces inside the anti-globalisation movement has meant that the question is no more, as in the
1970s, in the great majority of cases, to conquer the Power via revolutionary organisations, but to find other ways for radical protest. We draw the opposite
conclusion. The ferocity of the state shown in Gothenburg and Barcelona in June 2001, the removal or restriction of our democratic rights under way as we prepare for

this movement needs to raise its game. If we dont, we risk falling back to the
isolated and fragmented protests over debt, pollution etc that characterised the 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, that is where some of the
Genoa, show that

NVDA activists are headed as if frightened by the power of the mass movement they helped create that is shaking capitalism to its foundations. Today, this minute,
we have the best chance since the 1970s to build revolutionary organisations that have a mass base among young people and organised workers. Today the spectre" of
anti-capitalism stalks the worlds rulers literally it is just yards away from their pampered international gatherings. So it is time the movement outlined its goals
clearly. Anti-capitalism means expropriation of all the MNCs, banks, and the other large companies and landowners too, so that economic power is put in the hands of
the workers and peasants without which rational economic planning will prove impossible. It means fighting for the overthrow of the bosses and bureaucrats in G7
and G77 countries alike. It means workers and peasants taking power into their own hands by means of general strikes and armed militias. It means working class
people running their own lives - through the forums of elected and recallable delegates in councils. Lets grasp the opportunity to build a revolutionary international
movement. Globalisation has sounded an alarm call to the youth and activists at the base of the worlds workers' movement. The dramatic surge in the concentration
and centralisation of capital, the size and velocity of capital movements, the power of the G8 dominated "world economic institutions", the downsizing or privatisation
of social welfare all threaten workers and small farmers and a substantial proportion of the lower middle classes. But enormous new opportunities also lie ahead.
The greater unification of the world economy the higher levels of education and literacy called for by the introduction of new information and communications
technology means that workers can spread the struggles and the lessons of struggles at the speed of thought, to use Bill Gates phrase. One no and many yes-es

A revolutionary fight that links the anti-capitalist movement with the multimillioned organised working class will destroy capitalism . This pamphlet is an action guide for building that movement.
will not destroy capitalism.

483

Kritik Answers

Provisional Truth Turn: 2AC (1/2)

TURN: PROVISIONAL TRUTHS
LITTLE A: THEIR ALTERNATIVE RELIES ON THE CREATION
AND ACCEPTANCE OF PROVISIONAL TRUTHS
Arrigo & Williams, Their Authors from the Califonria School of Professional Psychology,
2K (Bruce & Christopher, The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the Gift of the Majority On
Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Search for Equality, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice,
Volume 16, Number 3, August)

This justice that is to come, this equality as an aporetic destination, resides in discourse. The
production of provisional truths and knowledge requires that the voice(s)
of alterity emerge to construct new visions of relational and positional
equality and justice. Thus, the undecidability of interaction the inclusion of minority
discourse with majoritarian discourse as differance represents a radically democratic in-road
producing multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial effects for equality .
This is what Caputo (1997) refers to as a highly miscegenated polymorphism (p. 107). For Derrida (1991, 1997), a radical democracy is
constituted by preparedness for the incoming of the other . Derrida (1997) advocates highly
heterogenous, porous, selfdifferentiating quasi-identities, [and] unstable identities . . . that . . . do not close over and form a seamless web of the selfsame (p. 107). In

a receptacle for difference that receives the provisional truths,

positional knowledge, and supplemental processes of meaning making is
necessary in the struggle for (im)possible equality .
short,

484

Kritik Answers

Provisional Truth Turn: 2AC (2/2)

LITTLE B: OPENING SPACE FOR THESE TYPES OF
PROVISIONAL TRUTHS OPENS THE DOOR FOR HOLOCAUST
DENIAL
Sherry, Earl R. Larson Civil Liberties & Civil Rights Law Professor at the University of Minnesota,
96 (Suzanna, THE SLEEP OF REASON, Georgetown Law Journal, February, 84 Geo. L.J. 453)
The consequences of accepting epistemological pluralism go much deeper than making some
epistemological pluralists look inconsistent or undermining attacks on the status quo, and are much more troubling than simply failing to fulfill the expectations of its

If we cannot confidently assert that the earth is round or that evolution occurred,
because those with a different epistemology present a counterargument
that is valid in their world even if not in ours, then the same must be true of other
scientific or historical statements. It is only the tools of the Enlightenment tradition that
allow us to refute such unsupported claims as that virtually all of what we now consider the accomplishments of
proponents.

Western civilization was stolen from black Africans, n160 or that the tragic bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building was the work of agents of the United States

It is only the acceptance of reason and empiricism as the epistemological standard

that allows us to reject such pseudoscientific theories , currently fashionable in some quarters, as
that melanin is "one of the strongest electromagnetic field forces in the universe" with the power to make its possessors intellectually superior, n161 or that
Jewish doctors are injecting black babies with the AIDS virus. n162 Nor is it a defense that the modern
alternative epistemologies advocated by radical and religious scholars do not always lead to such absurdity. n163 The point is that antirational
epistemologies, unlike the principles of the Enlightenment, offer no weapons against a variety of
intellectual and political atrocities. As Marvin Frankel points out, "for most of Judaism's 5700-plus years, . . . the great
government.

Western religions neither caused democracy to happen nor exhibited discomfort about its absence." n164 [*483] Even today, the religious epistemologies that
mandate discrimination against gays and lesbians are indistinguishable from those in the not too distant past that mandated discrimination against blacks. n165 And

there is a more horrific example of the

beliefs that become acceptable when reason and empiricism are demoted
as socially constructed epistemologies . Deborah Lipstadt notes that postmodern doctrines
have allowed Holocaust denial theories to flourish and to be treated as "the
other side," another "point of view," or a "different perspective": n166 [The postmodern
doctrines of Fish and Rorty] fostered an atmosphere in which it became harder to say that an idea was beyond the pale of rational thought. At its most
radical it contended that there was no bedrock thing such as experience. . . .
Because deconstructionism argued that experience was relative and
nothing was fixed, it created an atmosphere of permissiveness toward
questioning the meaning of historical events and made it hard for its
proponents to assert that there was anything "off limits" for this skeptical
approach. n167 Thus, those who deny that the Holocaust occurred are, in an
epistemologically plural world, as entitled to demand public recognition of
their beliefs as are the creationists, the Afrocentrists, and all the others who reject the epistemology of the Enlightenment. They can demand -- and
if the melanin or AIDS myths are not sufficiently silly or frightening,

many defenders of epistemological pluralism, if not current case law, would support such demands from other groups -- that textbooks should reflect the existence
and potential soundness of denial theories; that if the public schools teach the Holocaust as a historical event, they must also teach that it may not have happened; that
if parents object to their children being taught what they consider a historical fabrication, the [*484] children should be excused from history class; that if a state

Lipstadt sees
Holocaust denial as "a threat to all those who believe in the ultimate power
of reason," n168 but the converse is also true: the denial of the ultimate power
of reason is a threat to those who would keep the memory of the Holocaust
alive.
university funds student speech on historical topics generally it must also fund a group dedicated to denying the Holocaust.

485

Kritik Answers

Provisional Truth: 1AR

THE ALTERNATIVE CREATES UNDECIDABILITY,
CONTINGENT UNIVERSALITIES, AND PROVISIONAL TRUTHS
Arrigo & Williams, Their Authors from the Califonria School of Professional Psychology,
2K (Bruce & Christopher, The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the Gift of the Majority On
Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Search for Equality, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice,
Volume 16, Number 3, August)

This article conceptually explores the problem of democratic justice in the form of
legislated equal rights for minority citizen groups. Following Derridas critique of Western logic and thought, at issue is the (im)possibility
of justice for under- and nonrepresented constituencies. Derridas socioethical treatment of justice , law, hospitality,
and community suggests that the majority bestows a gift (ostensible sociopolitical empowerment); however, the ruse
of this gift is that the giver affirms an economy of narcissism and reifies the hegemony and power of the majority. This article concludes
by speculating on the possibility of justice and equality informed by an affirmative
postmodern framework. A cultural politics of difference, contingent
universalities, undecidability, dialogical pedagogy, border crossings, and
constitutive thought would underscore this transformative and
deconstructive agenda.

486

Kritik Answers

**Global/Local**
Micropolitics Only Benefit Privileged
ATTENTION GIVEN TO MICROPOLITICS OBSCURES ACTUAL
SUCCESSES OF DISFAVORED GROUPS AND ONLY BENEFITS
THE PRIVILEGED
Patricia Hill Collins, Prof. of Sociology - Dept. of African-American Studies at Univ. of Cincinnati,
Fighting Words, 1998, 135-7
In this academic context, postmodern treatment of power relations suggested by the rubric of decentering may provide some relief to intellectuals who wish to resist
oppression in the abstract without decentering their own material privileges. Current preoccupations with hegemony and microlevel, local politicstwo emphases
within postmodern treatments of powerare revealing in this regard. As the resurgence of interest in Italian Marxist Antonio Gramscis work illustrates (Forgacs
1988), postmodern social theorists seem fascinated with the thesis of an all-powerful hegemony that swallows up all resistance except that which manages to survive
within local interstices of power. The ways in which many postmodernist theorists use the heterogeneous work of French philosopher Michel Foucault illustrate these
dual emphases. Foucaults sympathy for disempowered people can be seen in his sustained attention to themes of institutional power via historical treatment of social
structural change in his earlier works (see., e.g., Foucaults analysis of domination in his work on prisons [979] and his efforts to write a genealogy linking sexuality to
institutional power [ii98oa]). Despite these emphases, some interpretations of his work present power as being everywhere, ultimately nowhere, and, strangely
enough, growing. Historical context is minimizedthe prison, the Church, France, and Rome all disappearleaving in place a decontextualized Foucauldian theory
of power. All of social life comes to be portrayed as a network of power relations that become increasingly analyzed not at the level of large-scale social structures, but
rather at the local level of the individual (Hartsock 1990). The increasing attention given to micropolitics as a response to this growing hegemony, namely, politics on
the local level that are allegedly plural, multiple, and fragmented, stems in part from this reading of history that eschews grand narratives, including those of collective
social movements. In part, this tendency to decontextualize social theory plagues academic social theories of all sorts, much as the richly textured nuances of Marxs
historical work on class conflict (see, e.g., The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1963]) become routinely recast into a mechanistic Marxist theory of social
class. This decontextualization also illustrates how academic theories empty out the more political and worldly substance of radical critiques (West 1993, 41) and

postmodern views of power that overemphasize hegemony and local

politics provide a seductive mix of appearing to challenge oppression while secretly believing that such
efforts are doomed. Hegemonic power appears as ever expanding and invading. It may even attempt to annex the counterdiscourses that have
thus participate in relations of ruling. In this sense,

developed, oppositional discourses such as Afrocentrism, postmodernism, feminism, and Black feminist thought. This is a very important insight. However, there is a
difference between being aware of the power of ones enemy and arguing that such power is so pervasive that resistance will, at best, provide a brief respite and, at

This emphasis on power as being hegemonic and seemingly absolute, coupled

with a belief in local resistance as the best that people can do, flies in the face of actual,
historical successes. African-Americans, women, poor people, and others have achieved
results through social movements, revolts, revolutions, and other collective social action
against government, corporate, and academic structures. As James Scott queries, What remains to be explained is why
worst, prove ultimately futile.

theories of hegemonyhaveretained an enormous intellectual appeal to social scientists and historians (1990, 86). Perhaps for colonizers who refuse,

emphasizing hegemony and stressing nihilism not

only does not resist injustice but participates in its manufacture. Views of power grounded exclusively in notions of
hegemony and nihilism are not only pessimistic, they can be dangerous for members of historically marginalized groups. Moreover, the emphasis on
local versus structural institutions makes it difficult to examine major structures such as
racism, sexism, and other structural forms of oppression. 7 Social theories that reduce hierarchical
power relations to the level of representation, performance, or constructed phenomena not only
emphasize the likelihood that resistance will fail in the face of a pervasive hegemonic presence, they also reinforce perceptions
individualized, local resistance is the best that they can envision. Over

that local, individualized micropolitics constitutes the most effective terrain of struggle. This emphasis on the local

If politics becomes
reduced to the personal, decentering relations of ruling in academia and other
bureaucratic structures seems increasingly unlikely. As Rey Chow opines, What these
intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import, and thus depriving the oppressed
of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful demand (1993, 13). Viewing decentering as a strategy situated within a larger process of
dovetails nicely with increasing emphasis on the personal as a source of power and with parallel attention to subjectivity.

resistance to oppression is dramatically different from perceiving decentering as an academic theory of how scholars should view all truth. When weapons of
resistance are theorized away in this fashion, one might ask, who really benefits? Versions of decentering as presented by postmodernism in the American academy
may have limited utility for African-American women and other similarly situated groups. Decentering provides little legitimation for centers of power for Black

the way to be legitimate within

postmodernism is to claim marginality, yet this same marginality renders Black women as a
group powerless in the real world of academic politics . Because the logic of decentering opposes constructing new centers of
any kind, in effect the stance of critique of decentering provides yet another piece of the new politics of containment. A depoliticized decentering
disempowers Black women as a group while providing the illusion of empowerment . Although
women other than those of preexisting marginality in actual power relations. Thus,

individual African-American women intellectuals may benefit from being able to broker the language and experiences of marginality in a commodified American

groups already
privileged under hierarchical power relations suffer little from embracing the language of
decentering denuded of any actions to decenter actual hierarchical power relations in
academia or elsewhere. Ironically, their privilege may actually increase.
academic marketplace, this in no way substitutes for sustained improvement of Black women as a group in these same settings. In contrast,

487

Kritik Answers

Localism Causes Oppression (1/2)

THE LOCAL IS UTILIZED TO FULFILL THE INTERESTS OF
ELITES
David Engel, SUNY Buffalo School of Law, Injury and Identity: The Damaged Self in Three
Cultures, April 24, 1999, http://homepage1.nifty.com/tkitamura/engel.html, accessed 11/16/02
Law plays a distinctive role in relation to the social settings in which injuries occur. The
judge may act as arbiter, choosing among the contending realities in the locales where
conflict arises, but the judges re-presentation of reality has its own distinctive qualities. This
was partially evident in Vosburg v. Putney, with its explication of the norms of the
playground as well as the classroom. It was fully evident in the runaway ox-cart case, where
the judge sustained familiar village concepts of remedy while subverting familiar village
concepts of marriage and family. The judge is not just an arbiter; the judge tells his or her
own story. The judge is a mythmaker. The court projects a version of reality back upon the
social setting from which the case emerges, and this refashioned version of local truths
inevitably redefines them. Judges, like politicians, understand the power of the myth of the
local. They may attempt to legitimate their pronouncements about order and responsibility
by relying on romanticized images of schools, families, and communities, selectively
rendered and stripped of contestation and ambiguity. Although citizens differ about
particular local norms or practices, most would respond to the importance of local-ness
itself as a value in opposition to intrusions by big government, big business, or alien
persons into local settings. By using, and inevitably distorting, the norms and practices they
discover in local settings, the spokespersons for state law shield themselves from the
accusation that they are intruding on the common sense of ordinary people. They legitimate
their decisions as mere reflections of a mythic local community. Of course, the laws
selectivity and distortion shapes identities in particular ways. Law transforms symbols and
images drawn from local settings and redeploys them as authoritative pronouncements that
can potentially change the very settings from which they are drawn.

488

Kritik Answers

Localism Causes Oppression (2/2)

PRIVILEGING THE LOCAL CEMENTS CULTURAL
OPPRESSION
Aihwa Ong, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of
Transnationality, 1999, p. 33-34
More broadly, postcolonial theorists focus on recovering the voices of subjects silenced by
patriarchy and colonial rule (The Empire Writes Back is the title of one popular collection);
they assume that all contemporary racial, ethnic, and cultural oppressions can all be
attributed to Western colonialisms. American appropriations of postcolonial theory have
created a unitary discourse of the postcolonial that refers to highly variable situations and
conditions throughout the world; thus, Gayatri Spivak is able to talk about the paradigmatic
subaltern woman, as well as New World Asians (the old migrants) and New Immigrant
Asians (often model minorities) being disciplinarized together? Other postcolonial
feminists also have been eager to seek structural similarities, continuities, conjunctures, and
alliances between the postcolonial oppressions experienced by peoples on the bases of race,
ethnicity, and gender both in formerly colonized populations in the third world and among
immigrant populations in the United States, Australia, and England. Seldom is there any
attempt to link these assertions of unitary postcolonial situations among diasporan subjects
in the West to the historical structures of colonization, decolonization, and contemporary
developments in particular non-Western countries. Indeed, the term postcolonial has been
used to indiscriminately describe different regimes of economic, political, and cultural
domination in the Americas, India, Africa, and other third-world countries where the actual
historical experiences of colonialism have been very varied in terms of local culture,
conquest, settlement, racial exploitation, administrative regime, political resistance, and
articulation with global capitalism. In careless hands, postcolonial theory can represent a
kind of theoretical imperialism whereby scholars based in the West, without seriously
engaging the scholarship of faraway places, can project or speak for postcolonial situations
elsewhere. Stuart Hall has warned against approaches that universalize racial, ethnic, and
gender oppressions without locating the actual integument of powerin concrete
institutions. A more fruitful strand of postcolonial studies is represented by subaltern
scholars such as Partha Chatterjee, who has criticized the Indian national projects, which
are based on Western models of modernity and bypass many possibilities of authentic,
creative, and plural development of social identities, including the marginalized
communities in Indian society. He suggests that an alternative imagination that draws on
narratives of community would be a formidable challenge to narratives of capital. This
brilliant work, however, is based on the assumption that both modernity and capitalism are
universal forms, against which non-Western societies such as India can only mobilize preexisting cultural solidarities such as locality, caste, tribe, religious community, or ethnic
identity. This analytical opposition between a universal modernity and non-Western
culture is rather old-fashioned it is as if Chatterjee believes the West is not present in Indian
elites who champion narratives of the indigenous community. Furthermore, the concept of a
universal modernity must be rethought when, as Arif Dirlik observes, the narrative of
capitalism is no longer the narrative of the history of Europe; non-European capitalist
societies now make their own claims on the history of capitalism. The loose use of the term
the postcolonial, then, has had the bizarre effect of contributing to a Western tradition of
othering the Rest; it suggests a postwar scheme whereby the third world was followed by
the developing countries, which are now being succeeded by the postcolonial. This
continuum seems to suggest that the further we move in time, the more beholden nonWestern countries are to the forms and practices of their colonial past. By and large,
anthropologists have been careful to discuss how formerly colonized societies have
developed differently in relation to global economic and political dominations and have
repositioned themselves differently vis-a-vis capitalism and late modernity. By specifying
differences in history, politics, and culture, anthropologists are able to say how the
postcolonial formation of Indonesia is quite different from that of India, Nicaragua, or Zaire.

489

Kritik Answers

Globalism Key to Resistance

GLOBAL ORGANIZATION CAN HIGHLIGHT AND UNITE THE
STRUGGLES OF MANY LOCALITIES
Maximilian Forte, Department of Anthropology, University of Adelaide, Renewed Indigeneity in the
Local-Global Continuum and the Political Economy of Tradition: The Case of Trinidads Caribs and The
Caribbean Organization of Indigenous People, March 18-21, 1998,
http://www.centrelink.org/renewed.html, accessed 11/16/02
One may also begin to see how local and global levels or arenas each acts as restraints,
parameters and motivations that both condition and inspire, constrain and enable the
revitalization of Carib identification. Globalized terms, images, motifs and practices of
indigeneity act as fund of materials which are engaged and sifted through by Caribbean
Amerindians to define who they were, are, and who they are to be (see Robertson 1992).
Mere association with and invocation of the names of large international indigenous bodies
can serve as symbolic capital for these groups. To a certain extent, the material for a
reformulated and revived indigenous identity comes from and is negotiated out of a
globalized aboriginality and a globally organized political economy of tradition where even
the most seemingly inane or trivial traditional practices take on large, global significance as
an alternative to the evils of modernization. I see these trends as adding, paradoxically, to
the Caribs own authenticity claims paradoxical because they emphasize the icons and
language of local continuity (despite the various global indigenous elements drafted into the
process of recreating the meaning of those elements said to be locally continuous), and yet,
in the "public eye" in Trinidad their indigenous qualities may be enforced insofar as they are
endorsed by "foreign" trends and institutions, thus rendering them more serious, more
"real." I see the Caribs self-understanding of indigeneity as very much a "work-in-progress,"
an indigenous "site under (re)construction," within a growing global network. We might
even tentatively begin to posit that this global network is the indigene, that is, adaptable to
and derivative of a variety of local platforms. A central process in the reconstruction of
Carib indigeneity is the organization, reproduction and display of "Carib culture" for a
national audience and for the tourist market (for a similar case, see Friedman 1990).
Presentation itself thus becomes an instrument in the constitution of selfhood. Processes of
globalization help to "lift" the discourse of local aboriginal issues and struggles to a global
plane. Aboriginal global organization helps in itself to further define aboriginality.
International organizations, whether inter-statal or indigenous, assist in the creation of an
"international personality" of indigenous peoples. The Caribs increasingly come to define
themselves, in part, within and through the international network of indigenous
organizations.

490

Kritik Answers

Alternative Kills Movements

THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE GLOBAL AND
THE LOCAL CREATING SUCH A FALSE DICHOTOMY
DESTROYS THE ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND THE POWER OF
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Stehr, Sociologist and Senior Research Fellow of the Sustainable Development Research
Institute @ U of British Colombia, 2K1 (Nico, The Fragility of Modern Socities: Knowledge
and Risk in the Information Age, P.99100)

I also do not accept any rigid

dichotomy between local (or regional) and global phenomena, according to
which every characterization of the social sphere must either take on strictly
local attributes or eliminate them altogether in the wake of the effects of
globalization. As long as the local/global axis is dichotomized in such a
rigid and asymmetric manner, the theoretical and empirical dilemma will be
that the political, social and economic processes have to be categorized under
the heading either of global attributes or of authentic local circumstances that
bear at best only a superficial resemblance to phenomena alleged to be
global in scope. As a result, a prohibition against a synchronism the incommensurable' (Max Frisch) or the 'non-contemporaneity of
the contemporaneous' (Wilhelm Finder) must be strictly observed (see Mannheim, (1928; 1993: 358). To follow such
prohibitions is to miss out on significant societal processes that result from
struggles between local and global phenomena, or that constitute emerging social
structures, cultural processes of political developments that succeed in joining
these forces in novel ways. Cultural manifestations are never created ex nihilo
and strictly in accordance with either local or global reference (Tomlinson, 1999). But it is
also unrealistic to expect that forms of knowledge disappear altogether in the
wake of the effects of globalization without leaving any trace (see Stehr, 1991), or that wellestablished patterns of social conduct vanish without signs of lasting influence.
With globalization and fragmentation proceeding concurrently, global as
well as particularistic political developments generate and heighten conflicts (see
My own perspective on the effects of globalization, however, is not a post-modern one.

192

Schmidt, 1995), for example between claims of universal human rights and particularistic identities based on language, religion, nationality, race and

political opportunities that result from extending the

boundaries of governance beyond the nation-state and ominous threats that
issue from the same developments for the nation-state appear to co-exist side-byside in many of the accounts of the political implications of globalization.
ethnicity (see Benhatib, 1999). Indeed, images of

491

Kritik Answers

Rejection Bad
THE CRITIQUE PARALYZES. CRITICISM MUST COME FROM
WITHIN STRUCTURES OF GLOBAL POWER
Arun Agrawal, assistant professor of political science at Yale University, Peace & Change, Oct

96, Vol. 21 Issue 4, p464, 14p.

The stance of this reviewer may be summarized as "I will engage, I must critique"--in
contrast to the poststructuralist position of "I will critique, I will reject." Throughout this
essay, I have tried to highlight the two dilemmas inherent in adopting a poststructuralist
stance. One is led either to a position that repeats one's initial assumptions, or one is forced
into contradictions that result from questioning metanarratives. In response, I suggest two
small strategic shifts for poststructuralist scholars, the first of which can already be
witnessed in the work of Stacy Leigh Pigg.[9] Instead of avowing an explicit commitment to
poststructuralism and calling for a repudiation of "development," it might be far more
fruitful to examine the ways in which attempts by the state to foster development are often
used as instruments of legitimation and extension of political control, yet also often
engender resistance and protest. It was Foucault, after all, who pointed to the positive as
well as the negative aspects of power.[10] A second productive move might be to accept the
impossibility of questioning all metanarratives and instead to rethink how development can
be profitably contested from within as well as from outside. Persistent criticisms of
"development" are indispensable; calls to go beyond it make sense primarily as signifiers of
romantic utopian thinking. In posing the dualisms of local and global, indigenous and
Western, traditional and scientific, society and state--and locating the possibility of change
only in one of these opposed pairs--one is forced to draw lines that are potentially
ridiculous, and ultimately indefensible.[11] Development, like progress, rationality, or
modernity, may be impossible to give up. Harboring the seeds of its own transformation, it
may be far more suited to co-optation than disavowal. Rather than fearing the co-optation
by "development" of each new strategy of change, it may be time to think about how to coopt "development." "[R]eversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding"[12]
is not just the task of the postcolonial position; it is the impossible task of all critical
positions.

492

Kritik Answers

A2 Localism
THERES GOOD GLOBALISM AND BAD GLOBALISM. WE
MUST SUPPORT THE GOOD TO OVERCOME THE BAD.
Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, 2/20/ 2003,
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/030220.html, accessed 2/23/03
One of the big media buzzwords to emerge in recent years is "globalization." By now, we're
likely to know what it means. That's unfortunate -- because at this point the word is so
ambiguous that it doesn't really mean much of anything. News outlets have reported that
key international pacts like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization gained U.S. approval
during the 1990s because most politicians in Washington favor "globalization." According to
conventional media wisdom, those globalizers want to promote unfettered communication
and joint endeavors across national boundaries. Well, not quite. These days, at the White
House and on Capitol Hill, the same boosters of "globalization" are upset about certain types
of global action -- such as the current grassroots movement against a war on Iraq. For the
most part, the same elected officials and media commentators who have applauded moneydriven globalization are now appalled by the sight of anti-war globalization. The recent
spectacle of millions of people demonstrating against war on the same day around the world
was enough to cause apoplexy at the White House. That's consistent with a recurring
pattern: "Pro-globalization" forces are unhappy to see the globalizing of solidarity for labor
rights, economic justice, the environment and alternatives to war. A similar contradiction
belies the media image of "anti-globalization" activists as foes of internationalism who want
to rigidify national boundaries, reinforce isolation and prevent worldwide interactions. On
the contrary, advocates for human rights, environmental protection and peace -- while
largely opposing global superstructures like NAFTA and the WTO -- have been busily
creating ways to work with like-minded people all over the planet. The form of
"globalization" deemed worthy of the name by media is corporate globalization, which gives
massive capital even more momentum to flatten borders and run roughshod over national
laws. Deluging every country with Nikes, Burger Kings and ATMs is presumptively
indicative of progress, no matter how bad the working conditions, how unhealthy the
products or how unjust the economic consequences. Meanwhile, fans of "globalization"
routinely contend that protection of labor rights or the environment amounts to unfair
restraint of trade, retrograde protectionism and antiquated resistance to "reforms." By
itself, "globalization" is much too simplistic a word to tell us anything. The term is so murky
that we may need to discard it, or at least develop some new phrases to bring realities into
focus. Today, the war-crazed Bush administration and the bipartisan majority of enablers in
Congress are fervent proponents of what might be called "isolationist intervention." Sure,
the present-day American leaders proclaim their global vision and declare that they want to
engage with the world, but on their own terms -- with the U.S. government reserving the
right to determine its policies in isolation from any nation that fails to offer subservient
support. With hefty corporate backing, they insist that the United States has the right to
intervene militarily overseas. Why? Because they say so. The gist of this approach to
"globalization" was well expressed by the glib pundit Thomas Friedman, whose 1999 book
"The Lexus and the Olive Tree" lauded the tandem roles of corporate capitalism and
American militarism. "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden
fist," he wrote. "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the
U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's
technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." This
veiled hand-and-fist stance is being actively rejected by millions of people marching through
cities in many parts of the world. And the leaders of numerous countries are giving voice to
that rejection. Speaking to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 18, Malaysia's prime minister
Mahathir Mohamed -- the incoming chair of the Non-Aligned Movement -- combined
realism with idealism. "We have no military or financial strength," he said, "but we can join
the world movement to oppose war on moral grounds." The globalization of that movement
is something to behold. And nurture.

493

Kritik Answers

Permutation
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ARE SUCCESSFULLY REDEPLOYED
FOR LOCAL ENDS
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France 19751976,2003, p. 6
So I would say: for the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability
of things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general feeling that the ground
was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most familiar, most
solid, and closest [nearest] to us, to our bodies, to our everyday gestures. But alongside this
crumbling and the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and local critiques, the
facts were also revealing something that could not, perhaps, have been foreseen from the
outset: what might be called the inhibiting effect specific to totalitarian theories, or at least
what I mean isall-encompassing and global theories. Not that all-encompassing and global
theories havent, in fairly constant fashion, providedand dont continue to provide tools
that can be used at the local level; Marxism and psychoanalysis are living proof that they
can. But they have, I think, provided tools that can be used at the local level only when, and
this is the real point, the theoretical unity of their discourse is, so to speak, suspended, or at
least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatized,
theatricalized, and so on. Or at least that the totalizing approach always has the effect of
putting the brakes on. So that, if you like, is my first point, the first characteristic of what has
been happening over the last fifteen years or so: the local character of the critique; this does
not, I think, mean soft eclecticism, opportunism, or openness to any old theoretical
undertaking, nor does it mean a sort of deliberate asceticism that boils down to losing as
much theoretical weight as possible. I think that the essentially local character of the
critique in fact indicates something resembling a sort of autonomous and noncentralized
theoretical production, or in other words a theoretical production that does not need a visa
from some common regime to establish its validity.

494

Kritik Answers

**Habeas Corpus**
Habeas Corpus Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, PERM DO BOTH
YOU CAN ACKNOWLEDGE THAT HABEAS VIOLATIONS
ELSEWHERE ARE BAD AND STILL GRANT IT TO ENEMY
COMBATANTS
SECOND, CRITICIZING REPRESENTATIONS DOESNT
PRECLUDE THE NEED FOR CONCRETE ACTION
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, Truth, Politics, and Postmodernism,
Spinoza Lectures, 1997, p. 51-2
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very
important meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida

the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the
writers who are labeled `post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good
experimentalist social democrats when it comes to actual political activity . I suspect, for example, that Gray,
usually replies that

Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist
philosophers have gotten a bad name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like `impossible; `self-contradictory' and
`unrepresentable'. They have helped create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more

. I am
all for getting rid of the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and
unrepresentability is counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the
generally, to the `metaphysics of presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible

metaphor of things being accurately represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for
philosophers, and we would be better off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate

Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls

a full presence beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity
will not have changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from
representation' was never a fruitful way to describe intellectual progress.
"

psychoanalysis. All that we have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss

We have been given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress
has been made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political program . Since Darwin we have come to suspect
which the Enlightenment offered.

that whether such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky.

THIRD, SPECIFIC SOLVENCY TRUMPS - PLAN SOLVES

WORSE INJUSTICE BY GUARANTEEING DUE PROCESS TO
ENEMY COMBATANTS AND ENDING INDEFINITE
DETAINMENT AND TORTURE UNDER MILLIGAN. CROSSAPPLY TRIBE AND KATYAL
FOURTH, THEIR LINK EV IS TERRIBLE IT JUST SAYS
THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF HABEAS WITHOUT SHOWING
WHY WE USE ONE OR THE OTHER OR GIVING A REASON
THAT THATS BAD

495

Kritik Answers

Habeas Corpus Answers: 2AC (2/3)

FIFTH, APPROPRIATING THE OTHER VIOLENTLY SEIZES
THE RIGHT TO SPEAK FOR SELFISH ENDS
Routledge 96
[Antipode]

The issue of representation is a vexed one which has received much attention
within the social sciences. For example, in discussing the academic strategy of
polyphony, Crang (1992) raises issues of how the voices of others are (re)presented;
the extent to which these voices are interwoven with persona of narrator the degree
of authorial power regarding who initiates research, who decides on textual
arrangements, and who decides which voices are heard; and the power relations
involved in the cultural capital conferred by specialist knowledge. Moreover,
Harrison (quoted in McLaren 1995 240) argues that polyphony can end up being
aform of romantic ventroloquism creating the magical notion of the Others coming
to voice. These questions have important political implications for research which
must be negotiated according to the specific circumstances of a particular project.
It is all too easy for academics to claim solidarity with the oppressed and act as
relays for their voices within social scientific discourse. This raises the danger of an
uncritical alignment with resisters on the assumption that they know all there is to
know without the intervention of intellectuals; and hence an academics role
becomes that of helping them seize the right to speak.

SIXTH, THE STATUS QUO IS WORSE COMBATANTS HAVE

NO RIGHTS. PLAN AT LEAST GIVES THEM TO SOME PEOPLE
SEVENTH, THEIR BRIGHT EV INDICTS THE ALTERNATIVE
ACTION IS THE ONLY REMEDY TO INDIFFERENCE. PLAN IS
KEY TO TAKING A SIDE AND DOING SOMETHING
EIGHTH, TURN- UPHOLDING LEGAL PRINCIPLES PROVES
THE LAWS FRAUDULENCE AND HOLDS IT ACCOUNTABLE
Vclav Havel, playwright, political prisoner, and president elect of Czechoslovakia, 19 86 (Living in
Truth, p. 137-38)
appeal to the laws not just to the laws concerning human rights, but to all laws does not mean at all
that those who do so have succumbed to the illusion that in our system the law is anything other
than what it is. They are well aware of the role it plays. But precisely because they know how desperately the system depends on it on the noble version
A persistent and never-ending

of the law, that is they also know how enormously significant such appeals are. Because the system cannot do without the law, because it is hopelessly tied down by

Demanding that the laws be upheld is

an act of living within the truth that threatens the whole mendacious structure at its point
of maximum mendacity. Over and over again, such appeals make the purely ritualistic nature of the law clear
to society and to those who inhabit its power structures. They draw attention to its real material substance and thus,
indirectly, compel all those who take refuge behind the law to affirm and make credible this agency of
excuses, this means of communication, this reinforcement of the social arteries outside of which their will could not be made to circulate through society. They
the necessity of pretending the laws are observed, it is compelled to react in some way to such appeals.
thus

are compelled to do so for the sake of their own consciences, for the impression they make on outsiders, to maintain themselves in power (as part of the systems own
mechanism of self-preservation and its principles of cohesion), or simply out of fear that they will be reproached for being clumsy in handling the ritual. They have no
other choice: because they cannot discard the rules of their own game, they can only attend more carefully to those rules. Not to react to challenges means to
undermine their own excuse and lose control of their mutual communications system.

To assume that the laws are a mere facade, that they have no validity and that therefore it is pointless to appeal to them would
mean to go on reinforcing those aspects of the law that create the facade and the ritual. It
would mean confirming the law as an aspect of the world of appearances and enabling those who exploit it to rest easy
with the cheapest (and therefore the most mendacious) form of their excuse. I have frequently witnessed policemen, prosecutors or
judges if they were dealing with an experienced Chartist or a courageous lawyer, and if they were exposed to public attention (as individuals with a name, no longer
protected by the anonymity of the apparatus) suddenly and anxiously begin to take particular care that no cracks appear in the ritual. This does not alter the fact

the very existence of the officials anxiety necessarily

regulates, limits and slows down the operation of that despotism.
that a despotic power is hiding behind that ritual, but

496

Kritik Answers

497

Kritik Answers

Habeas Corpus Answers: 2AC (3/3)

NINTH, THIS ISNT OFFENSE, ITS A BAD PMN THERE WILL
ALWAYS BE INJUSTICE THAT PLAN DOESNT SOLVE. USING
THAT TO VOTE NEG DEJUSTIFIES DOING ANYTHING,
CREATING NIHILISM
TENTH, THE ALTERNATIVE OPTS FOR INACTION IN THE
FACE OF DOMINATION ONLY POLICY DISCUSSIONS CAN
REORIENT INTELLECTUALS TOWARDS FIGHTING
INJUSTICE
SAID (University Professor, Columbia University) 94
[Edward W., The Intellectuals and the War, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle
for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994, New York: Vintage, p. 316-19]
HARLOW: What are the political, intellectual, and cultural imperatives for combating this agenda? In 1967 Chomsky wrote the essay Responsibility of Intellectuals.
What would be the main component of such an essay today?

jargonistic postmodernisms that now dot the landscape. They are worse
are neither capable of understanding and analyzing the power structure of this
country nor are they capable of understanding the particular aesthetic merit of an individual
work of art. Whether you call it deconstruction or postmodernism or poststructuralism or post-anything, they all represent a sort of spectacle of giving back
SAID: One would have to pretty much scuttle all the jaw-shattering
than useless. They

tickets that the entrance and saying, were really out of it. We want to check into our private resort and be left alone. [317]

Reengagement with intellectual processes has very little to do with being politically correct, or
citing fashionable names, or striking acceptable poses, but rather having to do with a return in a way to a
kind of old-fashioned historical, literary, and above all, intellectual scholarship based upon the premise that
human beings, men and women, make their own history. And just as things are made, they can be unmade and re-re-remade. That
sense of intellectual and political and citizenry empowerment is what I think the intellectual class needs.
Theres only one way to anchor oneself, and that is by affiliation with a cause, with a political movement. There has to be some identification, not with the

; there has to be an affiliation with

matters involving justice, principle, truth, conviction. Those dont occur in a laboratory or a library. For the American
intellectual, that simply means, at bottom, in a globalized environment, that there is today one superpower, and the
relationship between the United States and the rest of the world, based upon profit and
power, has to be altered from an imperial one to one of coexistence among human
communities that can make and remake their own histories together. This seems to me to be
the number-one priority---theres nothing else.
powers that be, with the Secretary of State or the great leading philosopher of the time or sage

An American has a particular role. If youre an anthropologist in America, its not the same thing as being an anthropologist in India or France; its a
qualitatively different thing.
HARLOW: Were both professors in English departments, despite the fact that the humanities have been quite irresponsible, unanswerable
SAID: Not the humanities. The professors of humanities.
HARLOW: Well, OK, the professors, but there is this question
SAID: I take the general view that, for all its inequity, for all its glaring faults and follies, the university in this society remains a relatively utopian place, a place of

. There needs to be some sense of the university as a place in which these issues are
not, because it is that kind of place, trivialized. Universities cannot afford to become just a
platform for a certain kind of narcissistic specialization and jargon. What you need is a
regard for the product of the human mind. And thats why Ive been very dispirited, I must tell you, but aspects of the great
great privilege

Western canon debate, which really suggest that the oppressed of the world, in wishing to be heard, in wishing their work to be recognized, really wish to do dirt on
everything else. Thats not the spirit of resistance. We come [318] back to Aime Cesaires line, There is room for all that at the rendezvous of victory. Its not that
some have to be pushed off and demeaned and denigrated. The question is not whether we should read more black literature or less literature by white men. The issue
is excellence---we need everything, as much as possible, for understanding the human adventure in its fullest, without resorting to enormous abstractions and
generalizations, without replacing Euro-centrism with other varieties of ethnocentrism, or say, Islamo-centrism or Afro-centrism or gyno-centrism. Is it a game of
substitutions? Thats where intellectuals have to clarify themselves.
HARLOW: I agree, but at least within certain university contexts there have been lately two major issues: the Gulf War and multiculturalism. I have not seen any
linkage between the two.
SAID: The epistemology and the ethic of specialization have been accepted by all. If youre a literature professor, thats what you talk about. And if youre an education
specialist, thats what you talk about. The whole idea of being in the university means not only respect for what others do, but respect for what you do. And the sense
that they all are part of a community. The main point is that we ascribe a utopian function to the intellectual. Even inside the university, the prevalence of norms based
upon domination and coercion is so strong because the idea of authority is so strong---whether its authority derived from the nation-state, from religion, from the
ethnos, from tradition---is so powerful that its gone relatively unchallenged, even in the very disciplines and studies that we are engaged in. Part of intellectual work is

And if you can understand that,

they your work is conducted in such a way as to be able to provide alternatives to
authoritative and coercive norms that dominate so much of our intellectual life, our national
and political life, and our international life above all.
understanding how authority is formed. Like everything else, authority is not God-given. Its secular.

HARLOW: What can alternative publications do to interrupt that particular way of presenting authority?
SAID: One is to remind readers that there are always other ways of looking at the issue---whatever it happens to be---than those that are officially credentialed.
Second, one of the things that one needs to do in intellectual enterprises is to---Whitehead says somewhere---always try to write about an author keeping in mind
what he or she might say of what youre writing. To adapt from that: some sense in which your constituency might be getting signals about what youre doing. The
agenda isnt set only by you; its set by others. You cant represent the others, but you can take them into account by soliciting their attention. Let such a publication be
a place in which its pages that which is occluded or suppressed or has disappeared from the consciousness of the West, of the intellectual, can be allowed to appear.
Third, some awareness of the methodological issues involved, and the gathering of information, the production of scholarship, the relationship between scholarship
and knowledge. The great virtue of these journals is that they are not guided by professional norms. Nobody is going to get tenure out of writing for these journals.
And nobody is trying to advance in a career by what he or she does there. So that means therefore that one can stand back and look at these things and take questions

498

Kritik Answers
having to do with how people know things. In other words, a certain emphasis on novelty is important and somewhat lacking. You dont want to feel too virtuous in
what you are doing: that Im the only person doing this, therefore, I must continue doing it. Wit is not such a bad thing.

499

Kritik Answers

**Habermas**
Habermas Answers: 2AC
HABERMAS HAS NOTHING NEW TO OFFER
McClean

01

David E.
, New School University, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, Presented at the 20
Annual Conference of the Society for the
Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm.

I cannot find in Habermas's lengthy narratives

very much more than I have found in the
Federalist Papers, or in Paine's Common Sense, or in Emerson's Self Reliance or Circles. I simply don't find the concept of
uncoerced and fully informed communication between peers in a democratic polity all that
difficult to understand, and I don't much see the need to theorize to death such a simple
concept, particularly where the only persons that are apt to take such narratives seriously
are already sold, at least in a general sense. Of course, when you are trying to justify yourself in the face of the other members of your chosen club (in
Habermas's case, the Frankfurt School) the intricacy of your explication may have less to do with simple
concepts than it has to do with parrying for respectability in the eyes of your intellectual
brethren. But I don't see why the rest of us need to partake in an insular debate that has
little to do with anyone that is not very much interested in the work of early critical theorists
such as Horkheimer or Adorno, and who might see their insights as only modestly relevant
at best. Not many self-respecting engaged political scientists in this country actually still
take these thinkers seriously, if they ever did at all.
Take Habermas, whose writings are admittedly the most relevant of the group.

regarding communicative action, discourse ethics, democracy and ideal speech situations

500

Kritik Answers

**Heidegger**
Ethics Turn
HEIDEGGERS FOCUS ON THE ONTOLOGY IGNORES THE
TRANSCENDENT FACE OF ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY
Michael Shapiro, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, Moral Spaces:
Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, ed. by Campbell and Shapiro, 1999, p. 64-65
The primary Levinasian struggle with philosophical discourse is conducted within
Heideggerian language because the philosophical depth of Levinas's ethics of infinite
responsibility to alterity is revealed in both his debts to and departures from Heidegger.
Prepositions are crucial here for while Levinas accepts Heidegger's notion of the individual's
intimate connection with alterity, he rejects the Heideggerian grammar of the self-other
relationship. The rejection takes the form of two grammatical shifts enacted in Levinas's
writing, beginning with the change from "with" to "in front of." Whereas for Heidegger the
relationship to the other "appears in the essential situation of Miteinandersein, reciprocally
being with another, Levinas expresses resistance to the "association of side-by-side" that
Heidegger's Mit suggests: "[I]t is not the preposition mitthut should describe the original
relationship with the other." It is instead the in front of, the face-to-face that locates the
ethical relation to the other. This grammatical shift to the face-to-face acknowledges the
fundamental separation of the self from the Other. To maintain an ethical bond with the
Other, to maintain the infinity of the Other, is to see the self in its relation to something "it
cannot absorb.

REFLECTION NEGATES THE OTHER: ONLY OUR

FRAMEWORK PRECLUDES MURDER
Emmanuel Levinas, Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne, 19 96, Levinas Basic Philosophical
Writings p. 9-10
In relation to beings in the opening of being, comprehension finds a signification for them on the basis of being. In this sense, it does not invoke these beings but only
names them, thus accomplishing a violence and a negation. A partial negation which is violence. This partiality is indicated by the fact that, without disappearing,
those beings are in my power. Partial negation, which is violence, denies the independence of a being: it belongs to me. Possession is the mode whereby a being, while
existing, is partially denied. It is not only a question of the fact that the being is an instrument, a tool, that is to say, a means. It is an end also. As consumable, it is
nourishment, and in enjoyment, it offers itself, gives itself, belongs to me. To be sure, vision measures my power over the object, but it is already enjoyment. The
encounter with the other (autrui) consists in the fact that despite the extent of my domination and his slavery, I do not possess him. He does not enter entirely into the
opening of being where I already stand, as in the field of my freedom. It is not starting from being in general that he comes to meet me. Everything which comes to me
from the other (autrui) starting from being in general certainly offers itself to my comprehension and possession. I understand him in the framework of his history, his
surroundings and habits. That which escapes comprehension in the other (autrui) is him, a being. I cannot negate him partially, in violence, in grasping him within the

The Other
is the sole being I can wish to kill. I can wish. " And yet this power is quite the contrary of
power. The triumph of this power is its defeat as power. At the very moment when my power to kill realizes itself,
the other (autrui) has escaped me. I can, for sure, in killing attain a goal; I can kill as I hunt or slaughter animals, or as I fell trees. But when
I have grasped the other (autrui) in the opening of being in general, as an element of the world where I stand, where I
have seen him on the horizon, I have not looked at him in the face, I have not encountered his face. The
temptation of total negation, measuring the infinity of this attempt and its impossibility - this is the presence of the face . To be in relation with
the other (autrui) face to face is to be unable to kill. It is also the situation of discourse. If things are only things, this is because the
horizon of being in general and possessing him. The Other (Autrui) is the sole being whose negation can only announce itself as total: as murder.
(Autrui)

relation with them is established as comprehension. As beings, they let themselves be overtaken from the perspective of being and of a totality that lends them a
signification. The immediate is not an object of comprehension. An immediate given of con- sciousness is a contradiction in terms. To be given is to be exposed to the
ruse of the understanding, to be seized by the mediation of a concept, by the light of being in general, by way of a detour, "in a roundabout way." To be given is to
signify on the basis of what one is not. The relation with the face, speech, an event of collectivity, is a relation with beings as such, as pure beings. That the relation
with a being is the invocation of a face and already speech, a relation with a certain depth rather than with a horizon - a breach in the horizon - that my neighbor is the
being par excellence, can indeed appear somewhat surprising when one is accustomed to the conception of a being that is by itself insignificant, a profile against a

. The face signifies otherwise. In it the

infinite resistance of a being to our power affirms itself precisely against the murderous will
that it defies; because, completely naked (and the nakedness of the face is not a figure of style), the face signifies
itself. We cannot even say that the face is an opening, for this would be to make it relative to an environing plenitude. Can things take on a face? Is not art an
luminous horizon and only acquiring signification in virtue of its presence within this horizon

activity that lends faces to things? Does not the facade of a house regard us? The analysis thus far does not suffice for an answer. We ask ourselves all the same if the
impersonal but fascinating and magical march of rhythm does not, in art, substitute itself for sociality, for the face, for speech. To comprehension and signification
grasped within a horizon, we oppose the signifyingness of the face. Will the brief indications by which we have introduced this notion allow us to catch sight of its role
in comprehension itself and of all the conditions which delineate a sphere of relations barely suspected? In any case, that which we catch sight of seems suggested by

the
encounter with the face - that is, moral consciousness - can be described as the condition of
consciousness tout court and of disclosure; how consciousness is affirmed as the impossibility
of killing; what are the conditions of the appearance of the face as the temptation and the impossibility of murder; how I can appear to myself as a face; in
what manner, finally, the relation with the other (autrui) or the collectivity is our relation, irreducible to
comprehension, with the infinite - these are the themes that proceed from this first
contestation of the primacy of ontology. Philosophical research, in any case, cannot be content
the practical philosophy of Kant, to which we feel particularly close. In what way the vision of the face is no longer vision but audition and speech; how

501

Kritik Answers
with a mere reflection on the self or on existence. Reflection offers only the tale of a personal
adventure, of a private soul, which returns incessantly to itself, even when it seems to flee
itself. The human only lends itself to a relation that is not a power.

Ontological Fascism Turn: 2AC

**** ONTOLOGICAL CRITICISM TRADES OFF WITH ONTIC
POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, ALLOWING ONE TO BECOME
COMPLICIT IN GRAND IDEOLOGIES OF FASCISM AND
TECHNOLOGY THAT ONE CRITICIZES ONE DISMISSES THE
OFFICIAL VERSION OF IDEOLOGY ON BEHALF OF ITS INNER
GREATNESS, BECOMING A MORE EFFECTIVE COG IN ITS
OPERATION
Zizek 99

[Slavoj, Unapologetic Self-Plagierist, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of political
ontology, NYC: Verso, 1999,13-4//uwyo-ajl]
Apropos of this precise point, I myself run into my first trouble with Heidegger (since I
began as a Heideggereian my first published book was on Heidegger and language). When,
in my youth, I was bombarded by the official Communist philosophers stories of
Heideggers Nazie engagement, they left me rather cold; I was definitely more on the side of
the Yugoslav Heideggerians. All of a sudden, however, I became aware of how these
Yugoslav Heideggerians were doing the same thing with respect to the Yugoslav ideology of
self-management as Heidegger himself did with respect to Nazism: in ex-Yugoslavia,
Heideggerians entertained the same ambiguously assertive relationship toward Socialist
self-management, the official ideology of the Communist regime in their eyes, the essense
of self-management was the very essence of modern man, which is why the philosophical
notion of self-management suits the ontological essence of our epoch, while the standard
political ideology of the regime misses this inner greatness of self-management
Heideggerians are thus eternally in search of a positive, ontic political system that would
come closest to the epochal ontological truth, a strategy which inevitably leads to error
which, of course, is always acknowledged only retroactively, post factum, after the disastrous
outcome of ones engagement.
As Heidegger himself put it, those who come closest to the ontological Truth are condemned
to err at the ontic level err about what? Precisely about the line between ontic and
ontological. The paradox not to be underestimated is that the very philosopher who focused
his interest on the enigma of ontological difference who warned again and again against
the metaphysical mistake of conferring ontological dignity on some ontic content (god as the
highest Entity, for example) fell into the trap of conferring on Nazism the ontoligcal
dignity of suiting the essence of modern man. The standard defense of Heidegger against the
reproach of his Nazi past consists of two points: not only was his Nazi engagement a simple
personal error (a stupidity [Dummheit], as Heidegger himself put it) in no way inherently
related to his philosophical project; the main counter-argument is that it is Heideggers own
philosophy that enables us to discern the true epochal roots of modern totalitarianism.
However, what remains unthought here is the hidden complicity between the ontological
indifference towards ocncrete social systems (capitalism, Frascism, Communism), in so far
as they all belong to the same horizon of modern technology, and the secret priveleging of a
concrete sociopolitical model (Nazism with Heidegger, Communism with some
Heideggerian Marxists), as closer to the ontological truth of our epoch.
Here, one should avoid the trap that caught Heideggers defenders, who dismissed
Heideggers Nazi engagement as a simple anomaly, as a fall into the ontic level, in blatant
contradiction to his thought, which teaches us not to confuse ontological horizon with ontic
choices (as we have already seen, Heidegger is at his strongest when he demonstrates how,
on a deeper structural level, ecological, conservative, and so on, oppositions to the modern
universe of technology are already embedded in the horizon of what they purport to reject:
the ecological critique of the technological exploitation of nature ultimately leads to a more
environmentally sound technology, etc. Heidegger di not engage in the Nazi political
project in spite of his ontological philosophical approach, but because of it; this

502

Kritik Answers
engagement was not beneath his philosophical level on the contrary, if one is to
understand Heidegger, the key point is to grasp the complicity (in Hegelese: speculative
identity) between the elevation above ontic concerns and the passionate ontic Nazi
political engagement.

503

Kritik Answers

Ontology = Nazism: 1AR

HEIDEGGERS FOCUS ON ONTOLOGY MAKES FASCIST
IDEOLOGY POSSIBLE THROUGH A FALSE INNER DISTANCE,
BLINDING ITSELF TO ONTIC ATROCITY
Zizek 99

[Slavoj, Unapologetic Self-Plagierist, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of political
ontology, NYC: Verso, 1999,14-5//uyo-ajl]
One can see the ideological trap that caught Heidegger: when he criticizes Nazi racism on
behalf of the true inner greatness of the Nazi movement, he repeats the elementary
ideological gesture of maintaining an inner distance towards the ideological text of
claiming that there is something more beneath it, a non-ideological kernel: ideology exerts
its hold over us by means of this very insistence that the Cause we adhere to is not merely
ideological. So where is the trap? When the disappointed Heidegger turns away from active
engagement in the Nazi movement, he does so because the Nazi movement did not maintain
the level of its inner greatness, but legitimized itself with inadequate (racial) ideology. In
other ords, hat he expected from it was that it should legitimize itself through direct
awareness of its inner greatness. And the problem lies in this very expectation that a
political movement that will directly refer to its historico-ontological foundaiton is possible.
This expectation, however, is in itself profoundly metaphysical, in so far as it fails to
recognize the gap separating the direct ideological legitimization of a movement from its
inner greatness (its historico-ontological essence) its constitutive, a positive condiiton of its
functioning. To use the terms of the late Heidegger, ontological insight necessarily entails
ontic blindness and error, and vice versa that is to say, in order to be effecitve at the ontic
level, one must disregard the ontological horizon of ones activity. (In this sense, Heidegger
emphasizes that science doesnt think and that, far from being is limitation, this inability is
the very motor of scientific progress.) In other words, what Heidegger seem suntable to
endorse is a concrete political engagement that would accept its necessary, constitutive
blindness as if the moment we acknowledge the cap separating the awareness of the
ontological horizon from ontic engagement, any ontic engagement is depreciated, loses its
authentic dignity.

504

Kritik Answers

Ontology = Nazism: Ext (1/3)

EXCLUSIVE FOCUS ON THE ONTOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGY
COLLAPSES INTO A FASCIST FANTASY OF BLOOD AND SOIL
Daniels 2002

[Michael D., Trinity University, Heidegger and Nazism, Prometheus: The John
Hopkins Student Journal of Philosophy, Vol. I, Fall 2002,
http://www.jhu.edu/prometheus/Heidegger%20and%20Nazism.pdf, acc 10-1104//uwyo-ajl]
The Nazis, Heidegger believed, were opposed to the view of technology held by
Americanism and communism, rather they trusted the feelings and sensibilities of
the
Volk and the need to create a German state out of German Volk. The Volk stresses
historical realization and exaltation of the Germans as German.38
Alan Paskow notes that Volk is merely a metaphysical justification for racism,
however, Heidegger saw much more in the Volk. Central to Heideggers support of
the Nazis was that their radicalism made possible a courageous confrontation with
the question of Being. This, in his view would make possible a truly human, or what
Heidegger called a truly spiritual, world. 39 If spiritual leaders pose this question
radically enough, a common questioning will pervade the community. Thereby, the
Volk can play an active role in shaping its fate by placing history into the openness
of the overpowering might of all the world-shaping forces of human existence and
by struggling ever anew to secure its spiritual world.40
Heidegger believed that Hitler was committed to facing the deepest and most
troubling questions. Furthermore, Heidegger hoped Hitler would evoke a
communal
reflection on the question of Being. In effect, Hitler would engineer a communal
escape
from the Platonic cave into the light of reality.41
In Heideggers view, the Nazis understood that knowledge was fundamentally
rooted in praxis and thus reconstituting the unity of life in a way unknown since
the pre-Socratics. For the Greeks before Plato, there was no theory apart from, or
above, practice. The Greeks understood that theory was the highest mode of human
activity, but they understood it as the supreme realization of practice.

THE SEARCH FOR AN AUTHENTIC MOVEMENT, FREE OF

TECHNOLOGY REQUIRES NAZISM BECAUSE EVERY
CONCEPTION OF RIGHTS IS INFECTED WITH ONTIC
REASONING
Zizek 99

[Slavoj, Unapologetic Self-Plagierist, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of

political ontology, NYC: Verso, 1999, 12-3//uwyo-ajl]
Here, however, complications arise: on closer inspection, it soon becomes clear
that Heideggers argumentative strategy is twofold. On the one hand, he rejects
every concern for democracy and human rights as a purely ontic affair unworthy of
proper philosophical ontological questioning democracy, Fascism, Communism,
they all amount ot the same with regard to the epochal destiny of the West; on the
other hand, his insistence that he is not convinced that democracy is the political
form which best suits the essence of technology none the less suggests that there is
another political form which suits this ontological essence better - for some time
Heidegger thought he had found it in the Fascist total mobilization (but,
significantly, never in Communism, which always remains for him epochally the
same as Americanism). Heidegger, of course, emphasizes again and again how
the ontological dimension of Nazism is not to be quated with Nazism as an ontic
ideologico-political order; in the well-known passage from An Introduction to

505

Kritik Answers
Metaphysics, for example, he repudiates the Nazi biologist race ideology as
something that totally misses the inner greatness of the Nazi movement, which
lies in the encounter between modern man and technology. None the less, the fact
remains that Heidegger never speaks of the inner greatness of, say, liberal
democracy as if liberal democracy is just that, a superficial world-view with no
underlying dimension of assuming ones own epochal destiny.

506

Kritik Answers

Ontology = Nazism: Ext (2/3)

THE HEIDEGGEREAN FOCUS NECESSITATES VALORIZATION
OF BLOOD AND WORK, ALLOWING FASCISM TO ENTER
THROUGH THE WINDOW
Wolin 2000
[Richard, Department of History at City University of New York, Arbeit Macht Frei: Heidegger as the
Philosopher of the German Way, Nietzshe, Heidegger, and the Future of Democracy, Winter
Quarter, January 24, 2000, olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/wolin.pdf, Acc. 10-12-04//uwyo-ajl]
Since the Logic is a lecture course rather than a public political statemen (which, therefore, might necessitate certain compromises with the regime),
it presumably reflects Heideggers genuine views. That is why

it is so disturbing to find him, at least in

one instance, flirting with the regimes racial-biological doctrines. Equally disturbing is
the fact that Heidegger suggests one might reconcile Nazisms racial precepts (the
concepts of blood and racial descent) with his own pet existential themes and
ideals

(mood, work, historicity):

Blood, racial descent (das Geblt) can only be [reconciled] with the foundationa mood of man when it is determined by temperament and mood [das
Gemt]. The contribution of blood comes from the foundational mood of man and belongs to the determination of our Dasein through work. Work =
the historical present. The present (die Gegenwart) is not merely the now; instead it is the present insofar as it transposes our Being in the
emancipation of existence that is accomplished through work. As someone who works man is transported into the publicness o

existence. Such being-transported belongs to the essence of our Being: that is, to
our being-transported amid things in the world. . . . As something original,
existence never reveals itself to us via the scientific cognition of objects, but32 instead in the essential moods of that flourish in work and in the
historical vocation of a Volk that predetermines all else.

One of the Nazis major domestic political concerns in the regimes initial years
was whether they would be successful in integrating the German working classes
traditionally, staunch supporters of the political left -- within the National Socialist

Volksgemeinschaft. To that end they established the German Labor Front to assure
German workers that their role in the new state was an indispensable one. Both the
strength through joy and beautification of labor programs discussed earlier were an
offshoot of the same effort.47 In his vigorous celebration of the joy of work
(Arbeitsfreudigkeit), Heidegger once again demonstrates the elective affinities between
Existenzphilosophie and the National Socialist worldview:
The question of the joy of work is important. As a foundational mood, joy is the
basis of the possibility of authentic work. In work as something present, the making present of Being occurs. Work is
presencing in the original sense to the extent that we insert ourselves in the preponderance of Being; through work we attain the whole of Being in all
its greatness, on the basis of the great moods of wonder and reverence, and thereby enhance it in its greatness (102).

HEIDEGGERS CRITICISM OF WESTERN RATIONALISM

OPENS UP THE SPACE FOR NATIONAL SOCIALISM BECAUSE
OF THEIR PERCEIVED INAUTHENTICITY
Wolin 2000
[Richard, Department of History at City University of New York, Arbeit Macht Frei: Heidegger as the
Philosopher of the German Way, Nietzshe, Heidegger, and the Future of Democracy, Winter
Quarter, January 24, 2000, olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/wolin.pdf, Acc. 10-12-04//uwyo-ajl]

Needless to say, a rejection of universal concepts by no means entails a

commitment to Nazism. Yet, with this radical philosophical maneuver, Heidegger
left
himself vulnerable to political movements whose major selling point in
opposition to
the presumed decrepitude of Western liberalism -- was an unabashed celebration
of
volkish particularism. The same normative criticisms Heidegger had brought to
bear
against Western rationalism were also used by him as arguments against their
corresponding political forms: cosmopolitanism, rights of man, constitutionalism.
Search
as one may through Heideggers voluminous philosophical corpus, one is extremely
hard pressed to find a positive word concerning the virtues of political liberalism.
His

507

Kritik Answers
philosophical and political predilections were related to one another necessarily
rather
than contingently.

508

Kritik Answers

Ontology = Nazism: Ext (3/3)

HEIDEGGERS OBSESSION WITH FACTICITY AND
AUTHENTIC PARTICULARISM ALLOWS ONE TO LAPSE INTO
CONSERVATIVE GLORIFICATION OF A RURAL FANTASY AND
ENDORSEMENT OF FASCISM
Wolin 2000

[Richard, Department of History at City University of New York, Arbeit Macht

Frei: Heidegger as the Philosopher of the German Way, Nietzshe, Heidegger,
and the Future of Democracy, Winter Quarter, January 24, 2000,
olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/wolin.pdf, Acc. 10-12-04//uwyo-ajl]
The epistemological emphasis on faciticity, which celebrates the particularism
of ones own immediate heritage/life/milieu, is a logical corollary of a perspective
that
esteems the concrete over the abstract. In this regard, the central position that
Heidegger in Being and Time accords to mineness (Jemeinigkeit) is also
indicative and
revealing. When in 1933 Heidegger turned down an offer for a position at
Humboldt
University in Berlin, he justified his decision by glorifying the provincial values of
locality and region, which he contrasted to the corrupting influences of modern city
life:
The world of the city runs the risk of falling into a destructive error. A very loud
and very active and very fashionable obstrusiveness often passes itself off as
5
concern for the world and existence of the peasant. But this goes exactly contrary
to the one and only thing that now needs to be done, namely, to keep ones
distance from the life of the peasant, to leave their existence more than ever to its
own law, to keep hands off lest it be dragged into the literatis dishonest chatter
about folk character and rootedness in the soil. 4
According to intimate Heinrich Petztet, the Freiburg philosopher felt ill at ease
with big-city life, "and this was especially true of that mundane spirit of Jewish
circles,
which is at home in the metropolitan centers of the West." 5 In the late 1920s
Heidegger
would vigorously protest the growing Jewification (Verjudung) of German
spiritual
life.6 Thus, in Heideggers corpus the boundaries between philosophy and
weltanschauung are fluid and not impenetrable.7 To date, the predominant
formalphilosophical
interpretations of his work have systematically neglected its ideological
dimensions, to their own detriment. By proceeding from a philosophical standpoint
that
consistently valued the particular over the universal, Heideggers thought was
exposed
from the outset to grave ethical and political deficits. This conclusion suggests that
in
seeking to account for Heideggers 1933 political lapsus, the existential standpoint
he
cultivated in the early 1920s is as important as the historical-biographical
contingencies
stressed by his defenders.

509

Kritik Answers

A2 We Dont Advocate Nazism: 1AR

THEYRE MISSING THE BOAT ON OUR ARGUMENT. WE
ARENT SAYING THAT YOU SHOULD REJECT THEM
BECAUSE THEY CITED SOMEONE WHO WAS A NAZI, BUT
RATHER, THAT EXCLUSIVE FOCUS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY
AFFECTS BEING LEADS TO POLITICAL PARALYSIS AND
ACCEPTANCE OF ATROCITY IN THE ONTIC REALM.
IF YOU SPEND ALL OF ENERGY SEARCHING FOR A WORLD
THAT WILL DISCLOSE ITSELF IN ITS AUTHENTICITY, THAT
ALLOWS YOU TO PARTICIPATE IN HORRIFIC VIOLENCE
BECAUSE IT DOESNT MEET THE CRITERIA OF AN
ONTOLOGICAL IMPACT. HEIDEGGER EVEN ADMITS THAT
THE TWO KINDS OF QUESTIONING TRADE OFF. CROSSAPPLY ZIZEK 99

510

Kritik Answers

A2 Nazism is Inauthentic: 1AR

EVEN IF NATIONAL SOCIALISM IS REALLY INAUTHENTIC,
THATS NON-RESPONSIVE TO THE ARGUMENT THAT THE
ATTEMPT TO ASSERT AUTHENTICITY DELUDES ONE INTO
ACCEPTING ONTICALLY ATROCIOUS POLITICAL CHOICES.
CROSS-APPLY ZIZEK 99
IF THIS IS TRUE, OUR ARG IS A TURN. THE SEARCH FOR
AUTHENTICITY RESULTS IN COMPLICITY IN POLITICS THAT
ARE EVEN MORE INAUTHENTIC, REINSCRIBING THE WILL
TO WILL THAT THEYRE CRITICIZING. WE THINK THAT WE
HAVE A PURE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WORLD BUT ARE
EVEN MORE TIED TO THE MEDIATION OF REALITY
THIS ARGUMENT BETRAYS HISTORICAL REVISIONISM
THE CRITICISM OF INAUTHENTICITY IS DIRECTLY TIED TO
REJECTION OF ONTIC ETHICS BECAUSE OF THEIR
MODERNITY
Wolin 2000
[Richard, Department of History at City University of New York, Arbeit Macht Frei: Heidegger as the
Philosopher of the German Way, Nietzshe, Heidegger, and the Future of Democracy, Winter
Quarter, January 24, 2000, olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/wolin.pdf, Acc. 10-12-04//uwyo-ajl]

In the massive secondary literature on Being and Time, the concept of historicity
has suffered from relative neglected. Perhaps this is because it represents the
aspect of
Heideggers treatise where the philosopher stands in the greatest proximity to
contemporary politics and, hence, the moment where the ideological aspects of
his
thought are most exposed. The reasons for this neglect are in part comprehensible. To
date Being and Time has primarily been interpreted in a Kierkegaardian/existential vein.
It portrays a highly individualized Dasein wrestling with a series of basic ontological
questions: the struggle for authenticity, the meaning of death, the nature of care. Yet,
7
the discussion of historicity, which in many respects represents a culmination of the
books narrative, emphasizes a set of concerns -- destiny, fate, the nature of authentic
historical community (Gemeinschaft) -- that are difficult to reconcile with the
Kierkegaardian interpretation of the work as basically concerned with Dasein as an
isolated individual Self. To be sure, were this Heideggers standpoint, it would be very
difficult to reconcile the idea of historical political commitment with his intentions, and
one would have to view Heideggers later political commitment as standing in
contradiction with Being and Times basic ideals. It has often been argued in the

philosophers defense that since Heideggers actions on behalf of Nazism

demanded a
surrender of individuality to the ends of the historical community, his political
choice
stood at cross-purposes with his philosophy. According to this reading, therefore,
Heideggers political involvement represented an instance of inauthenticity.
However,
this interpretation forfeits its cogency once the concept of historicity -- in which
Heidegger unambiguously declares the centrality of collective historical
commitment -- is
taken seriously.
As Lwith understood, it is but a short step from the facticity and particularism of

511

Kritik Answers
individual Existenz to a celebration of volkish parochialism in collective-historical
terms.
For Heidegger the mediating link between these two aspects of Dasein -- the
individual
and the collective -- was the conservative revolutionary critique of modernity . This
strident lament concerning the world-historical decadence of bourgeois existence was
first articulated in the work of Nietzsche, Spengler as well as countless lesser
Zivilisationskritiker. In Thomas Manns Confessions of an Unpolitical Man, for example,
the antinomy between Kultur and Zivilisation occurs over one hundred times.

512

Kritik Answers

Heidegger Kills Change

HEIDEGGERS ALTERNATIVE IS BASED ON DOGMATIC
AUTHORITARIANISM THAT CAN NEVER LEAD TO POSITIVE
CHANGE
Thiele, Prof of Political Science @ U of Florida, 2K3 (Leslie Paul, The Ethics and Politics of
Narrative, Foucalt and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed. Rosenberg and Milchman)

The pursuit of knowledge continues unabated for the skeptic. Yet it proceeds with a suspicious eye. There are inherent limitations to and
a price to pay forthe pursuit of knowledge. Charles Scott describes Foucault's efforts in this regard: Far from the skepticism that argues
that nothing is really knowablegenealogies embody a sense of the historical limits that define our capacities for knowing and believing.

Both Heidegger and

Foucault maintain that there is no legitimate basis for the radical skeptic's conviction that
knowledge is impossible or unworthy of pursuit. This sort of skepticism , Heidegger states, consists
merely in an addiction to doubt. 9 The skeptical nature of political philosophical thought , in
contrast, is grounded in the imperative of endless inquiry. The point for Heidegger and Foucault is to inquire
not in order to sustain doubt, but to doubt that one might better sustain inquiry. At the same time, inquiry is tempered with a
sensibility of the ethico-political costs of any knowledge that is gained. Doing political
philosophy of this sort might be likened to walking on a tightrope. If vertigo is experienced,
a precarious balance may be lost. Falling to one side leaves one mired in apathy, cynicism,
and apoliticism. This results when skeptical inquiry degenerates into a radical skepticism,
an addictive doubt that denies the value of (the search for) knowledge and undermines the
engagements of collective life, which invariably demand commitment (based on tentatively
embraced knowledge). Falling to the other side of the tightrope leaves one mired in
dogmatic belief or blind activism. Authoritarian ideologies come to serve as stable
foundations, or a reactive iconoclasm leads to irresponsible defiance. Apathy, cynicism, and
apoliticism, on the one side, and dogmatic authoritarianism or reactive iconoclasm, on the
other, are the dangerous consequences of losing one's balance . These states of mind and their
Things are known. But they are known in ways that have considerable social and cultural costs. 8

corresponding patterns of behavior relieve the vertigo of political philosophical inquiry, but at a prohibitive cost. It has been argued that
Foucault did not so much walk the tightrope of political philosophy as straddle it, at times leaving his readers hopeless and cynical, at
times egging them on to an irresponsible monkeywrenching. For some, the Foucauldian flight from the ubiquitous powers of
normalization undermines any defensible normative position. Hopelessness accompanies lost innocence. Cynicism or nihilism become the
only alternatives for those who spurn all ethical and political foundations. By refusing to paint a picture of a better future, Foucault is said
to undercut the impetus to struggle. Others focus on Foucault's development of a tool kit whose contents are to be employed to
deconstruct the apparatuses of modern power. Yet the danger remains that Foucault's hyperactive tool-kit users will be unprincipled
activists, Luddites at best, terrorists at worst. In either case, Foucault provides no overarching theoretical vision. Indeed, Foucault is
upfront about his rejection of ethical and political theories and ideals. I think that to imagine another system is to extend our
participation in the present system, Foucault stipulates. Reject theory and all forms of general discourse. This need for theory is still part
of the system we reject. 10 One might worry whether action is meant to take the place of thought. If Foucault occasionally straddles the
tightrope of political philosophy, Heidegger

obviously stumbled off it. In the 19305, Heidegger enclosed

himself within an authoritarian system of thought grounded in ontological reifications of
a folk and its history. Heidegger's historicization of metaphysics led him to believe that a new
philosophic epoch was about to be inaugurated. It implicitly called for a philosophical Fuehrer who could put an
end to two millennia of ontological forgetting . 11 The temptation for Heidegger to identify
himself as this intellectual messiah and to attach himself to an authoritarian social and
political movement capable of sustaining cultural renewal proved irresistible . Whether Heidegger
ever fully recovered his balance has been the topic of much discussion. Some argue that Heidegger's prerogative for
political philosophizing was wholly undermined by his infatuation with folk destiny,
salvational gods, and political authority . 12

513

Kritik Answers

Heidegger Irrelevent
HEIDEGGERS PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT APPLY AND IS
DANGEROUS IN THE POLITICAL REALM BECAUSE
METAPHYSICAL RESULTS WILL NOT RESULT FROM
POLITICS
Wolin, Prof of Modern European Intellectual History @ Rice, 90 (Richard, The Politics of Being,
P. 117-118)

Moreover, as Harries indicates, Heidegger's theory of the state as a "work" is modeled upon his theory of the work of art. Thus, as we have
seen, in Heidegger's view, both works of art and the state are examples of the "setting-to-work of truth." In essence, the state becomes a
giant work of art: like the work of art, it participates in the revelation of truth, yet on a much more grandiose and fundamental scale, since
it is the Gesamtkunstwerk within which all the other sub-works enact their preassigned roles. However, the idea of basing political

Though we may readily accept and

even welcome Heidegger's claim that works of art re veal the truth or essence of beings ("The
judgments on analogy with aesthetic judgments is an extremely tenuous proposition.

work [of art] ... is not the reproduction of some particular entity that happens to be present at any given time," observes Heidegger; "it is,

we must question the attempt to transpose

aesthetico-metaphysical criteria to the realm of political life proper. Is it in point of fact
meaningful to speak of the "unveiling of truth" as the raison d'etre of politics in the same
way one can say this of a work of art or a philosophical work? Is not politics rather a
nonmetaphysical sphere of human interaction, in which the content of collective human
projects, institutions, and laws is articulated, discussed, and agreed upon? Is it not, moreover, in
some sense dangerous to expect "metaphysical results" from politics? For is not politics
instead a sphere of human plurality, difference, and multiplicity; hence, a realm in which the
more exacting criteria of philosophical truth must play a sub ordinate role? And thus, would it
not in fact be to place a type of totalitarian constraint on politics to expect it to deliver
over truth in such pristine and unambiguous fashion? And even if Heidegger's own conception of truth (which
we shall turn to shortly) is sufficiently tolerant and pluralistic to allay such fears, shouldn't the main category of
political life be justice instead of truth? Undoubtedly, Heidegger's long-standing prejudices
against "value-philosophy prevented him from seriously entertaining this proposition; and
thus, as a category of political judgment, justice would not stand in sufficiently close proximity
to Being. In all of the aforementioned instances, we see that Heideggers political philosophy is
overburdened with ontological considerations that end up stifling the inner logic of
politics as an independent sphere of human action.
on the contrary, the reproduction of the thing's general essence"),66

514

Kritik Answers

Rejecting Tech Leads to Extinction

HEIDEGGERS PHILOSOPHY OF REJECTING ALL
TECHNOLOGY MAKES LIFE MEANINGLESS, CULMINATING
IN EXTINCTION
Hicks, Prof and Chair of philosophy @ Queens College of the CUNY, 2K3 (Steven V., Nietzsche,

Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond, Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed. Alan
Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, p. 109, Questia)
Heidegger's insightful reading
of Nietzsche and the problem of nihilism is itself too ascetic. Heidegger's emphasis on
silence as proper to Dasein's being, his frequent use of quasireligious (even Schopenhauerean) terms of
grace and call of conscience, his many references to the destiny of the German Volk, his
avoidance of politics and the serious quietistic tone of Heideggerian Gelassenheit are all
reminiscent of the life-denying ascetic ideal Nietzsche sought to avoid. 65 Moreover,
Foucault seems to join with Derrida and other neo-Nietzscheans in regarding Heidegger's
idea of letting Being behis vision of those who have left traditional metaphysics behind
and with it the obsession with mastery and technology that drives contemporary civilization
as too passive or apathetic a response to the legitimate problems of post-Nietzschean
nihilism that Heidegger's own analysis uncovers. 66 Here we have arrived at a key difference between Heidegger
Why a philosophical shock? The answer, in part, may be that from Foucault's perspective,

and Foucault: for Foucault, Heidegger takes insufficient account of the playful and even irreverent elements in Nietzsche and of
Nietzsche's critique of the dangers of the ascetic ideal. Foucault joins with other new Nietzscheans in promoting, as an alternative to
Heideggerian Gelassenheit, the more Nietzschean vision of playing with the textwhich in Foucault's case means promulgating active
and willful images of resistance and struggle against particular practices of domination, rebellion against micro-powers, and blatant
disregard for tradition (cf. DP, 27). 67 This context-specific, unambiguously confrontational nature of Foucault's critique of the forms of
domination and technologies of power lodged in modern institutions offers a more Nietzsche-like response than the one Heidegger offers

the lessons Heidegger would have us draw

from Nietzsche throw us back to the passive nihilism of emptiness that Nietzsche feared .
to the nihilistic problems of Western civilization. As Foucault sees it,

While not predicting the emergence of better times, Foucault tries to offer a better (less passive, less ascetic) model for reforming our

cultivating an affirmative attitude toward life that he and other neoNietzscheans think may be our only chance to keep from extinguishing life on earth
altogether. 68
background practices and for

515

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Lapses Into Ontic

Thought
EVERY ATTEMPT TO RECONCEPTUALIZE BEING LAPSES
INTO ONTIC THOUGHT, MEANING THAT THE AFF IS STILL
TIED TO THE HISTORICAL POLITICAL HORIZON THAT
THEYRE CRITICIZING
Wolin 2000

[Richard, Department of History at City University of New York, Arbeit Macht

Frei: Heidegger as the Philosopher of the German Way, Nietzshe, Heidegger,
and the Future of Democracy, Winter Quarter, January 24, 2000,
olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/wolin.pdf, Acc. 10-12-04//uwyo-ajl]
That the standpoint of Being and Time is informed by the conservative
revolutionary worldview suggests that Heideggers existential analytic, far from a
purely
formal undertaking, is in fact laden with ontic content -- a content derived from
the
Zeitgeist of the interwar years. The critique of everydayness in Division I of
publicness, falling, curiosity, and the they emerges precisely therefrom.
Inattention to this dimension of Heideggers work suggests the pitfalls a purely
textimmanent reading, in which the filiations between politics and philosophy are a
priori
extruded.
The intimate relationship between fundamental ontology and the German
ideology should come as no surprise. Heidegger always insisted that ontological
questioning can never be atemporal and never comes to pass in an historical void.
Instead,
it is unavoidably saturated with historicity. As he remarks at one point in Being
and
Time: every ontology presupposes a determinate ontic point of view. . .
Outfitted with a measure of historical perspective, we are now aware of the extent
to which the early Heidegger made this critique his own. 10 As Lwith comments:
Whoever. . .reflects on Heideggers later partisanship for Hitler, will find in this
first formulation of the idea of historical existence the constituents of his
political decision of several years hence. One need only abandon the still
quasireligious
isolation and apply [the concept of] authentic existence -- always particular to
each individual -- and the duty that follows therefrom to specifically German
existence and its historical destiny in order thereby to introduce into the general
course of German existence the energetic but empty movement of existential
categories (to decide for oneself; to take stock of 9 oneself in the face of
nothingness; wanting ones ownmost destiny; to take responsibility for
oneself) and to proceed from there to destruction now on the terrain of politics.
It is not by chance if one finds in Carl Schmitt a political
decisionism -- in which the potentiality-for-Being-a-whole of individual
existence is transposed to the totality of the authentic state, which is itself
always particular -- that corresponds to Heideggers existentialist philosophy.

516

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails: Tech Returns

REJECTING A CERTAIN FORM OF TECHNOLOGICAL
DOMINATION MERELY REPLACES IT WITH A NEW ONE,
FURTHERING THE TECHNOLOGIZATION OF LIFE AND
REINSCRIBING THE TARGET OF CRITICISM
Zizek 99

[Slavoj, Unapologetic Self-Plagierist, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of

political ontology, NYC: Verso, 1999, 11-12//uwyo-ajl]
In his project of overcoming metaphysics, Heidegger fully ensorses this Nietzschean
dismissal of quick and easy exists from metaphysics; the only real way to break the
metaphysical closure is to pass through it in its most dangerous form, to endure the pain of
metaphysical nihilism at its most extreme, which means that one should reject as futile all
false sedatives, all direct attempts to suspend the mad vicious cycle of modern technology by
means of a return to premodern traditional Wisdom (from Chrsitianity through Oriental
thought), all attempts to reduce the threat of modern technology to the effect of some ontic
social wrong (capitalist exploitation, patriarchal domination, mechanicist paradigm).
These attempts are not only ineffectual: the true problem with them is that, on a deeper
level, they incite the evil they are fighting even further. An excellent example here is the
ecological crisis: the moment we reduce it to disturbances provoked by our excessive
technological exploitation of nature, we silently already surmise that the solution is to rely
again on technological innovations: new green technology, more efficient and global in its
control of natural processes and human resources Every concrete ecologogical concern
and project to change technology in order to improve the state of our natural surroundings
is thus devalued as relying on the very source of the trouble.

517

Kritik Answers

Alternative Causes Suffering

HEIDEGGER UNDERMINES MORALS AND POLITICS THE
ALTERNATIVE WILL ONLY CAUSE SUFFERING AND THE
DESTROY ALL ETHICS
Thiele, Prof of Political Science @ U of Florida, 2K3 (Leslie Paul, The Ethics

and Politics of Narrative, Foucalt and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed. Rosenberg and
Milchman)
The complementarity of Heidegger's and Foucault's accounts of modern demons and saving graces should not be too surprising. Foucault's
indebtedness to and fascination with Heidegger is well documented. 1 My intent in this chapter is neither to focus on the complementarity
of these visions, nor to outline the striking philosophical and political differences that remain in Heidegger's and Foucault's work. Rather, I
attempt to make a claim for what at first blush might appear a lost cause. Despite their originality and intellectual brilliance,

Heidegger and Foucault are often castigated as ethico-political dead-ends. They are
criticized for their unwillingness or inability to supply the grounds for sound moral and
political judgment. Heidegger's embrace of Nazism, in particular, is frequently identified as
proof positive that he has little, if anything, to contribute to the ethico-political domain. The
standard charge is that his highly abstract form of philosophizing, empyrean ontological
vantage point, and depreciation of das Man undermines moral principle and
political responsibility. From his philosophical heights, it is suggested, Heidegger
remained blind to human sufferings, ethical imperatives, and political practicalities. He
immunized himself against the moral sensitivity, compassion, and prudence that might have
dissuaded him from endorsing and identifying with a brutal regime. Those who embrace his
philosophy, critics warn, court similar dangers. In like fashion, it is held that Foucault dug himself into an
equally deep, though ideologically relocated, moral and political hole. Genealogical studies left Foucault convinced of the ubiquity of the
disciplinary matrix. There would be no final liberation. The sticky, normalizing webs of power were inescapable and a hermeneutics of
suspicion quashed any hope of gaining the ethical and political high ground. 2 As such, critics charge, Foucault stripped from us all reason
for resistance to unjust power and all hope of legitimating alternative ethico-political institutions. In a Foucauldian world of panoptic
power that shapes wants, needs, and selves, critics worry, one would have no justification for fighting and nothing worth fighting for. 3 In
sum, Heidegger's and Foucault's critics suggest that both thinkers undermine the foundations of the practical wisdom needed to ethically
and politically navigate late modernity. Despite the brilliance and originality of their thought, arguably the greatest philosopher and the
greatest social and political theorist of the twentieth century remain ungrounded ethically and divorced from political responsibility.

Critics argue that Heidegger's statements and actions endorsing and defending Nazi
authoritarianism and Foucault's radical anarchism, as displayed in his discussions of
popular justice with Maoists, demonstrate that neither thinker is capable of supplying us
with the resources for sound moral and political judgment.

518

Kritik Answers

Alternative Causes Paralysis (1/2)

HEIDEGGERS PHILOSOPHY HAS MORAL CONSEQUENCES
AND LEADS TO PARALYSIS IT JUSTIFIES SITTING BACK
AND ALLOWING FOR THE HOLOCAUST WHILE CRITICIZING
THE TECHNOLOGY USED TO KILL THE JEWS
Bookchin, Founder of the Institute for Social Ecology and Former Professor @
Ramapo College, 95 (Murray, Re Re-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human
Spirit Against Antihumanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism, p. 168-170)

"Insofar as Heidegger can be said to have had a project to shape human lifeways, it was as an endeavor to resist, or should I say, demur
from, what he conceived to he an all-encroaching technocratic mentality and civilization that rendered human beings 'inauthentic' in their
relationship to a presumably self-generative reality, 'isness', or more esoterically, 'Being' (Sein). Not unlike many German reactionaries,

Heidegger viewed modernity' with its democratic spirit, rationalism, respect for the
individual, and technological advances as a 'falling' (Gefallen) from a primal and naive
innocence in which humanity once 'dwelled, remnants of which he believed existed in the
rustic world into which he was born a century ago. 'Authenticity', it can be said without any
philosophical frills, lay in the pristine Teutonic world of the tribal Germans who retained
their ties with the Gods, and with later peoples who still tried to nourish their past amidst
the blighted traits of the modern world. Since some authors try to muddy Heidegger's prelapsarian message by
focusing on his assumed belief in individual freedom and ignoring his hatred of the French Revolution and its egalitarian, 'herd'-like
democracy of the 'They', it is worth emphasizing that such a view withers m the light of his denial of individuality. The individual by
himself counts for nothing', he declared after becoming a member of the National Socialist party in 1933. 'The fate of our Volk m its state
counts for everything.'22 As

a member of the Nazi party, which he remained up to the defeat of

Germany twelve years later, his antihumanism reached strident, often blatantly reactionary
proportions. Newly appointed as the rector of the University of Freiburg upon Hitler's
ascent to power, he readily adopted the Fuehrer-principle of German fascism and preferred
the title Rektor-Fuhrer, hailing the spirit of National Socialism as an antidote to 'the
darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth [by technology],
the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and
creative. His most unsavory remarks were directed in the lectures, from which these lines are taken, 'from a metaphysical point of
28

view', against 'the pincers' created by America and Russia that threaten to squeeze 'the farthermost corner of the globe ... by technology
and ... economic exploitation.'29 Technology,

as Heidegger construes it, is 'no mere means. Technology

is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of
technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing , i.e., of truth.30 After which
Heidegger rolls out technology's transformations, indeed mutations, which give rise to a
mood of anxiety and finally hubris, anthropocentricity, and the mechanical coercion of
things into mere objects for human use and exploitation. Heidegger's views on technology are part of a larger
weltanschauung which is too multicolored to discuss here, and demands a degree of interpretive effort we must forgo for the present in the
context of a criticism of technophobia. Suffice

it to say that there is a good deal of primitivistic animism

in Heidegger's treatment of the 'revealing' that occurs when techne is a 'clearing' for the
'expression' of a crafted material - not unlike the Eskimo sculptor who believes (quite wrongly, I
may add) that he is 'bringing out' a hidden form that lies in the walrus ivory he is carving. But
this issue must be seen more as a matter of metaphysics than of a spir itually charged
technique. Thus, when Heidegger praises a windmill, in contrast to the 'challenge' to a tract
of land from which the hauling out of coal and ore' is subjected, he is not being 'ecological'.
Heidegger is concerned with a windmill, not as an ecological technology, but more
metaphysically with the notion that 'its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely
to the wind's blowing'. The windmill 'does not unlock energy from the air currents, in order
to store it'.31 Like man in relation to Being, it is a medium for the 'realization' of wind, not an
artifact for acquiring power. Basically, this interpretation of a technological interrelationship
reflects a regression - socially and psychologically as well as metaphysically into
quietism. Heidegger advances a message of passivity or passivity conceived as a human
activity, an endeavor to let things be and 'disclose' themselves. 'Letting things be' would be
little more than a trite Maoist and Buddhist precept were it not that Heidegger as a National
Socialist became all too ideologically engaged, rather than 'letting things be', when he was
busily undoing 'intellectualism,' democracy, and techno logical
[continues]

519

Kritik Answers

Alternative Causes Paralysis (2/2)

[continues]
intervention into the 'world'. Considering the time, the place, and the abstract way in
which Heidegger treated humanity's 'Fall' into technological inauthenticity a Fall that
he, like Ellul, regarded as inevitable, albeit a metaphysical, nightmare - it is not hard to see
why he could trivialize the Holocaust, when he deigned to notice it at all, as part of a technoindustrial condition. 'Agriculture is now a motorized (motorsierte) food industry, in essence the
same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps,' he
coldly observed, 'the same as the blockade and starvation of the countryside, the same as the
production of the hydrogen bombs. In placing the industrial means by which many Jews
were killed before the ideological ends that guided their Nazi exterminators, Heidegger
essentially displaces the barbarism of a specific state apparatus, of which he was a part, by
the technical proficiency he can attribute to the world at large! These immensely revealing
offhanded remarks, drawn from a speech he gave in Bremen m 1949, are beneath contempt.
But they point to a way of thinking that gave an autonomy to technique that has fearful
moral consequences which we are living with these days in the name of the sacred, a
phraseology that Heidegger would find very congenial were he alive today. Indeed,
technophobia, followed to its logical and crudely primitivistic conclusions, finally devolves into a dark
reactionism and a paralyzing quietism. For if our confrontation with civilization
turns on passivity before a disclosing of Being, a mere dwelling on the earth, and a letting
things be, to use Heideggers verbiage much of which has slipped into deep ecologys
vocabulary as well the choice between supporting barbarism and enlightened humanism
has no ethical foundations to sustain it. Freed of values grounded in objectivity, we are
lost in a quasi-religious antihumanism, a spirituality that can with the same
equanimity hear the cry of a bird and ignore the anguish of six million once-living people
who were put to death by the National Socialist state.
32

520

Kritik Answers

Heidegger Was a Nazi

HEIDEGGER IS A NAZI AND THAT UNIQUELY INFLUENCED
HIS PHILOSOPHY
Thiele, Prof of Political Science @ U of Florida, 2K3 (Leslie Paul, The

Ethics and Politics of Narrative, Foucalt and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed. Rosenberg
and Milchman)
Heidegger was a Nazi, and a rather unrepentent one at that. Some suggest Heidegger's
Nazism cannot be separated from his philosophy, that indeed the former follows from the
latter. The argument, in short, is that Heidegger's political biography pretty well tells the whole
story. This position has been rearticulated periodically since the end of the Second World War, each time creating something of an
academic row. 16 To be sure, the story of Heidegger's life does not well illustrate an education in
sound moral and political judgment, except perhaps as an example of a lesson left unlearned. Yet the story that
Heidegger himself tells about human life, about human being in history, can do much to
cultivate moral and political judgment. I assert this despite insightful critiques of Heidegger that accuse him of ignoring
and eliding phronesis as a human potentiality. 17 My argument, then, is not that Heidegger's work explicitly celebrates prudence, but that

his philosophical narrative facilitates its cultivation.

521

Kritik Answers

Anti-Humanism Justifies Genocide

ANTI-HUMANISMS ALL-OR-NOTHING MENTALITY
JUSTIFIED THE HOLOCAUST WE MUST CHALLENGE THE
REDUCTION IN HUMANIST VALUES IN ORDER TO PREVENT
ANOTHER HOLOCAUST
Ketels, Assoc Prof of English @ Temple U, 96 (Violet B., Havel to the Castle! The Power of
the Word, 548 Annals 45, November, Lexis)

our terror of
being found guilty of phrases too smooth or judgment too simple is not in itself a value.
Some longing for transcendence persists in the human spirit, some tenacious faith that truth
and goodness exist and can prevail. What happened in the death camps, the invasion of Prague by Russian tanks, the
History has survived them and provides a regenerative, other view against nihilism and detachment. It testifies that

rape of Muslim women, the dismembering of Bosnian men, the degrading of a sophisticated society to subsistence and barbarous banditry:
these things do not become fictions simply because we cannot speak of them adequately or because composing abstractions is safer than
responding to the heinous reality of criminal acts. No response to the Holocaust and its murderous wake or to the carnage in the former
Yugoslavia could possibly be adequate to the atrocities alphabetized in file folders of perpetrators or to the unspeakable experiences

Bellow warned about the

"humanistic civilized moral imagination" that, seized with despair, "declines into lethargy
and sleep." n15 Imagine the plight of human creatures if it were to be silenced altogether, extinguished or forgotten. " Humanism
did not produce the Holocaust, and the Holocaust, knowing its enemies, was bent on the
extermination of humanism. It is an odd consequence of an all-or-nothing
mentality to repudiate humanist values because they are inadequate as an antidote to evil ."
burned into brains and bodies of survivors. But no response at all breeds new catastrophe. Saul

n16 Basic human rights asserted in words cannot be restored in reality unless they are matched to practices in all the spheres of influence

We feel revulsion at the repudiation of humanist values so visible in the savagery of

the battlefield and the councils of war. Yet we seem inoculated against seeing the brutalities
of daily human interactions, the devaluing of values in our own intellectual spheres, the
moral and ethical debunking formally incorporated into scholarly exegesis in literature,
philosophy, the social sciences, and linguistics, the very disciplines that cradled humanist
values. Remembering for the future by rehearsing the record, then, is not enough, as the most eloquent witnesses to Holocaust history
have sorrowfully attested. We must also respond to the record with strategies that challenge
humanist reductionism in places where we tend to overlook it or think it harmless. Our
moral outrage should be intensified, not subdued , [*50] by what we know. We must search
out alternatives to the anomie that seizes us when the linguistic distance between words and
reality seems unbridgeably vast, and reflections upon historical events ill matched to the
dark complexities of the human experience we would illumine.
we occupy.

ANTI-HUMANISM DESTROYS HUMAN DIGNITY

Campbell, Prof of International Politics @ U of Newcastle, 99 (David, The

Deterritorialization of Responsibility, Moral Spaces, Eds. Michael J. Shapiro & David

Campbell)
Liberalism is thus insufficient for human dignity because the election that justifies man "comes from a god or
Godwho beholds him in the face of the other man, his neighbor, the original 'site' of the Revelation." Similarly, humanism is
insufficient, and "modern antihuman-ism ... is true over and beyond the reasons it gives
itself." What Levinas finds laudable in antihumanism is that it "abandoned the idea of
person, goal and origin of itself, in which the ego is still a thing because it is still a being ." As
such, antihumanism does not eradicate the human, but "clears the place for subjectivity positing
itself in abnegation, in sacrifice, in a substitution which precedes the will ." It would therefore be a
grave error to conclude in haste that Levinas's antihumanism is either inhuman or inhumane. To the contrary. Levinas declares
that "humanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human," '' because it
is insufficiently attuned to alterity. If one understood "hu manism" to mean a "humanism of
the Other," then there would be no greater humanist than Levinas .
34

36

522

Kritik Answers

Liberal Humanism Solves Oppression

LIBERAL HUMANISM LIBERATES MORE THAN IT DESTROYS
AND STOPS THE WORST OPPRESSION IN HISTORY THE
WESTS FIGHT AGAINST COMMUNISM PROVES
Kors, Prof of History @ U of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research
Institute, 2K1 (Alan Charles, Triumph without Self-Belief, Orbis, Summer, ebsco)
For generations, and to this day, the great defenders of the humane consequences of the allocation of capital by free markets--Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and
Milton Friedman, for example--have remained unexplored, marginalized, or dismissed as absurd by most American intellectuals. The lionized intellectuals were and
are, in sentimental memory, those who dreamed about and debated how one would make the transition from unproductive and unjust capitalism to the cornucopia of
central planning. For a full generation, academic intellectual culture above all generally viewed the West's anticommunist military strength, let alone its willingness to
project that strength, as the great obstacle to international justice and peace, and derided the doctrine of peace through strength as the slogan of the demented. For at
least a generation, Western intellectual contempt for the West as a civilization, a set of ideals, and the object of hope for the potentials of humanity has been the
curriculum of the humanities and "soft" social sciences. Given these ineffably sad phenomena, the seeming triumph of the West (both the collapse of neo-Marxist
theory at universities outside the West, and especially the downfall of the Soviet empire) will be understood by Western intellectuals as showing, in the latter case, how
absurd Western fears were from the start, and, in both cases, not so much a victory for the West as merely the economic collapse of communists who in various ways
betrayed their ideals or failed to temper them with adequate pragmatism or relativism. One must recall, however, the years 1975-76 in the world of the intellectual
Left: the joy at American defeat in Indochina; the excitement over Eurocommunism; the anticipation of one, ten, a hundred Vietnams; the contempt for Jean-Francois
Revel's The Totalitarian Temptation; the ubiquitous theories of moral equivalence; the thrill Of hammers and sickles in Portugal; the justifications of the movement of
Cuban troops into those great hopes for mankind, Angola and Mozambique; the loathing of all efforts to preserve Western strategic superiority or even parity. One
must recall, indeed, the early 1980s: the romanticization of the kleptomaniacal and antidemocratic Castroite Sandinistas and the homicidal megalomaniac Mengistu
of Ethiopia; the demonization of Reagan's foreign policy; the outrage when Susan Sontag declared the audience of Reader's Digest better informed than readers of The
Nation about the history of the USSR; the mockery of the president's description of the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and of communism as a vision that would end
on "the dustbin of history"; and the academic associations that approved politically correct resolutions for a nuclear freeze. The latter included the American Historical
Association, which voted in overwhelming numbers to inform the American government and public that, as professional historians, they knew that Reagan's
rearmament program and deployment of missiles in Europe would lead to a severe worsening of U.S.-Soviet relations, end the possibilities of peace, and culminate in
an exchange of weapons in an ineluctable conflict. All of that will be rewritten, forgotten, indirectly justified, and incorporated into a world view that still portrays the

The initial appeal of communism and romanticized Third

World leaders--Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Sekou Toure, and Daniel Ortega--who
would redefine human well-being and productivity (well, they certainly redefined something) reflected the Western
pathology whereby intellectuals delude themselves systematically about the non-West,
about that "Other" standing against and apart from the society that does not appreciate those intellectuals' moral and
West as empire and the rest of the world as victim.

practical authority and status. However, when an enemy arose that truly hated Western intellectuals--namely, fascism--and whose defeat depended upon the West's
self-belief, Western intellectuals quickly became masters of judgments of absolute superiority and had no difficulty in defining a contest between good and evil.

the most
murderous regime in all of human history, the Bolsheviks in power, has fallen: its agents
were guilty of irredeemable crimes against humanity, and its apologists should do penance
for the remainder of their lives. Anticommunists within the law were warriors for human freedom; communists and antianticommunists, whatever their intentions, were warriors for human misery and slavery. The most that can be said in
communism's favor is that it was capable of building , by means of, slave labor and terror, a
simulacrum of Gary, Indiana, once only, without ongoing maintenance, and minus the good stuff. Secondly, voluntary exchange
among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law has demonstrably created
the means of both prosperity and diverse social options. Such a model has been a
precondition of individuation and freedom, whereas regimes of central planning have
created poverty, and (as Hayek foresaw) ineluctable developments toward totalitarianism and the
worst abuses of power. Dynamic free-market societies, grounded in rights-based individualism, have altered the entire human
Cognitive dissonance is an astonishing phenomenon, and in academic circles, it prevents three essential historical truths from being told. First,

conception of freedom and dignity for formerly marginalized groups. The entire "socialist experiment," by contrast, ended in stasis, ethnic
hatreds, the absence of even the minimal preconditions of economic, social, and political renewal, and categorical contempt for both

Thirdly, the willingness to contain communism, to fight its

expansion overtly and covertly, to sacrifice wealth and often lives against its heinous efforts
at extension--in Europe, Vietnam, Central Asia, Central America, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, and, indeed, Grenada--was,
with the struggle against Nazism over a much briefer period, the great gift of American taxpayers and the
American people to planet earth. As Britain under Churchill was "the West" in 1940, so was the United States from 1945 to 1989, drawing
individuation and minority rights.

from its values to stand against what was simultaneously its mutant offspring and its antithesis. In the twentieth century, the West met and survived its greatest trial.
On the whole, however, Western intellectuals do not revel in these triumphs, to say the least. Where is the celebration? Just as important, where is the accounting? On
the Left, to have either would be to implicate one's own thought and will in the largest crime and folly in the history of mankind. We have seen myriad documentaries
on the collective and individual suffering of the victims of Nazism, but where is the Shoah, or the Night and Fog, let alone the Nuremberg trails of the postcommunist

the countless victims who froze to death or were

maimed in the Arctic death camps would go unremembered; the officers and guards who
broke their bodies and often their souls would live out their lives on pensions, unmolested; and
present? As Solzhenitsyn predicted repeatedly in The Gulag Archipelago,

those who gave the orders would die peacefully and unpunished. Our documentary makers and moral intellectuals do not let us forget any
victim of the Holocaust. We hunt down ninety-year-old guards so that the bones of the dead might have justice, and properly so .

The
bones of Lenin's and Stalin's and Brezhnev's camps cry out for justice, as do the bones of
North Vietnam's exterminations, and those of Poi Pot's millions, and Mao's tens of millions.
In those cases, however, the same intellectuals cry out against--what is their phrase?--"witch-hunts," and ask us to let the past be the past. We celebrated the
millennium with jubilation; we have not yet celebrated the triumph of the West. Ask American high school or even college students to number Hitler's victims and
Columbus's victims, and they will answer, for both, in the tens of millions. Ask them to number Stalin's victims and, if my experience is typical, they will answer in the
thousands. Such is their education, even now. The absence of celebration, of teaching the lessons learned, and of demands for accountability is perhaps easily

Convinced that the West above all has been the source of artificial relationships of
dominance and subservience, the commodification of human life, and ecocide, leftist intellectuals
have little interest in objectively analyzing the manifest data about societies of voluntary
exchange, or in coming to terms with the slowly and newly released data about the conditions of life and death under the Bolsheviks and their heirs, or in
understood on the Left.

confirming or refuting various theories on the outcome of the Cold War (let alone, given their contemporary concerns, in analyzing ecological or gender politics under
communist or Third World regimes). Less obvious, but equally striking in some ways, has been the absence of celebration on so much of the intellectual Right, because
it is not at all certain something worth calling Western civilization did in fact survive the twentieth century.

523

Kritik Answers

Humanism Solves Genocide

STRENGTHENING HUMAN VIRTUES IS THE ONLY WAY TO
MAINTAIN PEACE SOLVES FURTHER HOLOCAUSTS
Ketels, Assoc Prof of English @ Temple U, 96 (Violet B., Havel to the Castle! The Power of the
Word, 548 Annals 45, November, Lexis)
[*46] THE

political bestiality of our age is abetted by our willingness to tolerate the

deconstructing of humanist values. The process begins with the cynical manipulation of
language. It often ends in stupefying murderousness before which the world stands silent,
frozen in impotent "attentism"--a wait-and-see stance as unsuited to the human plight as a
pacifier is to stopping up the hunger of a starving child. We have let lapse our pledge to the 6
million Jewish victims of the Holocaust that their deaths might somehow be transfiguring
for humankind. We allow "slaughterhouse men" tactical status at U.N. tables and "cast down
our eyes when the depraved roar past." n1 Peacemakers, delegated by us and circumscribed by our fears, temporize with
thugs who have revived lebensraum claims more boldly than Hitler did. In the Germany of the 1930s, a demonic idea was born in a
demented brain; the word went forth; orders were given, repeated, widely broadcast; and men, women, and children were herded into
death camps. Their offshore signals, cries for help, did not summon us to rescue. We had become inured to the reality of human suffering.
We could no longer hear what the words meant or did not credit them or not enough of us joined the chorus. Shrieking victims perished in
the cold blankness of inhumane silence. We were deaf to the apocalyptic urgency in Solzhenitsyn's declaration from the Gulag that we

only the unbending

strength of the human spirit, fully taking its stand on the shifting frontier of encroaching
violence and declaring "not one step further," though death may be the end of it--only this
unwavering firmness offers any genuine defense of peace for the individual, of genuine
peace for mankind at large. n2 In past human crises, writers and thinkers strained language to the breaking point to keep
must check the disastrous course of history. We were heedless of the lesson of his experience that

alive the memory of the unimaginable, to keep the human conscience from forgetting. In the current context, however, intellectuals seem
more devoted to abstract assaults on values than to thoughtful probing of the moral dimensions of human experience. "Heirs of the ancient
possessions of higher knowledge and literacy skills," n3 we

seem to have lost our nerve, and not only because of

Holocaust history and its tragic aftermath. We feel insecure before the empirical absolutes of
hard science. We are intimidated by the "high modernist rage against mimesis and content ,"
n4 monstrous progeny of the union between Nietzsche and philosophical formalism, the grim
proposal we have bought into that there is no truth, no objectivity, and no disinterested
knowledge. n5 Less certain about the power of language, that "oldest flame of the [*47]
humanist soul," n6 to frame a credo to live by or criteria to judge by, we are vulnerable even to
the discredited Paul de Man's indecent hint that "wars and revolutions are not empirical events . . .
but 'texts' masquerading as facts." n7 Truth and reality seem more elusive than they ever were
in the past; values are pronounced to be mere fictions of ruling elites to retain power. We are
embarrassed by virtue. Words collide and crack under these new skeptical strains, dissolving into banalities the colossal enormity of what must be
expressed lest we forget. Remembering for the future has become doubly dispiriting by our having to remember for the present, too, our having to register and
confront what is wrong here and now. The reality to be fixed in memory shifts as we seek words for it; the memory we set down is flawed by our subjectivities. It is
selective, deceptive, partial, unreliable, and amoral. It plays tricks and can be invented. It stops up its ears to shut out what it does not dare to face. n8 Lodged in our
brains, such axioms, certified by science and statistics, tempt us to concede the final irrelevance of words and memory. We have to get on with our lives. Besides,
memories reconstructed in words, even when they are documented by evidence, have not often changed the world or fended off the powerful seductions to silence,
forgetting, or denying. Especially denying, which, in the case of the Holocaust, has become an obscene industry competing in the open market of ideas for control of
our sense of the past. It is said that the Holocaust never happened. Revisionist history with a vengeance is purveyed in words; something in words must be set against
it. Yet what? How do we nerve to the task when we are increasingly disposed to cast both words and memory in a condition of cryogenic dubiety? Not only before but
also since 1945, the criminality of governments, paraded as politics and fattening on linguistic manipulation and deliberately reimplanted memory of past real or
imagined grievance, has spread calamity across the planet. "The cancer that has eaten at the entrails of Yugoslavia since Tito's death [has] Kosovo for its locus," but
not merely as a piece of land. The country's rogue adventurers use the word "Kosovo" to reinvoke as sacred the land where Serbs were defeated by Turks in 1389! n9
Memory of bloody massacres in 1389, sloganized and distorted in 1989, demands the bloody revenge of new massacres and returns civilization not to its past glory but
to its gory tribal wars. As Matija Beckovic, the bard of Serb nationalism, writes, "It is as if the Serbian people waged only one battle--by widening the Kosovo charnelhouse, by adding wailing upon wailing, by counting new martyrs to the martyrs of Kosovo. . . . Kosovo is the Serbianized [*48] history of the Flood--the Serbian New
Testament." n10 A cover of Suddeutsche Zeitung in 1994 was printed with blood donated by refugee women from Bosnia in an eerily perverse afterbirth of violence

We stand benumbed before multiplying horrors. As Vaclav Havel warned more than a decade ago,
regimes that generate them "are the avant garde of a global crisis in civilization." The
depersonalization of power in "system, ideology and apparat," pathological suspicions about
human motives and meanings, the loosening of individual responsibility, the swiftness by
which disastrous events follow one upon another "have deprived us of our conscience, of our
common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual humanity ." n12 Nothing less
than the transformation of human consciousness is likely to rescue us.
revisited. n11

524

Kritik Answers

A2 Reject Technology: 2AC

THE PROBLEM ISNT TECHNOLOGY, BUT OUR
RELATIONSHIP TO IT. REJECTING IT MASKS THE PROBLEM
AND ONLY ACKNOWLEDGING ITS INCOMPLETION CAN
TRAVERSE ITS HOLD OVER US
Daniels 2002
[Michael D., Trinity University, Heidegger and Nazism, Prometheus: The John Hopkins Student
Journal of Philosophy, Vol. I, Fall 2002, http://www.jhu.edu/prometheus/Heidegger%20and
%20Nazism.pdf, acc 10-11-04//uwyo-ajl]

Despite his grave concerns about technology, he was never simply an opponent
of it nor did he seek its abolition or destruction. The problem, Heidegger believed,
was
not technology per se, but the hegemony that technology had come to exercise over
human action. Techne as a form of uncovering reveals the world as a process of
production. Everything within the world is thus merely the equipment with which
this
productive enterprise is carried out. Modern man imagines that technology
produces
goods to satisfy his wants and desires, providing a nice lifestyle. Technology,
however,
can only serve human beings if they live according to something other than
technical
and economic imperatives. Only if distinctively human action is placed at the
center of
our concern will technology serve our ends. We can only become active, as opposed
to
productive, beings if we are guided by phronesis. Phronetic insight, however, is
only
possible if we resolutely face the possibility of our own death and accept the destiny
that is revealed in the moment of vision. Thus, we must resolve ourselves to face
the
question of Being. Without resolve to do this, we will lose the capacity for action
and
become mere cogs in the equipment that constitutes the world uncovered by
techne.

525

Kritik Answers

A2 Spanos: 2AC (1/3)

SPANOS DEMAND FOR PURITY ENSURES HIS
MARGINALIZATION AND FORECLOSES ON COALITION
BUILDING ONLY THE PERM OFFERS A WAY OUT
Perkin 93

[J. Russell, Prof. English @ St. Marys, Theorizing the Culture Wars, Postmodern Culture
3: 3, 1993, Muse//uwyo]
My final criticism is that Spanos, by his attempt to put all humanists into the same category
and to break totally with the tradition of humanism, isolates himself in a posture of
ultraleftist purity that cuts him off from many potential political allies, especially when, as I
will note in conclusion, his practical recommendations for the practical role of an
adversarial intellectual seem similar to those of the liberal pluralists he attacks. He seems illinformed about what goes on in the everyday work of the academy, for instance, in the field
of composition studies. Spanos laments the "unwarranted neglect" (202) of the work of
Paulo Freire, yet in reading composition and pedagogy journals over the last few years, I
have noticed few thinkers who have been so consistently cited. Spanos refers several times
to the fact that the discourse of the documents comprising The Pentagon Papers was linked
to the kind of discourse that first-year composition courses produce (this was Richard
Ohmann's argument); here again, however, Spanos is not up to date. For the last decade the
field of composition studies has been the most vigorous site of the kind of oppositional
practices The End of Education recommends. The academy, in short, is more diverse, more
complex, more genuinely full of difference than Spanos allows, and it is precisely that
difference that neoconservatives want to erase.
By seeking to separate out only the pure (posthumanist) believers, Spanos seems to me to
ensure his self-marginalization. For example, several times he includes pluralists like Wayne
Booth and even Gerald Graff in lists of "humanists" that include William Bennett, Roger
Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza. Of course, there is a polemical purpose to this, but it is one
that is counterproductive. In fact, I would even question the validity of calling shoddy and
often inaccurate journalists like Kimball and D'Souza with the title "humanist intellectuals."
Henry Louis Gates's final chapter contains some cogent criticism of the kind of position
which Spanos has taken. Gates argues that the "hard" left's opposition to liberalism is as
mistaken as its opposition to conservatism, and refers to Cornel West's remarks about the
field of critical legal studies,
"If you don't build on liberalism, you build on air" (187). Building on air seems to me
precisely what Spanos is recommending. Gates, on the other hand, criticizes "those
massively totalizing theories that marginalize practical political action as a jejune
indulgence" (192), and endorses a coalition of liberalism and the left.

PERM DO BOTH
SPANOS ALONE ISNT EMANCIPATORY COMBINING THE
CRITICISM WITH PROBLEM SOLVING IS OPTIMAL
Lewandowski 94

[John, Prof @ SUNY Binghamton, Philosophy and Social Criticism 20, 119]
Spanos rightly rejects the textuality route in Heidegger and Criticism precisely because of
its totalizing and hypostatizing tendencies. Nevertheless, he holds on to a destructive
hermeneutics as disclosure. But as I have already intimated, disclosure alone cannot support
a critical theory oriented towards emancipation. I think a critical theory needs a less
totalizing account of language, one that articulates both the emphatic linguistic capacity to
communicate, solve problems in and criticize the world. The essential task of the social critic
and any literary theory that wants to be critical is to couple world disclosure with
problem-solving, to mediate between the extra-ordinary world of textuality and the
everyday world of texts. In this alternative route, literary theory may become the kind of
emancipatory oriented critical theory it can and should be.

526

Kritik Answers

A2 Spanos: 2AC (2/3)

527

Kritik Answers

A2 Spanos: 2AC (3/3)

528

Kritik Answers

**Human Rights Bad (Imperialism)**

HR Bad Answers: 2AC (1/4)

FIRST, NO LINK WE DONT DICTATE THE
INTERNATIONALIZATION OF RIGHTS. OUR EV JUST SHOWS
THAT OTHERS WILL VOLUNTARILY MODEL PLAN
SECOND, WE CONTROL UNIQUENESS ZAKARIA SHOWS
THAT DEMOCRATIC PROMOTION IS INEVITABLE NOW. WE
JUST SEND A BETTER SIGNAL THAT STABILIZES STATUS
QUO TRANSITIONS
THIRD, ESSENTIALISM TURN
A. THEIR ARGUMENT ESSENTIALIZES NON-WESTERN
CULTURES, DEPRIVING THEM OF AGENCY
Mered 96
[Sohail, JD Candidate @ Western Reserve University School of Law, Its Not a Cultural Thing:
Disparate Domestic Enforcement of Internaitonal Criminal Procedure Standards A Comparison of
the United States and Egypt, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Winter,
LN//uwyo-ajl]

. Most significant and dangerous is the assumption by relativists that

a culture is monolithic. Their reliance on stereotypes of entire races,
ethnicities, and religions stems from that assumption. n65 The result is an argument which must fail
because of its oversimplification. No culture can be viewed as a homogeneous grouping of
people; nor can religion alone characterize a culture. Relativists like to refer to the "Islamic culture," thereby obliterating
significant cultural differences which exist among peoples from Morocco to Indonesia (passing through some sub-Saharan African
The cultural relativist position fails in several ways

nations, such as Nigeria). n66 These cultural differences, due to the diversity of race, and ethnicity, as well as historical experience, all give insight into the way these

A simplistic scholarly argument which conveniently overlooks

intricacies and complexities necessarily raises suspicions and destroys itself.
different states may behave.

B. THIS MIMICS COLONIZATION, ENTRENCHING

OPPRESSION
Butler 99
[Judith, prof. of rhetoric at UC Berkeley, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999, 18-19//uwyo-ajl]
Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of

The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse

that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms. That the
feminism.

tactic can operate in feminist and antifeminist contexts alike suggests that the colonizing gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist. It can operate to effect

other relations of racial, class, and heterosexist subordination to name but a few. And clearly, listing the varieties of oppression, as I began to do, assumes their
discrete, sequential coexistence along a horizontal axis that does not describe their convergences within the social field. A vertical model is similarly insufficient;
oppressions cannot be summarily ranked, causally related, distributed among planes of originality and derivativeness. Indeed, the field of power structured in part
by the imperializing gesture of dialectical appropriation exceeds and encompasses the axis of sexual difference, offering a mapping of intersecting differentials which
cannot be summarily hierarchized either within the terms of phallogocentrism or any other canddidate for the position of primary condition of oppression.

Rather than an exclusive tactic of masculinist signifying economies, dialectical

appropriation and suppression of the Other is one tactic among many deployed
centrally but not exclusively in the service of expanding and rationalizing the
masculinist domain.

FOURTH, NO ALTERNATIVE CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGE

IS INEVITABLE IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD, PREVENTING
CULTURAL AUTHENTICITY
529

Kritik Answers

HR Bad Answers: 2AC (2/4)

FIFTH, THE ALTS RELATIVISM RISKS CRUSHING
TOTALITARIANISM
Farber & Sherry 95
[Daniel A., Henry J. Fletcher Professor of Law and Assoc Dean of Faculty @ U. of Minnesota, &
Suzanna, Earl R. Larson Prof. of Civ Rights and Civ Liberties Law @ U. of Minnesota, Is the Radical
Critique of Merit Anti-Semitic? California Law Review, May, LN//uwyo-ajl]

This unsettling possible alignment of radical constructivism with the worst totalitarian
regime of this century should also - upon reflection - seem less than shocking. n147 The core of the radical constructivist
paradigm is a rejection of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on rationality and scientific explanation. n148 Instead, radical constructivists seek to explain the world
solely as the result - deliberate or unconscious - of ideology and the pursuit of dominance. But that standard leaves little room for shared concepts of merit, morality,
or anything else. n149 As other scholars have noted, radical constructivism "leaves no ground whatsoever for distinguishing reliable knowledge from superstition."

it can readily slide into

moral relativism n151 - only one step away from relying on raw power to
determine truth. For if ideas are mere reflections of the exercise of power, it becomes difficult to find a basis
for criticizing social arrangements. And if raw power is the test of truth, totalitarians are merely
the most unabashed constructors of reality. Much as radical constructivists may dislike this conclusion, its potential is
n150 As a feminist philosopher who sympathizes with what we have called radical constructivism has warned,

present in their conceptual apparatus.

SIXTH, TURN PLAN SOLVES THE WORSE IMPERIALISM OF

FORCIBLY DETAINING ENEMY COMBATANTS FOR LIFE
WITHOUT DUE PROCESS
SEVENTH, TURN: THEIR PATRONIZING RESPECT FOR
OTHERS IS RACISM UNDER ANOTHER GUISE AND
SMOOTHES THE PATH FOR CAPITAL-DRIVEN DESTRUCTION
Zizek '99
[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass,
The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso,
1999, 215-6
How, then, does the universe of Capital relate to the form of nation-state in our era of global capitalism? Perhaps this relationship is best designated as
'autocolonization': with the direct multinational functioning of Capital, we are no longer dealing with the standard opposition between metropolis and colonized
countries; a global company, as it were, cuts its umbilical cord with its mother-nation and treats its country of origin as simply another territory to be colonized. This is
what is so disturbing to patriotically orientated right-wing populists, from Le Pen to Buchanan: the fact that the new multinationals have exactly the same attitude
towards the French or American local population as towards the population of Mexico, Brazil or Taiwan. Is there not a kind of poetic justice in this self-referential turn
of today's global capitalism, which functions as a kind of 'negation of negation', after national capitalism and its internationalist! colonialist phase? At the beginning
(ideally, of course), there is capitalism within the confines of a nation-state, and with the accompanying international trade (exchange between sovereign nationstates); what follows is the relationship of colonization, in which the colonizing country subordinates and exploits (economically, politically, culturally) the colonized

the final moment of this process is the paradox of colonization, in which there are
only colonies, no colonizing countries - the colonizing power is no longer a nation-state but the global
company itself. In the long term, we shall all not only wear Banana Republic shirts but also live in banana republics.
And, of course, the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism,
the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture as the
colonizer treats colonized people - as 'natives' whose mores are to be carefully studied and 'respected'. That is to say: the
country;

relationship between traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same as the relationship between Western cultural
imperialism and multiculturalism - just as global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing nation-state metropolis,

multiculturalism involves a patronizing Eurocentrist distance and/or respect

for local cultures without roots in one's own particular culture. In other words,
multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a 'racism
with a distance' - it 'respects' the Other's identity , conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed 'authentic'
community towards which the multiculturalist maintains a distance made
possible by his/her privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of
all positive content' (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist; he or she does not oppose the the Other the particular values of his or her own culture); none the less he
or she retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) other particular cultures properly -

multiculturalist respect for the Other's specificity is the very form of asserting
one's own superiority. Pursuing multiple perspectives legitimizes racism and
disables us from solving ecological and social disasters

530

Kritik Answers

HR Bad Answers: 2AC (3/4)

EIGHTH, PERM DO BOTH
COMBINING UNIVERSALITY AND RELATIVISM CHECKS
ETHNOCENTRISMAND LOCAL REPRESSION
Donoho 2001

[Douglas Lee, Prof. Law @ Southeastern University, Autonomy, SelfGovernance, and the Margin of Appreciation: Developing a Jurisprudence of
Diversity within Universal Human Rights, 15 Emory International Law Review
391, Fall, LN//uwyo-ajl]
On the other side of the debate, reliance on relativism by non-Western states and scholars reflects a mixture of contrasting
motives.

For some repressive regimes, the lure of relativism undoubtedly lies in its
potential for deflecting international scrutiny. Universalists' deep suspicion regarding the motives of
those who champion relativism seems well founded. Indeed, prominent among states promoting relativism at the World
Conference in Vienna were those on the short list of the World's most egregious violators - measured on virtually any scale -

many of these government's

espoused claims of cultural or [*414] religious imperative are nothing more than
cynical manipulations meant to undermine the effectiveness of rights. Yet the appeal of
relativism is hardly limited to repressive governments. Especially among non-Westerners , arguments about
relativism are a reflection of something far more profound than the misleading,
"either/or" dichotomy of universal versus relative rights. For many, the appeal of a seemingly relativist
of basic human dignity. n63 Only a true Pollyanna would fail to suspect that

perspective is simply a means to advocate genuine concern over the cultural, social, and political domination of Western values. n64 It similarly
reflects an understandable desire to preserve local traditions and values - a desire that on some level clearly conflicts with progressive human rights
development and may serve as the unwitting ally of oppression. n65 Finally, the relativist perspective may be used to promote self-governance and
autonomy - the prerogative to develop the specific meaning of human rights, in accordance with local terms of reference. n66 To a significant extent,
genuine concerns for diversity, pluralism and local autonomy have been obscured by the West's legitimate fear that "relativism" could serve as the
"last refuge for oppression." n67 The "relativist" label has thus become, in the [*415] words of Makau Wa Mutua, a bit like "human rights name-

, the fears and corresponding rhetoric of the West have created a

misleading oppositional narrative that obscures the real and difficult issues that
genuine diversity poses for the international human rights system. n69 As is often true in
calling." n68 In this sense

political debates, the competing motivations of universalist and relativist governments have been manifested in arguments
imprecisely cast in "either/or" terms; that is, all rights are, in all of their manifestations, either universal or relative. Yet one

this is a false dichotomy.

international human rights can be

plausible reading of the compromise language of the Vienna Declaration suggests that
Rather, it may be that the Vienna Declaration reflects the notion that

simultaneously universal and variant.

NINTH, TURN: THEIR RELATIVISM IS ITSELF

ETHNOCENTRIC
Morgan-Foster 03
[Jason, JD Cand at U. of Michigan School of Law, A New Perspective on the Universality DebA2
Reverse Moderate Relativism in the Islamic Context, ILSA Journal of Intl and Comparative Law,
Fall, LN//uwyo-ajl]

: the notion that all values are culturally relative,

the belief in "the equal dignity and worth of all cultures," or "the equal right of all peoples to participate
in the formation of international law" are themselves culturally shaped value judgments, which
would be void under the cultural relativist's own theory. There is no reason for cultural relativists to
Strict cultural relativism has been criticized as self-contradictory

accept these starting points as universal in order to support a doctrine which denies the legitimacy of [*43] universals. n37 From a normative human rights
perspective, strict cultural relativism is also questionable because it has little to no support in human rights conventions. The only treatment of strict cultural
relativism in a human rights convention is article 63(3) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which says that "[t]he provisions of this Convention shall be
applied in [colonial territories] with due regard, however, to local requirements." n38 A strict cultural relativist reading of this provision has been rejected by the
European Court of Human Rights in Tyrer v. United Kingdom, where the local custom of corporal punishment was at issue. n39
Thus, because of the logical self-contradiction inherent in strict cultural relativism, and because of the virtual complete lack of support for strict cultural
relativism in the human rights discourse, strict cultural relativism fails as a paradigm to conceptualize the universality discourse.

531

Kritik Answers

HR Bad Answers: 2AC (4/4)

TENTH, TURN GROUNDING RESISTANCE TO A FALLEN
IDENTITY OF PRE-WESTERN INTERVENTION RENDERS THE
COLONIZED PASSIVE VICTIMS WITHOUT AGENCY
ACTIVISM WITHIN COLONIALISM USES ITS OWN EXCESSES
TO DISMANTLE IT
Zizek '99
[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish Subject:
the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 256-7//uwyo-ajl]

Against Butler, one is thus tempted to emphasize that Hegel was well aware of the
retroactive process by means of which oppressive power itself generates the form of
resistance is not this very paradox contained in Hegel's notion of positing the
presuppositions, that is, of how the activity of positing-mediating does not merely
elaborate the presupposed immediate-natural Ground, but thoroughly transforms
the very core of its identity? The very In-itself to which Chechens endeavour to
return is already mediated-posited by the process of modernization, which
deprived them of their ethnic roots.
This argumentation may appear Eurocentrist, condemning the colonized to repeat
the European imperialist pattern by means of the very gesture of resisting it
however, it is also possible to give it precisely the opposite reading. That is to say:
if we ground our resistance to imperialist Eurocentrism in the
reference to some kernel of previous ethnic identity, we automatically
adopt the position of a victim resisting modernization, of a passive object
on which imperialist procedures work. If, however, we conceive our
resistance as an excess that results from the way brutal imperialist
intervention disturbed our previous self-enclosed identity, our position
becomes much stronger, since we can claim that our resistance is
grounded in the inherent dynamics of the imperialist system that the
imperialist system itself, through its inherent antagonism, activates the forces that
will bring about its demise. (The situation here is strictly homologous to that of
how to ground feminine resistance: if woman is 'a symptom of man', the locus at
which the inherent antagonisms of the patriarchal symbolic order emerge, this in
no way constrains the scope of feminine resistance but provides it with an even
stronger detonating force.) Or to put it in yet another way the premise
according to which
resistance to power is inherent and immanent to the power edifice (in the sense
that it is generated by the inherent dynamic of the power edifice) in no way obliges
us to draw the conclusion that every resistance is co-opted in advance, including in
the eternal game Power plays with itself the key point is that through the
effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very
inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process
which leads to its own ultimate downfall.
It seems that such a notion of antagonism is what Foucault lacks: from the fact that
every resistance is generated ('posited') by the Power edifice itself, from this
absolute inherence of resistance to Power, he seems to draw the conclusion that
resistance is co-opted in advance, that it cannot seriously undermine the system
that is, he precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent
inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able to master
and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In short,
Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping,
outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to
power and is as such absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. (the
philosophical point to be made here is that this is the fundamental feature of the
dialectical-materialist notion of 'effect': the effect can 'outdo' its cause; it can be
ontologically 'higher' than its cause.) One is thus tempted to reverse the
Foucauldian notion of an all-encompassing power edifice which always-already
contains its transgression, that which allegedly eludes it: what if the price to be

532

Kritik Answers
paid is that the power mechanism cannot even control itself, but has to rely on an
obscene protuberance at its very heart? In other words: what effectively eludes the
controlling grasp of Power is not so much the external In-itself it tries to dominate
but, rather, the obscene supplement which sustains its own operation.

533

Kritik Answers

#3 Essentialism Turn: 1AR

MUTUA ESSENTIALIZES NON-WESTERN CULTURES, RECREATING THE HIERARCHY THAT THEY CRITICIZE.
REIFYING AN IMAGINED MACRO CULTURE ESTABLISHES
THE FRAMEWORK WHERE SUBORDINATION OF BOTH
INDIVIDUALS AND CULTURES.
THIS TURNS THE CRITIQUE, AND ACTS AS A SOLVENCY
TAKEOUT THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE K ARE INEVITABLE.
THEIR ARGUMENT ESSENTIALIZES NON-WESTERN
CULTURES, SUPPRESSING THOSE WHO DEMAND HUMAN
RIGHTS
Mered 96

[Sohail, JD Candidate @ Western Reserve University School of Law, Its Not a

Cultural Thing: Disparate Domestic Enforcement of Internaitonal Criminal
Procedure Standards A Comparison of the United States and Egypt, Case
Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Winter, LN//uwyo-ajl]
In stereotyping entire peoples, and assuming a monolithic cultural thought, relativists fail to
account for the dissenters in a society (or as relativists would characterize it, a culture), who
are the intellectuals and the individuals who claim their human rights have been abused.
Relativists discount the intellectual dissent as Westernized. n71 The simplicity of this
argument is intellectually dishonest. The entire intellectual voice of a country cannot be so
flippantly ignored and discounted. It is the perfect argument from the relativists' point of
view since the crux of [*153] their position is that any Western idea is simply inapplicable to
the nonWest, so any non-Westerner who espouses ideas determined to be Western can be
discounted as Westernized and thus irrelevant to the debate about his or her own culture.
The intellectual elite in the West is regarded as the most eloquent representative of their
societies. Relativists have offered no convincing argument why non-Western elites do not
represent their societies. The only adequate retort to this dismissal of non-Western elites is
to prove that the human rights are universal, and thus the intellectual dissenters are
necessarily only espousing values of their own culture. At the 1993 U.N. World Conference
on Human Rights, the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhism, stated that it was in "the
inherent nature of all human beings to yearn for freedom, equality, and dignity." n72 A more
peculiar aspect of the relativist position is the minimal importance it lends to the individual
complainants from the non-Western world who claim their government has violated their
human rights. The relativists fail to address the question of why there are individuals who
complain if the rights allegedly violated are foreign to their cultural concepts. Individuals
claim the rights they know are inalienable because they are human beings, regardless of
their culture. These individual complainants cannot be dispensed as Westernized
intellectuals. They are perhaps the most effective argument in support of the position that
international human rights standards speak universally to all peoples. n73

534

Kritik Answers

#5 Relativist Apologism Turn: 1AR

THE APOLOGETIC NATURE OF THE KRITICISM IS AN
ATTEMPT TO REGARNISH TIES BETWEEN THE WEST AND
EAST UNDER A FEAR OF ORIENTAL RETALIATION. THE
IMPLICATIONS OF THE CRITICISM INDICATE THAT MATUA
AND HUMAN RIGHT LIBERALS ARE AFRAID OF A STRONGER
ORIENT THAT WILL BACKLASH AGAINST THEIR
OPPRESSERS, THIS APPOLIGETIC NATURE REASTABLISHES
A NORM OF WESTERN DOMINANCE, WITHOUT TAKING
DOWN THE SOCIETAL NORMS THAT ALLOWS FOR THESE
HIERARCHIES
THEIR RELATIVISTIC POSITION MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO
CRITICIZE AND DISMANTLE OPPRESSION, ALLOWING
TOTALITARIANISM TO FILL THE VOID
Farber & Sherry 95
[Daniel A., Henry J. Fletcher Professor of Law and Assoc Dean of Faculty @ U. of
Minnesota, & Suzanna, Earl R. Larson Prof. of Civ Rights and Civ Liberties Law
@ U. of Minnesota, Is the Radical Critique of Merit Anti-Semitic? California
Law Review, May, LN//uwyo-ajl]
This unsettling possible alignment of radical constructivism with the worst totalitarian
regime of this century should also - upon reflection - seem less than shocking. n147 The core
of the radical constructivist paradigm is a rejection of the Enlightenment and its emphasis
on rationality and scientific explanation. n148 Instead, radical constructivists seek to explain
the world solely as the result - deliberate or unconscious - of ideology and the pursuit of
dominance. But that standard leaves little room for shared concepts of merit, morality, or
anything else. n149 As other scholars have noted, radical constructivism "leaves no ground
whatsoever for distinguishing reliable knowledge from superstition." n150 As a feminist
philosopher who sympathizes with what we have called radical constructivism has warned, it
can readily slide into moral relativism n151 - only one step away from relying on raw power
to determine truth. For if ideas are mere reflections of the exercise of power, it becomes
difficult to find a basis for criticizing social arrangements. And if raw power is the test of
truth, totalitarians are merely the most unabashed constructors of reality. Much as radical
constructivists may dislike this conclusion, its potential is present in their conceptual
apparatus

535

Kritik Answers

#8 Permutation: 1AR (1/3)

BALANCING RIGHTS AND PLURALITY SOLVES BEST
Donoho 2001
[Douglas Lee, Prof. Law @ Southeastern University, Autonomy, SelfGovernance, and the Margin of Appreciation: Developing a Jurisprudence of
Diversity within Universal Human Rights, 15 Emory International Law Review
391, Fall, LN//uwyo-ajl]
It is probable, therefore, that the elements of relativist language in the Vienna
Declaration reflect no more than a widespread desire among non-Western states to
manifest local preferences, preserve a degree of autonomy in the implementation of
rights, and promote diversity values. Thus, in its best light, such language is
motivated by the idea that the manifestation of human rights must somehow
accommodate communal preferences and recognize diversity and self-governance
wherever possible without violating underlying universal values. n81
This position suggests an undefined balance between universal values and local
preferences. At a minimum, the international community's continued emphasis on
universality demands that culturally based variations in [*421] rights must be
compatible with, and preserve, core universal values. It similarly requires that
diversity and autonomy concerns not undermine the progressive development of
human rights or serve as an excuse for oppression or uncritical preservation of the
status quo.
The Vienna Declaration may be seen, therefore, as a practical compromise among
competing motivations. It essentially directs international institutions to
accomplish a difficult and delicate task - interpret the specific meaning of rights in
ways that allow diversity, self-governance, and autonomy, while maintaining core,
universal human rights values. In the case of select rights, such as those relating to the physical integrity of
the individual, there may be little or no room for variation. n82 For other rights, there may be little actual consensus over
their specific meaning and significant potential for variations that nevertheless preserve core universal values. n83 For still
others, it may turn out that consensus is lacking even over the supposed core value represented in the abstract normative
standard. In such cases, the level of shared understanding over specific meaning may be so shallow as to cast doubt on the
existence of the right itself as a meaningful international standard.

ETHICAL UNIVERSALISM IS COMPATIBLE WITH CULTURAL

DIVERSITY AND IS NECESSARY TO FIGHT ETHNOCENTRISM
Tilley 2000
[John J., Assoc. Prof of Philosophy at Indiana University-Purdue University
Indianapolis, Cultural Relativism, Human Rights Quarterly, 22.2, The John
Hopkins University Press, 539//uwyo-ajl]
The trouble with the ethnocentrism argument is quite simple: to grant universalism is not to
be ethnocentric. In fact, it's consistent with universalism to advance the following as
universally valid: "Ethnocentrism is immoral." So the ethnocentrism argument fails. The
same goes for arguments that substitute "imperialistic," "authoritarian," or "antipluralistic"
for "ethnocentric." For example, although universalism implies that some moral
requirements are the same for everyone, it does not imply that we all have a moral
requirement to be the same, nor that we have any moral requirement that discourages
cultural diversity. Most likely, one of our main requirements is to respect such diversity (and
hence to respect cultural integrity). 67 Therefore, universalism is compatible with cultural
pluralism.

536

Kritik Answers

#8 Permutation: 1AR (2/3)

A BLANKET REJECTION OF HEGEMONIC IDEALS ALSO
REJECTS THE ONLY HOPE FOR ENDING OPPRESSION. WE
SHOULD COMBINE WESTERN ENLIGHTENMENT WITH THE
ALTERNATIVE.
Michael Thompson, 2003 Iraq, Hegemony, and the Question of the American Empire
accessed online http://www.logosjournal.com/thompson_iraq.htm
Hegemony in international terms without some kind of competing force, such as the Soviets,
can clearly lead to the abuse of power and a unilateralist flaunting of international
institutions that do not serve at the imperium's whim. But this should not mean that
hegemony itself is a negative concept. Although empire is something rightfully reviled,
hegemony may not be as bad as everyone thinks. We need to consider what is progressive
and transformative in the ideas and values of the western republican and liberal traditions.
We need to advocate not an anti-hegemonic stance in form, but an anti-hegemonic and antiimperialist stance in content, one that advocates the particular interests of capital of the
market in more broad terms rather than the universal political interests of others. Rather
than choose between western hegemony on the one hand and political and cultural
relativism on the other, we need to approach this problem with an eye toward
cosmopolitanism and what the political theorist Stephen Eric Bronner has called "planetary
life."
Simple resistance to American "imperial" tendencies is no longer enough for a responsible,
critical and rational left. Not only does it smack of tiers-mondisme but at the same time it
rejects the realities of globalization which are inexorable and require a more sophisticated
political response. The real question I am putting forth is simply this: is it the case that
hegemony is in itself inherently bad? Or, is it possible to consider that, because it can, at
least in theory, consist of the diffusion of western political ideas, values and institutions, it
could be used as a progressive force in transforming those nations and regions that have
been unable to deal politically with the problems of economic development, political
disintegration and ethnic strife?
It is time that we begin to consider the reality that western political thought provides us with
unique answers to the political, economic and social problems of the world and this includes
reversing the perverse legacies of western imperialism itself. And it is time that the left
begins to embrace the ideas of the Enlightenment and its ethical impulse for freedom,
democracy, social progress and human dignity on an international scale. This is rhetorically
embraced by neoconservatives, but it turns out to be more of a mask for narrower economic
motives and international realpolitik, and hence their policies and values run counter to the
radical impulses of Enlightenment thought. Western ideas and institutions can find
affinities in the rational strains of thought in almost every culture in the world, from 12th
century rationalist Islamic philosophers like Alfarabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sinna) and Averroes
(Ibn Rushd) to India's King Akbar and China's Mencius. The key is to find these intellectual
affinities and push them to their concrete, political conclusions.
Clearly, the left's problem with the idea of the spread of western political ideas and
institutions is not entirely wrong. There was a racist and violent precedent set by the French
and English imperial projects lasting well into the 20th century. The problem is in
separating the form from the content of western hegemonic motives and intentions. And it is
even more incorrect to see the occupation of Iraq as a symptom of western ideas and
Enlightenment rationalism. Nothing could be further from the case and the sooner this is
realized, the more the left will be able to carve out new paths of critique and resistance to a
hegemony that is turning into empire.
And it is precisely for this reason why, in institutional terms, the UN needs to be brought
back in. Although there are clearly larger political and symbolic reasons for this, such as the
erosion of a unilateralist framework for the transition from Hussein's regime, there is also
the so-called "effect of empire" where Iraq is being transformed into an instrument of
ideological economics. The current U.S. plan for Iraq, one strongly supported by Bremer as
well as the Bush administration, will remake its economy into one of the most open to trade,
capital flows and foreign investment in the world as well as being the lowest taxed. Iraq is
being transformed into an neo-liberal utopia where American industries hooked up to the

537

Kritik Answers
infamous "military-industrial complex" will be able to gorge themselves on contracts for the
development of everything from infrastructure to urban police forces.

continued

538

Kritik Answers

#8 Permutation: 1AR (3/3)

continued
As time moves on, we are seeing that Iraq provides us with a stunning example of how
hegemony becomes empire. It is an example of how the nave intention of "nation building"
is unmasked and laid bare, seen for what it truly is: the forceful transformation of a
sovereign state into a new form suited to narrow western (specifically American) interests.
Attempts to build a constitution have failed not from the lack of will, but from the lack of
any political discourse about what form the state should take and about what values should
be enshrined in law. Ruling bodies have become illegitimate almost immediately upon their
appointment because there exists almost complete social fragmentation, and the costs of
knitting it together are too great for America to assume.
In the end, America has become, with its occupation of Iraq and its unilateralist and
militaristic posture, an empire in the most modern sense of the term. But we should be
careful about distinguishing empire from a hegemon and the implications of each. And
since, as Hegel put it, we are defined by what we oppose, the knee-jerk and ineffectual
response from the modern left has been to produce almost no alternative at all to the
imperatives that drive American empire as seen in places such as Iraq. To neglect the
military, economic and cultural aspects of American power is to ignore the extent to which it
provokes violent reaction and counter-reaction. But at the same time, to ignore the
important contributions of western political ideas and institutions and their power and
efficacy in achieving peace and mutual cooperation, whether it be between ethnic
communities or whole nations themselves, is to ignore the very source of political solutions
for places where poverty, oppression and dictatorships are the norm and remain stubbornly
intact.

539

Kritik Answers

#10 Zizek Presymbolism: 1AR (1/2)

THE KRITIK IS GROUNDED IN A GOAL TO RETURN
CULTURES BACK TO THEIR UNTOUCHED PRE-COLONIAL
STATEONE CANNOT UNDUE THE EFFECTS OF
COLONIALISM. THE ALT OBLITERATES ANY COALITION
BUILDING POSSIBILITIES AS YOUR MOVEMENT IS
PREMISED ON VICTIMHOOD. THE APARTHEID AND TAIWAN
ARE EXAMPLES OF SOCIETIES THAT WERE COLONIZED
WHOS IDENTITIES AND SOCIETIES ARE ALTERED
INDEFINATELY.
AND, THE 1AC FUNCTIONS AS A CRITICISM OF
IMPERIALISM, WE ARE THE EXCESS OF OPPRESSION THAT
LEADS TO IMPERIALISMS ULTIMATE COLLAPSE.
THE ZIZEK EVIDENCE IS A UNIQUE LINK TURN TO THEIR
ALTERNATIVECOUNTER-HEGEMONIC MOVEMENTS WILL
COLLAPSE WESTERN IDEALISM NOW THE ALTERNATIVE
COLLAPSES THESE MOVEMENTS PERPETUATING THE
SYSTEM THROUGH REFORMIST MEASURES
THIS IS A NET BENEFIT TO THE PERMONLY A RISK THAT
OUR ETHIC WILL BUILD COALITIONS AROUND THE RIGHT
TO LIFE TO TAKE DOWN VIOLENT SYSTEMS OF HEGEMONY

540

Kritik Answers

#10 Zizek Presymbolism: 1AR (2/2)

MULTICULTURALISM REINCRIBES EUROCENTRISM BY
APPROPRIATING OTHER CULTURES INTO THE WESTERN
MACHINE SINCE WESTERN THOUGHT IS INEVITABLE,
ONLY AN ASSERTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT-BASED
CONTINGENCY CAN OVERCOME IMPERIALISM ***
Zizek '92
[Slavoj, Doesn't like sharing Chinese food, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan
in Hollywood and Out, New York City: Routledge, 1992, 184-5//uwyo-ajl]
Consequently, our position here is radically "Eurocentric": the break of the
Enlightenment is irreversible, the epoch of the Enlightenment is "an epoch to end
all epochs," i.e., by means of the Versagung which constitutes the subject of the
Enlightenment, an abyss becomes visible against the background of which all other
epochs can be experienced in their epochal closure, as something ultimately
contingent. 59 The point is simply that the Enlightenment, like a cancerous tissue,
contaminates all preceding organic unity and changes it retroactively into an
affected pose. In Hegelese: as soon as we enter the Enlightenment, every
presupposition (of an organic ground) is suspected of being "posited." Suffice it to
recall the returns to oriental wisdom, the rejections of the so-called "Western
Protestant-Cartesian imperialist paradigm," which abound today. Apropos of them,
one usually emphasizes the need to distinguish authentic cases of such "returns"
from their commercialized distortions (newspaper ads for "transcendental
meditation," e.g.). Yet perhaps such an opposition is all too naive; perhaps what
appears as a commercialized distortion of the authentic oriental wisdom is today its
truth; perhaps the very "return to the lost oriental wisdom" is already in
service of the late capitalist social machine, facilitating the untroubled
run of its nuts and bolts-perhaps we betrayed "oriental wisdom" the
moment we uprooted it from its pretechnologicallife world and
transfunctionalized it into an individual therapeutic means. In other words, here,
also, the dialectical maxim "the cleaner you are, ther dirtier you are" is in force: the
more "truly" you return to oriental wisdom, the more your effort
contributes to the transformation of oriental wisdom into a cog in the
Western social machine. . . The reverse of it is that those who preach
"multicultural decenterment," "openness toward non-European
cultures," etc., thereby unknowingly affirm their "Eurocentrism," since
what they demand is imaginable only within the "European" horizon:
the very idea of cultural pluralism relies on the Cartesian experience of the empty,
substanceless subjectivity-it is only against the background of this
experience that every determinate form of substantial unity can appear
as something ultimately contingent.

541

Kritik Answers

No Link
OTHERS ADOPT US CULTURE BECAUSE IT REFLECTS THE
DIVERSITY OF AMERICAN SOCIETY AND, NATIONS
REALIZE THAT THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO US
IDEOLOGY
Victor Davis Hanson, Ph. D. in Classics, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
University, a Professor Emeritus at California University, Fresno, A Funny Sort of Empire: Are
Americans really so imperial? National Review Online, November 27, 20 02,
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson112702.html, UK:Fisher
In that regard, America is also a revolutionary, rather than a stuffy imperial society. Its crass
culture abroad rap music, Big Macs, Star Wars, Pepsi, and Beverly Hillbillies reruns
does not reflect the tastes and values of either an Oxbridge elite or a landed Roman
aristocracy. That explains why Le Monde or a Spanish deputy minister may libel us, even as
millions of semi-literate Mexicans, unfree Arabs, and oppressed southeast Asians are dying
to get here. It is one thing to mobilize against grasping, wealthy white people who want your
copper, bananas, or rubber quite another when your own youth want what black, brown,
yellow, and white middle-class Americans alike have to offer. We so-called imperialists don't
wear pith helmets, but rather baggy jeans and backwards baseball caps. Thus far the rest of
the globe whether Islamic fundamentalists, European socialists, or Chinese Communists
has not yet formulated an ideology antithetical to the kinetic American strain of Western
culture.

542

Kritik Answers

Relativism Is Self-Refuting
RELATIVISM REFUTES ITSELF
Schick and Vaughn 2002

[Theodore, Jr., Muhlenberg College & Lewis, How to Think about Weird Things:
Critical Thinking for a New Age, Third ed., Boston: McGraw Hill, 87//uwyo-ajl]
According to the relativist whether a subjectivist, a social constructivist, or a
conceptual relativist everything is relative. To say that everything is relative is to
say that no unrestricted universal generalizations are true (an unrestricted
generalization is a statement to the effect that something holds for all individuals,
societies, or conceptual schems). But the statement No unrestricted universal
generalizations are true is itself an unrestricted universal generalization. So if
relativism in any of its forms is true, its false. As a result, it cannot possibly be true.
To avoid such self-contradiction, the relativist may try to claim that the statement
Everything is relative is only relatively true. But this claim wont help, because it
just says that relatavists (or their society or their conceptual scheme) take
relativism to be true. Such a claim should not give the nonrelativist pause, for the
fact that relativists take relativism to be true is not in question. The question is
whether a non-relativist should take relativism to be true. Only if relativists can
provide objective evidence that relatvisim is true should a nonrelativist believe that
its true. But this evidence is precisely the kind that relatvists cant provide, for, in
their view, there is no objective evidence.
Relativists, then, face a dilemma: If they interpret their theory objectively, they
defeat themselves by providing evidence against it. If they interpret their theory
relativistically, they defeat themselves by failing to provide any evidence for it.
Either way, relativists defeat themselves.

RELATIVISM PRESUPPOSES THAT CULTURAL HEGEMONY IS

UNIVERSALLY NEGATIVE, DISPROVING ITSELF
Tilley 2000
[John J., Assoc. Prof of Philosophy at Indiana University-Purdue University
Indianapolis, Cultural Relativism, Human Rights Quarterly, 22.2, The John
Hopkins University Press, 528-9//uwyo-ajl]
Perhaps relativists will complain that the effectiveness of the examples stems from
act-descriptions that refer to motives. This calls for two replies. First, there is
nothing underhanded about such descriptions. They are a common way of
producing highly definite moral judgments. Second, relativists should be wary
about granting "effectiveness" to the examples. If [End Page 529]
they mean that the examples are indeed universally valid, they have abandoned
their thesis, for they have admitted that some moral judgments are valid for
everyone. This admission contradicts relativism no matter what act-descriptions
appear in the judgments. Also, it implies that there is nothing about moral
predicates that prevents the judgments in which they occur from being valid for all
cultures. So it's likely that many such judgments are universally valid, including
many that say nothing about motives.
Some relativists (though not the diehard ones) are likely to make a second complaint. They
will exclaim: "But we don't deny that such judgments are universally valid! The whole point
of our thesis is that cruelty and oppression are universally wrong, that respect and tolerance
are universally right!" But if this is indeed their "whole point," they have nothing to
contribute to moral theory.
If relativism is not an alternative to universalism, if it is merely a set of commonplace
remarks that most any brand of universalism can accommodate, it lacks the philosophical
importance its defenders claim for it. 52 To the extent that it has that importance, it conflicts

543

Kritik Answers
with universalism, which means that it does deny, implicitly at least, that the example
judgments are universally valid.

544

Kritik Answers

Defense: Non-Westerners Want Dignity

EVEN IF HUMAN RIGHTS ARE WESTERN IN ORIGIN, NONWESTERNERS STILL DESIRE THEM BECAUSE THEY
PROVIDE BASIC DIGNITY
Mered 96

[Sohail, JD Candidate @ Western Reserve University School of Law, Its Not a

Cultural Thing: Disparate Domestic Enforcement of Internaitonal Criminal
Procedure Standards A Comparison of the United States and Egypt, Case
Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Winter, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Relativists, notably non-Western scholars, argue that some violations of human
rights are due to the fact that non-Western cultures value collective societal rights
over individual rights. The concept of individual rights originated in Europe, and
thus cannot be applied to the non-Western world. Conceding the point that the
concept of individual rights as referred to in international instruments has Western
origins, relativists have nevertheless failed to prove that non-Western cultures do
not value individual rights as well. This argument assumes that the natural law
ideals of Locke can only be referred to in those Western terms used in international
conventions. The fact that some cultures value collective rights more than the West
does not preclude the same cultures valuing the concepts embodied in the human
rights which protect basic human dignity. When non-Westerners allude to the
greater emphasis on group rights, they are referring to a greater consideration for
units such as the family or the community. n70 They have failed to prove, however,
that the weaker emphasis on individualism in their society would permit a state to
strip an individual of his or her civil rights. Relativists have yet to prove that the
concepts are mutually exclusive.

EVEN IF RIGHTS ARE CULTURAL, THEYRE

PRAGMATICALLY DESIRABLE BECAUSE THEY ENSURE
FAIRNESS
Binder 99

[Guyora, Prof. of Law @ SUNY Buffalo, Cultural Relativism and Cultural

Imperialism in Human Rights Law, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, 1999,
LN//uwyo-ajl]
At the same time, and for the same reasons, the admission that support for
international protection of civil and political rights rests on culturally specific
value judgments does not refute those value judgments. Advocates sought a
foundation for international human rights law in the natural liberty of individuals
only in order to overcome the foundationalist arguments of defenders of the
absolute autonomy of sovereign states. But arguments for and against international
human rights law or state autonomy need no foundations. We can always assess
international legal institutions and doctrines in pragmatic terms, as contributing to
human betterment, or as embodying broadly participatory decisions emerging
from acceptably fair processes, or as tolerably useful and superior to available
alternatives, or to the costs of pursuing change. n11 This is how we commonly
assess domestic political institutions. Why should we treat international legal
institutions any differently?

545

Kritik Answers

A2 Foundationalism Bad
EVEN IF WE HAVE NO CERTAIN FOUNDATIONS, WE CAN
USE CHAINS OF INFERENCE TO CREATE PRAGMATIC
ETHICAL CODES THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE IS THE
REJECTION OF ALL KNOWLEDGE INCLUDING THE K
Tilley 2000

[John J., Assoc. Prof of Philosophy at Indiana University-Purdue University

Indianapolis, Cultural Relativism, Human Rights Quarterly, 22.2, The John
Hopkins University Press, 537//uwyo-ajl]
Second (and at the price of some repetition), fallibilism, as it pertains to moral
beliefs, implies merely that such beliefs are "tentative" or "provisional" in the
special sense fallibilists give those terms. It implies that moral beliefs are
corrigible, or in principle revisable, and as such are in the same boat with the
following beliefs (all of which, according to fallibilism, are in principle revisable):
"1=1;" "I exist;" "others besides myself exist;" "my birth preceded my reading of
Folkways;" "there is more than one culture in the world;" "relativists and
universalists use language when defending their views."
Does anyone, including any relativist, lack confidence in these beliefs? Of course
not. Nor is there any need to, even if we reject foundationalism. Foundationalism is
neither the only plausible account of justification, nor the only one at home with
the commonsense view that some beliefs warrant considerable confidence. 64 So
the rejection of foundationalism does not put "substantial limits" on the confidence
we can place in our beliefs. If it be said that special difficulties attend confidence in
moral beliefs, my reply is that this needs to be shown; it does not follow from
fallibilism. If it is shown, it will apply to all moral beliefs, including the ones
relativists are eager to vindicate--namely, those that aspire to merely "local," or
culturally specific, validity. Hence it will advance the relativist's cause not a whit.

546

Kritik Answers

A2 Morality Is Culturally Created

NOT TRUE [TWO REASONS]
A)NO EVIDENCE OF CULTURAL DETERMINISM
B)IT UNDERMINES RELATIVISM
Tilley 2000

[John J., Assoc. Prof of Philosophy at Indiana University-Purdue University

Indianapolis, Cultural Relativism, Human Rights Quarterly, 22.2, The John
Hopkins University Press, 539-40//uwyo-ajl]
The weakness of this argument resides in the word "biased." The fact that a thesis
is culturally biased discredits the thesis only if "biased" means roughly the same as
"distorted" or "mistaken." 70 But if it has that meaning, two problems arise. First,
cultural determinism is not confirmed by any evidence marshaled for it, because
according to cultural determinism, that evidence is not evidence at all, but a batch
of mistakes or distortions. Second, the relativist's new argument fails to make
relativism more plausible than universalism. Its main premise, cultural
determinism, implies that every [End Page 540] product of the human mind is
culturally biased. So every such product is discredited, including cultural relativism
and cultural determinism.
In short, the relativist has shot himself in the foot. His argument rests on a premise
which, if interpreted so that it can do the work assigned to it, discredits both itself
and relativism. (Of course, if it discredits itself we can dismiss it as false, in which
case it discredits nothing. Such are the puzzles spawned by self-discrediting
premises.) His problem is similar to one he faced earlier, when he claimed that
every truth is merely a local truth. His present argument rests on a similar claim,
one that thwarts his aims just as surely as the earlier one did.
Perhaps the relativist will respond by revising cultural determinism so that it
concerns only normative moral theories. He then can use it against such theories
without threatening either relativism or cultural determinism. 71 This tactic fails.
For one thing, metaethical theories are no less biased than normative ones, in any
sense of "biased" that supports the view that normative theories are inescapably
biased. Ironically, this is especially true of the metaethical thesis of relativism,
which owes much of its popularity to historically specific "biases," among them the
anti-Victorian attitude of early twentieth century intellectuals. 72

547

Kritik Answers

K = Imperialist
THE CRITICISM IS ITSELF THE RESULT OF WESTERN
CULTURAL NORMS, IMPOSING THEM UPON THE WORLD
Morgan-Foster 2003

[Jason, JD Cand at U. of Michigan School of Law, A New Perspective on the

Universality DebA2 Reverse Moderate Relativism in the Islamic Context, ILSA
Journal of Intl and Comparative Law, Fall, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Strict cultural relativism has been criticized as self-contradictory: the notion that
all values are culturally relative, the belief in "the equal dignity and worth of all
cultures," or "the equal right of all peoples to participate in the formation of
international law" are themselves culturally shaped value judgments, which would
be void under the cultural relativist's own theory. There is no reason for cultural
relativists to accept these starting points as universal in order to support a doctrine
which denies the legitimacy of [*43] universals. n37 From a normative human
rights perspective, strict cultural relativism is also questionable because it has little
to no support in human rights conventions. The only treatment of strict cultural
relativism in a human rights convention is article 63(3) of the European
Convention on Human Rights, which says that "[t]he provisions of this Convention
shall be applied in [colonial territories] with due regard, however, to local
requirements." n38 A strict cultural relativist reading of this provision has been
rejected by the European Court of Human Rights in Tyrer v. United Kingdom,
where the local custom of corporal punishment was at issue. n39
Thus, because of the logical self-contradiction inherent in strict cultural
relativism, and because of the virtual complete lack of support for strict cultural
relativism in the human rights discourse, strict cultural relativism fails as a
paradigm to conceptualize the universality discourse.

548

Kritik Answers

**Kappeler**
Kappeler Answers: 2AC (1/5)
FIRST, NO LINK WE DONT SAY THAT VIOLENCE IS AN
ABERRATION. WE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT ITS INEVITABLE
AND THAT REALISM IS THE LEAST BAD APPROACH
SECOND, WE OUTWEIGH THE VIOLENCE THEY DESCRIBE
IS LOWSCALE. MINIMAL COERCION IS NECESSARY IN THE
FACE OF MUCH LARGER SCALE THREATS OF ANNIHILATION
THIRD, PERM DO BOTH
YOU SHOULD ACKNOWLEDE THAT VIOLENCE IS AN
AGENCY ISSUE AND PASS PLAN
Kappeler, Assoc Prof at Al-Akhawayn U, 95 (Susanne, The Will to Violence: The politics of
personal behavior, P.8)

personal behavior is no alternative to political action; there is no question of

either/or. My concern, on the contrary, is the connection between these recognized forms of
violence and the forms of everyday behavior which we consider normal but which betray
our own will to violence- the connection , in other words, between our own actions and those acts
of violence which are normally the focus of our political critiques. Precisely because there is
no choice between dedicating oneself either to political issues or to personal behavior, the
question of the politics of personal behavior has (also) to be moved into the centre of our
politics and our critique.
Moreover,

FOURTH, WE SOLVE PLAN TAKES RESPONSIBILITY FOR

VIOLENCE DONE IN OUR NAME BY CHALLENGING
UNILATERAL DETAINMENT WITHOUT DUE PROCESS.
CROSS-APPLY TRIBE AND SANYAL
FIFTH, KAPPELERS CRITICISM COLLAPSES REAL AND
VIRTUAL VIOLENCE, PREVENTING MOBILIZATION AGAINST
ATROCITY
Bronfen 86

[Elisabeth, U. of Munich, Disavowal and Insight, Art History 11:1, March, ASP//uwyo-ajl]
There is undoubtedly a heuristic value in focusing on structural similarities and in denying
that a fictional representation is fundamentally different from a documentary one when seen
from the point of view of the function of this image. This allows Kappeler to reveal how
violation can take place on more than just the literal level. Yet it seems necessary to me to
see that there is also a fundamental difference between a depiction based on or involving the
real violence done to a physical body (Thomas Kasire, snuff movies) and the imagined
one, representing this violence on paper, canvas or celluloid, without any concretely violated
body as its ultimate signified. Not because the latter can then be absolved from any
responsibility toward the material of its depiction, but because to collapse the two levels on
which signification works might also mean not doing justice to the uniquely horrible
violence that occurs when a body is used quite literally as the site for an inscription by the
other.

549

Kritik Answers

Kappeler Answers: 2AC (2/5)

SIXTH, MULTILATERALISM SOLVES WE REPLACE THE
VIOLENCE OF HARD POWER WITH INTERNATIONAL
COOPERATION, SHORT-CIRCUITING THEIR IMPACT. CROSSAPPLY NYE
SEVENTH, EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE
REQUIRES A REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION,
MEANING THAT THE ALTERNATIVE OCCURS AGAINS THE
BACKGROUND OF COVERT VIOLENCE
Zizek '99

[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish
Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 153-4//uwyo-ajl]
It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis,
determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical restructuring of the analysand's
subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. Does not
Lacan himself provide a number of hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond
Law, using the very Pauline terms to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St
Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does not already posit a 'new

harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean for one. However,
this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is Lacan's contention that, in this
negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is confronted which is already
'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity, a negative gesture of
withdrawal, precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identifiction with a Cause:
negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic identification that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it, but is simultaneously obfuscated by it
and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what

'Death' stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of
the world', the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its
links with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate clean' that opens up the domain of the
symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier. Here,
Lacan parts company with St Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already was dead - that is to say, after Freud, one cannot directly
have faith in a Truth-Event;

every such Event ultimately remains a semblance obfuscating a

preceding Void whose Freudian name is death drive. So Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination
of the exact status of this domain beyond the rule of the Law. That is to say: like Lacan, Badiou delineates the contours
of a domain beyond the Order of Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the 'morbid' super ego
connection between Law and its transgressive desire. For Lacan, however, the Freudian topic of the death drive cannot
be accounted for in the terms of this connection: the 'death drive' is not the outcome of the morbid

confusion of Life and Death caused by the intervention of the symbolic Law. For Lacan, the
uncanny domain beyond the Order of Being is what he calls the domain 'between the two
deaths', the pre-ontologicalf domain of monstrous spectral apparitions, the domain that is
'immortal', yet not in the Badiouian sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but in
the sense of what Lacan calls lamella, of the monstrous 'undead' object-libido.18

550

Kritik Answers

Kappeler Answers: 2AC (3/5)

EIGHTH, KAPPELER DOESNT GET COGNITION THE
VIOLENT IMAGE ALLOWS THE VIEWER TO EMPATHIZE
WITH THE VICTIM, ENABLING QUESTIONING OF OUR
REPRESENTATIONS AT THE SAME TIME AS IT DEPICTS
THEM
Bronfen 86

[Elisabeth, U. of Munich, Disavowal and Insight, Art History 11:1, March, ASP//uwyo-ajl]
to use another as object for self-expression always involves a shift
non-identity between self and self-reflecting image . As Lacan points out, to see oneself in an image
is recognition as misrecognition. The interesting thing is that a third term/body is needed for this to occur, even if it involves the reduction
What she ignores in her argument, however, is that
or

of a subject to an object, from the gazing subjects point of view. That is to say, narcissistic self-recognition occurs only through the introduction of difference, even if

, the subjectivity of the objectified other is always

latently possible, present, and potentially signifiable, even if not signified. That is to say, the
attempt to efface the others voice is a strategy that can unwittingly turn upon itself and
expose its own limitations.
an attempt is made to efface this difference again in the process. Due to this

Thus the process by which the gazing man recognizes himself in the look of the gazed-at woman always also implies an element of duplicity. For since she is sexually
different from him he both can and cannot see himself in her. His objectifying gaze depends on the transformation of the otherness of the other into an image of
similarity yet it is precisely this otherness that seems to make the reduction so satisfying. Even if the ultimate goal is homophobic bonding, it occurs over a body
which will always give back the sought-for look of self-recognition only imperfectly. As such, the woman/object is always double, both confirming and not confirming
the male gaze, similar but not the same. Thus I would argue that her text (voice) is always also inscribed in the male text, even if we are asked to be blind to it, even if it
is that which marks where the dominant structure of representation is staged in this scenario falters. The dynamics involved in violating the body of a woman by
transforming it into a Woman/victim as figure for something alterior to herself seems to me to be more complicated. What, for example, remains unexplained by
Kappelers formula is why the representation of another is needed to bring about self-expression, why a straightforward self-portrait will not suffice or, to put it
another way, why patriarchy needs to designate certain members of society as other, in order to stabilize its own power. Clearly what this suggests is that the violent
creation of similarity out of difference is more satisfying than a static homogeneous space. Clearly also, the charm of reducing another to a silent object which will not
respond in word or gaze allows an unlimited plethora of inscriptions and semantizations by the gazing subject that remain unchallenged. But if the object of the
representation is always only a silent victim, the question remains, why is it possible that the victim can mirror the master?
In part as a response to Barthess discussion of de Sades writings, Kappeler distinguishes further between two forms of victimization. The first form is a
straightforward act of objectification, annihilating the womans subjectivity, with the victim objecting to the vexation and crying out in pain. The second form involves
a complicit victim: faking subjectivity, she chooses (in Barthess terminology) to ejaculate or discharge, to transform herself into a libertine, and enjoy herself in her
vexation. Yet Kappelers point is that while the subject of this situation desires the womans complicity and pleasure, wants her to want to be a victim masquerading as
subject, it is ultimately the subjects feeling of pleasure that is at stake. She sees this analogous to Barthess notion of the authors search for his readers pleasure as a
way to guarantee his own pleasure as supreme writing object. The point of her comparative reading is to show that where the question of complicity and collaboration
is involved, the object (the willing woman libertine) and the reader (the willing co-player of the authors game) are in similar positions, serving similar functions,

What this collaboration is blind to, is the possibility of identifying

with some position other than that of the speaking subject, for example that of the
victim/object. For her this second form of violence, the collaboration with the master-plot, is doubly perfidious because it not only denies the subjectivity
of another but pretends to deny its own elision of the other. Astute as her analysis is, it does raise the question of what Kappeler is
willing to ignore in her will to expose the literal content of figural language. For one could also say that
by pretending to deny the others victimization, by faking an objectified others subjectivity,
a space is opened that ironically (and critically) questions these strategies at exactly the
same moment that it stages them.
namely to confirm the speaking male subject.

NINTH, POWER IS ZERO SUM THE ALTERNATIVE ONLY

SHIFTS POWER ELSEWHERE
John Mearsheimer, Professor at University of Chicago, 2001 (The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics p. 34)
Consequently, states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special
effort to maximize their share of world power. Specifically, they look for opportunities to alter the

balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential

rivals. States employ a variety of meanseconomic, diplomatic, and militaryto shift the balance of power in
their favor, even if doing so makes other states suspicious or even hostile. Because one states gain in
power is another states loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing
with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other
states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states
are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to survive. In
short, great powers have aggressive intentions.

551

Kritik Answers

Kappeler Answers: 2AC (4/5)

TENTH, KAPPELERS ARGUMENT IS PREMISED ON AN
ESSENTIALIST APPLICATION OF SEXUALITY TO VIOLENCE
Pringle 96

[Rosemary, Book Reviews, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography
3:2, July, ASP//uwyo-ajl]
Kappeler insists that we have 'ample opportunity in situations of no such threat to challenge the legitimacy of violence and to practise alternatives' (p. 258). We must
scrutinise our own will to power and find alternative political ways of resisting oppression and domination. 'We' is used deliberately as a shifting signifier in relation to
which the reader is free to recognise herself, to identify as included or excluded, perhaps either at different times. Most of the time I felt excluded. I admired the
honesty of her account of white women's racism, and I laughed wryly at her attack on the more self-indulgent moments of therapy. Beyond that, I was unable to

. Kappeler goes over much

old ground in insisting that sexuality is fundamentally gender-specific and cannot be
democratised. If she believes this, it is hard to see why she would bother about politics in the
first place. Any attempt to claim sexual subjectivity or an active desire is interpreted as part
of a will to power and hence an act of violence. Dworkin, Mackinnon, Pateman and Jeffries are quoted approvingly. If anything,
Kappeler outdoes them in her insistence that sexuality may have to be given up in order to
eradicate violence:
if experience shows that sex indeed means violence and sexual excitement the pleasure of power--that sex minus the violence
does not leave us with non-violent sex but simply 'no sex' at all--it does not follow that we therefore must accept violence ; it follows that 'sex' as
such is unacceptable. (p. 181)
connect at all with her critique of sexuality and desire, with a politics that seems to take so little account of subjectivity

ELEVENTH, THIS MIMICS COLONIZATION, ENTRENCHING

OPPRESSION
Butler 99

[Judith, prof. of rhetoric at UC Berkeley, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999, 18-19//uwyo-ajl]
Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of

The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse

that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms. That the
feminism.

tactic can operate in feminist and antifeminist contexts alike suggests that the colonizing gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist. It can operate to effect

other relations of racial, class, and heterosexist subordination to name but a few. And clearly, listing the varieties of oppression, as I began to do, assumes their
discrete, sequential coexistence along a horizontal axis that does not describe their convergences within the social field. A vertical model is similarly insufficient;
oppressions cannot be summarily ranked, causally related, distributed among planes of originality and derivativeness. Indeed, the field of power structured in part
by the imperializing gesture of dialectical appropriation exceeds and encompasses the axis of sexual difference, offering a mapping of intersecting differentials which
cannot be summarily hierarchized either within the terms of phallogocentrism or any other canddidate for the position of primary condition of oppression.

Rather than an exclusive tactic of masculinist signifying economies, dialectical

appropriation and suppression of the Other is one tactic among many deployed
centrally but not exclusively in the service of expanding and rationalizing the
masculinist domain.

552

Kritik Answers

Kappeler Answers: 2AC (5/5)

TWELFTH, TURN - ATTEMPTING TO CLEANSE LANGUAGE OF
VIOLENCE FETISHIZES AUTHENTICITY, RESULTING IN
POLITICAL DISENGAGEMENT BECAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE
AT THE HEART OF ALL LANGUAGE AND INTERACTION
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 137-8//uwyo-ajl]
Thus, what secondly distinguishes the 'metaphysical innocence' of Rameau is his pursuit of violence - not only the violence of determinate negation, of alienation from
culture and the serial progression of knowledge, but the violence of imperfection, of disrupted subjectivity, of unforeseen catastrophes and superfluous resources, of
human inconsistency and what Gillian Rose calls the 'agon' of existence. Violence, like suffering and fickleness for Dostoevsky, represents subjective (as against

. Violence
increases as the result not of a deterioration in social behaviour but of a lowering in the
cultural threshold beyond which action appears as violence. In such a context Rameau's disintegration, his
objective) culture, a last manifestation of individual volition, and a point of resistance to what BaudriUard calls the 'triumph' of simulation

'epigrammatic' existence and his cultivation of violence represent the final recourse of a disfranchised and alienated subjectivity faced with an apparently sewn up,
indifferent world.
In postmodernity this threshold between action and violence is lower, perhaps, than ever before. Political correctism, 'Queer' theory, Communitarianism, the
liberation discourse of the Internet, calls for homogenization of the private and public lives of politicians, the new discipline of 'postmodern ethics', all are varying

of a fetishization of objective culture. To find

intolerable the violence of linguistic oppression, of 'inauthentic' sexual identity (the product of Freud's 'family romance', etc.), of
instances of a collective endeavour to put a freeze on reason as risk, the consequence

political antagonism, of the formalization of truth in its dissemination, of the compart mentalization of public and private life, of the indeterminacy of moral options,

is in every case to subscribe to a peculiar literalism, to evince a profound discomfort with the
signifying relation, to take the signifier persistently for the thing itself, in such a way that
political activity is replaced with a series of cosmetic adjustments to objective culture.
Rameau's cynicism therefore represents a commitment to subjective culture, to reality, to the referent and to the signified, to the truth of the world and of the
individual. Cynicism constitutes a certain necessary indifference to objective culture, a certain subjective wager, a projection of the self beyond objective culture and

In a climate in which 'authenticity' is at a premium, where all action has been

proscribed as intolerably violent, and where self consciousness is therefore only a disabling mechanism to be discad, cynicism
appears as a spirit in disintegration, the monopoly broker of disinvestment in the present, the
sole locus of reason and of faith in anything other than the phenomenal here and now, the disposition which alone embodies both energy and depth .
beyond its own limits.

553

Kritik Answers

#5 Alternative Causes Violence: 1AR

(1/2)
THE ALTERNATIVE DISEMPOWERS RESISTANCE
KAPPELERS FOCUS ON THE INDIVIDUAL RATHER THAN
PROVIDING A MEANS TO COMBAT VIOLENCE PREVENTS
EFFECTIVE RESISTANCE TO VIOLENCE
Gelber 95 (Kath, Review of The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behaviour, Green Left
Weekly, http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1995/198/198p26b.htm)

The Will to Violence presents a powerful and one-sided critique of the forces which enable violence between individuals to occur. Violence between individuals is

Kappeler's thesis is that violence in all

these cases is caused in the final instance by one overriding factor -- the individual choice to
commit a violent act. Of course, in one sense that is true . Acknowledging alternative models of human behaviour and
taken in this context to mean all forms of violence, from personal experiences of assault to war.

analyses of the social causes of violence, Kappeler dismisses these as outside her subject matter and exhorts her readers not to ignore the agent's decision to act as he
[sic] did, but to explore the personal decision in favour of violence. Having established this framework, she goes on to explore various aspects of personal decisions
to commit violence. Ensuing chapters cover topics such as love of the other, psychotherapy, ego-philosophy and the legitimation of dominance. However, it is the

Kappeler is dismissive of social or structural analyses of

the multiple causes of alienation, violence and war. She dismisses such analyses for their
inability to deal with the personal decision to commit violence . For example, some left groups have
tried to explain men's sexual violence as the result of class oppression, while some Black
theoreticians have explained the violence of Black men as a result of racist oppression. She
continues, The ostensible aim of these arguments may be to draw attention to the pervasive
and structural violence of classism and racism, yet they not only fail to combat such
inequality, they actively contribute to it . Kappeler goes on to argue that, although such oppression is a very real part of an agent's life
introduction which is most interesting. Already on the third page,

context, these `explanations' ignore the fact that not everyone experiencing the same oppression uses violence, i.e. the perpetrator has decided to violate. Kappeler's

her
rejection of alternative analyses not only as of little use, but as actively contributing to the
problem, frames her own thesis extremely narrowly. Her argument suffers from both her inability, or unwillingness, to
discuss the bigger picture and a wilful distortion of what she sees as her opponents' views . The result is less than satisfactory . Kappeler's
book reads more as a passionate plea than a coherent argument. Her overwhelming focus on the individual, rather than
providing a means with which to combat violence, in the end leaves the reader feeling
disempowered. After all, there must be huge numbers of screwed up and vengeful people in
the world to have chosen to litter history with war, environmental destruction and rape . Where
do we go from here? Those lucky enough to have read Kappeler's book are supposed to decide not to
use violence ourselves. A worthy endeavour, but hardly sufficient to change the world.
aim of course was to establish a framework for her particular project: a focus on the individual and the psychological to find a cause for violence. However,

554

Kritik Answers

#5 Alternative Causes Violence: 1AR

(2/2)
FOCUS ON REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE WORSENS REAL
VIOLENCE
Elana Gomel, Tel-Aviv University, Written in Blood: Serial Killing and Narratives of Identity, Post
Identity, Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 1999, p. 24-25, http://ids.udmercy.edu/pi/2.1/PI21_2470.pdf, accessed 1/28/02
ONE CAN START WITH FOUCAULTS famous and endlessly circulated statement in The
Order of Things: It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man
is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our
knowledge, and that he will disappear as soon as this knowledge has discovered a new form.
(xxiii) Man the Universal Subject, a cookie-cutter mold of (post)technological identity,
stamping out simulacra of individuality. But why should we be comforted and experience
relief at the thought of his imminent dissolution? Perhaps because, at least from Adorno
on, the subject of reason has also been identified as the subject of violence. The universal
Man of the Enlightenment has been reconceptualized as the universal killer, armed with the
most potent of weaponsrepresentation. In their Introduction to the collection typically
entitled Violence of Representation Armstrong and Tennenhouse offer the basic formula of
this approach: The violence of representation is the suppression of difference (8). In this
particular reading of Foucault the discursive constructedness of identity is directly
responsible for corporeal violence inflicted by some (post)modern subjects upon others. In
his recent book Serial Killerr and in the series of articles that preceded it Mark Seltzer
applies this insight to the fascinating and grisly phenomenon of serial killing, variously
identified also as stranger killing and sometimes lust murder. For Seltzer the enigma of
the serial killers personality consists in an experience of typicality at the level of the
subject The serial killer, I will be arguing, is in part defined by such a radicalized experience
of typicality within. Simply put, murder by numbers (as serial murder has been called) is
the form of violence proper to statistical persons. (30-1) Violence of representation,
representation of violence and violence per se smoothly link into an unbroken chain, leading
from statistics to mayhem and from typology of subjects to fingertyping of putrefying
bodies. My goal in this essay is to put a hitch into this chain, to question the easy fit between
discursive moulds of identity and the individual self-experience of serial killers, and to
suggest that represenration may be not so much the cause of violence as a post factum
defence against it. I do not imply, however, that violence in general or serial murder in
particular are totally free from the constraints of discourse or that the identity of the serial
killer is not constructed using the building blocks of cultural narratives (though the
narratives in question are more variegated than Seltzer suggests). Rather, I would claim that
the serial form of violence is conditioned not so much by the monolithic coherence of
representation as by its breakdown. The violent behavior of a serial killer is not a direct
outcome of any social construction but a random, causeless choice which is retrospectively
incorporated into a generic narrative of identity. The repeated ritualistic violence, then,
becomes a means of reinforcing this identity but achieves precisely the opposite, its
complete disintegration. Rather than being generated by representation, corporeal violence
offers a resistance to it.

555

Kritik Answers

#7 Negation: 1AR
EXTEND THE 2AC#1 ZIZEK 99 CARD. THERES NO SUCH
THING AS A PURE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE. EVERY TIME YOU
SAY THAT SOMETHINGS GOOD, BETWEEN THE LINES
YOURE SAYING THAT SOMETHING ELSE, LIKE DEATH AND
VIOLENCE, ARE BAD. THEIR YES TO LIFE IS AN IMPLICIT
NO TO THE SAME DEATH AND VIOLENCE THAT WERE
SAYING IS BAD. FEAR OF APOCALYPTIC VIOLENCE IS STILL
CONTAINED IN ALL OF THEIR ARGUMENTS, REPRESSED
BENEATH THE SURFACE OF THEIR WORDS.
THIS MEANS WELL WIN THE UNIQUENESS FOR OUR TURNS
BECAUSE SOME FORM OF VIOLENT REPRESENTATION IS
INEVITABLE IN ALL POLITICAL DISCOURSE, THE ONLY
QUESTION IS OF WHETHER THOSE REPRESENTATIONS
INTERROGATE THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY OF POLITICAL
REALITY BY ACKNOWLEDING OUR INEVITABLE
RELATIONSHIP TO THE TRAUMA OF DEATH AND VIOLENCE
THATS INHERENTLY REPRESSED BY THE SYMOBLIC
CONCEIVING OF VIOLENCE AS AN UNDESCRIBABLE
HORROR IS A FANTASY THAT ALLOWS US TO AVOID THE
TRAUMATIC ANTAGONISM THAT CONSTITUTES REALITY
ONLY IDENTIFICATION OF ITS OBSCENE UNDERSIDE
ALLOWS US TO INTERROGATE ITS IDEOLOGICAL
GROUNDING
Zizek 2001

[Slavoj, Megalomaniacal mercy killer, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on
September 11 and Related Dates, New York: Verso, 30-2//uwyo]
the passion for the Real is this identification with this heroic gesture of fully
assuming the dirty obscene underside of Power : the heroic attitude of Somebody has to do the dirty work, so lets do it!, a
The very core of

kind of mirror-reversal of the Beautiful Soul which refuses to recognize itself in its result. We find this stance also in the properly Rightist admiration for the
celebration of heroes who are ready to do the necessary dirty work: it is easy to do a noble thing for ones country, up to sacrificing ones life for it it is much more
difficult to commit a crime for ones countryHitler knew very well how to play this double game apropos of the Holocaust, using Himmler ot spell out the dirty
secret. In his speech to the SS leaders in Posenon October 4 1943, Himmler spoke quite openly about the mass killing of the Jews as a glorious page in our history,
and one that has never been written and never can be written; he explicitly included the killing of women and chilrden:
We faced the question: what should we do with the women and children? I decided here too to find a completely clear solution. I did not regard myself as justified in
exterminating the men that is ot say, to kill them or have them killed and to allow the avengers in the shape of chilrden to grow up for our sons and grandchildren.
The difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the earth.
The very next day, the SS leaders were ordered to attend a meeting where Hitler himself gave an account of the state of the war; here, Hitler did not have to mention
the Final Solution directly oblique references to the SS leaders knowledge and to their shared complicity, were enough: The entire German people know that it is a

it is along these
lines that we can oppose the reactionary and the progressive passion for the Real: while
the reactionary one is the endorsement of the obscene underside of the Law, the
progressive one is confrontation with the Real of the antagonism denied by the passion for purification, which in both its
matter of whether they exist or do not exist. The bridges have been destroyed behind them. Only the way forward remains. And, ideally,

versions, the Rightist and the Leftist assumes that the Real is touched in and through the destruction of the excessive elemtn which introduces antagonism. Here, we
should abandon the standard metaphorics of the Real as the terrifying Thing that is impossible to confront face to face, as the ultimate Real concealed beteath the
layers of imaginary and/or symbolic Veils: the very idea that, beneath the deceptive appearances, ther elies hidden some ultimate Real Thing too horrible for us to look
at directly is the ultimate appearance this Real Thing is a fantasmic spectre whose presence guarantees the consistency of our symbolic edifice, thus enabling us to
avoid confronting its constitutive inconsistency (antagonism). Take Nazi ideology: the Jew as its Real is a spectre evoked in order to conceal social antagonism that
is, the figure of the Jew enables us to perceive social totality as an organic Whole. And does not the same go for the figure of Woman Thing inaccessible to the male
grasp? Is she also not the ultimate Spectre enabling men to avoid the constitutive deadlock of the sexual relationship?

556

Kritik Answers

#8 Subversion: 1AR
THEY MISUNDERSTAND COGNITION - IDENTIFICATION
WITH IMAGES OF DOMINATION UNDERMINES
RELATIONSHIPS OF SUBORDINATION
Krips '99

[Henry, Professor of Communication at the Pitt, Fetish: an erotics of culture, Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 1999, 5-6//uwyo-ajl]
Arguments against linking the cultural and psychic realms also seem apposite in criticizing
MacKinnon's claim that there exists a direct causal connection between pornography and a
psychic characteristic of its male consumers, namely sexual aggression. At a theoretical
level, her argument fails to take into account Freud's point that identification with a
phantasy figure flows readily across gender lines. For example, in the Dora case, Freud argues
that Dora's behavior manifests an unconscious desire for Frau K., her father's lover and suitor's wife.
For Freud her desire does not indicate any sexual instability. Instead, through an identification with her
father's desire, it signals an unconscious paternal identification. In other words, for Freud the

significant aspect of Dora's phantasy is not the sexual content of the desire but rather the
paternal position from which she engages with it. By parity of reasoning, it follows that quite
"normal" male readers of porn may identify with the position of woman victim rather than
male aggressor, in which case their aggressive tendencies cannot be reinforced in the
simplistic way that MacKinnon suggests.3 In short, as Laura Kipnis points out, neither the
biology nor gender of readers of Hustler magazine determines the form of their
identification with its pornographic materials, let alone forces them into a common psychic
response (Kipnis 1996, 196). In the same way, one may argue, gender-swapping phantasy games
played by Net users do not indicate their gender instability. On the contrary. one might turn the
argument around and conclude that the preponderance of biological males among Net users suggests
that even when playing at being a woman, they are engaging in a "boys' game."

557

Kritik Answers

#12 Authenticity: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC #4 BEWES 97 EVIDENCE. THE CALL TO
ERASE VIOLENCE FROM LANGUAGE IS A FANTASY THAT
IGNORES THE WAY THAT VIOLENCE IS ENDEMIC TO ALL
POLITICS. ATTEMPTS TO COVER IT UP AND PRETEND THAT
WE CAN HAVE A NON-VIOLENT COMMUNICATION PROVIDE
FALSE DISTANCE BETWEEN US AND THAT VIOLENCE,
ALLOWING YOU TO ACT IN EVEN MORE DESTRUCTIVE
WAYS WHEN YOU HYSTERICALLY LASH OUT AT PERCEIVED
THREATS TO YOUR LIFE WHILE BELIEVING YOUVE
ESCAPED VIOLENCE IN THE GUISE OF A SUPERFICIAL
LINGUISTIC ALTERATION.
THE EXTERNAL IMPACT IS DEPOLITICIZATION THE ONLY
WAY TO ERASE VIOLENCE IS TO CEASE ALL POLITICAL
ENGAGEMENT BECAUSE EVERY ACTION CONTAINS THE
STAIN OF VIOLENCE. THAT POSITION MAKES US COMPLICIT
IN OPPRESSION AND EVEN MORE HORRIFIC FORMS OF
PHYSICAL ANNIHILATION, WHICH OUTWEIGHS ANY
NEGLIBILE IMPACT OF IN ROUND DISCURSIVE VIOLENCE
BECAUSE IT IMPLICATES YOUR VERY ABILITY TO CONDUCT
POLITICS, SUCH AS THE 1AC AND THE CRITICISM, IN THE
FIRST PLACE
AND, RETREAT FROM VIOLENT RHETORIC INTO FANTASIES
OF METAPHYSICAL INNOCENCE ALLOWS US TO SPEND
HOURS DEBATING THE FINER POINTS OF THE
AUTHENTICITY OF OUR WORDS WHILE GAS CHAMBERS
ARE BUILT
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997,146-7//uwyo-ajl]
If it is unreasonable to suppose that the Final Solution was potentiated or even necessarily
facilitated by Schmitt's theories, it is certainly the case that this metaphysical structure of
domination in the Third Reich, whereby the status of public citizens is reduced to a level
determined entirely in the 'natural' or biological realm of necessity, is foreshadowed in his
1927 essay. In an abstract and insidious way Schmitt introduces the idea that the
'transcendent' realm of the political, as a matter of course, will not accommodate a people
with insufficient strength to ensure its own participation, and that such a fact is ipso facto
justification for its exclusion. 'If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to
maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world.
Only a weak people will disappear.'130 Schmitt's concept of the 'political', quite simply, is
nothing of the sort - is instead weighed down by necessity, in the form of what Marshall
Berman calls German-Christian interiority - by its preoccupation with

558

Kritik Answers
authenticity, that is to say, and true political 'identity'. Auschwitz is a corollary not of reason,
understood as risk, but of the fear of reason, which paradoxically is a fear of violence. The
stench of burning bodies is haunted always by the sickly aroma of cheap metaphysics.

559

Kritik Answers

**Kato**
Kato Answers: 2AC (1/4)
FIRST, WE OUTWEIGH: EVEN IF WE IGNORE PAST NUCLEAR
WARS, THE ONES THAT PLAN SOLVES ARE BAD IN AND OF
THEMSELVES AND WOULD KILL THE VERY PEOPLE THEY
DESCRIBE
SECOND, PERM - DO THE PLAN AND ACCEPT THAT NUCLEAR
WARS VIA NUCLEAR TESTING AND URANIUM MINING ARE
BEING CARRIED OUT AGAINST INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND
THE FOURTH WORLD. THIS SOLVES BECAUSE THE ALT IS
LITERALLY PLAN PLUS.
THIRD, NO LINK: KATO CRITICIZES NOT RECOGNIZING
TESTING AS AN ACTUAL NUCLEAR WAR WE ONLY SAY
THAT THE PLAN PREVENTS A NUCLEAR WAR,
RECOGNIZING ONGOING NUCLEAR WARS
Kato, Political Science Professor at the University of Hawaii at Honolulu, 93 (Masahide, Nuclear
Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War, Alternatives, V. 18, N. 3)

Nuclear criticism finds the likelihood of "extinction" as the most fundamental aspect of
nuclear catastrophe. The complex problematics involved in nuclear catastrophe are thus reduced to the single possible instant of extinction. The task
of nuclear critics is clearly designated by Schell as coming to grips with the one and only final instant "human extinction-whose likelihood we are chiefly interested in
finding out about:" Deconstructionists, on the other hand, take a detour in their efforts to theologize extinction. Jacques Derrida, for example, solidified the prevailing
mode of representation by constituting extinction as a fatal absence: Unlike the other wars, which have all been preceded by wars of more or less the same type in
human memory (and gunpowder did not mark a radical break in this respect), nuclear war has no precedent. It has never occurred, itself; it is a non-event. The
explosion of American bombs in 1945 ended a "classical," conventional war, it did not set off a nuclear war The terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the

By representing the possible

extinction as the single most important problematic' of nuclear catastrophe (posing it as either a threat or a symbolic void),
nuclear' criticism disqualifies the entire history of nuclear violence, the "real" of nuclear
catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive process . The "real" of nuclear war is designated by nuclear critics as a "rehearsal'
(Derrik De Kerkhove) or "preparation" (Firth) for what they reserve as the authentic catastrophes' The history of nuclear violence offers,
at best, a reality effect to the imagery of "extinction." Schell summarized the discursive position of nuclear critics very
signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text At least today apparently."

succinctly, by stating that nuclear catastrophe should not be conceptualized "in the context of direct slaughter of hundreds of millions people by the local effects: "8
Thus the elimination of the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process of discursive "delocalization" of nuclear violence. Their primary focus
is not local catastrophe, but delocalized, unlocatable, "global" catastrophe

FOURTH, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST

HORRIBLE IMPACT IMAGINEABLE, PUTTING RIGHTS FIRST
IS PUTTING A PART OF SOCIETY BEFORE THE WHOLE
Schell 1982

(Jonathan, Professor at Wesleyan University, The Fate of the Earth, pages 136-137 uw//wej)
Implicit in everything that I have said so far about the nuclear predicament there has been a perplexity that I would now like to take up explicitly, for it
leads, I believe, into the very heart of our response-or, rather, our lack of response-to the predicament. I have pointed out that our species is the most
important of all the things that, as inhabitants of a common world, we inherit from the past generations, but it does not go far enough to point out this
superior importance, as though in making our decision about ex- tinction we were being asked to choose between, say, liberty, on the one hand, and

world, and to
speak of sacrificing the species for the sake of one of these benefits involves one in the
absurdity of wanting to de- stroy something in order to preserve one of its parts, as
if one were to burn down a house in an attempt to redecorate the living room , or to kill
the survival of the species, on the other. For the species not only overarches but contains all the benefits of life in the common

someone to improve his character. ,but even to point out this absurdity fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is not some
invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we ourselves, without whom
everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of saying that extinction is unique not because it destroys mankind as an object but
because it destroys mankind as the source of all possible human subjects, and this, in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death,
for one's own individual death is the end not of any object in life but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, how- ever, places the mind in a
quandary. One of-the confounding char- acteristics of death-"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that, precisely because it removes the person
himself rather than something in his life, it seems to offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak
"about" death at all, as. though death were a thing situated some- where outside us and available for objective inspection, when the fact is that it is
within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we are. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that death, as a fundamental element of our
being, "thinks" in us and through us about whatever we think about, coloring our thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives

560

Kritik Answers

Kato Answers: 2AC (2/4)

FIFTH, NUCLEARISM IS INEVITABLE MAINTENANCE AND
DETERRENCE ARE NECESSARY FOR WORLD PEACE
Robinson 2001
[C. Paul, Sandi National Laboraties, A White Paper:Pursuing a New Nuclear Weapons Policy for the
21st Century, March 22, www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Nuclear-Weapons-Policy-21stC.htm, 9-2306//uwyo-ajl]
I served as an arms negotiator on the last two agreements before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and have spent most of my career enmeshed in the complexity of
nuclear weapons issues on the government side of the table. It is abundantly clear (to me) that formulating a new nuclear weapons policy for the start of the 21st
Century will be a most difficult undertaking. While the often over-simplified picture of deterrence during the Cold War-two behemoths armed to the teeth, staring

, there are nevertheless huge arsenals of nuclear weapons and

delivery systems, all in quite usable states, that could be brought back quickly to their Cold
War postures. Additionally, throughout the Cold War and ever since, there has been a steady proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass
each other down-has thankfully retreated into history

destruction by other nations around the globe. The vast majority of these newly armed states are not U.S. allies, and some already are exhibiting hostile behaviors,
while others have the potential to become aggressors toward the U.S., our allies, and our international interests.
Russia has already begun to emphasize the importance of its arsenal of nuclear weapons to compensate for its limited conventional capabilities to deal with hostilities
that appear to be increasing along its borders. It seems inescapable that the U.S. must carefully think through how we should be preparing to deal with new threats
from other corners of the world, including the role that nuclear weapons might serve in deterring these threats from ever reaching actual aggressions.

the abolition of nuclear weapons as an impractical dream in any foreseeable future. I came to this view
from several directions. The first is the impossibility of ever "uninventing" or erasing from
the human mind the knowledge of how to build such weapons. While the sudden appearance of a few tens of nuclear weapons causes only a
small stir in a world where several thousands of such weapons already exist, their appearance in a world without nuclear
weapons would produce huge effects. (The impact of the first two weapons in ending World War II should be a sufficient example.) I
I personally see

believe that the words of Winston Churchill, as quoted by Margaret Thatcher to a special joint session of the U.S. Congress on February 20, 1985, remain convincing
on this point: "Be careful above all things not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure, and more sure than sure, that other means of preserving the peace are
in your hands."

the majority of the nations who have now acquired arsenals of nuclear
weapons believe them to be such potent tools for deterring conflicts that they would never
surrender them. Against this backdrop, I recently began to worry that because there were few public statements by U.S. officials in reaffirming the
Similarly, it is my sincere view that

unique role which nuclear weapons play in ensuring U.S. and world security, far too many people (including many in our own armed forces) were beginning to believe
that perhaps nuclear weapons no longer had value. It seemed to me that it was time for someone to step forward and articulate the other side of these issues for the
public: first, that nuclear weapons remain of vital importance to the security of the U.S. and to our allies and friends (today and for the near future); and second, that

nuclear weapons will likely have an enduring role in preserving the peace and preventing
world wars for the foreseeable future. These are my purposes in writing this paper.

SIXTH, IMAGINING NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION IS A PROJECT

OF SURVIVAL THEIR ALTERNATIVE CREATES
REPRESSION AND DENIAL WHICH MAKES NUCLEAR WAR
MORE LIKELY
Lenz, Science and Policy Professor at SUNY, 90 (Nuclear Age Literature For Youth, p. 9-10)
all people have difficulty
grasping the magnitude and immediacy of the threat of nuclear arms and this psychological unreality is a
basic obstacle to eliminating that threat. Only events that people have actually experienced can have true emotional
A summary of Franks thought in Psychological Determinants of the Nuclear Arms Race notes how

impact. Since Americans have escaped the devastation of nuclear weapons on their own soil and nuclear weapons poised for annihilation
in distant countries cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched, we

find it easy to imagine ourselves immune

to the threat. Albert Camus had the same phenomenon in mind when he wrote in his essay Neither Victims nor Executioners of the
inability of most people really to imagine other peoples death (he might have added or their own). Commenting on Camus, David P.
Barash and Judith Eve Lipton observed that this

distancing from deaths reality is yet another aspect of our

insulation from lifes most basic realities. We make love by telephone, we work not on matter but on machines, and
we kill and are killed by proxy. We gain in cleanliness, but lose in understanding. If we are to heed Camuss call to refuse to be
either the victims of violence like the Jews of the Holocaust, or the perpetrators of it like the Nazi executioners of
the death camps, we must revivify the imagination of what violence really entails. It is here , of course,
that the literature of nuclear holocaust can play a significant role. Withou t either firsthand experience
or vivid imagining, it is natural, as Frank points out, to deny the existence of death machines and
their consequences. In psychiatric usage denial means to exclude from awareness, because letting [the
instruments of destruction] enter consciousness would create too strong a level of anxiety or other painful emotions. In most life-

adapting ourselves to nuclear

fear is counterproductive. We only seal our doom more certainly . The repressed fear, moreover, takes a
threatening situations, an organisms adaptation increases chances of survival, but ironically,
psychic toll.

561

Kritik Answers

Kato Answers: 2AC (3/4)

SEVENTH, CRITICIZING REPRESENTATIONS OF NUCLEAR
PRESENCE DOESNT PRECLUDE THE NEED FOR CONCRETE
ACTION
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, Truth, Politics, and Postmodernism,
Spinoza Lectures, 1997, p. 51-2
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very
important meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida

the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the
writers who are labeled `post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good
experimentalist social democrats when it comes to actual political activity . I suspect, for example, that Gray,
usually replies that

Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist
philosophers have gotten a bad name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like `impossible; `self-contradictory' and
`unrepresentable'. They have helped create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more

. I am
all for getting rid of the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and
unrepresentability is counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the
generally, to the `metaphysics of presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible

metaphor of things being accurately represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for
philosophers, and we would be better off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate

Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls

a full presence beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity
will not have changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from
representation' was never a fruitful way to describe intellectual progress.
"

psychoanalysis. All that we have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss

We have been given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress
has been made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political program . Since Darwin we have come to suspect
which the Enlightenment offered.

that whether such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky.

EIGHTH, PLAN SOLVES WORSE IMPERIALISM BY ENDING

THE UNILATERAL AND INDEFINITE DETAINMENT AND
TORTURE OF ENEMY COMBATANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE
NINTH, APPROPRIATING THE OTHER VIOLENTLY SEIZES
THE RIGHT TO SPEAK FOR SELFISH ENDS
Routledge 96
[Antipode]
The issue of representation is a vexed one which has received much attention
within the social sciences. For example, in discussing the academic strategy of
polyphony, Crang (1992) raises issues of how the voices of others are (re)presented;
the extent to which these voices are interwoven with persona of narrator the degree
of authorial power regarding who initiates research, who decides on textual
arrangements, and who decides which voices are heard; and the power relations
involved in the cultural capital conferred by specialist knowledge. Moreover,
Harrison (quoted in McLaren 1995 240) argues that polyphony can end up being
aform of romantic ventroloquism creating the magical notion of the Others coming
to voice. These questions have important political implications for research which
must be negotiated according to the specific circumstances of a particular project.
It is all too easy for academics to claim solidarity with the oppressed and act as
relays for their voices within social scientific discourse. This raises the danger of an
uncritical alignment with resisters on the assumption that they know all there is to
know without the intervention of intellectuals; and hence an academics role
becomes that of helping them seize the right to speak.

562

Kritik Answers

Kato Answers: 2AC (4/4)

TENTH, THEY PORTRAY THE FOURTH WORLD AS
POWERLESS VICTIMS. THIS IS THE NEW MEANS OF
COLONIAL PACIFICATION IT PRESUPPOSES THE
INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF THE FOURTH WORLD AND
UNDERMINES ANY MOVES TOWARDS REAL SOLIDARITY
THE IMPACT GUTS THEIR ALTERNATIVE SOLVENCY AND
FLIPS THE K
Root, Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Toronto 97 (Deborah, Borrowed Power:
Essays on Cultural Appropriation, Edited by Bruce Ziff)

Why would Karma and his countercultural predecessors identify with people who, time and time again, are presented as victims? First Nations writer Deborah

it is precisely the image of Indians as doomed victims that some white people
identify with: she calls this the "I'm a victim too complex. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche conceived, something like this complex as the very core of Christian
culture, underlining the link between pity and contempt. Thinking of someone else as a victim is a way of displacing
one's own pain: in reactive Christian thinking, I am less of a victim than you because you are more of a victim than me. White hippies do
tend to recognize some of the oppressive aspects of industrial, consumerist society but manifest this by
focusing on and identifying with people who seem to be even more oppressed, thus
reproducing the 1970s movie version of Natives as defeated victims who exist only in the past.
Western culture is permeated with the duplicitous, Christian notion of victimization, which on
the one hand implies a moral or spiritual superiority and on the other a kind of weakness
that is to be overcome. Martyred saints are represented as suffering physical torment with a heroic steadfastness of faith. Yet the body, whether
sinful or suffering, is thought to be inherently abject. Thus, to be a victim is to be both heroic and abject. White representations (both
"sympathetic" and explicitly racist) of colonial wars tend to maintain this definition and underline the view
that Native heroism derives from and is the consequence of defeat. The white fascination
with the romantic, abstract heroism of Native people is thus able to function as another
means of colonial pracification because it presupposes the inevitable defeat and
disappearance of the nations. Colonialism adds a new twist to the Christian view that people are victims by their very nature or essence, and
here the relation between aggressor and victim becomes wholly static and cannot shift. Every-one is frozen into his or her position and role. And, of course,
conceiving of an enemy nation as heroic also makes the oppressors look good because they
have defeated a truly worthy and valiant enemy. This, too, is nothing new in Western culture. Recall the famous Roman
Doxtator makes the point that

sculpture of the dying Gaul, an image of a heroic, yet defeated enemy. Here we approach what it was we all forgot in our eagerness to embrace the representation of

if Native nations are portrayed as inherently abject and doomed to defeat,

white viewers will not feel any connection to colonialism , either in the past or in the present. This is why the phony Native
culture of movies, Edward Curtis photographs, and television is so appealing to white people: if, as Hollywood and capitalism would have it, the nations
are foreordained to assimilate and vanish, then white viewers need not question racism or
face the discomfort of interrogating our continuing position as members of a colonizing
nation. We will not feel connected to ongoing struggles in James Bay, Chiapas, Kanesatake, and elsewhere and to the
different relation to the land that these struggles express. Any sense of connection to events occurring on the ground
is lost, and "Native" becomes another empty category that can be mined for its trappings and images. And the
"love" of Indians professed by counterculture old and new continues to have nothing to do with
Native people and certainly nothing to do with supporting contemporary Native struggles .
Westerns and other colonial narratives are in the business of producing binarisms which have had effects on all of us. As white people, we need
to rethink and recover the histories erased by popular culture and school textbooks. There were always alternatives
Inidans as heroic victims:

to John Wayne. We also need to think through the nature of power and its relation to culture. John Trudell said somewhere that there is a difference between being
oppressed and being powerless: Native people may be oppressed, but the traditions have power; white people may be "in charge" within a colonial context, but our

It is up to us to look into how our traditions were taken over and

distorted by a destructive, soulless ethos and find ways to heal our cultural diseases . This is where
culture has lost its heart, soul, and life-its power.

Karma's approach breaks down: he thinks he has to turn himself into a "white-skinned Indian" because he cannot find a way to transform and locate power in his own
tradition. Because of the elided histories, he is unable to identify with the white people who have resisted oppression over the centuries. He, too, is rendered passive by
the romantic discourse of inevitable defeat and disappearance. And because Karma thinks white culture is one thing-the dead, shopping-mall culture of our timeappropriation becomes his only escape, and it becomes impossible for him to imagine standing side by side with Native people as equals.

563

Kritik Answers

**Levinas/Derrida**
A2 Infinite Responsibility (1/3)
[you might want to read Calculability Good]
DERRIDAS ETHIC TOWARDS THE OTHER REQUIRES
THINKING THROUGH THE OPPRESSORS EYES,
DESTROYING ETHICS
Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law,
Transcendental Deconstruction, Transcendent Justice-- Part II, 92 Mich. L. Rev. 1131, 19 94,
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/articles/trans02.htm
Derrida's ethics of Otherness has a second component: It employs a different sense of individuality and uniqueness. Under this
view, justice requires one to speak in the language of the Other by trying to see things from
the Other's point of view. (78) This conception of justice seems most attractive when we are the injurer or the stronger party in a relationship, or
when we are in the position of a judge who is attempting to arbitrate between competing claims. For example, suppose that we are the State, the stronger party, the
oppressor, or the injurer, or suppose that we are contemplating an action that might put us in such a position. It seems only just that we should try to understand how
we have injured or oppressed the Other (or might be in a position to injure or oppress). We can only do this if we try to see the problem from the Other's perspective
and understand her pain and her predicament in all of its uniqueness. The duty we owe to the Other is the duty to see how our actions may affect or have affected the
Other; to fulfill this duty we must put away our own preconceptions and vocabulary and try to see things from her point of view. Similarly, if we are a judge in a case
attempting to arbitrate between the parties, the ethics of Otherness demands that we try to understand how our decision will affect the two parties, and this will

Suppose, however, that we are not the injurer, but the victim; not
the State, but the individual; not the strong, but the weak; not the oppressor, but the
oppressed. Does justice require that we speak in the language of the person we believe is
injuring or oppressing us? Must a rape victim attempt to understand her violation from the
rapist's point of view? Does justice demand that she attempt to speak to the rapist in his own
language - one which has treated her as less than human? Must a concentration camp
survivor address her former captor in the language of his worldview of Aryan supremacy?
We might wonder whether this is what justice really requires, especially if the injustice we
complain of is precisely that the Other failed to recognize us as a person , refused to speak in our language,
require us to see the matter from their perspective.

and declined to consider our uniqueness and authenticity.

VOTE TO SAVE LIVESTHE EXISTENCE OF ENDANGERED 3 RD

PARTIES MAKES RESPONSIBILITY IMPOSSIBLE TO
DETERMINE
David Campbell, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle, Moral Spaces:
Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, ed. by Campbell and Shapiro, 1999, p. 35-36
Levinas's thought is appealing for rethinking the question of responsibility, especially with respect to situations like the Balkan crisis, because it maintains that

there is no circumstance under which we could declare that it was not our concern . As Levinas notes,
people can (and obviously do) conduct their relationship to the Other in terms of exploitation, oppression, and violence. But no matter how allergic
to the other is the self, "the relation to the other, as a relation of responsibility, cannot be totally
suppressed, even when it takes the form of politics or warfare." In consequence, no self can ever opt out of a relationship with
the other: "[I]t is impossible to free myself by saying, 'It's not my concern.' There is no choice, for it is always and
inescapably my concern. This is a unique 'no choice,' one that is not slavery." This unique lack of choice comes about because in Levinas's thought ethics has been
transformed from something independent of subjectivitythat is, from a set of rules and regulations adopted by pregiven, autonomous agentsto something
insinuated within and integral to that subjectivity. Accordingly, ethics can be understood as something not ancillary to the existence of a subject; instead, ethics can be
appreciated for its indispensability to the very being of the subject. This argument leads us to the recognition that "we" are always already ethically situated, so making
judgments about conduct depends less on what sort of rules are invoked as regulations and more on how the interdependencies of our relations with others are
appreciated. To repeat one of Levinas's key points: "Ethics redefines subjectivity as this heteronomous responsibility, in contrast to autonomous freedom." Suggestive
though it is for the domain of international relations where the bulk of the work on ethics can be located within a conventional perspective on responsibility

Levinas's formulation of responsibility, subjectivity, and ethics nonetheless possesses some problems when
it comes to the implications of this thought for politics. What requires particular attention is the means by which
the elemental and omnipresent status of responsibility, which is founded in the one-to-one or face-to-face relationship, can function in
circumstances marked by a multiplicity of others. Although the reading of Levinas here agrees that "the ethical exigency to be
responsible to the other undermines the ontological primacy of the meaning of being," and embraces the idea that this demand "unsettles the natural and political
positions we have taken up in the world and predisposes us to a meaning that is other than being, that is otherwise than being:" how those disturbances are negotiated
so as to foster the maximum responsibility in a world populated by others in struggle remains to be argued. To examine what is a problem of considerable import

I want to consider Levinas's discussion of "the third person ," the distinction he makes
andof particular importance in a consideration of the politics of international actionthe role of the state
in Levinas's thought.
given the context of this essay,

between the ethical and the moral,

564

Kritik Answers

A2 Infinite Responsibility (2/3)

EMPATHIZING WITH THE OTHER IGNORES LARGER
STRUCTURES OF DOMINATION, REINSCRIBING THE GAP
BETWEEN THE SELF AND THE OTHER
Rey Chow, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California
at Irvine, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, 19 93, p. 12 15,
UK: Fisher
In the "cultural studies" of the American academy in the 1990s, the Maoist is reproducing
with prowess. We see this in the way terms such as "oppression," "victimization," and
"subalternity" are now being used. Contrary to Orientalist disdain for contemporary native
cultures of the non-West, the Maoist turns precisely the "disdained'' other into the object of
his/her study and, in some cases, identification. In a mixture of admiration and moralism,
the Maoist sometimes turns all people from non-Western cultures into a generalized
"subaltern" that is then used to flog an equally generalized "West." 21
Because the representation of "the other" as such ignores (1) the class and intellectual
hierarchies within these other cultures, which are usually as elaborate as those in the West,
and (2) the discursive power relations structuring the Maoist's mode of inquiry and
valorization, it produces a way of talking in which notions of lack, subalternity,
victimization, and so forth are drawn upon indiscriminately, often with the intention of
spotlighting the speaker's own sense of alterity and political righteousness. A comfortably
wealthy white American intellectual I know claimed that he was a "third world intellectual,"
citing as one of his credentials his marriage to a Western European woman of part-Jewish
heritage; a professor of English complained about being "victimized" by the structured time
at an Ivy League institution, meaning that she needed to be on time for classes; a graduate
student of upper-class background from one of the world's poorest countries told his
American friends that he was of poor peasant stock in order to authenticate his identity as a
radical "third world" representative; male and female academics across the U.S. frequently
say they were "raped" when they report experiences of professional frustration and conflict.
Whether sincere or delusional, such cases of self-dramatization all take the route of selfsubalternization, which has increasingly become the assured means to authority and
power. What these intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their critical
and oppositional import, and thus depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of
protest and rightful demand. The oppressed, whose voices we seldom hear, are robbed
twicethe first time of their economic chances, the second time of their language, which is
now no longer distinguishable from those of us who have had our consciousnesses "raised."
In their analysis of the relation between violence and representation, Armstrong and
Tennenhouse write: "[The] idea of violence as representation is not an easy one for most
academics to accept. It implies that whenever we speak for someone else we are inscribing
her with our own (implicitly masculine) idea of order." 22 At present, this process of
"inscribing" often means not only that we "represent" certain historic others because they
are/were ''oppressed"; it often means that there is interest in representation only when what
is represented can in some way be seen as lacking. Even though the Maoist is usually
contemptuous of Freudian psychoanalysis because it is "bourgeois," her investment in
oppression and victimization fully partakes of the Freudian and Lacanian notions of "lack."
By attributing "lack," the Maoist justifies the "speaking for someone else" that
Armstrong and Tennenhouse call "violence as representation." As in the case of Orientalism,
which does not necessarily belong only to those who are white, the Maoist does not have to
be racially "white" either. The phrase "white guilt" refers to a type of discourse which
continues to position power and lack against each other, while the narrator of that discourse,
like Jane Eyre, speaks with power but identifies with powerlessness. This is how
even those who come from privilege more often than not speak from/of/as its "lack." What
the Maoist demonstrates is a circuit of productivity that draws its capital from others'
deprivation while refusing to acknowledge its own presence as endowed. With the material
origins of her own discourse always concealed, the Maoist thus speaks as if her charges were
a form of immaculate conception.
[Continues.No Text Removed]

565

Kritik Answers

A2 Infinite Responsibility (3/3)

[Continued.No Text Removed]
The difficulty facing us, it seems to me, is no longer simply the "first world" Orientalist who
mourns the rusting away of his treasures, but also students from privileged backgrounds
Western and non-Western, who conform behaviorally in every respect with the elitism of
their social origins (e.g., through powerful matrimonial alliances, through pursuit of
fame, or through a contemptuous arrogance toward fellow students) but who nonetheless
proclaim dedication to "vindicating the subalterns." My point is not that they should
be blamed for the accident of their birth, nor that they cannot marry rich, pursue fame, or
even be arrogant. Rather, it is that they choose to see in others' powerlessness an idealized
image of themselves and refuse to hear in the dissonance between the content and
manner of their speech their own complicity with violence. Even though these
descendents of the Maoist may be quick to point out the exploitativeness of Benjamin
Disraeli's "The East is a career," 23 they remain blind to their own exploitativeness as they
make "the East" their career. How do we intervene in the productivity of this
overdetermined circuit?

566

Kritik Answers

Levinas Destroys Ethics (1/2)

LEVINASIAN ETHICS IS ORIENTED TOWARDS PREONTOLOGICAL ALTERITY, BASED ON ORIGINARY
NEGATIVITY, BLOCKING AFFIRMATION OF ETHICS IN
SPECIFIC CONTEXTS
Hallward 2001

[Peter, Nip/Tuck junky, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Trans. Peter
Hallward, New York: Verso, 2001, xxii-xxiii//uwyo-ajl]
ethical questions can arise only in a specific situation and under circumstances
which, however divisive, are essentially indifferent to differences, concerning subjects 'disinterested' in the
other as such, the other qua other (i.e. in the circumstances created by a truthprocedure). The 'ethical ideology', by
contrast, precisely presumes to transcend all situated restrictions and to prevail in a
consensual realm beyond division, all the while orientated around the imperious
demands of difference and otherness qua otherness, the difference of the altogether other as much as the
irreducibly incommensurable demands of every particular other. As Badiou is the first to recognize, nowhere is the essential
logic more clearly articulated than in Levinas's philosophy, where 'the Other comes
to us not only out of context but also without mediation ... .'28 According to Levinas,
there can be no ethical situation as such, since ethics bears witness to a properly
meta- or preontological responsibility (roughly, the responsibility of a creature to its transcendent creator, a creator
For Badiou, true

altogether beyond the ontological field of creation). For Levinas, as for Derrida after him, the other is other only if he immediately evokes or expresses
the absolutely (divinely) other.

our
responsibility to this other is a matter of 'unconditional obedience' , 'trauma', 'obsession',
Since the alterity of the other is simultaneously 'the alterity of the human other [Autruzl and of the Most High [Tres Haut]' ,29 so then

'persecution', and so on.30 Of course, the limited creatures that we are can apprehend the Altogether-Other only if this otherness appears in some
sense 'on our own level', that is, in the appearing of our 'neighbour' (of our neighbour's face): there is only 'responsibility and a Self because the trace

in my 'nonrelation' with the Other, 'the Other remains absolute and absolves itself from the
relation which it enters into'.32 The relation with the other is first and foremost a 'relation' with the transcendent.beyond as
of the [divinely] Infinite . . . is inscribed in proximity'.31 But this inscribing in nearness in no sense dilutes the essential fact that

such. Levinasian ethics, in short, is a form of what Badiou criticizes as anti-philosophy, that is, the reservation of pure or absolute value to a realm
beyond all conceptual distinction

LEVINAS ARGUMENT DEPENDS ON THE THEOLOGICAL

INFINITY OF GOD. SECULAR APPROPRIATION LAPSES INTO
FINITUDE, BLOCKING RESPONSIBILITY
Badiou 2001

[Alain, Number muncher, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Trans. Peter
Hallward, New York: Verso, 2001, 21-3//uwyo-ajl]
: the ethical primacy of the
Other over the Same requires that the experience of alterity be ontologically
'guaranteed' as the experience of a distance , or of an essential non-identity, the traversal of which is the ethical
experience itself. But nothing in the simple phenomenon of the other contains such a
guarantee. And this simply because the finitude of the other's appearing certainly can be conceived as resemblance, or as imitation, and thus
The difficulty, which also defines the point of application for these axioms, can be explained as follows

lead back to the logic of the Same. The other always resembles me too much for the hypothesis of an originary exposure to his alterity to be necessarily
true.
The phenomenon of the other (his face) must then attest to a radical alterity which he nevertheless does not contain by himself. The Other, as he
appears to me in the order of the finite, must be the epiphany of a properly infinite distance to the other, the traversal of which is the originary ethical
experience.

n order to be intelligible, ethics requires that the Other be in some sense

carried by a principle of alterity which transcends mere finite experience. Levinas
calls this principle the 'Altogether-Other', and it is quite obviously the ethical name
for God. There can be no Other if he is not the immediate phenomenon of the AltogetherOther. There can be no finite devotion to the nonidentical if it is not sustained by the infinite devotion of the principle to that which subsists outside it . There can be no ethics
without God the ineffable.
In Levinas's enterprise, the ethical dominance of the Other over the theoretical ontology of the same is entirely bound up with a religious axiom; to
believe that we can separate what Levinas's thought unites is to betray the intimate
movement of this thought, its subjective rigour. In truth, Levinas has no philosophy - not even philosophy
This means that i

as the 'servant' of theology. Rather, this is philosophy (in the Greek sense of the word) annulled by theology, itself no longer a theology (the
terminology is still too Greek, and presumes proximity to the divine via the identity and predicates of God) but, precisely, an ethics.
To make of ethics the ultimate name of the religious as such (i.e. of that which relates [re-lie] to the Other under the ineffable authority of the
Altogether-Other) is to distance it still more completely from all that can be gathered under the name of 'philosophy'.

567

Kritik Answers
every effort to turn ethics into
the principle of thought and action is essentially religious. We might say that Levinas is the coherent
To put it crudely: Levinas's enterprise serves to remind us, with extraordinary insistence, that

and inventive thinker of an assumption that no academic exercise of veiling or abstraction can obscure: distanced from its Greek usage (according to
which it is clearly subordinated to the theoretical), and taken in general, ethics is a category of pious discourse.

568

Kritik Answers

Levinas Destroys Ethics (2/2)

OBSESSION WITH ABSTRACT RESPONSIBILITY ALLOWS US
TO IGNORE SINGULARITY, MEANING THAT NONE OF THEIR
SWEEPING DEMANDS MANIFEST IN THE REAL WORLD WE
FEEL BETTER ABOUT OURSELVES WHILE PEOPLE ARE
ENSLAVED
Badiou 2001

[Alain, Number muncher, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Trans. Peter
Hallward, New York: Verso, 2001, 14-6//uwyo-ajl]
3. Finally, thanks to its negative and a priori determination of evil, ethics prevents
itself from thinking the singularity of situations as such, which is the obligatory
starting point of all properly human action. Thus, for instance, the doctor won over
to 'ethical' ideology will ponder, in meetings and commissions, all sorts of
considerations regarding 'the sick', conceived of in exactly the same way as the
partisan of human rights conceives of the indistinct crowd of victims - the 'human'
totality of subhuman entities [reels].
But the same doctor will have no difficulty in accepting the fact that this particular
person is not treated at the hospital, and accorded all necessary measures, because
he or she is without legal residency papers, or not a contributor to Social Security.
Once again, 'collective' responsibility demands it! What is erased in the process is
the fact that there is only one medical situation, the clinical situation,7 and there is
no need for an 'ethics' (but only for a clear vision of this situation) to understand
that in these circumstances a doctor is a doctor only if he deals with the situation
according to the rule of maximum possibility - to treat this person who demands
treatment of him (no intervention here!) as thoroughly as he can, using everything
he knows and with all the means at his disposal, without taking anything else into
consideration. And if he is to be prevented from giving treatment because of the
State budget, because of death rates or laws governing immigration, then let them
send for the police! Even so, his strict Hippocratic duty would oblige him to resist
them, with force if necessary.
'Ethical commissions' and other ruminations on 'healthcare expenses' or
'managerial responsibility', since they are radically exterior to the one situation that
is genuinely medical, can in reality only prevent us from being faithful to it. For to
be faithful to this situation means: to treat it right to the limit of the possible. Or, if
you prefer: to draw from this situation, to the greatest possible extent, the
affirmative humanity that it contains. Or again: to try to be the immortal of this
situation.
As a matter of fact, bureaucratic medicine that complies with ethical ideology
depends on 'the sick' conceived as vague victims or statistics, but is quickly
overwhelmed by any urgent, singular situation of need. Hence the reduction of
'managed', 'responsible' and 'ethical' health-care to the
abject task of deciding which sick people the 'French medical system' can treat and
which others - because the Budget and public opinion demand it - it must send
away to die in the shantytowns of Kinshasa.

569

Kritik Answers

Levinas/Derrida Destroy Ethics

THE ALTERNATIVE IS PREMISED ON THE INCALCULABLE
CALL OF THE OTHER, PREVENTING AN UNCONDITIONAL
COMMITMENT TO A TRUTH EVENT THAT PRODUCES
SUBJECTIVITY, PROVIDING THE ONLY ACCESS TO THE
SINGULARITY BECAUSE OF ITS UNIVERSAL ACCESSIBILITY
Hallward 2001

[Peter, Nip/Tuck junky, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Trans. Peter
Hallward, New York: Verso, 2001, xxv-xxvii//uwyo-ajl]
Like Badiou, Derrida is careful to distinguish the realm of decision from the realm of knowledge. To reduce
my decision to respond to the calculus of reasons and the assessment of possibilities is to eliminate its
radical character as a decision. The decision must always concern what I cannot know.
Ethics is a matter of 'responsibility in the experience of absolute decisions made outside of
knowledge or given norms' .39 But Derrida does not stop there.

The responsible decision must concern not only the notknown, it must evade
conceptualization altogether. 'In order for [absolute responsibility] to be what it must be it must
remain inconceivable, indeed unthinkable.'40 The decision becomes precisely what is impossible for the
subject as such. If, then, a response or a decision does take place, it can only have been 'the decision of the
other in me'. 41 Like Abraham responding to God's instruction to sacrifice his son, I
must respond without trying to interpret (and thus appropriate) the other's meaning. I must
respond simply because radical otherness demands it; only then do I become the unknowing vehicle for
this other's decision.
Hence the mysterium tremendum whose 'trembling' quivers throughout Donner la mort : 'we fear and

tremble before the inaccessible secret of a God who decides for us although we
remain responsible' .42 Hence, too, the irreducibly 'tragic' and 'guilty' quality of
Derrida's ethical responsibility (54-5/51), the impasse of a responsibility to impossibly

overwhelming (and impossibly incommensurable) obligations. This impasse, moreover, is only exacerbated
by any attempt to justify an ethical decision. Since every such decision must be made by a fully solitary or
'irreplaceable' subject, so then its justification according to the necessarily general or universal criteria of
collective ethics threatens 'to dissolve my singularity in the medium of the concept', to betray my secret
within the publicity of language - in short, to threaten me with replacement.43 If it is to be a genuine
decision, it seems, the decision must take place as a pure leap of faith, one that resists any location in the
situation, any justification by its subject, and any 'conceptualization' by philosophy.

Badiou's emphasis on the material topology of a truthprocedure, by contrast, is

designed precisely to situate every such leap and to justify every apparently
'unjustifiable' commitment in terms of its eternal and universal address.
The decision is no less 'incalculable', no less extra-ordinary or extra-legal. But for Badiou,
an ordinary (replaceable) individual becomes irreplaceable, becomes a (singular)
subject, only through this very commitment itself ; it is only the commitment to a truth-

process that 'induces a subject'.44 Whereas Derrida maintains that responsibility to 'the absolute
singularity of the other. . . calls for a betrayal of everything that manifests itself within the order of
universal generality' ,45 Badiou declares that we can access the realm of singularity only
through adherence to strictly universal criteria - that is, to the universality produced by a
truth-procedure. Derrida's responsibility keeps itself 'apart and secret', it 'holds to what is apart and secret'
(33/26tm); whereas Badiou's commitment, inspired by Lacan's logic of the matheme the literal
basis for an 'integral transmission' of truth46 - pursues clarity for all. Derrida's tension
between (singular) subject and (collective) justification disappears here without trace, as does every hint of
pathos roused by a responsibllity deemed impossible a priori. A true statement, as Badiou conceives
it, is precisely one that can be made by anyone, anyone at all.47 Again, with Badiou,
impossibility is invariably thought in terms of a particular situation, that is, as the Real of that
situation, the void around which it is structured in its systematic entirety - and thus the
point from which, through a process of eminently' logical revolt' ,48 it becomes possible to
transform the situation as a whole. And whereas both Badiou and Derrida orientate their ethics
around the advent of something 'to come' that escapes incorporation within any logic of anticipation or
figuration, Badiou's event remains situated vis-a-vis the state of the' situation (the
elements of the 'symptomal' or 'evental' site [site evenementiel] are perfectly accessible 'in their own right';
they are inaccessible only from within the perspective adopted by the state of the situation), whereas

Derrida's messianic event is simply 'monstrous' in the strong sense, consigned to a

general 'formlessness'.

570

Kritik Answers

**Nietzsche**
Nietzsche Answers: 2AC (1/6)
FIRST, TURN THE 1AC IS AN AFFIRMATION OF LIFE
AGAINST THE NEGATIVITY OF ENEMY COMBATANT
DOCTRINE
SECOND, PERM DO BOTH
DEFENSE OF MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES IS NECESSARY FOR
CONSTANT CRITICISM, CHALLENGING BEING BY THINKING
IN FRAGMENTS
Bleiker 97

[Roland, PhD Cand @ Australian National U. of Political Sci, Alternatives 22, 57-85//uwyo]
No concept will ever be sufficient, will ever do justice to the object it is trying to capture. The objective then becomes to conceptualize thoughts so that they do not
silence other voices, but coexist and interact with them. Various authors have suggested methods for this purpose, methods that will always remain attempts without

Bakhtins dialogism, a theory of knowledge and language that tries to avoid the excluding
accepts the existence of multiple meanings, draws connections
between differences, and searches for possibilities to establish conceptual and linguistic dialogues among competing ideas,
ever reaching the ideal state that they aspire to. We know of Mikhail
tendencies of monological thought forms. Instead, he

values, speech forms, texts, and validity claims, and the like. Jurgen Habermas attempts to theorize the preconditions for ideal speech situations. Communication, in
this case, should be as unrestrained as possible, such that claims to truth and rightness can be discursively redeemed, albeit, one should add, though a rationalism
and universalism that it violently anti-Bakhtinian and anti-Adornian. Closer to the familiar terrain of IR we find Christine Sylvesters feminist method of

empathetic cooperation, which aims at opening up questions of gender by a process of

positional slippage that occurs when one listens seriously to the concerns, fears, and agendas of those
one is unaccustomed to heeding when building social theory. But how does one conceptualize such attempts if
concepts can ever do justice to the objects they are trying to capture?
The daring task is, as we know from Adorno, to open with concepts what does not fit into concepts, to resist the distorting power of reification and return the
conceptual to the nonconceptual. This disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of critical philosophy. It impedes the concept from developing its own dynamics
and from becoming an absolute in itself. The first step toward disenchanting the concept is simply refusing to define it monologically. Concepts should achieve
meaning only gradually in relation to each other. Adorno even intentionally uses the same concept in different way in order to liberate it from the harrow definition

.
One cannot eliminate the contradictory, the fragmentary, and the discontinuous.
Contradictions are only contradictions if one assumes the existence of a prior universal
standard of reference. What is different appears as divergent, dissonant, and negative only as long as
our consciousness strives for a totalizing standpoint, which we must avoid if we are to
escape the reifying and excluding dangers of identity thinking. Just as reality is fragmented, we need to
think in fragments. Unity then is not to be found be evening out discontinuities. Contradictions are to be referred over
artificially constructed meanings and the silencing of underlying conflicts. Thus, Adorno advocates writing
in fragments, such that the resulting text appears as if it always could be interrupted, cut off abruptly,
any time, and place. He adheres to Nietzsches advice that one should approach deep
problems like taking a cold bath, quickly into them and quickly out again . The belief that one does not
that language itself had already imposed on it. That contradictions could arise out of this practice does not bother Adorno. Indeed, he considers them essential

reach deep enough this way, he claims, is simply the superstition of those who fear cold water. But Nietzsches bath has already catapulted us into the vortex of the
next linguistic terrain of resistance the question of style.

THIRD, NO LINK WE DONT ASSERT DEVOTION TO A

TRANSCENDENT LAW. PLAN IS ONLY A CONTINGENT
CONTESTATION OF NEGATIVITY

571

Kritik Answers

Nietzsche Answers: 2AC (2/6)

FOURTH, EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE REQUIRES
A REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION, MEANING THAT
EVERY AFFIRMATION OF LIFE OCCURS AGAINS THE
BACKGROUND OF HUMN DEATH AND FINITUDE
Zizek '99

[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish
Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 153-4//uwyo-ajl]
It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical
restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. Does not Lacan himself provide a number of
hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of

does not already posit a 'new harmony', a new TruthEvent; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean for one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks,
because it is Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is
confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity, a
negative gesture of withdrawal, precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identifiction
with a Cause: negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic
identification - that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it, but is simultaneously
obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what
'Death' stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of
the world', the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its
links with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate clean' that opens up the domain of the
symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier. Here, Lacan parts company
with St Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already was dead - that is to say, after Freud, one cannot directly have faith in a Truth-Event; every such
Event ultimately remains a semblance obfuscating a preceding Void whose Freudian name is
death drive. So Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination of the exact status of this domain beyond the rule of the Law. That is to say: like Lacan,
St Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it

Badiou delineates the contours of a domain beyond the Order of Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the 'morbid' super ego connection between

: the 'death
drive' is not the outcome of the morbid confusion of Life and Death caused by the
intervention of the symbolic Law. For Lacan, the uncanny domain beyond the Order of Being is
what he calls the domain 'between the two deaths', the pre-ontologicalf domain of monstrous
spectral apparitions, the domain that is 'immortal', yet not in the Badiouian sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but in the sense of
Law and its transgressive desire. For Lacan, however, the Freudian topic of the death drive cannot be accounted for in the terms of this connection

what Lacan calls lamella, of the monstrous 'undead' object-libido.18

FIFTH, THE ALT DOESNT SOLVE WITHOUT PLAN,

UNILATERAL DETAINMENT WILL CONTINUE, LOCKING IN
THE SLAVE MORALITY OF THE STATUS QUO

572

Kritik Answers

Nietzsche Answers: 2AC (3/6)

SIXTH, CALL TO REJECT RE-INVENTS HIERARCHIES
POLITICAL ACTION IS KEY TO TRANSCEND THE NIHILISTIC
BINARY OF THE ALTERNATIVE
Newman 2001

[Saul, Sociology @ Macquarie University, Philosophy & Social Criticism 27: 3, pp. 46//uwyo]
Derrida does not simply want to invert the terms of these binaries so
that the subordinated term becomes the privileged term. He does not want to put writing in the place of speech, for
instance. Inversion in this way leaves intact the hierarchical, authoritarian structure of the
binary division. Such a strategy only re- affirms the place of power in the very attempt to
overthrow it. One could argue that Marxism fell victim to this logic by replacing the bour- geois state with the equally authoritarian workers state. This is a
logic that haunts our radical political imaginary. Revolutionary political theories have often succeeded only in
reinventing power and authority in their own image. However, Derrida also recognizes the
dangers of subversion that is, the radical strategy of overthrowing the hierarchy altogether,
It must be made clear, however, that

rather than inverting its terms. For instance, the classical anarchists critique of Marxism went along the lines that Marxism neglected political power in particular
the power of the state for economic power, and this would mean a restoration of political power in a Marxist revolution. Rather, for anarchists, the state and all

Derrida believes that subversion and inversion

both culminate in the same thing the reinvention of authority, in different guises . Thus, the
forms of political power must be abolished as the first revolutionary act. However,

anarchist critique is based on the Enlightenment idea of a rational and moral human essence that power denies, and yet we know from Derrida that any essential

, anarchism substituted political and economic

authority for a rational authority founded on an Enlighten- ment-humanist subjectivity.
Both radical politico-theoretical strategies then the strategy of inversion, as exemplified by
Marxism, and the strategy of subversion, as exemplified by anarchism are two sides of the
same logic of logic of place. So for Derrida:
identity involves a radical exclusion or sup- pression of other identities. Thus

What must occur then is not merely a suppression of all hierarchy, for an- archy only consolidates just as surely the established order of a metaphys- ical hierarchy;
nor is it a simple change or reversal in the terms of any given hierarchy. Rather the Umdrehung must be a transformation of the hierar- chical structure itself.

to avoid the lure of authority one must go beyond both the anarchic desire to
destroy hierarchy, and the mere reversal of terms. Rather, as Derrida suggests, if one wants to avoid this trap the hierar- chical
structure itself must be transformed. Political action must invoke a rethinking of revolution and authority in
a way that traces a path between these two terms, so that it does not merely reinvent the
place of power. It could be argued that Derrida propounds an anarchism of his own, if by anarchism one means a questioning of all authority, including
In other words,

textual and philosophical authority, as well as a desire to avoid the trap of reproducing authority and hierarchy in ones attempt to destroy it.
This deconstructive attempt to transform the very structure of hier- archy and authority, to go beyond the binary opposition, is also found in Nietzsche. Nietzsche
believes that one cannot merely oppose auth- ority by affirming its opposite: this is only to react to and, thus, affirm the domination one is supposedly resisting.

One must, he argues, tran- scend oppositional thinking altogether go beyond truth and error ,
beyond being and becoming, beyond good and evil. For Nietzsche it is simply a moral prejudice to privilege truth
over error. However, he does not try to counter this by privileging error over truth, because this leaves the
opposition intact. Rather, he refuses to confine his view of the world to this opposition: Indeed what compels us to
assume that there exists any essential antithesis between true and false? Is it not enough to suppose grades of apparentness and as it were lighter and darker
shades and tones of appearance? Nietzsche displaces, rather than replaces, these oppositional and authoritarian structures of thought he displaces place. This

.
Rather than reversing the terms of the binary opposition, one should perhaps question, and
try to make prob- lematic, its very structure.
strategy of displacement, similarly adopted by Derrida, provides certain clues to developing a non-essentialist theory of resist- ance to power and authority

573

Kritik Answers

Nietzsche Ansers: 2AC (4/6)

SEVENTH, THE ALTERNATIVE ALONE DESTROYS ANY
CHECK ON CRUELTY, LEGITIMIZING ATROCITY
May, College Research Fellow in Philosophy @ Birkbeck College, 99 (Simon, Nietzsches ethic
versus morality: The new ideal, Nietzsches Ethics and his War on Morality, P. 132-133)

An apologist for Nietzsche might suggest that his ethic is not alone in effectively legitimizing inhumanity. He might argue, for example,
that some forms of utilitarianism could not prevent millions being sacrificed if greater numbers could thereby be saved; or that heinous
maxims could be consistently universalized by Kant's Categorical Imperativemaxims against which Kant's injunction to treat all human
beings as ends in themselves would afford no reliable protection, both because its conception of 'humanity' is vague and because it would

with
Nietzsche there is not even an attempt to produce a systematic safety net against cruelty,
especially if one judges oneself to be a 'higher' type of person with life-enhancing pursuits
and, to this extent, his philosophy licenses the atrocities of a Hitler even though, by his personal table of
values, he excoriates anti-Semitism and virulent nationalism. Indeed, to that extent it is irrelevant whether or not
Nietzsche himself advocates violence and bloodshed or whether he is the gentle person
described by his contemporaries. The reality is that the supreme value he places on
individual life-enhancement and self-legislation leaves room for, and in some cases
explicitly justifies, unfettered brutality. In sum: the point here is not to rebut Nietzsche's claim that 'everything evil,
be overridden by our duty, as rational agents, to respect just such universalized maxims. To this apologist one would reply that

terrible, tyrannical in man' serves his enhancement 'as much as its opposite does' (BGE, 44my emphasis)for such a rebuttal would be a

It is rather to suggest that the necessary balance between

danger and safety which Nietzsche himself regards as a condition for flourishing (for example, in
this quote from BGE, 44) is not vouchsafed by his extreme individualism. Indeed, such individualism
seems not only self-defeating, but also quite unnecessary: for safeguards against those who
have pretensions to sovereignty but lack nobility could be accepted on Nietzsche's theory of
value as just another 'condition for the preservation' of 'higher' types. Since the overriding
aim of his attack on morality is to liberate people from the repressiveness of the 'herd'
instinct, this unrelieved potential danger to the 'higher' individual must count decisively
against the successand the possibility of successof his project.
major ethical undertaking in its own right.

EIGHTH, THE SURFACE/DEPTH MODELS SEARCH FOR

SUBJECTIVE INTEGRITY RELIES ON ASSUMPTIONS OF
METAPHYSICAL INNOCENCE, FETISHIZING AN
AUTHENTICITY THAT NEVER EXISTED
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 195-6//uwyo-ajl]
postmodernism has actually become
something. Its principal characteristic is the retreat from and disavowal of the violence of representation - both political and semiotic.
Despite the diligence and the sterling efforts of its best theoreti-cians, then, it seems that

There are three further aspects to this essentially ignominious cultural operation: (i) a cultivation of stupidity (what I have called Kelvinism, or 'metaphysical

a recourse to the idea of an internal or

subjective 'truth of the soul' which transcends political reality, along with the contingencies
of representation. Both of these signal an attachment to a surface/ depth model of subjectivity
which in each case amounts to a fetishization of authenticity, whether by opting to 'remain' on the
surface, or by retreating 'inwards'; (iii) a collapse of faith by individuals and even politicians themselves, not only in the political
innocence') as a means of circumventing the ideational 'brutality' of the political life; (ii)

infrastructure but in the very' concept of political engagement - here it becomes apparent that Tony Blair, for example, is more 'postodern' than any theoretician.
.

these three responses stand in an approximately analogous relationship to the archetypal forms in which consciousness,
in a state of anxiety, shrinks from the violence of determinate negation and 'strives to hold on to what it is
It should be clear that

in danger of losing'. 59 At various points throughout the present work I have used the terms 'decadence', 'irony' and 'relativism' to refer to these instances of an

capitulation to 'things as they are'

epistemological loss of nerve, this

; it may be as well here to remind ourselves of the terms in which Hegel
describes these manifestations of a retreat from truth. Consciousness, he says, at the decisive moment in which it is required to go beyond its own limits, (i) 'wishes to
remain in a state' of unthinking inertia'; (ii) gloats over its own understanding, 'which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego
instead of any content'; (iii) 'entrenches itself in sentimentality, which assures us that it finds everything to be good in its kind'. 60 Postmodernism, an empirical social
condition - by which I mean that a series of critical-theoretical strategies has attained a certain concrete form - legitimizes these symptoms of cultural anxiety;
postmodernism becomes synonymous, therefore, with deceleration, with a sense of cultural and political conclusivity; postmodernism is the principal vehicle of what
Baudrillard calls 'the illusion of the end'.

574

Kritik Answers

Nietzsche Answers: 2AC (5/6)

NINTH, AUTHENTICITY FETISHIZATION AND ITS FEAR OF
REASON FORCES A RETREAT FROM THE POLITICAL WHILE
GAS CHAMBERS ARE BUILT
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997,146-7//uwyo-ajl]
If it is unreasonable to suppose that the Final Solution was potentiated or even necessarily
facilitated by Schmitt's theories, it is certainly the case that this metaphysical structure of
domination in the Third Reich, whereby the status of public citizens is reduced to a level
determined entirely in the 'natural' or biological realm of necessity, is foreshadowed in his
1927 essay. In an abstract and insidious way Schmitt introduces the idea that the
'transcendent' realm of the political, as a matter of course, will not accommodate a people
with insufficient strength to ensure its own participation, and that such a fact is ipso facto
justification for its exclusion. 'If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to
maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world.
Only a weak people will disappear.'130 Schmitt's concept of the 'political', quite simply, is
nothing of the sort - is instead weighed down by necessity, in the form of what Marshall
Berman calls German-Christian interiority - by its preoccupation with authenticity, that is to
say, and true political 'identity'. Auschwitz is a corollary not of reason, understood as risk,
but of the fear of reason, which paradoxically is a fear of violence. The stench of burning
bodies is haunted always by the sickly aroma of cheap metaphysics.

TENTH, TURN THE SEARCH FOR HIDDEN MOTIVES

ENGAGES IN A HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION, RISKING
SPIRAL INTO PROFOUND SKEPTICISM
Berman 2001
[Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, LN]
Ricoeur contrasts two different "poles" among hermeneutic styles. At one pole, "hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of ...
meaning." 23 At the other pole, hermeneutics is "understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion." 24 It is not entirely clear to me precisely

a hermeneutics of faith to be one that treats the

object of study as possessing inherent meaning on its own terms. In contrast, the
hermeneutics of suspicion seeks to expose societal practices as illusory edifices that
mask underlying contradictions or failures of meaning. I will return to the first pole in Part Four of this
what Ricoeur means by these two categories. Nevertheless, I understand

Essay, but for now I wish to focus on the hermeneutics of demystification and suspicion.

t each of these
thinkers makes "the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as
"false' consciousness." 25 Ricoeur sees this perspective as an extension of Descartes' fundamental position of doubt at the dawn of the
Ricoeur locates in the work of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud the central hallmarks of this suspicious approach. He argues tha

Enlightenment. According to Ricoeur, "The philosopher trained in the school of Descartes knows that things are doubtful, that they are not such as
they appear; but he does not doubt that consciousness is such as it appears to itself; in consciousness, meaning and consciousness of meaning
coincide." 26

The hermeneutics of suspicion takes doubt one step farther, by distrusting even our
perceptions.
This suspicious position questions the so-called "correspondence [*104] theory" of truth. As we go through our lives, most of us generally assume that
our mental perceptions accord with reality because we believe we have direct access to reality through our senses or through reason. This is the legacy
of the Enlightenment, the "answer" to the fundamental Cartesian doubt. But the hermeneutics of suspicion maintains that human beings create false
truths for themselves.

Such false truths cannot be "objective" because they always serve some interest or
purpose.
By discovering and revealing those interests or purposes, suspicious analysis seeks to expose so-called "false consciousness" generated through social
ideology or self-deception. False consciousness may arise in many different ways. Nietzsche looked to people's self-deceit in the service of the "will to
power." Marx focused on the social being and the false consciousness that arises from ideology and economic alienation. Freud approached the
problem of false consciousness by examining dreams and neurotic symptoms in order to reveal hidden motivations and desires. Thus, "the Genealogy
of Morals in Nietzsche's sense, the theory of ideologies in the Marxist sense, and the theory of ideas and illusions in Freud's sense represent three
convergent procedures of demystification." 27

575

Kritik Answers

Nietzsche Answers: 2AC (6/6)

ELEVENTH, AND, SKEPTICISM STOPS SOCIAL CHANGE
THEIR PARANOIA FORECLSOES UPON REVOLUTION
Berman 2001
[Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, LN]

, one might view this as a positive development. One might think people
should stop being lulled into a false sense of believing that the rhetoric of public life
really matters. If people began to view such rhetoric as a construction of
entrenched power, so the argument might go, they would form the nucleus of a
truly revolutionary political movement.
I doubt that such an eventuality is likely to occur. Moreover, I am not sure that a culture
of suspiciousness is the most effective way to seek political (or personal) change anyway.
Of course

Suspicious analysis seeks to expose the dangers of our enchantment with reason or truth or collectivity, but there are dangers that arise from
relentless disenchantment as well. As [*123] Richard K. Sherwin has observed,

Without the means of experiencing more profound enchantments , without communal rituals
those beliefs
ultimately lose their meaning and die... . Forms of enchantment in the service of
deceit, illicit desire, and self-gratification alone must be separated out from forms of enchantment
in the service of feelings, beliefs, and values that we aspire to affirm in light of the self, social, and legal realities they help to
and social dramas through which the culture's deepest beliefs and values may be brought to life and collectively reenacted,

construct and maintain. 112

576

Kritik Answers

Nietzsche = Nihilism
NIETSZCHES DENIAL OF BEING LEADS TO NIHILISM
REMOVING ALL MEANING IN LIFE THIS LEADS TO AN
ENDLESS SEARCH FOR POWER WHICH NEVER IS
SUCCESSFUL
Hicks, Prof and Chair of Philosophy @ Queens College of the CUNY, 2K3 (Steven V.,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond, Foucault and Heidegger: Critical
Encounters, Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, P. 109, Questia)
Here again, one might raise objections to Heidegger's equating of Nietzsche's doctrine of will to power with the metaphysics of subjectivity. After all, Nietzsche often

Nietzsche still follows

Descartes's lead in making human beings the subject or foundation of things . Unlike Descartes, however,
attacked Descartes's ego cogito as a logical or linguistic fiction (cf. BGE, 16, 54). Yet according to Heidegger,

Nietzsche's subject is not a fixed mental substance, but the body interpreted as a center of instincts, drives, affects, and sublimations, i.e., as will to power.

Heidegger claims that this body as given idea still involves Nietzsche in a fixity that
brings him into the philosophy of presence: Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent (N, 2:200). And
this forced sense of presence, Heidegger thinks, leads to the dangers of radical objectifiability
and to the disposability of beings, i.e., treating beings as nothing but objects of use, control,
and management. 32 Moreover, like its Cartesian counterpart, the Nietzschean subject reins supreme over the whole of beings and posits the measure
for the beingness of every being (N, 4:121). 33 In claiming that truths are illusions and that Being is an empty fiction, Nietzsche fashions for the subject an
absolute power to enjoin what is true and what is false and hence to define what it means to be or not to be a being (N, 4:145). According to Nietzsche, what is true
what has beingis that which serves the interest of the subject whose essence is will to power (in the mode of existence of eternal recurrence; cf. N, 2:203).

Being is thus reduced to the status of a value or a condition of the preservation and
enhancement of the will to power (N, 4:176). This is why Heidegger considers Nietzsche the
consummation, and not the overcoming, of Western metaphysics: by reducing Being to a
value, the doctrine of will to power makes the nihilism of the metaphysical tradition (the
assumption that Being itself is nothing and the human will everything) a matter of philosophical principle . 34 Thus
Nietzsche's counter-ideals of will to power and eternal recurrence, far from overcoming
nihilism, actually express or exemplify the loss of any sense of Being, or the withdrawal of
Being itself, in favor of beings (i.e., products of human will). As Heidegger reads him, Nietzsche understands
Being in terms of value (or what is useful for enhancing the human will) because Being itself has totally withdrawn in default. And this brings to
completion traditional metaphysics, which, according to Heidegger, is the history of Being in its withdrawal. As Heidegger sees it, Nietzsche's
metaphysics of will to power is the most extreme withdrawal of Being and thus the
fulfillment of nihilism proper (N, 4:204, 232). So Nietzsche brings to completion, in his denial
of Being, the very nihilism he wanted to overcome . Far from twisting free of the ascetic ideal, Heidegger claims,
Nietzsche 's doctrine of will to power actually provides the basis for its most complete
expression in the modern secularized ascetic will-tocontrol everything . In other words, instead
of seeking salvation in a transcendent world by means of ascetic self-denialthe aspect of
metaphysics that Nietzsche most obviously rejectssalvation is now , Heidegger claims, sought
exclusively in the free self-development of all the creative powers of man (N, 4:89). This
unlimited expanding of power for power's sake parallels in many ways what Nietzsche
characterized as the most terrifying aspect of the ascetic ideal: the pursuit of truth for
truth's sake. It is, according to Heidegger, the hidden thorn in the side of modern humanity (cf. N, 4:99). This hidden thorn expresses itself variously in
the Protestant work ethic and in the iron cage of bureaucratic-technological rationality (discussed in the works of Max Weber); it also expresses itself in the various
power aims of modern scientific/technological culture as well as in the frenzied impulse to produce and consume things at ever faster rates. Heidegger even suggests

Nietzsche's own figure of the Overman (Ubermensch) foreshadows the calculating,

technological attitude of modern secularized asceticism: His Overman [stands] for the
technological worker-soldier who would disclose all entities as standingreserve necessary for
enhancing the ultimately aimless quest for power for its own sake.35 This emerging
technological human, grounded in a control-oriented anthropocentrism, compels entities to
reveal only those one-dimensional aspects of themselves that are consistent with the power
aims of a technological/productionist culture . Instead of dwelling and thinking in a world unified by what Heidegger
that

metaphorically terms the fourfold of earth and sky, gods and mortals, impoverished modern technocrats occupy a world bereft of gods in which thinking becomes
calculating, and dwelling becomes tantamount to the technological domination of nature and what Nietzsche calls the common economic management of the earth
in which mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a machine in the service of this economy (WP, 866). Thus citizens come to be viewed primarily as
consumers, wilderness is looked upon in terms of wildlife management areas, and genuine human freedom is replaced by the organized global conquest of the
earth, and the thrust into outer space (N, 4:248). As Heidegger sees it, our era entertains the illusion that man, having become free for his humanity, has freely taken
the universe into his power and disposition (N, 4:248). In summary, Nietzsche tried to combat the nihilism of the ascetic ideal (e.g., the collapse of the Christian table

instead
of overcoming nihilism, Nietzsche simply reinforced it. By characterizing Being as an
empty fiction and the last smoke of a vaporized reality (TI, 2:2, 481), and by degrading it to the status of a value for
enhancing the subject's will to power, Nietzsche loses any sense of Being as such . For him it is a mere nothing, a nihil.
And this brings to completion the fundamental movement of history in the West, which is
nihilism: the withdrawal of Being itself and the consequent focus on beings as objects for
consolidating the power of Will and for expanding it out beyond itself in an everof values) by bringing forth new nonascetic values that would enhance rather than devalue humanity's will to power. According to Heidegger, however,

577

Kritik Answers
increasing spiral. 36 As Heidegger sees it, this eternally recurring will to power, or will to will, is a
will-to-control that only reinforces the nihilism Nietzsche feared: the loss of meaning
or direction, the devaluation of the highest values, the constructs of
domination, and the devotion to frenzied consumption and production.

578

Kritik Answers

Nietzsche Legitimizes Genocide (1/2)

NIETZSCHES PHILOSOPHIES LEGITIMIZED NAZISM AND
THE HOLOCAUST
Ortega-Cowan, B.A. @ Boston College and J.D. with Honors @ Florida State U
College of Law, 2K3 (Roman, Dubious Means to Final Solutions: Extracting Light from
the Darkness of Ein F Hrer and Brother Number One, 31 Fla. St. U.L. Rev. 163, Fall)

Nietzsche's emphasis on the triumph of the will over emotion gave the Nazis the
mental strength to accomplish the horrors of the Holocaust. n35 The choice of self-definition
through hardness was seen as central to the establishment and assertion of a new national
identity, and such emphasis led to a devaluation of human compassion and other emotions . n36
With a set ideology of hatred founded upon angry anti-Semitism, a belief in "scientific"
racial superiority, and a will immune from emotional influence, the Nazis embarked on a
catastrophic mission targeting a clearly defined enemy . After taking control of the government, they
quickly built a wall of legal repression around the Jews, which culminated in the Nuremberg
Laws and Kristallnacht decrees and left the Jews vulnerable to the violence that lay ahead .
Finally,

n37

NIETZSCHES PHILOSOPHIES LEGITIMIZED THE

HOLOCAUST HIS NOTIONS OF MASTER MORALITY
FUELED THE FIRE BEHIND GENOCIDES OF THE WEAK AND
IMPERFECT FRAMING THEM AS MANS GREATEST
DANGER
Aschheim, Prof of German Cultural and Intellectual History @ Hebrew U, Jersulem,
97 (Steven E., Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, Nietzsche and Jewish
Culture, Ed. Jacob Golomb, P. 13-16)

At any rate, what I am proposing here is that both in its overall bio-eugenic political and medical vision, its programmatic obsession with
degeneration and regeneration, whether in parodistic form or not, there are clear informing parallels with key Nietzschean categories and
goals. From one perspective, as Robert Jay Lifton has recently persuasively argued, Nazism

is about the "medicalisation of

killing". Its genocidal impulses were implicit within a bio-medical vision and its vast, selfproclaimed programmatic task of racial and eugenic-hygiene. On an unprecedented scale it
would assume control of the human biological future, assuring health to positive racial stock
and purging humanity of its sick, degenerative elements. Its vision of "violent cure", of
murder and genocide as a "therapeutic imperative", Lifton argues, resonates with such
Nietzschean themes.40 While every generation may emphasize their particular Nietzsche, there
can be little doubt that in the first half of this century various European political circles
came to regard him as the deepest diagnostician of sickness and degeneration and its most
thoroughgoing regenerative therapist. "The sick", he wrote, "are man's greatest danger; not
the evil, not the 'beasts of prey'."41 To be sure, as was his wont, he employed these notions in multiple, shifting ways, as
metaphor and irony (he even has a section on "ennoblement through degeneration"42) but most often, most crucially, it was represented
(and understood) as a substantial literal danger whose overcoming through drastic measures was the precondition for the urgent re-

Although he was not alone in the wider nineteenthcentury quasi-bio-medical, moral, discourse of "degeneration" 43 - that highly flexible,
politically adjustable tool that cut across the ideological spectrum, able simultaneously to
locate, diagnose and resolve a prevalent, though inchoate, sense of social and cultural crisis
through an exercise of eugenic labeling and a language of bio-social pathology and potential
renewal44 - he formed an integral part in defining and radicalizing it. He certainly constituted its most
important conduit into the emerging radical right. What else was Nietzsche's Lebensphilosophie , his reassertion of instinct
and his proposed transvaluation whereby the healthy naturalistic ethic replaced the sickly
moral one (a central theme conveniently ignored or elided by the current post-structuralist champions of Nietzsche). "Tell me, my
creation of a "naturalized", non-decadent humankind.

brothers", Zarathustra asks, "what do we consider bad and worst of all? Is it not degeneration}'"15 In this world, the reassertion of all that
is natural and healthy is dependent upon the ruthless extirpation of those anti-natural ressentiment sources of degeneration who have
thoroughly weakened and falsified the natural and aristocratic bases of life. Over and over again, and in different ways, Nietzsche declared
that "The species requires that the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish".46 The

Nazi bio-political understanding

of, and solution to "degeneration", as I have tried to show here and elsewhere, was in
multilayered ways explicitly Nietzsche-inspired. From the World War I through its Nazi

579

Kritik Answers
implementation, Nietzschean exhortations to prevent procreation of "anti-life" elements and
his advocacy of euthanasia, of what he called "holy cruelty " - "The Biblical

contiued

580

Kritik Answers

Nietzsche Legitimizes Genocide (2/2)

continued
prohibition 'thou shalt not kill'", he noted in The Will to Power, "is a piece of naivete compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of
life to decadents: 'thou shalt not procreate!'. . . Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted - that would be the profoundest
immorality, that would be antinature itself as morality!"47 - both inspired and provided a "higher" rationale for theorists and practitioners
off such measures.48 The

translation of traditional anti-Jewish impulses into genocide and the

murderous policies adopted in different degrees to other labeled outsiders (Gypsies, physically and
mentally handicapped, homosexuals, criminals, inferior Eastern peoples and Communist political enemies) occurred within
the distinct context of this medico-bio-eugenic vision. There were, to be sure, many
building-blocks that went into conceiving and implementing genocide and mass murder but
I would argue that this Nietzschean framework of thinking provided a crucial conceptual
precondition and his radical sensibility a partial trigger for its implementation . Related to but also
going beyond these programmatic parallels and links we must raise another highly speculative, though necessary, issue: the vexed question
of enabling preconditions and psychological motivations. Clearly, for events as thick and complex as these no single theoretical or
methodological approach or methodology will suffice. Yet, given the extraordinary nature of the events, more conventional modes of
historical analysis soon reach their limits and demand novel answers (the study of Nazism has provided them in abundance, some more,
some less convincing49). I am not thus claiming exclusiveness for the Nietzschean element at this level of explanation, but rather arguing
for his continued and important relevance. To be sure, of late, many accounts of the ideas behind, and the psychological wellsprings
enabling, mass murder have been, if anything, anti-Nietzschean in content. For Christopher Browning it was hardly Nietzschean
intoxication, the nihilistic belief that "all is permitted", that motivated the "ordinary killers" - but rather prosaic inuring psychological
mechanisms such as group conformity, deference to authority, the dulling powers of alcohol and simple (but powerful) processes of
routinization.50 For George L. Mosse, far from indicating a dynamic anti-bourgeois Nietzschean revolt, the mass murders represented a
defense of bourgeois morality, the attempt to preserve a clean, orderly middle-class world against all those outsider and deviant groups
that threatened it.51 These contain important insights but, in my view, leave out crucial experiential ingredients, closely related to the
Nietzschean dimension, which must form at least part of the picture. At some point or another, the realization must have dawned on the
conceivers and perpetrators of this event that something quite extraordinary, unprecedented, was occurring and that ordinary and middleclass men were committing radically transgressive, taboo-breaking, quite "un-bourgeois" acts.52 Even if we grant the problematic
proposition that such acts were done in order to defend bourgeois interests and values, we would want to know about the galvanizing,
radicalizing trigger that allowed decision-makers and perpetrators alike to set out in this direction and do the deed. To argue that it was

We
are left with the issue of the radicalizing, triggering forces. These may be many in number
but it seems to me that Nietzsche's determined anti-humanism (an atheism that, as George Lichtheim has
noted, differs from the Feuerbachian attempt to replace theism with humanism33), apocalyptic imaginings and
exhortatory visions, rendered such a possibility, such an act, conceivable in the first place (or,
at the very least, once thought of and given the correct selective readings easily able to
provide the appropriate ideological cover). This Nietzschean kind of thought, vocabulary
and sensibility constitutes an important (if not the only) long-term enabling precondition of
such radical elements in Nazism. With all its affinities to an older conservatism, it was the
radically experimental, morality-challenging, tradition-shattering Nietzschean sensibility
that made the vast transformative scale of the Nazi project thinkable. Nietzsche, as one
contemporary commentator has pointed out, "prepared a consciousness that excluded
nothing that anyone might think, feel, or do, including unimaginable atrocities carried out
on a gigantic order".54 Of course, Nazism was a manifold historical phenomenon and its revolutionary thrust sat side by side
with petit-bourgeois, provincial, traditional and conservative impulses.55 But surely, beyond its doctrinal emphases on
destruction and violent regeneration, health and disease, the moral and historical
significance of Nazism lies precisely in its unprecedented transvaluations and boundarybreaking extremities, its transgressive acts and shattering of previously intact taboos. It is
here - however parodistic, selectively mediated or debased - that the sense of Nazism, its informing
project and experiential dynamic, as a kind of Nietzschean Great Politics continues to haunt
us.
"racism" merely pushes the argument a step backward, for "racism" on its own -while always pernicious - has to be made genocidal.

581

Kritik Answers

Nietzsche Legitimizes Patriarchy

NIETZSCHES CALLS FOR DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN THE
WEAK AND THE STRONG ARE NOTIONS OF CLASSISM
AND SERVE TO REINFORCE PATRIARCHAL DOMINANCE
Schutte, Assist Prof of Philosophy @ U of Florida, 84 (Ofelia, Nietzsches Politics, Beyond
Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks, P. 186-188)

As long as one gives philosophical credibility to the rhetoric of the "superior type" or "higher" person and sets aside the political and
practical implications of how this rhetoric is instantiated, both by Nietzsche and by the historical patriarchal tradition in which we still live,

While the logic of unspecified prejudice

calls for the higher/lower distinction without committing itself to any particulars to fill those
categories, Nietzsche has made it quite clear what groups by "nature" or "destiny" are higher
and what lower. Here are two statements regarding women and workers, two groups Nietzsche
has condemned to the "low." Reversing Goethe's statement that "the eternal feminine draws us higher," the author of
we are defending what I shall call "the politics of unspecified prejudice."

Beyond Good and Evil wrote: "I do not doubt that every nobler woman will resist this faith, for she believes the same about the EternalMasculine."62 The criterion of a woman's "nobility," then, is her "faith" that the male, as male, is more noble than herself .

This
insidious rhetoric is also applied to the slave, who is urged to believe that his exploitation is
justified because the master/aristocrat is more noble than he. When one unmasks the
realities of this rhetoric, one sees that the practical advantages do not go to "superior"
personseven assuming there were so pure a typebut simply to the privileged classes of
the established society. Nietzsche himself points this out in Twilight of the Idols: The labor question. The stupidityat bottom,
the degeneration of instinct, which is today the cause of all stupiditiesis that there is a labor question at all. Certain things one does not
question: that is the first imperative of instinct. . . . But what was done? . . . The instincts by virtue of which the worker becomes possible as
a class, possible in his own eyes, have been destroyed through and through with the most irresponsible thoughtlessness. The worker was
qualified for military service, granted the right to organize and to vote: is it any wonder that the worker today experiences his own
existence as distressingmorally speaking, as an injustice? But what is wanted? ... If one wants an end, one must also want the means: if
one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.63 The

theme of the "strength" of not questioning

the structure of power that serves the interests of a privileged class is not simply anti-liberal
to the point of malice (as Nietzsche suggests in the aphorism that precedes this one). It is anti-critical to the point of malice.
These statements on women, the working class, and the need of the privileged class for
thoughtless and obedient "slaves" are not simply isolated opinions on Nietzsche's part, as
sometimes they tend to be read. They are logically tied to other notions that Nietzsche is
commended for holdingsuch as the distinction between the "superior" person and the
"herd," the belief in a "strong" culture, and even the love of one's fate. The fact that we ignore the
concrete side of the issue while holding on to the more abstract side shows that in this case we are much less logical than Nietzsche, for we
are the ones caught in a logical dilemma, while Nietzsche is not. Nietzsche, however, is caught in a much larger type of contradiction even
though his logic is tight with respect to the connection between elitism and oppression. This is the contradiction between his intended
affirmation of life and his reactionary and nihilistic politics. Still, the political implications of Nietzsche's thought can be turned around to
some extent if we ask: was not Nietzsche correct in insisting upon a logical connection between a "strong" masculine ideal, a "strong"
culture, and a blind system of political exploitation and psychological repression? Is it not true that if the goal of one's values is to
implement a "strong" patriarchal system where a few will command and the rest will obey, it is then foolish to allow moral codes which
favor the notions of the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of human beings? Does not the morality of universal human dignity entail in
theory, if not also in practice, the elimination of all forms of elitism, domination, and oppression? In Nietzsche's idea of "greatness" one

thanks to his uninhibited articulation of the

extreme he has exposed the logic of patriarchal domination in its essence. While Nietzsche has
finds the logic of the extremeof this he was well aware. But

outlined various incentives for overturning the democratic influences of modern times and for instituting a "purer" system of patriarchal

it is up to us, not him, to make

the choice as to what we want our political future and our moral values to be. His appeals to
destiny, intolerance, and the suspension of critical questioning of authoritarian political
institutions are not convincing.
domination under the banner of overcoming the "evils" of "effeminacy" and "decadence,"

582

Kritik Answers

Alternative Causes Annihilation

THE ALTERNATIVES DESTRUCTION OF ONTOLOGY CAUSES
VIOLENCE AND ANNIHILATION
Hicks, Prof and Chair of Philosophy @ Queens College of the CUNY, 2K3 (Steven V., Nietzsche,

Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond, Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed. Alan
Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, P. 109, Questia)
This response, however, only succeeds in postponing Heidegger's real objection. For according to Heidegger, psychology (and indeed, all of
the human sciences) are caught up in the web of traditional metaphysical thinking. As such, Nietzsche's 'psychology' is simply

Heidegger argues
that modern metaphysics is defined precisely by the fact that man becomes the measure
and center of beings, and this , in turn, results in the modern technological understanding of
beings as objects for use and control, or as Heidegger says, entities wholly present as standingreserve (Bestand) (QT, 17). 26 This extends even to human beings themselves, who are
increasingly transformed by the human sciences (and their technological systems) into resources
for objectification and control (cf. N, 4:23445). Here, Heidegger anticipates Foucault's claim that modern
technological systems attempt to make human beings wholly present as bio-power, or
subjects completely present for surveillance and control via the disciplinary practices of
institutions (psychological, juridical, carceral) whose aim is to normalize human life. 27 Thus from Heidegger's
perspective, the actual nihilism Nietzsche feared annihilation, spreading violence, and so
forthis evoked by the preponderance, in the modern world, of this productionist,
technological objectification of being, and by the complete ordering of all beings in the
sense of a systematic securing of stockpiles for further technological usage, control, and
domination (N, 4:22934). The relentlessness of [this] usage extends so far that the abode of Beingthat is, the essence of man
is omitted; man is threatened with the annihilation of his essence, and Being itself is
endangered (N, 4:245). Ironically, Heidegger argues, it was precisely Nietzsche's proposing of Being as a
value posited by the will to power that led to this final [nihilistic] step of modern
metaphysics, in which Being comes to appear as will to power (N, 4:234). Simply put, Nietzsche's
doctrine of the will to power succeeds in reducing the whole question of Being to the status
of a value; and this completes the metaphysics of subjectivity initiated by Descartes, which in turn results in a
blindness to the whole question as to what Being itself is. This blindness to Being,
Heidegger argues, is at the root of all nihilism and is connected to the modern
technological/productionist attitude toward the world (cf. N, 4:23132). Why does Heidegger make this claim?
coterminous with metaphysics . [it] lies grounded in the very essence of modern metaphysics (N, 4:2, 8).

Heidegger believes that metaphysics is essentially the history of Being, a history in which Being discloses itself as withdrawn in default
or concealed (cf. N, 4:23032). He basically reads the whole history of Western philosophy as the history of Being and its gradual selfconcealment. In this context, Heidegger praises Nietzsche for his insight into the basic development of that history: In his [Nietzsche's]
view it is nihilism . The phrase 'God Is Dead' is not an atheistic proclamation; it is a formula for the fundamental experience of an event
in Occidental history (N, 1:156). Heidegger

even suggests that Nietzsche came close to recognizing (albeit

that the fundamental question of Being had been omitted, forgotten, or suppressed
within the metaphysical tradition of previous philosophy, and that this omission of the
default of Being in its unconcealment is the very essence of nihilism (cf. N, 4:23032). For
example, when Nietzsche denies truth or refers to Being as an empty fiction (see TI, 481),
Heidegger claims that he is actually experiencing and expressing the nothing or
omission of Being itself in the history of Western philosophy, which is tantamount to
nihilism:
opaquely)

583

Kritik Answers

Nihilism Fails
NIHILISM IS AN INEFFECTIVE MEANS OF RESISTANCE THAT
REPLICATES EVERYTHING BAD ABOUT THE STATUS QUO
Mann, Prof of English @ Pomona, 95 (Paul, Stupid Undergrounds, PostModern Culture 5:3,
Project Muse)

One might find it amusing to assume the pose of someone who states problems with brutal simplicity. As in this little nugget: Every
historical form of cultural and political revolt, transgression, opposition, and escape has turned out to be nothing more than a systemic
function. The notion of recuperation has encountered a thousand alibis and counter-tropes but still constitutes the closest thing cultural
study has to a natural law. Collage, antimelodic high-decibel music, antimasterpieces, romantic primitivism, drunkenness and drugs,
renegade sexuality, criticism itself: it is amazing that a single radical claim can still be made for any of this, and entirely characteristic that

Every conceivable form of negation has been dialectically coordinated into the
mechanism of progress. The future of the anti has not yet been reconceived . That is why it is
it is.

ridiculous to accuse some poor kid with a bad attitude or some putative grownup with a critique but no "positive program for change" of

strictly speaking, nihilism doesn't exist. What was once called nihilism has long
since revealed itself as a general, integral function of a culture that, in all its glorious
positivism, is far more destructive than the most vehement no. Nothing could be more
destructive, more cancerous, than the positive proliferation of civilization (now there's a critical
clich), and all the forms of opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of
advancing it. As for the ethos of "resistance": just because something feels like resistance
and still manages to offend a few people (usually not even the right people) hardly makes it effective. It
is merely ressentiment in one or another ideological drag . And how can anyone still be deluded by youth, by
being nihilistic:

its tedious shrugs of revolt? Even the young no longer believe their myth, although they are quite willing to promote it when convenient.
Punk nihilism was never more than the nihilism of the commodity itself. You should not credit Malcolm McLaren with having realized this
just because he was once pro-situ. All he wanted was to sell more trousers without boring himself to death; indeed he is proof that the guy
with the flashiest ressentiment sells the most rags. And if he wasn't bored, can he be said to have advanced the same favor to us?

NIHILISM ENTRENCHES IDEAS THAT PROMOTE

ARROGANCE AND VICTIMIZATION
Dyson, Assist Prof of Law @ SMU, 05 (Maurice R., Awakening an Empire of Liberty: Exploring
the Root of Socratic Inquiry and Political Nihilism in American Democracy, Democracy Matters:
Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, Vol. 83 No. 2, Wash Univ Law Quarterly)
for West, these three entrenched dogmas are in turn driven by three forms of
"political nihilism." These are evangelical nihilism, paternalistic nihilism, and sentimental
nihilism. "Evangelical nihilism" is a notion of arrogant superiority that justifies might as
right, or in other words, the belief that the U.S. would not be so powerful if we were not right . West
Furthermore,

terms it "evangelical" because of its perceived militant intolerance for dissension as well as blind faith to the belief that the exercise of
power is a predicate to ensuring security and prosperity. For West, the quintessential evangelical nihilist is derived from Plato's Republic

Paternal nihilism, on the other

treats American citizens as victims of deception by government actors who in turn
attempt to superficially appease the masses. These governmental leaders fundamentally
accept corrupt regimes and policies rather than question them . He finds in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The
in the form of Thrasymachus who debates with Socrates the moral superiority of might.(FN1)
hand,

Brothers Karamazov the literary metaphor for paternal nihilism in the form of the Grand Inquisitor. As West points out, this character
knows full well the atrocities of the Inquisition represent a gross distortion of the Christian gospel, but nonetheless, personally takes part

The
political nihilist is faulted here not just for his failure of imagination to envison a truer
democracy, but for his lack of conviction to battle corrupt elites even when history has
shown these battles can be vigorously waged .(FN3) Sentimental nihilism refers to West's belief
that the news media's oversimplification and sensationalized reporting of global events
sacrifices truth for distraction. Sentimental nihilism pacifies the American people by
blunting the critical aspects of news events that implicate corruption in government.
in condemning infidels to death sentences because he believes the corrupted church is the best that mankind can hope for.(FN2)

584

Kritik Answers

Nihilism Causes Terrorism (1/2)

NIHILISM IS THE ROOT OF ALL TERRORISM IT PERVERTS
THE NOTION OF NATIONALISM AND PRIDE AND
LEGITIMIZES UNENDING CYCLES OF VIOLENCE
Ignatieff, Carr Prof of Human Rights @ Harvards Kenndy School of Government, 2K4
(Michael, The Temptations of Nihilism, an extract from The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in
an Age of Terror, New England Review Vol. 25 No. 1/2, P. 54-74)
Neither side in a war on terror is immune from this temptation of coming to see violence as
an end in itself. Agents of a democratic state may find themselves driven by the horror of terror to
torture, to assassinate, to kill innocent civilians, all in the name of rights and democracy.
Succumbing to this inversion is the principal way that both groups slip from the lesser evil to the greater. If, however, this temptation is strong, a strategy of combating
it with lesser evils may not be plausible at all. A lesser evil morality may be too rational. It makes the assumption that violence by a liberal democratic state faced with
terror can be controlled in the name of ethically appropriate ends like rights and dignity. A lesser evil approach to a war on terror would assume, for example, that
agents of a liberal democratic state should be able to hold the line that divides intensive interrogation from torture, or the line that separates targeted assassination of
enemy combatants from assassinations that entail the death of innocent civilians. Current U.S. policy does not allow assassination of civilians in peacetime but does
permit killing of enemy combatants in wartime, with the proviso that such assassinations must be discriminate and avoid collateral damage. This policy--a lesser evil
approach if there ever was one--implies that the agents charged with defending a state have the strength of character, together with a clear enough sense of the values
of the society they are defending, to be trusted with morally ambiguous means. But a perfectionist case against such an approach would argue that morally equivocal
means are hard to control and thus liable to end in betrayal of the values that a liberal democracy should stand for. Hence liberal states should not allow those who
defend them to have any of the moral discretion implied in lesser evil approaches. States should absolutely ban extreme interrogations, targeted assassinations, and
other uses of violence, because once you start with means like these, it becomes next to impossible to prevent the lesser from shading into the greater evil. Another
problem with the lesser evil would be that liberal democratic regimes encourage a kind of moral narcissism, a blinding belief that because this kind of society
authorizes such means, they must be acceptable. Thus democratic values, instead of preventing the lesser from shading into the greater evil, may actually blind
democratic agents to the moral reality of their actions. The nobility of ends is no guarantee against resort to evil means; indeed, the more noble they are, the more
ruthlessness they can endorse. This is why democracy depends on distrust, why freedom's defense requires submitting even noble intentions to the test of adversarial

three distinct ways--the tragic, the cynical, and the fanatical--in which nihilism can
come to dominate both a terrorist campaign and a war on terror. The first might be called
tragic because it occurs despite the political intentions of all concerned, when terrorists and
counterterrorists become trapped in a downward spiral of reprisal and counterreprisal. One
side kills to avenge its last victim; the other side replies to avenge its last victim. Both sides
start with an ethic of restraint and end up in a struggle without end. Here shedding of blood
creates two communities--the terrorists and the counterterrorists --in which loyalty to the group prevails over
institutional accountability or individual principle. Both sides are bonded to their own because both have blood on
their hands or blood to avenge. Their bonds to the group are stronger than any they have to the institutions that could possibly restrain their
behavior. Violence creates belonging and belonging produces closure. Terrorists listen only to
themselves and no longer to restraining messages from the communities their violence is
supposed to serve. Counterterrorist agencies, having suffered losses, bond with each other, view their
civilian superiors as spineless libertarians, chafe under operational restrictions on their use
of force, seek to evade these wherever possible, covering up as they do so, and seek to fight
the terrorists on their own terms. At the bottom of this downward spiral, constitutional police forces and
counterterror units can end up behaving no better than the terrorist cells they are trying to
extirpate. Their moral conduct becomes dependent on the increasingly repellent conduct of
the other side. This is the unintentional path to nihilism, taken by constitutional forces to
defend the fallen and to revenge their losses. In the process, torture and extrajudicial killing may
become routine. Gillo Pontecorvo's masterful film The Battle of Algiers (I965) portrays the Algerian war for independence, between i955 and 196Z, as a
review. I can see

tragic duel in which two sides, conscientiously believing in the rightness of their course, become trapped in just such a downward spiral as we have been considering.
The film may be fictional, but it is drawn from extensive documentary research into the actual history of the Algerian struggle. While clearly siding with the Algerian
revolution, Pontecorvo takes care to avoid any moral caricature of the French, and shows why torture could be seen as a rational and effective way to break up the
terrorist cells working in the Algiers Casbah. Nor does the filmmaker conceal the bloody reality of the liberation struggle, showing the full horror of an attack on a caf
that leaves the street strewn with mangled bodies and traumatized survivors. The film maintains an extraordinarily subtle moral balance, supporting the Algerian
struggle for freedom without mitigating the crimes committed in its name, condemning the French use of torture without failing to do justice to the reality that it was
committed not by brutes but by people with dedicated convictions. The Battle of Algiers thus becomes a testament to the tragedy of terrorist war. Calling this path

In the tragic path, violence, once

used as a means, becomes an end in itself, to the horror of those who are trapped by the
conduct of the other side. In the second path, violence doesn't begin as a means to noble ends. It is used, from
the beginning, in the service of cynical or self-serving ones. On both the terrorist and
counterterrorist sides, there are bound to be individuals who actually enjoy violence for its
own sake. Violence and weapons exert a fascination all their own, and their possession and
use satisfy deep psychological needs. It isn't necessary to delve into the question of why human beings love violence and seek to use
tragic is not to excuse it, merely to distinguish it from a second path, which is altogether more cynical .

weapons as instruments of power and even of sexual gratification. The fact that violence attracts as well as repels is a recurring challenge to the ethics of a lesser evil,
since it explains why the appetite for violence can become insatiable, seeking ever more spectacular effects even though these fail to produce any discernible political
result. Many terrorist groups use political language to mask the absence of any genuine commitment to the cause they defend. In their cynicism, they can become
uncontrollable, because once violence is severed from the pursuit of determinate political ends, violence will not cease even if these goals are achieved. What is true of
terrorists can also characterize counterterrorists. The type of personnel attracted to police and antiterrorist squads may be recruited because they are drawn to violent
means. These means confer power, boost sexual confidence, and enable them to swagger and intimidate others. The type of personality attracted into a counterterror
campaign may not have any intrinsic or reflective commitment to democratic values of restraint. Rules of engagement for the use of deadly force need be obeyed only
when superiors are watching and can be disregarded at any other time. There may always be a gap, therefore, between the values of a liberal democracy when it is
under attack and

continued

585

Kritik Answers

Nihilism Causes Terrorism (2/2)

continued
the conduct of the counterterrorist forces who have to take the war to the enemy. There is no necessary reason to suppose that those who
defend a democracy do so out of any convinced belief in its values. Their chief motivation may be only the thrill of the chase and the
glamour of licensed violence. Liberal states cannot be protected by herbivores. But if we need carnivores to defend us, keeping them in
check, keeping them aware of what it is they are defending, is a recurrent challenge. On the terrorist side, there will always be a gap
between those who take the political goals of a terrorist campaign seriously and those who are drawn to the cause because it offers
glamour, violence, money, and power. It is anyone's guess how many actual believers in the dream of a united Ireland there are in the
ranks of the IRA. But it is a fair bet to suppose that many recruits join up because they want to benefit from the IRA's profitable protection
rackets. The IRA bears as much relation to the Mafia as it does to an insurrectionary cell or a radical political party, and the motivations
that draw young people into the movement are often as criminal as they are political. When criminal goals predominate over political ones,
it becomes difficult for leaders to prevent their followers from turning violence into an end in itself. The criminal allure of terrorist groups
and the cynicism of those who join them are additional reasons why it is a mistake to conciliate or appease a group like the IRA with
political concessions. Their political goals may be subsidiary to their criminal interests, and like any criminal enterprise they can be driven
out of business only by the force of the law. Equally, to express surprise that they tarnish political ideals with squalid tactics, or that they
seem to be indifferent to the costs that their violence imposes on the communities they purport to represent, would be to misunderstand
their real nature and purpose. Not all terrorists, however, are moral cynics. Not all terrorist groups use politics as an excuse for other

There are other groups whose political purposes are genuine, but who
nonetheless end up turning violence into a way of life. These are the groups that have the
characteristics, not of criminal gangs, but of fanatic sects. Here nihilism takes the form, not
of believing in nothing, but of believing in too much. What I mean is a form of conviction so
intense, a devotion so blind, that it becomes impossible to see that violence necessarily
betrays the ends that conviction seeks to achieve. Here the delusion is not tragic, as in the first case, because
believers are not trapped into violence by the conduct of the other side. Nor is it cynical: for these are true believers. They initiate
violence as a sacred and redemptive duty. This is the third path to nihilism, the fanatical use
of high principle to justify atrocity. What is nihilistic is the belief that such goals license all
possible means, indeed obviate any consideration of the human costs. Nihilism here is willed
indifference to the human agents sacrificed on the altar of principle. Here nihilism is not a
belief in nothing at all; it is, rather, the belief that nothing about particular groups of human
beings matters enough to require minimizing harm to them. The high principles commonly used to justify
straightforwardly violent ends.

terrorism were once predominantly secular--varieties of conspiratorial Marxism--but today most of the justifying ideologies are religious.
To call religious justifications of violence nihilistic is, of course, to make a certain kind of value judgment, to assert that there cannot be, in
principle, any metaphysical or God-commanded justification for the slaughter of civilians. From a human rights standpoint, the claim that
such inhumanity can be divinely inspired is a piece of nihilism, an inhuman devaluation of the respect owed to all persons, and moreover a
piece of hubris, since, by definition, human beings have no access to divine intentions, whatever they may be. The hubris is not confined to
vocalizing divine intention. It also consists in hijacking scriptural tradition. The devil can always quote scripture to his use, and there is
never a shortage in any faith of texts justifying the use of force. Equally, all religions contain sacred texts urging believers to treat human
beings decently. Some may be more universalistic in these claims than others. Some may confine the duties of benevolence to fellow
believers, while others may extend these duties to the whole of humankind. But whatever the ambit of their moral concern, all religious
teaching offers some resistance to the idea that it is justifiable to kill or abuse other human beings. This resistance may range from outright

nihilist use of religious doctrine is one that perverts

the doctrine into a justification for inhuman deeds and ignores any part of the doctrine
which is resistant to its violent purposes. The nihilism here engages in a characteristic
inversion: adjusting religious doctrine to rationalize the terrorist goal, rather than subjecting
it to the genuine interrogation of true faith. It is unnecessary here to document the extent to which Al Qaeda has
condemnation to qualified justification as a last resort. A

exploited and distorted the true faith of Islam. To take but one example, the tradition of jihad, which refers to the obligation of the believer
to struggle against inner weakness and corruption, has been distorted into an obligation to wage war against Jews and Americans. In the
hands of Osama bin Laden, the specifically religious and inner-directed content of jihad has been emptied out and replaced by a doctrine
justifying acts of terror. This type of religious justification dramatically amplifies the political impact of terrorist actions. When Al Qaeda
strikes, it can claim that it acts on behalf of a billion Muslims. This may be a lie, but it is an influential one nonetheless. Appropriating
religious doctrine in this way also enables the group to offer potential recruits the promise of martyrdom. Immortality complicates the
relationship between violent means and political ends, for the promise of eternal life has the effect of making it a secondary matter to the
suicide bomber whether or not the act achieves anything political at all. What matters most is securing entry into Paradise. Here political

Once violent means cease to serve

determinate political ends, they take on a life of their own. When personal immortality
becomes the goal, the terrorists cease to think like political actors, susceptible to rational
calculation of effect, and begin to act like fanatics. It is not easy to turn human beings into fanatics. In order to
violence becomes subservient not to a political end but to a personal one.

do so, terrorist groups that use suicide bombers have to create a cult of death and sacrifice, anchored in powerful languages of belief.
Osama bin Laden used an interview with an American journalist in May I998 in Afghanistan to justify terrorism in the language of faith:
The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah, the
tyrants, the traitors who commit acts of treason against their own countries and their own faith and their own prophet and their own
nation.What

is noticeable here is the use of religion not just to justify killing the infidel but to
override the much more serious taboo against killing fellow believers. The function of
nihilism here is to recast real, living members of the Islamic faith as traitors deserving
death. Nihilism takes the form of nullifying the human reality of people and turning them
into targets.

586

Kritik Answers

Nihilism is the Root Cause of Violence

NIHILISM IS THE ROOT OF ALL VIOLENCE AND MANIFESTS
PERMANENT DEATH CULTS IN SOCIETIES
Ignatieff, Carr Prof of Human Rights @ Harvards Kenndy School of Government, 2K4

(Michael, The Temptations of Nihilism, an extract from The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of
Terror, New England Review Vol. 25 No. 1/2, P. 54-74)
Nihilism--which is the blunt name for taking the gloves off--holds real dangers for both
sides. When a democratic state licenses all means to repress a terrorist group, it may only
play into the hands of its enemy. Some terrorist groups deliberately seek to draw reprisals
upon themselves in order to radicalize their own population . As the state's repression increases, the
terrorists respond by tightening their screws on their base of support, replacing a political relation to their own side with one of
unvarnished tyranny, killing or intimidating anyone who questions whether the costs of the campaign are outweighing the gains.
Populations that once supported armed struggle for reasons of conviction become trapped either in fanaticism or in complicit silence. In
the process, political regulation of terrorist groups by their community at large becomes impossible. Moderate voices who might persuade
a community to withdraw their support from terror are silenced. In place of a properly political culture, in which groups and interests
compete for leadership, a people represented by suicide bombers ceases to be a political community at all and becomes a cult, with all the
attendant hysteria, intimidation, and fear. This is the process by which nihilism leads to a war without end. In such a terrorist cult, many
praiseworthy moral virtues are inverted, so that they serve not life but death. Terrorist groups typically expropriate the virtues of the
young--their courage, their headstrong disregard for consequences, their burning desire to establish their own significance--and use these

Once violence
becomes part of a community death cult, the only rational response by a state under attack
must be to eliminate the enemy one by one, either by capture and lifelong imprisonment or
by execution. Those for whom violence has become the driving rationale of conduct cannot
be convinced to desist. They are in a deathly embrace with what they do, and argument
cannot reach them. Nor can failure. It counts for nothing that violence fails to achieve their
political objective because such achievement has long since ceased to be the test of their
effectiveness. It is redemption they are after, and they seek death sure that they have attained it. They have nothing to
negotiate for, and we have nothing to gain by negotiating with them . They will take gestures of
to create an army of the doomed. In this way, violence becomes a career, a way of life that leads only to death.

conciliation as weakness and our desire to replace violence with dialogue as contemptible na"ivet. To say we are at war with Al Qaeda and
suicide bombers in general is to say that political dialogue is at an end. We have nothing to say to them nor they to us.

Either we

prevail or they do, and force must be the arbiter.

587

Kritik Answers

Nihilism Causes Authoritarianism

NIHILISM CULIMINATES IN AUTHORITARIANISM
Christenson, Nippert Prof of Law and Dean @ U of Cincinnati College of Law, 85 (Gordon
A., Uncertainty in Law and its Negation: Reflections, 54 U. Cin. L. Rev. 347)

Some dramatically characterize the trends just described as legal nihilism or the negation of the exercise of legitimate
power without the assertion of substantive theory in its place. As Michael Polanyi so cogently has noted,

nihilism, whether real or imagined, leads [*357] inexorably to

authoritarian responses and to the rise of ideology. The second phenomenon
which gave rise to our particular predicament thus emerged from the conversion of subjective moral judgment into
ideology. Whether derived from the twentieth century revolutions based on socialism or Marxism, on the human rights
movement, or on a resurgence of neo-conservatism, the intellectual roots of such movements are well described in

resulting in the
negation of law and value, are Neitzche's moral and ethical
superiority, Dostoyevski's novels and short stories and the works of the phenomenologists, existentialists and
European and Latin American literatures. Symbolic of that literature, and

structuralists. All ask similar questions. Post-Marxist thinkers -- Habermas, Foucault and Berger and other non-legal

If there
is no common basis for law or morality other than through a
subjective or ideological construct, then the question is not what
values underpin a particular legal system, but how one's
subjective preferences may be infused with power, strategy and
tactics throughout the general community or imposed by
coercion. The lawyer-advocate has long used various techniques based on pragmatic ideas of progress, the
critical scholars -- have gained influence in legal scholarship which finds them to be useful analytic tools.

frontier and change. These have been associated with the romanticism of the defender of the poor and downtrodden,
the fighter for civil rights, the human-rights warrior and the social reformer, who use courts and law as instruments of
social change. In this construct, law as a secular system has no normative content that is not ultimately subjective. If
God is dead, all things are morally possible. The main claim to legitimacy or validity rests in process; namely that the
advocates who represent a particular morality or a particular social philosophy fight and prevail as warriors and
advocates in an existing decisionmaking process, akin to chivalry, aimed at changing official behavior or custom by
fighting injustice, admittedly a subjective construct. Once, however, the subjective advocacy model of changing the
social structure is an accepted way of life, the natural reaction is that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If the
objective validity of the normative system tacitly is rejected by those who seek to change it, then radicals holding an
opposite belief might just as well produce a similar claim by an activism with subjective preferences even more firmly
rooted within the vices of common life. The dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis that seemed to move outward
from the subjective to an objective world-view could work for the radical right just as well as for the Marxist left!

588

Kritik Answers

**Nonviolence**
Nonviolence Answers: 2AC (1/6)
FIRST, NO LINK PLAN DOESNT TAKE A STANCE ON
VIOLENT RESPONSE. IT ONLY ENDS CURRENT DETAINMENT
PRACTICES
SECOND, PERM DO BOTH
WE MUST BE PRAGMATIC PACIFISTS TO END STATE
VIOLENCEABSOLUTE PACIFISM FAILS TO CHALLENGE
THE POLICIES OF THE STATE BY OPTING OUT OF THE GAME
ENTIRELY
Robert L. Phillips, professor of philosophy, War and Justice, 19 84, p. 114-6
It conceivable that governments might grant selective objection the same legal status as it
gives to pacifism? The answer, I fear, is no. And that tells us something important about
pacifism. Governments are prepared to tolerate pacifism, because it poses no threat either to
their political policies or to the manner in which wars are con ducted. The pacifist objects
equally to all wars waged by all governments. In this sense he opts out of the game
altogether. By contrast, the selective objector will be forced to analyze both the policy
decisions of the government as well as the conduct of the armed forces. He will be publicly
carrying out an officially sanctioned comparison between mutually agreed just-war criteria
and the actual performance of the government. That is a lot to expect of governments as we
know them, but there is still more. What would be the implication of a state granting an exemption on selective grounds? Fundamentally, the state would be agreeing with the claim
that its war policies may be reasonably interpreted as unjust. The belief that all war is wrong
is a proposition which states might agree is debatable among rational men, and, therefore,
claims to exemption on this basis may be allowed. It is a very different matter, however, to
grant exemption for a particular war, for here we are faced not with two philosophical
theories about violence but with a factual dispute. Selective objection presupposes that both
the government and the claimant agree upon the criteria for undertaking a justified war and
the rules for conducting it. The claimant would have to show, in order to qualify for an
exemption, that his government is engaged in acts of war which a person might reasonably
characterize as immoral. As such an admission is inseparable from policy questions, it is inconceivable that any government would be willing (or politically able) to wage war while
publicly agreeing that there is sufficient reason to doubt the morality of that war to grant
exemptions from it. This is not to say that individuals should not refuse to fight in wars
which they believe are immoral but to acknowledge that governments cannot be expected to
institutionalize such a practice. The evenhandedness of the pacifist who objects to all wars
does not threaten the particular policies of any state. In condemning them all equally,
pacifism exempts itself from political reality: What is needed, then, is not a general
pacifism but a discriminating conscientious refusal to engage in war in certain circum stances. States have not been loath to recognize pacifism and to grant it a special status. The
refusal to take part in all war under any conditions is an unworldly view bound to remain a
sectarian doctrine. It no more challenges the states authority than the celibacy of priests
challenges the sanctity of marriage. By exempting pacifists from its prescriptions the state
may even seem to display a certain magnanimity. But conscientious refusal based upon the
principles of justice as they apply to particular conflicts is another matter. For such refusal is
an affront to the governments pretensions, and when it becomes widespread, the
continuation of an unjust war may prove impossible.

THIRD, PLAN IS NECESSARY FOR ALTERNATIVE SOLVENCY

IN THE SQUO PEOPLE WILL STILL BE VIOLENTLY
DETAINED. THIS MAKES A DOUBLE BLIND EITHER THE
589

Kritik Answers

ALT CAUSES PLAN AND THERES NO LINK DIFFERENTIAL

OR IT DOESNT SOLVE

590

Kritik Answers

Nonviolence Answers: 2AC (2/6)

FOURTH, MULTILAT SOLVES BY ALLOWING US TO ADDRESS
PROBLEMS WITH INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION,
SOLVING BAD FORMS OF VIOLENCE. CROSS-APPLY NYE
FIFTH, WAR AND VIOLENCE ARE ENDEMIC TO IR POLITICS,
MOVING AWAY WILL INEVITABLY RESULT IN GREAT
POWER WARS
MEARSHEIMER 2001

[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the
Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg xi-xii. )
The twentieth century was a period of great international violence.In World
War I (1914-18), roughly nine million people died on European battlefields. About fifty million people were killed duringWorld War 11(1939-45), well
over half of them civilians. Soon after the end of World War II, the Cold War engulfed the globe. During this con-frontation, the Soviet Union and its
Warsaw Pact allies never directly fought the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies,but many millions died in proxy wars in
Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Millions also died in the century's lesser, yet still fierce, wars, including
the Russo-Japanese con-flicts of 1904-5 and 1939, the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1920, the Russo-Polish War of 1920-

Hopes
for peace will probably not be realized, because the great powers that
shape the international system fear each other and compete for power
as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant
power over others, because having dominant power is the best means
to ensure one's own survival. Strength ensures safety, and the greatest
strength is the greatest insurance of safety. States facing this incentive are fated to clash as each
competes for advantage over the others. This is a tragic situation, but there is no escaping it
unless the states that make up the system agree to form a world government. Such a vast transformation is hardly a realistic prospect, however , so
conflict and war are bound to continue as large and enduring features
of world politics.
21, the various Arab-Israeli wars, and the han-Iraq War of 1980-88. This cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium.

SIXTH, THEIR AUTHORS MISUNDERSTAND IR, WHICH IS A

SELF HELP SYSTEM. RATIONAL ACTORS ARE DETERRED BY
VIOLENCE, CREATING WORLD PEACE

591

Kritik Answers

Nonviolence Answers: 2AC (3/6)

SEVENTH, NON-VIOLENCE FAILS AND MAKES US
COMPLICIT WITH GENOCIDETHEIR ALTERNATIVE
DEVALUES LIFE AND LEADS TO MORE CONFLICT AND
MILLIONS OF DEATHS
Ketels, Assoc Prof of English @ Temple U, 96 (Violet B., Havel to the Castle! The Power of
the Word, 548 Annals 45, November, Lexis)

Havel stresses the potential of truth and humane values to transform human consciousness incrementally over time. We must constantly work for every good thing

Violence may be unavoidable in the

face of totalitarian savagery. Still, it must remain a means of last resort. Repeatedly, he warns that violence breeds
violence. Havel is not, however, a pacifist , as that term applies to Quakers or others who organize peace movements. n40 Although
and struggle against violence. But Havel is tough-minded, his vision comprehensive and realistic.

the regime Havel and his fellow dissidents resisted for more than thirty years accused them of terrorist tactics and plots, they conscientiously sought legal
justification for their resistance, using the letter even of unjust laws to manifest support for the principle of legality. Their attitude was "fundamentally hostile to the
notion of violent change--simply because it places its faith in violence," Havel writes in one place. He immediately restates the point, however, in a powerfully

"the 'dissident' attitude can only accept violence as a necessary evil in extreme
situations, when direct violence can only be met by violence and where remaining passive
would in effect mean supporting violence." n41 He recalls us to the tragic blindness of
European pacifism that helped to prepare the ground for World War II. He points to the fact
that the Czechs sent troops to the Persian Gulf and stood willing to contribute to a U.N. force in the former
Yugoslavia. But he is at pains to condemn violence used as a quick fix to change political systems--the sacrifice of human beings here and now for "abstract
significant parenthesis:

political visions of the future." The problems in human society "lie far too deep to be settled through [*55] mere systemic changes, either governmental or
technological." n42 Havel writes and thinks out of a unique humanist tradition that has been continuous in Czech history. He has specifically identified with the
humanism of the founder of the Czech state, Tomas Masaryk, who regarded "ethical, aesthetic and scientific categories" as "no less real than bread and butter."
Masaryk felt the need for a social revolution "more moral and less materialistic than that envisaged by the Marxists." Like Havel, he hoped to avoid violence, but he
does not rule it out altogether. His language is as circumspect as Havel's: We must consistently reject every act of violence; otherwise we shall never be able to

We may, should, must protect, defend ourselves. In extreme cases with

the sword. But even in self-defense we must restrain ourselves from new, active acts of violence. n43 In an address prepared for delivery at a 1985 peace
conference, Havel explains the reticence of Europeans to join Western peace movements as rooted in the
skepticism of those who have already been burned by succumbing to other forms of
utopianism, specifically the Stalin-Leninist variety, which grotesquely deformed its utopian
principles as soon as it got power. The very word "peace" has been drained of all content by
the European experience of "peace in our time." n44 The Western version of peace sounds far too much like appeasement.
disentangle ourselves from violence.

Havel speculates whether World War II, with its millions of corpses, could have been avoided if the Western democracies had stood up to Hitler forcefully and in time.

the inability to risk, in extremis, even life itself to save

what gives it meaning and a human dimension leads not only to the loss of meaning but
finally and inevitably to the loss of life as well--and not one life only but thousands and
millions of lives. n45
He ascribes to the Czech people as a whole the firmly rooted idea that

592

Kritik Answers

Nonviolence Answers: 2AC (4/6)

EIGHTH, OUR PLAN IS THE EXEMPTION NUCLEAR
ANNIHILATION MUST BE PREVENTED BEFORE NONVIOLENCE
Marty, Professor of Political Science. Mepbis State University, 71 (William R., The Journal
Politics, Vol. 33, No. I, Feb, p. 19-20, JSTOR)

Defenders of nonviolence sometimes level a final crushing charge against

violencethat it is, in an age of nuclear weapons, a sure path to annihilation.
Dr. King, for example, argued that our choice is no longer nonviolence or
violence, rather it is nonviolence or nonexistence.17 The only new element in
this argument for nonviolence is the threat of nuclear annihilation. That
threat, presumably, makes total commitment to nonviolence both necessary
and possible. In fact, however, certain types of violence pose no threat of
nuclear warfare, hence the horrors of nuclear warfare provide no reason or
incentive to give up these types of violence; other types of violence pose a real
threat of nuclear warfare, but the dangers involved in abandoning
conventional weapons will seem greater and more immediate, hence
conventional violence is unlikely to be abandoned; and, finally, realistic plans
for community order and nuclear disarmament, the most likely path to
survival, depend, at least potentially, upon violent enforcement. For these
reasons, the call to total commitment to nonviolence in order to avoid total
nuclear annihilation is neither rationally necessary nor psychologically likely
to be adopted. Each of the listed objectives deserves elaboration. First, certain
types of violence pose no threat of nuclear annihilation. The man or woman
who keeps a weapon in the home to deal with intruders (burglars, sex
criminals, rioters) may be unwise for several reasons, but not because his or
her weapon poses a threat of nuclear warfare. Whether this person uses a
weapon against an intruder, or resists nonviolently, or submits, will have no
effect on whether nuclear war is waged between nations, though it will have
considerable effect on his or her personal safety. To ask this person to disarm
in order to avoid nuclear warfare is as ridiculous as it would be to ask city
officials having no say whatever in the decision to wage nuclear warfare to
disarm their police in order to avoid nuclear annihilation. Even on a national
and international level there are types of violence that pose little threat of
nuclear warfare. In Chad and Sudan, for example, there has been guerrilla and
civil warfare for years, but the threat of nuclear warfare resulting from these
conflicts is small or nonexistent because nuclear weapons don't exist in those
nations and because nations with nuclear weapons have no incentive to
intervene that is worth a nuclear confrontation. In these cases the threat of
nuclear warfare is inadequate as an incentive to adopt nonviolence because no
apparent threat of nuclear warfare exists. In sum, from the individual to the
international level, there are types of violence that pose no real threat of
nuclear warfare, and certainly are not perceived by those employing them as
threatening nuclear warfare; hence they have no incentive to adopt
nonviolence as an alternative to nuclear warfare. In other cases, such as the
continuing crisis in the Middle East, the possibility of nuclear warfare is real,
but the threat is unlikely to cause renunciation of violence because other
dangers seem greater and more immediate. To Israel the dangers of adopting
nonviolence in the face of Arab hatred and calls for national extinction seem
greater than the dangers of nuclear warfare resulting from armed defense. The
Israelis are unlikely to make a total commitment to nonviolence in all
circumstances despite a real threat of nuclear confrontation. The same
situation occurs in Vietnam. There was at least a remote chance of nuclear
confrontation in Vietnam at one time, but that did not provide adequate
incentive to any of the involved parties, from the Viet Cong to the United States
and Russia, to renounce all types of violence, though it did produce some
restraints on United States and Russian intervention. Again, when the danger
of death is already great by conventional means, and when abandonment of

593

Kritik Answers
conventional weapons appears as suicidal, then the threat of nuclear warfare
will he inadequate as an incentive to renounce all types of violence. An appeal
to the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, or to the Saigon government, or to
both, to abandon violence in order to avoid the possibility of nuclear war would
be fruitless.

594

Kritik Answers

Nonviolence Answers: 2AC (5/6)

EVEN NON-VIOLENT MOVEMENTS INEVITABLY BECOME
TOTALITARIAN AND VIOLENTTHE LEADERS CANNOT
CONTROL THE MASSES
Steger, Prof in the Dept of Politics and Government @ Illinois State U, 00 (Manfred B., Gandhis
Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power)

Urging all Indians to crown the swadeshi campaign by publicly burning their foreign-made clothes, Gandhi spoke in glowing terms of the
"inspiring sight" of large piles of garments going up in smoke: "And as the flames leapt up and enveloped the whole pyramid [of clothes],
there was a shout of joy resounding through the air. It was as if our shackles had been broken asunder. A glow of freedom passed through
the vast concourse. It was a noble act nobly performed."62 Yet, the flames of swadeshi kindled by thousands of ordinary Indian also
symbolized, like no other satyagraha action, the fundamental tension at the core of Gandhi's nonviolent nationalism. For the Ma-hatma,
the burning clothes manufactured in England conveyed India's economic, political, and spiritual emancipation from the threads
of oppression. He viewed these spectacles as symbols of the nonviolent purification of a corrupted civilization and its materialist culture,
and, therefore, the purgation of a tainted Indian identity. For othersincluding some of Gandhi's closest associates and friends, like
Charlie Andrewsthe

flames of swadeshi signified a rather violent act of self-definition that

seemed to be an ominous sign of things to come: the obliteration of the Other by nationalist
passions set ablaze. Indeed, the first indication that Gandhi was incapable of controlling the
nationalist passions of the masses set free during the noncooperation campaign came as
early as April 1921, when a sub-inspector of police and four constables were killed in an act
of mob violence provoked by the trial of Khilafat workers in the city of Malegaon. Gandhi chided the perpetrators for having "put
back the hands of the clock of progress," and reminded them that, "Non-violence is the rock on which the whole structure of non-cooperation is built."63 Yet

another incident took place in Bombay on November 17, 1921, the day the Prince
of Wales arrived there for an official visit. Violent attacks were launched by Hindu and
Muslim noncoop-erators upon Parsi and Christian Indians who had voluntarily taken part in
the Prince's welcome. The violence escalated as many non-cooperators looted shops and
burned clothes. Soon these actions expanded to the torching of entire buildings and the
beating of government officials, ultimately leading to the deaths of several policemen and
demonstrators. When, after three days of violence, the passions had finally cooled down, fifty-eight Bombay citizens
had been killed and nearly four hundred had been injured .64

EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE REQUIRES A

REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION, MEANING THAT THE
ALTERNATIVE OCCURS AGAINS THE BACKGROUND OF
COVERT VIOLENCE
Zizek '99

[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish
Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 153-4//uwyo-ajl]
It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical
restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. Does not Lacan himself provide a number of
hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of

psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does not already posit a 'new harmony', a new
Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean for one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks,
because it is Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is
confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity, a
negative gesture of withdrawal, precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identifiction
with a Cause: negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic
identification - that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it, but is simultaneously
obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what
'Death' stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of the world', the self-withdrawal , the absolute
contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate
clean' that opens up the domain of the symbolic New Beginning , of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained
St Paul or Badiou:

by a newly emerged Master-Signifier. Here, Lacan parts company with St Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already was dead - that is to say, after Freud,

every such Event ultimately remains a semblance obfuscating a

preceding Void whose Freudian name is death drive. So Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination of the exact status
one cannot directly have faith in a Truth-Event;

of this domain beyond the rule of the Law. That is to say: like Lacan, Badiou delineates the contours of a domain beyond the Order of Being, beyond the politics of
service des biens, beyond the 'morbid' super ego connection between Law and its transgressive desire. For Lacan, however, the Freudian topic of the death drive

the 'death drive' is not the outcome of the morbid confusion

of Life and Death caused by the intervention of the symbolic Law. For Lacan, the uncanny
domain beyond the Order of Being is what he calls the domain 'between the two deaths', the precannot be accounted for in the terms of this connection:

595

Kritik Answers
ontologicalf domain of monstrous spectral apparitions, the domain that is 'immortal', yet not in the Badiouian sense of the
immortality of participating in Truth, but in the sense of what Lacan calls lamella, of the monstrous 'undead' object-libido.18

596

Kritik Answers

Nonviolence Answers: 2AC (6/6)

TURN - ATTEMPTING TO CLEANSE LANGUAGE OF VIOLENCE
FETISHIZES AUTHENTICITY, RESULTING IN POLITICAL
DISENGAGEMENT BECAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE AT THE
HEART OF ALL LANGUAGE AND INTERACTION
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 137-8//uwyo-ajl]
Thus, what secondly distinguishes the 'metaphysical innocence' of Rameau is his pursuit of violence - not only the violence of determinate negation, of alienation from
culture and the serial progression of knowledge, but the violence of imperfection, of disrupted subjectivity, of unforeseen catastrophes and superfluous resources, of
human inconsistency and what Gillian Rose calls the 'agon' of existence. Violence, like suffering and fickleness for Dostoevsky, represents subjective (as against

. Violence
increases as the result not of a deterioration in social behaviour but of a lowering in the
cultural threshold beyond which action appears as violence. In such a context Rameau's disintegration, his
objective) culture, a last manifestation of individual volition, and a point of resistance to what BaudriUard calls the 'triumph' of simulation

'epigrammatic' existence and his cultivation of violence represent the final recourse of a disfranchised and alienated subjectivity faced with an apparently sewn up,
indifferent world.
In postmodernity this threshold between action and violence is lower, perhaps, than ever before. Political correctism, 'Queer' theory, Communitarianism, the
liberation discourse of the Internet, calls for homogenization of the private and public lives of politicians, the new discipline of 'postmodern ethics', all are varying

of a fetishization of objective culture. To find

intolerable the violence of linguistic oppression, of 'inauthentic' sexual identity (the product of Freud's 'family romance', etc.), of
instances of a collective endeavour to put a freeze on reason as risk, the consequence

political antagonism, of the formalization of truth in its dissemination, of the compart mentalization of public and private life, of the indeterminacy of moral options,

is in every case to subscribe to a peculiar literalism, to evince a profound discomfort with the
signifying relation, to take the signifier persistently for the thing itself, in such a way that
political activity is replaced with a series of cosmetic adjustments to objective culture.
Rameau's cynicism therefore represents a commitment to subjective culture, to reality, to the referent and to the signified, to the truth of the world and of the
individual. Cynicism constitutes a certain necessary indifference to objective culture, a certain subjective wager, a projection of the self beyond objective culture and

In a climate in which 'authenticity' is at a premium, where all action has been

proscribed as intolerably violent, and where self consciousness is therefore only a disabling mechanism to be discad, cynicism
appears as a spirit in disintegration, the monopoly broker of disinvestment in the present, the
sole locus of reason and of faith in anything other than the phenomenal here and now, the disposition which alone embodies both energy and depth .
beyond its own limits.

DETERRENCE IS NECESSARY FOR WORLD PEACE

Robinson 2001
[C. Paul, Sandi National Laboraties, A White Paper:Pursuing a New Nuclear Weapons Policy for the
21st Century, March 22, www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Nuclear-Weapons-Policy-21stC.htm, 9-2306//uwyo-ajl]
I served as an arms negotiator on the last two agreements before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and have spent most of my career enmeshed in the complexity of
nuclear weapons issues on the government side of the table. It is abundantly clear (to me) that formulating a new nuclear weapons policy for the start of the 21st
Century will be a most difficult undertaking. While the often over-simplified picture of deterrence during the Cold War-two behemoths armed to the teeth, staring

, there are nevertheless huge arsenals of nuclear weapons and

delivery systems, all in quite usable states, that could be brought back quickly to their Cold
War postures. Additionally, throughout the Cold War and ever since, there has been a steady proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass
each other down-has thankfully retreated into history

destruction by other nations around the globe. The vast majority of these newly armed states are not U.S. allies, and some already are exhibiting hostile behaviors,
while others have the potential to become aggressors toward the U.S., our allies, and our international interests.
Russia has already begun to emphasize the importance of its arsenal of nuclear weapons to compensate for its limited conventional capabilities to deal with hostilities
that appear to be increasing along its borders. It seems inescapable that the U.S. must carefully think through how we should be preparing to deal with new threats
from other corners of the world, including the role that nuclear weapons might serve in deterring these threats from ever reaching actual aggressions.

the abolition of nuclear weapons as an impractical dream in any foreseeable future. I came to this view
from several directions. The first is the impossibility of ever "uninventing" or erasing from
the human mind the knowledge of how to build such weapons. While the sudden appearance of a few tens of nuclear weapons causes only a
small stir in a world where several thousands of such weapons already exist, their appearance in a world without nuclear
weapons would produce huge effects. (The impact of the first two weapons in ending World War II should be a sufficient example.) I
I personally see

believe that the words of Winston Churchill, as quoted by Margaret Thatcher to a special joint session of the U.S. Congress on February 20, 1985, remain convincing
on this point: "Be careful above all things not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure, and more sure than sure, that other means of preserving the peace are
in your hands."

the majority of the nations who have now acquired arsenals of nuclear
weapons believe them to be such potent tools for deterring conflicts that they would never
surrender them. Against this backdrop, I recently began to worry that because there were few public statements by U.S. officials in reaffirming the
Similarly, it is my sincere view that

unique role which nuclear weapons play in ensuring U.S. and world security, far too many people (including many in our own armed forces) were beginning to believe
that perhaps nuclear weapons no longer had value. It seemed to me that it was time for someone to step forward and articulate the other side of these issues for the
public: first, that nuclear weapons remain of vital importance to the security of the U.S. and to our allies and friends (today and for the near future); and second, that

nuclear weapons will likely have an enduring role in preserving the peace and preventing
world wars for the foreseeable future. These are my purposes in writing this paper.

597

Kritik Answers

#2 Pragmatic Pacifism Perm: 1AR (1/2)

WE MUST ADOPT AN INTRINSIC FORM OF PACIFISM
ABSOLUTE PACIFISM JUSTIFIES PASSIVITY IN THE FACE OF
ATROCIOUS ACTS LIKE RAPE OR GENOCIDE
Robert L. Phillips, professor of philosophy, War and Justice, 19 84, p. 101-2
Let us label this position intrinsicalism and contrast it with what I shall call tactical
pacifism. Someone who believes that it is morally permissible to use force to resist or
prevent violence might adopt the pacifist stance as a purely tactical matter. He might judge
that pacifism is likely to be the best means of bringing about peace. This could happen in at
least two ways. It might be thought that pacifism is the appropriate response because of pe culiar historical circumstances. Thus, India in 1946 and the United States in the 1960s could
be seen as places where nonviolent resistance would be an appropriate tac tic. In both of
those places the rule of law obtained to the degree that the penalties for such disobedience
were relatively mild, and there was a chance that such tactics might succeed. However, the
same person could well decide that pacifism was not obligatory in Nazi Germany or Stalinist
Russia. Someone might also adopt tactical pacifism based upon a judgment about the actual
possibility of using force justly in the modern era. While admitting the theoretical possi bility
of justified force, it may be thought that as long as certain sorts of weapons are retained, or
as long as terror is officially sanctioned, then a justified war simply cannot be fought. Both of
these versions of tactical pacifism are compatible with bellum justum; indeed, they are
entailed by that doctrine. Neither makes an a priori commitment to the position that the use
of force will always, under all conceivable circumstances, be wrong. The behavior of the tactical pacifist may be indistinguishable from that of the intrinsicalist on many occasions, but
the former leaves open the question of whether force is justified in a given circumstance, and
this marks an important moral difference. Thus, intrinsicalism is the only version of
pacifism which can be described as a moral position opposed to bellurn justum. In
Narvesons words, To hold the pacifist position as a genuine, full-blooded moral principle is
to hold that nobody has a right to fight back when attacked, that fight ing back is inherently
evil, as such. It means we are mistaken in supposing we have a right of self-protection.

MUST BACK UP NON-VIOLENCE WITH THE THREAT OF

VIOLENCE ACTION OF MLK AND MALCOLM X PROVE THIS
SOLVES BEST
J. A. H. Futterman, Ph.D. from UT-Austin and Physicist at the University of California's
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Obscenity and Peace: Meditations on the Bomb, 1990- 94,
http://www.dogchurch.com/scriptorium/nuke.html, UK: Fisher
Even when non-violence does succeed, it does so by rallying the majority of the population
toward whom it is directed to stop the direct perpetrators of injustice by force -- the force of
law in the form of the police, the prisons, and the polls -- force that necessarily includes the
threat of violence. In other words, non-violent resistance harnesses (or co-opts), rather than
eliminates violence.
In fact, non-violence is sometimes even helped by the threat of violence to achieve its
objectives. The non-violence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was complemented by the
willingness to use "any means necessary" of Malcolm X. These two men were sending white
America the same message concerning justice and racial equality. If whites failed to respond
to the message stated gently, whites would be given the opportunity to respond to it stated
violently. It took both statements to achieve the progress made thus far.

598

Kritik Answers

#2 Pragmatic Pacifism Perm: 1AR (2/2)

WE DONT ADVOCATE VIOLENCE, JUST DEFENSE AGAINST
OPPRESSION
Hans Massaquoi, Ebony, February 1993, p. 36
Now the reporter wants to know whether Malcolm X suggests using violence. The benign
expression vanishes and his eyes become fierce. We dont advocate violence, but nonviolent tactics based solely on morality can only succeed when you are dealing with a
basically moral people, he explains. A man who oppresses another man because of his
color is not moral. It is the duty of every Afro-American to protect himself [herself] against
mass murderers, bombers, lynchers, floggers, brutalizers and exploiters. If the government
is unable or unwilling to protect us, we reserve our right as citizens to defend ourselves by
whatever means necessary. A man with a rifle or club can only be stopped by a person
armed with a rifle or club.
[herself is my feminist editing, ceo]

599

Kritik Answers

A2 Violence Snowballs: 1AR

THE STRATEGIC EXERCISE OF VIOLENCE DOESNT
SNOWBALL INTO A CULT OF TERRORIT IS A NECESSARY
PART OF OUR STRATEGIC REPERTOIRE OF RESISTANCE
Ward Churchill, (Keetoowah Band Cherokee) Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of
American Indian Studies, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 90-92
This perception of pacifism as a self-justifying ideological preemption of proper praxical
consideration, subliminally intended to perpetuate the privileged status of a given
progressive elite, is helpful in determining what is necessary to arrive at a true liberatory
praxis within advanced capitalist contexts. The all but unquestioned legitimacy accruing to
the principles of pacifist practice must be continuously and comprehensively subjected to
the test of whether they, in themselves, are capable of delivering the bottom-line
transformation of state-dominated social relations which alone constitutes the
revolutionary/liberatory process. Where they are found to be incapable of such delivery, the
principles must be broadened or transcended altogether as a means of achieving an
adequate praxis. By this, it is not being suggested that nonviolent forms of struggle are or
should be abandoned, nor that armed struggle should be the normative standard of
revolutionary performance, either practically or conceptually. Rather, it is to follow the line
of thinking recently articulated by Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) when he noted: If we
are to consider ourselves as revolutionaries, we must acknowledge that we have an
obligation to succeed in pursuing revolution. Here, we must acknowledge not only the power
of our enemies, but our own power as well. Realizing the nature of our power, we must not
deny ourselves the exercise of the options available to us; we must utilize surprise, cunning
and flexibility; we must use the strength of our enemy to undo him, keeping him confused
and off-balance. We must organize with perfect clarity to be utterly unpredictable. When our
enemies expect us to respond to provocation with violence, we must react calmly and
peacefully; just as they anticipate our passivity, we must throw a grenade. What is at issue
is not therefore the replacement of hegemonic pacifism with some cult of terror. Instead, it
is the realization that, in order to be effective and ulti mately successful, any revolutionary
movement within advanced capitalist nations must develop the broadest possible range of
thinking/action by which to confront the state. This should be conceived not as an array of
component forms of struggle but as a continuum of activity stretching from petitions/letter
writing and so forth through mass mobilization/demonstrations, onward into the arena of
armed self-defense, and still onward through the realm of offensive military operations
(e.g., elimination of critical state facilities, targeting of key individuals within the
governmental/corporate apparatus, etc.). All of this must be apprehended as a holism, as an
internally consistent liberatory process applicable at this generally-formulated level to the
late capitalist context no less than to the Third World. From the basis of this fundamental
understanding and, it may be asserted, only from this basis can a viable liberatory
praxis for North America emerge. It should by now be self-evident that, while a substantial
even preponderant measure of nonviolent activity is encompassed within any
revolutionary praxis, there is no place for the profession of principled pacifism to preclude
much less condemn the utilization of violence as a legitimate and necessary method of
achieving liberation. 167 The dismantling of the false consciousness inherent in the ideology
of nonviolent revolution is therefore of primary importance in attaining an adequate
liberatory praxis.

TACTICAL USE OF VIOLENCE IS NECESSARY

Ed Mead, a guy who went to prison for violent protest, 19 98, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 14
Those who denounce the use of political violence as a matter of principle, who advocate
nonviolence as a strategy for progress, are wrong. Nonviolence is a tactical question, not a
strategic one. The most vicious and violent ruling class in the history of humankind will not
give up without a physical fight. Nonviolence as a strategy thus amounts to a form of liberal

600

Kritik Answers
accommodation and is bound to fail. The question is not whether to use violence in the
global class struggle to end the rule of international imperialism, but only when to use it.

601

Kritik Answers

#5 Violence Inevitable: 1AR

POWER IS ZERO SUM THE ALTERNATIVE ONLY SHIFTS
POWER ELSEWHERE
John Mearsheimer, Professor at University of Chicago, 2001 (The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics p. 34)
Consequently, states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special
effort to maximize their share of world power. Specifically, they look for opportunities to alter the

balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential

rivals. States employ a variety of meanseconomic, diplomatic, and militaryto shift the balance of power in
their favor, even if doing so makes other states suspicious or even hostile. Because one states gain in
power is another states loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing
with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other
states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states
are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to survive. In
short, great powers have aggressive intentions.

602

Kritik Answers

#7 Pacifism Allows Atrocity: 1AR

VIOLENCE IS KEY TO RESIST OMNICIDEPACIFISM IS
MORALLY BANKRUPT COMPLICITY IN THE VIOLENCE OF
THE STATE
Mike Ryan, Canadian anti-imperialist, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 161
We recognize the right of oppressed peoples to respond to their oppression with violence,
but we abstain from engaging in violence ourselves. Thus we recognize our own
participation in the oppression of other peoples while we also attempt to deny the critical
situation in which we ourselves are found today, a circumstance described by Rosalie Bertell
in an earlier quote. If, as Bertell suggests, we are sitting upon a dying earth, and
consequently dying as a species solely as a result of the nature of our society, if the
technology we have developed is indeed depleting the earth, destroying the air and water,
wiping out entire species daily, and steadily weakening us to the point of extinction, if
phenomena such as Chernobyl are not aberrations, but are (as I insist they are) mere
reflections of our daily reality projected at a level where we can at last recognize its true
meaning, then is it not time--long past time --when we should do any thing, indeed
everything, necessary to put an end to such madness? Is it not in fact an act of unadulterated
self-defense to do so? Our adamant refusal to look reality in its face, to step outside our
white skin privilege long enough to see that it is killing us, not only tangibly reinforces the
oppression of people of colour the world over, it may well be the single most important
contributor to an incipient omnicide, the death of all life as we know it. In this sense, it may
well be that our self-imposed inability to act decisively, far from having anything at all to do
with the reduction of violence, is instead perpetuating the greatest process of violence in
history. It might well be that our moral position is the most mammoth case of moral
bankruptcy of all time.

603

Kritik Answers

Pacifism = State Collusion (1/2)

PACIFIST PROTEST IS A COLLUSION WITH THE STATEIT
HAS ZERO REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL
Ward Churchill, (Keetoowah Band Cherokee) Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of
American Indian Studies at University of Colorado, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 61-62
Precisely. The preoccupation with avoiding actions which might provoke violence is thus
not based on a sincere belief that violence will, or even can, truly be avoided. Pacifists, no
less than their unpacifist counterparts, are quite aware that violence already exists as an
integral component in the execution of state policies and requires no provocation; this is a
formative basis of their doctrine. What is at issue then cannot be a valid attempt to stave off
or even minimize violence per se. Instead, it can only be a conscious effort not to refocus
state violence in such a way that it would directly impact American pacifists themselves.
This is true even when it can be shown that the tactics which could trigger such a refocusing
might in themselves alleviate a real measure of the much more massive state-inflicted
violence occurring elsewhere; better that another 100,000 Indochinese peasants perish
under a hail of cluster bombs and napalm than Americas principled progressives suffer real
physical pain while rendering their governments actions impracticable. Such conscientious
avoidance of personal sacrifice (i.e., dodging the experience of being on the receiving end of
violence, not the inflicting of it) has nothing to do with the lofty ideals and integrity by which
American pacifists claim to inform their practice. But it does explain the real nature of such
curious phenomena as movement marshals, steadfast refusals to attempt to bring the seat of
government to a standstill even when a million people are on hand to accomplish the task,
and the consistently convoluted victim-blaming engaged in with regard to domestic groups
such as the Black Panther Party. Massive and unremitting violence in the colonies is
appalling to right-thinking people but ultimately acceptable when compared with the
unthinkable alternative that any degreee of real violence might be redirected against
mother country radicals. Viewed in this light, a great many things make sense. For
instance, the persistent use of the term responsible leadership in describing the normative
nonviolent sector of North American dissent always somewhat mysterious when applied
to supposed radicals (or German Jews) is clarified as signifying nothing substantially
different from the accommodation of the status quo it implies in more conventional settings.
The rules of the game have long been established and tacitly agreed to by both sides of the
ostensible oppositional equation: demonstrations of resistance to state policies will be
allowed so long as they do nothing to materially interfere with the implementation of those
policies. The responsibility of the oppositional leadership in such a trade-off is to ensure that
state processes are not threatened by substantial physical disruption; the reciprocal
responsibility of the government is to guarantee the general safety of those who play
according to the rules This comfortable scenario is enhanced by the mutual understanding
that certain levels of appropriate (symbolic) protest of given policies will result in the
oppositional victory of their modification (i.e., really a tuning of policy by which it may
be rendered more functional and efficient, never an abandonment of fundamental policy
thrusts), while efforts to move beyond his metaphorical medium of dissent will be squelched
by any means necessary and by all parties concerned. Meanwhile, the entire unspoken
arrangement is larded with a layer of stridently abusive rhetoric directed by each side
against the other. We are left with a husk of opposition, a ritual form capable of affording a
sentimentalistic Im OK, youre OK satisfaction to its subscribers at a psychic level but
utterly useless in terms of transforming the power rela tions perpetuating systemic global
violence. Such a defect can, however, be readily sublimated within the aggregate comfort
zone produced by the continuation of North American business as usual; those who remain
within the parameters of nondisruptive dissent allowed by the state, their symbolic duty to
the victims of U.S. policy done (and with the bases of state power wholly unchallenged), can
devote themselves to the prefiguration of the revolutionary future society with which they
proclaim they will replace the present social order (having, no doubt, persuaded the state to
overthrow itself through the moral force of their arguments).92 Here, concrete activities
such as sexual experimentation, refinement of musical/artistic tastes, development of
various meat-free diets, getting in touch with ones id through meditation and ingestion of
hallucinogens, alteration of sex-based distribution of household chores, and waging campaigns against such bourgeois vices as smoking tobacco become the signifiers of correct

604

Kritik Answers
politics or even revolutionary practice. This is as opposed to the active and effective
confrontation of state power.

605

Kritik Answers

Pacifism = State Collusion (2/2)

PACIFISM IS PLAYING BOTH SIDES OF THE ROADIT
FACILITATES THE RACIST CO-OPTATION OF THIRD WORLD
VIOLENT STRUGGLE
Ward Churchill, (Keetoowah Band Cherokee) Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of
American Indian Studies at University of Colorado, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 72-74
It is possible then to visualize a world revolutionary process in which the necessity of armed
participation and attendant physical suffering) by white radicals is marginalized or
dispensed with altogether. Their role in this scenario becomes that of utilizing their already
attained economic and social advantages to prefigure, both intellectually and more literally,
the shape of the good to be shared by all in the postrevolutionary context; is presumed that
they will become a (perhaps the) crucial social element, having used the space (comfort
zone) achieved through state concessions generated by the armed pressure exerted by others
to the constructive rather than destructive purpose of developing a superior model of
societal relations. The function of responsible oppositional leadership in the mother
country as opposed to the irresponsible variety that might precipitate some measure of
armed resistance from within before the Third World has bled itself in diminishing state
power from without (and who might even go so far as to suggest whites could directly
participate) is first and foremost to link the mother country movements inaction
symbolically and rhetorically to Third World liberation struggles. The blatant
accommodation to state power involved in this is ration alized (both to the Third Worlders
and to the movement rank-and-file) by professions of personal and principled pacifism, as
well as in the need for working models of nonviolent behavior in postrevolutionary society.
From there, the nonviolent American movement (by now overwhelmingly composed of
white progressives) can be steered into exactly the same symbolic and rhetorical
solidarity with an emerging nonwhite armed revolution within the United States and
voila! positive social transformation has not only been painlessly achieved (for whites),
but they (being the prefigurative nonviolent experts on building postrevolutionary society)
have maneuvered themselves into leading roles in the aftermath. All of this, of course, is
predicated on the assumption that the colonized, both within and without, will ultimately
prove equal to their part, and that revolutionary transformation will actually occur. In the
event that the colonizing state ultimately proves the stronger of parties in such a contest, the
nonviolent movement having restricted its concrete activities to limits sanctioned by that
same state will have a natural fall-back position, being as it were only a variant of the loyal
opposition.22 The result of the carefully-constructed balance (between professed solidarity
with armed Third World insurgents on the one hand, and tacit accommodation to the very
state power against which they fight on the other) is that North American adherents to
nonviolence are intended to win regardless of the outcome; the comfort zone of white skin
privilege is to be continued in either event. Or this is the outcome that fence-sitting is
expected to accomplish. The range of tremendous ethical, moral, and political problems
inherent in this attitude are mostly so self-evident as to require no further explanation or
targeting, and elimination of some internal entity as the subversive element undercutting
the national will and purpose. At such times the state needs no, indeed can tolerate no hint
of, domestic opposition; those who are tainted by a history of even the milder forms of
antisocial behavior can be assured of being selected as the scapegoats required for this
fascist sort of consensus building. While the precise form which might be assumed by the
scapegoating involved in a consolidation of North American fascism remains unknown, it is
clear that the posture of the mass nonviolent movement closely approximates that of the
Jews in Germany during the 1930s. The notion that it cant happen here is merely a parallel to the Jewish perception that it wouldnt happen there, insistence on inhabiting a comfort
zone even while thousands upon thousands of Third World peasants are cremated beneath
canisters of American napalm is only a manifestation of the attitude of going on with
business as usual, even in a holocaust.27 Ultimately, as Bettelheim observed, it is the
dynamic of attempting to restrict opposition to state terror to symbolic and nonviolent responses which gives the state the idea that [its victims can] be gotten to the point where
they [will] walk into the gas chambers on their own.128 And, as the Jewish experience has
shown for anyone who cares to look the matter in the face, the very inertia of pacifist

606

Kritik Answers
principles prevents any effective conversion to armed self-defense once adherents are
targeted for systematic elimination by the state.

607

Kritik Answers

Embracing Violence = Nonviolence

IN ORDER TO HAVE A SUCCESSFUL TRANSITION TO
NONVIOLENCE, WE MUST FIRST SUBMIT TO THE VIOLENCE
Walter Wink, professor of theology, The Powers that be: Theology for a new Millennium, 19 99, p.
119-120
What Gandhi learned from this experiment is that it is impossible to move oppressed people
directly from submission to active nonviolence. They need first to own their feelings of rage
and even hatred and be willing to fight against their oppressors. They need to be energized
by their anger. Then they can freely renounce violence for a nonviolent alternative that
transforms the energy of their anger into a dynamic and resolute love. We can apply
Gandhis insight practically. If our children are being bullied at school, of course we would
prefer a nonviolent solution, and one can usually be found. But it may be important for our
children at least to be willing to fight on their own behalf before turning to a nonviolent
solution. Otherwise, requiring them literally to turn the other cheek can simply encourage
cowardice. It will be submission to evil rather than a creative alternative to violence. Heres
how one boy dealt with a bully on a school bus. The child was too slight of build to fight the
far sturdier bully. But he had a weakness that he made into a strength: chronic sinusitis. One
day, exasperated at the bullys behavior, he noisily blew a load of snot into his right hand
and approached his nemesis, hand outstretched, saying, I want to shake the hand of a real
bully. The bully retreated, wide-eyed, to his seat. That ended the career of that bully. Those
sinuses were the ultimate weapon, and they were always at the ready!

608

Kritik Answers

Pacifism = Violence (1/3)

NONVIOLENCE RISKS APPEASEMENT WHICH RESULTS IN
MORE CONFLICT
Rummel, Prof of Political Science @ U of Hawaii, 81 (R.J., The Just Peace,
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil1s/TJP.CHAP 10.HTM)

Violent conquest is usually wrong (the Just Package). Forcibly imposing one's values and goals on another, aside from its general
immorality, can create smoldering resentment, grievance, and hostility that later may burst into greater conflict and violence. Nonetheless,

in some exceptional conflict situations, the only resolution possible or desirable may be
through conquest: a test of strength and the unambiguous violent defeat of the other side-as of Hitler's Germany. To believe that conflict should always be resolved through negotiation, mediation, and compromise
invites an aggressor to assume that what is his is his, but what is yours is negotiable. Resisting aggression forces a test of
interests, capabilities, and will--if the aggressor so wants it. And this may be a faster,
ultimately less conflictful, less violent way of resolving conflict than conciliation or
appeasement. In resisting aggression, gauge different power responses. Do not automatically respond to aggression in kind. The
most effective response is one which shifts power to bases which can be employed more
effectively, while lessening the risk of violent escalation . And respond proportionally. To meet aggression in
equal measure is legitimate, while overreaction risks escalation to a more extended and intense conflict, and underreaction
appears weak and risks defeat and repeated aggression.

YOU CANT IMAGINE THE WORLD AS PEACEFUL THIS SELF

DECEPTION BEGETS MORE VIOLENCE
Laren 2K1 (Carter, Pacificism Empowers Terrorism, Capitalism Magazine, October 4,
http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID= 1128)
Pacifists would argue that they are idealists, as if

being an idealist meant being excused from having to

defend those ideals. Consider an individual engaged in the following line of reasoning: "It would be ideal if all people knew how
to perform open- heart surgery, so I am going to behave as if everyone is a heart surgeon. I am an idealist." Although this may
be idealism, it is also idiocy (and self-destructive). Pacifists think that by pretending that
violence doesn't exist, eventually it won't. This is not just silly; it is a vicious, deadly lie.
Aggression cannot be defeated by rewarding it . Organizers of "Don't turn tradgedy [sic] into a war" rallies across the
country would have Americans believe that the proper response to the murder of thousands of innocent lives is a candlelight vigil and
impromptu poetry readings. This

is mass suicide. It is an invitation to the Hitlers, the Stalins, the

Attilas, and the Bin Ladens of the world to slaughter the American people and to gut their
corpses. Implicit in the pacifist's drivel is the implication: "may the worst man win." Only two types of people can accept a philosophy
like this: a fiend or a fool. A fiend hates everyone, including himself, and so doesn't care if the "worst man" wins. A fool believes
that if he smiles sheepishly at Adolf Hitler, Hitler will suddenly change his mind and decide
to take-up knitting. They are both wrong, and they are both evil, [because in both cases such
a policy can only lead to the destruction of the good. To promote this evil in the wake of the
recent terrorist attacks, pacifists have added a few extra deceptions to their arsenal . One of these
is the equation of war and racism. "War and Racism are Not the Answer," reads an anti-war poster at a San Francisco university. This
statement blatantly implies that those who support war against terrorist-harboring nations are racist. It relies on the insecurity of the

A war against the Afghan, Iranian,

and other terrorist-supporting governments does not constitute racism. It constitutes selfdefense. Racism is clearly wrong, but pacifism doesn't hold a monopoly on that idea.
reader by convincing him to oppose war for fear of being (unjustly) labeled "racist."

609

Kritik Answers

Pacifism = Violence (2/3)

PACIFISM CAUSES IMMEDIATE ESCALATION OF VIOLENCE*
Robert L. Phillips, professor of philosophy, War and Justice, 19 84, p. 102-3
Narveson argues that what I have called intrinsicalism is a genuine moral position in virtue
of its claim that the use of force in self-defense is in itself evil and that pacifism is incumbent
on everyone, not just those who happen to believe that the use of force is evil. So
intrinsicalism satisfies the Kantian test for calling a particular principle a moral imperative.
Narvesons objection to pacifism is directed toward what he claims are logical
inconsistencies in the principle itself. For the belief that the use of force is inherently evil
must minimally entail that people have a right not to be the object of violent attacks. At least
part of what must be meant by saying that a particular action is wrong is that people have a
right not to have that sort of thing done to them; they have a right to take steps to prevent
the abridgement of that right. This is an interesting line of argument because its
effectiveness depends not upon an opposed set of moral principles but upon an analysis of
what it means to possess a right in general. If the notion of having a right is to make any
sort of sense, if it is not be be merely an expression, then to say that someone has a right
must also be to say that he is justified in taking steps to prevent that right from being
abridged. The must is a logical must: To say that you have a right to X but no one has any
justification whatever for preventing people from depriving you of it, is self-contradictory. If
you claim a right to X, then to describe some action as an act of depriving you of X, is
logically to imply that its absence is one of the things you have a right to.8 A pacifist might
well reply that this logical point, while sound, is not a description of his position. What
Narveson shows is that if a person has a right, [they] cannot also have a duty to be purely
passive in the face of an attack upon that right. Of course, the pacifist will insist that his is
not a doctrine of passivity or fatalism. As a moral agent, he is concerned with ethical
imperatives, with guiding action. So the question becomes not whether a person does or
does not have a duty to acquiesce in the removal of one of his rights but, rather, what level of
force is appropriate in face of a violent attack. Narveson might well reply that the
commitment always to refrain from violence is in effect a permission to abrogate his rights.
For if an opponent knows in advance that the pacifist will only resist up to the level of actual
fighting, then [they] will simply escalate his attacks beyond that point. This is precisely what
happened when nonviolent resistance was tried briefly in Nazi-occupied Norway.
**This evidence has been gender modified

610

Kritik Answers

Pacifism = Violence (3/3)

TRUE PEACE NECESSITATES SOME UNAVOIDABLE
VIOLENCE VIOLENCE IS KEY TO DIGNITY AND OTHER
VIRTUES
Rummel, Prof of Political Science @ U of Hawaii, 81 (R.J., The Just Peace,
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil1s/TJP.CHAP 10.HTM)

Such are major subprinciples of peacemaking. Conflict engages what the parties want and can and will do in a situation
in which relevant status quo expectations are disrupted. Situational perceptions, expectations, interests, capabilities,
and will are the elements of the conflict--and of peacemaking. Material things--land, people, wealth, ports, borders-are merely the tools or objects of conflict. And material conditions, such as the topography of a country or a
mountainous border between states, only frame and physically limit conflict. The essence of conflict is an opposition of
minds. The arena of conflict is the mental field. The principles and rules for its resolution are psychological. Now,

peacemaking is not necessarily the best and most immediate response to

conflict. Doubtlessly, some conflicts are unnecessary, some needlessly intense and long-lasting. But some also are a
real and unavoidable clash, the only means through which one, as a partisan, can protect or further vital interests and

war against Hitlers Germany

from 1939 to 1945 cost millions lives, but it prevented the greater misery, the
terror, the executions, the cold-blooded murders which probably would have
occurred had Hitler consolidated his control of Europe and subjugated the
Soviet Union. We always can end a conflict when we want by surrender. But
some ideas are more important than peace: Dignity. Freedom. Security. That is,
peace with justice--a just peace. There is another relevant qualification. The term "peacemaking" is well
achieve a more satisfactory and harmonious just peace. For example,

established, and I used it accordingly. Unfortunately, the verb "make" can imply that peace is designed and
constructed, as a house is planned and erected brick by brick or a road engineered and built. This implication is
especially seductive in this age when society is seen as manmade (rather than having evolved),9 and many believe that
communities should be centrally planned and managed. But peace is not constructed like a bridge. Peace emerges from
the balancing of individual mental fields. What the leaders of a group or nation honestly believe, actually want, truly
are willing to get, are really capable of achieving are unknown to others--and perhaps only partially to themselves.
Nonetheless only they can best utilize the information available to them to justly satisfy their interests. For a third
party to try to construct and enforce an abstract peace imposed on others is foolhardy. Such a peace would be
uncertain, forestall the necessary trial-and-error balancing of the parties themselves, and perhaps even create greater
conflict later. The best peace is an outcome of reciprocal adjustments among those involved. At most, peacemaking
should ease the process. A final qualification. Pacifists

believe that violence and war cannot

occur if people laid down their arms and refused to fight. But this ignores
unilateral violence. Under threat, a state or government may try to avoid
violence by submission. The result may be enslavement, systematic execution,
and elimination of leaders and "undesirables." The resulting genocide and
mass murder may ultimately end in more deaths than would have occurred had
people fought to defend themselves. I agree that in some situations nonviolence
may be an effective strategy for waging conflict,10 as in the successful Black civil rights
demonstrations of the 1960s in America; or the successful nonviolent, civil disobedience movement for Indian
independence from Britain begun by Mahatma Gandhi in 1922. In some situations refusal to use violence may avoid

there are also conflicts, especially

involving actual or potential tyrants, despots, and other such oppressors, in
which nonviolence cannot buy freedom from violence by others or a just
resolution of a dispute. Then a down payment on such a peace requires public
display of one's capability and a resolve to meet violent aggression in kind.
unnecessary escalation and ease peacekeeping. However,

611

Kritik Answers

Pacifism Doesnt Solve Violence

PACIFISM IS NOTHING MORE THAN A FORM OF MORAL
EGOISM THAT ALLOWS INDIVIDUALS TO BE PASSIVE IN
THE FACE OF BRUTALITY
Robert L. Phillips, professor of philosophy, War and Justice, 19 84, p. 103-4
There is one way of attempting to get around this internal contradiction which intrinsicalism
appears to carry with it. Instead of seeing pacifism as a moral position in the ordinary
sense, perhaps we should understand it as a commitment to an ideal type. The pacifist will
concentrate on developing into the kind of person for whom nonviolence is a permanent
part of the soul, and by example he will encourage others to do the same. The pacifist would
admit that the world does contain men who commit violent at tacks upon others, but his
concern will be to demonstrate by his own example that an alternative way of life is possible:
men do not have to take life; they do not have to adopt the posture of the utilitarian
bargainer. This kind of saintliness does, however, seem irresponsible. The unwillingness of
the pacifist to dirty his hands is no doubt the source of the charge that he is more concerned
about the state of his soul than with the preservation of life. The unwillingness to kill or
injure may be part of the pacifists very being, but what happens to his respect for life
defense when his refusal to fight causes loss of lives which could have been saved? Critics of
the argument that pacifism is part of a program to attain an ideal of self-hood respond with
the charge of moral egoism. It [moral egoism] differs from ordinary egoism only in its
allegedly spiritual quality. It is a thoroughgoing refusal to dirty ones own hands.... I suggest
that those whose concerns are thus limited are warped, self-righteous and ultimately selfserving. The pacifist saint who stands by while others are being murdered or bru talized..,
how does he differ from a moral idiot, except in point of pretentiousness?

612

Kritik Answers

Pacifist Activism Fails: General

NONVIOLENT CHANGE IS TEMPORARY
Brian Martin, STS U of Wollongong 2001Nonviolence Versus Capitalism
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/01nvc/nvcall.html
It is important to note that not all uses of nonviolent action lead to long-lasting, worthwhile
change. Nonviolent action is not guaranteed to succeed either in the short term or long term.
The 1989 prodemocracy movement in China, after a short flowering, was crushed in the
Beijing massacre. Perhaps more worrying are the dispiriting aftermaths following some
short-term successes of nonviolent action. In El Salvador in 1944, the successful nonviolent
insurrection against the Martnez dictatorship did not lead to long term improvement for
the El Salvadorean people. There was a military coup later in 1944, and continued
repression in following decades. The aftermath of the Iranian revolution was equally
disastrous. The new Islamic regime led by Ayatollah Khomeini was just as ruthless as its
predecessor in stamping out dissent.

ABSOLUTE PACFICISM IS IMPOSSIBLE

Mohandes Gandhi, as quoted in The Pacifist Conscience, ed. by Peter Mayer, 1966, p 214
I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would
advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been
present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have nm away and
seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted
to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence.
Hence it was that I took part in the Boer War, the so called Zulu rebellion and the late War.
Hence also do I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of violence. I
would rather have India resort to aims in order to defend her honour than that she should in
a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour.

NONVIOLENCE ALONE FAILS.

Brian Martin STS @ U of Wollongong 2001Nonviolence Versus Capitalism
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/01nvc/nvcall.html
The consent theory of power Gandhi approached nonviolent action as a moral issue and, in
practical terms, as a means for persuading opponents to change their minds as a result of
their witnessing the commitment and willing sacrifice of nonviolent activists. While this
approach explains some aspects of the power of nonviolent action, it is inadequate on its
own. Moral persuasion sometimes works in face-to-face encounters, but has little chance
when cause and effect are separated. Bomber pilots show little remorse for the agony caused
by their weapons detonating far below,[24] while managers of large international banks
have little inkling of the suffering caused by their lending policies in foreign countries.

613

Kritik Answers

Pacifist Activism Fails: Law is Violent

ALL LAW IS VIOLENCE. THE CRITIQUE OF MILITARISM
FAILS.
Jacques Derrida, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Drucilla Cornell, ed, 92, p. 40-2.
To discuss the conservative violence of law, Benjamin sticks to relatively modern problems,
as modern as the problem of the general strike was a moment ago. Now it is a question of
compulsory military service, the modern police or the abolition of the death penalty. If,
during and after World War I, an impassioned critique of violence was developed, it took
aim this time at the law-conserving form of violence. Militarism, a modern concept that
supposes the exploitation of compulsory military service, is the forced use of force, the
compelling (twang) to use force or violence (Gewalt) in the service of the state and its legal
ends. Here military violence is legal and conserves the law, and thus it is more difficult to
criticize than the pacifists and activists believe; Benjamin does not hide his low esteem for
these declaimers. The ineffectiveness and inconsistency of anti-military pacifists results
from their failure to recognize the legal and unassailable character of this violence that
conserves the law. Here we are dealing with a double bind or a contradiction that can be
schematized as follows. On the one hand, it appears easier to criticize the violence that
founds since it cannot be justified by any preexisting legality and so appears savage. But on
the other hand, and this reversal is the whole point of this reflection, it is more difficult,
more illegitimate to criticize this same violence since one cannot summon it to appear before
the institution of any preexisting law: it does not recognize existing law in the moment that
it founds another. Between the two limits of this contradiction, there is the question of this
ungraspable revolutionary instant that belongs to no historical, temporal continuum but in
which the foundation of a new law nevertheless plays, if we may say so, on something from
an anterior law that it extends, radicalizes, deforms, metaphorizes or metonymizes, this
figure here taking the name of war or general strike. But this figure is also a contamination.
It effaces or blurs the distinction, pure and simple, between foundation and conservation. It
inscribes iterability in originarity, in unicity and singularity, and it is what I will call
deconstruction at work, in full negotiation: in the "things themselves"and in Benjamin's text.
As long as they do not give themselves the theoretical or philosophical means to think this
co-implication of violence and law, the usual critiques remain naive and ineffectual.
Benjamin does not hide his disdain for the declamations of pacifist activism and for the
proclamations of "quite childish anarchism" that would like to exempt the individual from
all constraints. The reference to the categorical imperative ("Act in such a way that at all
times you use humanity both in your person and in the person of all others as an end, and
never merely as a means," p. 285), however uncontestable it may be, allows no critique of
violence. Law (droit) in its very violence claims to recognize and defend said humanity as
end, in the person of each individual. And so a purely moral critique of violence is as
unjustified as it is impotent. For the same reason, we cannot provide a critique of violence in
the name of liberty, of what Benjamin here calls "gestaltlose Freiheit," "formless freedom,"
that is, in short, purely formal, as empty form, following a Marxist-Hegelian vein that is far
from absent throughout this meditation. These attacks against violence lack pertinence and
effectiveness because they remain alien to the juridical essence of violence, to the
Rechtsordnung, the order of law (droit). An effective critique must lay the blame on the
body of droit itself, in its head and in its members, in the laws and the particular usages that
law adopts under protection of its power (Macht). This order is such that there exists one
unique fate or history (nur ein einziges Schicksal, "only one fate," p. 285). That is one of the
key concepts of the text, but also one of the most obscure, whether it's a question of fate
itself or of its absolute uniqueness. That which exists, which has consistency (das
Bestehende) and that which at the same time threatens what exists (das Drohende) belong
inviolably (unverbriichlich) to the same order and this order is inviolable because it is
unique. It can only be violated in itself. The notion of threat is important here but also
difficult, for the threat doesn't come from outside. Law is both threatening and threatened
by itself: This threat is neither intimidation nor dissuasion, as pacifists, anarchists or
activists believe. The law turns out to be threatening in the way fate is threatening. To reach
the "deepest meaning" of the indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit, "uncertainty," p. 28S) of the
legal threat (der Rechtsdrohung), it will later be necessary to meditate upon the essence of
fate at the origin of this threat.

614

Kritik Answers

Pacifist Activism Fails: Final Solution

(1/3)
JEWISH PACIFISM IN THE FACE OF THE FINAL SOLUTION IS
THE ULTIMATE PROOF OF THE INADEQUACY OF NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE
Ward Churchill, (Keetoowah Band Cherokee) Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of
American Indian Studies at University of Colorado, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 32-37
Pacifism possesses a sublime arrogance in its implicit as sumption that its adherents can
somehow dictate the terms of struggle in any contest with the state. Such a supposition
seems unaccountable in view of the actual record of passive/nonviolent resistance to state
power. Although a number of examples can be mustered with which to illustrate this point
including Buddhist resistance to U.S. policies in Indochina, and the sustained efforts
made to terminate white supremacist rule in southern Africa none seems more
appropriate than the Jewish experience in Hitlerian Germany (and later in the whole of
occupied Europe). The record is quite clear that, while a range of pacifist forms of
countering the implications of nazism occurred within the German Jewish community
during the l930s, they offered virtually no physical opposition to the consolidation of the
nazi state. To the contrary, there is strong evidence that orthodox Jewish leaders counseled
social responsibility as the best antidote to nazism, while crucial political formulations
such as the Zionist Hagana and Mossad el Aliyah Betactually seem to have attempted to coopt the nazi agenda for their own purposes, entering into cooperative relations with the SS
Jewish Affairs Bureau, and trying to use forced immigration of Jews as a pretext for
establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.8 All of this was apparently done in an effort
to manipulate the political climate in Germany by not exacerbating conditions and not
alienating the German people any further in a manner more favorable to Jews than the
nazis were calling for.~ In the end, of course, the nazis imposed the final solution to the
Jewish question, but by then the dynamics of passive resistance were so entrenched in the
Jewish zeitgeist (the nazis having been in power a full decade) that a sort of passive
accommodation prevailed. Jewish leaders took their people, quietly and nonviolently, first
into the ghettos, and then onto trains evacuating them to the east. Armed resistance was
still widely held to be irresponsible. Eventually, the SS could count upon the brunt of the
nazi liquidation policy being carried out by the Sonderkommandos, which were composed of
the Jews themselves. It was largely Jews who dragged the gassed bodies of their
exterminated people to the crematoria in death camps such as Auschwitz/Birkenau, each
motivated by the desire to prolong his own life. Even this became rationalized as
resistance; the very act of surviving was viewed as defeating the nazi program. By 1945,
Jewish passivity and nonviolence in the face of the weltanschauung der untermenschen had
done nothing to prevent the loss of millions of lives. The phenomenon sketched above must
lead to the obvious question: [How could] millions of men [sic] like us walk to their death
without resistance? In turn, the mere asking of the obvious has spawned a veritable cottage
industry among Jewish intellectuals, each explaining how it was that the process had left
the Jewish people no choice but to go along, to remain passive, to proceed in accordance
with their aversion to violence right up to the doors of the crematoria and beyond. From
this perspective, there was nothing truly lacking in the Jewish performance; the Jews were
simply and solely blameless victims of a genocidal system over which it was quite impossible
for them to extend any measure of control. The Jews having suffered horribly under nazi
rule,6 it has come to be considered in exceedingly poor taste antisemitic, according to
the logic of the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith to suggest that there was indeed
something very wrong with the nature of the Jewish response to nazism, that the mainly
pacifist forms of resistance exhibited by the Jewish community played directly into the
hands of their executioners. Objectively, there were alternatives, and one need not look to
the utterances of some lunatic fringe to find them articulated. Even such a staid and
conservative political commentator as Bruno Bettelheim, a former concentration camp
inmate, has offered astute analysis of the role of passivity and nonviolence in amplifying the
magnitude of the Holocaust. Regarding the single known instance

615

Kritik Answers

Pacifist Activism Fails: Final Solution

(2/3)
CONTINUED
in which inmates physically revolted at Auschwitz, he observes that: In the single revolt of
the twelfth Sonderkommando, seventy SS were killed, including one commissioned officer
and seventeen non-commissioned officers; one of the crematoria was totally destroyed and
another severely damaged. True, all eight hundred and fifty-three of the kommando died.
But. . . the one Sonderkommando which revolted and took such a heavy toll of the enemy
did not die much differently than all the other Sonderkommandos. Aside from pointing out
that the Jews had literally nothing to lose (and quite a lot to gain in terms of human dignity)
by engaging in open revolt against the 55, Bettelheim goes much further, noting that such
actions both in and outside the death camps stood a reasonable prospect of greatly impeding
the extermination process. He states flatly that even individualized armed resistance could
have made the Final Solution a cost-prohibitive proposition for the nazis: There is little
doubt that the [Jews], who were able to
provide themselves with so much, could have provided themselves with a gun or two had
they wished. They could have shot down one or two of the SS men who came for them. The
loss of an SS with every Jew arrested would have noticeably hindered the functioning of the
police state.2 Returning to the revolt of the twelfth Sonderkommando, Bettelheim observes
that: They did only what we should expect all human beings to do; to use their death, if they
could not save their lives, to weaken or hinder the enemy as much as possible; to use even
their doomed selves for making extermination harder, or maybe impossible, not a smoothrunning process If they could do it, so could others. Why didnt they? Why did they throw
their lives away instead of making things hard for the enemy? Why did they make a present
of their very being to the SS instead of to their families, their friends, even to their fellow
prisoners[?] Rebellion could only have saved either the life they were going to lose anyway,
or the lives of others. . Inertia it was that led millions of Jews into the ghettos the SS had
created for them. It was inertia that made hundreds of thousands of Jews sit home, waiting
for their executioners. Bettelheim describes this inertia, which he considers the basis for
Jewish passivity in the face of The persecution of the Jews was aggravated, slow step by slow
step, when no violent fighting back occurred. It may have been Jewish acceptance, without
retaliatory fight, of ever harsher discrimination and degradation that first gave the SS the
idea that they could be gotten to the point where they would walk into the gas chambers on
their own . . . [I] n the deepest sense, the walk to the gas chamber was only the last
consequence of the philosophy of business as usual. Given this, Bettelheim can do little else
but conclude (correctly) that the post-war rationalization and apologia for the Jewish
response to nazism serves to stress how much we all wish to subscribe to this business as
usual philosophy, and forget that it hastens our own destruction, to glorify the attitude of
going on with business as usual, even in a holocaust.

THE FINAL SOLUTION PROVES THE TOTAL FAILURE OF

PACIFISM
Ward Churchill, (Keetoowah Band Cherokee) Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of
American Indian Studies at University of Colorado, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 40One may assume for the moment that such a gross distortion of reality is hardly the intent of even the hardiest pacifist polemicists, although it may well be an intrinsic

nazi policy
toward the Jews, from 1941 onward, was bound up in the notion that extermination would
proceed until such time as the entire Jewish population within German occupied territory was liquidated?~
There is no indication whatsoever that nonviolent intervention/mediation from any quarter held the
least prospect of halting, or even delaying, the genocidal process. To the contrary there is evidence
that efforts by neutral parties such as the Red Cross had the effect of speeding up the
slaughter. That the Final Solution was halted at a point short of its full realization was due solely to the massive
application of armed force against Germany (albeit for reasons other than the salvation of the Jews). Left to a pacifist prescription
aspect of their position. Worse than this is the Inconsistency of nonviolent premises. For instance, it has been abundantly documented that

for the altering of offensive state policies, and the effecting of positive social change, World Jewry at least in its Eurasian variants would have offered total

. Even the highly symbolic trial of SS Colonel Adolph Eichmann could not be
accomplished by nonviolent means, but required armed action by an Israeli paramili tary
unit fifteen years after the last death camp was closed by Russian tanks. There is every indication that adherence to pacifist principles would have resulted in
extermination by mid-1946 at the latest

616

Kritik Answers
Eichmanns permanent avoidance of justice, living out his life in reasonable comfort until to paraphrase his own assessment he leapt into the grave laughing at

With reference to the Jewish experience, nonviolence was a

catastrophic failure, and only the most extremely violent intervention by others saved
Europes Jews at the last moment from slipping over the brink of utter extinction. Small wonder that the survivors insist, Never again!
the thought of having killed six million Jews.

617

Kritik Answers

Pacifist Activism Fails: Final Solution

(3/3)
NON VIOLENCE WOULD HAVE HAD NO CHANCE TO STOP
THE NAZIS DENMARKS STRATEGY WOULDNT HAVE
WORKED ON A GLOBAL SCALE A THOUSAND YEAR REICH
WOULD OF RESULTED
J. A. H. Futterman, Ph.D. from UT-Austin and Physicist at the University of California's
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Obscenity and Peace: Meditations on the Bomb, 1990- 94,
http://www.dogchurch.com/scriptorium/nuke.html, UK: Fisher
That said, I admit that I admire non-violent resistance. [4] Remember, however, that nonviolent resistance is a sophisticated technique that works only when used by the "right"
people at the "right" time against the "right" opponents. For example, the Indians
successfully used non-violent resistance to persuade the British to end the Raj, because the
British eventually acknowledged that the Indians, led by the British-educated Gandhi, were
human beings like themselves.
The Nazis, who with their "Master Race" ideology admitted only so-called "Aryans" to the
category of human, provide an example counter to that of the British. There were some
successful acts of non-violent confrontation against the Nazis, like King Christian of
Denmark's public declaration that he would wear the yellow star if it were introduced in his
country. He did so in response to the Nazi practice of ordering Jews to wear yellow-starred
armbands so that the Nazis could more easily isolate them from their surrounding society.
That many Danes followed their king's example helped camouflage many Jews until they
could escape to Sweden in fishing boats. [5] Now this resistance worked partly because the
Nazis considered the Danes to be "Aryans" like themselves. Had the Poles tried the same
thing, the Nazis would have been perfectly happy to use the event as an excuse for
liquidating more Poles. Rather than awaken the Nazis' moral sense, non-violent
confrontation on the part of the Poles would probably have enabled the Nazis to carry out
their agenda in Poland more easily. The other reason these acts succeeded was that
overwhelming violence of the Allies had stretched the Nazi forces too thin to suppress
massive action by a whole populace, and eventually deprived the Nazis of the time they
needed to find other ways to carry out their "final solution."
In other words, non-violence resistance alone would have been very slow to work against the
Nazis, once they had consolidated their power. And while it slowly ground away at the evil in
the Nazi soul, how many millions more would have died, and how much extra time would
have been given to Nazi scientists trying to invent atomic bombs to go on those V-2 rockets?
The evil of Nazism may well have expended itself, but perhaps after a real "thousand-year
Reich," leaving a world populated only by blue-eyed blondes. In other words, if the world
had used non-violence alone against the Nazis, the results may have been much worse those
of the war.[6]

618

Kritik Answers

Civil Disobedience Fails (1/2)

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE CAUSES MARGINALIZATION,
DISPROPORTIONAL PUNISHMENT, AND FAILS TO HAVE
TRANSFORMATIVE EFFECTS
Rachael E. Schwartz, J.D. 1981 Georgetown University Law Center, BOSTON
UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL, Fall 1994, p. 256-257.
Recent decades have seen an impressive expansion of the extent to which international law
recognizes fundamental individual rights. Public international law no longer concerns itself
solely with the subject of relations between states. However, the establishment of a law of
individual remedies and the accompanying enforcement institutions to assure vindication of
these rights has not kept as swift a pace as the recognition of the existence of the rights
themselves. As a result, many people have bare rights with no legal substantive basis or
process for obtaining redress for violations of these rights. Faced with such a state of affairs,
several options are available to the aggrieved individual. One may simply resign one's self to
one's fate. While it is understandable that some may take this route as a means of shortterm self-preservation, it is unacceptable to many. Alternatively, one may attempt to avail
one's self of those limited legal avenues which are open. This is admirable, but ultimately
may well prove a futile risk; the individual may gain nothing only to become known to the
government as a "troublemaker." A third possibility is civil disobedience; that is, open and
non-violent breaking of the law of a state with voluntary acceptance of such punishment as
may be imposed pursuant to that law. Prominent practitioners of civil disobedience include
Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This too has obvious
risks: there may be little chance that the punishment will be fair or that those in authority
will be persuaded by a display of moral integrity to correct their behavior rather than
retaliate.

Nonviolent change is temporary. The 1989 prodemocracy movement in China was

crushed in the Beijing massacre. In El Salvador 1944, the nonviolent insurrection
against the Martnez dictatorship didnt lead to long term improvement. Iranian
non-violent revolutions have been ultimately unsuccessful, as was Jewish pacifism.
Ghandis non-violence was only successful in the context of global armed resistance
to British colonialism. For every Martin Luther King, there is a counter-example

619

Kritik Answers

Civil Disobedience Fails (2/2)

WE MUST BE PRAGMATIC PACIFISTS TO END STATE
VIOLENCEABSOLUTE PACIFISM FAILS TO CHALLENGE
THE POLICIES OF THE STATE BY OPTING OUT OF THE GAME
ENTIRELY
Robert L. Phillips, professor of philosophy, War and Justice, 1984, p. 114-6
It conceivable that governments might grant selective objection the same legal
status as it gives to pacifism? The answer, I fear, is no. And that tells us something
important about pacifism. Governments are prepared to tolerate pacifism, because
it poses no threat either to their political policies or to the manner in which wars
are conducted. The pacifist objects equally to all wars waged by all governments. In
this sense he opts out of the game altogether. By contrast, the selective objector will
be forced to analyze both the policy decisions of the government as well as the
conduct of the armed forces. He will be publicly carrying out an officially
sanctioned comparison between mutually agreed just-war criteria and the actual
performance of the government. That is a lot to expect of governments as we know them, but there is still more. What would be the
implication of a state granting an exemption on selective grounds? Fundamentally, the state would be agreeing with the claim that its war policies may be reasonably
interpreted as unjust. The belief that all war is wrong is a proposition which states might agree is debatable among rational men, and, therefore, claims to exemption
on this basis may be allowed. It is a very different matter, however, to grant exemption for a particular war, for here we are faced not with two philosophical theories
about violence but with a factual dispute. Selective objection presupposes that both the government and the claimant agree upon the criteria for undertaking a
justified war and the rules for conducting it. The claimant would have to show, in order to qualify for an exemption, that his government is engaged in acts of war
which a person might reasonably characterize as immoral. As such an admission is inseparable from policy questions, it is inconceivable that any government would
be willing (or politically able) to wage war while publicly agreeing that there is sufficient reason to doubt the morality of that war to grant exemptions from it. This is
not to say that individuals should not refuse to fight in wars which they believe are immoral but to acknowledge that governments cannot be expected to

of the pacifist who objects to all wars does not threaten

the particular policies of any state. In condemning them all equally, pacifism
exempts itself from political reality: What is needed, then, is not a general
pacifism but a discriminating conscientious refusal to engage in war in certain
circumstances. States have not been loath to recognize pacifism and to grant it a
special status. The refusal to take part in all war under any conditions is an
unworldly view bound to remain a sectarian doctrine. It no more challenges the
states authority than the celibacy of priests challenges the sanctity of marriage. By
exempting pacifists from its prescriptions the state may even seem to display a
certain magnanimity. But conscientious refusal based upon the principles of justice
as they apply to particular conflicts is another matter. For such refusal is an affront
to the governments pretensions, and when it becomes widespread, the
continuation of an unjust war may prove impossible.
institutionalize such a practice. The evenhandedness

THEIR NOTION OF DISOBEDIENCE CEMENTS THE STATES

MONOPOLY OF VIOLENCE
Jordan J. Paust, Professor of Law, University of Houston, EMORY LAW JOURNAL, Spring 19 83, p.
549-550.
With such a focus, one should discover that private individuals and groups can and
do engage in numerous forms of permissible violence. It is too simplistic to say,
therefore, that authoritative violence can only be engaged in by "the government"
or by governmental elites and functionaries. As Professor Reisman stated, the
notion that only state institutions can permissibly use high levels of violent
coercion "is a crucial self-perception and deception of state elites." Thus, the useful question is not
whether private violence is permissible, but what forms of private violence are permissible, when, in what social context, and why. As Professor Reisman further

[I]nsistence on non-violence and deference to all established institutions in a

global system with many injustices can be tantamount to confirmation and
reinforcement of those injustices. In certain circumstances, violence may be the last appeal or the first expression of demand of a
suggests:

group or unorganized stratum for some measure of human dignity. Of course, such an injunction can also have particular relevance concerning the question of
revolutionary social violence. Here, as elsewhere

, no facile "rule" or simplistic prohibition will do.

620

Kritik Answers

A2 Violence Alienates the People: 2AC

PASSIVE PROTEST DOESNT WIN THE MASSES-VIOLENCE
CHANGES THE LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Mike Ryan, Canadian anti-imperialist, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 134-135
Turning now to the argument that violence alienates the people, I find myself face to face
with several unanswerable flaws of logic. If violence alienates the people, are we to refrain
from engaging in any but passive acts of protest (and here I use the term protest rather than
resistance quite consciously) because this will win popular support? If this is the case, I am
forced to ask why, after years of consistent nonviolent protest, no qualitative growth, and
only the slightest quantitative, has occurred within our movement? From these questions, I
would go on to suggest that catering our activity to our perception (which might not even be
accurate) of the level of resistance acceptable to people, far from being revolutionary, is in
fact counter to the development of revolutionary Consciousness: A party (or, in our case, an
organization or movement) which bases itself on an existing average level of consciousness
and activity, will end up reducing the present level of both. It is the partys responsibility to
lead, to change the existing level of consciousness and activity, raise them to higher levels)
It is clear that the peace movement, rather than offering vital connections and a direction for
popular discontent (which plainly exists), has failed to offer anything more than a repetitive
and increasingly boring spectacle. The government in Ottawa, and the general populus, has
increasingly taken to yawning at our activities.

621

Kritik Answers

A2 Non-Violence Key to Prevent

Eradication of Movement: 2AC
NON-VIOLENCE ONLY AVOIDS PERSECUTION BECAUSE IT IS
INEFFECTIVEANY SUCCESSFUL REVOLUTION HAS TO
DEAL WITH THE VIOLENCE OF THE STATE
Mike Ryan, Canadian anti-imperialist, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 135-136
The argument that violence brings repression down on the left indicates a naivete bordering
on sheer madness. Do we really believe that if we could devise a non violent means of
eliminating the state we would be allowed to proceed unhindered in carrying it out? The
state is violent in its very nature. The police, the army, and prisons stand as immediate,
tangible evidence of this. The genocide of Third and Fourth World peoples stands as
evidence of this. Canadas role as an arms producer and supplier for the Indonesian
colonization of East Timor is a daily, ongoing act of violence. Violence, overt and covert,
aggressive and preventive, is fundamental to the function of the Canadian state. No violence
issuing from the movement could hope to be more than a pale reflection of the constant
violence of the repressive apparati. That this violence generally remains invisible is more a
statement of our failure than of our success, a reflection of the degree to which we have
remained within the limits acceptable to the state. As Mao said in 1939: It is good and not
bad if the enemy fights against us: I think it is bad for us be it for individual, a party, an
army, or a school of thought if the enemy does not take a stand against us, because in that
case it could only mean that we are hand in glove with the enemy. If we are being fought by
the enemy, then that is good: it is proof that we have drawn a clear line between us and the
enemy. If the enemy goes vigorously into action against us, and accepts nothing at all, then
this is even better: it shows that we have not only drawn a clear line between us and the
enemy, but that our work has achieved tremendous success.

622

Kritik Answers

Pacifism Bad: War Good (1/2)

ATTEMPTS AT PACIFISM FAIL EVIL EXISTS IN THE WORLD
ATTEMPTS AT UTOPIANISM ARE SUICIDAL
Adam G. Mersereau, Served in the enlisted and officer ranks of the United States Marine Corps
from 1990 to 1995; now an attorney, Down with the Peace Movement: The trouble with the antiwar
warriors, National Review Online, January 15, 2003,
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-mersereau011503.asp
Many members of the peace movement also hold tightly to a loosely defined utopianism.
They believe that the human race (save conservative Republicans) is evolving toward a
higher and more noble plane of social existence. The activists themselves are, of course, at
the forefront of the evolutionary curve; while the Cro-Magnon in the White House and his
Cabinet of Neanderthals stubbornly resist progress. Although the Left has largely declared
the concepts of "good" and "evil" to be pass, the peace activist believes that the heart of
man is intrinsically "good," and that it would be "evil" if we do not give Saddam Hussein
every chance to let his goodness shine through.
Utopianism is dead in the minds of most people, because as veterans of the 20th century,
which was the bloodiest century ever, we cannot deny that "good" and "evil" are entangled
within the hearts of men and many of his ideologies, and that peace is little more than a
welcome respite between wars. We also know that unless the Saddam Hussein's and
Kim Jong-il's of the world are Utopians too, then to champion utopianism in America or
Europe is useless. Utopianism is folly; unilateral utopianism is suicidal. But rather
than adjust their policy to reflect reality, the peace activists will march in circles, carry their
signs, and wait for reality to reflect their policy.

PACIFISM THE WORST OF ALL WORLDS CAUSES

MILLIONS OF DEATHS, APPEASEMENT OF ENEMIES, AND
THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE
Alex Epstein, Graduate of Duke University, BA Philosophy, Junior fellow at the Ayn Rand
Institute, Peacenik Warmongers, Ayn Rand Institute, December 9, 20 02,
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7458, UK: Fisher
Pacifism necessarily invites escalating acts of war against anyone who practices it.
There is an increasingly vocal movement that seeks to engage America in ever longer, wider,
and more costly wars--leading to thousands and perhaps millions of unnecessary
deaths. This movement calls itself the "anti-war" movement. Across America and
throughout the world, "anti-war" groups are staging "peace rallies" that attract tens and
sometimes hundreds of thousands of participants, who gather to voice their opposition to an
invasion of Iraq and to any other U.S. military action in the War on Terrorism. The goal of
these rallies, the protesters proclaim, is to promote peace. "You can bomb the world to
pieces," they chant, "but you can't bomb it into peace." If dropping bombs won't work, what
should the United States do to obtain a peaceful relationship with the numerous hostile
regimes, including Iraq, that seek to harm us with terrorism and weapons of mass
destruction? The "peace advocates" offer no answer. The most one can coax out of
them are vague platitudes (we should "make common cause with the people of the world,"
says the prominent "anti-war" group Not in Our Name) and agonized soul-searching ("Why
do they hate us?"). The absence of a peacenik peace plan is no accident. Pacifism is
inherently a negative doctrine--it merely says that military action is always bad. As one San
Francisco protestor put the point: "I don't think it's right for our government to kill people."
In practice, this leaves the government only two means of dealing with our enemies: to
ignore their acts of aggression, or to appease them by capitulating to the aggressor's
demands.

Pacifism Bad: War Good (2/2)

623

Kritik Answers

PACIFISM MAKES WARS BIGGER AND LONGER HARDLINE

MILITARISM WOULDVE PREVENTED THE RISE OF HITLER
J. A. H. Futterman, Ph.D. from UT-Austin and Physicist at the University of California's
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Obscenity and Peace: Meditations on the Bomb, 1990- 94,
http://www.dogchurch.com/scriptorium/nuke.html, UK: Fisher
Of course, if deterrence is not enough, if your opponent is that crazy, what do you do?
Running away may work for individuals, but not for nations, so I will neglect that option.
Negotiation is also unworkable, because you can't reason with bullies. They exhibit a kind of
willful mindlessness, a demonic will to unconsciousness. They don't negotiate back, they
merely use your forbearance to buy time and opportunity to get at you, or to get around you
like Hitler did, while Chamberlain declared, "peace in our time." You assert your position,
and set some limits. And if they exceed your limits, you use force.
But is it moral to use force? Those of us who might contemplate calling the police in order to
stop a murder must believe that occasionally it is. Further, I maintain that sometimes it may
be immoral to do anything else. Remember that Hitler could have been stopped easily by a
show of force when he threatened to annex the Sudetenland. That force was not brought to
bear in a timely manner is due largely to the pacifist sentiment in Europe and America at
the time. Instead of engaging in a minor military expedition which would have forced Hitler
to back down, to lose face, and ultimately to lose political power, the world passively sold out
Czechoslovakia to him, paving the way for a much more prolonged and bloody conflict
later a conflict that resulted in the development of the first atomic bombs. In other words,
I think a reflexive pacifism is no more entitled to a presumption of moral innocence than
nuclear weapons work, and that pacifism applied in the wrong way at the wrong time
contributed to the development of the nuclear weapons that pacifists now find so abhorrent.
In short, pacifism can sometimes help to make wars bigger and worse than they have to
be.

Pacifism Bad: Unethical

PACIFISM EQUATES DEFENDANT TO AGGRESSOR, RAPIST
TO RAPE VICTIM DESTROYS ABILITY TO MAKE
NORMATIVE JUDGMENTS ABOUT VIOLENCE THAT ARE
CRITICAL TO SAFETY
Kevin Delaney, Freelance Writer in Los Angeles, Debunking the Clichs of Pacifism, Capitalism
Magazine, October 13, 2001, http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1157, UK: Fisher
The philosophy of pacifism can be expressed in a single principle: "The use of force is
morally wrong." This means that ALL force - any kind of force - is out of the question and
must be opposed. If you spend any amount of time thinking about the issue (which most
pacifists do not), you'll very quickly be able to think of a number of situations in which the
use of force is clearly not only not morally wrong, but clearly necessary - a woman fighting
off a rapist, for example. Take a few moments to come up with several such "exceptions,"
then abstract their common element, and you'll arrive at the ominous error at the root of the
pacifist philosophy: pacifism makes no distinction between force which is initiated, and
force which is used in self-defense. Were a pacifist totally consistent in his philosophy, he'd
have to say that the woman who fights off the rapist is wrong to do so - after all, she's
certainly committing an act of force. If the pacifist were also consistent in his use of clichs,
he'd say that in fighting the rapist off, the woman has "sunk to the rapist's level." She has
"resorted to violence," and is now "just like him." This same thought process (or lack of it) is
behind the pacifists' opposition to war - specifically, in the case of our current situation, the
opposition to a country fighting back when war has been initiated against it. To the pacifist,
attacker and victim are moral equals. Which side initiated the war is of no interest to him;
his mind knows only the abstraction "war," and that he's against it. Pacifism used to be
known as "nonresistance," which names the heart of the matter: total passivity and
surrender when faced with any kind of threat. Of course, you never hear the position stated

624

Kritik Answers
this way: today's pacifists almost always make their case exclusively in terms of what they're
against, rarely what they're for (except in the most general sense, such as "world peace,"
etc.). Full-fledged pacifists are relatively rare, yet their clichs are nevertheless having an
effect on many minds, throwing monkey-wrenches into people's convictions at a time when
this country needs every ounce of moral certainty it can muster. Over the past few weeks,
I'm sure you've heard at least once, something to the effect of: "If we bomb our enemies,
we'll just be doing to them what they did to us. We'll be sinking to their level!" If you
understand the pacifists' basic error, you can see very clearly what's wrong with this picture:
the failure to differentiate between the force of an aggressor, and force used in retaliation
against the aggressor in self-defense. No, it's not morally wrong to fight back against
someone who's attacking you; if you value your life, it's absolutely essential that you do.

Pacifism Causes Oppression

THEIR ARGUMENT EQUATES TO SUPPORT FOR OPPRESSIVE
DICTATORSHIPS
Steven Brockerman, Assistant Editor for Capitalism Magazine, Pacifists and Professors of
Oppression, Capitalism Magazine, October 12, 20 01, http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1154,
UK: Fisher
Righteous in their indignation against the use of American military force, the pacifists and
professors, nonetheless, willingly accept the preemptive annihilation of an entire city in
Syria by that nation's despotic ruler. They who speak intolerantly of American racism are,
nevertheless, willing to tolerate the slave trade thriving in Sudan. Avowed defenders of the
Palestinians, they look the other way when those who even mildly publicly criticize Arafat
have their tongues cut out or worse. About all that oppression they are silent. What those
pacifists and professors are not silent about, though, is their opposition to America's right to
self-defense. They who tolerate Mid-Eastern Arab tyrannies are not silent in their
intolerance of America. The pacifists and the professors cannot accept that America -- a
nation they hate with the religious fervor of an Islamic terrorist -- is morally right and, thus,
morally superior; therefore, they are willing to grimly evade not only the reason America
was attacked on September 11, but also the reason they -- the pacifists and the professors -are attacking America now. America was attacked, not because the U.S. has oppressed the
Arab people, but because the U.S. represents the greatest threat to those Mid-East
dictatorships that do and, thus, represents the greatest hope to the Arab peoples. America is
now being attacked by many in the universities, not because the U.S. is racist or imperialist,
but because the U.S. stands for individual rights, capitalism and the pursuit of happiness,
which are the greatest rebukes to the beliefs of the pacifists and the professors and anyone
else whose ideas make possible and then excuse dictatorship, poverty and oppression.

625

Kritik Answers

Pacifism Causes Aggression (1/2)

PEACE MOVEMENTS ULTIMATELY FAIL EVEN IF THE US
TURNS MORE PEACEFUL, OTHER ENEMIES WONT
Adam G. Mersereau, Served in the enlisted and officer ranks of the United States
Marine Corps from 1990 to 1995; now an attorney, Down with the Peace Movement: The
trouble with the antiwar warriors, National Review Online, January 15, 20 03,
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-mersereau011503.asp
Peace activists may be well intentioned; but at their worst, they are more helpful to
America's enemies than to America. The best we can say is that they are clinically nave.
They are as insufferable as a college freshman who believes he and his political-science
professor can end poverty if only people would listen. It is as if the peace activists believe
they have discovered for the first time those self-evident and thus ancient truths that human
life is sacred, and war is tragic. Little do they know that a majority of the Iraqis who stroll
past their peace marches in Baghdad support an American invasion. Many would eagerly
fight and risk death in an armed revolution if they could obtain the resources and
momentum to launch one for themselves.
Navet allows the peace movement to thrive, but it is animated by arrogance.
THE ARROGANCE
While campaigning for the presidency, candidate Bush said that his administration would
conduct its foreign policy with less arrogance than past administrations had displayed. He is
now widely accused of forsaking the less-arrogant approach and of choosing, instead, to
rattle his saber at any dictator he thinks he can rattle. But is it really arrogant for the
president to insist that a violent and unpredictable dictator with ambitions to control the
world's oil supply who is also a friend of al Qaeda should be denied a secret nuclear,
chemical- and biological-weapons program? Is it arrogant to suggest that Saddam Hussein
should be removed from power if he continues to defy and deceive the international
community? Likewise, is it arrogant to expect the North Koreans to abide by the Agreed
Framework, under which the U.S. promised to inject millions of U.S. tax dollars into the
faltering North Korean economy? Perhaps it is slightly arrogant, but the peace movement is
fantastically more arrogant.
The peace movement is founded upon a subtle ethnocentrism that escapes detection even by
the multicultural Left where most peace activists are bred. The group that most openly
celebrates the diversity of mankind does not understand that many people in the world hold
diverse beliefs and subscribe to ideologies that are entirely independent of American
influence. In the mind of the peace activist, America is not just the sole superpower, it is
the center of gravity for all world events; and so every world event is simply an equal (and
sometimes opposite) reaction to a prior American action. Peace activists believe that
America's economy and culture are such dominant forces in the lives of people throughout
the world that the actions and policies of other nations can be interpreted only as mere
reactions to the actions and policies of the United States government. Therefore, they
believe America has the unbounded ability to manipulate foreign governments through
economic and cultural means.
Peacenik foreign policy is really very simple: Without an action by the United States, there
will be no reaction by others. If America does not start a war, there will be no war. This is the
arrogant ethnocentrism of the peace movement. Under this view, it is unthinkable that
quaint little dictators such as Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-il might deign to
manipulate America as much or more than America tries to manipulate them. It is
unthinkable that a nation would resort to building nuclear weapons if they did not first feel
threatened by the world's only super-bully. It is inconceivable that Saddam Hussein or Kim
Jong-il might have diabolical plans and evil aspirations that were not created by, and are not
controlled by, the U.S. State Department. The peace activist then reaches the conclusion that
the United States can make a unilateral decision for peace, simply by choosing to lay down
its arms. If the United States would ignore open and notorious breaches of U.N. directives

626

Kritik Answers
and treaties, and simply refuse to disturb the current state of peace, then peace would
prevail by default.
Of course, the choice between war and peace is not ours alone. There could be war and
likely will be war regardless of our course of action. The only questions are: on whose
terms, and on whose turf?

627

Kritik Answers

Pacifism Causes Aggression (2/2)

NONVIOLENCE IS CODE FOR APPEASEMENT HISTORY
PROVES THAT EVEN RHETORICAL STANCES AGAINST THE
USE OF FORCE CAN EMBOLDEN AGGRESSORS
Sowell 2K1 (Thomas, September 23, Pacifism on Principle is Suicide, Capitalism
Magazine, http://capmag.com/articlePrint.asp?ID= 1108)
Although most Americans seem to understand the gravity of the situation that terrorism has put us in -- and the need for some serious
military response, even if that means dangers to the lives of us all -- there are still those who insist on posturing, while on the edge of a
volcano. In the forefront are college students who demand a peaceful response to an act of war. But there are others who are old enough

the pacifist platitudes of the 1930s that contributed so much to

bringing on World War II. A former ambassador from the weak-kneed Carter administration says that we
should look at the root causes behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. We should understand the alienation and sense of grievance against us by various people in the Middle East. It is
to know better, who are still repeating

astonishing to see the 1960s phrase root causes resurrected at this late date and in this context. It was precisely this kind of thinking.
which sought the root causes of crime during that decade, creating soft policies toward criminals, which led to skyrocketing crime rates.

On the
international scene, trying to assuage aggressors feelings and look at the world from their
point of view has had an even more catastrophic track record . A typical sample of this kind of thinking can
Moreover, these soaring crime rates came right after a period when crime rates were lower than they had been in decades.

be found in a speech to the British Parliament by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938: It has always seemed to me that in dealing
with foreign countries we do not give ourselves a chance of success unless we try to understand their mentality, which is not always the
same as our own, and it really is astonishing to contemplate how the identically same facts are regarded from two different angles. Like

Chamberlain sought to remove the causes of strife or war.

He wanted a general settlement of the grievances of the world without war. In other words, the
our former ambassador from the Carter era,

British prime minister approached Hitler with the attitude of someone negotiating a labor contract, where each side gives a little and

What Chamberlain did not understand was that all his

concessions simply led to new demands from Hitler -- and contempt for him by Hitler . What
everything gets worked out in the end.

Winston Churchill understood at the time, and Chamberlain did not, was that Hitler was driven by what Churchill called currents of
hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them. That was also what drove the men who drove the planes into the

Pacifists of the 20th century had a lot of blood on their hands for weakening
the Western democracies in the face of rising belligerence and military might in aggressor
nations like Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In Britain during the 1930s, Labor Party members of Parliament
World Trade Center.

voted repeatedly against military spending, while Hitler built up the most powerful military machine in Europe. Students at leading British
universities signed pledges to refuse to fight in the event of war. All

of this encouraged the Nazis and the Japanese

toward war against countries that they knew had greater military potential than their own.
Military potential only counts when there is the will to develop it and use it, and the
fortitude to continue with a bloody war when it comes. This is what they did not believe the
West had. And it was Western pacifists who led them to that belief. Then as now, pacifism
was a statement about ones ideals that paid little attention to actual consequences. At a
Labor Party rally where Britain was being urged to disarm [!!!]as an example to others,
economist Roy Harrod asked one of the pacifists: You think our example will cause Hitler
and Mussolini to disarm? The reply was: Oh, Roy, have you lost all your idealism? In other
words, the issue was about making a statement --that is, posturing on the edge of a volcano, with World War II threatening to erupt at
any time. When disarmament advocate George Bemard Shaw was asked what Britons should do if the Nazis crossed the channel into

What a shame our schools and college neglect

history, which could save us from continuing to repeat the idiocies of the past, which are
even more dangerous now in a nuclear age.
Britain, the playwright replied, Welcome them as tourists.

628

Kritik Answers

**Normativity**
Normativity Answers: 2AC (1/7)
FIRST, EVEN IF THERE IS NO STABLE, OBJECTIVE LEGAL
SUBJECT, PEOPLE STILL ACT IN RESPONSE TO THE LAW,
MAKING IT THE BEST PRAGMATIC MEANS OF SOCIAL
CHANGE. CROSS-APPLY OUR SPECIFIC TRIBE AND KATYAL
SOLVENCY
SECOND, PERFORMATIVE CONTRADICTION REJECTING
NORMATIVE LEGAL THROUGHT PRESCRIBES A NON-NLT
LEGAL NORM, WHICH IS BAD BECAUSE IT PREVENTS US
FROM LINKING OFFENSE, DESTROYS ARGUMENTATIVE
ACCOUNTABILITY, AND IS A VOTER FOR FAIRNESS AND
EDUCATION
THIRD, PERM DO BOTH
ABANDONING NORMATIVITY IS IMPOSSIBLE.
ACKNOWLEDGING THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM WHILE
VICARIOUSLY PARTICIPATING IN LITIGATION CREATES
SUBJECTIVE FREEDOM THROUGH THE LAWS REPEATED
FAILURE, COMING TO TERMS WITH LEGAL APORIA
Carlson 99

[David Gray, Prof Law @ Cardozo, Duellism in Modern American Jurisprudence, 99

Colum. L. Rev. 1908, November, LN//uwyo-ajl]
of Professor Schlag's points about legal
scholarship are undoubtedly well taken. But it doesn't follow that it should or even could be
abolished. In truth, whether he admits it or not, Professor Schlag himself does legal scholarship. He does not follow his
own advice about not doing it. Nor could he. If legal scholarship stands for participation in the realm of the
symbolic, then legal scholarship - i.e., culture - is the very medium that perpetuates selfconsciousness.
Should normative legal scholarship be abolished, as Professor Schlag suggests? Some

Schlag is very hard on law professors who give advice to judges. He mocks their work as mere "pretend-law," n313 mere journalism. n314 "One need only pick up a
judicial opinion, a state statute, a federal regulation, or a law review article to experience an overwhelming sense of dread and ennui." n315 Meanwhile, judges are not
even paying attention to legal scholarship n316 - which, experience teaches, is disappointingly true.

Vicarious participation in litigation or legislation can nevertheless be defended as a participation

in culture itself. Law professors can contribute to that culture by making law more coherent,
and in this sense their project is at least as worthy as any that philosophy, history or astrophysics [*1951] could devise. Law has an objective structure that exceeds
mere subjectivity. This objective structure can be altered by hard work. An altered legal world, however, is not the point. Evidence of consequential impact is

in the work itself that the value of legal scholarship can be

found. Work is what reconciles the failure of the unhappy consciousness to achieve justice.
gratifying, but this is simply what mere egotism requires. It is

Work is, in Hegel's view,

desire held in check, fleetingness staved off... work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent... This
negative middle term or the formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now... acquires an element of
permanence. n317

By working the law, lawyers, judges, private citizens, and even

academics can make it more permanent, more resilient, more "existential," n318 but, more to the point, they make
themselves more resilient, more "existential." n319 Work on law can increase freedom - the
positive freedom that relieves the worker of "anxiety" - fear of disappearance into the Real.
n320 When work is done, the legal universe swells and fills itself out - like an appetite that "grows by what it feeds on." n321 But far more important , the self
gains a place in the world by the very work done. Work is the means of "subjective destitution" or
"narcissistic loss" n322 - the complete externalization of the subject and the surrender of the fantasy support
upon which the subject otherwise depends. In Lacanian terms, "subjective destitution" is the wages of cure at the end of analysis.
n323 Or, in Hegelian terms, cure is "the ascesis that is necessary if consciousness is to reach genuine philosophic knowledge." n324 In this state, we
precisely lose the suspicion that law (i.e., the big Other) does not exist. n325 In Hegel's inspirational words:
Hegel, then, gives a spiritual turn to that worthy slogan "publish or perish."

Each individual consciousness raises itself out of its allotted sphere, no longer finds its essence and its work in this particular sphere, but grasps itself as the Notion of
will, grasps all spheres as [*1952] the essence of this will, and therefore can only realize itself in a work which is a work of the whole. n326

629

Kritik Answers
I make no special claim that legal academic work is worthy of extra-special respect. It is a craft, like any other. As such, it is at least worthy of its share of respect. If
spirit unfolds and manifests itself in the phenomenal world of culture, n327 why should it not also manifest itself in the law reviews?

630

Kritik Answers

Normativity Answers: 2AC (2/7)

FOURTH, NO IMPACT SCHLAG JUST SAYS NORMATIVITY
HAPPENS WITHIN A FIELD OF VIOLENCE, NOT THAT IT
CAUSES VIOLENCE
FIFTH, THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF JUSTICE MAKES JUSTICE
POSSIBLE BY SUBLIMATING ETHICS THE ALTERNATIVE IS
A FANTASY SCREEN THAT INSTALLS A SENSE OF
SUBJECTIVE COMPLETION THAT NEVER EXISTED
Carlson 99

[David Gray, Prof Law @ Cardozo, Duellism in Modern American Jurisprudence, 99

Colum. L. Rev. 1908, November, LN//uwyo-ajl]
For this very reason, justice is quite opaque to general definition. Being a phallic trope,
justice never has been and never will be defined. Any definition of justice could only occur
by use of signifiers, yet justice is precisely what is beyond signification. n51 So conceived, it
is clear that justice must always fail. n52
Doing justice is therefore always an act of "sublimation" - in sublimation, I "elevate an object
to the dignity of the Thing." n53 Justice, as this void between legal concepts, participates in
what Slavoj <hac Z>i<hac z>ek calls the "ethics of the Real," which is
the moral Law in its impenetrable aspect, as an agency that arouses anxiety by addressing
me with the empty, tautological and, for that very reason, enigmatic injunction 'Do your
duty!', leaving it to me to translate this injunction into a determinate moral obligation - I,
the moral subject, remain forever plagued by uncertainty, since the moral Law provides no
guarantee that I "got it right"... n54
Justice, I contend, is Professor Schlag's "robust referent." Yet what Schlag does not consider
is that justice always necessarily fails. Justice is a negative located in the interstices of law.
Any attempt to legislate justice [*1918] is mere sublimation. To deliver on this promise of
justice, law would have to fill the legal universe and crowd out the negative moment of
justice. n55 To the extent law fails to deliver on its promise - when it fails to fill the legal
universe - it precisely leaves open the possibility of justice itself. n56 Justice is designed to
fail!
According to the false Lacanian autobiography, law has promised justice, but it cannot
deliver. Law has castrated the subject but has not lived up to its side of the bargain. It has
defaulted on its promise of restitution. Law only fills the field of justice with more signifiers,
on a logic by which law is remade with every instance of legal practice. Revealingly, Schlag
writes: "To be really good at 'doing law,' one has to have serious blind spots and a stunningly
selective sense of curiosity." n57 Professor Schlag captures the practice of law acutely in this
remark. "Doing law" is filling the gap with signifiers, a practice that does indeed require
serious blind spots in the performance of it. To speak or to act is literally to forget - that the
castrated subject is not whole. n58
There is no sense, however, in being angry about judicial failure. Law cannot be blamed for
what it cannot deliver. The healthy subject comes to learn that this failed bargain is a
falsehood. The subject never had the phallus. n59 Nor does the symbolic realm withhold it.
Nothing has been lost and no restitution is due. n60 Schlag's insinuation, that the symbolic
realm has breached its obligation to deliver justice is thus false. n61

SIXTH, NO LINK WE DONT CLAIM THAT LAW ACHIEVES

FINAL JUSTICE, JUST THAT PLAN IS PERCEIVED IN A
CONSEQUENTIALLY BENEFICIAL WAY

631

Kritik Answers

Normativity Answers: 2AC (3/7)

SEVENTH, THE CRITICISM MISIDENTIFIES THE LACKING
NATURE OF LANGUAGE, REINSCRIBING STABLE
SUBJECTIVITY
Carlson 99

[David Gray, Prof Law @ Cardozo, Duellism in Modern American Jurisprudence, 99

Colum. L. Rev. 1908, November, LN//uwyo-ajl]
I began by suggesting that Pierre Schlag assumes the position of a duellist. He thinks legal
academics are either fools or knaves. But he mistakes his opponent. The villain is language
itself. Language is what causes the split in the subject, and Professor Schlag has made the
classic error of assuming that legal academics are deliberately withholding l'objet petit a.
They hold surplus enjoyment and are to blame for the pain and the lack that always
accompanies the presence of the subject in the symbolic order.
If this psychoanalytic suggestion explains the angry tone of Schlag's work, it also explains
the basic errors into which he falls. When one considers this work as a whole, most of these
errors are obvious and patent. Indeed, most of these errors have been laid by Schlag himself
at the doorstep of others. But, in surrendering to feeling or, as perhaps Schlag would put it,
to context (i.e., the pre-theoretical state), Schlag cannot help but make these very same
errors. Some examples:
(1) Schlag's program, induced from his critiques, is that we should rely on feeling to tell us
what to do. Yet Schlag denounces in others any reliance on a pre-theoretical self. n328
(2) Schlag warns that, by definition, theory abstracts from context. n329 He warns that
assuming the right answer will arise from context unmediated by theory is "feeble." n330
Yet, he rigorously and repetitively denounces any departure from context, as if any such
attempt is a castration - a wrenching of the subject from the natural realm. He usually
implies that context alone can provide the right answer - that moral geniuses like Sophocles
or Earl Warren can find the answer by consulting context.
[*1953] (3) Schlag complains that common law judges are "vacuous fellows" when they
erase themselves so that law can speak. n331 Yet, Schlag, a natural lawyer, likewise erases
himself so that context can speak without distortion.
(4) Schlag warns that merely reversing the valences of polarities only reinstates what was
criticized. n332 Yet he does the same in his own work. In attacking the sovereignty of the
liberal self, he merely asserts the sovereignty of the romantic self. Neither,
psychoanalytically, is a valid vision. One polarity is substituted for another. n333
(5) Schlag scorns the postulation of ontological entities such as free will, but makes moral
arguments to his readers that depend entirely on such postulation.
(6) Schlag denounces normativity in others, but fails to see that he himself is normative
when he advises his readers to stop being normative. The pretense is that Schlag is an
invisible mediator between his reader and context. As such, Schlag, the anti-Kantian, is
more Kantian than Kant himself. Thus, context supposedly announces, "Stop doing
normative work." Yet context says nothing of the sort. It is Schlag's own normative theory
that calls for the work slowdown.
(7) Schlag urges an end to legal scholarship when he himself continues to do legal
scholarship. He may wish to deny that his work is scholarship, but his denial must be
overruled. We have before us a legal scholar, like any other.

632

Kritik Answers

Normativity Answers: 2AC (4/7)

EIGHTH, DISAVOWAL OF THE VIOLENCE OF
REPRESENTATION AND CALLS FOR INTERNAL RETHINKING
RELY ON ASSUMPTIONS OF METAPHYSICAL INNOCENCE,
FETISHIZING AN AUTHENTICITY THAT NEVER EXISTED
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 195-6//uwyo-ajl]
postmodernism has actually become
something. Its principal characteristic is the retreat from and disavowal of the violence of
representation - both political and semiotic. There are three further aspects to this essentially
ignominious cultural operation: (i) a cultivation of stupidity (what I have called Kelvinism, or 'metaphysical innocence')
as a means of circumventing the ideational 'brutality' of the political life; (ii) a recourse to
the idea of an internal or subjective 'truth of the soul' which transcends political reality,
along with the contingencies of representation. Both of these signal an attachment to a
surface/ depth model of subjectivity which in each case amounts to a fetishization of
authenticity, whether by opting to 'remain' on the surface, or by retreating 'inwards' ; (iii) a collapse
Despite the diligence and the sterling efforts of its best theoreti-cians, then, it seems that

of faith by individuals and even politicians themselves, not only in the political infrastructure but in the very' concept of political engagement - here it becomes
apparent that Tony Blair, for example, is more 'postodern' than any theoretician.
.

these three responses stand in an approximately analogous relationship to the archetypal forms in which consciousness,
in a state of anxiety, shrinks from the violence of determinate negation and 'strives to hold on to what it is in danger
It should be clear that

of losing'. 59 At various points throughout the present work I have used the terms 'decadence', 'irony' and 'relativism' to refer to these instances of an epistemological

capitulation to 'things as they are'

loss of nerve, this

; it may be as well here to remind ourselves of the terms in which Hegel describes these
manifestations of a retreat from truth. Consciousness, he says, at the decisive moment in which it is required to go beyond its own limits, (i) 'wishes to remain in a
state' of unthinking inertia'; (ii) gloats over its own understanding, 'which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego instead of any

Postmodernism, an empirical social

legitimizes these symptoms of

content'; (iii) 'entrenches itself in sentimentality, which assures us that it finds everything to be good in its kind'. 60
condition - by which I mean that a series of critical-theoretical strategies has attained a certain concrete form -

cultural anxiety; postmodernism becomes synonymous, therefore, with deceleration, with a sense of cultural and political conclusivity; postmodernism is
the principal vehicle of what Baudrillard calls 'the illusion of the end'.

AND, AUTHENTICITY FETISHIZATION AND ITS FEAR OF

REASON AND VIOLENCE ALLOW US TO SPEND HOURS
DEBATING THE FINE POINTS OF BAUDRILLARIAN ETHICS
WHILE GAS CHAMBERS ARE BUILT
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997,146-7//uwyo-ajl]
If it is unreasonable to suppose that the Final Solution was potentiated or even necessarily
facilitated by Schmitt's theories, it is certainly the case that this metaphysical structure of
domination in the Third Reich, whereby the status of public citizens is reduced to a level
determined entirely in the 'natural' or biological realm of necessity, is foreshadowed in his
1927 essay. In an abstract and insidious way Schmitt introduces the idea that the
'transcendent' realm of the political, as a matter of course, will not accommodate a people
with insufficient strength to ensure its own participation, and that such a fact is ipso facto
justification for its exclusion. 'If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to
maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world.
Only a weak people will disappear.'130 Schmitt's concept of the 'political', quite simply, is
nothing of the sort - is instead weighed down by necessity, in the form of what Marshall
Berman calls German-Christian interiority - by its preoccupation with authenticity, that is to
say, and true political 'identity'. Auschwitz is a corollary not of reason, understood as risk,
but of the fear of reason, which paradoxically is a fear of violence. The stench of burning
bodies is haunted always by the sickly aroma of cheap metaphysics.

633

Kritik Answers

Normativity Answers: 2AC (5/7)

NINTH, PUBLIC CRITICISM OF EXECUTIVE POWER CREATES
CRITICAL MOMENTUM THAT FORCES THE COURTS TO
HOLD PRESIDENTIAL ABUSES ACCOUNTABLE WEN HO
LEE PROVES
Yamamoto 2005

[Eric K., Prof. Law @ Hawaii, White (House) Lies: Why the Public Must Compel the Courts
to Hold the President Accountable for National Security Abuses, 68 Law & Contemp. Prob.
285, Spring, LN//uwyo-ajl]
These events and counter-messages garnered national press. Belatedly, the mainstream
media responded with new images and opinions. Writers who had contributed significantly
to the public vilification of Dr. Lee now became critical of his treatment and even advocated
for his release. n116 On August 22 and 23, 2000 - during the crucial days when Judge Parker
was considering the defense's key motions for bail, discovery, and evidence - editorials and
[*310] headlines in major newspapers declared: "Wen Ho Lee Deserves Bail and Fair
Treatment" (San Francisco Chronicle); "Is Lee Guilty Until Proven Innocent?" (Chicago
Tribune); "Free Wen Ho Lee" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch); "Wrong One Is on Trial in Lee Case"
(Los Angeles Times); and "Bail for Wen Ho Lee" (New York Times). n117
Organizers also employed an effective strategy of public education through print ads in
major newspapers. For example, on August 7, 2000, Chinese for Affirmative Action
organized a full-page ad in the New York Times demanding "Drop all charges. Free Dr. Wen
Ho Lee now." The ad was titled, "Wen Ho Lee & The Nuclear Witch Hunt" and focused on
being "charged with being ethnic Chinese." The ad presented Dr. Lee in a different light than
New York Times readers had become accustomed to seeing. Instead of the stereotypical
foreign spy, Dr. Lee was presented as an "American scientist" separated from his wife and
two children for eight months, countering the usual media image of Dr. Lee in shackles.
Op-ed pieces also countered the executive lies and stereotypes. Attorneys Theodore Wang
and Victor Hwang published an opinion piece titled, "Charged With Being Ethnic Chinese."
n118 In it they exposed the racial profiling and challenged the premise on which the
government based its racist actions. They correctly framed the issue as "not only for Lee but
for all Americans concerned about whether the government should be able to launch
criminal investigations based on the race of a suspect." They also argued that "by focusing
only on Asian Americans, a real spy may have escaped the scrutiny of the federal
government altogether." n119 This and other op-ed pieces strategically framed the issue of
racial profiling as one for "all Americans" and publicly questioned the effects of allowing the
government to continue such practices without accountability. n120
Critical legal advocacy and organized pressure helped reframe for the public, and for Judge
Parker, the real issues - selective racial prosecution Executive lies and the need for
accountability. This new sense in the public culture of what was really going on and what
was really at stake provided the backdrop for courtroom decisions. Amid intensifying
demands to free Dr. Lee and put the Justice Department on trial instead, Judge Parker
ordered the government to disclose documents on racial profiling and negotiate a release
agreement with Dr. Lee. n121

634

Kritik Answers

Normativity Answers: 2AC (6/7)

TENTH, DEBATE AND DELIBERATIVE POLITICS ARE
CONSTANT RENEGOTIATION OF VALIDITY CLAIMS,
CARRYING THE CAPACITY FOR CONSTANT INNOVATION OF
MEANING
Kulynych 97

[Jessica, Asst. Prof. of Poli Sci @ Winthrop, Polity 30: 2, Winter//uwyo]

If we interpret the "to show" here not as pointing out what is wrong with disciplinary society (which would leave Foucault subject to Fraser's normative criticism), but
rather as "showing," or "showing up," then we no longer need the introduction of normative notions, we are merely doing disciplinary society one better. Making a
point is a function of discourse, the ability to align and arrange arguments that support a position. Yet, the performative protestor does not argue against the state, he
mocks it. The protestor works at the margins of discourse, utilizing puns and jokes and caricature to "expose" the limits of what is being said. Thus, performative
resistance, when considered as critique, does not need to tell us what is wrong, rather it reveals the existence of subjection where we had not previously seen it. I am
not suggesting that we can get a normative anchor out of the notion of performativity. To the contrary, I am suggesting performative resistance makes no such

performativity is not about normative distinctions. We bring normativity to our

By unearthing the contingency of the "selfevident," performative resistance enables politics. Thus, the question is not should we resist
(since resistance is always, already present), but rather what and how we should resist.
This notion of performativity is also important for understanding the possibilities for innovation in Habermasian deliberative
participation. Just as a protestor exposes the contingency of concepts like justice, a dialogue exposes the limits and contingency
of rational argumentation. Once we are sensitive to the performative nature of speech, language and discourse, then we can see that deliberative
politics cannot be confined to the rational statement of validity claims. Deliberation must be theatrical: it is in the performance of deliberation that that
which cannot be argued for finds expression. Indeed it is precisely the non-rational aspects of
deliberation that carry the potential for innovation. In his description of the poignant reminders of demonstration Chaloupka
normative distinctions, or rather, that

performances as ethical principles that are themselves subject to resistance.

recognizes that it is at the margins that the actual force of the demonstration resides, no matter what happens at the microphone. The oral histories of
demonstrations (the next day over coffee) linger over the jokes and funny signs and slogans, the outrages and improprieties, more than the speeches and carefully

Any convincing account of the politics of deliberation must take account of

the creative potential that resides in the performance of debate.
coherent position papers.(68)

ELEVENTH, THE ALTERNATIVE COLLAPSES BACK INTO

NORMATIVITY, REINSCRIBING LEGAL VIOLENCE
Annelise Riles, Ford Fellow in Public International Law, Harvard Law School, 1993 94, 19 94 U.
Ill. L. Rev. 597, *650
If Geertz's argument signals a loss of faith in the interdisciplinary scholar's ability to combine the theories of each discipline, is there hope for the current effort to
break law and society into myriad component parts and relate these anew, as Geertz sought to do with his turn to fact and law? In this respect, I think, the two

in manipulating one dichotomy after another, the scholar has

the sinking sense that all the possible positions are prefigured. As noted at the outset, practitioners of legal anthropology now
disciplines share a moment of theoretical impasse, for

pessimistically perceive the possibilities of their discipline. Likewise, although it is now increasingly fashionable for lawyers to turn outside their discipline for grand

, the totally new insight, the epistemology, never seems fulfilled. Every combination and recombination, every construction and
deconstruction seems already prefigured. Just as the "whole" of culture now has ceased to do the work of organizing our arguments,
the "whole" of the discipline certainly no longer seems worth supporting or opposing. But neither do its parts . The effect of this change is that there
no longer is much rhetorical force in claiming dangerous or creative spaces in-between. How can Leach's
insights, they do so with increasing wariness. The image of what anthropology might have to offer
bursting perspective

disciplinary terrorism be maverick if the opposition he bridges is no longer real for us? How can Geertz's shuttling between fragmented points of relation feel
innovative if the parameters within which these points lie are entirely familiar from the start? To claim that there is nothing new to combine, or that relation no longer
works, is to relinquish the identity of the productive scholar -- who is productive because he or she makes new forms. B. Normative and Reflexive Knowledge As noted
at the opening of this part, one must stand for something in an article such as this one; reflecting on the arguments of others in itself is not enough. If the task of
relationship building in interdisciplinary scholarship has lost its force, therefore, I now must argue for an alternative. This understanding pervades the works we have
considered from Henry Maine to the present day. The imperative to harness observations, as here about the state of interdisciplinary scholarship, into a claim, as here
for a future direction of interdisciplinarity, and the difficulty experienced in doing so, characterizes much contemporary interdisciplinary work. Indeed, one of the
enduring characteristics of the tradition we have considered is precisely this transformation from what we might call a reflexive mode of knowledge into a normative
mode and back again. Every work we have considered in the preceding pages has made its contribution to legal knowledge by approaching its subject reflexively. By

insight always is produced by observing a topic in European or American law from another,
wider vantage point. Maine, for example, reflects upon legal positivism from the *644 point of view of the history of European civilization. Leach
this, I mean that

takes the problem of an international response to terrorism and recasts it in terms of violence in primitive societies. This reflexivity involves a broadening of
perspective, and it often is achieved by a kind of movement beyond one's starting position to another position and back again, as when Geertz takes us on a tour of the
world's legal systems or when Maine moves through successive stages of historical development. When contemporary interdisciplinary scholars argue for attention to
the "outside," to "context," or to a "wider reality" beyond the law, I think they are conflating the metaphors we use to describe this reflexive mode of knowledge --

. Yet every author also understands him or herself to be

staking out a normative claim. Maine is for a more academic tradition of legal scholarship, and he is against the democratization of legal
metaphors of expansion and movement -- with an "actual" outside

institutions. Leach, likewise, has a political motive in treating the terrorist bombings of the 1970s and the atom bombing of Hiroshima as commensurates. This kind of
normative claim, in contrast to reflexive knowledge, is achieved precisely by holding things constant, by refusing to move to another perspective even if one
understands such movement as possible, and

by constricting rather than

continued
635

Kritik Answers

Normativity Answers: 2AC (7/7)

continued
expanding the scope of inquiry so that a sharp claim can be made. It is no wonder that we describe such normative
knowledge using stationary metaphors -- staking out a position, taking a stand, etc. To make a claim about the future of interdisciplinary work in legal anthropology,

normative and reflexive knowledge. It is worth noting at the outset,

are not logically contradictory.

then, is to be normative in the sense of this engagement between

however, that these two modes of knowledge

On the contrary -- it is precisely Maine's reflexive
reconsideration of modern legal institutions from a broader historical vantage point that gives rise to his antipopulism, and it is Leach's interest in understanding

. One of the defining

aspects of the interplay between reflexive and normative modes of engagement is that each slips
effortlessly, almost uncontrollably, into the other. There is no resting point at which one is reflexive or
primitive society on its own terms that leads him to defend the terrorist's world view against the position of international law

normative: we "know" that every relativism is actually an argument for something or other. Indeed, this knowledge gives rise to one of the classic modes of critique in
the repertoire of both lawyers and anthropologists, as we expose the "position" or "argument" behind a certain reflexive exposition. The same is true of normative

: we can always understand a normative claim such as a call for the universal protection of rights of expression, for
to be the expression of a particular point of view, and indeed, as soon as such a normative claim is made,
it seems to engender a reflexive turn . It is not just that a normative argument produces a reflexive one. Rather, the very same
knowledge, effectuated in a reflexive mode, invariably becomes normative. Maine's historicization of
argument
example,

Bentham's positivism, for example, in turn becomes an argument against the universal application of positivism. Leach's reconsideration of the cultural construction
of terrorism becomes a normative claim for the importance of attention to cultural difference itself. One of the defining aspects of the interplay between reflexive and
normative knowledge in interdisciplinary scholarship, then, is the way in which each relativism in turn becomes its own position, which then is open to relativization
again. A reflexive observation becomes an argument to stand by, and that argument then can be reconsidered in a reflexive way. By way of example, we might consider
a prominent article by lawyer and anthropologist Sally Falk Moore, Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers What to Say to Africans About Running
"Their Own" Native Courts. Building on a career-long investigation into the British colonial legal system, its assumptions about African society, and the response it
generated among the Chagga, Moore takes as her point of departure a 1957 British directive concerning the organization of customary courts among the natives of
Tanganyika. The theme of the piece is the conflict between the British administrators and the village courts over British legal notions, such as res judicata and the Rule
of Law as a rule of the written word, and the intended audience of the piece includes both lawyers and anthropologists. The contribution of the piece is a reflexive
reconsideration of what Moore takes as the Anglo-American faith in the rule of law. She writes in the article abstract: This article is presented at two levels throughout.
On the surface it is a straightforward historical analysis of a directive to British officers . . . . On a deeper level the article uses the British colonial occasion to explore
widely held cultural assumptions in Anglo-American law about the definability of "justice," the concept of time and timing in legal affairs, and the complex place of the
idea of legitimate, authoritative, and permanent "knowledge" in legal institutions. *646 Moore's ultimate target is the colonial government's obsession with rule
making, with cataloguing African practices into a codifiable form. In a classic relativizing spirit, she is concerned that we understand that notions of a "rule-governed
judiciary" of the kind she finds in the texts of H.L.A. Hart, and the obsession with written precedent on which it depends, are culturally specific ways of resolving
conflicts, not -- as she quotes her colonial directive to claim -- natural law. This reflexive turn engenders many of the patterns we have observed in other contemporary
works of Legal Anthropology: Moore emphasizes the rationality of African legal systems on their own terms and in so doing discovers a social reality outside the law.
She argues that the architects of the British colonial legal regime failed to understand that "[t]he Africa of reality had its own social and legal logic." This African
reality, moreover, is the realm of expertise of the anthropologist: "The colonials had to cope with the consequences of this 'localism' but did not understand the nature
of local rural communities," she notes, owing partly to the fact that (unlike anthropologists) "most of them did not speak any of the many local languages." She
explains that "[t]he colonials did not picture these villages as they were . . . . Had they known what we now know about the internal political life of African
neighborhoods and villages, they might have had a very different understanding of what was going on." She even notes concerning the 1950s writing of a Restatement
of African Law, that the law professor in charge saw the insights of anthropologists as too imprecise to be useful to courts engaged in modernization and nation
building. This reconsideration of law from a wider perspective is also its own normative argument, a kind of lecture to lawyers about the cultural particularity of their
world view. The ultimate point Moore hammers home to her legal audience is the classic plea for attention to context. As she puts it, "[t]his circumstance raises a
question in relation to the colonial instance that has far wider application: Is it possible to 'know' much about a legal system without knowing the character of the casegenerating milieu?" The answer for Moore clearly is no. Text is meaningless without context. This rhetoric in turn is organized around a severe and confident break
between the legal and social spheres -- both of the subject, the colonial administrator and the Chagga, and the subtext, the lawyer and the anthropologist. "Certainly
the difference between the designed judicial institution and the 'event-evolved' set of neighborhood institutions is very great." The effort of looking at the world of law
from a broader perspective now has become the subject of an argument to Moore's legal colleagues. Yet Moore does not stop with the lessons of anthropology for law.
In a fascinating passage, she attacks the "fashion" of anthropological critiques of colonial practices that show the ignorance of colonial administrators about local
practices: "As the colonial period has been safely over for more than thirty years, showing colonial flaws coupled with colonial arrogance is not only politically risk
free, it is a rather conventional version of history for our time." Claiming for herself a more "experimental" territory, she asserts an interest in "the cumulative
historical production of institutions" that lies beyond such simple assertions of colonial failure. Given the symbolic association of the legal academic and the colonial
administrator in her text, one is left to wonder what this might mean for those who, like the vulgar critics of colonialism, engage in vulgar lectures to legal academics
about the weaknesses of legal formalism and rule- based adjudication. The paper cannot come to a close, in other words, until Moore's normative claims on behalf of
anthropological methods engender their own reflexive reconsideration. The transformation of reflexive into normative modes and back again spawns a parallel
transformation in the knowledge it produces. For example, we saw that anthropologists first reflected on law from a wider point of view and discovered relationships
by doing so. These relationships soon became a position in themselves, outside the law. It was only a matter of time, therefore, before that position itself would
become the subject of reflexive interpretation, as I have done in the pages above. Yet if reflexive modes of knowledge engender normative knowledge and vice versa,
these modes are not alternatives in the lexicon of *648 lawyers and anthropologists, nor are they opposites. One cannot simply choose to relativize or to argue for
something, as one would choose a Law and Economics approach or a Law and Anthropology approach to a legal problem, because each is understood to negate the
possibility of the other. Likewise, it would be nonsensical to try to devise an approach that would combine normative and reflexive knowledge: one cannot be a
relativist and stand for something, it is often said. Each mode engulfs the entire enterprise of representation, so that if I write in one genre, I cannot invoke the other.
This is because unlike disciplines or cultures, normative and reflexive modes of knowledge are not of the same order. They are not contained in a single frame, as law
and anthropology are contained in the frame of disciplinarity, or as Barotse legal systems and Anglo-American law are contained in the frame of cultural difference.
Taking a position and looking at things from a relativizing point of view will not create a relationship even if we want it to. Reflexive and normative knowledge were
not always incommensurable in this way. Henry Maine's peers would not have interpreted his appeal to a wider historical perspective as negating the possibility of
normative argument about legal positivism or practical engagement with contemporary legal problems. Maine's failure to treat his argument and his reflexive analysis
as incommensurable, I think, contributes to the contemporary view of Ancient Law as uninteresting scholarship at best and embarrassingly naive scholarship at worst.
Leach might exemplify an epistemological change, vis-aea-vis Maine, then. Although we saw that Leach quite consciously stakes out claims about the rationality of the
terrorist even as he treats his own arguments about terrorism as objects of reflexive inquiry, there is a marked tension between these two modes of engagement, and
the tension is resolved only by the irony in his assertion that savages are not "dog-headed cannibals" that acknowledges the possibility of relativizing the normative
claim even as it seeks to hold that claim constant. It has become necessary for Leach, as it was not for Maine, to appeal to a rhetorical device such as irony to keep what
have become two incommensurable modes of engagement in view. This incommensurability, still implicit in Leach's case, now itself has become a problem, a topic of
furious debate. One hardly can have a conversation about law these days without arguing about relativism. *649 The transformation of normativity into reflexivity and
back again has become its own topic of normative engagement, in other words. We might consider this a key aspect of the contemporary epistemological moment for
both disciplines. The effect of this development is that being in favor of an interdisciplinary method of legal studies today means having faith in this transformation of
one mode of knowledge into another. Or to rephrase the claim in more normative terms, what is best about contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship is the
transformation of knowledge it engenders. Although this movement is not "real" in the sense of a reality outside the law, I am suggesting that it is worth taking
seriously in its own right. In this sense, Maine's appeal to movement and change, in which structure appears as reflection after the fact on the path of such movement,
can be as much a model to us as Leach's more contemporary arguments in which structure is prefigured as an organizing frame. Yet this transformation of modes of
knowledge differs from the movement both Maine and Geertz advocate in that normativity and reflexivity are not positions, places of the same order that occupy a
single plane. At least at this juncture, no linear connection can be drawn between them nor can any descriptive thesis summarize the transformation of one into the
other. I do not mean to imply that this kind of transformation is unique to anthropological approaches to law. On the contrary, lawyers know that slippage from
normativity to reflexivity and back again pervades legal thinking as well. Yet perhaps the tension between disciplines provides an apt metaphor for describing what we
do not yet have other language to describe. Perhaps this incommensurablity becomes concretized, or institutionalized in the gulf between disciplines that both lawyers
and anthropologists celebrate, so that interdisciplinary engagement between law, as the metaphorical province of normativity and politics, and anthropology as the
metaphorical province of reflection and difference, provides a technology for experiencing and elaborating the incommensurability of reflexive and normative thought.
In the pages above, I have endeavored to trace a path through a series of claims for an anthropological, ethnological, or interdisciplinary study of the law. A
consideration of this tradition leaves us with a number of possible observations. First, it leads to an appreciation of the extent to which contemporary anthropological
appeals to reality outside the law, discovered through empirical observation of context, and through emphasis on real people rather than the theoretical structures of
law, is predicated on shared notions among lawyers and anthropologists about the salience of the disciplinary divide. Ironically, *650 however, if the success of the

arguing for attention to

context against the legal text, for example -- can never offer an escape from the theoretical
impasse created by the dichotomy precisely because the move is prefigured in the very
structure of the dichotomy itself. Such an earnest -- even in some cases strategically self-righteous -- plea on
behalf of the outside, whether it be the new methodological innovation or the "real world out there," may find itself welcome in both legal and
anthropological circles but hardly seems poised to make ground-breaking contributions to either. We need
rhetoric is predicated on a shared epistemology, then simply defending one side or another of a shared dichotomy --

636

Kritik Answers
an alternative to a move to the periphery that always prefigures a return to the center. Second, in
tracing the emergence of the project of discovering and elaborating relationships as the modern project of interdisciplinary work, we come to appreciate why this
project also now fails to satisfy. This elaboration of relationships between disciplines, between law and society, or between ever smaller fragments of each seems
predictable because it is. In order to work, the entities to be combined must already exist in a prefigured frame -- disciplinary or cultural difference, for example -- so
that we know at the outset the parameters within which the new mix will take its form. The recent attempt to show scholarly productivity by finding ever more
intricate, indeterminate, or subtle connections only heightens the sense of a project that now is spent.

637

Kritik Answers

#3 Permutation: 1AR
SCHLAGS CRITICISM ONLY GETS IT HALF RIGHT- THE
BUREAUCRACY CERTAINLY OPERATES ON A FIELD OF PAIN
AND DEATH, BUT WE SHOULD NOT BREAK FROM THE LAW,
BUT INSTEAD EMBRACE IT
CARLSON & SCHROEDER IN 2003

(JEANNE AND DAVID, CARDOZO LAW PROFESSORS, 57 U MIAMI L. REV 767)

Beyond laying down the law, another normative program emerges from Schlag's work:
"What is missing in normative legal thought is any serious questioning, let alone tracing, of
the relations that the practice, the rhetoric, the routine of normative legal thought have (or
do not have) to the field of pain and death." 18 The suggestion is that we should come to
realize that law itself is the very ground for the field of pain and death. When this is realized,
the normative program to lay down the law becomes a high moral imperative. It appears
from Schlag's work that the proper project for legal scholarship is to expose
law's responsibility for pain and death. This is what we should do. When legal
scholarship has achieved this task, presumably pain and death will have been
eliminated. Turning the tables on law and economics, Pierre implies that it
would be efficient (i.e., useful to human utility) if law would abolish itself. But,
stranded on a field exfoliated of pain and death, what next? The implicit
program seems to be that, once the distortions of law are removed, the subject
simply does not have to be told to do anything. Whatever the subject does will
be authentic. This is the free, liberated subject that Schlag's normativity
implies--a natural subject from whom completeness and authenticity has been unfairly
denied by the legal bureaucracy. If we are right, then underlying Schlag's polemic
against law is an uncritical romantic psychology. This would in turn mean that
Schlag is not so much a critical scholar as a romantic one. This implicit psychology
means that Schlag has something in common with the political liberals he attacks. Both
Schlag and liberals believe in the autonomy of the human subject--and the
possibility that the subject can achieve this desired state of freedom. Furthermore, they
both believe in the existence of subjectivity in a state of nature on which positive law or social engineering cannot possibly improve. Law, then, has become a tool for
oppressing the bureaucratic society that legal academia unwittingly serves. Legal subjects, subjected to the law, are alienated from themselves by the law. The corollary
to this [*771] is that there must be at least the possibility that subjectivity could be other than it is now--distorted by law. Lest we be misunderstood, we emphasize
that we agree with much of the above account. We agree with Schlag's suggestion that normativity cannot succeed. Virtually every observation that Schlag makes about
law and policy scholarship (normativity) is correct. Where we disagree is that there is a subject left standing once legal normativity is abolished. Unfortunately,
although Schlag ostensibly bases much of his analysis on the post-modern critique of the liberal conception of the autonomous self-identical subject, he, in fact, falls
back on a liberal conception of a natural self. Romanticism implies that the self-identical individual of liberalism is real--but disfigured by law and hence on a field of
pain and death. The post-modern position is quite different. It denies the pre-legality of personality and suggests that personality is itself a legal idea. On this view, the

Lacanian psychoanalysis agrees with half of

Schlag's proposition. The subject is on a field of pain and death, where it is not
self-identical, but severely wounded by law. It is precisely law (broadly
understood as the symbolic order) that castrates the subject, as Schlag
maintains. Breaking the chains of the law, however, would not free but would
obliterate the subject. Subjectivity is nothing but the split, the gap, the rift in
the natural subject torn by law. If law is removed, the rift that creates
subjectivity is obliterated. What was Lacan's name for a person who
successfully follows Schlag's normative program and slips the chains of law?
His term for such a person was "psychotic." 19 For Lacan, the normative
program is precisely not to let go of the symbolic order, for that would be the
death of subjectivity, not its liberation.
self-identical subject of liberalism cannot exist as a theoretical matter.

638

Kritik Answers

#3 Permutation: Ext
DISCOURSE RELIES ON INFORMATION FROM THE OUTSIDE;
WITHOUT ENGAGING IN THE REAL WORLD, CHANGE IS
IMPOSSIBLE.
Habermas, Prof @ Goethe U in Frankfurt, 90 (Jurgen, Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program
of Philosophical Justification, The Communicative Ethics Controversy, Ed. Benhabib and Dallmayr, P.
100-101)
The principle of discourse ethics makes reference to a procedure, namely, the discursive redemption of normative claims to validity. To
that extent, discourse

ethics can properly be characterized as formal, for it provides no

substantive guidelines but only a procedure: practical discourse. Practical discourse is not a
procedure for generating justified norms but a procedure for testing the validity of norms
that are being proposed and hypothetically considered for adoption. This means that
practical discourses depend on content brought to them from outside. It would be utterly
pointless to engage in a practical discourse without a horizon provided by the life world of a
specific social group and without real conflicts in a concrete situation in which the actors
considered it incumbent upon them to reach a consensual means of regulating some
controversial social matter. Practical discourses are always related to the concrete point of departure of a disturbed normative
agreement. These antecedent disruptions determine the topics that are "up" for discussion. This procedure, then, is not formal in the sense

practical discourse is dependent upon

contingent content being "fed" into it from outside . In discourse this content is subjected to a process in which
that it abstracts from content. Quite the contrary is true. In its openness,

particular values are ultimately discarded as being not susceptible to consensus. The question now arises whether this very selectivity
might not make the procedure unsuitable for resolving practical questions.

639

Kritik Answers

#5 Sublime Justice: 1AR

INSOFAR AS PEOPLE THINK OF THE LAW AS REAL, IT
EXISTS, ALLOWING FOR POWERFUL CHANGE
DETAINMENT PROVES
Carlson 99

[David Gray, Prof Law @ Cardozo, Duellism in Modern American Jurisprudence, 99

Colum. L. Rev. 1908, November, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Conceived as that which causes the judge to decide (per Schlag's definition), law is dynamic. It is indeed "performative," as Schlag maintains. n162 This future anterior

Law exists, and so it animates the judge who

pronounces judgment. It bears not a circular but a linear relation to the judge. Law animates when the judge's free
will suppresses the judge's pathological criteria and lets the judge be the law's oracle. n164 True,
the empirical judge is capable of bad faith. Perhaps what the judge had for breakfast rather than the law caused a judicial decision to be pronounced. But law's
possibility, at least, is affirmed by license of free will. n165
Consequence, Schlag maintains, cannot prove that law exists. n166 But quite the opposite is true. Law's consequence (which Schlag
concedes) n167 proves law's existence and its suitability for scientific study. n168 Schlag is prepared to concede
that the law causes human beings to act, as when they execute or incarcerate a prisoner . It then
grammar of law doesn't make it purely subjective, however. n163

follows that either (a) the law has a mechanical effect on human beings - an absurdity n169 - [*1932] or (b) human beings have the capacity to choose to obey law.
The second possibility is the only plausible one, because Schlag effectively admits the existence of free will and moral capacity. Thanks to this concession, we can
affirm that law exists and that human beings can choose to follow the law. n170 Admittedly, we can never confirm legal effect directly, because it must be mediated by

We can, however, confirm its possibility and rule out its impossibility.
If thoughts (such as law) induce free human beings to act, then thoughts are things - and
powerful things at that. To the extent we indulge in a belief in free will, law is potentially
effective. When it is, when human beings execute the law, law's effects are rendered "tangible" and "visible" - the very attributes of the super-realist
metaphysics that seem to underwrite Schlag's work. Although law cannot be felt directly, its indirect effects are sensual indeed .
free will, which can only be postulated. n171

LEGAL THOUGHT EMBRACES THE NEGATIVITY OF ETHICS,

CREATING SUBJECTIVE FREEDOM
Carlson 99

[David Gray, Prof Law @ Cardozo, Duellism in Modern American Jurisprudence, 99

Colum. L. Rev. 1908, November, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Schlag criticizes legal academics for unwitting indulgence in a contradiction. The self is
supposed to be sovereign. Yet the self bows down [*1943] to the rule of law. n244 The
choice to be bound is supposed to be a contradiction in terms. n245
From what has been said, it should be clear that there is no contradiction here. The self that
stands against the natural world, and the animal inclinations that afflict its body, is a
negative entity. At heart, the subject is nothing at all. n246 Yet, if it is to "exist," it must have
externally observable properties. It must do something, and the things it does become an
attribute of the self. We are what we do. n247
The subject that lawfully follows its passion achieves existence and so perpetuates itself.
n248 This is the positive freedom of the self. Any self choosing to conform to the law has put
forth its moral character in the world. It was the free choice of the self to do this. n249
Hence, the free self can choose to be bound, without contradiction. n250
This concrete subject is likewise free to violate the law and to perpetuate itself by crime. This
is the negative freedom of the concrete subject. It is not properly freedom at all, but slavery
to inclination. Crime constitutes inclination speaking in defiance of the moral side, thereby
committing a crime on the subject's own self. The particularity of the criminal is therefore
not freedom but slavery. n251
In fact, tied into the very idea of following the law is the idea of a free will that might choose
not to follow the law. The free will that aspires to follow the law never truly binds itself. A
subject that puts itself forward as lawful could give into impulse tomorrow and is therefore
"free" (in the negative sense) to violate the law. Lawfulness is therefore a constant struggle the ongoing achievement of the concrete self. Furthermore, it is a struggle in which the
subject must fail:
Freedom realizes itself through a series of failures: every particular attempt to realize
freedom may fail; from its point of view, freedom remains an empty possibility; but the very
continuous [*1944] striving of freedom to realize itself bears witness to its "actuality." n252

640

Kritik Answers
Freedom is thus "powerful." It exhibits the "primacy of possibility over actuality." n253
Forever potential, it is nevertheless a possibility that transforms the world.

641

Kritik Answers

#7 Alt Reinscribes Subject: 1AR (1/2)

THE ALTERNATIVE IS A BEFORE THE FALL FANTASY OF A
PRE-LEGAL SUBJECT
Carlson 99

[David Gray, Prof Law @ Cardozo, Duellism in Modern American Jurisprudence, 99

Colum. L. Rev. 1908, November, LN//uwyo-ajl]
In contrast to this view, Professor Schlag wants to say that freedom means the concrete self
can do what it feels like. But he should know better than to exalt the authenticity of the prelegal natural self, and he has on occasion chastised others for doing just that. n254 To exalt
the sovereignty of such a self (that may be in the thrall of criminal passion) instead of the
liberal self is to permit the contingent side of the self to govern in its moral arbitrariness.
n255 In other words, the essence of personality is the rationality of the liberal self. Negative
freedom denies the essence of personality and therefore ends up destroying its own self.
n256
To summarize, Schlag's work is based on a romantic psychology. If only the concrete self
were freed from law, Schlag implies, it would know what to do. Law offers mere "norms" and
presents the subject with empty choices. Such a theory of the self ignores the fact that
human nature has two sides - the natural and the moral. One side cannot be privileged at the
expense of the other.
To be sure, many of Schlag's criticisms of liberal psychology n257 are well taken. Liberal
psychology absolutely denies a place for the unconscious and irrational. His accusation that
liberal philosophy does not consider the challenge of deconstruction to liberal psychology is
an excellent contribution. Liberal philosophy in recent times deserves criticism for not
peering very deeply into the soul of the legal subject. n258 But liberal philosophy is also on
to something: The moral dimension of personality [*1945] is constitutive and cannot be
abolished without destroying personality entirely.

THE ALTERNATIVE IS A FANTASMIC ATTEMPT TO RESTORE

A UNITARY SUBJECT, SHORING UP ENJOYMENT STOLEN BY
THE LAW
Carlson 99

[David Gray, Prof Law @ Cardozo, Duellism in Modern American Jurisprudence, 99

Colum. L. Rev. 1908, November, LN//uwyo-ajl]
In his disenchantment with reason, Schlag has written that, just because lawyers pursue
their profession "does not establish whether liberal categories such as 'individual rights' are
on the order of rocks, trees, dollar bills, rubles, words, advertising images, or angels." n69
Within the gross and scope of this ontic spectrum, rocks and trees are trenchantly
existential. They can be felt. Dollars are perhaps less so, on most measures of the money
supply, but rubles, words, advertising images, angels and liberal category drift into the
realm of "ontological entities" n70 - mere figments of the imagination. These latter items do
not "exist." Perception mediated by thought is not to be trusted.
Law's defect, then, is that, like Macbeth's dagger, it is insensible to feeling. Law is nothing
but thought. Thought (mediation) does not exist, and neither does law. n71 Tangibility immediacy of intuition - is, I infer, Schlag's criterion of epistemic certainty. What is tangible
does not rely on language for its integrity. n72 Tangibility transcends the legal order. It is
quite alegal and for this very reason valid. n73
Such a criterion of reality means that, in the end, Schlag's program is a romantic one. Law
has deprived the subject of its jouissance. If law would kindly step aside, the subject could
enjoy an immediate restitution of its lost parts - a unity that would be certified by feeling.
Therefore, justice supposedly demands that law abolish itself so that the concrete subject in
its negative freedom can be guided by its natural, uncomplicated [*1921] dimension - by
feeling - towards wholeness. n74 But for law, the subject could enjoy itself all the time. n75

642

Kritik Answers

#7 Alt Reinscribes Subject: 1AR (2/2)

SCHLAGS PARANOID VISION OF LEGAL BUREACRACY IS A
FANTASY ATTEMPT TO RATIONALIZE THE FAILURE OF THE
SYMBOLIC
Carlson 99

[David Gray, Prof Law @ Cardozo, Duellism in Modern American Jurisprudence, 99

Colum. L. Rev. 1908, November, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Lacanian theory allows us to interpret the meaning of this anti-Masonic vision precisely.
Schlag's bureaucracy must be seen as a "paranoid construction according to which our
universe is the work of art of unknown creators." n273 In Schlag's view, the bureaucracy is
in control of law and language and uses it exclusively for its own purposes. The bureaucracy
is therefore the Other of the Other, "a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the great Other
(the symbolic order)." n274 The bureaucracy, in short, is the superego (i.e., absolute
knowledge of the ego), n275 but rendered visible and projected outward. The superego, the
ego's stern master, condemns the ego and condemns what it does. Schlag has transferred
this function to the bureaucracy.
As is customary, n276 by describing Schlag's vision as a paranoid construction, I do not
mean to suggest that Professor Schlag is mentally ill or unable to function. Paranoid
construction is not in fact the illness. It is an attempt at healing what the illness is - the
conflation of the domains of the symbolic, imaginary, and real. n277 This conflation is what
Lacan calls "psychosis." Whereas the "normal" subject is split between the three domains,
the psychotic is not. He is unable to keep the domains separate. n278 The symbolic domain
of language begins to lose place to the real domain. The psychotic raves incoherently, and
things begin to talk to [*1947] him directly. n279 The psychotic, "immersed in jouissance,"
n280 loses desire itself.
Paranoia is a strategy the subject adopts to ward off breakdown. The paranoid vision holds
together the symbolic order itself and thereby prevents the subject from slipping into the
psychotic state in which "the concrete 'I' loses its absolute power over the entire system of its
determinations." n281 This of course means - and here is the deep irony of paraonia - that
bureaucracy is the very savior of romantic metaphysics. If the romantic program were ever
fulfilled - if the bureaucracy were to fold up shop and let the natural side of the subject have
its way - subjectivity would soon be enveloped, smothered, and killed in the night of
psychosis. n282
Paranoid ambivalence toward bureaucracy (or whatever other fantasy may be substituted
for it) is very commonly observed. Most recently, conservatives "organized their enjoyment"
by opposing communism. n283 By confronting and resisting an all-encompassing, sinister
power, the subject confirms his existence as that which sees and resists the power. n284 As
long as communism existed, conservatism could be perceived. When communism
disappeared, conservatives felt "anxiety" n285 - a lack of purpose. Although they publicly
opposed communism, they secretly regretted its disappearance. Within a short time, a new
enemy was found to organize conservative jouissance - the cultural left. (On the left, a
similar story could be told about the organizing function of racism and sexism, which, of
course, have not yet disappeared.) These humble examples show that the romantic yearning
for wholeness is always the opposite of [*1948] what it appears to be. n286 We paranoids
need our enemies to organize our enjoyment.
Paranoid construction is, in the end, a philosophical interpretation, even in the clinical
cases. n287 As Schlag has perceived, the symbolic order of law is artificial. It only exists
because we insist it does. We all fear that the house of cards may come crashing down.
Paradoxically, it is this very "anxiety" that shores up the symbolic. The normal person knows
he must keep insisting that the symbolic order exists precisely because the person knows it
is a fiction. n288
The paranoid, however, assigns this role to the bureaucracy (and thereby absolves himself
from the responsibility). Thus, paranoid delusion allows for the maintenance of a "cynical"
distance between the paranoid subject and the realm of mad psychosis. n289 In truth,
cynicism toward bureaucracy shows nothing but the unconfronted depth to which the cynic
is actually committed to what ought to be abolished.

643

Kritik Answers

#9 Normativity Good: 1AR

THE CRITIQUE OF NORMATIVITY IS SIMPLY WRONGWE
MUST EMBRACE NORMATIVE THEORY INSTEAD OF
ATTEMPTING TO DECONSTRUCT ITS CLAIMS
Tushnet, Prof of Law @ Georgetown U, 92 (Mark V., The left critique of
Normativity: A comment, Michigan Law Review, August, Lexis)

one might find another tool for rebuilding normative discourse. It is to

relinquish any normative [*2347] claims for leftist inclinations. n92 Left legal scholarship
would be exclusively critical, deconstructing the normative claims made elsewhere in legal
scholarship but offering nothing at all in their place. This project, too, seems difficult to
sustain. Left legal academics walk into classrooms every day in which students demand that we say what our views are on controverted
To use Delgado's terms, though,

issues. A stance of unremitting critique will not satisfy them. To face such dissatisfaction routinely is simply uncomfortable. Thus, even a
leftist teacher committed to "only critique" is likely to succumb in the classroom. n93 Because the classroom is where we try out many of
our ideas, it seems likely that the normativity to which this teacher is pushed in the classroom will come to infect his or her scholarship.

There is, of course, an alternative. Perhaps the critique of normativity goes all the way down,
in which case the "only critique" stance is the only one an intellectually honest legal
academic can take. But perhaps the critique of normativity is wrong. Legal academics might
then remain committed to the project of comprehensive normative rationality, and their
modest normative gestures would be promissory notes to be cashed in elsewhere, in the
development of a comprehensive normative theory. n94

644

Kritik Answers

#10 Simulation/Roleplaying Good: 1AR

(1/3)
INFORMAL DELIBERATIVE SITUATIONS, SUCH AS THIS
DEBATE ARE A USEFUL STARTING POINT TOWARDS
INFORMING PUBLIC DISCOURSE AND EFFECTUATING
SOCIAL CHANGE.
KULYNYCH IN 1997

(JESSICA, Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and postmodern participation Polity,

Winter 1997 v30 n2)
Participation equals discursive participation; it is communication governed by rational,
communicatively achieved argument and negotiation. Habermas distinguishes two types of
discursive participation: problem-solving or decision-oriented deliberation, which takes
place primarily in formal democratic institutions such as parliaments and is regulated or
governed by democratic procedures; and informal opinion-formation, which is opinionformation "uncoupled from decisions... [and] effected in an open and inclusive network of
overlapping, subcultural publics having fluid temporal, social and substantive
boundaries."(11) In many ways this two-tiered description of discursive
participation is a radically different understanding of political participation,
and one better suited to the sort of societies we currently inhabit. Habermas
moves the focus of participation away from policymaking and toward
redefining legitimate democratic processes that serve as the necessary
background for subsequent policymaking. While only a limited number of
specially trained individuals can reasonably engage in decisionmaking
participation, the entire populous can and must participate in the informal
deliberation that takes place outside of, or uncoupled from, formal
decisionmaking structures. This informal participation is primarily about
generating "public discourses that uncover topics of relevance to ail of society,
interpret values, contribute to the resolution of problems, generate good
reasons, and debunk bad ones."(12) Informal participation has two main
functions. First, it acts as a "warning system with sensors that, though
unspecialized, are sensitive throughout society."(13) This system
communicates problems "that must be processed by the political system ."(14)
Habermas labels this the "signal" function. Second, informal participation must not
only indicate when problems need to be addressed, it must also provide an
"effective problematization" of those issues. As Habermas argues, from the
perspective of democratic theory, the public sphere must, in addition, amplify
the pressure of problems, that is, not only detect and identify problems but also
convincingly and influentially thematize them, furnish them with possible
solutions, and dramatize them in such a way that they are taken up and dealt
with by parliamentary complexes.

645

Kritik Answers

#10 Simulation/Roleplaying Good: 1AR

(2/3)
THE PROCESS OF DELIBERATION IS AN END IN AND OF
ITSELF- EVEN WHEN WE CANT DIRECTLY INFLUENCE
POLICY
KULYNYCH IN 1997

(JESSICA, Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and postmodern participation Polity,

Winter 1997 v30 n2)
VII. The Politics of Deliberation in a Performative Perspective A performative perspective on
participation enriches our understanding of deliberative democracy. This enlarged
understanding can be demonstrated by considering the examination of citizen politics in
Germany presented in Carol Hager's Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry
in the West German Energy Debate.(86) Her work skillfully maps the precarious position of
citizen groups as they enter into problemsolving in contemporary democracies. After
detailing the German citizen foray into technical debate and the subsequent creation of
energy commissions to deliberate on the long-term goals of energy policy, she concludes
that a dual standard of interpretation and evaluation is required for full understanding of
the prospects for citizen participation. Where traditional understandings of participation
focus on the policy dimension and concern themselves with the citizens' success or failure to
attain policy preferences, she advocates focusing as well on the discursive, legitimation
dimension of citizen action. Hager follows Habermas in reconstituting participation
discursively and asserts that the legitimation dimension offers an alternative reason for
optimism about the efficacy of citizen action. In the discursive understanding of
participation, success is not defined in terms of getting, but rather in terms of
solving through consensus. Deliberation is thus an end in itself, and citizens
have succeeded whenever they are able to secure a realm of deliberative
politics where the aim is forging consensus among participants, rather than
achieving victory by some over others. Through the creation of numerous
networks of communication and the generation of publicity, citizen action furthers
democracy by assuming a substantive role in governing and by forcing
participants in the policy process to legitimate their positions politically rather
than technically. Hager maintains that a sense of political efficacy is enhanced
by this politically interactive role even though citizens were only minimally
successful in influencing or controlling the outcome of the policy debate, and
experienced a real lack of autonomy as they were coerced into adopting the
terms of the technical debate. She agrees with Alberto Melucci that the impact of
[these] movements cannot.., be judged by normal criteria of efficacy and success .... These
groups offer a different way of perceiving and naming the world. They demonstrate that
alternatives are possible, and they expand the communicative as opposed to the
bureaucratic or market realms of societal activity.(87)

INFORMAL PARTICIPATION REDUCES OUR ROLES AS

CONSUMING CITIZENS, INCREASING THE LIKELIHOOD
THAT WE WONT BE PASSIVE TO THE REGIMENTING
PROCESSES OF THE BUREAUCRACY.
KULYNYCH IN 1997
(JESSICA, Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and postmodern participation Polity,
Winter 1997 v30 n2)
When we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative perspective, we look
precisely at those moments of defiance and disruption that bring the invisible and
unimaginable into view. Although citizens were minimally successful in
influencing or controlling the out come of the policy debate and experienced a
considerable lack of autonomy in their coercion into the technical debate, the

646

Kritik Answers
goal-oriented debate within the energy commissions could be seen as a defiant
moment of performative politics. The existence of a goal-oriented debate
within a technically dominated arena defied the normalizing separation
between expert policymakers and consuming citizens. Citizens momentarily
recreated themselves as policymakers in a system that defined citizens out of
the policy process, thereby refusing their construction as passive clients. The
disruptive potential of the energy commissions continues to defy technical
bureaucracy even while their decisions are non-binding.

647

Kritik Answers

#10 Simulation/Roleplaying Good: 1AR

(3/3)
INSULAR DELIBERATION AND SIMULATING THE POLITICAL
PROCESS CAN GENERATE IMPORTANT VIEWPOINTS ON
ISSUES FACING SOCIETY
MITCHELL AND SUZUKI IN 2004

(GORDON AND TAKESHI, UNIV OF PITTSBURGH COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSOR

AND TSUDA COLLEGE COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSOR, BEYOND THE DAILY ME:
ARGUMENTATION IN AN AGE OF ENCLAVE DELIBERATION, PAPER PRESENTED AT
THE SECOND TOKYO CONFERENCE ON ARGUMENTATION AUGUST 2-5, 2004,
TOKYO, JAPAN)
One should not be too quick to dismiss the value of tournament debating purely
on the grounds that it unfolds in obscure enclaves. Such activity benefits greatly the
modest number of debaters who are able to learn the games arcane rules and invest the
substantial resources required for tournament travel (Muir, 1990; Panetta, 1993). Recall
Sunsteins stipulation enclave deliberation is not intrinsically bad it all
depends on whether the walls insulating particular discourse communities are
temporary or permanent. While it is true that insular deliberative groups can
generate truly novel viewpoints on important issues facing society, such views
can only deepen societys overall argument pool if eventually, such groups
turn outward to communicate with those beyond their tight circle of members
(Cox & Jensen, 1989; Weiss, 1987).

648

Kritik Answers

#11 Alt Lapses Back into NLT: 1AR

SUBJECT FREE FROM LAW CANNOT EXIST
CARLSON & SCHROEDER IN 2003

(JEANNE AND DAVID, CARDOZO LAW PROFESSORS, 57 U MIAMI L. REV 767)

Lacanian theory shows the defects in both normative policy scholarship and
romanticism--the two dominant modes of thinking in American law schools. As for the
latter, the Lacanian concept of the subject's false autobiography helps explain
why a romantic faith in the wholeness of the subject apart from the law cannot
be accepted. We find that although Pierre Schlag intuits the Lacanian insight of
the split subject castrated by artificial law, he implies a romantic liberal vision
of a self-identical, uncastrated subject who could exist in a mythical state of
nature free from law's corrupting influence. Lacan teaches otherwise. He
suggests that law is a constituent part of the constitution of the subject. To lay
down the law, as Schlag suggests, is to lay down our subjectivity. The law
cannot be escaped. Better to make it our work product, so that we recognize
ourselves in the law.

SCHLAGS CRITIQUE IS BOUND BY THE RHETORIC HE

CRITICIZESHE FAILS TO BREAK FROM THE NARROWNESS
OF THE LAW
Conaghan, Prof @ Kent Law School, 2K3 (Joanne, Beyond Right and Reason:
Pierre Schlag, the Critique of Normativity, and the Enchantment of Reason: Schlag in
Wonderland, Miami Law Review, April, Lexis)

A final concern emerging from the confines of Schlag's selective mimicry of the mainstream lies in its resolutely legal character. American
legal scholars do not, by and large, like to stray too far beyond the boundaries of what is acceptably "legal" n65 and interestingly, neither
does Schlag. He/they prefers the snug confines of traditional legal discourse and its discontents ,
modestly professing ignorance and lack of expertise beyond the terrain of law, narrowly understood as judicial decisions and the doctrines
and theories legal scholars derive from them. Schlag

bemoans this narrowness repeatedly but seems in no

great hurry to escape it. Indeed, one sometimes wonders whether or not his insistence on so limited an enquiry masks a fear of
his moving beyond what he has experienced as safe and steady ground. By his own admission, this is the critique of "an insider," n66 but
does it simultaneously affirm the attractions of remaining "inside"? This dogged determination to steer clear of the complexities that an

might introduce is also manifest in Schlag's exclusive preoccupation with

reason's aesthetic appeal. While I applaud his efforts to draw attention to the coercive power of particular aesthetic forms--in
extra-legal dimension

the context of law, the compelling effects of grid-like manifestations of reason--his neglect of, indeed total silence in relation to, other
features of law's coerciveness puts him at risk of overstating his case. This is particularly so when what is neglected is so closely bound up
with what he addresses at such length. Here, I am thinking in particular of the ideological context within which law operates and upon
which reason seeks to make her mark. In my view, there is an ideological dimension to the effective deployment of reason that is not, or is
only secondarily, dependent upon its aesthetic form. There

is a detectable distinction (not always but sometimes)

between invocations of reason that are dependent upon the political and ideological
landscape for their validity and deployments of reason that [*557] draw upon (or seek to develop)
our aesthetic inclinations, particularly our attraction to order and coherence . n67 Often, what
seems reasonable is inextricably related to our understanding of what is possible, and yet, it
is not always the case that what is possible is determined by the boundaries of reason. The
ideological landscape abounds with all of the "sources of belief" making an appearance in Schlag's critique. The point is that
reason as a particular aesthetic does not always work to disqualify reason as a repository for
widely held ideological beliefs. Although the former may contribute to understandings of the latter, it may not wholly
determine (or be determined by) them. A failure to acknowledge this explicitly arguably serves to weaken
the power of Schlag's critique. There are times when he invokes a primarily ideological
concept of reason--one that relies on notions of truth, self-evidence, and righteousness--and
then proceeds to critique it for its failure to adhere to an aesthetic form . Sometimes, this is effective,
and it is almost always amusing. n68 At other times, one has a sense that the boot does not fit, that he is over-emphasizing the importance
of the schematic structure of the argument in circumstances where its success has little to do with its schematic structure and everything to
do with its correspondence to the ideological status quo. Put bluntly, if

reason's appeal to self-evidence (Sunstein)

or virtue (Nussbaum) is dependent upon factors beyond its internal logic, it is not thereby
significantly diminished by demonstrating that that logic has reached its limits . Schlag's account of
the wonderland of American legal scholarship is undoubtedly perceptive; his dissection of the stances adopted by
those who typify it both masterly and liberating, and his representation of his own alienation
intensely resonant of the experiences of many who occupy the margins of the legal academy .
Indeed, therein lies its appeal. But by the same token, it is at times injudicious in its forays into "hostile" terrain. It fails

649

Kritik Answers
adequately to guard against the dangers of importation, co-option, domestication, and
reproduction. It constitutes even as it deconstructs. In Schlagean terms, the power of his
critique is diminished by neglect of aspects of the "rhetorical economy" with which he is
engaging. n69 In simpler terms, there appear to be dimensions to his enchantment of which
he is unaware.

650

Kritik Answers

#11 Alt Lapses Back into NLT: Ext

THE ALTERNATIVE LAPSES BACK INTO REASON AND NLT
University of Miami 2003

[Pierre Schlag, the Critique of Normativity, and the Enchantment of Reason: Smoking in
Bed 57 U. Miami L. Rev. 827, April, LN//uwyo-ajl]
However, Schlag knows all this. Indeed, he writes, "critical reflexivity is not invariably or
even intrinsically liberating or empancipatory. On the contrary, pushed to its limits, it is
single-minded and formalistic." n54 Exactly. And critical reflexivity can not tell you when
you are onto a good thing versus a bad one, n55 or in a "good practice" [*838] versus a "bad
one." So? Why so hard on the proponents of Reason? After all, they are just trying to get
somewhere. For them, reason is the means to the end. Yet Schlag suggests they want more.
The proponents of Reason, he claims, want to have their cake and eat it too. n56 He indicts
this fantasy and says that the pretense that one can have it both ways is what keeps
academics focusing on the wrong questions. This can lead to the question, "Why is critical
reflexivity so unrewarded?" Well, it could be because if belief in Reason is a faith that we
believe can answer "the big question," and that belief simultaneously rejects faith as an
answer, critical reflexivity will expose the very thing rejected by the faithful - the inadequacy
of their "answer" by the dictates of their faith. In other words, Schlag uses reason to expose
unreason in Reason. n57
By using reason to expose unreason, however, Schlag too arguably asks the "wrong"
questions, making the case of "what is a legal academic to do?" seem more desperate than it
is. The questions he appears to think are the ones worth pursuing seem to me to be precisely
the ones that can not be answered. At least not with any more reliability than the questions
he claims are the wrong questions. Moreover, the difference between those questions that
Schlag claims are the "wrong" questions and the ones he claims are the "right" questions is
that the "wrong" ones are a prelude to or a call to action (even if no real action follows). That
is, even if "advocating 'progressive legal change' <noteq> advancing progressive legal
change" n58 the question of how to do so appears to be one about what actions to take.

651

Kritik Answers

Normative Thought Inevitable (1/3)

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ESCAPE NORMATIVE CLAIMS-MIGHT
AS WELL TRY TO LIVE WITH IT.
RADIN AND MICHELMAN IN 1991

( MARGARET JANE AND FRANK, STANFORD AND HARVARD LAW PROFESSORS, 139
U PA. L. REV 1019, APRIL)
What should we do? What should the law be? What do you propose?' . . . asks normative
legal thought." n11 Normative, we thus understand, is what every prescriptive
utterance is; normativity marks every saying addressed to a question of what
someone should (or should not) do. Now, it seems obviously correct that normativity,
thus sweepingly defined, is pandemic in legal thought and writing. But so is it pandemic, we
would say, in thought and writing about legal thought -- as represented, say, by the articles
in this symposium.
[*1021] To work, in writing, at the displacement or destabilization of some
named practice of writing (like normative legal thought) n12 is already to
exemplify and thereby to commend some different, some critically chastened,
practice. n13 Moreover, it is extremely difficult to carry on the work of
destabilization without appearing to lapse into normative modes of discourse.
Take, for example, this passage from an article by Schlag:
[T]his [talk-talk genre] simply argues that we should talk [some] new talk. . . . Variations
on this old talk/new talk include the following: we should talk . . . more normatively, [or]
more contextually . . . [etc.] or in that hopeful humanist way until we figure out what the hell
we're doing up here 30,000 feet from earth arguing about how we should land. n14
"We should talk more normatively" (WSTMN, for short) is the name of a certain sentence -the one that says we should talk more normatively. If uttering WSTMN is contemptible as
just talk or as normative talk (and, to boot, as naively presupposing that how we talk, what
we do, is within our power to decide n15 ), then what is a reader supposed to make of the
sentence that says that uttering WSTMN is contemptible on those grounds? It seems that
saying that cannot (coherently) be an argument about whether or how we should (or should
not) talk. How can one argue that what makes an utterance (or a genre)
unworthy of attention or respect is that it is normative talk? To argue is to
invoke the practice of argument, and that practice consists of normative talk.
(Maybe you could try by some other means to remove that practice from
society's repertoire, but you can't well do that by arguing about it.) But if this
utterance of Schlag's is not argument, then what is it?

652

Kritik Answers

Normative Thought Inevitable (2/3)

NORMATIVE THOUGHT IS INEVITABLE DISCUSSING THE
RULE OF LAW IS THE ONLY WAY TO PREVENT COMPLETE
DESTRUCTION OF RIGID CONCEPTIONS OF LEGAL THEORY
Mootz, Assoc Prof of Law @ Western New England College School of Law, 94 (Francis J., The
Paranoid Style in Contemporary Legal Scholarship, Houston Law Review, Fall, Lexis)

The differences between my conception of postmodern legal theory and Schlag's are highlighted by our very different reactions to the idea
of the rule of law. Schlag regards the rule of [*883] law as a "virtually empty" signifier whose sole purpose is "simply to arrest thought
upon impact." n36 Schlag does not propose to reformulate the idea of the rule of law, or even to replace it with a more fitting concept,
because such moves would circle within the same vacuous maze of normative legal thought. n37 Schlag's disengagement from the language
used by lawyers and judges is so stark and unrepentant that its significance easily is underestimated. In an important sense, the ongoing
struggle over the terms and conditions of social organization defines Western history. A significant feature of this struggle has been the

Schlag bifurcates the operation of

the legal system from the discourse of its participants, arguing that the normative claims
made by those attempting to describe what the rule of law entails is superfluous to the
reality of law. By doing so, he openly places in question whether discourse can describe, not
to mention influence, practice. n38 Admittedly, much of the "fancy" scholarship of the academy is removed from the
ongoing effort to describe what it means for a society to be governed by the rule of law.

everyday language of legal practice, but the assertion that every theoretical invocation of the rule of law is detached from some deeper,
hidden, nonlinguistic realm of legal reality greatly overstates the case. The extent of critical detachment presumed by Schlag's total
rejection of the usefulness of discussing the rule of law is quite fantastic. An individual who truly could achieve this detachment would be
exhibiting the paranoid style. n39 I [*885] wholeheartedly share Schlag's assessment that the justificatory efforts of judges and scholars
alike to define the rule of law has been framed by the unhelpful polarity of justify and redeem and constrain and control strategies. n40 Yet

the recognition that past formulations no longer suffice leads me to attempt to articulate a
new conception of the rule of law that accords with our experience. n41 It is possible to
destroy rigid conceptions of the rule of law without embracing endless deconstruction that
renders further discussion moot. Schlag is correct that the traditional accounts of the rule of law often are caricatures that
arrest thought and discussion, n42 but I argue that we should resume a vital discussion rather than conclude
that all discussion inherently is vacuous. The criticism that rule of law talk doesn't capture reality reveals a wistfulness
for the foundationalist hope of discovering a political truth that is not subject to a contingent, ongoing dialogue among members of society.

By claiming that everyone else is trapped in a meaningless maze, Schlag conveniently avoids
placing himself at risk in normative dialogue. By asserting that normative legal dialogue is
irrelevant, Schlag eliminates the possibility that he might have to change his mind in light of
the force of a better argument, and he avoids an obligation to rescue the hoi polloi from the
maze. In sum, Schlag's approach insulates him from the contingent and provisional language of social discourse. Such an insulating
move runs contrary to antifoundational accounts of the rule of law, which emphasize that the law never operates outside
the context of wider social struggles to define the terms of sociopolitical organization.
Traditional normative legal thought ordinarily is criticized as being unhelpful because it
offers a constricted and artificial conception of legal norms, not because normative legal
thought is by nature irrelevant to legal practice . Quite the opposite seems true: every assertion of legal
power is predicated on a normative conception of politics that always is subject to attack and
reassessment. Escape from the maze of normative legal thinking is the [*886] familiar dream of
empiricists and rationalists alike, but it simply is not possible. Talking about the reality of law as distinct from our representation of this
reality in normative legal dialogue constitutes a performative contradiction. n43 This is not to say that reality is wholly linguistic, but
rather that our experience and understanding of reality is always linguistically mediated in a shared realm of normative public dialogue.
n44

NORMATIVE THOUGHT CANNOT BE COMPLETELY

DESTROYEDWE SHOULD FOCUS ON CLEARING A WAY
THROUGH THE MAZE INSTEAD OF REJECTING IT
Mootz, Assoc Prof of Law @ Western New England College School of Law, 94 (Francis J., The
Paranoid Style in Contemporary Legal Scholarship, Houston Law Review, Fall, Lexis)
As Hilary Putnam concisely states, "the

elimination of the normative is attempted mental suicide ." n49 I

Schlag writes
powerfully, invariably capturing my interest and leading me to important new insights. However, his effort to distance himself
from the normative legal language that is our heritage falls short, as it must . I congratulate Schlag for
his skill in destroying some of the most cherished talismans in our legal vocabulary, including the rule of law. But destruction is
never total. In the wake of destruction we inevitably chart new paths in the maze. Legal
theory properly is viewed not as an attempt to escape the maze of normative legal thought,
would refine Putnam's observation by including paranoid distanciation within the scope of mental suicide. Professor

653

Kritik Answers
but as an effort to develop shared strategies for navigating through the maze. Forging a path,
rather than finding an exit, is the goal. That is enough for me.

654

Kritik Answers

Normative Thought Inevitable (3/3)

SCHLAGS CHARACTERIZATION OF THE MAZE FAILS TO
TAKE ITS FUNCTION WITHIN CRITICAL THEORY INTO
ACCOUNTESCAPE FROM THE MAZE IS IMPOSSIBLE
Mootz, Assoc Prof of Law @ Western New England College School of Law, 94 (Francis J., The
Paranoid Style in Contemporary Legal Scholarship, Houston Law Review, Fall, Lexis)

Schlag's
effort to analyze legal scholarship from outside the maze is extremely problematic. Schlag
believes that most scholars reside within a maze characterized by "dreariness," but that a
select few have found a way out, gained perspective [*879] on the maze, and now engage in a
fruitful questioning that reveals rather than obscures the law . n20 In sharp contrast, I reject the idea
that such a dramatic escape can take place. Just when a scholar believes that she has scaled
the last wall of the maze, she will be confronted by a boundless horizon of paths endlessly
circling within the ambit of the same maze. Hope for escape must always be dashed in the end, but this does not
mean that an individual's comportment within the maze is without ethical or political significance. The central problem for
contemporary jurisprudence is not the maze of normative legal discourse, but the failure to recognize the
maze as an unavoidable condition that is productive of knowledge . Postmodern thought is a stimulating
The epistemological problems posed by modernist critical projects are only partially answered by adding a postmodern gloss.

force, but it has been overused and abused by more than one scholar in search of a truly radical break from the politics of normalcy. The
questions raised by the maze are much more subtle and complex than Schlag allows. Schlag's

confusion over what the

maze represents, how it operates, and the consequential function of critical theory,
exemplifies the postmodern crisis in legal theory. Put differently, Schlag's characterization of the maze, offered
with a sly wink and a conspiratorial nod to others in the know, comes off sounding just a bit paranoid.

655

Kritik Answers

Alternative Fails
SCHLAGS REFUSAL TO DELINEATE A PRECISE OBJECT OF
HIS CRITIQUE CAUSES HIS KRITIK TO BE CO-OPTED INTO
THE VERY NORMATIVE SYSTEM HE CHALLENGES WHILE
HE IGNORES KEY NORMATIVE STRUCTURES WE NEED TO
CRITICIZE
Conaghan, Professor @ Kent Law School, 2K3 (Joanne, Beyond Right and Reason: Pierre
Schlag, the Critique of Normativity, and the Enchantment of Reason: Schlag in Wonderland, Miami
Law Review, April, Lexis)
Schlag's refusal to delineate with any precision the object of his critique is not a
risk-free strategy. One difficulty arising is that reason remains deliciously ephemeral throughout,
assuming a [*550] dream-like, shadowy quality that at times heightens its allure and triggers a
desire to capture and contain it. This is of course a reflection of Schlag's own ambivalence towards reason, signalled in
particular by his use of the word "enchantment" n29 to denote our (his?) affinity to it. Schlag's portrayal of reason is that
of a siren, a femme fatale, who simultaneously entices and deceives. And, while he urges us
endlessly to recognize her pathological tendencies, we remain suspicious that he is still in
her thrall. More importantly, however, the nebulous quality of Schlag's invocations of reason is
misleading and belies the prescriptive content of the notion(s) he deploys. Reason , for Schlag's
purposes, is bounded in ways he does not openly acknowledge. Woven within the fabric of his
critique is a particular perspective from which reason's purposes are derived and its
shortcomings identified and assessed.
Nevertheless,

ALT CANT SOLVE THE NORMS YOU TRY AND CHANGE

WONT TRANSFER TO THE PUBLIC SPHERE YOU CAN ONLY
CHANGE ONE INSTANCE OF BAD DISCOURSE
Habermas, Prof @ Goethe U in Frankfurt, 90 (Jurgen, Discourse Ethics: Notes
on a Program of Philosophical Justification, The Communicative Ethics Controversy, Ed.
Benhabib and Dallmayr, P. 82-83)

True as it may be that

freedom of opinion in the sense of freedom from external interference in the process of
opinion formation is one of the inescapable pragmatic presuppositions of every
argumentation, the fact remains that what the skeptic is now forced to accept is no more
than a the notion that as a participant in a process of argumentation he has implicitly
recognized a principle of freedom of opinion'. This argument does not go far enough to convince him in his capacity
Admittedly, a second objection can be raised against such arguments, one that is not so easily refuted.

as an actor as well. The validity of a norm of action, as for example a publicly guar anteed constitutional right to freedom of expression,
cannot be justified in this fashion. It

is by no means self-evident that rules which are unavoidable within

discourses can also claim to be valid for regulating, action outside of discourses. Even if
participants in an argumentation are forced to make substantive normative presuppositions
(e.g., to respect one another as Competent subjects; to treat one another as equal partners; to assume one another's truthfulness; and to
cooperate with one another),34 they

could still shake off this transcendental pragmatic compulsion

when they leave the field of argumentation. The necessity of making such presuppositions is not transferred directly
from discourse to action. In any case, a separate justification would be required to explain why the
normative content discovered in the pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation should
have the power to regulate action.

656

Kritik Answers

Pragmatism Good
PRAGMATICALLY COMBINING THE INSIGHTS OF THE
CRITICISM WITH THE AFF SOLVES BEST
RADIN AND MICHELMAN IN 1991

( MARGARET JANE AND FRANK, STANFORD AND HARVARD LAW PROFESSORS, 139
U PA. L. REV 1019, APRIL)
The poststructuralist moment in critical practice is conceptual, diagnostic, and
global. It fastens on intellectual structures and denies their analytic probity. It
indicts whole discourses and all their works by showing their conceptual,
categorical frameworks in a state of collapse. In the poststructuralist frame of mind,
we search for dialectical fault lines implanted in discursive frameworks. We deflate
argumentative paradigms built around a characteristic set (one for each target
jurisprudence) of categories, distinctions, and oppositions. We show their failures of closure
-- perhaps by exposing addiction to a "fundamental contradiction," n51 perhaps by
exposing tactics of recursion and deferral. n52
The pragmatist moment in critical practice is, by contrast, empirical,
epidemiological, and local. It notices characteristic kinds of errors or biases
that recur when target discourses are deployed by nonideal -- incompletely
committed and assiduous -- practitioners caught in specific cultural
environments. n53 The pragmatically minded critic does not deny or ignore
conceptual instability. Neither does she hold that conceptual instability per se
discredits a framework. Indeed, she does not especially care to discredit any
discourse intrinsically or holistically. She rather seeks to evaluate the
discourse in use (given its conceptual instabilities) by ordinarily complacent,
culturally bound practitioners. She asks, for example, about the tendency of the
discourse, in its cultural setting, to focus [*1032] on some problems and blur others.
Pragmatically successful critique does not necessarily mean that practitioners
give up use of the framework. It may mean, rather, that they watch out and
correct for biases to which the culturally situated framework is prone.

657

Kritik Answers

**Nuclearism**
Nuclearism Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, PERM DO BOTH
NUCLEARISM CANT SOLVE WITHOUT A POLITICS
Lifton & Falk 82

[Robert Jay & Richard, Prof. Psychiatry * Prof Intl Affairs, Indefensible Weapons: The
Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism, New York: Basic Books, 133]
. The entrenched forces that stand behind nuclearism are powerful and
wily, and, if necessary, ruthless. Popular movements are notoriously easy to coopt, divert,
infiltrate, bore, and outlast. For the antinuclear movement to succeed, it desperately needs
a politics, that is, a clear understanding of what must be changed and how to do it. This understanding of what must be changed and how to do it. This
yet we must not be too encouraged

understanding must also include an alternative idea of security. The antinuclear ranks are not composed of idealists who believe that peace on earth, goodwill to men
and women is an idea whose time has come. Overwhelmingly they are acting out of fear of the nuclear menace, increasingly deciding that this fear takes precedence

in the end this movement will not

succeed unless it combines a negation of nuclearism with the persuasive creation of new
ways to protect independence and territorial integrity of the states that make up world
society. At this time, then, it is crucial to initiate discussions of the politics of antinuclearism. My hope is that this book is read primarily as a contribution to this
over their more traditional concerns about national defense and preserving a way of life. But

work.

SECOND, THEY HAVENT DISPROVED OUR TRUTH CLAIMS

IN THE STATUS QUO THERE REALLY IS A THREAT OF
NUCLEAR DISASTER. UNLESS THEY TAKE OUT THE IMPACT,
VOTE AFF.
THIRD, REALISM SOLVES THEIR ARGUMENT NUMBING IS
IRRELEVENT IF DETERRENCE AND SELF-INTEREST
PREVENT AGENTS FROM USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
CROSS-APPLY KHALILZAD
FOURTH, NUCLEARISM IS INEVITABLE MAINTENANCE
AND DETERRENCE ARE NECESSARY FOR WORLD PEACE
Robinson 2001
[C. Paul, Sandi National Laboraties, A White Paper:Pursuing a New Nuclear Weapons Policy for the
21st Century, March 22, www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Nuclear-Weapons-Policy-21stC.htm, 9-2306//uwyo-ajl]
I served as an arms negotiator on the last two agreements before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and have spent most of my career enmeshed in the complexity of
nuclear weapons issues on the government side of the table. It is abundantly clear (to me) that formulating a new nuclear weapons policy for the start of the 21st
Century will be a most difficult undertaking. While the often over-simplified picture of deterrence during the Cold War-two behemoths armed to the teeth, staring

, there are nevertheless huge arsenals of nuclear weapons and

delivery systems, all in quite usable states, that could be brought back quickly to their Cold
War postures. Additionally, throughout the Cold War and ever since, there has been a steady proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass
each other down-has thankfully retreated into history

destruction by other nations around the globe. The vast majority of these newly armed states are not U.S. allies, and some already are exhibiting hostile behaviors,
while others have the potential to become aggressors toward the U.S., our allies, and our international interests.
Russia has already begun to emphasize the importance of its arsenal of nuclear weapons to compensate for its limited conventional capabilities to deal with hostilities
that appear to be increasing along its borders. It seems inescapable that the U.S. must carefully think through how we should be preparing to deal with new threats
from other corners of the world, including the role that nuclear weapons might serve in deterring these threats from ever reaching actual aggressions.

the abolition of nuclear weapons as an impractical dream in any foreseeable future. I came to this view
from several directions. The first is the impossibility of ever "uninventing" or erasing from
the human mind the knowledge of how to build such weapons. While the sudden appearance of a few tens of nuclear weapons causes only a
small stir in a world where several thousands of such weapons already exist, their appearance in a world without nuclear
weapons would produce huge effects. (The impact of the first two weapons in ending World War II should be a sufficient example.) I
I personally see

believe that the words of Winston Churchill, as quoted by Margaret Thatcher to a special joint session of the U.S. Congress on February 20, 1985, remain convincing
on this point: "Be careful above all things not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure, and more sure than sure, that other means of preserving the peace are
in your hands."

the majority of the nations who have now acquired arsenals of nuclear
weapons believe them to be such potent tools for deterring conflicts that they would never
surrender them. Against this backdrop, I recently began to worry that because there were few public statements by U.S. officials in reaffirming the
Similarly, it is my sincere view that

658

Kritik Answers
unique role which nuclear weapons play in ensuring U.S. and world security, far too many people (including many in our own armed forces) were beginning to believe
that perhaps nuclear weapons no longer had value. It seemed to me that it was time for someone to step forward and articulate the other side of these issues for the
public: first, that nuclear weapons remain of vital importance to the security of the U.S. and to our allies and friends (today and for the near future); and second, that

nuclear weapons will likely have an enduring role in preserving the peace and preventing
world wars for the foreseeable future. These are my purposes in writing this paper.

659

Kritik Answers

Nuclearism Answers: 2AC (2/3)

FIFTH, IMAGINING NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION IS A PROJECT
OF SURVIVAL THEIR ALTERNATIVE CREATES
REPRESSION AND DENIAL WHICH MAKES NUCLEAR WAR
MORE LIKELY
Lenz, Science and Policy Professor at SUNY, 90 (Nuclear Age Literature For Youth, p. 9-10)
all people have difficulty
grasping the magnitude and immediacy of the threat of nuclear arms and this psychological unreality is a
basic obstacle to eliminating that threat. Only events that people have actually experienced can have true emotional
A summary of Franks thought in Psychological Determinants of the Nuclear Arms Race notes how

impact. Since Americans have escaped the devastation of nuclear weapons on their own soil and nuclear weapons poised for annihilation
in distant countries cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched, we

find it easy to imagine ourselves immune

to the threat. Albert Camus had the same phenomenon in mind when he wrote in his essay Neither Victims nor Executioners of the
inability of most people really to imagine other peoples death (he might have added or their own). Commenting on Camus, David P.
Barash and Judith Eve Lipton observed that this

distancing from deaths reality is yet another aspect of our

insulation from lifes most basic realities. We make love by telephone, we work not on matter but on machines, and
we kill and are killed by proxy. We gain in cleanliness, but lose in understanding. If we are to heed Camuss call to refuse to be
either the victims of violence like the Jews of the Holocaust, or the perpetrators of it like the Nazi executioners of
the death camps, we must revivify the imagination of what violence really entails. It is here , of course,
that the literature of nuclear holocaust can play a significant role. Withou t either firsthand experience
or vivid imagining, it is natural, as Frank points out, to deny the existence of death machines and
their consequences. In psychiatric usage denial means to exclude from awareness, because letting [the
instruments of destruction] enter consciousness would create too strong a level of anxiety or other painful emotions. In most life-

adapting ourselves to nuclear

fear is counterproductive. We only seal our doom more certainly . The repressed fear, moreover, takes a
threatening situations, an organisms adaptation increases chances of survival, but ironically,
psychic toll.

SIXTH, WE DO NOT REALLY KNOW THE IMPACT TO

NUCLEAR WAR- DENYING THAT DESTRUCTION CAN OCCUR
THROUGH THE CRITICISM FURTHERS NUMBING
Lifton and Markusen, Prof of International Relations @ Princeton U and Assist
Researcher @ U of New York, 90 (Robert Jay and Eric, The Genocidal Mentality, P. 203)
Not only are we much more ignorant about what
we call nuclear war than we care to admit, but "we don't know how much we do or do not
know about it." Since, as the Israeli philosopher Avner Cohen points out, "we do not really know how to conceive of nuclear
Dissociation is called forth to cover over and deny ignorance.

warfare as a concrete actuality, how it could be properly kept under control and how it might be brought to termination," it is less than

all evidence suggests that "no

matter what nuclear war might be, it would not be the kind of rule-governed practice" often
assumed on the basis of past wars. And while the principle of deterrence has a long history in political and military
responsible to claim how such an event could be "managed, controlled or concluded." But

practice going back to the time of the Greek city-states, the consequences, should deterrence fail and the deterrer act on his threat, were

Precisely the present absence

of those limits "should deterrence fail," the uncertainty or unlikelihood of any significant
amount of human life remaining, radically distinguishes nuclear deterrence from that
tradition. Dissociation, especially in the form of psychic numbing, helps blur that distinction
by denying not only our ignorance but also what we can be expected to know.
always limited: after the war and destruction, there would be recovery and resumption of life.

660

Kritik Answers

Nuclearism Answers: 2AC (3/3)

SEVENTH, CRITICIZING NUCLEAR REPRESENTATIONS
DOESNT PRECLUDE THE NEED FOR CONCRETE ACTION
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, Truth, Politics, and Postmodernism,
Spinoza Lectures, 1997, p. 51-2
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very
important meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida

the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the
writers who are labeled `post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good
experimentalist social democrats when it comes to actual political activity . I suspect, for example, that Gray,
usually replies that

Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist
philosophers have gotten a bad name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like `impossible; `self-contradictory' and
`unrepresentable'. They have helped create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more

. I am
all for getting rid of the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and
unrepresentability is counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the
generally, to the `metaphysics of presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible

metaphor of things being accurately represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for
philosophers, and we would be better off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate

Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls

a full presence beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity
will not have changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from
representation' was never a fruitful way to describe intellectual progress.
"

psychoanalysis. All that we have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss

We have been given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress
has been made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political program . Since Darwin we have come to suspect
which the Enlightenment offered.

that whether such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky.

EIGHTH, MEDIA IMAGES PLAY THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF

REVEALING THEIR OWN ILLUSIONS
Jean Baudrillard, professor of philosophy of culture and media at Univ. or Paris, 1994,
Illusion of the End, pg. 60-61
And yet there will, nonetheless, have been a kind of verdict in this Romanian affair, and the
artificial heaps of corpses will have been of some use, all the same. One might ask whether
the Romanians, by the very excessiveness of this staged event and the simulacrum of their
revolution, have not served as demystifiers of news and its guiding principle. For, if the
media image has put an end to the credibility of the event, the event will, in its turn, have
put an end to the credibility of the image. Never again shall we be able to look at a television
picture in good faith, and this is the finest collective demystification we have ever known.
The finest revenge over this new arrogant power, this power to blackmail by events. Who
can say what responsibility attaches to the televisual production of a false massacre
(Timisoara), as compared with the perpetrating of a true massacre? This is another kind of
crime against humanity, a hijacking of fantasies, affects and the credulity of hundreds of
millions of people by means of television a crime of blackmail and simulation. What
penalty is laid down for such a hijacking? There is no way to rectify this situation and we
must have no illusions: there is no perverse effect, nor even anything scandalous in the
Timisoara syndrome. It is simply the (immoral) truth of news, the secret purpose
[destination] of which is to deceive us about the real, but also to undeceive us about the real.
There is no worse mistake than taking the real for the real and, in that sense, the very excess
of media illusion plays a vital disillusioning role. In this way, news could be said to undo its
own spell by its effects and the violence of information to be avenged by the repudiation and
indifference it engenders. Just as we should be unreservedly thankful for the existence of
politicians, who take on themselves the responsibility for that wearisome function, so we
should be grateful to the media for existing and taking on themselves the triumphant
illusionism of the world of communications, the whole ambiguity of mass culture, the
confusion of ideologies, the stereotypes, the spectacle, the banality soaking up all these
things in their operation. While, at the same time, constituting a permanent test of
intelligence, for where better than on television can one learn to question every picture,
every word, every commentary? Television inculcates indifference distance, scepticism and
unconditional apathy. Through the worlds becoming-image, it anaesthetizes the
imagination, provokes a sickened abreaction, together with a surge of adrenalin which

661

Kritik Answers
induces total disillusionment. Television and the media would render reality [le reel]
dissuasive, were it not already so. And this represents an absolute advance in the
consciousness or the cynical unconscious of our age.

662

Kritik Answers

#1 Permutation: 1AR
THE PERMUTATION TO DO THE PLAN WHILE RETHINKING
SOLVES BEST THEIR OWN AUTHOR SAYS THAT THERE IS
NO SINGLE TRUTH ENGAGING IN POLITICAL ACTION AND
RECOGNIZING THE POWER OF THE HUMAN RACE ALLOWS
US TO RESIST NUCLEAR AGGRESSION
Lifton and Markusen, Prof of International Relations @ Princeton U and Assist
Researcher @ U of New York, 90 (Robert Jay and Eric, The Genocidal Mentality, P. 278-279)
Species awareness means awareness of human choice: "This is not the End of Timeunless
we choose to make it so. We need not accept the death sentence . . . .We are not powerless."
By choosing instead a human future, we arein the words of the Polish Solidarity leader Adam Michnik"defending hope." And "hope is
important. Perhaps more important than anything else." Hope is greatly enhancedas is the acceptance of individual mortalityby the
sense of reasserting the immortality of the species. The task is intensified by the psychological upheavals we can expect in connection with
the millennial transition of the year 2000. Whatever the millennial imagery, we

must recognize that the hopeful

future is not an apocalyptic heavenly peace but rather expanded awareness on behalf of
human continuity. This adaptation will not eliminate peoples need to define themselves in
relation to otherness, but it can begin to subsume that otherness to larger human
commonality. It must include struggles against widespread oppression and drastic human
inequities by invoking the kind of originality in political action that has taken place in the Solidarity movement
in Polandand in related movements in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgariaand was so cruelly frustrated in the

This speciesoriented approach would defy the given models of defiance. No one can claim knowledge
of a single, correct path. Rather, there must be endless combinations of reflection and action
and, above all, the kind of larger collective adaptation we have been discussing. At the same
time, we must remain aware of persisting genocidal arrangements and expressions of
genocidal mentality. We cannot afford to stop thinking . Nor can we wait for a new Gandhi or Saint Joan to
deliver us. Rather, each of us must join in a vast project political, ethical, psychologicalon
behalf of perpetuating and nurturing our humanity. We are then people getting up from
their knees to resist nuclear oppression. We clear away the thick glass that has blurred
our moral and political vision. We become healers, not killers, of our species.
student movement in China: Political action that enlarges, rather than blights or destroys, human possibilities.

663

Kritik Answers

#4 Nuclear Weapons Key to Peace: 1AR

NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE NECESSARY FOR WORLD PEACE,
ELIMINATING EVILS, AND ENSURING PROTECTIONS OF
FREEDOMS THEIR ARGUMENT IGNORES THE RATIONAL
BASIS FOR THE CREATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
J. A. H. Futterman, Ph.D. from UT-Austin and Physicist at the University of California's
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Obscenity and Peace: Meditations on the Bomb, 1990- 94,
http://www.dogchurch.com/scriptorium/nuke.html, UK: Fisher
With the above statement as background I observe that many peace activists confront the
evil impulse in the powers of war with the evil impulse in themselves. They rightly see
nuclear war as a threat to the planet, and therefore a threat to themselves and humanity,
and so confront the threat of violence with anger. Such an attitude is self-defeating, because
acting from it creates more conflict, rather than less. Rather than making peace, such action
merely makes war on war.
Now the peace activists didn't invent this type of response. In the same spirit, nuclear
weapons were first invented by good people who were confronting the evil of the Nazis (who
were trying to develop their own atomic bomb) with the evil impulse in themselves. And by
continuing to develop and/or maintain a stockpile of them we give our assent to this evil
impulse. I give my assent.
I give it because in response to the Nazis, I would have done the same thing. In response to
Stalinism, I would also have done as my predecessors did. I believe that Nazism had to be
defeated at all costs, and Stalinism had to be contained, in order to preserve and enlarge the
freedoms that I hold dear for myself and for all people. Such a response satisfies the
criterion of Utilitarianism -- the greatest good for the greatest number -- at least in its
outcome so far. Even the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which hastened the
defeat of the evil of Japanese Imperialism, satisfies the criterion of Utilitarianism in that it
spared the loss of American lives and the even worse devastation of Japan and loss of
Japanese lives that would have resulted from a conventional invasion. And I suppose I
would have supported it for that reason. (And if you think there we could have demonstrated
the bomb over an unpopulated area, remember that we used our entire stockpile of two
bombs, and that it took two cities, to bring about the surrender.) [29] But the image of an
orphaned baby, burned and screaming, annihilates forever the argument that it was good.
[30] It was an evil response of good people to evil, and it was the best that we humans could
do at the time.
[30] Ironically, what I had remembered as an image of Hiroshima turns out to be H. S.
Wong's photo taken after the Japanese conventional bombing of Nanking on August 29,
1937.
And so the question of whether I am good or evil in my participation in the nuclear weapons
business is already contained in the discussion of yezer tov and yezer ra, above. Or in the
Christian idea that we are simultaneously sinners and saints. I am neither one nor the other
-- like you, I am both. In associating with a nuclear weapons program, I confront the evil of
potential aggressors against America with my own evil impulse. On the other hand, it is
necessary (but not sufficient) for us to defend our turf, even in this outrageous manner, if we
are to defend our freedom. (Otherwise we risk being attacked just for being vulnerable. And
if the old enemy is no longer visible on our horizon, all we need do is to become complacent
for a new one to appear.) Just as an individual needs his evil impulse to live, so does a
nation. The question is not how to eliminate the evil impulse -- the question is how to
harness it. How can we use it for good?[31]

664

Kritik Answers

#5 Fear of Nuc Weapons Solves Usage:

1AR
FEAR OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS HAS PREVENTED THEIR USE
DETERRENCE HAS CHECKED CONFLICT
Rajaraman, Professor of Theoretical Physics at JNU, 2K2 (R., Ban battlefield nuclear
weapons, The Hindu, April 22,
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/04/22/stories/2002042200431000.htm[

There were a variety of different reasons behind each of these examples of abstinence from using nuclear weapons. But one major common
factor contributing to all of them has been an ingrained terror of nuclear devastation. The well documented images of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the awesome photographs of giant mushroom clouds emerging from nuclear tests in the Pacific and the numerous movies based

Armageddon scenarios have all contributed to building up a deep rooted fear of

nuclear weapons. This is not limited just to the abhorrence felt by anti-nuclear activists. It permeates to one extent
or another the psyche of all but the most pathological of fanatics. It colours the calculations,
even if not decisively, of the most hardened of military strategists. The unacceptability of
nuclear devastation is the backbone of all deterrence strategies. There is not just a fear of being attacked
oneself, but also a strong mental barrier against actually initiating nuclear attacks on enemy
populations, no matter how much they may be contemplated in war games and strategies.
As a result a taboo has tacitly evolved over the decades preventing nations, at least so far,
from actually pressing the nuclear button even in the face of serious military crises.
on nuclear

665

Kritik Answers

#5 Fear of Nuc Weapons Solves Usage:

Ext
FEAR AND HORROR FORCE PEOPLE TO TAKE THE PATH
TOWARDS PEACE
J. A. H. Futterman, Ph.D. from UT-Austin and Physicist at the University of California's
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Obscenity and Peace: Meditations on the Bomb, 1990- 94,
http://www.dogchurch.com/scriptorium/nuke.html, UK: Fisher
But the inhibitory effect of reliable nuclear weapons goes deeper than Shirer's deterrence of
adventurer-conquerors. It changes the way we think individually and culturally, preparing
us for a future we cannot now imagine. Jungian psychiatrist Anthony J. Stevens states, [15]
"History would indicate that people cannot rise above their narrow sectarian concerns
without some overwhelming paroxysm. It took the War of Independence and the Civil War
to forge the United States, World War I to create the League of Nations, World War II to
create the United Nations Organization and the European Economic Community. Only
catastrophe, it seems, forces people to take the wider view.
Or what about fear? Can the horror which we all experience when we contemplate the
possibility of nuclear extinction mobilize in us sufficient libidinal energy to resist the
archetypes of war? Certainly, the moment we become blas about the possibility of
holocaust we are lost. As long as horror of nuclear exchange remains uppermost we can
recognize that nothing is worth it. War becomes the impossible option. Perhaps horror, the
experience of horror, the consciousness of horror, is our only hope. Perhaps horror alone
will enable us to overcome the otherwise invincible attraction of war."
Thus I also continue engaging in nuclear weapons work to help fire that world-historical
warning shot I mentioned above, namely, that as our beneficial technologies become more
powerful, so will our weapons technologies, unless genuine peace precludes it. We must
build a future more peaceful than our past, if we are to have a future at all, with or without
nuclear weapons a fact we had better learn before worse things than nuclear weapons are
invented. If you're a philosopher, this means that I regard the nature of humankind as
mutable rather than fixed, but that I think most people welcome change in their
personalities and cultures with all the enthusiasm that they welcome death thus, the fear
of nuclear annihilation of ourselves and all our values may be what we require in order to
become peaceful enough to survive our future technological breakthroughs.[16]
Of course, we could just try for a world-wide halt to scientific research and technological
change. This is obviously not desirable because technological change serves humanity like
biological diversity serves life in general -- it gives us ways to cope with new challenges to
our existence. For example, medical scientists deliberately forced the smallpox virus into
virtual extinction. Nor is halting technological change possible, because the demand for such
change is so great people want the new stuff so much that they actually buy it.
The fear of nuclear annihilation may be what we require in order to become peaceful enough
to survive our future technological breakthroughs.
In other words, when the peace movement tells the world that we need to treat each other
more kindly, I and my colleagues stand behind it (like Malcolm X stood behind Martin
Luther King, Jr.) saying, "Or else." We provide the peace movement with a needed sense of
urgency that it might otherwise lack.

Fear of Nuclear Weapons Good: Ext

(1/4)
FEAR IS OKAY IN THE CONTEXT OF A DEBATE ROUND
DISCUSSION HELPS ALLEVIATE THE NUMBING CAUSED BY
FEAR
Dr. Peter M. Sandman is a preeminent risk communication speaker and consultant in the United
States and has also worked extensively abroad, Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University in

666

Kritik Answers
1971, and Dr. JoAnn M. Valenti, a founding member of SEJ and elected Fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Scared stiff or scared into action, Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, January 1986, pp. 1216, Winner of the 1986/1987 Olive Branch Award for Outstanding
Coverage of the Nuclear Arms Issue, given by New York Universitys Center for War, Peace, and the News
Media, http://www.psandman.com/articles/scarstif.htm, UK: Fisher
Numerous testimonials indicate that the shock therapy of a fear appeal may sometimes cut
through paralysis. But such testimonials are usually from activists who were neither
paralyzed nor numb in the first place, whose fear was maintained at reasonable levels by
their own activism, and who derived new energy and reinforcement from what people in the
adjacent seats may well have found intolerable. Our wager is that the fear speeches revitalize
the committed into renewed action, startle the apathetic into fresh attention, and torment
the terrorized and the numb into starker terror and deeper numbness.
In a set of guidelines for Helping People Deal With Terrifying Films, Frances Peavey
advised readers in 1981: Do not stand up after the film is over and try to scare people with
further horrifying facts. This is a violent act and does not encourage peace. When people are
subjected to too much fear-provoking material, they tend toward numbing, forgetting or
feeling so violated that they are hostile to the overall message.(12) At that time Peavey still
saw value in terrifying films, so long as the discussion afterward helped people deal with
the feelings they aroused. In 1985, when few are apathetic but many are numbed by terror,
the value of the films themselves is much reduced.

FEAR MOTIVATES PEOPLE TO PURSUE CONSTRUCTIVE

MEANS TO SUSTAIN PEACE AND PREVENT LARGE-SCALE
CATASTROPHE
Lifton, Distinguished Prof of Psychiatry and Psychology @ John Jay College, 2K1 (Robert
Jay, Illusions of the second nuclear age, World Policy Journal, Spring, Vol. 18, Iss. 1, P. 25)
The trouble is that in other ways the dangers associated with nuclear weapons are greater than ever : the
continuing weapons-- centered policies in the United States and elsewhere; the difficulties in controlling nuclear weapons that exist under
unstable conditions (especially in Russia and other areas of the former Soviet Union);2 and the

eagerness and potential

capacity of certain nations and "private" groups to acquire and possibly use the weapons . In
that sense, the nuclear quietism is perilous. Or, to put the matter another way, we no longer manifest an
appropriate degree of fear in relation to actual nuclear danger . While fear in itself is hardly to be
recommended as a guiding human emotion, its absence in the face of danger can lead to catastrophe. We
human animals have built-in fear reactions in response to threat. These reactions help us to
protect ourselves-to step back from the path of a speeding automobile , or in the case of our ancestors,
from the path of a wild animal. Fear can be transmuted into constructive planning and policies : whether
for minimizing vulnerability to attacks by wild animals, or for more complex contemporary threats. Through fear, ordinary people
can be motivated to pursue constructive means for sustaining peace , or at least for limiting the
scope of violence. Similarly, in exchanges between world leaders on behalf of preventing largescale conflict, a tinge of fear-sometimes more than a tinge- can enable each to feel the potential bloodshed
and suffering that would result from failure . But with nuclear weapons, our psychological circuits are impaired. We
know that the weapons are around-and we hear talk about nuclear dangers somewhere "out there" -but our minds no longer connect with
the dangers or with the weapons themselves. That blunting of feeling extends into other areas. One of the many sins for which advocates of
large nuclear stockpiles must answer is the prevalence of psychic numbing to enormous potential suffering, the blunting of our ethical

In the absence of the sort of threatening nuclear rhetoric the United

States and Russia indulged in during the 1980s, we can all too readily numb ourselves to
everything nuclear, and thereby live as though the weapons pose no danger, or as though
they don't exist. To be sure, we have never quite been able to muster an appropriate level of fear with respect to these weapons-one
standards as human beings.

that would spur us to take constructive steps to remove the threat. We have always been able to numb ourselves in this regard, which must
be seen as a basic human response to a threat that is apocalyptic in scope and so technologically distanced as to be unreal. But there were
at least brief moments when we would awaken from our nuclear torpor.

667

Kritik Answers

Fear of Nuclear Weapons Good: Ext

(2/4)
THE AFFIRMATIVES ACTIVISM IS CRITICAL TO
EMPOWERING INDIVIDUALS ALLOWING THEM TO BREAK
ANY FEAR CAUSED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Dr. Peter M. Sandman is a preeminent risk communication speaker and consultant in the United
States and has also worked extensively abroad, Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University in
1971, and Dr. JoAnn M. Valenti, a founding member of SEJ and elected Fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Scared stiff or scared into action, Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, January 1986, pp. 1216, Winner of the 1986/1987 Olive Branch Award for Outstanding
Coverage of the Nuclear Arms Issue, given by New York Universitys Center for War, Peace, and the News
Media, http://www.psandman.com/articles/scarstif.htm, UK: Fisher
The main obstacle to action, writes Frank, is neither apathy nor terror but simply a
feeling of helplessness. To combat it, I have perhaps overemphasized the small signs that
antinuclear activities are at last beginning to influence the political process.(19)
Helplessness, hopelessness, futility, and despair are words one hears even more often than
fear from the barely active and the formerly active. And like fear, these emotions can easily
lead to psychic numbing. Those who feel powerless to prevent nuclear war try not to think
about it; and it serves the needs of those who do not wish to think about nuclear war to feel
powerless to prevent it. Messages of hope and empowerment, however, break this
vicious circle.
The label hope, as we use it, subsumes a wide range of overlapping concepts: for example,
optimism, a sense of personal control and efficacy, confidence in methods and solutions, a
sense of moral responsibility, and a vision of the world one is aiming for.
It is well established (and hardly surprising) that hope is closely associated with
willingness to act. Activism appeals most to people who feel positive about both the
proposed solution and their personal contribution to its achievement. Over the long term,
this means that antinuclear organizers must communicate a credible vision of a nuclear-free
world. Meanwhile, they must offer people things to do that seem achievable and worthwhile.
The nuclear-weapons-freeze campaign attracted millions of new activists in 1982 because it
offered credible hope. By 1985 many of those millions could no longer ground their hope in
the freeze; some found other approaches and some returned to inactivity.
Most social psychologists today see the relationship between hope and action as
independent of fear or other feelings. For example, Kenneth H. Beck and Arthur Frankel
conclude that three cognitions (not emotions) determine whether people will do something
about a health risk: recognizing the danger as real, believing the recommended plan of
action will reduce the danger, and having confidence in their ability to carry out the plan.
(20) Similarly, Suttons review of the fear-appeal literature finds inconsistent support for the
notion that people can accept higher levels of fear if they feel the proposed solution will
remedy the problem, but strong evidence that, regardless of fear, people are more inclined to
act on solutions they see as more effective.(21)

668

Kritik Answers

Fear of Nuclear Weapons Good: Ext

(3/4)
NUCLEAR WEAPONRY CHECKS DICTATORIAL CONQUEST
AND GLOBAL WAR
J. A. H. Futterman, Ph.D. from UT-Austin and Physicist at the University of California's
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Obscenity and Peace: Meditations on the Bomb, 1990- 94,
http://www.dogchurch.com/scriptorium/nuke.html, UK: Fisher
I could say that if I didn't do it, someone else would, but that answer was rejected at
Nuremberg. (It's also a better reason to leave the weapons program than to stay.) I continue
to support the nuclear weapons business with my effort for many reasons, which I discuss
throughout this piece. But mostly, I do it because the fear of nuclear holocaust is the only
authority my own country or any other has respected so far when it comes to nationalistic
urges to make unlimited war. As William L. Shirer states in his preface to The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich (Touchstone Books, New York, 1990),
"Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of
Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out
on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on
that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the
ballistic missile, and of rockets which can be aimed to hit the moon."
Now this contrasts with the argument of those who would "reinvent government" by putting
up bureaucratic roadblocks to maintaining the reliability of the US nuclear arsenal through
research and testing. They reason that if the reliability of everyone's nuclear arsenals
declines, everyone will be less likely to try using them. The problem is that some
"adventurer-conqueror" may arise and use everyone's doubt about their arsenals to risk
massive conventional war instead. An expansionist dictatorship might even risk nuclear
war with weapons that are simpler, cruder, less powerful, much riskier (in terms of the
possibility of accidental detonation) but much more reliable than our own may eventually
become without adequate "stockpile stewardship."[14]

Fear of Nuclear Weapons Good: Ext

(4/4)
NATIONS WILL INEVITABLY SEEK THE DEADLIEST
WEAPONS INGRAINED IN HUMAN NATURE EXISTENCE
OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS CHECKS DEVELOPMENT OF WORSE
WEAPONS IN THE FUTURE
J. A. H. Futterman, Ph.D. from UT-Austin and Physicist at the University of California's
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Obscenity and Peace: Meditations on the Bomb, 1990- 94,
http://www.dogchurch.com/scriptorium/nuke.html, UK: Fisher
Some people argue that the goal of civilization is to raise our children so that wars don't
happen. Unfortunately, we've had civilization for six thousand years, and our history has
been as dysfunctional as our families. The only thing that's ever made us pause in our
societal "addiction" to war is nuclear weaponry, and the realization that the next big war
may kill us all.
But if war is humanity's heroin, nuclear weaponry is its methadone. That is, the
treatment has potentially dangerous side effects. I am partly referring to the doctrine of
deterrence by Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD. It is MAD, because it is intrinsically
unstable, as those who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis may recall. The Strategic
Defense Initiative, (or Star Wars) was an attempt to move toward something more stable,
and its successor, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), may in time succeed,
provided it is managed as a research program rather than as a political football. But even a

669

Kritik Answers
successful BMD will not make the world stable against massively destructive war -- it will
merely make it more stable than it is now. BMD is a technical fix that does not address the
real cause of the instability.
As long as war is the ultimate arbiter of international disputes, nations will arm themselves
with ultimate weapons. And that means, that if something worse than nuclear weapons can
be discovered and developed, it will be. And then we will find something worse than that,
and so on perhaps until we, ourselves, prematurely punctuate the end of our universe with
as big a bang as the one which began it. Nuclear weapons may actually be giving us a chance
to learn to get along with each other before we get something really dangerous, a kind of
world-historical warning shot.[8] The problem is not nuclear weapons, the problem is war.

#5 Nuclear Imagery Good: 1AR

DISCUSSING NUCLEAR WAR IS KEY TO PREVENTIN GIT
DENYING THE POSSIBILITY OF NUCELAR WAR INCREASES
POWERLESSNESS
Goodman & Hoff 90
[Lill & Lee, authors, Omnicide]

Why then do we feel so powerless? One of our problems is a partly voluntary lack of
imagination. It protects us from fully visualizing the unthinkable horrors of such a war. It
also prevents us from insisting that government serve our mandates (which, after all, defines
democracy) rather than the other way around. Instead of searching for ways to prevent
those who consider nuclear war a viable course of action from every carrying it out, we
engage in self-deceptive maneuvers as a protection against feeling inadequate, helpless, and
anxious. Unfortunately, distorting or denying the gravity of our present condition does not
change its reality. On the contrary, as already noted, it may even be instrumental in bringing
about the disaster.

670

Kritik Answers

A2 Nuclear Numbing: 2AC

NUMBING CAN ONLY BE SOLVED BY EXPOSING THE TRUTH
OF NUCLEARISM PROTECTING PEOPLE FROM EXPOSURE
ONLY DOOMS THEM
Gallagher 93

[Carole, photographer, American Ground Zero: the Secret Nuclear War]

The phrase nuclear numbing was coined by Dr Robert jay Lifton, a psychiatrist whose
definitive studies of the emotional health effects of nuclearism (beginning most notably with
the interviews of the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for his book Death in Life) have
been a major part of his lifes work. His writings suggest that the passivity, the numbness
that I witnessed may have been a natural byproduct of both the trauma of the atomic bomb
tests conducted so close by (near enough for the shock waves to throw people from their
beds) and the cover-up, the web of lies in which the downwinders were tangled. To cope
with the psychic damage from their betrayal, perhaps it was necessary to avoid acquiring
further information that would make their vague fears specific enough to require decisive
action. In this warping of awareness and crippling of grass roots political potency, the
downwinders were the cold War bellwether of an increasingly unquestioning nation. They
were the unwitting casualties of an American nuclear jihad the Cold War against
Communism. Each society produces its own slaughter of innocents, of those who are most
expendable in dangerous times, whether the danger is falsely manufactured to achieve a
political end or truly exists. My country right or wrong: the issue of blind obedience to
authority is germane to all societies that value abstract ideals above life itself. The active or
passive role of absolute repression of individual choice, by either a government or a religion,
seems to be a repetition of the human holocaust syndrome, genocide. And at the heart of
this planetary misery is a manipulative net of what Erasmus called deceitful fictions for the
rabble reaching back into recorded history, with which the powerful few of both the church
and the state control the lives of the many, always for their own good.

671

Kritik Answers

A2 Nuclear Deterrence Immoral: 2AC

(1/2)
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE DESIGNED TO DETER WARS
THEY ARE MORALLY ACCEPTABLE BECAUSE THEY SECURE
THE WORLD
Gusterson, Assoc Prof of Anthropology and Science Studies @ MIT and Adjunct Fellow @
Harvard Us Center for Psychology and Social Change, 93 (Hugh, Ethnographic Writing on
Militarism, Journal of Contemporary Ethnology, April, Vol. 22, No.1, P.72)

How can the anthropologist and the political citizen learn to live together in the same person in such a situation? How, for ex- ample,

Lester,3 who told me that, although his university colleagues tried to talk him out of
believes that it is more ethical to
work on nuclear weapons than on less destructive conventional weapons because nuclear
weapons are designed to deter wars rather than to fight them . He says that he could never work as a lawyer
defending murderers or other criminals but feels mor- ally comfortable with his work as a nuclear warhead designer, and even wonders if
it might be morally reprehensible not to work on nuclear weapons because , as he sees it, they
make the world more stable. Lester is puzzled by those who cannot see that nuclear weapons make us safer by making war
unthink- able. Like most of his colleagues, he is confident that nuclear weapons can be controlled by humans,
that technological progress is unavoidable and beneficial, and that nuclear weapons are the
embodiment of a transcendent rationality, which alone can discipline the dark impulses
leading humans to make war. Everything in his life, where he sees the atom bent to the experimental will of human
should one write about an interview subject like

working at a nuclear weapons laboratory, their objec- tions did not trouble him? He

rationality on a daily basis, confirms those beliefs. Lester does not worry that the United States will misuse the hydrogen bombs he
designs, bombs he describes as "no more strange than a vacuum cleaner. You don't feel a fear for them at all." In fact, he sees weapons
technology as "beautiful." "How do I explain that?" he asked me. "To me, a spectrometer is a very pretty thing ... and you feel badly that
it's going to be destroyed [in a nuclear test]."

672

Kritik Answers

A2 Nuclear Deterrence Immoral: 2AC

(2/2)
DETERRENCE IS MORAL
A)NECESSARY TO THWART IMMORAL REGIMES
B)ALL OTHER SECURITY REGIMES RELY ON
DETERRENCE, MAKING THE MORAL DILEMMA
INEVITABLE
Joseph, Under Secretary Arms Control & International Security and Former Professor
of National Security Studies & Director of the Center for Counterproliferation Research at

the National Defense University, 98 (Robert, THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR DETERRENCE
TODAY, Orbis, Winter, Volume 42, Issue 1)
Morality and ethics. In terms of morality, the

blanket charge that any use of nuclear weapons--and even reliance on the
threat of nuclear retaliation for deterrence --would be immoral goes beyond past proclamations, such as
those contained in the 1983 Catholic bishops' pastoral letter which, while calling for general disarmament and condemning the first use of
nuclear weapons, left ambiguous the role of nuclear weapons for deterrence. If allowed to stand unchallenged, such a charge could carry
substantial weight in the policy debate, especially in a democracy (and perhaps only in a democracy) built upon moral principles. But it

are at best simplistic, and perhaps--in

light of what we know about human nature and history--dangerous in themselves . The use, or
does not take a trained ethicist to recognize that such blanket moral assertions

even threat of use, of any weapon may contain elements of moral ambiguity. And like other weapons--whether a club in Rwanda or
artillery surrounding Sarajevo--nuclear weapons could be used in ways that are clearly immoral. Moreover, the scale of destruction that
could result from the employment of even a few nuclear weapons makes imperative the need to consider carefully the full range of moral
issues associated with the possession of these weapons. Perhaps for this reason, well-intentioned people have for decades debated where
ethical lines should be drawn regarding the possession and use of nuclear weapons. Yet, within this realm of considerable ambiguity,

policymakers during the Cold War were forced to decide where the greater risk lay and make
decisions with real consequences. Given the awful consequences of failure, the choice was not simple. On the one hand,
nuclear deterrence could fail. In the aftermath of such failure, it was possible (but by no means certain, insofar as a conscious choice for
use would have to be made by political authorities) that nuclear weapons would be unleashed on civilian populations with truly
catastrophic consequences. On the other hand, in

the absence of a credible nuclear deterrent, conventional

deterrence could fail, as it had so often in the past, twice globally, resulting in another
devastating war with casualties perhaps even greater than those in World War II . Looking back,
one might even argue that those who condemned nuclear weapons as immoral were simply
wrong. The Western alliance's nuclear weapons were in fact the moral weapon of choice. They
worked precisely as intended by deterring an immoral totalitarian state from attacsking
Western Europe and undermining the peace, values, and freedom which the democracies
cherished. Indeed, given the tens of millions of innocent noncombatants killed in two world
wars, one can argue that the possession of nuclear weapons to deter yet another outbreak of
mass slaughter by conventional weapons, either in Europe or Asia, was squarely in the just war
tradition. The argument that the external environment has changed so much with the end of the Cold War that no ethical or moral
basis for nuclear arms remains is likewise unconvincing. American lives and interests remain threatened. In fact, the proliferation of
chemical and biological weapons have made the likelihood of conflict and the prospect of the use of weapons of mass destruction even
greater than in the past in several key regions. But just as before, sound public and defense policy will emerge only from a prudent
calculation of risks and benefits, not from sweeping generalizations about the morality or immorality of possession or use of nuclear
weapons. The

"new eliminationists" who wrap themselves in the cloak of moral superiority and
be asked to address the consequences of disarming the great democracies in a world in
which advanced conventional, chemical, and biological weapons (and in some cases nuclear capabilities)
continue to spread among states explicitly hostile to democratic values .
certainty should

673

Kritik Answers

A2 Proliferation K: 2AC
CRITICISM OF THIRD WORLD NUCLEARPOWERS NOT
ETHNOCENTRIC WE THINK ALL NUCLEAR POWERS ARE
IRRESPONSIBLE
Rao & Vanaik 2002

[Parsa & Achin, All Nuclear Powers are Irresponsible, Gulf News, June 10,
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/02/06/10/53954.html, acc 9-38-06//uwyo-ajl]
Does the nuclear belligerence of India and Pakistan confirm Western criticism that Third
World countries possessing nuclear weapons cannot be expected to behave responsibly?
All nuclear powers, whether they belong to the West or to the Third World, are
irresponsible. How else can you explain the stockpiling of nuclear weapons by the US and
the Soviet Union during the Cold War? It was sheer madness because they did not make
hundreds of nuclear warheads for deterrence. They had the capacity to destroy not only each
other but the whole world many times over. It was sheer irresponsibility.

674

Kritik Answers

**Religion**
Wrath of God Answers: 2AC (1/6)
1. NO LINK THERES NO WARRANT FOR WHY PLAN MAKES
ANY METAPHYSICAL ENTITY ANGRY
2. SOULS DONT EXIST. HUMAN IDENTITY IS NOTHING
MORE THAN AN ARRANGEMENT OF FINITE QUANTUM
STATES
Tipler 94
[Frank J., Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, The Physics of
Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New
York: Doubleday, 1994, 221-3//uwyo-ajl]
The Bekenstein Bound follows from the basic postulates of quantum theory
combined with the further assumptions that (1) the system is bounded in energy,
and (2) the system is bounded, or localized, in space. A rigorous proof of the
Bekenstein Bound would require quantum field theory, but it is easy to describe in
outline why quantum mechanics leads to such a bound on the information coded in
a bounded region. In essence, the Bekenstein Bound is a manifestation of the
uncertainty principle. Recall that the uncertainty principle tells us that there is a
limit to the precision with which we can measure the momentum of a particle and
its position. More precisely, the uncertainty principle says that the location of a
point in phase space-a concept I defined in Chapter III-cannot be defined more
closely thal1 Planck's constant h. Since a system's state is defined by where it is
located in phase space, this means that the number of possible states is less than or
equal to the size of the phase space region the system could be in, divided by the
size of the minimum phase space size, Planck's constant. (I've given a mathematical
expression of this argument in the Appendix for Scientists.) This state counting
procedure, based on there being an absolute minimum size h to a phase space
interval, is an absolutely essential method of quantum statistical mechanics. We
have already used it in Chapter III to prove the almost periodicity of a bounded
quantum system. It is confirmed by the thousands of experiments which have been
based on this counting method.9 In high energy particle physics, any calculation of
the "cross section" requires counting the possible number of particle initial and
final states, and the above state counting method is used.lO The cross section,
which is the measure of how many particles scatter in a particular direction when
they collide in particle accelerators, is the basic quantity tested in particle physics.
The Bekenstein Bound on the number of possible states is thus confirmed by the
correctness of the calculated cross sections. In summary, the Bekenstein Bound on
the total information that can be coded in a region is an absolute solid conclusion
of modern physics, a result as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.
One can also use the Bekenstein Bound to deduce an upper bound to the rate of
information processing. The time for light to cross a sphere of a given diameter is
equal to the diameter of the sphere divided by the speed of light. Since a state
inside the sphere cannot completely change until a signal has time to travel trom
one side to the other, the rate of information processing is bounded above by the
above Bekenstein Bound divided by this time interval. Putting in the numbers
(details in the Appendix for Scientists), we calculate that the rate of state change is
less than or equal to 4 X 1051 bits per second, multiplied by the mass of the system
in kilograms. That is, the rate of information processing possible for a system
depends only on the mass of the system, not on its spatial size or on any other
variable. So a human being of mass 100 kilograms cannot change state more
rapidly than about 4 X 1053 times per second. This number is of course enormousand in fact a human will probably change state much, much more slowly than thisbut it's finite.

675

Kritik Answers

Wrath of God Answers: 2AC (2/6)

3. TURN FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANITY REQUIRES
STONING OF DIVORCEES AND HELLFIRE FOR GLBT
INDIVIDUALS, JUSTIFYING THE MURDER OF INNOCENT
INDIVIDUALS LIKE MATTHEW SHEPARD AND IS AN
INDEPENDENT REASON TO REJECT THE NEG
4. THERE ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF POSSIBLE DEITIES
AND YOU CANT BE CERTAIN OF WHICH ONE IS REAL.
TAKING A POSITION ON ONE INCREASES THE CHANCE OF
PISSING OFF ONE OF THE OTHER ONES, MEANING THE
SAFEST POSITION IS ONE OF NEUTRALITY
5. IF GOD EXISTS, ITS PROVEN THAT IT WONT INTERACT
WITH OUR REALITY, MEANING THERES NO IMPACT
Infidels.org 2003

[An Introduction to Atheism, February 24,

www.infidels.org/news/atheism/intro.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajlo]
If God interacts with our universe in any way, the effects of his interaction must
have some physical manifestation. Hence his interaction with our universe must be
in principle detectable.
If God is essentially non-detectable, it must therefore be the case that he does not
interact with our universe in any way. Many atheists would argue that if God does
not interact with our universe at all, it is of no importance whether he exists or not.
A thing which cannot even be detected in principle does not logically exist.
Of course, it could be that God is detectable in principle, and that we merely cannot
detect him in practice. However, if the Bible is to be believed, God was easily
detectable by the Israelites. Surely he should still be detectable today? Why has the
situation changed?
Note that I am not demanding that God interact in a scientifically verifiable,
physical way. I might potentially receive some revelation, some direct experience of
God. An experience like that would be incommunicable, and not subject to
scientific verification -- but it would nevertheless be as compelling as any evidence
can be.
But whether by direct revelation or by observation, it must surely be possible to
perceive some effect caused by God's presence; otherwise, how can I distinguish
him from all the other things that don't exist?

676

Kritik Answers

Wrath of God Answers: 2AC (3/6)

6. PERM DO BOTH. YOU CAN ACKNOWLEDGE GODS
EXISTENCE AND STILL VOTE AFF.
7. RELIGION HAS CAUSED MORE EARTHLY DESTRUCTION,
CONFLICT, AND SUFFERING THAN ANY OTHER FORCE
Infidels.org 2003

[An Introduction to Atheism, February 24,

www.infidels.org/news/atheism/intro.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajlo]
Religion represents a huge financial and work burden on mankind. It's not just a
matter of religious believers wasting their money on church buildings; think of all
the time and effort spent building churches, praying, and so on. Imagine how that
effort could be better spent.
Many theists believe in miracle healing. There have been plenty of instances of ill
people being "healed" by a priest, ceasing to take the medicines prescribed to them
by doctors, and dying as a result. Some theists have died because they have refused
blood transfusions on religious grounds.
It is arguable that the Catholic Church's opposition to birth control -- and condoms
in particular -- is increasing the problem of overpopulation in many third-world
countries and contributing to the spread of AIDS world-wide.
Religious believers have been known to murder their children rather than allow
their children to become atheists or marry someone of a different religion.
Religious leaders have been known to justify murder on the grounds of blasphemy.
There have been many religious wars. Even if we accept the argument that religion
was not the true cause of those wars, it was still used as an effective justification for
them.

8A. IF EVOLUTION IS TRUE, THEN EVERYTHING IN THE

BIBLE IS A LIE
Gitt 95

[Werner, Creationist Information Scientist, 10 Dangers of theistic evolution,

Creation Ex Nihilo, vol 17 no 4, September-November,
www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1305.asp, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
The entire Bible bears witness that we are dealing with a source of truth authored
by God (2 Timothy 3:16), with the Old Testament as the indispensable 'ramp'
leading to the New Testament, like an access road leads to a motor free way (John
5:39). The biblical creation account should not be regarded as a myth, a parable, or
an allegory, but as a historical report, because:
Biological, astronomical and anthropological facts are given in didactic [teaching]
form.
In the Ten Commandments God bases the six working days and one day of rest on
the same time-span as that described in the creation account (Exodus 20:8-11).
In the New Testament Jesus referred to facts of the creation (e.g. Matthew 19:4-5).
Nowhere in the Bible are there any indications that the creation account should be
understood in any other way than as a factual report.
The doctrine of theistic evolution undermines this basic way of reading the Bible,
as vouched for by Jesus, the prophets and the Apostles. Events reported in the
Bible are reduced to mythical imagery, and an understanding of the message of the
Bible as being true in word and meaning is lost.

677

Kritik Answers

Wrath of God Answers: 2AC (4/6)

B. THE OVERWHELMING WEIGHT OF EXPERIMENTAL AND
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE VERIFIES EVOLUTION
Talkorigins.org 97

[The absolute best site on evolution on the internet, period, contributed to by

biological scientists, Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution, October 1,
talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
Biologists define evolution as a change in the gene pool of a population over time.
One example is insects developing a resistance to pesticides over the period of a few
years. Even most Creationists recognize that evolution at this level is a fact. What
they don't appreciate is that this rate of evolution is all that is required to produce
the diversity of all living things from a common ancestor.
The origin of new species by evolution has also been observed, both in the
laboratory and in the wild. See, for example, (Weinberg, J.R., V.R. Starczak, and D.
Jorg, 1992, "Evidence for rapid speciation following a founder event in the
laboratory." Evolution 46: 1214-1220). The "Observed Instances of Speciation"
FAQ in the talk.origins archives gives several additional examples.
Even without these direct observations, it would be wrong to say that evolution
hasn't been observed. Evidence isn't limited to seeing something happen before
your eyes. Evolution makes predictions about what we would expect to see in the
fossil record, comparative anatomy, genetic sequences, geographical distribution of
species, etc., and these predictions have been verified many times over. The
number of observations supporting evolution is overwhelming.
What hasn't been observed is one animal abruptly changing into a radically
different one, such as a frog changing into a cow. This is not a problem for
evolution because evolution doesn't propose occurrences even remotely like that.
In fact, if we ever observed a frog turn into a cow, it would be very strong evidence
against evolution.

9. THERES NO EVIDENCE THAT GOD WILL TAKE CARE OF

THE PROBLEMS OF CASE. ITS EMPIRICALLY DENIED BY
THE MANY ECO-CATASTROPHES LIKE THE TSUNAMI THAT
SHE OR HE MANAGED TO OVERLOOK

678

Kritik Answers

Wrath of God Answers: 2AC (5/6)

10. GOD DOESNT EXISTPARADOX OF CAUSATION PROVES
Russell no date

Bertrand, philosopher, http://members.aol.com/JAlw/joseph_alward.html

"If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be
anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there
cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the
Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon
a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose
we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no
reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the
other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no
reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must
have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore,
perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First
Cause."

11. EMOTIONS ARGUMENT PROVES GOD DOESNT EXIST

EVILBIBLE.COM 03
A God who knows everything cannot have emotions. The Bible says that God
experiences all of the emotions of humans, including anger, sadness, and
happiness. We humans experience emotions as a result of new knowledge. A man
who had formerly been ignorant of his wife's infidelity will experience the emotions
of anger and sadness only after he has learned what had previously been hidden. In
contrast, the omniscient God is ignorant of nothing. Nothing is hidden from him,
nothing new may be revealed to him, so there is no gained knowledge to which he
may emotively react.
We humans experience anger and frustration when something is wrong which we
cannot fix. The perfect, omnipotent God, however, can fix anything. Humans
experience longing for things we lack. The perfect God lacks nothing. An
omniscient, omnipotent, and perfect God who experiences emotion is impossible.

679

Kritik Answers

Wrath of God Answers: 2AC (6/6)

12A. SEX ABUSE IS ENDEMIC TO CHRISTIANITY
Rice 01

(Fredric, The Skeptic Tank January 17, 2001

http://www.skeptictank.org/clrabuse.htm)
The problem of Christian clergy child sexual abuse is so epidemic in Westernized socities
that the "Sodomizing Priest" has become both stereotypical and cliche. It's not limited to one
particular brand name of Christianity; it's not an aspect of ideological differences; it's
epidemic to all Christian brand names.

B. SEX ABUSE DESTROYS SPIRITUALITY

Franz 02
(Thaeda, Liberty University, Power, Patriarchy and Sexual Abuse in the Christian
Church,http://www.fsu.edu/~trauma/v8/Church.pdf)
In the book, Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches (1993), Carol
Heggen describes the manner in which sexual abuse can leave victims feeling
spiritually
bereft. Her discussion of the problems between victims of sexual abuse and the
church is threefold. First, according to Heggen, the church has ignored the problem
of sexual
abuse. Second, the church has ignored victims of sexual abuse. Third, the church
through policies and subtle patriarchal language- has enveloped perpetrators in a
web of
safety where their violations will be forgiven and forgotten under the guise of
grace.
Heggen (1993) claims there can be profound spiritual damage in the instances of
sexual abuse where the abuser and the victim are both religious. If the victim
prayed to
God for protection, and the abuse continued, the victim may see God as uncaring
(Heggen, 1993). If the perpetrator is a church leader, the violation is even worse.
For
example, if a little girl is being molested by her father, who is a minister, both the
violation of the father/daughter trust, and the pastor/church member trust occurs.
This
can hinder the victims ability to develop a close relationship with God in the
future. God
begins to be associated with the experience of molestation, and can keep the victim
from seeking out religious spiritual help later in life. The fact that the church at
worst
unwilling, and at best unable to discuss sexual abuse has not made it any easier for
these victims to have their questions answered regarding God and His not having
protected them.

680

Kritik Answers

#1 Finite Quantum States: 1AR

EXTEND 2AC NUMBER 2 TIPLER 94 EVIDENCE. QUANTUM
MECHANICS PROVES THAT YOUR IDENTITY IS NOTHING
MORE THAN A SERIES OF QUANTUM PARTICLE STATES.
YOU SHOULD PREFER OUR EVIDENCE ON THIS POINT
BECAUSE ITS BASED ON EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE IN THE LAB
AND IS FALSIFIABLE, WHEREAS THEIR EVIDENCE IS
UNEVIDENCED CONJECTURE THAT YOU COULD NEVER
DETERMINE WHETHER IT WAS TRUE OR NOT. THIS HAS
TWO IMPACTS:
A. IT TAKES OUT THE INTERNAL LINK TO ALL OF THEIR
OFFENSE BECAUSE YOU NO LONGER EXIST AFTER YOU
DIE, MEANING NO RISK OF HELLFIRE
B. IT MEANS CASE OUTWEIGHS BECAUSE DEATH IS
FINAL, ANNIHILATING YOUR IDENTITY. PLAN IS THE
ONLY WAY TO CONTINUE YOUR EXISTENCE
AND, COMPLEX INFORMATION PROCESSING IS THE BASIS
OF LIFE, MEANING THAT DEATH CAUSES ANNIHILATION OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
Tipler 94
[Frank J., Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, The Physics of
Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New
York: Doubleday, 1994, 124-5//uwyo-ajl]
IN ORDER TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER LIFE can continue to exist forever, I
shall need to define "life" in physics language. I claim that a "living being" is any
entity which codes information (in the physics sense of this word) with the
information coded being preserved by natural selection. Thus "life" is a form of
information processing, and the human mind-and the human soul-is a very
complex computer program. Specifically, a "person" is defined to be a computer
program which can pass the Turing test, which was discussed in Chapter II.
This definition of "life" is quite different from what the average person-and the
average biologist-would think of as "life." In the traditional definition, life is a
complex process based on the chemistry of the carbon atom. However, even
supporters of the traditional definition admit that the key words are "complex
process" and not "carbon atom." Although the entities everyone agrees are
"alive" happen to be based on carbon chemistry, there is no reason to believe that
analogous processes cannot be based on other systems. In fact, the British
biochemist A. G. Cairns-Smith! has suggested that the first living beings--':our
ultim:ate ancestors-were based on metallic crystals, not carbon. If this is true, then
if we insist that living beings must be based on carbon chemistry, we would be
forced to conclude that our ultimate ancestors were not alive. In Cairns-Smith's
theory, our ultimate ancestors were self-replicating patterns of defects in the
metallic crystals. Over time, the pattern persisted, but was transferred to another
substrate: carbon molecules. What is important is not the substrate but the pattern,
and the pattern is another name for information.
But life of course is not a static pattern. Rather, it is a dynamic pattern that persists
overtime. It is thus a process. But not all processes are alive. The key feature of the
"living" patterns is that their persistence is due to a feedback with their

681

Kritik Answers
environment: the information coded in the pattern continually varies, but the
variation is constrained to a narrow range by this feedback. Thus life is, as I stated,
information preserved by natural selection.

682

Kritik Answers

A2 Cant Disprove Gods Existence:

1AR
FIRST, THATS BECAUSE NO NEGATIVE IS PROVABLE.
HOWEVER, IN LIGHT OF AN ABSENCE OF ANY EMPIRICAL
EVIDENCE, YOU MIGHT AS WELL ASSUME THAT IT DOESNT
EXIST. I CANT PROVE PINK UNICORNS DONT EXIST, BUT
THERES STILL NO RATIONAL BASIS TO ASSUME THAT THEY
DO
SECOND, EVEN IF GOD DOES EXIST, THERES NO
INDICATION THAT IT INTERACTS WITH OUR WORLD,
MAKING THIS IRRELEVENT

683

Kritik Answers

#7 Religious Suffering: 1AR (1/3)

RELIGIOUS DOGMATISM BREEDS INTOLERANCE AND
VIOLENCE
Nussbaum 2004

[Martha, Ernst Freund distinguished service prof of law and ethics at U of

chicago, Relgious Intolerance, Foreign Policy, Sept/Oct, 44//uwyo-ajl]
Sometimes old ideas are the most dangerous, and few ideas are older than those
that undergird religious intolerance. Lamentably, these ideas are acquiring new
life. In 2002, Hindus in Gujarat, India, killed several hundred Muslims, with the
collaboration of public officials and the police. Europe has recently seen a
frightening rebirth of anti-Semitism, while the appeal of radical forms of Islam
appears to be increasing in the Muslim world. Prejudice against Muslims and a
tendency to equate Islam with terrorism are too prominent in the United States. On
and on it goes. Intolerance breeds intolerance, as expressions of hatred fuel
existing insecurities and permit people to see their own aggression as legitimate
self-defense.

CHRISTIANITY CAUSES HATRED AND WAR

Dolgorukii 97

(Alexis, columnist, Associated press: 26 May 1997)

I would like to have "the undoubted blessings brought by Christianity" demonstrated to me.
As for myself, as an historian I can find nothing at all that Christianity has done to make life
on this planet better for the greatest mass of people. Christians have always babbled blithely
about "love and peace" but I see absolutely no historical indication that they have produced
anything but hatred and war! Christians also babble on about "Christian Charity", but that
too is a lie. Charity existed long before Christianity and Christian Charity (such as it is) has
always come with chains of adamant fastened to it. "Christian Charity" is best exemplified by
"The Salvation Army", a militant Christian Organization that feeds the hungry but insists
that they be evangelized along with dinner!

RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE GIVES WAY TO NIHILISM AND

THE JUSTIFICATION OF SUFFERING AND INEQUALITY
Nussbaum 2004

[Martha, Ernst Freund distinguished service prof of law and ethics at U of

chicago, Relgious Intolerance, Foreign Policy, Sept/Oct, 44//uwyo-ajl]
The appeal of religious intolerance is easy to understand. From an early age,
humans are aware of helplessness toward things of the highest importance, such as
food, love, and life itself. Religion helps people cope with loss and the fear of death;
it teaches moral principles and motivates people to follow them. But precisely
because religions are such powerful sources of morality and community, they all
too easily become vehicles for the flight from helplessness, which so often
manifests itself in oppression and the imposition of hierarchy. In todays
accelerating world, people confront ethnic and religious differences in new and
frightening ways. By clinging to a religion they believe to be the right one,
surrounding themselves with coreligionists, and then subordinating others who do
not accept that religion, people can forget for a time their weakness and mortality.

684

Kritik Answers

#7 Religious Suffering: 1AR (2/3)

CHRISTIANITY KILLED MORE PEOPLE THAN THE NAZIS
Dolgorukii 97 (Alexis, columnist, Associated press: 26 May 1997)
What has Christianity given humanity? Well, there's the Inquisition, which
murdered more people than the Nazi death camps. There's the various Crusades,
which murdered millions in the name of the "Prince of Peace". There's the religious
Wars of the Reformation which killed untold millions of people in Europe. And
there's the Nazis themselves, who never would have been able to preach their
doctrine of racial hatred had that hatred not been fostered by a millennium of antiJewish preachments from the pulpits of Christian Churches. And lastly, and far
more insidiously there's the unending grinding oppression administered by
Christianity and its minions on all the people over whom they held sway. What else
has it given us? Well with its totally insane views on sexuality and sin, Christianity
has given the human race guilt and psychosis to an absolutely astonishing degree.

ALL DEFENDERS OF CHRISTIANITY ARE BIASED AND LIE

Schnook 03 (Charlotte, EVILBIBLE.COM,

http://www.evilbible.com/hitler_was_christian.htm)
Considering that Christianity has thus far been incapable of producing an unbiased,
educated follower which speaks the truth, (I havent encountered any), I have been forced to
dispel the myth by writing this essay.

CHRISTIANITY ENCOURAGES PARENTS TO STARVE THEIR

CHILDREN TO DEATH
Rice 01 (Fredric, The Skeptic Tank January 17, 2001
http://www.skeptictank.org/clrabuse.htm)

Parents who murder their own children by starving them to death or by allowing them to die
from easilly treatable diseases and other medical problems are doing so because their
religious masters tell them to. As followers, the parents have no cognitive volition of their
own when the health and safety of their children come second to obeying the dictates of
their religious masters. It is the priesthood which should be held accountable for the
murder of children first and foremost; then the parents of the murdered child must be held
accountable.

685

Kritik Answers

#7 Religious Suffering: 1AR (3/3)

CHRISTIANITY WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HOLOCAUST
Schnook 03
(Charlotte, EVILBIBLE.COM, http://www.evilbible.com/hitler_was_christian.htm)
History is currently being distorted by the millions of Christians who lie to have us believe
that the Holocaust was not a Christian deed. Through subterfuge and concealment, many of
todays Church leaders and faithful Christians have camouflaged the Christianity of Adolf
Hitler and have attempted to mark him an atheist, a pagan cult worshipper, or a false
Christian in order to place his misdeeds on those with out Jesus. However, from the earliest
formation of the Nazi party and throughout the period of conquest and growth, Hitler
expressed his Christian support to the German citizenry and soldiers. Those who would
make Hitler an atheist should turn their eyes to history books before they address their pews
and chat rooms.

CHRISTIANITY INSPIRED HITLERS ANTI-SEMITISM

Schnook 03

(Charlotte, EVILBIBLE.COM, http://www.evilbible.com/hitler_was_christian.htm)

Hitlers anti-Semitism grew out of his Christian education. Austria and Germany were
majorly Christian during his time and they held the belief that Jews were an inferior status
to Aryan Christians. The Christians blamed the Jews for the killing of Jesus. Jewish hatred
did not actually spring from Hitler, it came from the preaching of Catholic priests and
Protestant ministers throughout Germany for hundreds of years. The Protestant leader,
Martin Luther, himself, held a livid hatred for Jews and their Jewish religion. In his book,
On the Jews and their Lies, Luther set the standard for Jewish hatred in Protestant
Germany up until World War 2. Hitler expressed a great admiration for Martin Luther
constantly quoting his works and beliefs.

686

Kritik Answers

A2 Those Ppl Werent Real Christians:

1AR
FIRST, EVEN IF THE PEOPLE WHO CAUSE RELIGIOUS WARS
ARENT REAL CHRISTIANS, THE NEGS ARGUMENT
ENGAGES IN THAT SAME FALSE CHRISTIANITY BY CALLING
FOR THE NIHILISTIC REJECTION OF EVERY PLAN THAT
TRIES TO SAVE LIVES
THAT ALSO MEANS THAT THEY DONT ACTUALLY DO THEIR
ALTERNATIVE, MEANING IT CANT SOLVE FOR THE
CRITICISM AND THERES AN EQUAL RISK WHETHER YOU
VOTE AFF OR NEG
ALSO, THIS ARGUMENT IS FALLACIOUS THEYRE
MANIFESTATIONS OF THE SAME RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGY,
PROVING HOW BANKRUPT IT IS
Infidels.org 98
This is rather like the No True Scotsman fallacy.
What makes a real believer? There are so many One True Religions it's hard to tell. Look at
Christianity: there are many competing groups, all convinced that they are the only true
Christians. Sometimes they even fight and kill each other. How is an atheist supposed to
decide who's a real Christian and who isn't, when even the major Christian churches like the
Catholic Church and the Church of England can't decide amongst themselves?
In the end, most atheists take a pragmatic view, and decide that anyone who calls himself a
Christian, and uses Christian belief or dogma to justify his actions, should be considered a
Christian. Maybe some of those Christians are just perverting Christian teaching for their
own ends -- but surely if the Bible can be so readily used to support un-Christian acts it can't
be much of a moral code? If the Bible is the word of God, why couldn't he have made it less
easy to misinterpret? And how do you know that your beliefs aren't a perversion of what
your God intended?
If there is no single unambiguous interpretation of the Bible, then why should an atheist
take one interpretation over another just on your say-so? Sorry, but if someone claims that
he believes in Jesus and that he murdered others because Jesus and the Bible told him to do
so, we must call him a Christian.

AND, FOISTING YOUR RELIGION UPON OTHERS THROUGH

STATE ACTION IS RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE THAT
JUSTIFIES VIOLENCE
Nussbaum 2004

[Martha, Ernst Freund distinguished service prof of law and ethics at U of

chicago, Relgious Intolerance, Foreign Policy, Sept/Oct, 44//uwyo-ajl]
Two ideas typically foster religious intolerance and disrespect. The first is that
ones own religion is the only true religion and that other religions are false or
morally incorrect. But people possessed of this view can also believe that others
deserve respect for their committed beliefs, so long as they do no harm. Much more
dangerous is the second idea, that the state and private citizens should coerce
people into adhering to the correct religious approach. Its an idea that is catching

687

Kritik Answers
on, even in many modern democracies. Frances reluctance to tolerate religious
symbols in schools and the Hindu right wings repeated claims that minorities in
India must become part of Hindu culture are disturbing recent examples. The
resurgence of this kind of thinking poses a profound threat to liberal societies,
which are based on ideas of liberty and equality.

688

Kritik Answers

#8 Evilution Disproves Religion: 1AR

EXTEND 2AC NUMBER 8. IF THE EARTH IS REALLY
MILLIONS OF YEARS OLD AND LIFE GRADUALLY EVOLVED,
THEN THAT DISPROVES THE CREATION ACCOUNT IN THE
BIBLE, UNDERMINING THE ENTIRETY OF ITS VALIDITY, AS
PROVEN BY GITT 95, AN EXPERT SOURCE FROM THE
CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT.
ALSO, THEYLL NEVER WIN THAT EVOLUTION IS FALSE. ITS
BEEN REPEATEDLY PROVEN BY EXPERIMENTAL TESTS AND
REAL WORLD DATA, AS PROVEN BY THE TALK ORIGINS
EVIDENCE.
ALSO, EVOLUTION UNDERMINES THE ENTIRE
BELIEVABILITY OF THE CHRISTIAN EDIFICE
Creation Magazine 89

[The Atheists KnowWhy Christianity has to Fight Evolution, Vol 11 Issue 4, September,
www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v11/i4/bozorath.asp, acc 1-20-2005//uwyo-ajl]
Christianity has fought, still fights, and will continue to fight science to the
desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the
very reason Jesus earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and
Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the
Son of God. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what
evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.

689

Kritik Answers

Evolution Contradicts Christianity: Ext

(1/2)
EVOLUTION MAKES THE CREATION STORY IMPOSSIBLE IN
SO MANY WAYS THAT IT HURTS
Creation Ex Nihilo 89

[Allan Rosser, March-May 1989, vol 11, no. 2,

www.answersingenesis.org/docs/3855.asp, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
if the Bible is the God-breathed Word of God, authoritative and correct, then the
theistic evolutionist who 'accepts' the scriptural account of man's creation does
have to stretch it a little to say that man's creation from dust just took millions of
years through transforming life-forms. If it happened this way, God must have
been deceiving us when He said He made man from dust. What prevented Him
from telling it like it was?
The fact that death came by one man. Adam (Romans 5:12) is a serious challenge to
theistic evolution, as many creatures already would have died in the evolutionary
process. The death that came through Adam was two-fold, even as Christ's death
was twofold:
(i) physical death: and
(ii) spiritual death-separation from God.
It was from physical death that Jesus rose. Let us not think that this death that
Adam brought in was only spiritual. The result of his sin was that he was not
allowed to eat of the tree of life. As a result of this, he died physically many years
later. Chapter 5 of Genesis tells us 'And he died . . .' some eight times, no doubt to
emphasize the consequences of Adam's sin.
As some degree of ape-man. Adam was going to die, so what was the use of God's
warning to Adam, 'In the day you eat of it, dying you will die'? (literal translation).
Did God give Adam the ability to live for ever and then after Adam's sin take it
away?
In Scripture we read 'for since by man came death, by man came also the
resurrection of the dead, for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made
alive' (1 Corinthians 15:22,23). If Adam was the end of the evolutionary line, then
thousands of evolving men had already died, and death did not come by Adam.
Chapter 15 also tells of the second Adam, who was Christ. If the first Adam " ex
ape-man " was as real a person as the second Adam, then there came a day when
God must have said: 'You are of this moment man, Adam!'
APE-MAN'S MATES?
Suddenly, everything was different. Now he is sinless and can sin, but as an 'apeman'or part 'ape-like creature', be couldn't have sinned. Now he couldn't take the
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or he would be sinning, and
would die. A moment ago these were no restrictions; now there are. For years he
had gone without clothes, and of course he would not have been ashamed. But now
he is a man. When did he lose his ape hair? A moment ago be had mates, now he
has none!
If we make some allowances and jump these hurdles, the women of that day would
present a problem. Let us set the stage again. If the theistic evolutionist believes
Adam to be descended from ape-like creatures, but a creation of God, then what
about the woman Eve? If Adam was a theistic evolution 'creation' " a literal, though
stretched, interpretation of the Genesis account-then what about Eve? God Himself
said, 'It is not good for man to be alone'.
What an incredible situation Adam's mother and father, sissy and brothers, aunts
and uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces, and his grandparents perhaps, were all
around him, and be was lonely! Maybe God left them out of Eden, or was this first
man 'called out' even as Abraham was in Genesis chapter 12?
ANIMAL RELATIVES?
God brought all the animals before Adam, and the Bible recounts that there was
not found among the animals a suitable mates or helper for Adam. Did all the
animals not include his mother and father, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles,

690

Kritik Answers
cousins, nephews and nieces, and his grandparents? Did God only bring a couple of
every kind of animal and did he leave Adam's relatives out? Why couldn't he marry
one of them? What was wrong with one of his distant relatives, or the closer ones?

continued

691

Kritik Answers

Evolution Contradicts Christianity: Ext

(2/2)
continued
Even if, amazingly, only one family had become the proto-man type, surely there
must have been others near enough, well up in the evolutionary tree. Surely if the
line-up of eligible spinsters included his unmarried female relatives, Adam would
have said, 'This one will do!'. And God would have said, 'No Adam. you can't marry
that sort, you are a new sort of creature, you are a new creation. Or rather a new
evolution.. She is not your sort!'
CHIMP OFF THE OLD BLOCK?
Adam would have said 'But she is just like my mother and my sister.' God would
have replied 'They are no longer your kith and kin.'
Or did God erase from Adam's mind who he used to be? Did God also remove from
his parents' and relatives' memories all knowledge of Adam before he became
Adam? Or did God suddenly and completely so transform him that he realized that
he was no longer a 'chip off the old block', and was determined to start his own
family tree?
If, though, it was because through a special creative act of God he was now
different, then why couldn't God have started from scratch-scratching dirt up to
make the man, not just rehashing an existing creature?
So, some allow that God evolved man, yet at a definite point declared: 'Ape, you
are now man! Adam is your name!' And at that point, God invested him with Godlikeness and the opportunity to live for ever as well. But, did he omit to evolve Eve?
Is this why he had to create Eve? The Bible is very explicit as to how God made Eve.
She was made from Adam's side.
CAIN AND THE APE HYBRIDS?
Years later, their son Cain, having killed Abel, is banished to the land of Nod. And
there he marries one of the daughters of the land. Where did she come from? Was
she one of the ape-men family? One of his ancestors' group? If Cain could have
married an ancestor type, then surely Adam could have. Cain certainly wasn't in the
Garden of Eden, but were none of his relatives suitable, if he was only two
generations away from them? If he couldn't have married an ape-woman, had God
made a hybrid variety, one that wasn't sterile?
If we accept the Bible account, then Adam and Eve were a special creation, made
on the sixth day of Creation weak. We find also that Adam lived to see Noah's
father, and Noah probably saw Abraham. In the days of Abraham there was
writing. Was Adam's story not written? Why has no trace of Adam's ancestry been
revealed? Has God hidden it from us and deceived us? Did Adam not tell his
children even till the eighth generation, or did God take it from his mind?
If there is anything miraculous about the creation of man, we must accept it by
faith. If there is nothing miraculous, who says these isn't? Will we believe man who
doesn't know everything of God? If God is God and His word is truth, then let us
accept the plain sense of Scripture by faith in God, the holy One who does not lie.

692

Kritik Answers

A2 Evolution Is Only a Theory: 1AR

EVOLUTION IS A THEORY AND A FACT. YOUR AUTHORS
HAVE NO IDEA HOW SCIENCE OPERATES
Gould 93

[Steven J., scientific genius, Evolution is a fact and a theory, talkorigins,

January 22, talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a
hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to
guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and
intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse
than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then
what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument
before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was
campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in
recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the
scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different
things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data.
Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go
away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of
gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves
in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors
whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be
discovered.

693

Kritik Answers

A2 Evolution Contradicts
Thermodynamics: 1AR
THAT LAW ASSUMES CLOSED SYSTEMS. THE EARTH ISNT
BECAUSE OF SOMETHING CALLED THE SUN
Talkorigins.org 97

[The absolute best site on evolution on the internet, period, contributed to by

biological scientists, Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution, October 1,
talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
This shows more a misconception about thermodynamics than about evolution.
The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is possible in which the sole
result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." [Atkins, 1984, The
Second Law, pg. 25] Now you may be scratching your head wondering what this
has to do with evolution. The confusion arises when the 2nd law is phrased in
another equivalent way, "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy
is an indication of unusable energy and often (but not always!) corresponds to
intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd
law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.
However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides
more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more
usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next
generation of tomatoes can't have more usable energy still? Creationists sometimes
try to get around this by claiming that the information carried by living things lets
them create order. However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order
from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes,
tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of
order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to
achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it,
you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from
disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous
in nature?
The thermodynamics argument against evolution displays a misconception about
evolution as well as about thermodynamics, since a clear understanding of how
evolution works should reveal major flaws in the argument. Evolution says that
organisms reproduce with only small changes between generations (after their own
kind, so to speak). For example, animals might have appendages which are longer
or shorter, thicker or flatter, lighter or darker than their parents. Occasionally, a
change might be on the order of having four or six fingers instead of five. Once the
differences appear, the theory of evolution calls for differential reproductive
success. For example, maybe the animals with longer appendages survive to have
more offspring than short-appendaged ones. All of these processes can be observed
today. They obviously don't violate any physical laws.

694

Kritik Answers

A2 No Transitional Fossils: 1AR

FIRST, EVERY SPECIES IS TRANSITIONAL. ITS NOT LIKE A
COMPLETELY NEW SPECIES IS CREATED OVERNIGHT
BECAUSE ITS SO GRADUAL.
SECOND, THEYVE BEEN FOUND
Talkorigins.org 97

[The absolute best site on evolution on the internet, period, contributed to by

biological scientists, Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution, October 1,
talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
To say there are no transitional fossils is simply false. Paleontology has progressed
a bit since Origin of Species was published, uncovering thousands of transitional
fossils, by both the temporally restrictive and the less restrictive definitions. The
fossil record is still spotty and always will be; erosion and the rarity of conditions
favorable to fossilization make that inevitable. Also, transitions may occur in a
small population, in a small area, and/or in a relatively short amount of time; when
any of these conditions hold, the chances of finding the transitional fossils goes
down. Still, there are still many instances where excellent sequences of transitional
fossils exist. Some notable examples are the transitions from reptile to mammal,
from land animal to early whale, and from early ape to human. For many more
examples, see the transitional fossils FAQ in the talk.origins archive, and see
http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/talk_origins.html for sample images for
some invertebrate groups.

THIRD, THIS BETRAYS A MISCONCEPTION ABOUT

CATEGORIES
Talkorigins.org 97
[The absolute best site on evolution on the internet, period, contributed to by
biological scientists, Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution, October 1,
talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
The misconception about the lack of transitional fossils is perpetuated in part by a
common way of thinking about categories. When people think about a category like
"dog" or "ant," they often subconsciously believe that there is a well-defined
boundary around the category, or that there is some eternal ideal form (for
philosophers, the Platonic idea) which defines the category. This kind of thinking
leads people to declare that Archaeopteryx is "100% bird," when it is clearly a mix
of bird and reptile features (with more reptile than bird features, in fact). In truth,
categories are man-made and artificial. Nature is not constrained to follow them,
and it doesn't.

695

Kritik Answers

#12 Sexual Abuse: 1AR

SEX ABUSE=DEHUMANIZATION
Clark 03

(Peg, The Daily News September 14, 2003

http://www.bishopaccountability.org/news2003_07_12/2003_09_14_Clark_GuestCommentary.htm)
In sexual abuse a victim is denied his or her full humanity; this is dehumanization.
In dehumanization, paradoxically, the oppressor too becomes less human in the
denial.

DEHUMYNIZATION IS WORSE THAN NUCLEAR WAR

Montagu and Matson 83
(Author and Professor of American at the University of Hawaii, Ashley and Floyd,
THE DEHUMANIZATION OF MAN, preface)
It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive
toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is
beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the 'Fifth
Horseman of the Apocalypse.' Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization.

696

Kritik Answers

Christianity = Sex Abuse: Ext (1/3)

SEXUAL ABUSE INEVITABLE IN CHRISTIANITY, SIX
REASONS:
Franz 02 (Thaeda, Liberty University, Power, Patriarchy and Sexual Abuse in the Christian
Church,http://www.fsu.edu/~trauma/v8/Church.pdf)

There are six beliefs present within the church that have aided perpetrators in
rationalizing their behavior when it comes to abuse (Heggen, 1993). Some of these
beliefs are not obvious parts of any Christian doctrine. They are found in the subtle
subtext of sermons, Bible studies, and Sunday school lectures throughout the
church. Then they are taken a step further in the minds of the perpetrator to justify
his actions.
The first belief is that God intends for men to dominate and for women and
children to submit (Heggen, 1993; Kroeger & Beck, 1996). As head of the family,
the authority of the husband/father is not to be questioned, under any
circumstances, regardless of how outrageous his behavior may be (LaHaye, 1980).
If he beats his wife, it is his business. If he molests his children, it is his business.
He is the unquestioned authority and lord over his domestic domain. The second
belief is that because of her role in the Fall, woman is morally inferior to man
(Heggen, 1993). She requires his guidance and is unable to stay on the straight
and narrow without it. After all, according to the Bible, it was Eve who sinned first
and led her husband, Adam, into sin with her. Some men in the church believe that
this is proof that women cannot be kept from sin without the control of their
husbands.
Additionally, this belief encourages women to trust their husbands sense of right
and wrong, over their own internal set of values (Kreoger & Beck, 1996). In some
cases, this leads a woman to allow her husband to convince her that it is morally
just for him to molest their daughter. Even if the woman knows such a thing is
wrong, she defers to her husbands moral compass, because she has been told by the
church that hers is defective (Kroeger & Beck, 1996). The third belief is that
children are inherently evil and must have their wills broken (Heggen, 1993). The
idea is that children must be forced to submit to their parents or they will never
learn to submit to God (Heggen, 1993). Children are seen as willful, and forcing
them into submission is seen as a parents duty--rather than an act of abuse. If a
mother feels the actions of her husband are too extreme, she may not say
anything--not because she doesnt want to protect her children, but because the
church tells her that her opinion comes second to that of her husband. The fourth
belief is that marriage is to be preserved at all costs (Heggen 1993). If the
husband/father is abusive, it is the wife/mothers responsibility to find a way to
help herself and her children endure as an act commitment to the marital
covenant.
The fifth belief is that suffering is a Christian virtue (Heggen, 1993). Traditionally,
the role of the ideal Christian woman is to be a suffering servant (Fortune, 1983;
Kroeger & Beck, 1996). A woman who decides to step out from under a yoke of
suffering is oftentimes seen as weak and lacking in faith (Fortune, 1983). Women
who complain about their marital situation are sometimes seen as lacking
commitment to their family and to their faith. Fellow congregants may suggest if
she would only pray more, and complain less, then all would be well. The final
belief is that Christians must promptly forgive those who sin against them (Heggen,
1993). Victims of sexual abuse have been told to forgive and forget-- and to give
it to God, as if the responsibility for reconciling with the perpetrator lays squarely
on the shoulders of the victim (Heggen, 1993; Kreoger & Beck, 1996).

697

Kritik Answers

Christianity = Sex Abuse: Ext (2/3)

CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANITY IS BEST PREDICTOR OF
SEXUAL ABUSE
Heggen 93 (Carolyn Holderread, author,

"Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches", p. 73:

http://www.skeptictank.org/cabuse6.htm)

"A disturbing fact continues to surface in sex abuse research. The

first best predictor of abuse is alcohol or drug addiction in the
father. But the second best predictor is conservative religiosity,
accompanied by parental belief in traditional male-female roles.
This means that if you want to know which children are most
likely
to be sexually abused by their father, the second most significant
clue is whether or not the parents belong to a conservative
religious group with traditional role beliefs and rigid sexual
attitudes.

ALL ATTEMPTS TO SOLVE ONLY MOVE THE ABUSE

ELSEWHERE
Rice 01 (Fredric, The Skeptic Tank January 17, 2001
http://www.skeptictank.org/clrabuse.htm)

After they go through their period of "therapy," they often get

shipped off to yet another church where, since their new
congregations are never informed of their master's past, the cycle of
abuse continues. (NOTE: "Megan's Law" now makes the location of
convicted sex offenders public knowledge. THIS IS A WIN FOR
THE GOOD SIDE! Everyone who has worked to get Megan's Law
passed has made it tougher for Christian clergy to hide their
convicted child moslesters within our communities.) Thus -whether unintentionally or not -- the Christian clergy ends up being
a safe dating service for pedophiles. Pedophiles may safely gravitate
toward the Christian clergy fairly confident in the knowledge that
even if they're ever reported or get caught, they'll simply be moved
to yet another location and be provided with new children to abuse.

CHRISTIAN RHETORIC IS A COVER-UP FOR SEX ABUSE

Rice 01 (Fredric, The Skeptic Tank January 17, 2001
http://www.skeptictank.org/clrabuse.htm)

The inescapable conclusion is that the Christian clergy screams

from the pulpit in an attempt to draw attention away from their own
horrid criminal activities and desires. It's also an inescapable
conclusion -- due to the epidemic problem they create -- that they
are successful.

698

Kritik Answers

699

Kritik Answers

Christianity = Sex Abuse: Ext (3/3)

REALITY OF SEX ABUSE IS EXCLUDED FROM CHRISTIAN
WORLDVIEW
Franz 02 (Thaeda, Liberty University, Power, Patriarchy and Sexual Abuse in the Christian
Church,http://www.fsu.edu/~trauma/v8/Church.pdf)

Considering the prevalence of sexual abuse, it is quite likely that

there are at least
a few survivors in any one church congregation. The church has a
history of speaking
only in generalities regarding sexual sin (Heggen, 1993). The
discomfort of the church in
dealing with sexual matters can make victims feel very isolated
(Heggen, 1993). For
victims who have been sexually abused, it is doubly painful to hear
that their reality does
not have a place within the confines of their church . Many victims
are told that such
things just do not happen among good Christian peopleparticularly if they identify
their perpetrator as someone who is a leader in the church (Heggen,
1993).

PATRIARCHAL ORDER OF CHRISTIANITY MAKES ABUSE

ENDEMIC
Franz 02 (Thaeda, Liberty University, Power, Patriarchy and Sexual Abuse in the Christian
Church,http://www.fsu.edu/~trauma/v8/Church.pdf)

Additionally, the majority of pedophiles are men (E. Schrader LSW,

personal communication, January 2002), and the majority of
people holding positions of leadership in the church are men
(Neuger, 1993). So, it would make sense that since men are leading
the church, and men are more often perpetrators rather than
victims, that the topic of sexual abuse has thus far been ignored
(Fortune, 1983). However, the gender of church leadership is only
the tip of the iceberg in determining why dealing with sexual abuse
has taken such a low priority within the church. The church has
embraced the notion that women are subject to the dominance of
men (Neuger, 1993). There are few stories of women in the Bible
(Neuger, 1993). When women are portrayed in the Bible, they are
described as either evil and seductive, or as impossible ideals of selfsacrifice and love (Neuger, 1993). It is possible that religious women
may be afraid to confront sexism in the church because they fear
male protection and approval will be withdrawn from them
(Rayburn, 1982). This fear can also carry over to God, and to the
withholding of divine blessing and acceptance (Rayburn, 1982).

700

Kritik Answers

A2 Life Without God Pointless: 1AR

FIRST, THIS IS RIDICULOUS EACH INDIVIDUAL CREATES
CONTINGENT MEANING FOR THEIR OWN LIVES.
ARBITRARILY CLAIMING THAT NO NON-THEIST HAS VALUE
TO THEIR LIVES IS OFFENSIVE
SECOND, LIFES MEANING IS CREATED BY THE INDIVIDUAL
FROM THE BEAUTY AVAILABLE TO EXISTENCE, MAKING
GOD IRRELEVENT
Infidels.org 2003
[An Introduction to Atheism, February 24,
www.infidels.org/news/atheism/intro.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajlo]
Perhaps it is to some, but still, many atheists live a purposeful life. They decide
what they think gives meaning to life, and they pursue those goals. They try to
make their lives count, not by wishing for eternal life, but by having an influence on
other people who will live on. For example, an atheist may dedicate his life to
political reform, in the hope of leaving his mark on history.
It is a natural human tendency to look for "meaning" or "purpose" in random
events. However, it is by no means obvious that "life" is the sort of thing that has a
"meaning".
To put it another way, not everything which looks like a question is actually a
sensible thing to ask. Some atheists believe that asking "What is the meaning of
life?" is as silly as asking "What is the meaning of a cup of coffee?". They believe
that life has no purpose or meaning, it just is.
Also, if some sort of mystical external force is required to give one's existence a
"meaning", surely that makes any hypothetical god's existence meaningless?

THIRD, LIFE ONLY BECOMES VALUELESS WHEN IT IS

DECLARED AS SUCH [author is describing specific men who were in Auschwitz with him]
Victor Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Mans Search for
Meaning, 1946, p. 90-93
We have stated that that which was ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoners inner self was not so much the enumerated psychophysical causes as it was the

only the men who allowed their inner hold

on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camps degenerating
influences. The question now arises, what could, or should, have constituted this inner hold? Former prisoners, when writing or relating their experiences,
result of a free decision. Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that

agree that the most depressing influence of all was that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be. He had been given no date for his
release. (In our camp it was pointless even to talk about it.) Actually a prison term was not only uncertain but unlimited. A well-known research psychologist has
pointed out that life in a concentration camp could be called a provisional existence. We can add to this by defining it as a provisional existence of unknown limit.
New arrivals usually knew nothing about the conditions at a camp. Those who had come back from other camps were obliged to keep silent, and from some camps no
one had returned. On entering camp a change took place in the minds of the men. With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end. It was impossible

A man
who could not see the end of his provisional existence was not able to aim at an ultimate
goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his
inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar
to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end. The latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach.

position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work done on unemployed miners has
shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed timeinner time-which is a result of their unemployed state. Prisoners, too, suffered from this strange timeexperience. In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to
pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time-experience! In this connection we are
reminded of Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain, which contains some very pointed psychological remarks. Mann studies the spiritual development of people who
are in an analogous psychological position, i.e., tuberculosis patients in a sanatorium who also know no date for their release. They experience a similar existence
without a future and without a goal. One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later
that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had
already died. This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in
space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remoteout of reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the
normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life, that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man
who looked at it from another world. A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a
different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the

danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make

something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our provisional existence as
present of its reality there lay a certain

701

Kritik Answers
unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life;
everything in a way became pointless. Such people forget that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man
the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camps difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and
despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past.

meaningless.

Life for such people became

702

Kritik Answers

A2 Life Without God is Terrifying:

1AR
FIRST, THIS IS INEVITABLE. SOME SORT OF FEAR WILL
EXIST NO MATTER WHAT. CHRISTIANS TRY TO SURVIVE
JUST LIKE ANYONE ELSE
SECOND, TURN - THE BELIEF IN GOD CREATES MORE
TERROR BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THE THE
ETERNAL FATE OF YOUR SOUL. AT LEAST OUR FEAR IS
FINITE
THIRD, THERE ARE A NUMBER OF WAYS TO COPE WITH
TERROR IN A GODLESS FRAMEWORK LIKE KITTENS, THE
NEW WILLIAM SHATNER ALBUM, OR ALCOHOL
Infidels.org 2003
[An Introduction to Atheism, February 24,
www.infidels.org/news/atheism/intro.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajlo]
There are many ways of obtaining comfort:
Your family and friends
Pets
Food and drink
Music, television, literature, arts and entertainment
Sports or exercise
Meditation
Psychotherapy

Drugs
Work
That may sound like rather an empty and vulnerable way to face danger, but so what? Should
individuals believe in things because they are comforting, or should they face reality no matter
how harsh it might be?
In the end, it's a decision for the individual concerned. Most atheists are unable to
believe something they would not otherwise believe merely because it makes them
feel comfortable. They put truth before comfort, and consider that if searching for
truth sometimes makes them feel unhappy, that's just hard luck. Often truth hurts.

703

Kritik Answers

Alternative Hurts Religion

RELIGION SHOULD BE A PRIVATE MATTER
ENTANGLEMENT ALLOWS ENROACHMENT ON THE
RELIGIOUS
Stevenjaygould.org no date

[Religious Court Rulings, www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/courtrulings.html, acc

1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
In the 1992 Lee v. Weisman case, the Court ruled that public schools may not sponsor
invocations at graduation ceremonies. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote: "The First
Amendment's Religion Clauses mean that religious beliefs and religious expression are too
precious to be either proscribed or prescribed by the State. The design of the Constitution is
that preservation and transmission of religious beliefs and worship is a responsibility and a
choice committed to the private sphere, which itself is promised freedom to pursue that
mission. It must not be forgotten then, that while concern must be given to define the prot
ection granted to an objector or a dissenting nonbeliever, these same Clauses exist to protect
religion from government interference."

704

Kritik Answers

**Securitization**
Security Good: Helps Marginalized
People
SECURITIZATION IS EMANCIPATINGGIVING
MARGINALIZES ISSUES LIKE HUMAN RIGHTS VISIBILITY
Jeff Huysmans, Lecturer in politics at the department of government at Open University,
Alternatives Defining Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writing
Security Feb 2002 p. 59-60.
There is no solution for the normative dilemma in the social-con structivist security analyses
defined above. The particular understanding of language makes any security utterance
potentially securitizing. Consequently, enunciating security is never innocent or neutral. Of
course, this does not have to result in a normative dilemma; it does so only if one wants to or
has to utter security in a political context while wanting to avoid a securitization of a par ticular area. Someone may also employ security language with the intention of securitizing
an area. This does not necessarily require a conservative interest in keeping the status quo
or in establishing law and order. Securitization can also be performed with an emancipatory
interest. Given the capacity of security language to prioritize questions and to mobilize
people, one may employ it as a tactical device to give human-rights questions a higher
visibility, for example. It is also possible to mobilize security questions in nonse curity areas
with the intention to change the conservative bias of the security language. This would
require a positive concept of security that defines liberation from oppression as a good that
should be secured.

705

Kritik Answers

Alt Bad: Allows Suffering to Continue

REJECTING OUR PLAN IN FAVOR OF THE CRITIQUE
PRIVILEGES SEMANTICS OVER REAL HUMAN SUFFERING
WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO RESPOND TO THREATS TO HUMAN
LIFE AND DIGNITY IN THE STATUS QUO WITHOUT
WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER WE OVERLY SECURITIZE
SUCH THREATS.
Nicholas Onuf, Professor, International Relatoins, Florida International University, Symposium on
the Norms and Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention, Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies
Working Paper 00-03, May 5, 2000, http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/gpacs/OnufHumanitarian.pdf.
Paradoxically, if an emergency is defined as a situation calling for immediate action, then
these situations cease to be emergenciesimmediate action remedied nothing. In the
meantime, human misery deepens. It is no wonder, then, that suffering becomes secondary,
as violations of human rights take priority. At least this is a tendency among progressive
liberals for whom the situation has become an inescapable morass, and for whom human
rights are the great project of social reform in our time.
Critics of liberalism think little of the human rights movement. They are disposed to see
social reform activism, and more generally the development of civil society, as a
manifestation of global liberal governance or, more scornfully, liberal peace. According
to Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, liberal peace finds itself deeply implicated in a terrain of
disorder in which some states are powerful, some states are in radical dissolution,
traditional societies are collapsing and civil conflict is endemic, where international
corporations and criminal cartels are also involved, and where international organizations
and nongovernmental organizations are inextricably committed as well. Dillon and Reid
have argued against calling the more striking manifestations of global disorder complex
emergencies because doing so unduly simplifies their vexed political character and masks
the degree to which global liberal governance is implicated in making them so vexed. Their
alternative descriptionemerging political complexesimplies that the people who want to
call these situations emergencies are cynically motivated. Perhaps some humanitarian
liberals are cynically motivated; others no doubt have complex political motivationspeople
always do. Yet banishing emergency from our vocabulary because people have mixed
motives in calling for immediate action has the untoward result of forestalling action that
could help the many victims of the liberal peace and its global disorder. Progressive liberals
and their critics both end up making suffering secondary to their own programmatic
concerns.

706

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Engagement/Nonengagement

Doublebind
ITS A DOUBLE-BIND: EITHER THE ALTERNATIVE LINKS OR
DOESNT SOLVE. IN ISOLATION, ALTERNATIVES CANT
INDIVIDUALLY DECONSTRUCT DOMINANT SECURITY
DISCOURSE. THEY MUST ENGAGE WITH SECURITY, BUT IN
DOING SO LEGITIMIZE THE PRACTICES BEING CRITIQUED.
Jeff Huysmans, Lecturer in politics at the department of government at Open University,
Alternatives Defining Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writing
Security Feb 2002 p. 50-51.
Although the critical edge of this literature cannot be ignored, denaturalizing security fields
is not necessarily successful in moderating the normative dilemma. The research continues
to map the security discourses, therefore repeating, in an often highly systematic way, a
security approach to, for example, migration or drugs. Demonstrating the contingent
character of the politicization does question the foundational character of this contingent
construction, but it does not necessarily undermine the real effects. It does this only when
these discourses rely heavily for their effects on keeping the natural character of its
foundations unquestioned. This points to a more general issue concerning this kind of
analysis. Although it stresses that language makes a difference and that social relations are
constructed, it leaves underdeveloped the concept of security formation that heavily
prestructures the possibilities to speak differently through rarifying who can speak
security, what security can be spoken about, how one should speak about security, and so
on.27 Another related problem is that the approach assumes that in dictating the mere
existence of alternative practices challenges the dominance of the dominant discourse. This
is problematic since the alternative constructions do not exist in a vacuum or in a sheltered
space. To be part of the game, they must, for example, Coy test political constructions of
migration. Alternative practices are thus not isolated but engage with other, possibly
dominant, constructions. This raises the question of how the engagement actually works.
It involves relations of power, structuring and restructuring the social exchanges. Staging
alternative practices does not necessarily challenge a dominant construction. The political
game is more complex, as Foucaults interpretation of the sexual revolution the
liberation from sexual repressionof the second half of the twentieth century showed.28 In
a comment on human-rights approaches of migration, Didier Bigo raises a similar point
that opposing strategies do not necessarily radically challenge established politicizations: It
is often misleading to counterpose the ideology of security to human rights because they
sometimes have more in common than their authors would like to admit. They often share
the same concept of insecurity and diverge only in their solutions.29 The main point is that
alternative discourses should not be left in a vacuum. The way they function in the political
struggle should be looked at. How are the alternative discourses entrenched in a specific
political game? Are they possibly a constitutive part of the mastery of the dominant
construction?

707

Kritik Answers

Alt Fails: Securitizes Itself

USELESSTHE ALTERNATIVE ACKNOWLEDGES BUT CANT
OVERCOME THE NORMATIVE SECURITY DILEMMA
Jeff Huysmans, Lecturer in politics at the department of government at Open University,
Alternatives Defining Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writing
Security Feb 2002 p. 52-53.
As already said, theorization means that authors explain the structuring work of the
discursive formation. They interpret the power-knowledge nexus by locating it in symbolic
and institutional contexts. The first question is therefore a heuristic one of how to
understand what is happening, rather than a critical question of how to intervene in the
securitization of societal areas. To some extent, this theoretical agenda engages with the
dilemma in a traditional way: at some point, it separates the research question from the
question What is to be done? This does not mean that the agenda ignores the latter
question; rather, the interpretation of why and how an issue is structured into a security
question is a precondition for answering the practical question.
But this more traditional way of dealing with the normative dilemma is only one side of the
theoretical game. The theoretical approach also engages with social relations in a more
direct way that is, without separating the research question from the practical one. A
theorization of power relations and the symbolic dimensions of the security formation can
be critical in itself. By explicitly uncovering dimensions of the security formation that are
commonly left implicit, it performs a critical practice. Moreover, explaining the work of
power relations involved in the securitization of societal questions is a politicizing act in
itself. As Stefano Guzzini remarks: integrating social relations in a power analysis politicizes
the issue in question since power is a concept that is generally used to define what counts
as a political issue, what it is possible to change.33 This does not imply that this form of
social constructivisrn claims that it escapes the normative dilemma. Due to its interpretation
of language, it cannot but accept that security enunciations risk the opening of space for
successful securitizing practices. The bottom line is, then, that the agenda has to accept the
normative dilemma as a dilemma. It cannot escape that its own security writing risks
contributing to the securitization of an area. As a general statement, it shares this position
with the other research projects I have sketched. It differs from the others in the specific way
in which it hopes to moderate the risk of reifying security threats that is, by theorizing the
power-knowledge nexus and interpreting securitization as a specific political strategy.

708

Kritik Answers

Perm Solves: Starting Point

SECURITY HAS MEANING. WE MUST ASSUME THAT
SECURITY IS UNIVERSAL IN ORDER TO DECONSTRUCT IT.
Anthony Burke, Prof at the School of Political Science and International Studies at
University of Queensland, Alternatives Aporias of Security 2002 p. 2
While this article argues strongly that security has no essential ontological integrity, it also
argues that if the power and sweep of security are to be understood and challenged, its
claims to universality must be taken seriously. They underpin and animate sweeping forms
of power, subjectivity, force, and economic circulation and cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Nor, in the hands of some humanist writerswho have sought to think human and gender
security in radical counterpoint to realist images of national and international securityare
such claims always pernicious. They have a valuable moral and political force that
undermines, perhaps unwittingly, the logocentric presuppositions of the realist discourses
they question. Yet a common assumption that security can be ontologically completed and
secured does present a hurdle for the kind of ontopolitical critique that we really need.2
The answer is not to seek to close out these aporias; they call to us and their existence
presents an important political opening. Rather than seek to resecure security, to make it
conform to a new humanist idealhowever laudablewe need to challenge security as a
claim to truth, to set its meaning aside. Instead, we should focus on security as a pervasive
and complex system of political, social, and economic power, which reaches from the most
private spaces of being to the vast flows and conflicts of geopolitics and global economic
circulation. It is to see security as an interlocking system of knowledges, representations,
practices, and institutional forms that imagine, direct, and act upon bodies, spaces, and
flows in certain waysto see security not as an essential value but as a political technology.
This is to move from essence to genealogy: a genealogy that aims, in William Connollys
words, to open us up to the play of possibility in the present . . . [to] incite critical responses
to unnecessary violences and injuries surreptitiously imposed upon life by the insistence
that prevailing forms are natural, rational, universal or necessary. 3

709

Kritik Answers

Perm Solves: Must Act

USING THE STATE DOESNT MEAN WE THINK IT IS
PERFECT. WE WORK WITH IT BECAUSE THERES NO OTHER
OPTION
Eric Mazur, doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of
California Santa Barbara, 1997, American Indian Studies, p. 251
We might add also that notions of authority, sovereignty, and political participation are not necessarily constructed on a single intellectual foundation. In the case of
Nathan Jim, our introduction to this wide- ranging conflict over authority, as well as in the broader historical development of the relationship of Native American
religious traditions and the American constitutional order, there are clear differences over how authority is determined, and by whom and under what circumstances.
Native traditions, centered (at least in part) on the cultural orientation toward land, cannot but conflict with the American constitutional order's orientation toward
the same land. Not as easily integrated into American culture as Christianity's symbolic emphasis on "The Word" (and its parallel relationship to the Constitution as
symbolic of the federal government's authority dependent on territoriality), Native American religious traditions expose the very real and tangible conflict that lies at
the heart of the American constitutional order. The strengths behind the Constitution are grounded in the control of the land, and any challenge to that control can be

. Nathan Jim may not see the legal system of the American
constitutional order as his law, but he has understood the power it holds over him, and has
agreed to abide by it. So, too, in many ways, have Native American religious traditions agreed to
abide by the American constitutional order. They may not accept the source of its authority,
but in the face of overwhelming power, they may have had no other choice but to accept it.
met with subtle, but immeasurable resistance

WE GOTTA DO SOMETHING AND CANNOT TOTALLY KRITIK

SUBJECTIVITY
Anthony Burke, Prof at the School of Political Science and International Studies at
University of Queensland, Alternatives Aporias of Security 2002 p. 22
It is perhaps easy to become despondent, but as countless struggles for freedom, justice, and
social transformation have proved, a sense of seriousness can be tempered with the
knowledge that many tools are already availableand where they are not, the ef fort to create
a productive new critical sensibility is well advanced. There is also a crucial political opening
within the liberal problematic itself, in the sense that it assumes that power is most effective
when it is absorbed as truth, consented to and desiredwhich creates an important space
for refusal. As Cohn Gordon argues, Foucault thought that the very possibility of governing
was conditional on it being credible to the governed as well as the govern ing.60 This throws
weight onto the question of how security works as a technology of subjectivity. It is to take
up Foucaults challenge, framed as a reversal of the liberal progressive movement of being
we have seen in Hegel, not to discover who or what we are so much as to refuse what we
are.61 Just as security rules subjectivity as both a totalizing and individualizing blackmail and
promise, it is at these levels that we can intervene. We can critique the machinic frameworks
of possibility represented by law, policy, economic regulation, and diplomacy, while
challenging the way these institutions deploy language to draw individual subjects into their
consensual web. This suggests, at least provisionally, a dual strategy. The first asserts the
space for agency, both in challenging available possibilities for being and their larger
socioeconomic implications. Roland Bleiker formulates an idea of agency that shifts away
from the lone (male) hero overthrowing the social order in a decisive act of rebellion to one
that understands both the thickness of social power and its fissures, fragmentation, and
thinness. We must, he says, observe how an individual may be able to escape the discursive order and influence its shifting boundaries. . . . By doing so, discursive terrains of dissent
all of a sudden appear where forces of domination previously seemed invincible. 62 Pushing
beyond security requires tactics that can work at many levelsthat empower individuals to
recognize the larger social, cultural, and economic implications of the everyday forms of
desire, subjection, and discipline they encounter, to challenge and rewrite them, and that in
turn contribute to collective efforts to transform the larger structures of being, exchange,
and power that sustain (and have been sustained by) these forms. As Derrida suggests, this
is to open up aporetic possibilities that transgress and call into question the boundaries of
the self, society, and the international that security seeks to imagine and police.

710

Kritik Answers

A2 Dillon: 2AC
DILLON DOESNT ADVOCATE REJECTION ENDORSING THE
POLITICAL ACT OF PLAN IS CONSISTENT WITH IS CALL FOR
ANOTHER FORM OF JUSTICE
Dillon 99

[Michael, Prof. IR @ Lancaster, Another Justice, Political Theory 27: 2, April,

Sage//uwyo]
Inordertobeatall,then,thiswayofbeinghastoposeandrespondtothe
questionwhatitistobe.Indoingsoittakesitsbearingcomposureoftransits,plots,courses,andfixesfromtheconnectednessinthemidstofwhich
italwaysalreadyfindsitself.Moreoftenthannot,itisonlywhenthosenavigationalaidsaredisrupted,anditsautomaticpilotsbreakdown,thatitfully
recognises its radically hermeneutical condition. It is at these points,
especially,thatthecallofanotherJusticeresoundsmostloudlythroughoutits
hermeneuticism. Here the bearing of a new bearing may be assumed. Each
alwayshastobeassumedquestioningly,however,withinagivenworld;and
none ever exhausts the task of having to do so. For another Justice always
already arises within and alongside is vented through the legislation, execution, and adjudication of existing distributive regimes.
This making way for other ways of being to be is a political art. Other justices emerge out of the injustices of regimes of distributive justice in response
to the call of another Justice. That is why there is an intimate link between
another Justice and politics. Such a politics isneitherasupposedlyhabitual
tradition,acontractualnegotiation,noranepistemicallyrealistcomputation
ofthecorrelatesofrigorouslyself-interestedbehaviour.It is an irruptive and
inventive practice called up by specific historical circumstances. Politics
becomes that way of being (politeia) whose composure is an art of intimation,articulation,intervention,andjudgment.It is a practice that responds to
the call ofanotherJustice.There is no guarantee that it will be available when
required, just as there is no guarantee that it will be successful should it be
exercised,orthateverybodyisabletopracticeitondemand.Toooftenrule,
managementdecision,andviolenceoccludeit.Recognisablewhenitmakes
itsappearance, we have to bear witness to it.

ETHICS AND POLITICS CAN CO-EXIST THE PERM IS

OPTIMAL
Dillon 99

[Michael, Prof. IR @ Lancaster, Another Justice, Political Theory 27: 2, April,

Sage//uwyo]
Philosophys task, for Levinas, is to avoid conflating ethics and politics.
The opposition of politics and ethics opens his first major work, Totality and
Infinity, and underscores its entire reading. This raises the difficult question
of whether or not the political can be rethought against Levinas with Levinas.
Nor is this simpl y a matter ofaskingwhetherornotpoliticscanbeethical.It
embracesthequestionofwhetherornottherecanbesuchathingasanethic
ofthepolitical.Herein,then,liesanimportantchallengetopoliticalthought.
Itarisesasmuchfortheontopoliticalinterpretationasitdoesfortheunderstandingofthesourceandcharacterofpoliticallifethatflowsfromthereturn
oftheontological. For Levinas the ethical comes first and ethics is first philosophy. But that leaves the political unregenerated, as Levinass own deferral to a Hobbesian politics, as well as his very limited political interventions,
indicate. In this essay I understand the challenge instead to be the necessity
of thinking the co-presence of the ethical and the political. Precisely not the
subsumption of the ethical by the political as Levinas charges, then, but the

711

Kritik Answers
belonging together of the two which poses, in addition, the question of the
civil composure required of a political life.

712

Kritik Answers

**Speaking for Others**

A2 Speaking for Others: 2AC (1/2)
FIRST, THERES NO WAY TO DETERMINE THE LINK.
IDENTITY IS FLUID AND YOU DONT KNOW HOW WE
IDENTIFY
SECOND, TURN THEY ASSUME A STATIC NOTION OF
GROUP IDENTITY BY ISOLATING IT AS BEING ABSOLUTELY
OTHER, DENYING WITHIN GROUP DIFFERENCE AND
UNSTABLE IDENTIFICATION OF INDIVIDUALS
--THAT FLIPS THE INTERNAL LINK
Butler 99

[Judith, prof. of rhetoric at UC Berkeley, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999, 18-19//uwyo-ajl]
Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of

The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse

that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms. That the
feminism.

tactic can operate in feminist and antifeminist contexts alike suggests that the colonizing gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist. It can operate to effect

other relations of racial, class, and heterosexist subordination to name but a few. And clearly, listing the varieties of oppression, as I began to do, assumes their
discrete, sequential coexistence along a horizontal axis that does not describe their convergences within the social field. A vertical model is similarly insufficient;
oppressions cannot be summarily ranked, causally related, distributed among planes of originality and derivativeness. Indeed, the field of power structured in part
by the imperializing gesture of dialectical appropriation exceeds and encompasses the axis of sexual difference, offering a mapping of intersecting differentials which
cannot be summarily hierarchized either within the terms of phallogocentrism or any other canddidate for the position of primary condition of oppression.

Rather than an exclusive tactic of masculinist signifying economies, dialectical

appropriation and suppression of the Other is one tactic among many deployed
centrally but not exclusively in the service of expanding and rationalizing the
masculinist domain.

THIRD, TURN RETREAT FROM SPEAKING FOR OTHERS IS

ANOTHER FORM OF PRIVILEGE THAT ALLOWS VOICES TO
BE TRAMPLED SPEAKING EXCLUSIVELY FOR YOURSELF
IS IMPOSSIBLE
Alcoff 92

[Linda, Prof. of Feminist Studies at the University of Syracuse, The Problem of Speaking for
Others, Cultural Critique, Winter 91-2, 20//uwyo]
This problem is that Trebilcots position, as well as a more general retreat position, presumes an
ontological configuration of the discursive context that simply does not obtain. In particular, it
assumes that one can retreat into ones discrete location and make claims entirely and
singularly based on that location that do not range over others, that one can disentangle
oneself from the implicating networks between ones discursive practices and others locations, situations,
and practices. (In other words, the claim that I can speak only for myself assumes the autonomous conception of the self in Classical Liberal theory that I
am unconnected to other in my authentic self or that I can achieve an autonomy from others given certain conditions.) But there is no neutral
place to stand free and clear in which ones words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the
experience of others, nor is there a way to decisively demarcate a boundary between ones
location and all others. Even a complete retreat from speech is of ocurse not neutral since it
allow the continued dominance of current discourses and acts by omission to
reinforce dominance.
As my practices are made possible by events spatially far from my body so too my own practices make possible or impossible practices of others . The
declaration that I speak only for myself has the sole effect of allowing me to avoid
responsibility and accountability for my effects on others; it cannot literally erase those
effects.

713

Kritik Answers

FOURTH, ALCOFF ONLY SAYS THAT CLAIMING TO SPEAK ON

BEHALF OF THE OTHER IS A BAD THING, NOT THAT
MAKING ANY CLAIM ABOUT THEM IS BAD. WE DONT CLAIM
TO REPRESENT OR EVEN KNOW WHAT ALL OF __________
THINK.

714

Kritik Answers

A2 Speaking for Others: 2AC (2/2)

FIFTH, PERFORMATIVE CONTRADICTION THE VERY
CLAIM THAT ACTING ON BEHALF OF A GROUP HURTS THAT
GROUP IS AN ATTEMPT TO ACT ON BEHALF OF THAT
GROUP, DESTROYING ALTERNATIVE SOLVENCY, SKEWING
THE 2AC BECAUSE WE HAVE TO ANSWER MULTIPLE
WORLDS, AND DESTROYIGN EDUCATION BECAUSE OF A
LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY WHICH IS A VOTER FOR
FAIRNESS AND EDUCATION
SIXTH, PERM DO BOTH AFFIRM THE 1AC AND ENGAGE
IN CRITICISM OF REPRESENTATIONS THAT CLAIM TO ACT
ON BEHALF OF THE OTHER
SEVENTH, THE PERM SOLVES SPEAKING ERRORS ARE
INEVITABLE AND GOOD BECAUSE THEY PROVIDE A LOCUS
FOR CONSTANT CRITICISM, SOMETHING THE NEG BY
ITSELF PRECLUDES
Alcoff 92

[Linda, Prof. of Feminist Studies at the University of Syracuse, The Problem of Speaking for
Others, Cultural Critique, Winter 91-2, 22//uwyo]
But surely it is both morally and politically objectionable to structure ones actions around
the desire to avoid criticism, especially if this outweighs other questions of effectivity. In
some cases perhaps the motivation is not so much to avoid criticism as to avoid errors, and
the person believes that the only way to avoid errors is to avoid all speaking for others.
However, errors are unavoidable in the theoretical inquiry as well as political struggle,
and moreover they often make contributions. The desire to find an absolute means to avoid
making errors comes perhaps not from a desire to advance collective goals but a desire for
personal mastery, to establish a privileged discursive posotion wherein one cannot be
undermined or challenged and thus is master of the situation. From such a position ones
own location and positionality would not require constant interrogation and critial
reflection; one would not hae to constantly engage in this emotionally troublesome
endeavor and would be immune from the interrogaton of others. Such a desire of rmastery
and immunity must be resisted.

EIGHTH, NO SPECIFIC LINK STORY POSITIONALITY

UNDERDETERMINES THE EFFECT OF A SPEECH ACT
ABSENT SPECIFIC ANALYSIS OF HOW WE DISEMPOWER,
THEIR ARGUMENT IS REDUCTIONIST AND NOT A REASON
TO REJECT
Alcoff 92

[Linda, Prof. of Feminist Studies at the University of Syracuse, The Problem of Speaking for
Others, Cultural Critique, Winter 91-2]
The first response I will consider is to argue that the formulation of the problem with
speaking for others involves a retrograde metaphysically unsupportable
essentialism that assumes one can read the truth and meaning of what one says straight

715

Kritik Answers
from the discursive context. This response I will call the charge of reductionism response,
because it argues that a sort of reductionist theory of justification (or evlauation) is entailed
by premises 1 and 2. Such a reductionist theory might, fo rexample, reduce evaluation to a
political assessment of the speakers location where that location is seen as an
insurmountable essence that fixes one, as if ones feet are superglued to a spot on the
sidewalk.

716

Kritik Answers

#3 Retreat: 1AR
EXTEND THE 2AC #3 ALCOFF 92 EVIDENCE. THIS DOES
TWO THINGS FOR US
IT PROVES THAT THERES NO ALTERNATIVE TO SPEAKING
FOR OTHERS. EVERY DISCURSIVE POSITION PRESUPPOSES
ENGAGEMENT WITH THE WORLD, MEANING THAT EVEN IF
YOU VOTE NEGATIVE, YOU STILL SPEAK FOR OTHERS
INTERESTS, ONLY IN A MORE IMPLICIT WAY, PROVING
THAT THE ALTERNATIVE LINKS JUST AS BADLY
IT DEMONSTRATES HOW A RETREAT FROM SPEAKING FOR
OTHERS CREATES NEW FORMS OF OPPRESSION BY
OMMITTING DISCUSSION OF OPPRESSION, ALLOWING ONE
TO ESCAPE REAL WORLD VIOLENCE INTO A SELFIMPORTANT YUPPIE LIFESTYLE, ALLOWING STATUS QUO
DOMINATION TO OCCUR, UNCHECKED, TURNING THEIR
ARGUMENT
ALSO, FALLING BACK TO ACADEMIC CRITICISM ALLOWS A
RETREAT FROM POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT AND INCREASED
EXPLOITATION OF THE OPPRESSED FOR PERSONAL GAIN
Alcoff 92

[Linda, Prof. of Feminist Studies at the University of Syracuse, The Problem of Speaking for
Others, Cultural Critique, Winter 91-2, 13//uwyo\
Neither premise 1 nor premise 2 entail reductionism or essentialism. They argue for the
relevance of location, not its singular power of determination. Since they do not specify how
we are to understand the concept of location, it can certainly be given a nonessential
meaning.
While the charge of reductionism response has been popular among academic theorists, a
second response which I will call the retreat response has been popular among some
sectionso f the US feminist movement. This response is simply to retreat from all practices
of speaking for and assert that one can only know ones own narrow individual experience
and ones own truth and can enver make claims beyond this. This response is motivated in
part by the desire to recognize difference, for example, different priorities, without
organizing these differences into hierarchies.
Now, sometimes I think this is the proper response ot the problem of speaking for others,
depnding on who is making it. We certainly want to encourage a more receptive listening on
the part of the discursively privileged and discourage presumptuosu and oppressive
practices of speaking for. But a retreat from speaking for will not result in an increase in
receptive listening in all cases; it may resul tmerely in a retreat into a narcissistic
yuppie lifestyle in which a privileged person takes no responsibility for her society
whatesoever. She may even feel justified in exploiting her priveleged capacity for personal
happiness at the expense of others on the grounds that she has no alternative.

717

Kritik Answers

#3 Retreat: Ext
AND RETREAT FROM POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT FOR FEAR
OF VIOLENCE IN SEARCH OF AUTHENTICITY ALLOWS US TO
SPEND HOURS DEBATING THE FINE POINTS OF ETHICS
TOWARDS THE OTHER WHILE GAS CHAMBERS ARE BUILT
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997,146-7//uwyo-ajl]
If it is unreasonable to suppose that the Final Solution was potentiated or even necessarily
facilitated by Schmitt's theories, it is certainly the case that this metaphysical structure of
domination in the Third Reich, whereby the status of public citizens is reduced to a level
determined entirely in the 'natural' or biological realm of necessity, is foreshadowed in his
1927 essay. In an abstract and insidious way Schmitt introduces the idea that the
'transcendent' realm of the political, as a matter of course, will not accommodate a people
with insufficient strength to ensure its own participation, and that such a fact is ipso facto
justification for its exclusion. 'If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to
maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world.
Only a weak people will disappear.'130 Schmitt's concept of the 'political', quite simply, is
nothing of the sort - is instead weighed down by necessity, in the form of what Marshall
Berman calls German-Christian interiority - by its preoccupation with
authenticity, that is to say, and true political 'identity'. Auschwitz is a corollary not
of reason, understood as risk, but of the fear of reason, which paradoxically is a fear
of violence. The stench of burning bodies is haunted always by the sickly aroma of
cheap metaphysics.

718

Kritik Answers

#6 Perm: 1AR
EXTEND THE 2AC #6 JUXTAPOSITION PERM. ENGAGING IN
CRITICISM OF SPEAKING FOR OTHERS, BY ITSELF, FAILS
BECAUSE IT MERELY FLIPS THE BINARISM AND FAILS TO
ACTUALLY ENGAGE THE DISCOURSE THAT IT CRITICIZES,
CREATING A NEW FORM OF MONOLITHIC HEGEMONY IN
WHICH NOTHING IS CHALLENGED. HOWEVER, COMBINING
THE 1AC AND THE CRITICISM ALLOWS FOR CONSTANT
CRITICISM, USING THE AFFS REPRESENTATIONS AS A
TARGET FOR CRITICAL INTERROGATION, LEADING TO
BETTER SOLVENCY THAN THE ALTERNATIVE BY ITSELF.
CROSS-APPLY THE ALCOFF 92 SOLVENCY EVIDENCE.
ALL OF THEIR PERM THEORY AND LINK ARGUMENTS DONT
APPLY BECAUSE THIS ISNT A STANDARD PERM. IT
COMBINES THE ENTIRETY OF THE 1AC AND THE CRITICISM
AND USES THAT CONTRADICTION TO ALLOW A
CONSIDERATION OF BOTH SIDES AND THE ISSUE AND A
MORE CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SPEAKING FOR,
FUNCTIONING AS AN IMPACT TURN TO THEIR ADVOCACY
OF ONE-SIDED CRITICISM.

719

Kritik Answers

#9 Reductionism: 1AR
EXTEND THE 2AC #9. THE ARGUMENT THAT
POSITIONALITY DETERMINES WHETHER A
REPRESENTATION IS GOOD OR NOT IGNORES THE MORE
COMPLICATED ISSUE OF HOW OUR SPEECH ACT ACTUALLY
OPERATES IN DISCURSIVE SPACE
THIS HAS TWO IMPLICATIONS
IT DESTROYS THE LINK. WITHOUT AN EXPLANATION OF
HOW OUR ACT FUNCTIONS, YOU DONT HAVE ENOUGH
INFORMATION TO DETERMINE THAT AN INTERNAL LINK
EXISTS
IT LOCKS THEIR CRITICISM INTO SUBJECT ESSENTIALISM
THAT RESULTS IN THE VERY OTHERIZATION THAT
THEYRE CRITICIZING, TURNING THE ARGUMENT
AND, THEIR METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE IS JUST WRONG
THERE IS NO STABLY EXISTING OTHER, ATTEMPTING TO
FIT ONE INTO A DISCREET LABEL MAGNIFIES OPPRESSION
Bewes 97

[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and

Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 48//uwyo-ajl]
In this light, to begin to use again terms and concepts which had seemed to be theoretically
proscribed (the author, the subject, reality, sexual and cultural identity, the universal) is not
neces-sarily to betray a reactionary or a nostalgic desire for 'presence'; on the contrary, what
the critical insights of post-structuralism (more specifically, deconstruction) reveal is not
only the possibil-ity but the imperative that such terms continue to be used. There are no
others - and if there were, they would by definition not only be liable to but would comprise
exactly the same catachrestic abuses

AND HERES THE ALTERNATIVE (OPTIONAL)

LACANIAN ETHICS RESISTS ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE THE
SUBJECT TO IDENTITARIANISM BY FOCUSING ON
CONSTITUTIVE LACK, NOT WHO IS LACKING
Stavrakakis 99

[Yannis, New Age composer, Lacan and the Political, 1999, NY: Routledge, 37//uwyo-ajl]
By locating, at the place previously assigned to an essence of the individual psyche, a
constitutive lack, Lacanian theory avoids the essentialist reductionism of the social to the
individual level and opens the way to the confluence of psychoanalysis and socio-political
analysis, since this lack can only be filled by socio-political objects of identification. The
point here is that analytic theory is not only concerned with lack but also with what attempts
to fill this lack: Psychoanalysis is otherwise directed at the effect of discourse within the
subject' (Ill: 135). In that sense, `Lacan.. believed in the priority of social discourses, of language, over the subject' (Copjec, 1994: 53). This is the meaning of the
constitutivity of the symbolic in the emergence of the subject that we have been describing up to now. Michelman is correct then when asserting that `Durkheim and
Lacan are thus allied in their critiques of various forms of psychological and biological reductionism that deny the existence and efficacy of facts of this order [the

720

Kritik Answers
symbolic/social order]' (Michelman, 1996: 127). Thus Lacan not only seems aware of the dangers pointed by Durkheim and reiterated by Jameson with which we
started this book but avoids them in the most radical way: ~there is no subject according to Lacan which is not always already a social subject' (Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy, 1992: 30)27

721

Kritik Answers

The Alternative is a Fantasy

CRITICIZING OUR SPEAKING IS AN ATTEMPT TO RESTORE
THE SYMBOLIC HIERARCHY. MARKING OUR DISCOURSE AS
THE CONTINGENT BARRIER TO STOPPING OPPRESSION IS A
NOSTALGIC UTOPIAN FANTASY, MAKING
TOTALITARIANISM POSSIBLE
Aleman 97

[Jorge, Spanish psychoanalyst, Lacan: The End, Lacanian Ink #11,

www.lacan.com/frameX16.htm acc 9-21-04//uwyo]
The task of non-metaphysical thinking and psychoanalysis thus come to a new crossroads.
They both discuss the localization of the void and how to handle it, and with Lacan the way
of writing it. This crossroads has a political scope: the key to totalitarianism becomes
intelligible while revealing the way the Master tries to fill up the void with a law of history or
of nature whose temporality is assured in progress. This is about giving substance to the
void in such a way that everything which is not involved in this project is viewed as dregs to
be eliminated. This might be why Lacan reminded left wing militants in the mid-'60s: "I
sustain that psychoanalysis has no right to interpret revolutionary practice, rather
revolutionary theory would do well to take responsibility for leaving empty the place of truth
as cause."
Lacan destroys the sphere, a privileged manner of hiding the "void of Being" while setting
up a topology of the speaking being aimed at a non-metaphoric writing, lest topology not
convey the nostalgia forever attempting to restore a certain symbolic hierarchy, a specific
last word on the real of jouissance and its empty place in the symbolic.
The emphasis of this article is not only on the fact that Heidegger unintentionally broached
psychoanalysis before it was conceived. We have yet tried to exacerbate the experience of
psychoanalysis, interrogating the fact that the speaking being may be "cured" in its core of
the most subtle form of his fantasme-the metaphysics that always returns with the meaning
that may hide its contingency.

722

Kritik Answers

**State Bad, Juhdge**

Strategic Use of State Good
MORALISTIC CRUSADES AIMED AT CHANGING THE STATE
ARE MISLEADING ABOUT THE NATURE OF OPPRESSIVE
FORCES. THIS OBFUSCATION DENIES THE POTENTIAL FOR
RADICAL TRANSFORMATION
Brown, Professor Political Science UC Berkeley, 2K1
(Wendy, Politics Out of History, pg. 35-37)

But here the problem goes well beyond superficiality of political analysis or compensatory
gestures in the face of felt impotence. A moralistic, gestural politics often
inadvertently becomes a regressive poli tics. Moralizing condemnation of the
National Endowment for the Arts for not funding politically radical art, of the U.S. military
or the White House for not embracing open homosexuality or sanctioning gay marriage, or
even of the National Institutes of Health for not treating as a political priority the lives of
HIV target populations (gay men, prostitutes, and drug addicts) conveys at best naive
political expectations and at worst, patently confused ones. For this
condemnation implicitly figures the state (and other mainstream institutions)
as if it did not have specific political and economic investments, as if it were not
the codification of various dominant social powers, but was, rather, a
momentarily misguided parent who forgot her promise to treat all her children
the same way. These expressions of moralistic outrage implicitly cast the state
as if it were or could be a deeply democratic and nonviolent institution;
conversely, it renders radical art, radical social movements, and various fringe
populations as if they were not potentially subversive, representing a
significant political challenge to the norms of the regime, but rather were
benign entities and populations entirely appropriate for the state to equally
protect, fund, and promote. Here, moralisms objection to politics as a domain
of power and history rather than principle is not simply irritating: it re suits in
a troubling and confused political stance. It misleads about the nature of
power, the state, and capitalism; it misleads about the nature of oppressive
social forces, and about the scope of the project of transformation required by
serious ambitions for justice. Such obfuscation is not the aim of the moralists
but falls within that more general package of displaced effects consequent to a
felt yet unacknowledged impotence. It signals disavowed despair over the prospects for more far-reaching transformations.

WE MUST NOT REJECT THE STATE- LIMITED AND

STRATEGIC USE OF THE STATE IS VITAL TO SUCCESSFUL
POLITICS
Derrida, French philosopher, 2K

(Jacques, Intellectual Courage: An Interview Culture Machine

http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j002/articles/art_derr.htm)
Q: Two essential problems of globalisation are the dissolution of the state and the impotence of politics. In your recently published text 'Cosmopolites de tous les pays,
encore un effort!', you develop certain ideas concerning a new right to asylum and a new balance of power between the different places of the political in view of a
possible new role of the city. How do you think philosophy could and should react to the problems mentioned with a kind of institutional fantasy?
JD: I am not sure I understand what you call 'institutional fantasy'. All political experimentation like the initiative of the 'refugee city', despite its limits and its
inevitably preliminary character, has in it a philosophical dimension. It requires us to interrogate the essence and the history of the state. All political innovation

All action, all political decision

making, must invent its norm or rule. Such a gesture traverses or implies philosophy. Meanwhile, at the risk of appearing
self-contradictory, I believe that one must fight against that which you call the 'dissolution of the
state' (for the state can in turn limit the private forces of appropriation, the
concentrations of economic power, it can retard a violent depoliticisation that
acts in the name of the 'market'), and above all resist the state where it gives in
too easily to the nationalism of the nation state or to the representation of
socio-economic hegemony. Each time one must analyse, invent a new rule:
touches on philosophy. The 'true' political action always engages with a philosophy.

723

Kritik Answers
here to contest the state, there to consolidate it. The realm of politics is not coextensive with the state, contrary to what one believes nowadays. The
necessary repoliticisation does not need to serve a new cult of the state. One
ought to operate with new dissociations and accept complex and differentiated
practices.

724

Kritik Answers

State is Key to Solving Oppression (1/2)

INDIVIDUAL ACTION ALONE IS NOT ENOUGHTHE STATE
IS CRITICAL TO JUMPSTART HUMAN RIGHTS RECORDS
THAT PREVENT WAR AND OPPRESSION
William W. Burke-White, Lecturer, Public and International Affairs and Senior Special Assistant
to the Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Human
Rights and National Security: The Strategic Correlation, THE HARVARD ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
REVIEW v. 17, Spring 2004, p. 266-267.
The social beliefs explanation begins from the proposition that individuals within human rights protecting states share a preference for a minimum set of protections
of human rights. This assumption is appropriate for two reasons. First, according to liberal political science theory, state policy represents the preferences of some

If the observed state policy is to protect human rights, then at least

even if individuals within a domestic polity
seek a variety of differentiated ends, basic respect for human rights allows
individuals to pursue--to some degree at least--those ends as they define them. Liberal
subset of the domestic polity. n100

some subset of the domestic polity must share that preference. Second,

theory thus suggests that individuals within a human rights respecting state tend to support basic human rights provisions. The next step in the social beliefs
argument is to recognize that respect for human rights has an inherently universalist tendency. n101 Unlike cultural or national rights, human rights are just that-human. They apply as much [*267] to those individuals within a domestic polity as to those outside the polity. Such cosmopolitan liberalism indicates that "the more
people are free, the better off all are." n102 The net result is that individuals within a human rights respecting state tend, on the average, to support the human rights

Given a set of universalist human rights values in states that respect human rights,
the policy articulated by the government may be one which respects human
rights at home and demands their protection abroad. This belief in a thin set of
universal human rights may cause the leadership of the state to frame its
security policy around that belief structure and to refrain from aggressive acts
that would violate the human rights of citizens at home or abroad. As Peter Katzenstein
of individuals in other states as well.

argues, "security interests are defined by actors who respond to cultural factors." n103 Acts of international aggression tend to impinge on the human rights of
individuals in the target state and, at least temporarily, limit their freedom. After all, bombs, bullets, death and destruction are not consistent with respect for basic
human rights. n104 Framed in the liberal international relations theory terms of policy interdependence, international aggression by State A imposes costs on State B,
whose citizens' human rights will be infringed upon by the act of aggression. This infringement in turn imposes costs on citizens in State A, whose citizens have a
preference for the protection of the human rights of citizens in both states. This shared value of respect for human rights thus may restrain State A from pursuing
international aggression. n105 By contrast, a state which commits gross human rights violations against its own people will not be subject to this restraint. Such
violations often occur when the government has been "captured" by a select minority that chooses to violate human rights. If the citizens themselves are not in favor of

Where capture occurs, the

government is not responsive to the preferences of the domestic polity. In such
cases, even if there is a strong preference among citizens to protect human
rights at home and abroad, the government is unlikely to respond to those
interests and its policies will not be constrained by them.
human rights at home, they are unlikely to be committed to the enforcement of human rights abroad.

CALLS UPON THE STATE ARE THE ONLY WAY TO ACHIEVE

SOCIAL PROGRESS THE ALTERNATIVE IS A COMBINATION
OF ANARCHY AND NIHILISM WE END UP DITHERING IN
THE FACE OF ATTROCITIES
Walzer, Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies & Former Professor at
Harvard, 1983 (Michael, The Politics of Michel Foucault, Dissent, Fall)
Here again a comparison with Hobbes is illuminating. Hobbes thought that political sovereignty was a literal necessity--else life was nasty, brutish, and short. He
supported every sort of sovereignty, and so for him tyranny was nothing more than "monarchy misliked." Foucault believes that discipline is necessary for this

for him liberalism is

nothing more than discipline concealed. For neither Hobbes nor Foucault does the
constitution or the law or even the actual workings of the political system make any
difference. In fact, I think, these things make all the difference. One of Foucault's followers, the author of a very intelligent
particular society-capitalist, modern, or whatever; he abhors all its forms, every sort of confinement and control, and so

essay on Discipline and Punish, draws from that book and the related interviews the extraordinary conclusion that the Russian Revolution failed because it "left intact

: the Bolsheviks created a new

regime that overwhelmed the old hierarchies and enormously expanded and intensified the
use of disciplinary techniques. And they did this from the heart of the social system and not from what Foucault likes to cal the capillaries,
from the center and not the extremities. Foucault desensitizes his reader to the importance of politics; but
politics matters. Power relations, he says, "are both intentional and nonsubjective." I don't know what that sentence means, but I think that the
contradictory words are intended (nonsubjectively?) to apply to different levels of power Every disciplinary act is planned and
calculated; power is intentional at the tactical level where guard confronts prisoner; doctor,
the social hierarchies and in no way inhibited the functioning of the disciplinary techniques." Exactly wrong

patient; lecturer, audience. But the set of power relations, the strategic connections, the deer -functionalism of power has no subject and is the product of no one's
plan

725

Kritik Answers

continued

726

Kritik Answers

State is Key to Solving Oppression (2/2)

continued
Foucault seems to disbelieve in principle in the existence of a dictator or a party or a state
that shapes the character of disciplinary institutions. He is focused instead on what he
thinks of as the "micro-fascism" of everyday life and has little to say about authoritarian or
totalitarian politics-that is, about the forms of discipline that -are most specific to his own lifetime. But
these are not the forms most specific to his own country, and Foucault does believe in sticking close to the local exercise of power. Nor does he often use terms like
"micro-fascism." He is not a "general intellectual" of the old sort-so he tells us-who provides an account and critique of society as a whole.' The general intellectual
belongs to the age of the state and the party, when it still seemed possible to seize power and reconstruct society. He is, in the world of political knowledge, what the

. Foucault's more recent work is

political epistemology. I now want to examine this epistemology, for it is the
ultimate source of his anarchism/nihilism. Sometimes Foucault seems to be committed to nothing more than an elaborate pun on
king is in the world of political power. Once we have cut off the king's head, power and knowledge alike take different forms
an effort to explain these forms, to work out what can be called a

the word "discipline"-which means, on the one hand, a branch of knowledge and on the other a system of correction and control. This is his argument: social life is
discipline squared. Discipline makes discipline possible (the order of the two nouns can be reversed). Knowledge derives from and provides the grounds for social
control; every particular form of social control rests on and makes possible a particular form of knowledge. It follows that power isn't merely repressive but also
creative (even if all it creates is, say, the science of penology); and similarly, knowledge isn't merely ideological but also true. But this doesn't make either power or
knowledge terribly attractive. Penology is "constituted" by the prison system in the obvious sense that there could not be a study of prisoners or of the effects of
imprisonment if there were no prisons. One form of discipline generates the data that makes the other possible. At the same time, penology provides both the rationale
and the intellectual structure of the prison system. There could be no exercise of discipline, at least no sustained and organized exercise, without disciplinary
knowledge. It is a nice model, though perhaps a little too easy. In any case, Foucault proceeds to generalize it. "Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by
virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power." So for every society, for every historical age, there is a regime of truth, unplanned but
functional, generated somehow out of the network of power relations, out of the multiple forms of constraint, and enforced along with them. There are certain types of
discourse that the society accepts "and makes . . . true," and there are mechanisms that enable us to distinguish true and false statements-and sanctions, so that we
won't make mistakes. Foucault believes that truth is relative to its sanctions and knowledge to the constraints that produce it. There would appear to be no
independent standpoint, no possibility for the development of critical principles. Of course, one can ask the obvious questions: what is Foucault's standpoint? to what
set of power relations is the genealogical antidiscipline connected'? Foucault is far too intelligent not to have worried about these questions. They are standard for any
relativism. He responds in two ways: first by saying, as I have already noted, that his genealogies are fictions waiting for the "political realities" that will make them

Foucault

true. Each present invents its own past, but Foucault has invented a past for some future present. At other times,
says more simply that his work is
made possible by the events of '68 and by subsequent local revolts here and there along the disciplinary continuum. As the conventional disciplines are generated and
validated by the conventional uses of power, so Foucault's antidiscipline is generated by the resistance to those uses. But I don't see, on Foucault's terms, how it can be
validated by resistance until the resistance is successful (and it's not clear what success would mean). But perhaps, after all, the demand that Foucault show us the

makes no demands on us that we adopt

this or that critical principle or replace these disciplinary norms with some other set of
norms. He is not an advocate. We are to withdraw our belief in, say, the truth of penology and then support ..- what? Not every prison revolt,
for there may be some that we have "good reason" not to support. At this point, it seems to me , Foucault's position is simply
incoherent. The powerful evocation of the disciplinary system gives way to an
antidisciplinarian politics that is mostly rhetoric and posturing . But there is more that has to be said. In
those prison revolts with which we might rightly sympathize, the prisoners don't in fact call
into question the line between guilt and innocence or the truth value of jurisprudence or
penology. Their "discourse" takes a very different form: they describe the brutality of the
prison authorities or the inhumanity of prison conditions , and they complain of punishments that go far beyond those
to which they were legally condemned. They denounce official arbitrariness, harassment, favoritism, and so on. They demand the
introduction and enforcement of what we might best call the rule of law. And these
descriptions, complaints, denunciations, and demands make an important point. Foucault is
certainly right to say that the conventional truths of morality, law, medicine, and psychiatry are implicated in
the exercise of power; that is a fact too easily forgotten by conventionally detached scientists, social scientists, and even philosophers . But
those same truths also regulate the exercise of power. They set limits on what can rightly be
done, and they give shape and conviction to the arguments the prisoners make. The limits
are important even if they are in some sense arbitrary. They aren't entirely arbitrary , however,
insofar as they are intrinsic to the particular disciplines (in both senses of the word). The truths of jurisprudence and
ground on which he stands, display his philosophical warrants, is beside the point. For he

penology, for example, distinguish punishment from preventive detention. And the truths of psychiatry distinguish the internment of madmen from the internment of

. A liberal state is one that maintains the limits of its constituent disciplines and
disciplinary institutions and that enforces their intrinsic principles. Authoritarian and
totalitarian states, by contrast, override those limits, turning education into indoctrination,
punishment into repression, asylums into prisons, and prisons into concentration camps .
political dissidents

These are crude definitions; I won't insist upon them; amend them as you will. I only want to suggest the enormous importance of the political regime, the sovereign

it is the state that establishes the general framework within which all other disciplinary
institutions operate. It is the state that holds open or radically shuts down the possibility of
local resistance. The agents of every disciplinary institution strive , of course, to extend their
reach and augment their discretionary power. Ultimately, it is only state power that can stop
them. Every act of local resistance is an appeal for political or legal intervention from the
center. Consider, for example, the factory revolts of the 1930s that led (in this country) to the establishment of collective bargaining and grievance procedures,
state. For

critical restraints on scientific management, which is one of Foucault's disciplines, though one that he alludes to only occasionally. Success required not only the
solidarity of the workers but also at least some support from the liberal and democratic state. And success was functional not to any state but to a state of that sort; we
can easily imagine other "social wholes" that would require other kinds of factory discipline. A genealogical account of this discipline would be fascinating and
valuable, and it would undoubtedly overlap with Foucault's accounts of prisons and hospitals. But if it were complete, it would have to include a genealogy of grievance

. Here is a kind of
knowledge-political philosophy and philosophical jurisprudence-that regulates disciplinary
arrangements across our society. It arises within one set of power relations and extends
toward the others; it offers a critical perspective on all the networks of constraint. This
suggests that whatever the value of detailed analyses and critiques of local discipline, we still
require-I don't mean that society requires, or capitalism or even socialism requires, but you and I require-what Foucault calls "general
intellectuals." We need men and women who tell us when state power is corrupted or
procedures too, and this would overlap with an account, which Foucault doesn't provide, of the liberal state and the rule of law

727

Kritik Answers
systematically misused, who cry out that something is rotten, and who reiterate the
regulative principles with which we might set things right . But I don't want to end on this last note. I don't want to ask
Foucault to be uplifting. That is not the task he has set himself. The point is rather that one can't even be downcast, angry, grim, indignant, sullen, or embittered with
reason unless one inhabits some social setting and adopts, however tentatively and critically, its codes and categories. Or unless, and this is much harder, one
constructs a new setting and proposes new codes and categories. Foucault refuses to do either of these things, and that refusal, which makes his genealogies so
powerful and so relentless, is also the catastrophic weakness of his political theory

728

Kritik Answers

State Key to Solving War (1/2)

STRONG HUMAN RIGHTS RECORDS FOSTER PEACE-HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTIONS CREATE INSTITUTIONAL
CONSTRAINTS ON AGGRESSION
William W. Burke-White, Lecturer, Public and International Affairs and Senior Special Assistant
to the Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Human
Rights and National Security: The Strategic Correlation, THE HARVARD ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
REVIEW v. 17, Spring 2004, p. 265-266.
One causal pathway rooted in liberal international relations theory that may explain the observed correlation between systematic human rights violations and

aggression is the institutional constraint that accompanies human rights

protections. n97 Institutionalization of human rights norms has at least two powerful effects on state behavior. First, human rights
protections govern how broad a spectrum of the community has at least some voice
interstate

in the political decisions of the state. Even if the state is not a democratic polyarchy, if it provides basic protections for the human rights of all or most citizens, then a
very broad spectrum of the polity is represented in political affairs. Freedom of thought and freedom from extrajudicial bodily harm, for example, allow citizens to

voices, in turn,
increases the level of political competition--one of the key structural
explanations for the democratic peace--even without the establishment of a democratic form of government. n98 Of
course, in a non-democratic, but human rights respecting state, the views of individual
interests may not have a direct effect on state policy, but, arguably, they can still increase the level of political
competition by facilitating debate and the exchange of ideas. The second effect of institutionalized
protections of human rights is to set a minimum floor of treatment for all citizens within the domestic polity. Even in a non-democracy , minimum
human rights protections ensure that [*266] rights are accorded to individuals not
directly represented by the government. By ensuring a minimum treatment of the unrepresented, human rights protections prevent the
government from externalizing the costs of aggressive behavior on the
unrepresented. In human rights respecting states, for example, unrepresented
individuals cannot be forced at gunpoint to fight or be bound into slavery to
generate low-cost economic resources for war, and thus restrain the state from engaging in
aggressive action. On the other hand, in a state where power is narrowly concentrated in the hands of a political elite that systematically represses
develop their own views on political issues and, often, to express those views through public channels. A wider spectrum of

its own people, the state will be more able to bear the domestic costs of war. By violating the human rights of its own citizens, a state can force individuals to fight or
support the military apparatus in its war-making activities. Similarly, by denying basic human rights, a state may be better able to bear the political costs of war. Even

denial of freedom of thought and expression might well

insulate the government from the electoral costs of an aggressive foreign
policy. n99
if such a state had fair elections,

HUMAN RIGHTS CONCIOUSNESS AT THE STATE LEVEL

CHECKS CONFLICT: (1) FOSTERS HUMAN RIGHTS CULTURE;
(2) EXPANDS CITIZEN OPPOSITION; (3) UNDERMINES STATE
COERCION TOWARDS WAR
William W. Burke-White, Lecturer, Public and International Affairs and Senior Special Assistant
to the Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Human
Rights and National Security: The Strategic Correlation, THE HARVARD ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
REVIEW v. 17, Spring 2004, p. 271-272.
The institutionalization of human rights protections is not only a means of signaling benign intent, but is also inversely
correlated with a state's ability to engage in aggressive conduct. As a state
embeds human rights protections in its domestic system--even without
democratization--a number of structural changes occur within the society that
limit aggressive potential. First, as Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink have argued, a culture of human rights may develop within the
population and become institutionalized domestically. n121 Such a human rights culture would reject international aggression as a threat to the human rights of

institutionalization of human rights protections expands the

ability of citizens to voice opposition to aggressive state policy through freedoms of belief, speech,
and assembly. Third, institutionalization erodes the ability of the state to coerce its
citizens into providing the resources and human capital necessary for
aggressive war. n122
citizens in other states. Second,

729

Kritik Answers

State Key to Solving War (2/2)

STATE ENFORCEMENT OF HUMAN RIGHTS SOLVES WAR
William W. Burke-White, Lecturer, Public and International Affairs and Senior Special Assistant
to the Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Human
Rights and National Security: The Strategic Correlation, THE HARVARD ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
REVIEW v. 17, Spring 2004, p. 271.
human rights informed
should be advocated
not just for the traditional human rights reasons of life and human dignity, n115
but also because improved human rights records may enhance national and
global security by preventing states from engaging in international aggression
in the future. Even for skeptics of the universal duty to promote human rights on grounds of individual dignity, this second argument should have
In dealing with states of concern, improving a given state's human rights policy is almost never a primary goal of U.S. policy. A
foreign policy would include far more active advocacy for improvement in some states' human rights records. Such policies

persuasive weight in asserting the strategic importance of human rights in U.S. foreign policy.

730

Kritik Answers

Alternative Creates Worse Oppression

(1/2)
DIRECT OPPOSITION TO THE STATE CREATES NEW, WORSE
FORMS OF MAOIST REPRESSION ONLY ALLOWING THE
STATE TO FAIL UNDER ITS OWN WEIGHT CAN CHALLENGE
THE STATUS QUO
BAD Press 92

[Anarchism and Civility, BAD Broadside #6, June,

http://world.std.com/~bbrigade/badbsd6.htm, acc. 10-2-06//uwyo-ajl]
.
Authoritarian revolutions gotten up by manipulative vanguardists are rejected as
inconsistent with the anarchist belief that the means must be consistent with the ends.
History has plenty of examples to show that seizure of power through elitist revolt, rather than
furthering the goals of the revolution, actually becomes a process for the strengthening of the State in a new and
more vicious form. From an evanescent moment of exultant freedom one inevitably wakes up to the hangover of a
Napoleon or a Lenin or a Mao.
Nevertheless, contemporary anarchists are often still mesmerized by the call to arms, even when the chance of such a romantic gesture succeeding is nil. The
only real revolutions occur when popular discontent causes the state to collapse under the
weight of its own folly, not when some bloody vanguard, following whatever destructive
fantasy its leaders concoct, meets the modern state head-on. This inevitably results in
meaningless hardship for the people involved, with the greatest misery reserved for
innocents who gets in the way of either side's fallacious ideology. Being a "rebel" and antagonizing the flatulent
A generally accepted anarchist tenet is that the State can only be effectively dismantled by a voluntary, cooperative and spontaneous insurrection by the people

powers-that-be in a modern state can be an exciting game, but it is only bluster and puerile self-gratification when genuine revolt is implausible. In the end the most
radical "revolutionaries" either end up as bitter, dead-end martyrs or become the next generations' "born-again" capitalists. Having had their fling, they come to
believe in their new "realism" as solipstically as they embraced rebellion. None of this brings us any closer to a solution to the problem of the State.

Everyone is prejudged by their race, gender, sexual or religious affiliation, and socially compartmentalized
in some politically correct egg basket. The goal of the anarchist movement is to establish a free, tolerant and cooperative society which
The fallacy of revolutionary adventurism is mirrored on a personal level by the intolerant and abusive discourse of identity politics.

will embrace diversity and celebrate difference. If the means are to be consistent with the ends, then how can such a abrasive and bigoted practice as identity politics

Identifying the "enemy" by birth or predilection, regardless of an individual's actual beliefs or actions, is simple
bigotry. Awarding moral virtue on the same grounds is simple stupidity. Similarly, essaying to act as a unwarranted spokesperson for a diverse grouping of
individuals who by chance share a single basic characteristic is the most arrogantsort of elitism. Real people, stripped of their
individual identities, are thus subsumed in some hypothetical single-dimensional construct
that effectively denies them any complexity of character. This isn't an answer to
institutionalized racism and bigotry, but rather its mirror image.
possibly achieve that end?

This sort of prejudicial activity has appeal for the simpleminded. It's easy to either attack or adulate a stranger on the grounds of appearance. A similar anxiety
powered the old Sumptuary laws which punished anyone who dressed above their social class -- it was too unnerving for the elite to think they might make a mistake
and treat an inferior as an equal, thanks to illicit appearances. Political prejudice makes it simple to get through the difficulty of rootless modern life where there are
no clear cut exterior indications of what a person might really be like. All white males (unless, perhaps, gay) are dangerous, power-driven and bigoted. All women
(unless, perhaps, Republican) are intuitive, nurturing and empathetic with Nature. Members of minorities (take your pick) are morally superior to members of
majorities. Classifications and labels which assist us in making such decisions are more real (and more important) than the people they describe. Et cetera. Bullshit.

The goal of a tolerant and cooperative society of free individuals can only be achieved by those
very means -- by being tolerant, cooperative and free. We must be better companions to our fellow mortals, whatever their outward
characteristics. Civility, which facilitates cooperation, is imperative if anarchy is to really work.
Pigheaded and self-important aggressiveness, hypercriticism and easy intolerance is a recipe
for the status quo. We don't mean to suggest some sort of all accepting, "turn-the-other-cheek" bourgeois crap, either. Once you get beyond the labels,
there are still unfortunately plenty of folks that it makes sense to despise. Arrogant, violent, intolerant, fanatical, bigoted, manipulative, rapacious... individuals with
these characteristics must be guarded against, but they are not all found in one easily recognized group identity. These adjectives equally describe individual men,
women, blacks, whites, handicapped people -- the whole gamut of the human race. Nor is anyone as morally pure as some of our new puritan idealists would insist
that they be. A person is the sum of their character traits, not a distillation of the most pronounced ones. Radicals are just as prone to frailties of character as
industrialists. It is by their actual effect on their community and environment that we should evaluate our fellow beings, not by some dominant virtue or fault which
particularly excites us. It would be far preferable to tolerate a insensitive verbal bigot who in practice actually helped people than a pious hypocrite who mouthed
politically correct platitudes and then went home and beat his lover.

731

Kritik Answers

Alternative Creates Worse Oppression

(2/2)
THEY TOTALIZE THE STATE IN REVERSE, REINSCRIBING
ITS FLAWS AND PREVENTING REORIENTATION NECESSARY
FOR EFFECTIVE POLITICS
Williams & Krause 97

[Michael, Asst. Prof. of Poli Sci @ Southern Maine, & Keith, Prof. of Polic Sci @ Grad Inst.
Intl Stud, Critical Security Studies, xvi//uwyo-ajl]
Many of the chapters in this volume thus retain a concern with the centrality of the state as a locus not only of obligation but of effective political action. In the realm

. The task of a critical approach is not to deny the

centrality of the state in this realm but rather, to understand more fully its structures, dynamics, and
possibilities for reorientation. From a critical perspective, state action is flexible and capable of
reorientation, and analyzing state policy need not therefore be tantamount to embracing the
statist assumptions of orthodox conceptions. To exclude focus on state action from a critical perspective on the
grounds that it plays inevitably within the rules of existing conceptions simply reverses the
error of essentializing the state. Moreover, it loses the possibility of influencing what remains the most
structurally capable actor in contemporary world politics.
of organized violence, states also remain the preeminent actors

732

Kritik Answers

Alternative Causes Power Vaccuum

STATISM IS NECESSARY TO PREVENT A POWER VACCUUM
ALLOWING WORSE OPPRESSION BY CORPORATE POWER
Knox 2000

[R. Redemocracy, http:///www.marininternet.com/rknox/car15.html, acc. 10-206//uwyo-ajl]

We are fools to think that free markets will do anything other than to consolidate and
monopolize the marketplace, which is their nature to do if uncontrolled or unchecked by
responsible democratic government. Uncontrolled and unchecked top-down hypercapitalism is as anti-social,-- as harmful to individuals, to families and to our village values
as totalitarian communism and its top-down central control proved to be for countries in the
Eastern Block.
This is precisely why our so-called "FOUNDERS" did not grant Constitutional rights to corporations. Rather they required corporations to petition for Legislative
Charters to incorporate for specific social benefit for time certain periods, after which they were un-incorporated. Our founders held corporations in the same low or
suspect repute as they did the Crown of England for the same economic reasons... the Crown and corporations shared an equal potential for evil anti-individual
behaviors. Fortunately, although there is an obvious corporate bias in law, corporate speech does not rise to a Constitutionally guaranteed right---at least not yet. But
you can bet that corporations are working to achieve this, too. After all, corporations have won through politics and legal machinations what it was not granted by the
Founders,---the status, protections and rights of individual personhood, actually super-personhood, as corporations (fake, pseudo or contrived persons) enjoy far
more benefits and protections in many respects than do individuals (real persons).
CORPORATIONS = Viritual Persons Who Enjoy More Power and Benefits than Real People, by design.
Corporations enjoy many benefits that have correctly been labeled as super-personhood, and have won legislative benefits that are not extened to individuals which

. Corporations are now in a position of usurping individual rights

essentially becoming a private government equally or more insidious than any undemocratic
form of government.
are granted specific rights under the Constitution

733

Kritik Answers

Alternative Causes Nuclear War

AVOIDING STRATEGIC USE OF THE STATE LEADS TO
NUCLEAR COUNTER-REVOLUTIONS
Martin Shaw, 2001

[Review of International Studies, The unfinished global revolution: intellectuals and the new
politics of international relations,
http://nationalism.org/library/science/ir/shaw/shaw-ris-2001-27-04.pdf]
The new politics of international relations require us, therefore, to go beyond the antiimperialism of the intellectual left as well as of the semi-anarchist traditions of the academic
discipline. We need to recognize three fundamental truths. First, in the twenty-first century
people struggling for democratic liberties across the non- Western world are likely to make
constant demands on our solidarity. Courageous academics, students and other intellectuals
will be in the forefront of these movements. They deserve the unstinting support of
intellectuals in the West. Second, the old international thinking in which democratic
movements are seen as purely internal to states no longer carries convictiondespite the
lingering nostalgia for it on both the American right and the anti-American left. The idea
that global principles can and should be enforced worldwide is firmly established in the
minds of hundreds of millions of people. This consciousness will become a powerful force in
the coming decades. Third, global state-formation is a fact. International institutions are
being extended, and (like it or not) they have a symbiotic relation with the major centre of
state power, the increasingly internationalized Western conglomerate. The success of the
global-democratic revolutionary wave depends first on how well it is consolidated in each
national contextbut second, on how thoroughly it is embedded in international networks
of power, at the centre of which, inescapably, is the West.
From these political fundamentals, strategic propositions can be derived. First, democratic
movements cannot regard non-governmental organizations and civil society as ends in
themselves. They must aim to civilize local states, rendering them open, accountable and
pluralistic, and curtail the arbitrary and violent exercise of power. Second, democratizing
local states is not a separate task from integrating them into global and often Westerncentred networks. Reproducing isolated local centres of power carries with it classic dangers
of states as centres of war.84 Embedding global norms and integrating new state centres
with global institutional frameworks are essential to the control of violence. (To put this
another way: the proliferation of purely national democracies is not a recipe for peace.)
Third, while the global revolution cannot do without the West and the UN, neither can it rely
on them unconditionally. We need these power networks, but we need to tame them too, to
make their messy bureaucracies enormously more accountable and sensitive to the needs of
society worldwide. This will involve the kind of cosmopolitan democracy argued for by
David Held.85 It will also require us to advance a global social-democratic agenda, to
address the literally catastrophic scale of world social inequalities. This is not a separate
problem: social and economic reform is an essential ingredient of alternatives to warlike and
genocidal power; these feed off and reinforce corrupt and criminal political economies.
Fourth, if we need the global-Western state, if we want to democratize it and make its
institutions friendlier to global peace and justice, we cannot be indifferent to its strategic
debates. It matters to develop international political interventions, legal institutions and
robust peacekeeping as strategic alternatives to bombing our way through zones of crisis. It
matters that international intervention supports pluralist structures, rather than ratifying
Bosnia-style apartheid.86
As political intellectuals in the West, we need to have our eyes on the ball at our feet, but we
also need to raise them to the horizon. We need to grasp the historic drama that is
transforming worldwide relationships between people and state, as well as between state
and state. We need to think about how the turbulence of the global revolution can be
consolidated in democratic, pluralist, international networks of both social relations and
state authority. We cannot be simply optimistic about this prospect. Sadly, it will require
repeated violent political crises to push Western and other governments towards the
required restructuring of world institutions.87 What I have outlined is a huge challenge; but
the alternative is to see the global revolution splutter into partial defeat, or degenerate into
new genocidal warsperhaps even nuclear conflicts. The practical challenge for all
concerned citizens, and the theoretical and analytical challenges for students of
international relations and politics, are intertwined.

734

Kritik Answers

735

Kritik Answers

Permutation Solvency (1/3)

WE MUST USE THE INSTITUTIONS THAT EXERCISE POWER
TO CHANGE THEM
Lawrence Grossburg, Professor, University of Illinois, WE GOTTA GET OUTTA THIS PLACE,
1992, p. 391-393.
The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance,
understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which power is actively
realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that power can be
challenged. The Left has assumed from some time now that, since it has so little access to
the apparatuses of agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through
tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to
the entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise, the Left has
nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation
and the other social disgraces of our world, although it is individuals who must take
responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they must act within organizations, and
within the system of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as well as the moral
responsibility) to fight them. Without such organizations, the only models of political
commitment are self-interest and charity. Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others
who cannot act on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of
global capitalism, and everyones position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will
not take much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the
experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the fallen middle class demonstrates.
Nor are there any guarantees about the future of any single nation. We can imagine
ourselves involved in a politics where acting for another is always acting for oneself as well, a
politics in which everyone struggles with the resources they have to make their lives (and the
world) better, since the two are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to think of
affirmation action as in everyones best interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We
need to think with what Axelos has described as a planetary thought which would be a
coherent thoughtbut not a rationalizing and rationalist inflection; it would be a
fragmentary thought of the open totalityfor what we can grasp are fragments unveiled on
the horizon of the totality. Such a politics will not begin by distinguishing between the local
and the global (and certainly not by valorizing one over the other) for the ways in which the
former are incorporated into the latter preclude the luxury of such choices. Resistance is
always a local struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to
connect into its global structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is
predicated precisely on locating the points of articulation between them, the points at which
the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the meaning of these
terms has to be understood in the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting
both globally and locally: Think globally, act appropriately! Fight locally because that is the
scene of action, but aim for the global because that is the scene of agency. Local struggles
directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point of their insertion into
the field of immanence. This requires the imagination and construction of forms of unity,
commonality and social agency which do not deny differences. Without such commonality,
politics is too easily reduced to a question of individual rights (i.e., in the terms of classical
utility theory); difference ends up trumping politics, bringing it to an end. The struggle
against the disciplined mobilization of everyday life can only be built on affective
commonalities, a shared responsible yearning: a yearning out towards something more and
something better than this and this place now. The Left, after all, is defined by its common
commitment to principles of justice, equality and democracy (although these might conflict)
in economic, political and cultural life. It is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion,
that such things are possible. The construction of an affective commonality attempts to
mobilize people in a common struggle, despite the fact that they have no common identity or
character, recognizing that they are the only force capable of providing a new historical and
oppositional agency. It strives to organize minorities into a new majority.

736

Kritik Answers

Permutation Solvency (2/3)

REFORMIST STRATEGIES CHALLENGE THE STATE TOO
THEY ARENT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE WITH RADICAL
APPROACHES
Dixon, Founding Member of Direct Action Network, 2K5 (Chris, Reflections on Privilege,
Reformism, and Activism, http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/ioaa/dixon2.html)

Evidently sasha doesn't grasp my argument in "Finding Hope." Or else he disagrees. It's difficult to tell because, while skillfully sidestepping engagement with my

we have to
move beyond the myopic view--often endemic among anarchists--that the most 'important'
activism only or mainly happens in the streets, enmeshed in police confrontations." In other words, spheres of traditional 'radical action'
discussion of privilege, he also sidesteps the main thrust of my essay: rethinking radicalism, particularly in the context of privilege. As I wrote, "

are limited and limiting. And though I don't believe that sasha fundamentally disagrees with this criticism, he refuses to accept its broader consequences. For instance,
where I question the bounds of 'radicalism' with examples of struggles like opposing prison construction and establishing community and cultural centers, he
conclusively points to "a set of demands and goals of which none suggest any serious critique of capitalism and the state in their totality." There is much more to the
"totality" that we all confront than capitalism and the state. That's unequivocal. Furthermore, a "totality" has an undeniable physical presence, and people do in fact
contest and resist it every day through a variety of struggles using a variety of means--not all containing the "serious critique" necessary to satisfy sasha. J. Kellstadt
nicely observes this, noting that an 'activist' perspective (not unlike sasha's) overlooks a whole layer of more "everyday" forms of resistance - from slacking off,
absenteeism, and sabotage, to shopfloor "counter-planning" and other forms of autonomous and "unofficial" organizing - which conventional activists and leftists
(including most anarchists) have a bad track record of acknowledging. And this still leaves out all of those modes of struggle which take place beyond the shopfloor,
such as various forms of cultural and sexual revolution. Unfortunately, sasha doesn't deign to discuss these all-too-pedestrian realities, many of which potentially
embrace the very anarchist ethics he touts. They certainly have bearing on the lives of many folks and speak to a breadth of social struggle, but they apparently don't
constitute a sufficient "critique." Even if sasha were to acknowledge their importance, my sense is that he would erect a rationalized theoretical division between
Kellstadt's "everyday forms of resistance" and 'reformism.' No doubt, he would use a rhetorical sleight of hand on par with the "simple fact of language that those who
want to reform the present system are called reformists." A seemingly irrefutable, self-apparent statement, this actually glosses over legitimate questions: Are
'reformists' so easily discernable and cleanly categorized? Are all 'reforms' equal? Can they be part of a long-term revolutionary strategy? So let's talk plainly about
reformism. No matter how much some might wish otherwise, it simply isn't a cut-and-dry issue. And while it actually deserves a book-length examination, here I'll
sketch some general considerations. Principally, I ask, assuming that we share the goal of dismantling systems of power and restructuring our entire society in
nonhierarchical ways, what role does reform play? Must we eschew it, unconditionally embrace it, or is there another approach? sasha steadfastly represents one
rather limited 'radical' view. To bolster his critique of 'reformism,' for instance, he critically cites one of the examples in my essay: demanding authentic public
oversight of police. "[This] might be a small step for social change in some general sense," he argues, "but ultimately it is a step backwards as it strengthens the
legitimacy of the police and of imposed decision." I respect the intent of this critique; it makes sense if one is privileged enough to engage with the police on terms of

in real life, it's both simplistic and insulated. Look at it this way: accepting sasha's argument, are we to
wait until the coming insurrectionary upheaval before enjoying an end to police brutality ? More
specifically, are African- American men to patiently endure the continued targeting of "driving
while Black"? Should they hold off their demands for police accountability so as to avoid
strengthening "the legitimacy of the police and of imposed decision "? And if they don't, are they 'reformists'?
Many folks who experience daily police occupation understand that ending the "imposed decision " (often epitomized
by police) will require radical change , and they work toward it. At the same time, they demand authentic
public oversight of police forces. The two don't have to be mutually exclusive . I'll even suggest that they can
be complementary, especially if we acknowledge the legacies of white supremacy and class stratification embedded in policing. Ultimately, we
need a lucid conception of social change that articulates this kind of complementarity . That is,
we need revolutionary strategy that links diverse, everyday struggles and demands to longterm radical objectives, without sacrificing either . Of course, this isn't to say that every so-called 'progressive' ballot initiative
or organizing campaign is necessarily radical or strategic. Reforms are not all created equal. But some can fundamentally shake
systems of power, leading to enlarged gains and greater space for further advances . Andre Gorz, in
one's own choosing. Yet

his seminal book Strategy for Labor, refers to these as "non-reformist" or "structural" reforms. He contends, "a struggle for non-reformist reforms--for anti-capitalist
reforms--is one which does not base its validity and its right to exist on capitalist needs, criteria, and rationales. A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of

the end of slavery, the eight-hour workday,

desegregation. All were born from long, hard struggles, and none were endpoints. Yet they all
struck at the foundations of power (in these cases, the state, white supremacy, and capitalism), and in the process,
they created new prospects for revolutionary change . Now consider contemporary struggles: amnesty for
undocumented immigrants, socialized health care, expansive environmental protections, indigenous
sovereignty. These and many more are arguably non-reformist reforms as well. None will single-handedly
dismantle capitalism or other systems of power, but each has the potential to escalate struggles and
sharpen social contradictions. And we shouldn't misinterpret these efforts as simply
meliorative incrementalism , making 'adjustments' to a fundamentally flawed system. Certainly that tendency exists, but there are plenty of
other folks working very consciously within a far more radical strategy, pushing for a qualitative shift in struggle. " To fight for alternative
solutions," Gorz writes, "and for structural reforms (that is to say, for intermediate objectives) is not to fight for
improvements in the capitalist system; it is rather to break it up, to restrict it, to create counterpowers which, instead of creating a new equilibrium, undermine its very foundations ."
what can be, but what should be." Look to history for examples:

Thankfully, this is one approach among a diverse array of strategies, all of which encompass a breadth of struggles and movements. Altogether, they give me hope.

737

Kritik Answers

Permutation Solvency (3/3)

SMALL STEPS FORWARD ARE POSSIBLE AND NECESSARY
ITS THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE THE SYSTEM ANY BETTER
WITHOUT THROWING OUR HANDS UP AND DECIDING THAT
NOTHING IS POSSIBLE
Walzer, Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies & Former Professor at
Harvard, 1983 (Michael, The Politics of Michel Foucault, Dissent, Fall)
all micro-forms of discipline are functional to a larger system

I have suggested that

. Foucault sometimes calls this
system capitalism, but he also gives it a number of more dramatic names: the disciplinary society, the carceral city, the panoptic regime and, most frightening (and
misleading) of all, the carceral archipelago. But whatever this larger system is, it isn't the political system, the regime or constitution. It isn't determined by a Hobbist
sovereign, shaped by a legislator or a founding convention, controlled through a judicial process. The crucial point of Foucault's political theory is that discipline
escapes the world of law and right-and then begins to "colonize" that world, replacing legal principles with principles of physical, psychological, and moral normality.
Thus in his book on prisons: "Although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism
enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery both immense and minute...." And the code by which this machinery operates is a scientific, not a legal
code. The function of discipline is to create useful subjects, men and women who conform to a standard, who are certifiably sane or healthy or docile or competent, not

The triumph of professional or

scientific norms over legal rights and of local discipline over constitutional law is a fairly
common theme of contemporary social criticism. It has given rise to a series of campaigns in
defense of the rights of the mentally ill, of prisoners, hospital patients, children (in schools and also in
free agents who invent their own standards, who, in the language of rights, "give the law to themselves."

families). Foucault himself has been deeply involved in prison reform or--1 had better be careful--in a political practice with regard to prisons that might give rise to

And indeed there have been reforms (in this country at least, but I suspect in Europe too): new laws about
consent, confidentiality, access to records; judicial interventions in the administration of
prisons and schools. Foucault has little to say about this sort of thing and is obviously
skeptical about its effectiveness. Despite his emphasis on local struggles, he is largely uninterested in local
victories. But what other victories can he think possible , given his strategic knowledge'? Consider (1) that discipline-inreforms.

detail, the precise control of behavior, is necessary to the (unspecified) large-scale features of contemporary social and economic life; (2) that this kind of control
requires the microsetting, the finely meshed network, the local power relation, represented in ideal-typical fashion by the cellular structure of the prison, the daily
timetable of prison events, the extralegal penalties inflicted by prison authorities, the face-to-face encounters of guard and prisoner; (3) that the prison is only one
small part of a highly articulated, mutually reinforcing carceral continuum extending across society, in which all of us are implicated, and not only as captives or
victims; (4) and finally, that the complex of disciplinary mechanisms and institutions constitutes and is constituted by the contemporary human sciences-an argument
that runs through all of Foucault's work, to which I will return. Physical disciplines and intellectual disciplines are radically entangled; the carceral continuum is
validated by the knowledge of human subjects that it makes possible. Given all this-leave aside for the moment whether it adds up to a fully satisfactory account of our
social life-

how can Foucault expect anything more than a small reform here or there , an casing of
the introduction of more humane
methods'

disciplinary rigor,
, if no less effective,
? What else is possible? And yet sometimes, not in
his books but in the interviews-and especially in a series of interviews of the early 1970s, which still reflect the impact of May '68-Foucault seems to see a grand
alternative: the dismantling of the whole thing, the fall of the carceral city, not revolution but abolition. It's for this reason that Foucault's politics are commonly called
anarchist, and anarchism certainly has its moments in his thought. Not that he imagines a social system different from our own, beyond discipline and sovereignty
alike: "I think that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system." It is precisely the idea of society as a system, a set of institutions,
that must give way to something else-what else, we can't imagine. Perhaps human freedom requires a nonfunctionalist society whose arrangements, whatever they are,
serve no larger purpose and have no redeeming social value. The nearest thing to an account of such arrangements comes in an interview first published in November
1971. "It is possible," says Foucault, "that the rough outline of a future society is supplied by the recent experiences with drugs, sex, communes, other forms of
consciousness, and other forms of individuality." In that same interview, with some such vision in mind, he repudiates the likely reformist results of his own prison
work: "The ultimate goal of [our] interventions was not to extend the visiting rights of prisoners to 30 minutes or to procure flush toilets for the cells, but to question
the social and moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty." As this last passage suggests, when Foucault is an anarchist, he is a moral as well as a political

To
abolish power systems is to abolish both moral and scientific categories : away with them all! But what will be
anarchist. For him morality and politics go together. Guilt and innocence are the products of law just as normality and abnormality are the products of discipline.

left'? Foucault does not believe, as earlier anarchists did, that the free human subject is a subject of a certain sort, naturally good, warmly sociable, kind and loving.
Rather, there is for him no such thing as a free human subject, no natural man or woman. Men and women are always social creations, the products of codes and

Foucault's radical abolitionism, if it is serious, is not anarchist so much as nihilist. For on his own arguments,
either there will be nothing left at all, nothing visibly human; or new codes and disciplines will be
produced, and Foucault gives us no reason to expect that these will be any better than the
ones we now live with. Nor, for that matter, does he give us any way of knowing what "better" might mean.
disciplines. And so

738

Kritik Answers

No Link
PROPOSING REFORMS DOESNT LEGITIMIZE THE STATE
Frost, University of Kent, Mervyn, 96, Ethics in International Relations, p. 90-1)
A first objection which seems inherent in Donelans approach is that utilizing the modern state domain of discourse in effect sanctifies the
state: it assumes that people will always live in states and that it is not possible within such a language to consider alternatives to the

by having recourse to the ordinary language of

international relations I am not thereby committed to argue that the state
system as it exists is the best mode of human political organization or that people
ought always to live in states as we know them. As I have said, my argument is that whatever
proposals for piecemeal or large-scale reform of the state system are made,
they must of necessity be made in the language of the modern state.
Whatever proposals are made, whether in justification or in criticism of the
state system, will have to make use of concepts which are at present part
and parcel of the theory of states. Thus, for example any proposal for a new global
institutional arrangement superseding the state system will itself have to be
justified, and that justification will have to include within it reference to a
new and good form of individual citizenship, reference to a new legislative machinery
equipped with satisfactory checks and balances, reference to satisfactory law enforcement procedures, reference to a
satisfactory arrangement for distributing the goods produced in the world, and so on. All of these notions are notions which have
been developed and finely honed within the theory of the modern state. It is not possible to imagine a
justification of a new world order succeeding which used, for example, feudal, or
traditional/tribal, discourse. More generally there is no worldwide language of political morality which is not completely shot
system. This objection is not well founded,

through with state-related notions such as citizenship, rights under law, representative government and so on.

739

Kritik Answers

No Alternative
THE NEGATIVES PROBLEMATIZING OF STATE IDENTITY
HAS NO ALTERNATIVE
Cole, professor of History @ Univ of Michigan, 95

(Juan R. I. Feature Review: Power, Knowledge, and Orientalism Diplomatic History Vol.
19 No. 3 Summer)
In short, Campbells imaginative and innovative approach places the politics of identity at
the very core of U.S. Foreign Policy. Nevertheless, this reviewer must express a few doubts
about his inflection of poststructuralist principles and Possibilities. Even if the struggle
over identity formed the core of contemporary politics on the national and
international levels, the crisis of politics could not be reduced to the crisis of
representation. As much as we learn from Writing Security about the production of
identity, as little do we learn about the reconstitution of politics. Diplomats,
policymakers, industrialists, intellectuals, and social activists, to name but a few, enter the
arena of identity politics under conditions that are uneven and change over time.
Campbell, however, treats identity struggles, and the strategies of otherness and
particular forms of representation that go along with them, as having neither
origins nor agency and as being unaccountable to multiple patterns of causality
and specific historical moments. Some might argue that the omissions of the
question of agency and of conventional causal explanations are the very
trademarks of poststructuralism The lack of attention to historical details and
peculiarities, and to the nonprogressive movement of history through time,
however, is certainly not an inevitable price of poststructuralist analysis.
Campbells alternative to the realist notion of an essentialist and universalist
search for power is a universal and ahistorical search for identity and
differentiation from the Other. Images of the American frontier, for instance, have no
doubt a different purpose and significance in an emerging as opposed to a late capitalist
order. Furthermore, Campbells critique of state- and nation-centered politics is curiously at
odds with his focus on the American identity.20 Such a systemic approach toward the
history of identity struggles is perhaps natural to political science, but not to
poststructuralism. By claiming that an only vaguely specified2l poststructuralist
attitude sees theory w practice (emphasis in original) (p. i), Campbell takes a
shortcut and tends to deny any meaningful understanding of the mediation
between theory and practice, or between the discursive and the non-discursive.

740

Kritik Answers

A2 Borders: 2AC
SOVEREIGNTY IS NECESSARY FOR COALITIONS OF
RESISTANCE
Gupta 92

[Akhil, Prof. Anthro @ Stanford, Cultural Anthropology 7(1), JSTOR//uwyo-ajl]

Second, just as formal equality of citizens in the nation-state often constitutionally
enshrined (Andersons deep horizontal comradeship), so the equality of nation-states in
the world system is given concrete expression the charter and functioning of international
organizations such as the United Nations. The independence of third world countries,
dependent as it is on the international order of the United Nations, thus redirects spatial
identity from the nation at the same time that it produces it.
Last, independence from colonial rule made it imperative for postcolonial third world
nation-states to examine the nature and meaning of sovereignty. They soon realized that the
independence they had fought so hard to obtain could not be sustained under the pressure
exerted by the superpowers to incorporate them into clientistic relationships. The only way
to resist this pressure was to band together and form a common front and to use this union
strategically to prevent absorption into either bloc. Sovereignty not only depends on the
protection of spatial borders, but it is above all the ability of state elites to regulate activities
that flow across those borders, such as the crossing of commodities and surpluses, the
passage of people in the form of labor, tourists, et cetera, and the movement of cultural
products and ideas. It is significant that the agenda of successive meetings of nonaligned
nations moved from an initial emphasis on the Cold War and colonialism to questions of
imperialism, unequal trading relationships, and the new information order. It was realized
that economic dependence, indebtedness, and cultural imperialism were as great, if not
greater, dangers to sovereignty as was military invasion. The Nonaligned Movement thus
represented an effort on the part of economically and militarily weaker nations to use the
interstate system to consolidate the nation-state.

741

Kritik Answers

**Terror Talk**
Terror Talk Answers: 2AC (1/5)
FIRST, NO LINK WE DONT SAY THAT TERROR IS
INTRINSICALLY CONNECTED TO ISLAM, WHICH IS WHAT
THEIR EV DESCRIBES. ALL INTENTIONAL KILLING OF
INNOCENTS IS BAD
SECOND, NO IMPACT - RHETORIC DOESNT SHAPE REALITY
Fram-Cohen 85

[Michelle, Reality, Language, Translation: What Makes Translation Possible? American Translators Association Conference,
enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/michelleframcohen//possibilityoftranslation.html, 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl]
Nida did not provide the philosophical basis of the view that the external world is the common source of all languages. Such a basis can be found in the philosophy of

reality is independent of
consciousness, consciousness being the means of perceiving ?reality, not of creating it . Rand
Objectivism, originated by Ayn Rand. Objectivism, as its name implies, upholds the objectivity of reality. This means that

defines language as "a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote concepts." (15) These symbols are the written or spoken words of any language. Concepts are
defined as the "mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted." (16) This
means that concepts are abstractions of units perceived in reality. Since words denote concepts, words are the symbols of such abstractions; words are the means of

Since reality provides the data from which we abstract and form
concepts, reality is the source of all words --and of all languages. The very existence of translation demonstrates
this fact. If there was no objective reality, there could be no similar concepts expressed in
different verbal symbols. There could be no similarity between the content of different languages, and so, no translation.
representing concepts in a language.

Translation is the transfer of conceptual knowledge from one language into another. It is the transfer of one set of symbols denoting concepts into another set of

This process is possible because concepts have specific referents in

reality. Even if a certain word and the concept it designates exist in one language but not in another, the referent this word and concept stand for nevertheless
symbols denoting the same concepts.

exists in reality, and can be referred to in translation by a descriptive phrase or neologism. Language is a means describing reality, and as such can and should expand
to include newly discovered or innovated objects in reality. The revival of the ancient Hebrew language in the late 19th Century demonstrated the dependence of
language on outward reality. Those who wanted to use Hebrew had to innovate an enormous number of words in order to describe the new objects that did not
confront the ancient Hebrew speakers. On the other hand, those objects that existed 2000 years ago could be referred to by the same words. Ancient Hebrew could not
by itself provide a sufficient image of modern reality for modern users.

THIRD, TURN: TERRORIST DISCOURSE PREVENTS

DEVOLUTION INTO MORAL NIHILISM
Jean Berthke Elshtain, Professor, Social and Political Ethics, University of Chicago,THINKING
ABOUT SEPTEMBER 11: DEFINING TERRORISM AND TERRORISTS, 2003, p. 19-20.
This line of reasoning pertains directly to how we talk about terror and terrorists. Just as the words martyr and martyrdom are distorted, whether in the Western or
the Islamic tradition, when applied not to those prepared to die as witnesses to their faith but instead to those who commit suicide while killing as many civilians as
possible. So terrorist is twisted beyond recognition if it is used to designate anyone anywhere fighting for a cause. Terrorists are those who kill people they consider

Terrorist and terrorism entered ordinary

language to designate a specific phenomenon: killing directed against all ideological enemies
indiscriminately and outside the context of a war between combatants. According to the logic of terrorism, enemies can legitimately
be killed no matter what they are doing, where they are, or how old they are. The word terror first entered the political vocabulary of
their "objective enemy," no matter what those people may or may not have done.

the West during the French Revolution. Those who guillotined thousands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris were pleased to speak of revolutionary terror as a form

a complex, subtle, and generally accepted international language

has emerged to make critical distinctions between different kinds of violent acts.
Combatants are distinguished from noncombatants. A massacre is different from a battle. An ambush is different from a
firefight. When Americans look back with sadness and even shame at the Vietnam War, it is
horrors like the My Lai massacre they have in mind. Those who called the slaughter of more than 400 unarmed men,
of justice. Since the era of the French Revolution,

women, and children a battle were regarded as having taken leave of their senses, perhaps because they were so determined to justify anything that Americans did in

Terror subjects its victims or would-be victims to

paralyzing fear. In the words of the political theorist Michael Walzer, terrorisms "purpose is to destroy the morale of a nation or a class, to undercut its
the Vietnam War that they had lost their moral moorings.2 A terrorist is one who sows terror.

solidarity; [terrorisms] method is the random murder of innocent people. Randomness is the crucial feature of terrorist activity. If one wishes fear to spread and
intensify over time, it is not desirable to kill specific people identified in some particular way with a regime, a party, or a policy. Death must come by chance."3

The reference is not to moral innocence, for none among us are innocent in
but to our inability to defend ourselves from murderous attacks as we go to work,

Terrorism is "the random murder of innocent people."

that way,
take a
trip, shop, or ride a bus. In other words, civilians are not combatants. The designation of terrorism becomes contested because terrorists and their apologists would
prefer not to be depicted accurately. It is important to distinguish between two cases here. In some hotly contested political situations, it may be in the interest of one
side to try to label its opponents as "terrorists" rather than "combatants" or "soldiers" or "fighters." We must ask who such men (and women) are attacking. Do they
target soldiers at outposts or in the field? Do they try to disable military equipment, killing soldiers in the process? As they carry out such operations, are they open to
negotiation and diplomacy? If so, it seems reasonable to resist a blanket label of "terrorism" for what they are up to. In a situation in which noncombatants are

using terms like "fighter" or "soldier" or

collapses the distance between those who plant
bombs in cafs or fly civilian aircraft into office buildings and those who fight other
combatants, taking the risks attendant upon military forms of fighting. There is a nihilistic edge to terrorism: It aims to destroy, most often in the service of
deliberately targeted and the murder of the maximum number of noncombatants is the explicit aim,
"noble warrior" is not only beside the point but pernicious. Such language

wild and utopian goals that make no sense at all in the usual political ways. The distinction between terrorism, domestic criminality, and what we might call "normal"
or "legitimate" war is vital to observe. It helps us to assess what is happening when force is used. This distinction, marked in historic, moral, and political discourses
about war and in the norms of international law, seems lost on those who call the attacks of September 11 acts of "mass murder" rather than terrorism and an act of
war under international law. It is thus both strange and disheartening to read the words of those distinction-obliterators for whom, crudely, a dead body is a dead
body and never mind how it got that way. Many of these same individuals would, of course, protest vehemently, and correctly, were commentators, critics, and

742

Kritik Answers
political actors to fail to distinguish between the great world religion that is Islam and the terrorists who perpetrated the events of September 11. One cannot have it
both ways, however, by insisting on the distinctions one likes and heaping scorn on those who put pressure on ones own ideological and political commitments. If we

if we
cannot distinguish the killing of combatants from the intended targeting of peaceable
civilians and the deliberate and indiscriminate sowing of terror among civilians, we live in a
world of moral nihilism. In such a world, everything reduces to the same shade of gray and we cannot make distinctions that help us take our
could not distinguish between a death resulting from a car accident and an intentional murder, our criminal justice system would fall apart. And

political and moral bearings. The victims of September 11 deserve more from us.

Terror Talk Answers: 2AC (2/5)

FOURTH, LANGUAGE DOESNT HAVE A DETERMINATE
EFFECT WORDS ARE EMPTY ABSENT CONTEXT, MEANING
OUR RHETORIC CAN BE READ IN A HETERODOX MANNER
TO CHALLENGE VIOLENCE
FIFTH, PERM DO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE
REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE DOESNT PRECLUDE THE
NEED FOR CONCRETE ACTION
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, Truth, Politics, and Postmodernism,
Spinoza Lectures, 1997, p. 51-2
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very
important meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida

the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the writers who are
post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good experimentalist social
democrats when it comes to actual political activity. I suspect, for example, that Gray, Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found
usually replies that
labeled `

ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist philosophers have gotten a bad
name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like `impossible; `self-contradictory' and `unrepresentable'. They have helped
create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more generally, to the `metaphysics of

I am all for getting rid of

the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and unrepresentability is
counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the metaphor of things being accurately
presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible.

represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for philosophers, and we would be better
off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate representation' was never a fruitful way

Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls "a full presence
beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity will not have
changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from psychoanalysis. All that we
to describe intellectual progress.

have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss which the Enlightenment

We have been given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress has been
made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political program. Since Darwin we have come to suspect that whether
such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky .
offered.

SIXTH, CRITICISM OF TERROR RHETORIC RENATURALIZES

ITS CAUSES, INSTILLING POWERLESSNESS
Rodwell 2005

[Jonathan, PhD Cand. @ Manchester Metropolitan University, Trendy But Empty: A

Response to Richard Jackson, 49th Parallel, Spring,
www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/rodwell1.htm, 9-23-06//uwyo-ajl]
The larger problem is that without clear causal links between materially identifiable events
and factors any assessment within the argument actually becomes nonsensical. Mirroring
the early inability to criticise, if we have no traditional causational discussion how can we
know what is happening? For example, Jackson details how the rhetoric of anti-terrorism
and fear is obfuscating the real problems. It is proposed that the real world killers are not
terrorism, but disease or illegal drugs or environmental issues. The problem is how do we
know this? It seems we know this because there is evidence that illustrates as much
Jackson himself quoting to Dr David King who argued global warming is a greater that than
terrorism. The only problem of course is that discourse analysis has established (as argued
by Jackson) that Kings argument would just be self-contained discourse designed to
naturalise another arguments for his own reasons. Ultimately it would be no more valid than
the argument that excessive consumption of Sugar Puffs is the real global threat. It is worth

743

Kritik Answers
repeating that I dont personally believe global terrorism is the worlds primary threat, nor
do I believe that Sugar Puffs are a global killer. But without the ability to identify real facts
about the world we can simply say anything, or we can say nothing.

744

Kritik Answers

Terror Talk Answers: 2AC (3/5)

SEVENTH, CRITIQUES OF SPEECH PRODUCES A
REACTIONARY POLITICS IN WHICH CHANGE IS FOCUSED
ON LANGUAGE DIRECTLY TRADING OFF WITH EFFORTS TO
REFORM THE SOCIOECONOMIC ROOT CAUSES OF
INJUSTICE
Brown, Professor Political Science UC Berkeley, 2K1
(Wendy, Politics Out of History, pg. 35-37)

hate speech
regulations, and the debates about them, usurp the discursive space in which one might have
offered a substantive political response to bigoted epithets, his point also applies to prohibitions against questioning from within
selected political practices or institutions. But turning political questions into moralistic ones as speech codes of any sort do
not only prohibits certain questions and mandates certain genuflections, it also expresses a
profound hostility toward political life insofar as it seeks to preempt argument with a legis lated and enforced truth. And the realization of that patently undemocratic desire can only and always convert emancipatory aspirations into
Speech codes kill critique, Henry Louis Gates remarked in a 1993 essay on hate speech.14 Although Gates was referring to what happens when

reactionary ones. Indeed, it insulates those aspirations from questioning at the very moment that Weberian forces of rationalization and bureaucratization are quite
likely to be domesticating them from another direction. Here we greet a persistent political paradox: the moralistic defense of critical practices, or of any besieged
identity, weakens what it strives to fortify precisely by sequestering those practices from the kind of critical inquiry out of which they were born. Thus Gates might

identity-based institutions, born of

social critique, invariably become conservative as they are forced to essentialize the identity
and naturalize the boundaries of what they once grasped as a contingent effect of histori cally specific
social powers.
But moralistic reproaches to certain kinds of speech or argument kill critique not only by displacing it with
arguments about abstract rights versus identity-bound injuries, but also by configuring political injustice and political righteousness as a
problem of remarks, attitude, and speech rather than as a matter of historical, political-economic, and
cultural formations of power. Rather than offering analytically substantive accounts of the forces of injustice or injury, they condemn the
have said, Speech codes, born of social critique, kill critique. And, we might add, contemporary

manifestation of these forces in particular remarks or events. There is, in the inclination to ban (formally or informally) certain utterances and to mandate others, a
politics of rhetoric and gesture that itself symptomizes despair over effecting change at more significant levels. As vast quantities of left and liberal attention go to
determining what socially marked individuals say, how they are represented, and how many of each kind appear in certain institutions or are appointed to various
commissions

, the sources that generate racism, poverty, violence against women, and other elements of social injustice remain
unaddressed

relatively unarticulated and

. We are lost as how to address those sources; but rather than examine this loss or disorientation, rather than bear
the humiliation of our impotence, we posture as if we were still fighting the big and good fight in our clamor over words and names. Dont mourn, moralize.

EIGHTH, REJECTING DISCOURSE DOES NOTHING AND

LEAVES ATTITUDES UNCHANGED.
Kelly, 12/98

Peace Review

One might ask, in "listening" to violent language and to the people who use it, whether we are actually condoning such language. This is far from the case. To listen is

When I listen to a person who, for example, uses sexist language, I am not lending
my approval to sexist language. Instead, what I am saying is that the person behind the
language, and my desire to make a connection with that person, are more important than
the sexist language. If I refuse to listen to the person who uses sexist language, then I might
prevent one particular case where sexist language is used. But I do nothing to overcome the
person's sexist attitudes. She will continue to use sexist language long after I am out of sight. But if I give her a voice, if I show her respect, if I try
not to pass judgment.

to take her seriously as a person, then In the future pershapes she will be more apt to take what I say about sexism seriously. If she knows that sexist language bothers
me, then perhaps she will be less likely to use it around me.

745

Kritik Answers

Terror Talk Answers: 2AC (4/5)

NINTH, LABEL POLITICS MISIDENTIFY THE CAUSE OF
PREJUDICE IN AGGRESSIVITY, SO THE NEW SYMBOL FILLS
IN THE SAME ROLL
APPROPRIATIONS OF OLD LABELS RECONCEIVE THEIR
MEANING
Zizek 97
[Slavoj, Moving away from the darkness, The Plague of Fantasies, New York: Verso, 1997, 111-2//uwyoajl]
In his formidable Fear in the Occident,7 Jean Delumeau draws attention to the unerring succession of atutudes in a medieval city infested by plague: first, people
ignore it and behave as if nothing terrible is really going on; then they withdraw into privacy, avoiding contact with each other; then they start to resort to religious
fervour, staging processions, confessing their sins, and so on; then they say to themselves 'What the hell, let's enjoy it while it lasts!', and indulge passionately in orgies
of sex, eating, drinking and dancing; finally, they return to life as usual, and again behave as if nothing terrible is going on. However, this second 'life as usual' does not
occupy the same structural role as the first: it is, as it were, located on the other side of the Moebius band, since it no longtt signals the desperate attempt to ignore the

Does not the same go for the gradual

replacement of (sexually, racially...) aggressive with more 'correct' expressions, like the
chain nigger - Negro - black - African American or crippled - disabled - bodily challenged? This replacement
functions as a metaphorical substitution which potentially proliferate and enhances the very
(racist, etc.) effect it tries to banish, adding insult to injury. In analogy to Delumeau, one should therefore claim
that the only way actually to abolish the hatred-effect is, paradoxically, to create the
circumstances in which one can return to the first link in the chain and use it in a nonaggressive way -like following the patterns of 'life as usual' the second time in the case of plague. That is to say: as long as the
expression 'crippled' contains a surplus, an indelible mark, of aggressivity this surplus will
not only be more or less automatically transferred on to any of its 'correct' metaphorical
substitutes, it will even be enhanced by dint of this substitution. The strategy of returning to
the first link, of course, is risky; however, the moment it is fully accepted by the group
targeted by it, it definitely can work. When radical African-Americans call each other 'niggers', it is wrong to dismiss this strategy as a
mere ironic identification with the aggressor; rather, the point is that it functions as an autonomous act of dismissing the aggressive sting .
reality of plague, but, rather its exact opposite: resigned acceptance of it . . . .

TENTH, SPEAKING ERRORS ARE INEVITABLE AND GOOD

BECAUSE THEY PROVIDE A LOCUS FOR CONSTANT
CRITICISM, SOMETHING THE NEG BY ITSELF PRECLUDES
Alcoff 92

[Linda, Prof. of Feminist Studies at the University of Syracuse, The Problem of Speaking for
Others, Cultural Critique, Winter 91-2, 22//uwyo]
it is both morally and politically objectionable to structure ones actions around the
desire to avoid criticism, especially if this outweighs other questions of effectivity. In some cases perhaps the motivation is not so much to avoid
criticism as to avoid errors, and the person believes that the only way to avoid errors is to avoid all speaking for others. However , errors are
unavoidable in the theoretical inquiry as well as political struggle, and moreover they
often make contributions. The desire to find an absolute means to avoid making errors
comes perhaps not from a desire to advance collective goals but a desire for personal
mastery, to establish a privileged discursive posotion wherein one cannot be undermined or challenged and thus is master
of the situation. From such a position ones own location and positionality would not require
constant interrogation and critial reflection ; one would not hae to constantly engage
in this emotionally troublesome endeavor and would be immune from the interrogaton of
others. Such a desire of rmastery and immunity must be resisted.
But surely

746

Kritik Answers

Terror Talk Answers: 2AC (5/5)

ELEVENTH, COUNTERSPEECH SOLVES BETTER THAN
CENSORSHIP
Calleros 95

[Charles R., Prof. of Law @ ASU, Paternalism, Counterspeech, and Campus Hate-Speech
Codes: A Reply to Delgado and Yun, 27 Ariz. St. L.J. 1249, Winter, LN//uwyo-ajl]
The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of speech, just not
the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary sanctions as a form of
empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert enough to catch his verbal hardball
and throw it back with ten times the force.
Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of offensive speech
is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is conceded by Delgado and Yun. In
both of the cases described above, the targets of hateful speech were supported by a
community united against bigotry. The community avoided splitting into factions because
the universities eliminated the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful
speakers were protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the
bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top administrators to
develop standards for, and some limitations on, their participation in such partisan speech.
n72
Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely
because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most
universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of
tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to
speak out [*1262] against intolerance when it is isolated as an issue rather than diluted in
muddied waters along with concerns of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations
of Martin Luther King, Jr., depended partly for their success on the consciences of the
national and international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their
television sets and in the print media, n73 the empowerment of the targets of hateful speech
rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community who sympathize with them.
One can hope that the counterspeech and educational measures used with success at A.S.U.
and Stanford stand a good chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual
inquiry at any campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate.

TWELFTH, THE CRITICISM ASSUMES STABLE SPEECH ACTS,

PREVENTING US FROM TAKING BACK HURTFUL WORDS
AND COLLAPSING INTO A JURIDICAL MODEL OF STABLE
SUBJECTIVITY THAT KILLS ACTIVISM
Judith Butler, Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley, Performativity and
Performance, Ed. Parker and Sedgwick, 1995, p. 204
That words wound seems incontestably true, and that hateful, racist, misogynist,
homophobic speech should be vehemently countered seems incontrovertibly right. But does
understanding from where speech derives its power to wound alter our conception of what it
might mean to counter that wounding power? Do we accept the notion that injurious speech
is attributable to a singular subject and act? If we accept such a juridical constraint on
thought - the grammatical requirements of accountability - as a point of departure, what is
lost from the political analysis of injury when the discourse of politics becomes fully reduced
to juridical requirements?? Indeed, when political discourse is collapsed into juridical
discourse, the meaning of political opposition runs the risk of being reduced to the act of
prosecution. How is the analysis of the discursive historicity of power unwittingly restricted
when the subject is presumed as the point of departure for such an analysis? A clearly
theological construction, the postulation of the subject as the causal origin of the
performative act is understood to generate that which it names; indeed, this divinely
empowered subject is one for whom the name itself is generative.

747

Kritik Answers

748

Kritik Answers

Terror Discourse Good: 1AR

MORAL CONDEMNATIONS OF TERRORISM IS APPROPRIATE
Robert Phillips, Director of the Program for War and Ethics, University of Connecticut,
TERRORISM,
PROTEST AND POWER, Martin Warner and Roger Crisp, eds., 1990, p. 68-9.
Moral denunciations of terrorism are appropriate and mandatory. Terrorist acts are
profoundly immoral and, in addition, tend not to be the short cut which their practitioners
advertise. One has only to look at the areas of the world where terror has held sway to see
that violence is typically prolonged, sometimes indefinitely. The reason for this is not
difficult to discern. Each side comes to perceive the other as 'criminal' and thus as beyond
the pale of civilized negotiation.

749

Kritik Answers

Counterspeech Solves: 1AR

COUNTERSPEECH SOLVES BEST
Strossen 2001

[Nadine, Pres. ACLU & Prof. Law @ NYU, Incitement to Hatred: Should There Be a Limit?
25 S. Ill. U.L.J. 243, Winter, LN//uwyo-ajl]
The viewpoint-neutrality principle reflects the philosophy, first stated in pathbreaking
opinions by former United States Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis
Brandeis, that the appropriate response to speech with which one disagrees in a free society
is not censorship but counterspeech-more speech, not less. Persuasion, not coercion, is the
solution. n38 Accordingly, the appropriate response to hate speech is not to censor it, but to
answer it. Recall, as I discussed earlier, that this is the strategy that the Anti-Defamation
League has been pursuing so effectively in response to Internet hate speech. [*255]
This counterspeech strategy is better than censorship not only in principle, butalso from a
practical perspective. That is because of the potentially empoweringexperience of
responding to hate speech with counterspeech. I say "potentially,"since I realize that the
pain, anger and other negative emotions provoked by being the target of hate speech could
well have an incapacitating effect on some targeted individuals, preventing them from
engaging in counterspeech. Even in such a situation, though, other members of the
community who are outraged by the hate speech could engage in counterspeech, and that is
likely to have a more positive impact than a censorial response. Furthermore, once other
community members denounce the hate speech, it should be easier for the target to join
them in doing so.

750

Kritik Answers

**Threat Construction**
Threat Construction Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, NO LINK PLAN DOESNT OVERTLY IDENTIFY ANY
NATION AS A THREAT IT ONLY ENDS EXECUTIVE
DETAINMENT, MEANING THERES NO RISK OF
CONSTRUCTING A THREAT
SECOND, THE ENEMY IMAGE DETERS INSTEAD OF
PROVOKING ATTACK, CIRCUMVENTING ANY RISK OF AN
IMPACT
Hermann 95

[Richard, Prof. Poli Sci @ Ohio State, International Organization, Summer, 431//uwyo]
The logic behind the association of particular strategies with particular images is grounded
in the dimensions and attributes of each image. For example, if an actor perceives a target as
an enemy, it perceives the target as a powerful, aggressive threatening actor that constantly
probes for weakness in its efforts to expand its influence in the international system. Since
the perceivers primary interests are threatened by the perceived revisionist motivation of
the target, the perceiver will seek to bridle the targets expansionist designs. It will not
cooperate with the target in any substantial way since it perceives that the target would take
advantage of cooperative initiatives. Furthermore, it will not directly attack the target
because it perceives it as having a capability base similar to its own. This suggests a cautious,
resisting strategy to counter the probes of the target.

THIRD, MULTILAT SOLVES BY ALLOWING US TO ADDRESS

PROBLEMS WITH INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION,
SOLVING BAD FORMS OF VIOLENCE. CROSS-APPLY NYE
FOURTH, HISTORY IS ON OUR SIDE. WE CONSTRUCTED THE
USSR AS AN ENEMY FOR OVER HALF A CENTURY, BUT
DETERRENCE AND SELF-INTEREST PREVENTED CONFLICT
FIFTH, WAR AND VIOLENCE ARE ENDEMIC TO IR POLITICS,
MOVING AWAY WILL INEVITABLY RESULT IN GREAT
POWER WARS
MEARSHEIMER 2001

[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the
Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg xi-xii. )
The twentieth century was a period of great international violence.In World
War I (1914-18), roughly nine million people died on European battlefields. About fifty million people were killed duringWorld War 11(1939-45), well
over half of them civilians. Soon after the end of World War II, the Cold War engulfed the globe. During this con-frontation, the Soviet Union and its
Warsaw Pact allies never directly fought the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies,but many millions died in proxy wars in
Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Millions also died in the century's lesser, yet still fierce, wars, including
the Russo-Japanese con-flicts of 1904-5 and 1939, the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1920, the Russo-Polish War of 1920-

Hopes
for peace will probably not be realized, because the great powers that
shape the international system fear each other and compete for power
as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant
power over others, because having dominant power is the best means
to ensure one's own survival. Strength ensures safety, and the greatest
strength is the greatest insurance of safety. States facing this incentive are fated to clash as each
21, the various Arab-Israeli wars, and the han-Iraq War of 1980-88. This cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium.

751

Kritik Answers
. This is a tragic situation, but there is no escaping it
, so
conflict and war are bound to continue as large and enduring features
of world politics.
competes for advantage over the others

unless the states that make up the system agree to form a world government. Such a vast transformation is hardly a realistic prospect, however

752

Kritik Answers

Threat Construction Answers: 2AC

(2/3)
SIXTH, PERM DO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE
REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE DOESNT PRECLUDE THE
NEED FOR CONCRETE ACTION
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, Truth, Politics, and Postmodernism,
Spinoza Lectures, 1997, p. 51-2
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very
important meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida

the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the writers who are
post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good experimentalist social
democrats when it comes to actual political activity. I suspect, for example, that Gray, Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found
usually replies that
labeled `

ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist philosophers have gotten a bad
name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like `impossible; `self-contradictory' and `unrepresentable'. They have helped
create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more generally, to the `metaphysics of

I am all for getting rid of

the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and unrepresentability is
counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the metaphor of things being accurately
presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible.

represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for philosophers, and we would be better
off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate representation' was never a fruitful way

Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls "a full presence
beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity will not have
changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from psychoanalysis. All that we
to describe intellectual progress.

have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss which the Enlightenment

We have been given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress has been
made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political program. Since Darwin we have come to suspect that whether
such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky .
offered.

SEVENTH, OUR ENGAGEMENT IN SCENARISM OVERCOMES

THE TRAP OF THREAT CONSTRUCTION WE AVOID THE
ILLUSION OF CERTAINTY IN IDENTIFYING FUTURE
THREATS, AND INSTEAD USE SCENARIOS TO CRITICALLY
EXAMINE POSSIBLE OUTCOMES TO DETERMINE THE BEST
COURSE OF ACTION. THE OTHER TEAMS REFUSAL TO
ENGAGE IN THIS PROCESS ONLY REINFORCES THE
PRACTICE OF SHALLOW RISK ANALYSIS.
P.H. Liotta, Jerome E. Levy Cahir, Economic Geography and National Security, Naval War College

and Timothy E. Somes, Professor Emeritus, The Art of Perceiving Scenarios and the Future,
NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW v. 56 n. 4, Autumn 2003,
http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2003/Autumn/cy1-a03.htm.

, the scenarios we are talking about are not the limited threat-based planning scenarios
common in defense planning. Threat-based scenarios, generally based on assessments of current or postulated threats or
enemy capabilities, determine only the amount and types of force needed to defeat an adversary.
(Similarly, capabilities-based planning seeks to avoid the perceived limits of threat-derived scenarios.)6 In contrast, the scenarios we want
to consider should look well beyond current evaluations of threats. If future military force
capabilities are derived from the kind of scenarios we are discussing, they must encompass
the full range of possibilities, with a commensurate weighing of benefits, costs, and risks.
Accomplishing this is a difficult but essential challenge, if decision makers are to come to
any informed, perceptive conclusions for the future. In Wacks words, Scenarios serve two purposes. The first is protective
Finally

anticipating and understanding risk. The second is entrepreneurialdiscovering strategic options of which one was previously unaware.7 Often, and probably

, decision makers prefer the illusion of certainty to understanding risk and realities. But
the scenario builder and analyst should strive to shatter the decision makers confidence in
his or her ability to look ahead with certainty at the future. Scenarios should allow a decision
naturally

753

Kritik Answers
maker to say, I am prepared for whatever happens, because we have thought through
complex choices with a knowledgeable sense of risk and reward. 8

754

Kritik Answers

Threat Construciton Answers: 2AC

(3/3)
EIGHTH, NO IMPACT - RHETORIC DOESNT SHAPE REALITY
Fram-Cohen 85
[Michelle, Reality, Language, Translation: What Makes Translation Possible? American Translators Association Conference,
enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/michelleframcohen//possibilityoftranslation.html, 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl]
Nida did not provide the philosophical basis of the view that the external world is the common source of all languages. Such a basis can be found in the philosophy of

reality is independent of
consciousness, consciousness being the means of perceiving ?reality, not of creating it . Rand
Objectivism, originated by Ayn Rand. Objectivism, as its name implies, upholds the objectivity of reality. This means that

defines language as "a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote concepts." (15) These symbols are the written or spoken words of any language. Concepts are
defined as the "mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted." (16) This
means that concepts are abstractions of units perceived in reality. Since words denote concepts, words are the symbols of such abstractions; words are the means of

Since reality provides the data from which we abstract and form
concepts, reality is the source of all words --and of all languages. The very existence of translation demonstrates
this fact. If there was no objective reality, there could be no similar concepts expressed in
different verbal symbols. There could be no similarity between the content of different languages, and so, no translation.
representing concepts in a language.

Translation is the transfer of conceptual knowledge from one language into another. It is the transfer of one set of symbols denoting concepts into another set of

This process is possible because concepts have specific referents in

reality. Even if a certain word and the concept it designates exist in one language but not in another, the referent this word and concept stand for nevertheless
symbols denoting the same concepts.

exists in reality, and can be referred to in translation by a descriptive phrase or neologism. Language is a means describing reality, and as such can and should expand
to include newly discovered or innovated objects in reality. The revival of the ancient Hebrew language in the late 19th Century demonstrated the dependence of
language on outward reality. Those who wanted to use Hebrew had to innovate an enormous number of words in order to describe the new objects that did not
confront the ancient Hebrew speakers. On the other hand, those objects that existed 2000 years ago could be referred to by the same words. Ancient Hebrew could not
by itself provide a sufficient image of modern reality for modern users.

NINTH, PREFER OUR EV THEIR K IS UTOPIAN THEORY

WITH ZERO GROUNDING IN PRAXIS OR CONSEQUENCE
Mearsheimer 95

[John, Prof. Poli Sci @ Chicago, International Security, Winter, 38//uwyo]

, critical theory per se has little to say about the future shape of international
politics. In fact, critical theory emphasizes that, It is impossible to predict the future. Robert Cox explains this point: Critical awareness of
potentiality for change must be distinguished from utopian planning, i.e. the laying out of the design of a
future society that is to be the end goal of change. Critical understanding focuses on the process of change rather
than on its ends; it concentrates on the possibilities of launching a social movement rather than on what that movement might achieve. Nevertheless,
international relations scholars who use critical theory to challenge and subvert realism certainly
expect to create a more harmonious and peaceful international system. But the theory itself
says little about either the desirability or feasibility of achieving that particular end.
Very significantly, however

755

Kritik Answers

#2 Threat Rhetoric Deters War: 1AR

NEGLECTING SECURITY AND DETERRENCE CAUSES WAR
Doran 99

[Charles, Prof. IR @ John Hopkins, Survival, Summer, 148-9//uwyo]

And by neglecting the underlying problem of security, the probability of war perversely
increases: as governments fail to provide the kind of defence and security necessary to
maintain deterrence, one opens up the possibility of new challenges. In this regard it is
worth recalling one of Clauswitzs most important insights: A conqueror is always a lover of
peace. He would like to make his entry into our state unopposed. That is the underlying
dilemma when one argues that a major war is not likely to occur and, as a consequence, on
need not necessarily be so concerned about providing the defences that underlie security
itself. History shows that surprise threats emerge and rapidly destabilising efforts are made
to try to provide that missing defence, and all of this contributes to the spiral of uncertainty
that leads in the end to war.

WORLD WAR II PROVES ITS BETTER TO BELIEVE IN

THREATS THAN IGNORE THEM AND RISK WAR
Thompson 85
[Kenneth, Prof. poli sci @ Virginia, Moralism and morality in politics and diplomacy, 1985,
130//uwyo]

We need also to recall that the failures leading up to World War II were not alone failures of
military preparation and military action. They were also political failures, as Arnold Wolfers
and Hans J. Morgenthau pointed out, of the allies and of France and Britain in particular, to
concert their foreign policies and present any kind of united, consistent and coherent
opposition which carried weight with Hitler, rather than tempting him with the disunity of
the West.

756

Kritik Answers

#5 Realism Inevitable: 1AR

POWER IS ZERO SUM THE ALTERNATIVE ONLY SHIFTS
POWER ELSEWHERE
John Mearsheimer, Professor at University of Chicago, 2001 (The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics p. 34)
Consequently, states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special
effort to maximize their share of world power. Specifically, they look for opportunities to alter the

balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential

rivals. States employ a variety of meanseconomic, diplomatic, and militaryto shift the balance of power in
their favor, even if doing so makes other states suspicious or even hostile. Because one states gain in
power is another states loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing
with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other
states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states
are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to survive. In
short, great powers have aggressive intentions.

757

Kritik Answers

#7 Scenario Analysis Good: 1AR (1/3)

OUR SCENARIOS ARE NOT FALSE CONSTRUCTION OF
THREATS BUT RATHER AN EXAMINATION OF CRITICAL
UNCERTAINTIES WHICH IS VITAL IN MAKING
RESPONSIBLE POLICY DECISIONS.
P.H. Liotta, Jerome E. Levy Cahir, Economic Geography and National Security, Naval War College

and Timothy E. Somes, Professor Emeritus, The Art of Perceiving Scenarios and the Future,
NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW v. 56 n. 4, Autumn 2003,
http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2003/Autumn/cy1-a03.htm.
Scenarios structure the future into both predetermined and uncertain elements. Any good
scenario reading explores and seeks to comprehend these elements. Often, events that are
already in the pipeline, such as demographic shifts or energy dependency, bring
consequences that have yet to unfold, and these consequences may have immense impact.
Schwartz provides one example to illustrate the shortcomings of conventional forecasting
and trend analysis:
[Consider] the U.S. birthrate. In the early 1970s it hovered around 3 million births per
year; forecasters at the U.S. Census Bureau projected that this trend would continue
forever. Schools, which had been rushed into construction during the baby boom of the
fifties and early sixties, were now closed down and sold. Policymakers did not consider that
the birthrate might rise again suddenly. But a scenario might have considered the likelihood
that original baby boom children, reaching their late thirties, would suddenly have children
of their own. In 1979, the U.S. birthrate began to rise . . . in 1990 [it was] almost back to the
4 million of the fifties. Demographers also failed to anticipate that immigration would
accelerate. To keep up with demand, the state of California (which had been closing schools
in the late 1970s) . . . [had to] build a classroom every day for the next seven years. 16
Assessing and developing the two fundamentalspredetermined elements and critical
uncertaintieswhen building a scenario may be among the more valuable aspects of this
process, or at least on what strategic planners spend much of their time. Yet experience tells
us that many of our war college students, initially introduced to this art of scenario
reading, find of particular value the process of deciding what are predetermined elements,
as opposed to critical uncertainties. When we examine geostrategic regions, for example, we
may strive to recognize which elements of each region are predetermined, such as
geography, and which may be critical but uncertain identities, such as how the
predetermined importance of geography can be made less important, or even irrelevant,
by the uncertainty and influence of technology.

758

Kritik Answers

#7 Scenario Analysis Good: 1AR (2/3)

ENGAGING IN SCENARIOS ALLOWS US TO OVERCOME
UNDECIDABILITY BY LEADING THE DECISION MAKER TO
CHANGE THEIR FUNDAMENTAL PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY.
P.H. Liotta, Jerome E. Levy Cahir, Economic Geography and National Security, Naval War College

and Timothy E. Somes, Professor Emeritus, The Art of Perceiving Scenarios and the Future,
NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW v. 56 n. 4, Autumn 2003,
http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2003/Autumn/cy1-a03.htm.
The challenge for strategic planners is to help decision makers understand what the future
security environment might look like, to affect their perceptions, in essence, to help them
reperceive. Wack, who gained some fame as a strategic planner during the oil crises of the
1970s with his ability to get the senior executives in Shell Oil to understand what might
happen in the energy business, wrote in the Harvard Business Review some years later:
Scenarios deal with two worlds: the world of facts and the world of perceptions. They
explore the facts but they aim at perceptions inside the heads of decision makers. Their
purpose is to gather and transform information of strategic significance into fresh
perceptions. This transformation process is not trivialmore often than not it does not
happen. When it works, it is a creative experience that generates a heartfelt Aha! from
you . . . [decision makers] and leads to strategic insights beyond the minds previous reach. 3
In short, to think and act effectively in an uncertain world, people need to learn to
reperceiveto question their assumptions and their understanding about the way the world
works. By questioning those assumptions and rethinking the correct way to operate under
uncertainty, we often see the world more clearly than we otherwise would. Wack
summarized his goals as a strategic planner and developer of scenarios by stating:
I have found that getting to that [decision makers] Aha! is the real challenge of scenario
analysis. It does not simply leap at you when youve been presented all the possible
alternatives . . . . It happens when your message reaches the microcosms of decision makers,
obliges them to question their assumptions about how their . . . world works, and leads
them to change and reorganize their inner models of reality.

759

Kritik Answers

#7 Scenario Analysis Good: 1AR (3/3)

SCENARIOS LIKE THE 1AC ESCAPE THE TRAP OF
UNDECIDABILITY BY LEADING TO A CONSTANT REPERCEPTION OF THE FUTURE THROUGH EXAMINATION OF
CRITICAL UNCERTAINTIES. FAILURE TO EFFECTIVELY
ENGAGE IN SCENARIOS WILL LEAD TO FUTURE DISASTER.
P.H. Liotta, Jerome E. Levy Cahir, Economic Geography and National Security, Naval War College

and Timothy E. Somes, Professor Emeritus, The Art of Perceiving Scenarios and the Future,
NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW v. 56 n. 4, Autumn 2003,
http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2003/Autumn/cy1-a03.htm.
The relationship between driving forces, predetermined elements, and critical uncertainties
is complex, but important to understand, as we learn to read the flow of what is occurring
in useful scenarios. As Schwartz points out, I sometimes think of the relationship between
predetermined elements and critical uncertainties as a choreographed dance. You cannot
experience the dance just by knowing the sequence of steps. Each dancer will interpret them
differently, and add his or her unpredictable decisions. 19 In terms of national security and
defense, one cannot anticipate the nature of a war merely by looking at the military orders of
battle, even if you know your plans and those of the enemy. In the same fashion, by
developing scenarios oriented to a more distant future, the interrelationship between that
which is predetermined and that which is uncertain may be equally open to interpretation
and changing factors. Pierre Wack offers several thoughts with respect to the use of
scenarios as tools:
I have found that scenarios can effectively organize a variety of seemingly unrelated
economic, technological, competitive, political, and societal information and translate it into
a framework for judgmentin a way that no model could do. . . . Decision scenarios describe
different worlds, not just different outcomes in the same world. . . . You can test the value of
scenarios by asking two questions: (1) What do they leave out? In five to ten years . . .
[decision makers] must not be able to say that the scenarios did not warn of important
events that subsequently happened. (2) Do they lead to action? If scenarios do not push
managers to do something other than that indicated by past experience, they are nothing
more than interesting speculations.20
We are experiencing a world of dynamic change where even the most mind-numbing,
dramatic events do not impress us for long. Yet any good strategist and planner must be able
to help the nations leaders see more clearly the different futures that may occur. To operate
in an uncertain world, we need to reperceiveto question our assumptions about how the
world works, so that we see the world more clearly. The purpose of this is to help us make
better decisions about the future.
Perhaps one way to think about this is to obvert George Santayanas famous saying about
learning from history by changing our perception of things that are yet to come, by
suggesting that those who do not learn from the future are destined to make mistakes in it.
To be able to understand that future, we have to have a mental map flexible enough to
consider plausible alternatives and possibilities we might not otherwise consider.

760

Kritik Answers

#9 Prefer Our Args: 1AR

THE ALT CANT SOLVE ZERO EXPLANATION OF HOW
REALISM IS UNSEATED AS THE PRIMARY MODE OF
POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Mearsheimer 95

[John, Prof. Poli Sci @ Chicago, International Security, Winter, 91-2//uwyo]

The most revealing aspect of Wendts discussion is tha the did not respond to the two main
charges leveled against critical theory in False Promise. The first problem with critical
theory is that although the theory is deeply concerned with radically changing state
behavior, it says little about how change comes about. The theory does not tell us why
particular discourses becoem dominant and others fall by the wayside. Specifically, Wendt
does not explain why realism has been the dominant discourse in world politics for well over
a thousand years, although I explicitly raised this question in False Promise (p. 42).
Moreover, he sheds no light on why the time is ripe for unseating realism, nor on why
realism is likely to be replaced by a more peaceful, communitarian discourse, although I
explicitly raised both questions.

CRITICAL APPROACHES LACK STRUCTURAL

EXPLANATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Walt 91

[Stephen, Poli Sci @ Chicago, International Studies Quarterly, 1991, 223//uwyo]

In short, security studies must steer between the Scylla of political opportunism and the
Charybdis of academic irrelevance. What does this mean in practice? Among other things, it
means that security studies should remain wary of the counterproductive tangents that have
seduced other areas of international studies, most notably the postmodern approach to
international affairs (Ashley, 1984, Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989; Lapid, 1989). Contrary to
their proponents claims, post-modern approaches have yet to demonstrate much value for
comprehending world politics; to date, these works are mostly criticism and not much
theory. As Robert Keohane has noted, until these writers have delineated . . . a research
program and shown . . . that it can illuminate important issues in world politics, they will
remain on the margins of the field (Keohane, 1988:392). In particular, issues of war and
peace are too important for the filed to be diverted into a prolix and self-indulgent discourse
that is divorced from the real world.

761

Kritik Answers

Dillon Supports Acting Against

Terrorism
DILLON HAS ADVOCATED MORE EFFICIENT STATE
RESPONSES TO TERROR THREATS.
David Smith, Economics Editor of the Times of London, THE EDGE, March 2003,
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCContent/downloaddocs/EdgeMarch.pdf.
In the wake of 9/11, the ESRC has allocated more than 600,000 for three Research projects
examining the quality of Britains response to, and preparedness for, terrorist incidents. One
of those involved is the University of Lancasters Professor of Politics, Michael Dillon. What
we lack, he says, is a single relevant department of state like Americas Homeland Security.
We seem to take a very British view, its all about committees. (In Britain there are close to
50 agencies that would be involved in dealing with a major terrorist attack.) Professor Dillon
is also critical of the Governments slowness to modernise the legislation for Civil Defence,
pointing out that it dates back to the Cold War in 1948 and desperately needs updating. So
what needs to be done? Professor Dillon lists three immediate priorities: Firstly, bring in
legislation sooner so local bodies know their responsibilities; secondly, improve their
financial resources so they can cope with a chemical or biological attack, and thirdly, provide
more obvious direct political leadership.

MORE EVIDENCE:
David Smith, Economics Editor of the Times of London, THE EDGE, March 2003,
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCContent/downloaddocs/EdgeMarch.pdf.
Buttressed by ESRC research projects on terrorism, commissioned in the wake of September
11, Gardner also calls into question Britains state of readiness. One researcher, Professor
Michael Dillon of the University of Lancaster, suggests the government machine is locked
into the 50-year old mentality of dealing with the ColdWar, rather than the new and more
diverse risks from terrorism. A government that has been criticized for too much
centralization appears unwilling to centralize enough when it comes to its civil contingency
strategy. Terrorism, by its nature, succeeds partly by action but mainly by fear.

762

Kritik Answers

**Zizek: Psychopolitics**
Lacan Destroys Social Change (1/2)
ALTERNATIVE DOESNT SOLVE CASE RECOGNIZING THE
LACK CANT ACCESS THE REAL-WORLD POLICY IMPACTS
INEVITABLE IN THE STATUS QUO
Robinson, PhD @ U of Nottingham, 2K5 (Andy, The Political Theory of

Constitutive Lack: A Critique, Theory and Event 8.1, The Johns Hopkins University Press,
Project Muse)
The function of the iekian "Act" is to dissolve the self, producing a historical event. "After
the revolution", however, everything stays much the same . For all its radical pretensions, iek's politics can
be summed up in his attitude to neo-liberalism: 'If it works, why not try a dose of it?'31. The phenomena which are
denounced in Lacanian theory are invariably readmitted in its "small print", and this leads
to a theory which renounces both effectiveness and political radicalism. It is in this
pragmatism that the ambiguity of Lacanian political theory resides , for, while on a theoretical
level it is based on an almost sectarian "radicalism", denouncing everything that exists for its
complicity in illusions and guilt for the present, its "alternative" is little different from what
it condemns (the assumption apparently being that the "symbolic" change in the
psychological coordinates of attachments in reality is directly effective, a claim assumed
wrongly to follow from the claim that social reality is constructed discursively ). Just like in the
process of psychoanalytic cure, nothing actually changes on the level of specific characteristics . The only
change is in how one relates to the characteristics, a process iek terms 'dotting the "i's"' in reality, recognizing and thereby installing

All that changes, in other words, is the interpretation: as long as they are reconceived as
expressions of constitutive lack, the old politics are acceptable . Thus, iek claims that de Gaulle's "Act"
necessity32.

succeeded by allowing him 'effectively to realize the necessary pragmatic measures' which others pursued unsuccessfully33.

THE CRITICISM IS PREMISED ON ORIGINARY LACK,

DESTROYING ANY HOPE OF POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION
Robinson, PhD @ U of Nottingham, 2K5 (Andy, The Political Theory of

Constitutive Lack: A Critique, Theory and Event 8.1, The Johns Hopkins University Press,
Project Muse)
The idea of "constitutive lack" is supposed to entail a rejection of neutral and universal standpoints, and it is this rejection which constructs it as an "anti-essentialist"

. In practice, however, Lacanians restore the idea of a universal framework through the
backdoor. Beneath the idea that "there is no neutral universality" lurks a claim to know
precisely such a "neutral universality" and to claim a privileged position on this basis. A
consistent belief in contingency and "anti-essentialism" entails scepticism about the idea of
constitutive lack. After all, how does one know that the appearance that 'experience' shows lack to be constitutive reflects an underlying universality, as
position

opposed to the contingent or even simulated effects of a particular discourse or episteme? Alongside its opponents, shouldn't Lacanian theory also be haunted by its
own fallibility and incompletion? There is a paradox in the idea of radical choice, for it is unclear whether Lacanians believe this should be applied reflexively. Is the
choice of Lacanian theory itself an ungrounded Decision? If so, the theory loses the universalist status it implicitly claims. If not, it would seem to be the kind of
structural theory it attacks. A complete structural theory would seem to assume an extra-contingent standpoint, even if the structure includes a reference to
constitutive lack. Such a theory would seem to be a radical negation of the incompletion of "I don't know".

The myth of constitutive lack, like all myths, has a closing role: it limits what can be said through an
"order not to think". On the other hand, the idea that creativity is motivated by a stance that "I-don't-know" has an opening effect. As Callinicos puts
#

it, 'what Badiou and iek calls the "void" in a situation is rather the set of determinate possibilities it contains, including that of transformation'122. If there is no
irreducible "Real" beneath each blockage or lack, these can be overcome by creative action, as with the creative role of anomalies in paradigm-change in the sciences,

. The imperative in Lacanian theory is to

"accept" lack, whereas the logic of a non-mythical idea of contingency is to use opportunities for openness as a basis for creativity.
# Furthermore, Lacanian theories involve a strong commitment to slave morality, as exemplified by Laclau's
and the creative role of "psychotic" philosophies such as those of Deleuze and Nietzsche

insistence that every chain of equivalence involve a unity against an external threat123, Norval's advocacy of the use of "apartheid" as a bogeyman in South African

Zizek's "revolutionary" insistence on the need for

masochistic self-degradation, 'subjective destitution' and identification with a Master and a
Cause126, not to mention his directly reactive insistence that self-awareness amounts to
awareness of the negative, of death and trauma, prior to any active identification or articulation127. This is a
reterritorializing "contingency" which fits closely with the operation of capitalist ideology,
where 'under conditions we recognize as desperate, we are told to alter ourselves', not the
conditions, because the self is conceived as a decisionist founder128 . The alternative is a difference which is not
politics124 and Mouffe's demand for submission to rules125, and also in

reified into a "positive" negativity. According to Deleuze, there are two models of contingency: the creative power of the poet, and the politician's denial of difference
so as to prolong an established order. It is for the latter that negation (lack) is primary, 'as if it were necessary to pass through the misfortunes of rift and division in
order to be able to say yes'. For the poet, on the other hand, difference is 'light, aerial and affirmative'. 'There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict,
the play of differences', differences which should be affirmed as positive and not overcoded by negativity

763

Kritik Answers

Lacan Destroys Social Change (2/2)

LACANIAN PESSIMISM IS A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
THEIR HYPER-SKEPTICISM LOCKS IN THE STATUS QUO,
PREVENTING RADICAL SOCIAL CHANGE
Robinson, PhD @ U of Nottingham, 2K5 (Andy, The Political Theory of

Constitutive Lack: A Critique, Theory and Event 8.1, The Johns Hopkins University Press,
Project Muse)
# There is more than an accidental relationship between the mythical operation of the concept of "constitutive lack" and Lacanians' conservative and pragmatist
politics. Myth is a way of reducing thought to the present: the isolated signs which are included in the mythical gesture are thereby attached to extra-historical
abstractions. On an analytical level

, Lacanian theory can be very "radical", unscrupulously exposing the underlying relations and assumptions concealed
radicalism,
, never translates into political conclusions

beneath officially-sanctioned discourse. This

however
: as shown
above, a radical rejection of anti-"crime" rhetoric turns into an endorsement of punishment, and a radical critique of neo-liberalism turns into a pragmatist
endorsement of structural adjustment. It is as if there is a magical barrier between theory and politics which insulates the latter from the former. One should recall a

Lacanians have a "radical"

theory oriented towards happiness, but politically, their primary concern is security. As long
as they are engaged in politically ineffectual critique, Lacanians will denounce and criticize
the social system, but once it comes to practical problems, the "order not to think" becomes
operative.
remark once made by Wilhelm Reich: 'You plead for happiness in life, but security means more to you'133.

# This "magic" barrier is the alibi function of myth. The short-circuit between specific instances and high-level abstractions is politically consequential. A present
evil can be denounced and overthrown if located in an analysis with a "middle level", but Lacanian theory tends in practice to add an "always" which prevents change.

,
Lacanian theory operates as an alibi: it offers a little bit of theoretical radicalism to inoculate the
system against the threat posed by a lot of politicized radicalism 134. In Laclau and Mouffe's version, this takes the
At the very most, such change cannot affect the basic matrix posited by Lacanian theory, because this is assumed to operate above history. In this way

classic Barthesian form: "yes, liberal democracy involves violent exclusions, but what is this compared to the desert of the real outside it?" The iekian version is

"yes, there can be a revolution, but after the revolution, one must return to the
pragmatic tasks of the present". A good example is provided in one of iek's texts. The author presents an excellent analysis of a
more complex:

Kafkaesque incident in the former Yugoslavia where the state gives a soldier a direct, compulsory order to take a voluntary oath - in other words, attempts to compel

one should not

attempt to escape it lest one end up in psychosis or totalitarianism135. The political function of Lacanian theory is to
consent. He then ruins the impact of this example by insisting that there is always such a moment of "forced choice", and that
preclude critique by encoding the present as myth.

There is a danger of a stultifying conservatism arising from within Lacanian political

theory, echoing the 'terrifying conservatism' Deleuze suggests is active in any reduction of history to negativity136. The addition of an "always" to contemporary
evils amounts to a "pessimism of the will", or a "repressive reduction of thought to the present". Stavrakakis, for instance, claims that
attempts to find causes and thereby to solve problems are always fantasmatic 137, while iek states
#

that an object which is perceived as blocking something does nothing but materialize the already-operative constitutive lack138. While this does not strictly entail the

it creates a danger of discursive slippage and

hostility to "utopianism" which could have conservative consequences. Even if Lacanians believe in
necessity of a conservative attitude to the possibility of any specific reform,

surplus/contingent as well as constitutive lack, there are no standards for distinguishing the two. If one cannot tell which social blockages result from constitutive lack
and which are contingent, how can one know they are not all of the latter type? And even if constitutive lack exists, Lacanian theory runs a risk of "misdiagnoses"
which have a neophobe or even reactionary effect. To take an imagined example, a Lacanian living in France in 1788 would probably conclude that democracy is a
utopian fantasmatic ideal and would settle for a pragmatic reinterpretation of the ancin regime. Laclau and Mouffe's hostility to workers' councils and iek's

The pervasive negativity and cynicism of

Lacanian theory offers little basis for constructive activity. Instead of radical
transformation, one is left with a pragmatics of "containment" which involves a conservative
de-problematization of the worst aspects of the status quo. The inactivity it counsels would
make its claims a self-fulfilling prophecy by acting as a barrier to transformative activity.
insistence on the need for a state and a Party139 exemplify this neophobe tendency.

764

Kritik Answers

Lacan = Being Towards Death

THE ALTERNATIVES OBSESSION WITH NEGATIVITY LOCKS
IN A BEING TOWARDS DEATH THAT PREVENTS
AFFIRMATION OF LIFE
Hallward 2001

[Peter, Nip/Tuck junky, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Trans. Peter
Hallward, New York: Verso, 2001, xvi-xix//uwyo-ajl]
What distinguishes Badiou's Philosophical ethics from Lacan's own essentially'
anti-philosophical stance is the precise status allocated to the Real in this
arrangement.15 Badiou emphasizes the topological location of the Real, the Real as
'being, in a situation, in any given symbolic field, the point of impasse, or the point
of impossibility, which precisely allows us to think the situation as a whole'.16 The
Real is what seems empty or void from the perspective of those who re-present
and dominate the situation (i.e. from the perspective assumed by the 'state of the
situation'); rejected from any stable assignation of place, it is thereby that which
calls into question the prevailing regime of place and placement tout court,17
Badiou's Real is always strictly situation-specific. But from a later Lacanian
perspective, the unsymbolizable Real often comes
to indicate general human finitude in its most elementary form, that is, death. As
Lacan's most forceful contemporary disciple puts it:
The whole of Lacan's effort is precisely focused on those limitexperiences in which
the subject finds himself confronted with the death drive at its purest, prior to its
reversal into sublimation. , " What 'Death' stands for at its most radical is not
merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of the world', the self-withdrawal,
the absolute contradiction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with 'reality' ,18
A Lacanian ethics is designed to enable us to endure this severing without
flinching, as the price to be paid for a 'symbolic New Beginning, the emergence of
the "New Harmony" sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier'.
And it is at this point, Zizek continues, that 'Lacan parts company with Badiou'
(154). For confrontation with Lacan's Real here amounts to an experience of the
abject, inarticulable realm of the corpse as such - the 'undead' that is Oedipus after
his mutilation, or Antigone reduced to her 'living death' ,19 Zizek accepts this
reduction without hesitation. Since 'modern subjectivity emerges when the subject
perceives himself as "out of joint", as excluded from the order of things, from the
positive order of entities', so 'for that reason, the ontic equivalent of the modern
subject is inherently excremental. . . , There is no subjectivity without the reduction
of the subject's positive-substantial being to a disposable "piece of shit''' (157).
From Zizek's perspective, what thus 'remains beyond Badiou's reach ... is this
domain "beyond the Good", in which a human being encounters the death drive as
the utmost limit of human experience, and pays the price by undergoing a radical
"subjective destitution", by being reduced to an excremental remainder' (161).
Badiou would no doubt plead guilty as charged. For the great virtue of his system,
compared with Lacan's, is surely its separation of the merely ineffable, insignificant horror of death from the generic 'destitution' or subtraction no doubt
demanded by every subjectification. It is Badiou's achievement to have subtracted
the operation of truth from any redemption of the abject, and to have made the
distinction between living and unliving, between finite and infinite, a matter of
absolute indifference. The 'Real' emergence of 'the undead-indestructible object,
[of] Life deprived of support in the symbolic order'20 is incapable of provoking the
slightest reaction either from within the domain of purely multiple being-as-being
on the one hand, or from the domain of an infinite, properly immortal
subjectivization on the other. From Badiou's perspective, death can never quality as
an event.

765

Kritik Answers

Lacan = Oppression
PSYCHOANALYSIS FORCES SEXUALITY INTO THE
JURIDICAL MODEL OF THE FAMILY, ALLOWING DISCIPLINE
OF OTHERNESS
May 93

[Todd, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and

Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1993, 48-9//wfi-ajl]
The intrusion of the deployment of sexuality upon the traditional sexual
arrangement of the family and its bonds (kinship structures, codes of name and
material transmission, and so on) forced it to change its shape in order to
accommodate this new, powerful set of practices. Although a more complete
analysis of the changes produced by this intrusion is given by Foucault's colleague
Jacques Donzelot (1979), Foucault points out that the deployment of sexuality
entails a set of power relationships that differ from those of the family alliance. For
the family alliance, power was realized on a juridical model of law, right, and
possession. For the new sexuality, however, power is a matter of local and
dispersed tactics that run through such nonfamilial domains as the school and the
clinic.
What binds these local and dispersed tactics into a uniform sexuality is both their
convergence upon an expanded set of behaviors that are considered to be sexually
relevant and the development of the normality/abnormality axis to which all
sexuality is now referred. At this intersection psychoanalysis finds its place,
structuring the new deployment of sexuality and grafting it onto the traditional
familial alliance. Indeed, the great genius of psychoanalysis lies in this: that it was
able to integrate the dispersed and mobile relations of sexuality into the rigid codes
of familial alliance without causing the breakdown of that alliance. Because
psychoanalysis presented the deployment of sexuality as a matter of juridical
power, of law-specifically the law that prohibits incest-the family, while becoming
infused with sexual strategies, was able to retain a sense of itself as the focal point
of those strategies and as their juridical protector. Thus sexuality, which threatened
to burst the bonds of familial alliance by introducing into it new matrices of power,
is coordinated with the familial scheme. Children have strange desires, it is true;
nevertheless, in the end it is their parents they desire, just as their parents desire
one another and their own parents.
What was being constituted in this new sexuality, which psychoanalysis sponsored
and to which it owes such a great debt? Essentially, sexuality itself was being
constituted, a modern sexuality that is often heralded as the deepest truth or,
better, as the essence of the modern soul. As the soul was being created by
disciplinary techniques, so its essence was being fashioned by sexual techniques.
And in both strategies psychological thinking, psychological discourse, and
psychotherapeutic intervention were drawing their nourishment and contributing
their effects. In both strategies, moreover, certain social figures were being created,
figures that correspond to contemporary networks of power and that invite
contemporary modes of intervention--often psychological intervention. In prisons,
the figure of the delinquent emerged, a criminal not in the mere authorship of a
crime but in an existence that was itself deviant. The delinquent "is not only the
author of his acts. . . but is linked to his offense by a whole bundle of complex
threads (instincts, drives, tendencies, character)" (Foucault 1977a, p. 253). As such,
the delinquent requires observation, intervention, and rehabilitation--or, if these
things fail, at least surveillance and usefulness for intervening with other
delinquents.

766

Kritik Answers

A2 Stavrakakis: 2AC
ENDORSING THE AFFIRMATIVE AS AN ACT OF HOPE, NOT
UTOPIA, IT IS POSSIBLE TO HAVE POLITICS WITHOUT
UTOPIA
Stavrakakis, Teaching Fellow in Government @ U of Essex, 99 (
Yannis, Lacan and the Political, P. 111-112)

What should not be neglected however in Ricoeurs standpoint is the centrality of the element
of hope. No doubt, a society without hope is a dead society . Yet, in reality, to eliminate the element of hope
is a dead society. Yet, in reality, to eliminate the element of hope from human life is not only undesirable
but also impossible. As Jacques Derrida has put it: There is no language without the performative
dimension of the promise, the minute I open my mouth I am in the promise. Even if I say I dont believe in
truth or whatever, the minute I open my mouth there is a believe me at work . Even when I lie,
and perhaps especially when I lie, there is a believe me in play. And this I promise you that I am speaking the truth is a messianic a
priori, a promise which, even if it is not kept, even if one knows it cannot be kept, takes place and qua promise is messianic. (Derrida,
1996:82-3) In addition, for Derrida, this element of hope is not necessarily utopian: I would not call this attitude utopian.
The messianic experience of which I spoke takes place here and now that is the fact of promising and speaking is an event that takes place
here and now and is not utopian (ibid.). Is

it then possible to retain this element of hope without

incorporating it into a utopian vision? Can we have passion in politics without holocausts?
Furthermore, is it possible to have a politics of hope, a politics of change without utopia? The
experience of the democratic revolution permits a certain optimism . Democratization is certainly a
political project of hope. But democratic discourse is not (or should not be) based on the vision of a utopian
harmonious society. It is based on the recognition of the impossibility and the catastrophic consequences of such a dream.
What differentiates democracy from other political forms of society is legitimization of
conflict and the refusal to eliminate it through the establishment of an authoritarian
harmonious order. Within this framework the antagonistic diversity between different conceptions of good is not seen as
something negative that should be eliminated, but as something to be valued and celebrated. This requires the presence of institutions that
establish a specific dynamic between consensus and dissent This is why democratic politics cannot aim towards harmony and
reconciliation. To believe that a final resolution of conflict is eventually possible, even when it is envisaged as asymptotic approaching to
the regulative idea of a free unconstrained communication, as in Habermas, is to put the pluralist democratic project at risk.(Mouffe,
1996b:8)14

767

Kritik Answers

Marxism Answers: 2AC (1/2)

768

Kritik Answers

Marxism Answers: 2AC (2/2)

769

Kritik Answers

Brown Turns (1/2)

TURN: THEIR LINK AND REJECTION CLAIMS ARE PART OF A
MELANCHOLIC POLITICS THAT MOURNS THE LEFTS PAST
THIS INTELLECTUAL STRAIGHTJACKET TIES THEM TO A
POLITICS THAT TIME HAS PASSED AND IGNORES THE
POLITICAL POSSIBILITIES TO BE FOUND IN OUR IMPURE
POLITICS
Brown, Professor, Political Science and Womens Studies, University of California-Berkeley, Resisting Left Melancholia, LOSS: THE
POLITICS OF MOURNING, ed. David L. Eng & David Kazanjian, 20 02, p. 460-463.
Wendy

Now our challenge would be to figure out who or what is this substitutive object. What do we hate that we might preserve the idealization of that romantic Left
promise? What do we [460] punish that we might save the old guarantees of the Left from our wrathful disappointment?
Two familiar answers emerge from recent quarrels and reproaches on the Left. The first is a set of social and political formations variously known as cultural politics or
identity politics. Here the conventional charge from one portion of the Left is that political movements rooted in cultural identity racial, sexual, ethnic, or gendered
not only elide the fundamental structure of modernity, capitalism, and its fundamental formation, class, but also fragment Left political energies and interests such
that coalition building is impossible. The second culprit also has various names poststructuralism, discourse analysis, postmodernism, trendy literary theory got up
as political analysis. The murder charges here are also familiar: postfoundational theories of the subject, truth, and social processes undermine the possibility of a

Together or
separately, these two phenomena are held responsible for the weak, fragmented, and
disoriented character of the contemporary Left. This much is old news. But if read through the prism of Left
theoretically coherent and factually true account of the world and also challenge the putatively objective grounds of Left norms.

melancholia, the element of displacement in both sets of charges may appear more starkly, since we would be forced to ask: What aspects of Left analysis or orthodoxy
have wilted on the vine for its adherents, but are safeguarded from this recognition through the scornful attention heaped on identity politics and poststructuralism?
Indeed, what narcissistic identification with that orthodoxy is preserved in the lament over the loss of its hold on young Leftists and the loss of its potency in the
political field? What love for the promises and guarantees that a Left analysis once held is preserved, as responsibility for the tattered condition of those promises and
guarantees is distributed onto debased others? And do we here also see a certain thingness of the Left take shape, its reification as something that is, the fantastical
memory that it once was, at the very moment that it so clearly is not/ one? . . . . .
Now let us bring these speculations about a melancholic Left back to Stuart Halls more forthrightly political considerations about the troubles of the contemporary

If Hall understands our failure as a Left in the last quarter century as a failure within the
Left to apprehend this time, this is a failure that is only reiterated and not redressed by our
complaints against those who are succeeding (liberal centrists, neoconservatives, the Right)
or by our complaints against one another (antiracists, feminists, queer activists,
postmodernists, or unreconstructed Marxists). In Halls understanding, this failure is not simply the
consequence of adherence to a particular [461] analytic orthodoxy the determinism of
capital, the primacy of class although it is certainly that. Rather, this failure results as well
from a particular intellectual straitjacket an insistence on a materialism that refuses the
importance of the subject and the subjective, the question of style, the problematic of
language. And it is the combination of these two that is deadly: Our sectarianism, Hall argues in
the conclusion of The Hard Road to Renewal , consists not only of a defensiveness toward the agendas fixed by
now anachronistic political-economic formations (those of the 1930s and 1945), but is also
due to a certain notion of politics, inhabited not so much as a theory, more as a habit of
mind. We go on thinking a unilinear and irreversible political logic, driven by some abstract
entity we call the economic or capital, unfolding to its preordained end. Whereas, as
Thatcherism clearly shows, politics actually works more like the logic of language: you can
always put it another way if you try hard enough. 9
Certainly the course of capital shapes the conditions of possibility in politics, but politics
itself is either conducted ideologically, or not at all. 10 Or, in another of Halls pithy formulas, politics does
not reflect majorities, it constructs them. 11
Left.

It is important to be clear here. Hall never claims that ideology determines the course of globalization but claims that it harnesses it for one political purpose or
another, and when it is successful, the political and economic strategies represented by a particular ideology will also themselves bring into being certain politicaleconomic formations within global capitalist developments.
Now we are beginning . . . to move into a post-Fordist society what some
theorists call disorganized capitalism, the era of flexible specialisation. One way of reading present developments is that privatization is Thatcherisms way of
harnessing and appropriating this underlying movement within a specific economic and political strategy and constructing it within the terms of a specific philosophy.
It has succeeded, to some degree, in aligning its historical, political, cultural and sexual logics with some of the most powerful tendencies in the contemporary logics
of capitalist development. And this, in part, is what gives it its supreme confidence, its air of ideological complacency: what makes it appear to have history on its
side, to be coterminous with the inevitable course of the future. The left, however, instead of rethinking its economic, political, and cultural strategies in the light of
this deeper, underlying logic of dispersal and diversification (which after all, need not necessarily be an enemy of greater democratization) simply resists it. If
Thatcherism can lay claim to it, then we must have nothing to do with it. Is there any more certain way of rendering yourself historically anachronistic? 12

If the contemporary Left often clings to the formations and formulations of another epoch,
one in which the notions of unified movements, social [462] totalities, and class-based
politics were viable categories of political and theoretical analysis, this means that it literally
renders itself a conservative force in history one that not only misreads the present but
also installs traditionalism in the very heart of its praxis, in the place where commitment to
risk and upheaval belongs. Walter Benjamin sketches this phenomenon in his attack on Eric Kastner, the Left-wing Weimer Republic poet, who
is the subject of his Left-Wing Melancholy essay: This poet is dissatisfied, indeed heavy-hearted. But this heaviness of heart derives
from routine. For to be in a routine means to have sacrificed ones idiosyncracies, to have
forfeited the gift of distaste. And that makes one heavy-hearted. 13 In a different tonality, Stuart Hall sketches
this problem in the Lefts response to Thatcherism:
I remember the moment in the 1979 election when Mr. Callaghan, on his last political legs, so to speak, said with real astonishment about the offensive of Mrs.
Thatcher that She means to tear society up by the roots. This was an unthinkable idea in the social-democratic vocabulary: a radical attack on the status quo

. The

770

Kritik Answers
truth is that traditionalist ideas, the ideas of social and moral respectability, have penetrated
so deep inside socialist consciousness that it is quite common to find people committed to a
radical political programme underpinned by wholly traditional feelings and sentiments. 14

Brown Turns (2/2)

THEIR POLITICS OF MOURNING ARE REALLY JUST
MELANCHOLIA IN DRAG (PUN INTENDED), WHICH
FORECLOSES UPON ANALYZING THE POLITICAL
POTENTIALITIES OF OUR CURRENT SITUATION
Wendy Brown, Professor, Political Science and Womens Studies, University of California-Berkeley,
Resisting Left Melancholia, LOSS: THE POLITICS OF MOURNING, ed. David L. Eng & David
Kazanjian, 2002, p. 458-459.
For the last two decades, cultural theorist Stuart Hall has insisted that the crisis of the Left is due
neither to internal divisions in the activist or academic Left nor to the clever rhetoric or funding schemes
of the Right. Rather, he has charged, this ascendancy is consequent to the Lefts own failure to apprehend
the character of the age and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this
character. For Hall, the rise of the Thatcher-Reagan Right was a symptom rather than a cause of this failure,
just as the Lefts dismissive or suspicious attitude toward cultural politics is for Hall a sign not of its unwavering principles but of its anachronistic habits of thought and its fears and
anxieties about revising those habits.

? I want to develop just one thread of this problem through a

consideration of the phenomenon named Left melancholia by Walter Benjamin more than half a century ago. What did Benjamin mean by
But what are the content and dynamic of these fears and anxieties

and with this pejorative appellation for a certain intellectual and political bearing? As most readers will know, Benjamin was neither categorically nor characterologically opposed to the
value and valence of sadness as such, nor to the potential insights gleaned from brooding over ones losses. Indeed, he had a well-developed appreciation of the productive value of acedia,

, Benjamin treated melancholia itself as something of a

creative wellspring. But Left melancholia is Benjamins unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack
who is, finally, more attached to a particular political analysis or ideal even to the failure of that ideal
than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present. In Benjamins enigmatic insistence on the political value of a dialectical
historical grasp of the time of the Now, Left [458] melancholia represents not only a refusal to come to terms with the
particular character of the present, that is, a failure to understand history in terms other than empty
time or progress. It signifies as well a certain narcissism with regard to ones past political
attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or
transformation. 1
The irony of melancholia, of course, is that attachment to the object of ones sorrowful loss supersedes
any desire to recover from this loss, to live free of it in the present, to be unburdened by it. This is what
renders melancholia a persistent condition, a state, indeed, a structure of desire, rather than a transient
response to death or loss. In Freuds 1917 meditation on melancholia, he reminds us of a second singular feature of melancholy: It entails a loss of a
more ideal kind [than mourning]. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object
of love. 2 Moreover, Freud suggests, the melancholic will often not know precisely what about the object has been
loved and lost: This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is
withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the
loss that is unconscious. 3 The loss precipitating melancholy is more often than not unavowed and unavowable. Finally, Freud suggests that the melancholic subject
sadness, and mourning for political and cultural work, and in his study of Baudelaire

low in self-regard, despairing, even suicidal has shifted the reproach of the once-loved object (a reproach waged for not living up to the idealization by the beloved) onto itself, thus
preserving the love or idealization of the object even as the loss of this love is experienced in the suffering of the melancholic.
Now why would Benjamin use this term, and the emotional economy it represents, to talk about a particular formation on and of the Left? Benjamin never offers a precise formulation of Left
melancholia. Rather, he deploys it as a term of opprobrium for those more beholden to certain long-held sentiments and objects than to the possibilities of political transformation in the
present. Benjamin is particularly attuned to the melancholics investment in things. In the Trauerspiel, he argues that melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge, here
suggesting that the loyalty of the melancholic converts its truth (every loyal vow or memory) about its beloved into a thing, indeed, imbues knowledge itself with a thinglike quality. 4

In its tenacious self-absorption [melancholy] embraces dead objects in its

contemplation. 5 More simply, melancholia is loyal to the world of things, 6 suggesting a certain logic
of fetishism with all the conservatism and withdrawal from human relations that fetishistic desire
implies contained within the melancholic logic. In the critique of Kastners poems in which Benjamin first coins Left melancholia, Benjamin
Another version of this formulation:

suggests that sentiments themselves become things for the Left melancholic who takes as much pride in the [459] traces of former spiritual goods as the bourgeois do in their material

We come to love our Left passions and reasons, our Left analyses and convictions, more than we
love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be
aligned with them. Left melancholia, in short, is Benjamins name for a mournful, conservative,
backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thinglike and
frozen in the heart of the putative Leftist. If Freud is helpful here, then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably
goods. 7

crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms Left, Socialism, Marx, or the Movement.
Certainly the losses, accountable and unaccountable, of the Left are many in our own time. The literal disintegration of socialist regimes and the legitimacy of Marxism may well be the least
of it. We are awash in the loss of a unified analysis and unified movement, in the loss of labor and class as inviolable predicates of political analysis and mobilization, in the loss of an
inexorable and scientific forward movement of history, and in the loss of a viable alternative to the political economy of capitalism. And on the backs of these losses are still others: we are
without a sense of international, and often even local, Left community; we are without conviction about the Truth of the social order; we are without a rich moral-political vision of the Good

. Thus we suffer with the sense of not only a lost movement but also a lost historical
moment, not only a lost theoretical and empirical coherence but also a lost way of life and a lost course of
pursuits.
to guide and sustain political work

771

Kritik Answers
in the hollow core of all these losses, perhaps in
the place of our political unconscious, is there also an unavowed loss the promise that Left analysis and
Left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the
true? Is it not this promise that formed the basis for much of our pleasure in being on the Left, indeed,
for our self-love as Leftists and our fellow feeling toward other Leftists? And if this love cannot be given
up without demanding a radical transformation in the very foundation of our love, in our very capacity
for political love or attachment, are we not doomed to Left melancholia, a melancholia that is certain to
have effects that are not only sorrowful but also self-destructive? Freud again: If the love for the object a love which cannot be given up
This much many on the Left can forthrightly admit, even if we do not know what to do about it. But

though the object itself is given up takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and
deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. 8

772

Kritik Answers

Permutation Key to Socialism

SOCIALISM MUST EMBRACE THE CAUSES OF OTHER
OPPRESSIONS IF IT IS TO EVER BE SUCCESSFUL
John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, The Renewing of Socialism: An Introduction, THE
MONTHLY REVIEW v. 57 n. 3, July-August 2005. Available from the World Wide Web at:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0705jbf.htm, accessed 4/12/06.
Socialism cannot survive unless it transcends not only class divisions that divide off those
who run the society from those that are compelled to work mainly on their behalf, but also
all other major forms of oppression that cripple human potential and prevent democratic,
social alliances. If any lesson was learned from the experiences of twentieth-century
attempts to create socialism it is that class struggle must be inseparable from the struggles
against gender, race, and national oppressionsand against other forms of domination such
as those directed against gays or against those politically designated as the disabled.
Socialism also cannot make any real headway unless it is ecological in the sense of
promoting a sustainable relation to the environment, since any other approach threatens the
well-being and even survival of the human species, along with all other species with which
we share the earth. The various forms of non-class domination are so endemic to capitalist
society, so much a part of its strategy of divide and conquer, that no progress can be made in
overcoming class oppression without also fightingsometimes even in advance of the class
strugglethese other social divisions. If the political emancipation of bourgeois society
constituted one of the bases upon which a wider human emancipation could be built, a
major obstacle to the latter has been the fact that political emancipationthe realm of socalled inalienable human rightshas remained incomplete under capitalism. That obstacle
must in all cases be overcome as a necessary part of the struggle for a socialist society.

773

Kritik Answers

**Miscellaneous**
A2 Art (1/2)
AESTHETICS ARENT ENOUGH THEORETICAL
ENLIGHTENMENT IS NECESSARY TO INSTILL SOCIAL
REVOLUTION
Best & Kellner 2002

[Steven & Douglas, Richard Rorty and Postmodern Theory,

www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/richardrortypostmoderntheory.pdf, 9-2406//uwyo-ajl]
Theory is necessary to the extent that the world is not completely and immediately
transparent to
consciousness. Since this is never the case, especially in our own hypercapitalist culture
where
the shadows flickering on the walls of our caves stem principally from television sets, the
corporate-dominated ideology machines that speak the language of deception and
manipulation.
As we show in our book The Postmodern Adventure (Best and Kellner, 2001), which
contains
studies of Thomas Pynchon, Michael Herr, Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, and
other
imaginative writers, Rorty is right that fiction can powerfully illuminate the conditions of
our
lives, often in more concrete and illuminating ways than theory. Ultimately, we need to
grant
power to both theory and fiction, and understand their different perspectives and roles. For
just
as novels like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle had dramatic social impact, so too has the
discourse of
the Enlightenment, which provided the philosophical inspiration for the American and
French
Revolutions, as well as numerous succeeding revolts in history.

MUSIC AND ART HAVE LIMITS IN SPACE AND TIME WHICH

ALLOW THEM TO BE EASILY COMMODIFIED AND USED TO
AFFIRM BOURGEOIS CULTURE
John Beverley, The Ideology of Postmodern Music and Left Politics, 19 90
(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.1beverley.html)
The antidote to Muzak would seem to be something like Punk. By way of a preface to a
discussion of Punk and extending the considerations above on the relation between music
and commodification, I want to refer first to Jackson Pollock's great paintingAutumn
Rhythm in the Met, a picture that--like Pollock's work in general--is particularly admired by
Free Jazz musicians. It's a vast painting with splotches of black, brown and rust against the
raw tan of unprimed canvas, with an incredible dancing, swirling, clustering, dispersing
energy. As you look at it, you become aware that while the ambition of the painting seems to
be to explode or expand the pictorial space of the canvas altogether, it is finally only the
limits of the canvas which make the painting possible as an art object. The limit of the
canvas is its aesthetic autonomy, its separation from the life world, but also its commodity
status as something that can be bought, traded, exhibited. The commodity is implicated in
the very form of the "piece;" as in the jazz record in Nausea, "The music ends." (The 78 RPM
record--the commodity form of recorded music in the 20s and 30s-- imposed a three minute
limit per side on performances and this in turn shaped the way songs were arranged in jazz
or pop recording: cf. the 45 and the idea today of the "single.")

774

Kritik Answers
Such a situation might indicate one limit of Jameson's cultural hermeneutic. If the strategy
in Jameson is to uncover the emancipatory utopian- communist potential locked up in the
artifacts of the cultural heritage, this is also in a sense to leave everything as it is, as in
Wittgenstein's analytic (because that which is desired is already there; it only has to be
"seen" correctly), whereas the problem of the relation of art and social liberation is also
clearly the need to transgress the limits imposed by existing artistic forms and practices and
to produce new ones. To the extent, however, such transgressions can be recontained within
the sphere of the aesthetic-- in a new series of "works" which may also be available as
commodities--, they will produce paradoxically an affirmation of bourgeois culture: in a
certain sense they are bourgeois high culture.

775

Kritik Answers

A2 Art (2/2)
ART AS RESISTANCE CAN GIVE AN AESTHETIC
GRATIFICATION WHICH STOPS FURTHER STRUGGLE
John Beverley, The Ideology of Postmodern Music and Left Politics, 19 90
(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.1beverley.html)
Adorno and the Frankfurt School make of the Kantian notion of the aesthetic as a
purposiveness without purpose precisely the locus of the radicalizing and redemptive power
of art, the sense in which by alienating practical aims it sides with the repressed and
challenges domination and exploitation, particularly the rationality of capitalist institutions.
By contrast, there is Lenin's famous remark--it's in Gorki'sReminiscences--that he had to
give up listening to Beethoven'sAppasionata sonata: he enjoyed it too much, it made him
feel soft, happy, at one with all humanity. His point would seem to be the need to resist a
narcotic and pacifying aesthetic gratification in the name of the very difficult struggle--and
the corresponding ideological rigor--necessary to at least setting in motion the process of
building a classless society. But one senses in Lenin too the displacement or sublation of an
aesthetic sensibility onto the field of revolutionary activism. And in both Adorno and Lenin
there is a sense that music is somehow in excess of ideology.

776

Kritik Answers

A2 Love
LOVE DOESNT BRING PEACEFUL RECONCILIATIONIT
RECREATES DIVISION AND OTHERNESS
Michael Dillon, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the Univ. of Lancaster,

1996, the Politics of Security, 194-5

But do not mistake this love for a peaceful reconciliation, or a reconciliation which brings
peace, neither for a release that brings tranquillity. There is a force in this I love you, I want
you to be. Do not be fooled into thinking, therefore, that the only violence of any
consequence is the violence which elides the other, effaces and defaces the other; as if, if we
could, facing up to rather than effacing the other, we might bring an end to violence. For in
this releasing love also lies the power and latent force of an injunction an injunction that
is itself disjointed.128 Issuing from someone who is himself out-of-joint, this
injunctioneffects another disjunction. Oedipus, with love, and through love, releases them to
their inheritance of life. That injunction insists, albeit lovingly, that the other can be no
other than other, come what may; and exhorts it to remain so. Ultimately, he says, you can
(must) be no other than other because that is what you are; haunted, as am I, by an
Otherness which I recognise but can never know, and I love you for it. Smitten as he is with
love, Oedipus smites back in the same currency: Pray for life my children, live where you are
free to grow and season. Pray god you find a better life than mine, the father who begot you.
In being loved, and finding love, these lines suggest, you do not find peace. Instead, the
struggle of your being is refreshed. This, therefore, is not the struggle-free love of a happy
ending. Love does not gather everything together in unison and unity here. An expression of
their being-in-common, of their belonging together in virtue of difference, this love also
effects a new scission or severance in which the possibility of the being of these other beings
specifically his daughters takes place. It consequently also splits asunder, severs and
divides, allowing for a further duplication of difference. For only in division does the
possibility of possibilities and their multiplication occur. There is violence in it precisely,
therefore, because it is an acceptance of this mortal freedom. Moreover, it is not a freedom
which is paternally, or patriarch-ally, granted by Oedipus, despite his being their father. His
off-spring are being wrenched from his grasp, and it is not a freedom, in any event, that is
within his gift. Instead, it is an antecedent freedom which, in extremity, he now recognises
that he shares in common with them. This I love you, I want you to be therefore says: stand
up for yourself and before others take up the burden of freedom afresh and live it out
more fully. Just as he tries to give that which he does not have the bearings of their
latitude to be so Oedipus love amounts to an impossible command. Freeing them of
himself is not possible. He cannot efface what he is and what has happened. He cannot, in
fact, withdraw what has already been given, and nothing can free them of the inheritance
into which they have come.129 In short, they cannot be delivered of their existence. But, is it
possible to have it delivered over to them, freely to assume it as best they might, in a freeing
way? Perhaps this is what Oedipus is trying to do. They alone can bear their inheritance.
But, in the way in which he himself comports himself towards its handing-on saying
something like grieve for me, therefore, keep me enough to use me as you must130
Oedipus tries to contribute somehow to their free reception and assumption of it.
Ultimately, however, it is impossible because (irrespective of the awfulness of the
inheritance which he leaves to them) there is nothing he, or they, can do to secure
compliance with a command to find and enjoy a better life. And, yet, that is precisely the
forceful insistent desire of love for the loved one. For its otherness, and the Otherness it
bears, to thrive.

777

Kritik Answers

A2 Poetry
LITERATURE FAILS TO UNDERMINE THE HEGEMONIC
MODES OF REPRESENTATION
John Beverley, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at Pitt,
Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Critical Theory, 19 99, p.4
Our hypothesis in Literature and Politics was that the dominant forms of modern Central
American literaturepoetry in particularhad become a material forcean ideological
practice, in the sense Louis Althusser gives the termin the construction of the
revolutionary movements that were vying for power in the region. However, as Marc and I
struggled to finish the book we were struck with a growing sense of the limitations of
literature as a form of popular empowerment and agencylimitations revealed dramatically
for us in the debates around the poetry workshop experiment in Nicaragua and in the
question of testimonio as a narrative form that resisted in some ways being treated simply as
a new kind of literature. We ended Literoture and Politics with these words: "We return,
therefore, in closing to the paradox that has been with us from the beginning of this book:
literature has been a means of national-popular mobilization in the Central American
revolutionary process, but that process also elaborates or points to forms of cultural
democratization that will necessarily question or displace the role of literature as a
hegemonic cultural institution" (207).

POETRY CANNOT BE TRANSFORMATIVE IN THE CURRENT

POLITICAL CLIMATE
Jamie Owen Daniel, English Department, The University of Illinois at Chicago, Does "poetry
makes nothing happen?": The Case for Public Poetry as a Counter-Public Sphere, 19 97,
http://english.rutgers.edu/does.htm , accessed January 30, 2002.
Thus, as attractive as the idea of public poetry may be as an alternative public sphere, it
nonetheless remains fixated and fixed at the level of changing the final product rather than
the process of production. Merely allowing "diverse relations of power and privilege" to
intermingle in public space, whether a poetry slam or spontaneous street festival or an
academic conference such as this one, does not magically render those constituencies equal,
given their various histories of deprivation or exploitation. Our inability or unwillingness to
confront the bigger, less easily manipulable world outside the institutions of culture is, it
seems to me, symptomatic of a key flaw in the celebration of more public poetry as a
potential counter-public sphere, for no matter how we de- or reconstruct the hierarchy of
authority, no matter how many voices we allow or encourage to intermingle, we still can't
make a democratic public sphere, or a democratic culture, in a society based on a system
that remains fundamentally anti-democratic.

778

Kritik Answers

A2 Silence
SILENCE IS CONSENT. SPEAKING RESTORES DIGNITY
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 1971, quoted in: In A Dark Time, ed. Robert
Lifton, 1986
When a bull is being led to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its
butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens
and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society
there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a [hu]man who broke
away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of
courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open.
But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesnt weigh
his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesnt know the despicable feeling of despair. Later I often wondered whether it is right to scream when you are
being beaten and trampled underfoot. Isnt it better to face ones tormentors in a stance of
satanic pride, answering them with contemptuous silence? I decided that it is better to
scream. This pitiful sound, which sometimes, goodness knows how, reaches into the
remotest prison cell, is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. It is a
mans way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams [one] he
asserts [the] his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and
calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime
against humanity.

779

Kritik Answers

A2 Third World Bad

THIRD WORLD, WHILE IMPRECISE AND ESSENTIALIZING,
IS A USEFUL PHRASE AND NECESSARY FOR
COMMUNICATION
Martin W. Lewis, associate research professor of geography, co-director of Comparative Area
Studies, Duke University, 1992, Green Delusions, pp. 191-192
One must take care to draw distinctions within this broad zone of global poverty. The
environmental problems and prospects of Mexico, for example, are as different from those
of Mali as they are from those of Germany. Still, terms such as the Third World or the
South provide convenient labels for the earths relatively poor countries. In this chapter
Third World will be employed to designate both the relatively nonin dustrialized and the
recently industrializing areas of the globe. The term admittedly obscures almost as much as
it reveals, but such imprecision is necessary if we are to avoid using stiflingly cumbersome
forms of expression.

780