Fear of Death Critique Index

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Death Kritik Index 1/3

Death Kritik Index....................................................................................................... 1
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**1NCs....................................................................................................................... 4
Death K 1NC............................................................................................................... 5
Death K 1NC............................................................................................................... 6
Death K 1NC............................................................................................................... 7
Death K 1NC............................................................................................................... 8
Death K 1NC............................................................................................................... 9
Death K 1NC............................................................................................................. 10
Death K 1NC............................................................................................................. 11
Death K 1NC............................................................................................................. 12
Pure War 1NC........................................................................................................... 13
Pure War 1NC........................................................................................................... 14
____________.............................................................................................................. 15
**Overviews............................................................................................................. 15
2NC Overview........................................................................................................... 16
2NC Pure War Overview............................................................................................ 17
2NR Overview........................................................................................................... 18
______........................................................................................................................ 19
**Links...................................................................................................................... 19
Link- Nuclear War..................................................................................................... 20
Link- Obsession........................................................................................................ 21
Link- Nuclear Death/Extinction.................................................................................22
Link- Hegemony....................................................................................................... 23
LinkOpposition to Death........................................................................................ 24
LinkPanic............................................................................................................... 25
LinkBukimi............................................................................................................. 26
___________................................................................................................................ 27
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**Link Blocks............................................................................................................ 27
AT: We Have Other Justifications...............................................................................28
AT: Death Bad/Life Good........................................................................................... 29
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________..................................................................................................................... 30
**Impacts................................................................................................................. 30
ImpactDignity........................................................................................................ 31
ImpactDestroys All Resistance.............................................................................. 32
ImpactNumbing..................................................................................................... 33
ImpactConsumerism............................................................................................. 34
ImpactExtermination............................................................................................. 35
_____________............................................................................................................. 36
**Impact Blocks........................................................................................................ 36
AT: Nuclear/War/Death Imagery Good 1/2................................................................37
AT: Nuclear/War/Death Imagery Good 2/2................................................................38
AT: FoD Makes Life Meaningful..................................................................................39
AT: Cold War Proves FoD Good..................................................................................40
AT: Violence Good..................................................................................................... 41
AT: Ketels.................................................................................................................. 42
AT: Fear Key to Prevent Nuke War (Futterman).........................................................43
AT: Stopping Nuclear War Key 2 Solve FOD..............................................................44
AT: FoD Key 2 Treat AIDS........................................................................................... 45
AT: FoD Fuel Peace Movements................................................................................ 46
AT: Denies Reality..................................................................................................... 47
AT: You Defend Extinction......................................................................................... 48
AT: How Does the Alt Change the World?.................................................................49
AT: How Does the Alt Change the World?.................................................................50
AT: You Ignore Suffering............................................................................................ 51
___________................................................................................................................ 52
**Alternative............................................................................................................. 52
Alternative- Transpersonal Solvency.........................................................................53
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Alternative- Nuclear War Solvency........................................................................... 54

Alternative- Mortality Solvency.................................................................................55
AlternativeMove Beyond Nuclear War...................................................................56
________________........................................................................................................ 57
**Alternative Blocks.................................................................................................. 57
AT: No Alternative/Causes Nihilism 1/2.....................................................................58
AT: No Alternative/Causes Nihilism 2/2.....................................................................59
AT: Alternative Doesnt Solve Case...........................................................................60
AT: Radical Alternative Destroys the Movement.......................................................61
AT: Permutation 1/2.................................................................................................. 62
AT: Permutation 2/2.................................................................................................. 63
AT: Permutation 2NR................................................................................................. 64
AT: Permutation Coalitions..................................................................................... 65
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________________........................................................................................................ 66
**Framework Blocks................................................................................................. 66
Framework 2nc......................................................................................................... 67
AT: Fiat Good 2NC 1/2............................................................................................... 68
AT: Fiat Good 2NC 2/2............................................................................................... 69
AT: Fiat Good 2NR..................................................................................................... 70
______________........................................................................................................... 71
**Realism Blocks...................................................................................................... 71
AT: Realism Good 2NC 1/2........................................................................................ 72
AT: Realism Good 2NC 2/2........................................................................................ 73
AT: Realism Good 2NR.............................................................................................. 74
AT: Threats Are Real.................................................................................................. 75
_____________............................................................................................................. 76
**Theory Blocks........................................................................................................ 76
AT: Performative Contradiction Other Positions......................................................77
AT: Performative Contradiction Kritiks Impact is Death.........................................78
AT: PIKs Bad.............................................................................................................. 79
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Death K 1NC
Contention One: Thanataphobia
Our society is held in the grip of intense thanatophobia. Our fear of dying
is so prevalent in every aspect of our lives that it is constantly repressed
into the subconscious. Americans are fighting a new war on the western
front, one against death itself.
Steven I. Friedland, Professor of Law at Nova Souteastern University, Shepard Broad Law Center, Cleveland
State University Journal of Law and Health, 10 J.L. & Health 95, 1995/1996
The demise of the belief in the good death has prompted the adoption of a new form of heroism, one that
involves beating death, not accepting it with dignity. As a result, medicine has become side-tracked. n64 As
society strives for a health care system that works, it is distracted by the need to prolong and
delay dying, which is in part fueled by our obsession with health and our fear of death. This
obsession has two parts: one moral, the other medical. The moral part is the belief that we have an unlimited
obligation to combat death and lethal disease. That is essentially the mission of biomedical research, which,
with enormous public support, conducts unrelenting wars against death. The medical part is the potent
assumption that death is essentially an accident, correctable with enough money, will and scientific ingenuity: if
smallpox could be conquered, then so can heart disease. If typhoid fever was eliminated, someday Alzheimer's
Rather than constructing a dialogue of death, society

hopes that death will be conquered through a massive research effort. n66 Instead of
recognizing the futility of this mission, Americans choose to wage war against death. The
disease will be beaten as well. n65 [*109]
fight against aging shows up in many different ways in our society. From infomercials hawking
return-to-youth products to antibiotics, transplants, chemotherapy, and the rise of cryogenics,
considerable energy and passion is dedicated to avoiding death and its creeping, inexorable grip.
Fighting it at all costs - never giving up - has become a rallying cry of the new heroism,
n67 which, if nothing else, has served to obfuscate and distort the narrative of death. n68
<CONTINUES>A narrative of avoidance characterizes modern American society's view of
death. This narrative has become dominant for several reasons. The promise of extended
longevity through the miracles of medicine, Americans' desire for immortality that is
propelled by continuous scientific discoveries, and the removal of death from the personal
realm have enhanced a fear of death that underlies much, if not all, of life's experiences .
This fear of death, in turn, has spurred its avoidance.
The affirmative replicates this evangelism of fear through its constructions

of violence, war and destruction, perpetuating the drive towards
immortality.
Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law at Purdue, Self-Determination, International Law and
Survival on Planet Earth, Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Spring 19 94
the spectacle of catastrophe and annihilation has been with us
from the beginning, and the seeming insignificance of individual life appears to be confirmed
by every earthquake or typhoon, by every pestilence or epidemic, by every war or
holocaust. Yet, each of us is unwilling to accept a fate that points not only to extinction, but
also to extinction with insignificance. Where do we turn? It is to promises of immortality. And
Humankind is different. Of course,
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from where do we hear such promises? From religion, to be sure, but also from States that have deigned to
and that cry out for "self-determination." How do these States
sustain the promise of immortality? One way is through the legitimization of the killing of
other human beings. And why is such killing the ostensible protection of one's own life? An answer is offered
represent God in his planetary political duties,
46
by Eugene Ionesco as follows: I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent
him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed
death. My enemy's death cannot be held against me, it is no longer a source of anguish, if I killed him with the
approval of society: that is the purpose of war. Killing is a way of relieving one's feelings, of warding off one's own
death. 47 There are two separate but interdependent ideas here. The first is the rather pragmatic and mundane
killing someone who would otherwise kill you is a life-supporting action. Why
assume that your intended victim would otherwise be your assassin? Because, of course,
your own government has [*17] clarified precisely who is friend and who is foe. The
second, far more complex idea, is that killing in general confers immunity from mortality.
observation that
This idea, of death as a zero-sum commodity, is captured by Ernest Becker's paraphrase of Elias Canetti: "Each
organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good." 48 Or, according to Otto
"The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing , the Sacrifice, of the other; through
the death of the other one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed." 49
Rank,
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Link- Nuclear War

The avoidance of nuclear catastrophes represents the ultimate fear of
death, ones collectivity, shattering the strive for immortality
Michael C. Kearl; Social Forces, Vol. 61, 1983, questia
Historically, the ultimate death fear has undoubtedly been the death of one's
collectivity, whether by pogrom or plague. The contemporary manifestation of this
megadeath fear is a nuclear holocaust,[sic] a phenomenon not only manmade [sic] but
accomplished by the highest level of social structure, the state. All modes of
immortality, whether they be of induction into some professional hall of fame, one's
genetic continuity, or religious genealogical files, are now at the mercy of the state. As
Lifton observed: "For, if we anticipate the possibility of nuclear weapons being used,
and I believe everyone from about the age of six or seven in some measure does, we
are faced with the prospect of being severed from virtually an of our symbolic
paths to immortality" (b, 23-4).
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Link- Obsession
The 1ac is obsessed with preserving life, avoiding death and emphasizing
destruction. This fear of death comes to encompass the entire politics of
the viewer, encompassing all thoughts within a frame of how to avoid their
own, individual, and our, collective, annihilation.
Robert Jay Lifton, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School University
Center, 1979, Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life
All this takes us to an evolving concept of obsessional states that relates them to
intolerance for and therefore preoccupation with "death, decay, destruction, violence,
anything dealing with unaccountable elements of human existence." 35 I would
emphasize in obsessive states the lifelong inner terror of disintegration.
Freud's patient as much as told him so when he remarked to his analyst, in the midst of an
exchange concerning conscious and unconscious aspects of his obsessive ideas: "Such an
occurrence, he continued, was thus only possible where a disintegration of the personality was
already present" (and it was Freud himself who underlined that phrase)." 36 Moreover, this case,
along with other writings of Freud, did much to develop the image-triad of obsession-fecesdeath,
remarked upon by a number of writers. That trinity has much to do, of course, with the tendency
for bowel training to become an arena of parent-child struggle. Keeping in mind the association
of feces and disintegration, we understand both the imagery and the struggle to have to do with
elements of life-power and "falling apart."
Freud dealt more with death imagery in this case than in most of his writings, and seemed to be
on the brink of elevating that imagery to some conceptual significance. But at a key point, he
drew back. In an important two-page sequence toward the end of the theoretical section he
notes the patient's "quite peculiar attitude towards the question of death," mentions his
nickname and its significance, and emphasizes (in passages we have already quoted) the
importance for the patient of the early death of his older sister and longstanding thoughts about
his father's death. 38 He recognizes that other obsessional neurotics behave similarly: "Their
thoughts are unceasingly occupied with other people's length of life and possibility of
death." These others need not have experienced family death at an early age as the
source of that death imagery. Instead, "these neurotics need the help of the possibility
of death chiefly in order that it may act as a solution of conflict they have left
unsolved." For Freud, death imagery must always be secondary--in this case to the
obsessive's inability to come to decisions, "especially in matters of love." Causation is
brought back to instinct: "For we must remember that in every neurosis we come upon
the same suppressed instincts behind the symptoms."
The primary significance of annihilation for obsessional neurosis becomes clear when
we turn to our third principle, that of meaning. Actual death imagery and death
equivalents come together around a troubled relationship with time. Fenichel writes:
"Orientation in time" is a typical reassuring measure. Many a fear of death means a
fear of a state where the usual conceptions of time are invalid. States in which the
orientation in time becomes more difficult--dusk or long evenings in winter or even
long days in summer--are feared by many compulsion neurotics. . . . 39
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ImpactDignity
As long as the Affirmative works within a framework that subscribes to the
fear of death, gross violations of human rights and dignity are inevitable.
The alternative alone is capable of placing an absolute value on human
rights.
Edward Callahan, Director of the Institute for Society, Ethics, and Life Sciences, The
Tyranny of Survival, 1973
The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But
abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have
been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported
threat of communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for
ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World
War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, into detention
camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States
(1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts othwerwise
blatantly unconstitutional. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official
legitimations of nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa
imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The
Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name
of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them.
For all these reasons, it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a
tyranny of survival. There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing
to inflict on another for the sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not
ready to suppress. It is easy of course to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and
manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the
need to defend the fatherland, to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But
my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival,
when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy
other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny of survival as a value is
that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become
an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive single-mindedness that will stop at
nothing.
We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically,
the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all
human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the right to life-then
how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process,
destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival? To put it
more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason
why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be a Pyrrhic victory to end all
Pyrrhic victories.
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Alternative- Nuclear War Solvency

Only by breaking down taboos and representations of death imagery can
the chances of nuclear war be lessened- our public participation seeks to
educate and influence
Marilyn S. Jacobs and M. Brewster Smith, 1989, American Psychology in the Quest for
Nuclear Peace, questia
Also related to psychology's role in public interest and advocacy is the attitude of citizens
toward nuclear war as reflected in public opinion polls; this area has gained importance
as a means of gauging advocacy based interventions. The substantial increase in public
concern, involvement, and commitment over the issue of nuclear war that occurred in the
late seventies and early eighties was considered by many psychologists to hold promise
for the only realistic role they could play in the prevention of nuclear war; i.e.,
influencing public opinion through persuasive communication. The dramatic
change in opinion of the American electorate regarding the arms race from a strong antiCommunist sentiment to the belief that it is time to negotiate with the Soviets
( Yankelovich and Doble, 1984) has been interpreted as being a psychological one (e.g.,
Markey, 1985; Klineberg, 1984, 1985). The task for psychology was seen as empowering
the public and opinion leaders ( M. B. Smith, 1984).
Klineberg ( 1984, 1985) asserts that psychology should become involved in organizing
public opinion through work with peace organizations, the public directly, and politicians.
He regards the following areas of psychology as potentially useful in influencing public
opinion: the role of perception in international relations; the role of mutual ignorance; the
dehumanization of the enemy; the role of national Stereotypes; the effect on mental
health of living with the nuclear threat; the psychological aspects of the "window of
vulnerability" theory; and the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy. He favors the international
community of psychologists working together. Thus, using public opinion, an educational
effort must be devised that is connected to people's lives; the question of the USSR must
be coped with; a more effective political coalition must be built; and realistic alternatives
to current policy must be formulated ( McFadden, 1984). Other writers recommend the
transformation of the Democratic party to achieve political ends related to peace ( Burns,
1984).
Similarly, Schofield and Pavelchak ( 1985) have suggested ways in which psychology can
contribute toward the prevention of nuclear war through persuasive communication
research, which might inform advocacy organizations that direct public information
campaigns. Such research also has implications for fundamental decisions related to
whether public information campaigns are useful interventions. These authors also
suggest that psychology might find a role in the development of materials concerning
nuclear war to be used by educators.
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**1NCs
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Death K 1NC
Subpoint A- Kill to Save
In a paradoxical attempt to rebel against death, humans turn to promises

of immortality through absolute loyalty to political ideology. We demand
the slaughter of our enemies as part of an impossible quest to destroy
death itself. War itself is not the issue but rather the death drive behind
it.
Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law at Purdue, International Journal on World
Peace, No. 3, Volume 16, September 1st, 1999
Behind the play of nations and their wars lies the wish of individual citizens, acting like a
herd in denying their own finitude, to achieve immortality. States have become gods and
must be desacralized if our terrible wars are to end. Individuals, not states, should be viewed
as sacred. They should find their true identity in personal virtue, not in a blind loyalty to a
state which promises immortality but leads them down the path to extinction.
The world is full of noise, but if we listen carefully we can hear the real music that will
transform ourselves into purposeful beings and our states into purposeful communities. Why
is an entire planet now in jeopardy? The usual answers are cast in terms of the language of
world politics. The nations of the world continue to defer to the primacy of Realpolitik.
Insufficient resources and hopes are committed to arms control. The post-War polarity of
East and West has been transformed into an era of exceedingly cruel ethnic conflicts. And
without the assurances of authentic world authority structures, each state's uncertainty
about the intentions of adversary states encourages growing membership in the nuclear
club.
Although these answers are certainly correct, they are also trivial. The struggle for world
power is always epiphenomenal. It is what underlies this struggle, what animates
competition between states, that represents the authentic source of unconventional war
and terrorism. I refer to the individual human being's all-consuming fear of death and to the
corollary drive of individuals for immortality.
This calls forth a terrible irony. Dreading, more than anything else, animality decomposition
and decay, humankind sees salvation in an endless display of holy wars disguised as the
natural expression of global competition. But as these wars could require millions to pass
through fire, they can only ensure the very evil they have been invented to dispel. While
these excursions into organized barbarism are designed to reveal potency and overcome
earthly limitations, they inevitably make life impossible.
It is not enough to have God on our side. The whole world contradicts not only eternal life,
but even a short, temporal one. As for states, which are always an expression of faith and
which have always (even long before Hegel) regarded themselves as the "march of God in
the world," their ceaseless search for power is spawned by the primal terror of individuals,
but it is their fate to create necropolis.
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Death K 1NC
The process of securing life and developing means to destroy in order to save is part of a
broader system of neoliberal violence. The current death drive is not new as the gulag,
holocaust and genocide are all past examples of the lesson the United States federal
government has apparently missed; humanity cant be saved by destroying itself.
Boaventura de Santos, Prof at Univ of Coimbra, April 2003, Collective Suicide?, Bad Subjects, Issue # 63
According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion
that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it . This is a salvific and
sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the
possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to
have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples,
and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused
millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was under
Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the Holocaust. And now today, this is how
it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the
semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether
what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It
is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the
ultimate perversion of the Western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of
saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion manifested in the belief that
there are no alternatives to the present-day reality, and that the problems and difficulties
confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to ultimate consequences. If
there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market
failures; instead, it is the outcome of market laws not having been fully applied. If there is
terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather,
to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists
and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and
knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it
aims to reproduce infinitely the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end
of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this
logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of
insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and
neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods
involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it
in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the state
and international institutions in their favor. I have described this situation as a
combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this
combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the
war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly
democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism,
predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the
massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the
other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide
becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market
radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a
number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of
the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept
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of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent

civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable
calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and
260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without
there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay
the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years.
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Death K 1NC
Subpoint B- Materialism
The Affs discourse of apocalyptic scenarios absent plan action motivates

a desire for frenetic action, white noise, and material acquisition, forming
the philosophical foundation for consumerism.
Marc Weeks, and Frederic Maurel, Voyages Across the Web of Time; Angkarn, Nietzsche
and Temporal Colonization, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, September 1st, 1999
It becomes particularly significant when we realize that the fear of death (thanatophobia),
though it pushes death into the margins of cultural consciousness, is absolutely critical in
determining the prodigious hyperactivity of postmodemity. As Norman O. Brown
suggested some four decades ago in the United States in a book entitled Life Against
Death, the exaggerated and apparently limitless desire for more material wealth, more
noise and more activity is an unconscious phobic overreaction to the absence, silence and
passivity of death which lurks within the uniquely temporal human psyche. [33]
Appearances to the contrary, it is Thanatos, not Eros, which primarily drives the
hyperactive consumer culture. So when Angkarn's "The Eye of Time" alludes to the
seduction of humans by precious objects towards which they "rush to their deaths", we
should remember that, ironically, it may be the individualized person's knowledge and
fear of death, and the vain desire to defeat mortality through material self-aggrandis
ement (or through mindnumbing, time-destroying freneticism), that actually render the
human so vulnerable to that seduction. There is an important sense, then, in which
Angkarn's aesthetic temporal philosophy, though not immune to nostalgia, presents a
more profound alterity to the increasingly pervasive market and productivity-centred
global culture than does Nietzsche. The German writer is clearly at odds with the culture
of unlimited consumption that was gestating in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. His philosophy of the will represents, among other things, a response to the willless, unrestrained desire of a human conceived principally as producer-consumer. Yet
Nietzsche's promotion of the superhuman individual who relentlessly pursues the mastery
of time, the domination of death, epitomizes that culture in which the individual is at
war with time, with mortality. As we have attempted to demonstrate here, that same
psychological war plays a significant role in driving the irrational and exponential growth
of a globalizing free market.
This drive to constantly acquire and consume transforms the world

into a materialist wasteland, devoid of meaning. The greatest
threat is not nuclear war it is avoiding nuclear war only to fall prey
to an eternity of counterfeit existence.
Michael E. Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy at Tulane, Contesting Earths Future:
Radical Ecology and Postmodernity, 1994
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Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens
the relation between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more
dangerous than a nuclear war that might bring about the complete annihilation of humanity
and the destruction of the earth. This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian
teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose ones soul by losing ones relation to
God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war,
life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur an
ontological clearing through which such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernitys
one-dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies them any being at all, the loss of
humanitys openness for being is already occurring. Modernitys background mood is horror
in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material happiness for
everyone by reducing nature to pure energy. The unleashing of vast quantities of energy
in nuclear war would be equivalent to modernitys slow-motion destruction of nature:
unbounded destruction would equal limitless consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear
war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed we would exist in a
state of ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise.
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Death K 1NC
Subpoint C- Biopolitics
The attempts to control, manage, and ensure safety of the population is

based on the power of death and its underside, the power to warn and
strike fear. This form of control is the root of all 20 th century atrocities as
the sovereign sword has diminished in favor of the violence of the
population.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume One, 1978
Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all
things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations.
But this formidable power of death and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force
and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits now presents itself as the
counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, subjecting it to precise
controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a
sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone;
entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life
necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and
the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars , causing so many to
be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused
them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the
one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival .
The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole
population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individuals continued
existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one has to be capable of
killing in order to go on living has become the principle that defines the strategy of states.
But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is
the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers,
this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is
situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population.
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Death K 1NC
Contention Two: Hope
The repression of mortality is sustained in political reality by a series of
linguistic prohibitions and taboos concerning the subject of death. While
the Affirmative builds the walls of fear ever higher, the negative offers a
different approach:
Text: Vote negative to shatter the silence surrounding death through an

absolute rejection of the Affirmatives fantasies of immortality in order to
embrace hope in the uncertain present.
The duty of those who judge is to relentlessly tear down the taboo
surrounding death at every turn a Negative ballot signifies an important
political stance, and begins the deconstruction of the deathwatch.
Louise Harmon, Professor of Law and Medical Ethics at the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center
at Touro College, 77 Minnesota Law Review 1, November 1992, gender paraphrased
There is also a direct relationship between our attitude toward death and its status as a
taboo subject. A taboo is something forbidden, and taboos come in many different
forms. They may be proscriptions against certain behaviors, n194 or against eating
certain foods, n195 or touching certain sacred or [*108] profane objects or persons.
n196 But taboos can also be what Levi-Strauss called "linguistic prohibitions." n197 In a
given culture, certain words or subjects may be forbidden to be spoken of in public
discourse. Someone with Victorian sensibilities, for example, may consider the
mention of sexual activity or birth to violate a taboo. n198 Geoffrey Gorer has theorized
that there has been a shift in prudery during the last century, with the subject of death
replacing the subject of sex as the forbidden topic on life's agenda. n199 His
explanation for the linguistic prohibition on the subject of death is the same as mine:
People no longer have a system of belief that includes spiritual immortality.
The reasoning goes something like this: If the predominant attitude toward death in a
culture is one of fear, then death becomes the subject of a linguistic prohibition -- a
taboo. n200 There are risks in violating a taboo. Much like a formal legal system, our
informal, traditional codes of conduct often [*110] carry sanctions for the breaking of
unwritten rules. n201 By referring to the subject of death, and in particular to one's
own death, one runs the risk of conjuring up death's appearance. n202 In breaking the
taboo, the speaker endangers himself [themselves] by making himself [them self]
vulnerable to the evil that prompted the taboo. If that risk is of no threat to the
speaker, then the subject can be openly spoken of. In this instance, if the appearance
of death does not rattle our bones, then there is no reason for silence on the subject .
Simply put, the less fear we have about something, the more likely we are to talk about
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it. The converse is true as well: the more fear we have about something, the less likely
we are to talk about it. Once again, this is not a very ambitious claim.
[Continues] If we could shatter the silence that surrounds the subject of death, we might be
able to confront the taboo. Confronting the taboo would make for better deaths, and making
for better deaths would help alleviate the horrors of the late twentieth-century-deathwatch.
It would be an improvement in the human condition; a benefit for us all, and something to
aspire to. But for the people in power, confronting the taboo must be more than just an
aspiration. Those people who orchestrate the deaths of others -- who have jurisdiction over
the human body, [*115] who judge death talk, who design death spaces -- have a duty to
confront the taboo. This duty runs not only to the dying person, but also to those who gather
around him.
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Death K 1NC
We must separate hope from solvency claims and calculability. We are
asking you to seek hope in an uncertain present rather than try to avoid
impending disaster.
Brian Massumi, Associate Professor of Communications at the Universit de Montral, and
Mary Zournazi, Philosopher and Ph.D in Cultural Theory, 2002, Hope: New Philosophies for
Change; New York: Routledge; p. 211-212
Yes - the idea of hope in the present is vital . Otherwise we endlessly look to the future
or toward some utopian dream of a better society or life, which can only leave us
disappointed, and if we see pessimism as the natural flow from this, we can only be
paralysed as you suggest. Yes, because in every situation there are any number of levels
of organisation and tendencies in play, in cooperation with each other or at cross-purposes.
The way all the elements interrelate is so complex that it isn't necessarily comprehensible
in one go. There's always a sort of vagueness surrounding the situation, an uncertainty
about where you might be able to go, and what you might be able to do once you exit
that particular context. This uncertainty can actually be empowering - once you realise
that it gives you a margin of manoeuvrability and you focus on that, rather than on
projecting success or failure. It gives you the feeling that there is always an opening to
experiment, to try and see. This brings a sense of potential to the situation. The present's
`boundary condition', to borrow a phrase from science, is never a closed door. It is an
open threshold - a threshold of potential. You are only ever in the present in passing. If
you look at it that way you dont have to feel boxed in by it, no matter what its horrors,
and no matter what, rationally, you expect will come. You may not reach the end of the
trail but at least there's a next step. The question of which next step to take is a lot less
intimidating than how to reach a far-off goal in a distant future where all our problems will
finally be solved. It's utopian thinking, for me, that's `hopeless'.
The best political stance is to reject calculations of probability and policy

outcomes, and instead embrace a personal stance of hope. Predictability
and the uncertainty of hope are mutually exclusive, so choose wisely.
Isabelle Stengers, Professor of Philosophy at the Universit Libre de Bruxelles, and Mary
Zournazi, a Philosopher and Ph.D in Cultural Theory; Hope: New Philosophies for Change;
New York: Routledge; 2002; p. 245-247
I think probability is often associated with the idea of cha n ce - so do you mean something else here, not simply an
encounter with chance? The word `chance' has many meanings. You may speak of chance when you calculate the chance for
something to happen, and then it is probability. For instance, you can throw the dice and have a succession of nine and six -
Probability is very interesting for all the

people who spend time describing systems they can define, but the behaviour of which
they are unable to predict. But it implies a closed definition, through a set of variables
which will remain invariant. It is thus a static notion. I call possibility what cannot be
calculated a priori, because it implies the fact that the very description of the system
itself can change. And you cannot calculate that. Possibility is connected to what I call èvents'. Again, the term
and you can calculate the probability of this particular succession.
èvent' may have many meanings - the one I retain emphasises the difference an event makes between the past, which made it
possible but which cannot explain it, and the future which, one way or another, takes it into account. Such a future may, and
often will, include telling the past in such a way that it seems to explain the event. The philosopher Henri Bergson is the one
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this creates the possibility of hope and the

creativity to think and feel in life? You have written about the importance of the capacity to feel in critical
who best described this `retroactive power' of what happens. So
practices, and that there needs to be a certain tenderness in understanding diff erent traditions of thought (for instance, in
revisiting thinkers like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud). / am wondering about that - the capacity to feel and what that
capacity enables, I mean it does enable a kind of hope, I think... For me, feeling and thinking are closely connected, but
their connection refers to experience as something which is not first `my' experience, but which is forced by encounters
which make me think and feel. It may be encounters with things or with people, or with ideas. When I read Whitehead I
do not just examine his ideas; they oblige me to feel and think in a new way. They induce èvents'. Whitehead himself
made the distinction between dead ideas and ideas which are alive - at school many ideas we try to transmit are dead.
In the best case, students will learn them and then forget about them. They are devoid of any importance because they do not
You cannot have true thinking without feeling - and what that
means is that true thinking is about transforming yourself. But the very fact that we can
be transformed by what we encounter, or what we participate in, is a matter of hope. It
does not promise anything, but no-one has the right to say Ì know how things are, they
are hopeless'. This hope is an unknown quality, right, because you cant predict the
outcome? Yes. I think so. And you cannot tell someone else that he or she should ~ have this experience, to think and feel.
force you to think and feel.
As a teacher I can only celebrate with a student the fact that I `felt' it was happening for him or her, and hope the one for whom what
I produced were dead ideas will encounter other opportunities. Again, the only thing which can be understood, explained and
hope is itself an event, and you must just be grateful as long as you
are able to hope or to think.
amply justified is despair. I think
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Death K 1NC
Embrace the current world, the status quo, for all its faults, to find the joy
in it. DO NOT link this joy of the present to a solution for future based on
our fear of death or all hope is lost.
Brian
Mary
Massumi, Associate Professor of Communications at the Universit de Montral, and

Zournazi, Philosopher and Ph.D in Cultural Theory, 2002, Hope: New Philosophies for
Change; New York: Routledge; p. 241-242

Yes, and there is a relation between this ethics, hope and the idea of joy. If we take Spinoza and Nietzsche
an ethic of joy and the cultivation of joy is an affirmation of life . In the sense of what you
even a small thing can become amplified and can have a global effect which is
life-affi rming . What are your thoughts on this ethical relationship in everyday existence? And in intellectual
practice - which is where we are coming from - what are the affi rmations of joy and hope? Well, I think that joy is not
the same thing as happiness . Just like good for Nietzsche is not the opposite of evil, joy for Spinoza (or `gaiety' in
Nietzsche's vocabulary) is not the opposite of unhappy. It's on a diff erent axis. Joy can be very
disruptive , it can even be very painful. What I think Spinoza and Nietzsche are getting at is joy as
affirmation, an assuming by the body of its potentials, its assuming of a posture that
intensifies its powers of existence . The moment of joy is the co-presence of those potentials, in the context of
seriously,
are saying,
a bodily becoming. That can be an experience that overcomes you. Take Antonin Artaud, for example. His artistic practice was
all about intensifying bodily potential, trying to get outside or underneath the categories of language and affective
containment by those categories, trying to pack vast potentials for movement and meaning in a single gesture, or in words
like a scream of possibility, a babble of

becoming, the body bursting out through an opening in expression. It's liberating, but at the same time the charge of that
that burst apart and lose their conventional meaning, becoming
potential can become unbearable and can actually destroy. Artaud himself was destroyed by it; he ended up mad, and so did
Nietzsche. So it is not just simple opposition between happy and unhappy or pleasant or unpleasant. I do think, though, that
the practice of joy does imply some form of belief. It can't be a total scepticism or nihilism or
cynicism, which are all mechanisms for holding oneself separate and being in a position to judge or
deride. But, on the other hand, it's not a belief in the sense of a set of propositions to adhere to
or a set of principles or moral dictates . There is a phrase of Deleuze's that I like very much, where he says that
what we need is to be able to find a way to `believe in the world' again . It's not at all a
theological statement - or an anti-theological statement, for that matter. It's an ethical statement . What it
is saying is that we have to live our immersion in the world, really experience our belonging to this world,
which is the same thing as our belonging to each other, and live that so intensely together that there is no
room to doubt the reality of it. The idea is that lived intensity is self-affirming. It doesn't need a
god or judge or head of state to tell it that it has value. What it means, I think, is accept the embeddedness, go with it, live it out,
and that's your reality, it's the only reality you have, and
it's your participation that makes it real. That's

what Deleuze is saying belief is about, a belief in the world. It's not a belief that's àbout' being in
the world; it is a being in the world. Because it's all about being in this world, warts and all,
and not some perfect world beyond, or a better world of the future, it's an empirical kind of belief. Ethical, empirical
- and creative, because your participation in this world is part of a global becoming. So it's about
taking joy in that process, wherever it leads, and I guess it's about having a kind of faith in
the world which is simply the hope that it continue... But again, it is not a hope that has a
particular content or end point - it's a desire for more life, or for more to life.
The criticism calls into question the ideology that forms a basis for their
action. Their thought process not only constitutes reality, but is more
important than the action itself.
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Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, The Post-Development Reader,

1997, p. 340
Yes, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important
component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an inner
coherence. As this aspect grows in importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality,
it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself albeit a reality
altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may
have even greater weight than reality as such. Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual
becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it. The significance of phenomena
no longer derives from the phenomena themselves, but from their locus as concepts in the
ideological context. Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse . Thus power
gradually draws closer to ideology than it does to reality: it draws its strength from theory
and becomes entirely dependent on it. This inevitable leads, of course, to a paradoxical
result; rather than theory, or rather ideology, serving power, power begins to serve ideology.
It is as though ideology has appropriated power from power, as though it had become
dictator itself. It then appears that theory itself, ritual itself, ideology itself, makes decisions
that affect people, and not the other way around.
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Pure War 1NC

The 1AC is a fantasy of pure war universal destruction that threatens us
at every turn this turns us into pure warriors who endlessly rehearse
our own deaths ultimately this leaves us unable to confront cruelty in
our everyday lives
Mark B. Borg Jr., practicing psychoanalyst and community/organizational consultant
working in New York City, 03 Psychoanalytic Pure War: interactions with the postapocalyptic unconscious, Journal of Psychoanalysis, questia
Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer's concept of "pure war"refers to the potential of a culture to
destroy itself completely (12). 2 We as psychoanalysts canand increasingly mustexplore
the impact of this concept on our practice, and on the growing number of patients who live with the
inability to repress or dissociate their experience and awareness of the pure war condition. The realization of a
patient's worst fears in actual catastrophic events has always been a profound enough psychotherapeutic challenge.
These days, however, catastrophic events not only threaten friends, family, and neighbors;
they also become the stuff of endless repetitions and dramatizations on radio, television, and
Internet. 3 Such continual reminders of death and destruction affect us all. What is the role of the
analyst treating patients who live with an ever-threatening sense of the pure war lying just below the surface of our
cultural veneer?
At the end of the First World War, the first "total war," Walter Benjamin observed that "nothing [after the war]
remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and
explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body"(84). Julia Kristeva makes a similar note about our
contemporary situation, "The recourse to atomic weapons seems to prove that horror...can
rage absolutely" (232). And, as if he too were acknowledging this same fragility and uncontainability, the
French politician Georges Clemenceau commented in the context of World War I that "war is too serious to be
confined to the military" (qtd. in Virilio and Lotringer 15).
Virilio and Lotringer gave the name "pure war"to the psychological condition that results
when people know that they live in a world where the possibility for absolute destruction
(e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As Virilio and Lotringer see it, it is not the technological capacity
for destruction (that is, for example, the existence of nuclear armaments) that imposes the
dread characteristic of a pure war psychology but the belief systems that this capacity sets
up. Psychological survival requires that a way be found (at least unconsciously) to escape
inevitable destructionit requires a way outbut this enforces an irresolvable paradox,
because the definition of pure war culture is that there is no escape. Once people believe in
the external possibilityat least those people whose defenses cannot handle the weight of the dread that pure
war imposespure war becomes an internal condition, a perpetual state of preparation for
absolute destruction and for personal, social, and cultural death.
The tragedy at the World Trade Center in New York City has given us a bitter but important opportunity to study the
effects of the pure war condition on individuals. It allows us to look at how this all-encompassing state appears in
psychoanalytic treatment and to observe its influence through the analysis of transference/countertransference
dynamics. The pure war condition has been brought grimly to consciousness. In this paper, I will explore how it
manifests itself in society, in character, and most specifically in the psychoanalytic treatment of one patient whose
dynamics highlight significant aspects of the pure war state.
How does treatment happen when, at some level, we perceive ourselves as already dead? Whatever our individual
differences, our visions of the psychoanalytic endeavor arise out of the social defense of the culture within which we
live and work (I have referred to this as "community character," cf. Borg 350). And whatever our individual
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differences, in a pure war situation the primary task is simply to sustain the dream of
psychic survival. The case of Joyce, who saw the first explosion at the World Trade Center as she rode down
Fifth Avenue in a bus after her session with me, exemplifies this task. [End Page 57]
Continues
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Pure War 1NC

Continued
The Pure Warrior
The philosophy (or practice) of "pure warriors," that is, of people who are preoccupied with
the pure war condition of their society, is based on the perpetual failure within them of the
dissociation and repression that allow others to function in a situation that is otherwise completely
overwhelming. Joyce was one of those who lived on the border of life and death; she could not escape awareness
of that dread dichotomy that most of us are at great pains to dissociate. She manifested the state of
perpetual preparation that is the hallmark of pure war culture and of the insufficiently
defended pure warrior, and also a constant awareness of the nearness of death in all its
various forms. She understood quite well, for instance, that when people are institutionalized (as she had
been on numerous occasions), "society is defining them as socially dead, [and that at that point] the
essential task to be carried out is to help inmates to make their transition from social death
to physical death" (Miller and Gwynne 74). Against this backdrop, Joyce sought psychoanalysis
as a "new world," the place where she would break free from the deathly institutionalized
aspects of her self, and begin her life anew. Her search for a "new world" included the
possibility of a world that was not a pure war worlda prelapsarian Eden.
Virilio and Lotringer state that "war exists in its preparation" (53). And Sun Tsu, who wrote over 2400
years ago and yet is often considered the originator of modern warfare, said in The Art of War, "Preparation
everywhere means lack everywhere" (44). This means that when the members of a culture must be
on guard on all fronts, the resources of that culture are necessarily scattered and taxed. The
more defenses are induced and enacted, the more psychologically impoverished a culture
(or a person) will be. In war-torn nations, resources like food, clothing, and materials for shelter may be scarce
in the general population because they are shunted off to the military. Similarly, the hoarding of
psychological resources and the constant alert status of the defense system are outcomes of
existence in a pure war culture. We can see this scattering and scarcity of resources occurring already in the
United States as billions of dollars are shunted from social services to war efforts and homeland security.
In pure war culturesthat is, in cultures that enact a perpetual preparation for warthe
notion of peace is itself a defensive fantasy, although to survive psychically we distract
ourselves from such frightening stimuli as widespread terrorist activities and other events that demonstrate
our pure war status. Pure war obliterates the distinction between soldier and citizen. We have all
been drafted. According to Virilio and Lotringer, "All of us are already civilian soldiers, without
knowing it...War happens everywhere, but we no longer have the means of recognizing it"
(42).
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____________
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**Overviews
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2NC Overview
The 1AC represents the status quo as doomed to widespread death absent
plan action. Our Friedland and Beres evidence indicate that the motivation
for their desire to preserve life is a fantasy of immortality sustained by
the repression of deaths inevitability. The need to talk about saving lives
to cover up the silence and passivity of death that lurks beyond their
conscious thought contributes to the repression of death in society.
3 Impacts:
1. Kill to Save- Within both the framework of fiat and discursive
performance, fear of death drives individuals to absolute obedience
to the State they see as capable of protecting them. They demand
continuous destruction of the Other, in an externalization of the
weakness they perceive in themselves and to cover up death,
ensuring destruction of all life on Earth.
2. Negates the Value to Life- In an attempt to create permanent

meaning in a temporary world, individuals try to define themselves
though material acquisition. The repression of death goes hand in
hand with the senseless drive to constantly accumulate and selfpreserve. This mentality dooms us to an eternity of counterfeit
existence which outweighs extinction.
3. Bioplitical Control- The panopticon is most applicable in this

situation- just as guards maintain control of their subjects through
fear of punishment, so does the affirmative keep actual change at
bay and promote violence on the subjects of their affirmative. The
implication of this form of biopower is constant comparison and
subjugation through all means of violence and extermination.
Our alternative offers a different approach- rather than utilize discourses

based on the repression of death, we must confront that repression with
hope through a rejection of the Affs fantasies of immortality. This
rejection not only avoids all the links it also presents the only way
possible to solve the Affirmative.
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Additionally, extend our Havel evidence - the judges duty is to decide

between competing frameworks, and adopt whichever framework best
exposes the repressed fantasmatic constructions.
Yannis Stavrakakis, Research Fellow at the School of Politics at the University of
Nottingham, Lacan and the Political, 1999
If there is a duty for critical intellectuals today it is to occupy all the time the space of this
hole, especially when a new order (a new reoccupation of traditional politics) is stabilized
and attempts to make invisible this lack in the Other (Zizek, 1993: 1-2). As far a political
praxis is concerned our ethical duty can only be to attempt the institutionalization of this
lack within political reality. This duty is a truly and radically democratic one. It is also an
ethical duty that marks the philosophical dimensions of democracy . As Bernasconi and Critchley point
out, if democracy is an ethically grounded form of political life which does not cease to call itself into question by asking of its
legitimacy, if legitimate communities are those that call themselves into question, then these communities are philosophical
(Critchley, 1992: 239).
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2NC Pure War Overview

Extend our original piece of Borg evidence from the 1nc- the affirmatives
depiction of war, war planning and destruction is not benign but rather a
psychological defense mechanism. These representations are part of the
pure war culture Virilio coined- a world in which constant images of
violence and war force entire social bodies to live in constant fear and
trepidation knowing that with the flick of a switch or turn of a button, the
frame of peace could be shattered. However, this internal conditions
paradox is quite evident- the same fear of death that is sought to give
security is the same condition that necessitates violence as there is no
escape from danger in a pure war culture as defenses eg. Nuclear bombs
and arms are constantly built up to kill to save
AND- Even if the affirmatives representations are well intentioned, the

constant process, especially in debate, of image after image in constant
loops and repetitions is an attempt to avoid the ultimate end of our fear of
death- one of annihilation- we must move away from these obsessive
pleas
Mark B. Borg Jr., practicing psychoanalyst and community/organizational consultant
working in New York City, 03 Psychoanalytic pure war: interactions with the postapocalyptic unconscious, Journal of Psychoanalysis, questia
From their individual viewpoints, therefore, Freud, Winnicott, and Sullivan each described
facets of the pure war condition. They outlined the processes by which it may be translated
into patterns of interaction with the environment (individuals, institutions, etc.), and they
examined the repetition/enactment of these processes in the transference. A person's
attitude toward his or her environment (of which one representation is the analyst) is
inevitably made up of transferential appraisals, which are formed initially and maintained
afterward in cultural as well as familial contexts. Of course, to the degree that pure war is an
internal condition, reaction to it may be observed in all forms of psychological defense:
sublimation, dissociation, repression, splitting, obsessive-compulsive behaviors,
and so on. Each one of these processes addresses the underlying terror of the pure war
perception by communicating the message, "See? Everything's really OK after all."
Patients like Joyce end up in our offices when such reassurance becomes impossible. The
specters with whom we share our (internal) lives perpetually threaten to retaliate, the
harbingers of pure war. As we share our lives with them, they share their deaths with us,
pulling away the covers under which we keep our own internalized and dissociated
personal visions of total annihilation.
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2NR Overview
Well do our impact analysis here-
The conceded Foucault evidence means their case impact cant make any
sense. EVEN IF THEY WIN THEIR ARGUMENTS ABOUT REPRESENTATIONS
BEING GOOD, they cant assign an objective value to human life within
their ethical system based on survivability. That calculation makes humans
an object, a necessary step to genocide and nuclear annihilation, which
turns case.
Also, they conceded our consumerism implication- this is impacted by our

Zimmerman evidence, which is comparative. Even if they win the result of
our alternative is nuclear war and extinction, it is preferable to a world
devoid of meaning.
Additionally, they conceded our Havel and Stavrakakis evidence- Ideology

creates the reality we live in and is more important than the action itself.
The duty of the judge is a constant criticism of attempts to cover up the
lack in the symbolic order. This means questions of desirability of the
plans implementation take a backseat to concerns of justification.
This is the only evidence that speaks to the relative importance of action
and theory, which makes it like a conceded topicality interpretation. No
matter how much offense they win, they dont have a credible counterinterpretation. This also takes out any risk of their permutation.
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______
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**Links
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Link- Nuclear Death/Extinction

Representations of death are the most cynical form of voyeurism- they
serve to influence the masses on taboo subjects, all the time, everyday
through renditions in various forms i.e. new advantages, cases, etc.
Unfortunately, they are all merely a product of the same pornographic
dealings with the fear factor that make the impacts possible.
Robert Jay Lifton, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School University Center,
1979, Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life
Geoffrey Gorer was groping toward that distortion when he spoke of the
"pornography of death." 18 He was referring to what he took to be the twentieth
century replacement of sex by death as an underground sphere of conflict; and the
eruption of previously taboo lurid private fantasy into public discourse in the form of
extravagant mass media rendition of death and violence. Gorer stresses a shift in
prudery--the unmentionability of sex giving way to the unmentionability of natural
death. But the source of the pornography--of our shared fantasies of runaway
violence--may reside in the state of mind we have been discussing. Our public
depictions of violent death can be exploitative and repulsive in the extreme. But they
are no more excessive than, perhaps appropriate to, the ultimate nuclear
pornography: the equation in our minds of death with extinction.
We have been discussing various forms of dislocation in connection with impaired
symbolic immortality, the identity of the meaninglessly doomed, and the equation of
death with extinction. As we move further along the aberrant sequence we find that
specific nuclear relationships to totalism and victimization can be understood around
imagery of "security" and "secrecy." We can consider these in their collective
significance and then turn to individual psychological counterparts.
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Link- Hegemony
Hegemony IS the drive towards immortality- the 1acs presentation and
sustenance of a strong, forward deployment and coherent national
security presents a move towards totalism in which fear is conquered,
paving the way for a transcendence of mortality
And since the development of nuclear weapons, we may speak of a pervasive sense of
vulnerability to annihilation. This vulnerability was recognized very early by some of those
originally closely associated with making the first atomic bomb. Even as he in effect
rejected scientists' petitions against the dropping of the first atomic bomb without
warning on a populated city, Secretary of War Henry Stimson not only suggested that the
weapon brought about a new relationship of man to the universe but said: "It must be
controlled if possible to make it an assurance of future peace rather than a menace to
civilization." 21
The most constructive approach to that vulnerability would be to acknowledge it and
work universally to overcome it. But the more frequent national response resembles that
of an individual who fends off his imagery of threatened annihilation by means of
more aggressive and more total measures to assert his power , measures which
may in turn enable him to believe his illusion of invulnerability. Thus nations,
perhaps especially bomb-possessors, are likely to move toward totalism in both foreign
and domestic policies. Hans J. Morgenthau, for instance, describes a dangerous American
tendency toward globalism," which he sees as isolationism "turned inside out":
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LinkOpposition to Death
By contrast, the Affirmative defines and defends life in opposition to death death is the
absence of life, it is subtracted from the value of those who remain living this way of
understanding death as the end of consumptive utility underlies the value system of
postmodern capital.
Butterfield Department of English University of Wisconsin 2002, Postmodern Culture
13.1
The primitives, Baudrillard maintains, responded to this challenge collectively through symbolic
exchanges with their dead and deities. Their belief in the sign's transparency, its symbolic singularity, can
be seen in animistic practices such as voodoo, where the enemy's hair is thought to contain his or her spirit. If the
dead are only humans of a different nature, and if the sign is what it stands for, then a
symbolic sacrifice to a dead person is every bit as binding as a gift to a living person. The
obligation to return is placed upon the dead, and they reciprocate by somehow honoring or benefiting the
living. Most Christians believe in and employ this same mechanism when they pray to the resurrected Christ, but
even they do not believe that their symbolic gestures are anything but metaphors. We no longer believe in the one to
one correspondence of signifier and signified, and we know the loved one is not really contained in the lock of hair.
Americans will doubtless commemorate the deaths of those killed on 9/11 as long as our
nation exists, but we know that our gifts to the dead are only symbolic, which for us means
imaginary.
Baudrillard's postmodern-primitive symbolic, on the other hand, aimed to obliterate the difference
in value between the imaginary and the real, the signifier and the signified, and to expose the
metaphysical prejudice at the heart of all such valuations. His wager was that this would be done through aesthetic
violence and not real violence, but having erased the difference between the two, there was never any guarantee that
others wouldn't take such theoretical "violence" to its literal ends. Graffiti art, scarification and tattooing are just the
benign counterparts of true terrorism, which takes ritual sacrifice and initiation to their extremes. Literalists and
extremists, fundamentalists of all sorts, find their logic foretold in Baudrillard's references to
the primitives. What the terrorists enacted on 9/11 was what Baudrillard would call a symbolic event of the first
order, and they were undeniably primitive in their belief that God, the dead, and the living would somehow honor
and benefit them in the afterlife. Unable to defeat the U.S. in economic or military terms, they
employ the rule of prestation in symbolic exchange with the gift of their own deaths. But
Americans are not "primitives"--we do not value death symbolically, but rather only as a
subtraction from life. Capitalism's implicit promise, in every ad campaign and marketing strategy,
is that to consume is to live. We score up life against death as gain against loss, as if
through accumulation we achieve mastery over the qualitative presence of death that
haunts life. Our official holidays honoring the dead serve no other function than to
encourage consumption.
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LinkPanic
The Affirmative is the society of panic WMD are everywhere and coming
to get us this is the mode of symbolic exchange by which the
government creates a simulatenously passive docile citizenry to facilitate
violence
CAROLLO Assistant Professor of English 2003
Bad Subjects, Issue # 64, September 2003
Panic is our national pastime. In February 2003, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon gave a lecture about
how childhood adventuring has been radically curtailed by the lack of "wilderness" to explore. People feel
uncomfortable leaving their children alone to explore their surroundings. Chabon spoke of his daughter learning to
ride a bicycle, followed by his realization that there's no place he feels comfortable having her ride it. In the course
of one generation, the wilderness of childhood has been planned, mapped, and regulated by the fears of adults. Paul
Feig's memoir, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence, describes how high school in America is defined by
the possibility of panic attacks lurking around every corner. Much of life centers on making
sure we avoid being attacked. The collective dimensions of panic disorder, an illness generally treated on an
individual basis, is the subject of this essay. Americans are strangely united by their isolation from
one another.
The much-heralded individualist spirit of American society relies on nurturing a fear of other people. Fear of public
spaces where anyone can hang out in turn supports the proliferation of private property and restricted access
locations. Fear of public transportation means more and more privately owned cars on the road. The rhetorical
necessity of slogans such as "United We Stand" are countered by the ongoing national
zeitgeist of "Leave Me and My Family Alone." The implication embodied in "United We Stand"
is that we have some (un-American) Other to be united against. A suggestive correlation between
the isolation of mental illness and political isolationism can be found in the rhetoric of "going it alone." The
individualization of panic disorder corresponds to the media-savvy militarization of American
politics. Panic inspires pre-emptive attacks on whatever violates the sanctity of private life.
As we regulate childhood, so we map out the appropriate parameters of adulthood. Television often plays on the
prevalent anxieties of adolescence, treating its viewers like children in need of constant rules and warnings. Local
Fox News promises the viewer "Stories that Affect You," but the news itself offers such in-depth detritus as exposs
on the dangers of car airbags and "that Duluth prostitution ring we've been keeping you informed about." I'm not
suggesting that danger doesn't exist, but local television news has largely become a venue
that creates a catalogue of fears for citizens everywhere. In addition, local formats adhere to
a national formula for what constitutes newsworthiness, and what should affect local
populations.
We locate panic at the extreme end of the anxiety spectrum, as the awful truth of a phobia,
the end result of what psychiatrist Robert L. DuPont refers to as the "what if?" of horrific
possibility. The possibility of panic, however, covers a much broader band of the spectrum. The
news media may not want panic attacks to actually occur, but they like us to routinely consider the
possibility that something awful might happen if we do not maintain a healthy level of
anxiety and keep watching the news for updates. Witness coverage of the scare of African killer bees
a few years ago, recently featured in Bowling for Columbine. Be alert. Get scared. This anxiety constitutes a sort of
pre-emptive strike, if you will, on the panic state. Awful things often do happen. A smoking gun does not need to be
fired; the suggestion of a gun's potential is enough. The very possibility of weapons of mass
destruction, for example, can inspire a state of panic. The weapons don't need to be there.
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Panic has dominion over the future. The past may inspire panic attacks, but only as the harbinger of what
may perhaps come again. As we get further away from cataclysmic events, their ability to inspire
terror becomes attenuated. This means government, the entertainment industry, or news
media need to regularly create new things to fear. Whether the hand that rocks the cradle is
the government wishing to sell a new military solution to the world's problems, or an entertainment
industry that wants us to believe that "a nation lost its innocence" after Pearl HarborTM, we find ourselves in
the business of selling and consuming panic of one sort or another.
Though post-9/11 panic no longer governs America in the same way it did in late 2001, the government still uses the
Trade Center bombings as a way to gain support for future military initiatives. Hence the pandemic of global
terrorism, a phenomenon that sees 9/11 as a significant event in a never-ending continuum
of potential danger. Just as we ritually lose our innocence, so we must honor our worst fears.
The current government encourages us to believe that no historical precursors exist to
muddy the squeaky-clean innocence of America, but it also must instill in us the sense that
America's illusory innocence could be our undoing. If we don't act now, then our worst fears
may well be realized.
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LinkBukimi
The Affirmative enacts bukimi the performance of an uncanny certainty that one has
been targeted for nuclear destruction this process creates an unassimilable trauma that
ultimately anesthetizes the subject, forcing us to constanty reenact our trauma on others
SAINT-AMOUR Assistant Professor of English Pomona College 2000
Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 59-82
The people of Hiroshima who experienced bukimi had detected the opening up of the
conditional space of catastropheconditional because, despite the signs that informed its citizens'
sense of uncanniness, Hiroshima might finally have been spared rather than razed if conditions had been
different on the day of the drop. 2 In certain respects, the kind of conditional traumatic space that
registered as bukimi was unique to human-made devastation, and particularly to early
nuclear weapons. The careful sparing of atomic bomb target cities from conventional bombing bespoke
American military commanders' confidence in the destructive potential of the bomb and their desire to demonstrate
that destructive power in the theater of relatively undamaged cities. Having noticed the passing-over of
Hiroshima, its citizens strove to read the intention of the enemy in the signs that constituted
that passing-over. Those signs, in a sense, had been returned from one of two futures: one culminating in the nonevent of preservation, the other in the
limit event of catastrophe. When that limit event occurred, its survivors underwent a historically specific,
unique traumatization. But in the period of eerie suspension before the explosion, those who
registered the nuclear uncanny in Hiroshima were also the first to experience a condition
that, in a far more explicit incarnation, would become familiar to everyone living in a
targeted city during the Cold War: the sense that the present survival and flourishing of the
city were simultaneously underwritten and radically threatened by its identity as a nuclear
target. To link the real devastation of Hiroshima to the potential devastation of Cold War [End
Page 60] target cities may seem to do a violence to the specificity of the former, to its status as event
rather than eventuality, and to the real suffering and annihilation of its victims. My claim, however, is not that
the inhabitants of Cold War cities exhibited post-traumatic symptoms akin to those of the
atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha, but that they became accustomed to a more overt and
permanent variant of the uncanny frisson felt in Hiroshima before the bombing, as a
structuring condition of everyday life. In other words, what I have called the conditional space of catastrophe that gave rise to feelings of
bukimi in Hiroshima became a general characteristic of Cold War urban experience. In her 1965 essay "The Imagination of Disaster," Susan Sontag wrote
suggestively that "Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which
is one of the oldest subjects of art." In the course of discussing the "aesthetics of
destruction" in Cold War science fiction films, Sontag ventures a traumatic referent for that aesthetics:
"One gets the feeling, particularly in Japanese films but not only there, that a mass trauma exists over
the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of future nuclear wars. Most of the science
fiction films bear witness to this trauma, and, in a way, attempt to exorcise it" [461-63]. Sontag's
formulation does not adequately distinguish among the intense trauma of hibakusha, the more attenuated national trauma experienced by non-hibakusha Japanese, and
the worldwide response to the looming specter of nuclear war. One
might also object that by compulsively repeating a

particular scene of traumatic violence, the filmic spectacles of monster-suited men wrecking model cities likely did
more to act out than to work through the trauma engendered by the past nuclear bombing
of cities, or that induced by the possibility of a future nuclear war. Nonetheless, Sontag's observation allows that certain traumatic responses to the use of nuclear
weapons might not have been limited to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but rather shared by all who knew of nuclear weapons, their devastating effects, and
the escalating likelihood of their use. In
this, Sontag seems to have been among the first to posit what we
might call the hysteron proteron of the nuclear condition: the literally preposterous
phenomenon of traumatic symptomsdenial, dissociation, fragmentation, repression, the
compulsive repetition of extreme violencethat exist not in the wake of a past event, but in
the shadow of a future one. But one might want to stop short of claiming that the bukimi experienced by inhabitants of Hiroshima constituted a
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symptom in advance of its originary traumatic event. Such
a feeling of weird anticipation or uncanniness may have

been allied to the symptom as return-of-the-repressed insofar as it arose from an experience
not of singularity but of repetitionthe repetition, say, that inheres in awaiting an expected
catastrophe others have experienced (for example, conventional aerial bombardment) while also repeating what must once have been
their hopes to be exempted through some special dispensation. But the traumatic cause of repression, the explosion of the bomb, with its immediate effects, had not yet
occurred. Surely if something repressed were returning in bukimi, it must have been something anterior to the feeling of uncanniness, a different trauma; certainly, it
was not the future nuclear catastrophe that anachronistically "returned" to a moment before its occurrence. Similarly, if a mass traumatization existed, or exists, in
relation to nuclear weapons, its inaugural event might not be a future conditional nuclear holocaust but the completed events of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Such a suggestion may accord a secondary witness status to most of the Cold War world and thus erode distinctions between different degrees of witnessing
and indeed between the survivor-witnesses and bystanders of a traumatic event. But at least it does not posit the seeming temporal impossibility of a pretraumatic
stress syndrome. 60
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___________
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**Link Blocks
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AT: We Have Other Justifications

1. Our link arguments indicate that valuing life as death deferred
undermines other means of living life since it requires the annihilation of
ALL that does not fit within the simulation of immortal life. Even if this
argument is true, well win that the fear of death makes all your other
implications fall short.
2. Additionally, our criticism is a reason to reject the affirmative. If they

had said racism good and something else, they should still lose regardless
of other justifications of the plan.
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AT: Death Bad/Life Good

Thats interesting, but irrelevant. We dont think that death is a good
thing that would be asinine. In the presentation of the 1AC, the
Affirmative felt compelled to speak out about the necessity of preserving
life. Our Friedland and Beres evidence indicates that this desire occurs
due to a phobic overreaction to deaths passivity. The negative, on the
other hand, accepts deaths inevitability and confronts the repression.
Our Harmon evidence indicates that this allows us to engage in a rational
discourse about death, where we can act to avoid nuclear war without
repressing deaths inevitability.
Our claim is not that we deserve to die but rather that we need to lay
claim to the logic of death and terror so that we can respond to it
13.1
Embedded in Jean Baudrillard's almost incomprehensible prose is the shocking assertion that terrorism is
justifiable, that the threat of globalization, as visualized by Baudrillard, justified the World Trade
Center attack. (Kelly et al. 4) Average Harper's readers may be spared blame for not comprehending Baudrillard's
theoretical prose, but the point of "L'Esprit" is not that 9/11 was justifiable in any moral sense,
but that, as Nietzsche held, true justice must end in its "self-overcoming" (Genealogy 73).
Baudrillard explicitly states that "if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond
Good and Evil" ("L'Esprit" 15). In light of his past writings, I suggest that his unspoken stand on the issue of
justice concerning 9/11 would have to be what Nietzsche's would have been: that there is no justice, only
forgiveness, and only the strong can forgive. But Baudrillard does not explicitly state this
claim, which I see as an implicit conclusion to his thought. Instead he plays the provocateur by laying
claim to the terrorists' logic, which was their greatest weapon. If, as Kellner would have it,
Baudrillard wants to seduce us into following his script, we must be sure to understand the script well so
we can decide how to act on it. The fact that 9/11 was arguably the most potent symbolic event since the crucifixion of Christ has inspired
Baudrillard to dress up his old ideas about the symbolic and symbolic exchange. To understand what he means by "symbolic dimension" and "strategic symbolism" in
the quotation from "L'Esprit" above, let us consult the origins and uses of the concept of the symbolic in his earlier work.
Baudrillard's Symbolic and Death
All
three, he claims, uphold the fetishization of the "law of value," a bifurcating, metaphysical
projection of the mind which allows us to measure the worth of things. The law of value
effectively produces "reality" in each system as both its effect and its alibi. For Marx this reality, this
metaphysical claim, was found in the concept of use value, for Freud it was the unconscious, and for Saussure it was
the signified (and ultimately the referent). According to Baudrillard, any critical theory in the name of
such projected "real" values ultimately reinforces the fetishized relations it criticizes. He
therefore relocates the law of value within his own Nietzsche-styled history of the "image"--a
term used as a stand-in for all that the words representation, reproduction, and simulation have
in common. In "How the 'True' World Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error," Nietzsche outlines in six concise steps the decline of western
Baudrillard's theory of the symbolic serves as a response to what he saw as the metaphysical underpinnings of the Marxist, Freudian and structuralist traditions.
metaphysics and its belief in a "True world" of essences, beyond the Imaginary world of appearances (Portable 485). Baudrillard's four-part history of the image
(commonly referred to as his four orders of simulation) closely mirrors Nietzsche's history of the "'True' World":
it [the image] is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
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it masks the absence of a profound reality;

it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. (Simulacra 6)
Marx, Freud and Saussure were stuck in the second order, where the critique of appearances
was thought to yield a glimpse of a deeper reality. We have since turned from the critique of
appearances to the critique of meaning and of reality itself (the third order), and from here can only enter into the
fourth order, the hyperreal. This is because we live in profoundly mediated environments, wherein
coded images are produced and exchanged far more than material goods, and the more these codes are
exchanged throughout the culture, the more erratically their values fluctuate, until at last they can no longer be
traced to their origins. Hyperreality thus describes the extreme limit of fetishization, wherein representation eclipses reality. Here the spectacle continues to fascinate, but indifference is the attitude du jour (indifference having long been
associated with the postmodern). But Baudrillard's history, it seems, has one more step to take before it completes its circle. Baudrillard imagines that from within the
fourth order, where all metaphysical distinctions of value have disappeared, there will emerge a type of postmodern primitivism (I propose to call it), which he
outlines in his conceptions of the symbolic and symbolic exchange.
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________
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**Impacts
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ImpactDestroys All Resistance

As long as the Affirmative works within a framework that subscribes to the
fear of death, resistance to racism, patriarchy, biopower, colonialism, and
capitalism will all be co-opted and will continue to form the basis for our
actions. The constant fear of death is what justifies some of the worst
acts of violence in history.
Arturo J. Aldama, Prof @ A.S.U. & fellow @ UCSB, Do You Fear Fear?: Docile Bodies and Fear
of the Other, Bad Subjects Issue 50, June 2000
When bodies feel sudden fear, the adrenaline curve in the nervous system spikes in the
first milliseconds, provoking a fight or flight response with varying intensities in the
physiology of the individual. Unlike the spontaneity of an individual lashing out, pushing
off and running away fast, or the collective adrenaline surges of crowds in protests (e.g.
the WTO demonstrations), the sustained proliferation and normalization of fear in the
"nervous system" of the body politic has different effects. The propagation and
internalization of fear in the social body attempts to keep people docile, numb, silent, and
afraid to challenge the status quo of racist, sexist and global capitalist orders in the
United States and other Euro-western nation-states. Fear of non-conformity, fear of race,
fear of disease, fear of touch, fear of blood, fear of non-straight sex, fear of workers, fear
of women, fear of subaltern rage, fear of color, fear of desire, fear of crime, fear of
"illegals", fear of uprising. Fear is both the justification that drives the disciplinary
apparatus of the nation-state (police, INS, military, schools) and the intended effects on
the body politic. Fear drives the repression, containment, co-optation, torture, and
annihilation of "unruly" subjects whose class, race, sex, ideological and religious
differences, for example, are threats to bourgeois, capitalist, patriarchal and neocolonial
orders. Fear drives the militarization of borders, anti-gay violence, abortion clinic
bombers, the CIA, NSA, xenophobia, the denial of imperial guilt, enslavement, lynching,
police, the Christian right, Bush's presidential campaign, anti-affirmative action policies,
California's Proposition 187, and migra shootings, to name a few.
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ImpactNumbing
As the desire to represent death increases, so does awareness, right? Not
really- constant representations of death becomes piecemeal building
blocks in a larger construction of internal and external psychic numbing to
death
From this unitary perspective there are a number of ways of symbolizing death.
The first and most fundamental is the perception of death as the end of life, as a form of
organic and psychological destiny, part of the "natural history" of each of us. However
that basic perception is resisted, denied, distanced by means of psychic numbing, it
continues to underlie whatever additional constructs or gaps we call forth in our
symbolizing activity.
A second perception of death is mimetic, that of life imitating death: the idea of "death in
life," or loss of vitality, or being frozen in some form of death terror as mentioned earlier.
The reversal is perceived as "unnatural"--life becomes deathlike precisely because of the
numbed negation of death, and only the dead possess "vitality." But this seemingly
unnatural reversal is, in fact, a continuous (and therefore "natural") potential of the
organism, both necessary and highly dangerous.
A third meaning of death, that of challenge and even muse, equates (with Bll) the
artist's relationship to death with the priest's to his breviary. That symbolization depends
upon a heightened awareness of the natural function of death as a counterpoint to life,
and as an ever-present limitation that gives shape to existence and grounding to wisdom.
Death is rendered formative by its very naturalness. In real psychological ways one must
"know death" in order to live with free imagination.
A fourth meaning is that of death as inseparable from disaster, holocaust, absurdity.
One's individual death cannot be separated from the sense that (as Hiroshima survivors
put it) "the whole world is dying." This perception is truly unnatural. It is partly a product
of our holocaust-dominated age, discussed later in connection with imagery of extinction
that haunts contemporary man. It is also connected with early exposure to specific forms
of the kind of imagery (school children subjected to drills as preparation for nuclear war)
that brings about the equation of death and holocaust. But even in the absence of
holocaust, people can equate the end of the self with the end of everything. Where this
latter tendency is present, one's own death is anticipated, irrespective of age and
circumstances, as premature, absurd, unacceptable. Much of this book will concern this
relationship between holocaust and individual-psychological struggles.
All four meanings, and others as well, are probably present in much of our death imagery.
The relative importance of each of these meanings varies greatly, of course, especially
around the issue of death as natural or unnatural. But death, for the human imagination,
never ceases to be a many-sided, seemingly contradictory yet ultimately unitary
psychological form.
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ImpactConsumerism
The quest for immortality and the conquest of death is
inescapable from the drive towards material acquisition. While
the suffering and dying sit on the periphery of cultural integrity,
the white noise offered up by the affirmatives advs serve to
overcome the emptiness associated with mortality.
David Wendell Moller, Professor of sociology at School of Liberal Arts, 2000 Fear and
Denial of Death, ww.baywood.com
According to Becker, greed, power, and wealth have become the modern response to
vulnerability and insecurity inherent in the human condition. They provide for a base of
honor in our materialistic society, and generate an illusion of omnipotence and
immorality. Becker takes this argument to its logical extreme, and asserts that the dread
of death and emptiness of life in the twentieth century have been responsible for
cultivating unprecedented evil through the pursuit of greed, power, and the associated
development of destructive capabilities.
Thus, for Becker, the stupidity and inhumanity of humanity lies in the nature of our social
arrangements. In the modern context, new patterns of death denial have emerged and
have become dangerous and dehumanizing. Up to a point, traditional cultures creatively
designed rituals to "deny" death, and these rituals enriched the life of the community. In
the absence of meaning systems and rituals, modern society has exploded onto a
dangerous and irrational course; shallowness and emptiness have created a crisis of
legitimacy.
In this regard, the argument of Becker is remarkably similar to Moore and others who
have made the case that one of the great afflictions of modern life is spiritual emptiness
and soullessness. Narcissism, self-seeking materialism, and heroic use of science and
technology have become prominent forces that shape daily life. In this environment of
self-glorification, material gratification, and extraordinary technological achievement,
suffering, dying, and death are pushed to the periphery of cultural experience.
Individuals are seduced into believing the illusion that, in this cultural context of denial,
the facts of death and suffering are inconsequential to their daily, personal lives.
Materialism is a prominent value in American life. Becker makes the argument that the
evolution of capitalism as an economic and social system is a modern form of death
denial. That is to say, in capitalism it is through the thrill of acquisition and the pursuit
of wealth that human frailty is overcome. Power accrues as wealth and possessions
amass, and wealth endows immortality as it is passed on to one's heirs. Narcissism,
another prominent fact of American cultural life, is also related to the denial of death. In
an age of individualism, we become hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. Although we
know that death is an unavoidable reality, narcissism facilitates the self-delusion that
practically everyone else is expendable, except ourselves. In this era of individualism, the
death of oneself becomes increasingly inconceivable. When one matters more than
anything or anyone else, self-absorption does not allow for the possibility that one will no
longer exist. In this way, the deeper we plunge into narcissistic, self-admiration and
idolization, the more we become oblivious to our inevitable fate. As a culture, the more
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oblivious we become, the more unable we are to face up to the facts of death in our daily
activities. Death is accordingly hidden and denied.
Thus, the social organization of modern life precipitates widespread oblivion and denial:
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time
shopping (or admiring and entertaining himself), which is the same thing. As awareness
(of our common human condition) calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no
longer provides for him, society continues to help him forget [E. Becker/ Escape From Evil,
The Free Press, New York, 1975, pp. 81-82].
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ImpactExtermination
The devaluation and rejection of the dead and death are merely the flipside of the fear of
our OWN deaths in devaluing the dead, we are devaluing ourselves. We become
fascinated with death and because our society cannot integrate the rupture and violence of
death by accepting the link between life and death, we must endlessly simulate death. This
is the role played by images of death they feed our covert need to give and receive death.
13.1
When it comes to actually dealing with death and the dead, even in public, we do so
in private. As Baudrillard points out, "This entails a considerable difference in enjoyment: we trade with our dead in a kind
of melancholy, while the primitives live with their dead under the auspices of the ritual and the feast" (134-35). Because
we devalue death and thereby the dead, we view them only as a dreaded caste of
unfortunates, and not as continuing partners in exchange. Ultimately, however, it is
not so much the dead but our own deaths, our negative doubles, that we insult by
denying their value. When we posit death as the negation of life, we bifurcate our
identities and begin a process of mourning over our own eventual deaths , a process
which lasts our whole lives. The more we devalue our death-imagoes, that is, the
greater they become, until they haunt our every moment, as in Don DeLillo's darkest comedy,
White Noise. This leads us, according to Baudrillard, to an obsession with death that can be felt in
the media fascination with catastrophes like 9/1 1. Death "becomes the object of a
perverse desire. Desire invests the very separation of life and death " (147). Political
economy's inability to absorb the rupturing energy of death is thus compensated by
the symbolic yield of the media catastrophe. In these events we experience an
artificial death which fascinates us, bored as we are by the routine order of the
system and the "natural" death it prescribes for us . Natural death represents an unnegotiable negation
of life and the tedious certainty of an unwanted end. It therefore inspires insurrection, until "reason itself is pursued by the hope
of a universal revolt against its own norms and privileges" (162). The terrorist spectacle is an example of such a revolt, in which
death gains symbolic distinction and becomes more than simply "natural." We
may not think we identify with

the terrorists' superstitions about honor in the next life, but in events like 9/11,
Baudrillard would suggest, we nevertheless identify despite ourselves with both with
the terrorists and their victims:
We are all hostages, and that's the secret of hostage-taking, and we are all dreaming, instead of dying
stupidly working oneself to the ground, of receiving death and of giving death . Giving
and receiving constitute one symbolic act (the symbolic act par excellence), which rids death of all the indifferent negativity it
holds for us in the "natural" order of capital. (166)
Violent, artificial death is a symbolic event witnessed collectively . "Technical, non natural and
therefore willed (ultimately by the victim him- or herself), death becomes interesting once again since willed death has a
meaning" (165). Was 9/11 willed by the victims? Obviously not, and yet, Baudrillard would
suggest, in our identification with both the killers and those who died, we ourselves
are not so innocent.
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_____________
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**Impact Blocks
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eAT: Nuclear/War/Death Imagery Good 1/2

First, extend our Friedland, Beres, and Santos evidencethey have
conceded a few arguments which circumvents most of their offense-
A) The attempt to breed apathy and concern through death imagery

is a blunder in and of itself. In an attempt to rebel against death,
humans turn to immortality and promises of salvation through
demands on the state. These demands are not only funneled into the
same system of violence the 1acs harms are rooted in but generate
new imperial controls as this fear of death grants legitimacy to all
state solutions, be it holy or nuclear wars.
B) Representations of destruction and death must exist to pacify the

masses. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate form of this as they are
the only weapons capable of bringing the fear of collective
annihilation to the everyone, everywhere. They conceded this forms
the basis for collective suicide with the only answer to problems is
the massive destruction of the other. The logic of this globalized
system of state-sanctioned cruelty negates the value to life and
justifies universal destruction and the worst acts of violence in
history.
Second, the threat of extinction does not exist as such but rather is a
distortion of the methods one represents with- it instills notions of
powerlessness and outrage at the Bomb itself, rather then the
bureaucratic apparatus responsible for its production
Marilyn S. Jacobs and M. Brewster Smith, 1989, American Psychology in the Quest for
Nuclear Peace, questia
Segal
regards the nuclear threat as an impetus for the distortion of language. In an

the most primitive layers of unconscious
fantasy are mobilized, producing terror of a different kind than the normal fear of death. It is
a terror of annihilation without symbolic survival. Primitive psychotic defenses (i.e., denial,
massive projections, fragmentation of ego functions) serve to render oblique the actual meanings of
communication, leading to profound anxiety and other disturbances in psychological
function. An analogue to this is the regressive dedifferentiation of structures within the
human psyche which the threat of nuclear weapons , and their threat of extinction of the human species,
pose (see Wangh, 1986). One of the areas most intensively investigated in the last several years concerns the impact of living
( 1986)
effort to hide the threatening reality posed by nuclear weapons,
with nuclear weapons on the minds of young people (e.g., Beardslee and Mack, 1982; Escalona, 1982; Schwebel, 1982; Boone,
the threat of nuclear war has created in the minds of young

people a sense of fear, powerlessness, anger, and outrage, doubt about the future, and a
sense of technology rushing out of control ( Mack and Snow, 1986). Also, concern has been directed
1985). Investigators have concluded that
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toward the relationship between the imminence of nuclear death and a "live for now"
attitude among children and adolescents. However, it is not entirely clear exactly what the nuclear threat actually
means to children and adolescents; there have not been enough reliable data to make definitive conclusions ( Mack and Snow,
1986).
Third, the problem with nuclear imagery is not so much death but the
meaningless rendered by a weapon without personality and a death
without valor
Center, and Eric Olsen, Prof of Politics and Sociology, 1974, Living and Dying, questia
The ultimate threat posed by nuclear weapons is not only death but meaninglessness:
an unknown death by an unimaginable weapon. War with such weapons is no longer heroic;
death from such weapons is without valor. Meaninglessness has become almost a stereotyped characterization of
twentieth-century life, a central theme in modern art, theater, and politics. The roots of this meaninglessness are many. But
crucial, we believe, is the anxiety deriving from the sense that all forms of human associations
are perhaps pointless because subject to sudden irrational ends . Cultural life thus becomes still more
formless. No one form, no single meaning or style, appears to have any ultimate claim. The psychological
implications of this formlessness are not fully clear; while there seem to be more life choices available, fewer are inwardly
compelling.
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AT: Nuclear/War/Death Imagery Good 2/2
Finally, extend our Foucault evidence from the C subpoint- 2 arguments
A) The problem with war and death is not so much the actions
themselves but the ideologies behind them. Through extending the
fear of death to grander and larger schemes ie. New advantages,
cases, etc., the affirmative seeks to replicate the logic of the Herd
mentality in which crises are viewed solely in terms of populations
rather then individuality, crushing the possibility for death to be
viewed in its mortality.
B) This proves our argument that they are the constant mobilization
for war. The idea that we should threaten death is the underside of
the attempt to ensure continued survival. Foucault and Santos say
this thinking produces a kill to save mentality which destroys all
humanity in the illusion of saving it.
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AT: FoD Makes Life Meaningful

1. Our argument is not that life has no meaning but that the motivation
for surviving should not be to prevent our extinction. This fear of death
serves as the ultimate conservative one, deepening ideology and
suppressing criticism. The justifications you use for the action you think
you are partaking in are like we shouldnt jump off the bridge because I
wanted to get a new cell phone. Rather than recognize the beauty of life,
our ideological motivation for survival is built around the walls of
consumerism.
2. The fear of death makes us docile bodies, a field of premature corpses.

Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law at Purdue, Self-Determination,
International Law and Survival on Planet Earth, Arizona Journal of International and
Comparative Law, Spring 1994
Fear of death, to summarize, not only cripples life, it also creates entire fields of
premature corpses. But how can we be reminded of our mortality in a productive way,
a way that would point to a new and dignified polity of private selves and, significantly,
to fewer untimely deaths? One answer lies in the ethics of Epicurus, an enlightened
creed whose prescriptions for disciplined will are essential for international stability.
3. Fearing death destroys all meaning to life, forcing us to

constantly look over our shoulder fearing anything that could be a
potential threat.
Nora Connor, The Abyss and You: A Brief Anatomy of Fear, Bad Subjects Issue
#50, June 2000
About three years ago I spent the entirety of a three-hour flight convinced it was up to
me to prevent the plane from plummeting down out of the sky and sending all its
passengers to a noisy and fiery death. The boarding and takeoff found me only slightly out of sorts; an
irritating whining noise near the gate was troubling me. As the plane climbed, I descended . An absolutely
devouring sense of certainty and hysteria surged within and around me; my eyes alternately bulged and
screwed themselves shut and I was compelled to remain utterly still except for the
sweat and tears flying off me. I think I might once have managed to convince the flight attendant that I did not
require attention. Somehow I was responsible for the fate of the vehicle and I felt it as a test;
we were all going down the second I decided I didn't mind living or dying. The grip of
my fingernails, several of which were torn by the end of the trip, indicated how hard I was
trying not to want to die. A momentary lapse in my conviction of the wish not to die
would prove fatal. I have never felt more intensely, viscerally afraid. There was surely a
conversation taking place within my head; I can't now say for sure if it was a conversation between myself and some other,
or between myself and myself. I remember a deep sense of having been found out, caught in some sense, and challenged to
really choose to make my innermost will a reality. I knew the 'right' answer to the only question on the test; but was it my
answer? Apparently by whatever standard not wanting to die can be measured, I was successful because nothing happened
to the airplane. I have always enjoyed flying and was fine on another flight two weeks later, as well as on subsequent flights.
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AT: Cold War Proves FoD Good

Not true
Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law at Purdue, International Journal on World
Peace, No. 3, Volume 16, September 1st, 1999
Consider the desolate metaphysics of our time. Living in what Camus called an
"unsacrosanct moment in history," we have nonetheless finalized the transfer of sanctity
to governments. It follows that ideology in most states has become theology, and that
opposition to particular policies-- even in the most democratic of societies--represents not
dissent but "blasphemy."
Why, then, did America hate the Soviet Union? Because that country was a despotism?
This is hardly likely, inasmuch as the US has had no difficulty including in the "free world"
several dozen other states whose respect for human dignity was always substantially
worse than that of the former USSR.
The answer lies elsewhere. More precisely, it can be discovered in a population that saw
such hatred as the sacred obligation of a properly God-fearing population to oppose the
forces of darkness. Although superpower competition had always been explained in
learned journals and popular magazines as a purely secular expression of the struggle for
power, its real origins must be found in an entirely different region--a region defined by
myth, mysticism and desperation.
The problem is always one of individuals. Our leaders could sustain an anti-Soviet
theology only because it satisfied the particular cravings of people. By treating the
Soviet Union as a pernicious society, Americans affirmed that they belonged to an
elite, one that was based on goodness. There were no special requirements for
membership in this elite, no standards of excellence that had to be met, only
citizenship in the United States.
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AT: Violence Good

This links to our criticism. Their assertion that violence is critical to prevent further
violence is EXACTLY the type of logic that justifies wholesale slaughter of entire
populations. This is answered on the overview- we have 3 different disads to this argument.
Violence can never constitute an effective act of resistance to violence.

Rather, acts of violence, however well-meaning, reaffirm the principle of
violence and make us directly complicit with the violence we seek to
prevent.
Susanne Kappeler, Associate Prof @ Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The
Politics of Personal Behavior, 1995, pg. 258
Resistance to violence however cannot consist of violence. Violence may change the
direction of violence, invert the roles of violator and victim, but it necessarily affirms
the principle of violence, whatever else it may achieve. And it adds new victims to the
world victims of our own making, not to mention more violent perpetrators, whose ranks
we have decided to join. While in extremity and under the threat of our lives we may not
have any means other than violence to secure our survival, most of us most of the time are
not in such situations, though we glibly speak of survival. Instead, we would have ample
opportunity in situations of no such threat to challenge the legitimacy of violence and to
practise alternatives above all by deciding not to use violence ourselves.
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AT: Ketels
1. Not responsive- this evidence isnt offense against our criticism. The
kritik does not preclude plan action- were criticizing certain justifications
for action presented in the 1AC do NOT let the affirmative paint our kritik
as a generic statism or capitalism argument. Under the framework of the
alternative, the plan could still be advocated or passed, as long as the
justification didnt utilize the survivalist framework we critique.
2. Also KETTELS IS DUMB and possibly a nazi. I dare you to find me ONE
warrant in that article for any of the ridiculous claims she makes. Our
alternative is in no way the French philosophical nihilism that she
criticizes. We dont preclude action.
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AT: Fear Key to Prevent Nuke War (Futterman)

1. This argument is cyclical. The moment we begin to believe that the only way to prevent
nuclear war is to constantly fear it, nuclear war becomes inevitable. Our link evidence is on
point saying that thought process is what justifies nuclear policy and redemptive violence in
order to prevent the threat of nuclear war.
2. The aff criminalizes the symptoms while they spread the disease- the fear of nuclear war
is what CAUSES nuclear war. Even if we prevent a nuclear war now, that constant fear will
only replicate when the next threat arises, and the next after that. Our alternative is the
only option for any long term solvency and to give life meaning.
3. Nuclear annihilation has already occurred the bomb is merely a

metaphor now. Vote negative to stop fearing and start living.
Jean Baudrillard, some weird French guy, The Anorexic Ruins, Looking Back on the End of
the World, 1989, 34-5
Look at the two great events: [the advent of] nuclear power and revolution. It is utterly pointless to hope for the one or fear
the other since both have already occurred. Everything has already been liberated, changed, undermined; what more do
you want? It is useless to hope: things are there; born or stillborn, they are there, done. Imagination reigns; enlightenment
and intelligence reign. We are already experiencing or soon will experience the perfection of the societal. Everything is
there. The heavens have come down to earth.
We sense the fatal taste of material paradise. It drives

one to despair, but what should one do? No future . Nevertheless, do not panic.
Everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporized. The explosion has already
occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now. What more do you want? Everything has
already been wiped off the map. It is useless to dream: the clash has gently taken place
everywhere. The last bomb, the one no one speaks about, is the bomb that is not content to
strew things in space but would strew them in time. The temporal bomb. Where it explodes,
everything is suddenly blown into the past; and the greater the bombs capacity, the further into
the past they go. Look around: this explosion has already occurred. In an amnesic world like
ours, everything living is projected into the past as though things had been over-hastily
plunged into a dimension in which the only meaning they acquire is that wrested from
time by a final revolution. That is the real bomb, the bomb that immobilizes things in
eerie retrogression.
(IF THEY READ FUTTERMAN)

Their Futterman evidence says only catastrophe forces people to take the
wider view. Well win that constant fear of annihilation makes life not
worth living. This evidence is also mistagged, the argument Futterman is
making is that nothing is worth starting a nuclear war over because the
horror outweighs.
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AT: Stopping Nuclear War Key 2 Solve FOD

1. History disproves this argument. Weve done MULTIPLE things in the
past to prevent nuclear war and weve still been on the brink for the
last 50 years. If this argument was true, post cold war there should never
have been a threat of nuclear war.
2. This argument assumes fear of death in terms of the fear of death from
nuclear war, not our fear of death rooted in our subconscious. Functionally
this argument is that we should stop nuclear war so we arent afraid of
dying from nuclear war. Dont let them spin this as stopping nuclear war
solves the entirety of our fear of death. Fear of death cant stop fear of
death, which makes no sense.
3. They cant solve this argument. The affirmative can never completely
eliminate the possibility of war. Theres only a chance our alternative can
solve.
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AT: FoD Key 2 Treat AIDS

This argument is a joke. Our alternative wouldnt reject any sort of AIDS
research or treatment. Our alternative, however, WOULD reject the idea
that AIDS should be treated to prevent terrorism and for national security
purposes. Our argument is that AIDS victims should get treatment, but
still not live their lives in constant fear of death. They cant win our ethic
of hope and joy would prevent people from treating aids.
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AT: FoD Fuel Peace Movements

1. This is empirically denied and non unique- the fear of death is prevalent
in the status quo. If your argument is true, then social peace movements
would have and should be propping up countlessly. It also takes out the
solvency to this argument; your representations prove these peace
movements arent working.
2. We internal link turn this argument- even if social peace movements

would occur, they would be trumped by the destruction that follows. Our
Beres and Santos evidence indicate that the fear of death drives
individuals to absolute obedience to the state in demand for immortality.
That act has been use to justify the worst acts of violence in history and
destruction of the Other in order to prevent the threat of war. Its on the
overview.
3. The Nuclear Freeze proves your movements will fail.
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AT: Denies Reality

Our argument doesnt deny the possibility of dealing with reality it
merely refuses to contest the war on its own terms and instead engages
the question of how images of violence are politically constituted
CHESTERMAN Oxford 1998
Postmodern Culture
But Baudrillard goes much further than this. He argues that more than simply questioning
the nature of this war and the media's complicity in its exposition, there is a need to
interrogate the very notion of truth qua simulacrum itself. Assuming a position for or against the
war denies inquiry into "the very probability of the war, its credibility or degree of reality"
(The Gulf War 67). Rather, it is necessary to resist the probability of the image (26-7, 66).
It is this argument that provoked a book-length response from Christopher Norris.16 He argues that Baudrillard's
essays constitute a definitive exposure of the political bankruptcy of postmodern scholarship and "the depth of
ideological complicity that exists between such forms of extreme anti-realist or irrationalist doctrine and the crisis of
moral and political nerve" that presently afflicts Western intellectuals (27). Attacking the "frivolous" exercise
of making the Gulf War into a pretext for arcane disputes about the "politics of theory," he
links such theoretical exercises to a prevailing mood of "cynical acquiescence" that fails to
contest the official version of events (29).
Norris's warnings as to the dangers of dissociating theory from praxis are, of course, important. But his reading
of Baudrillard's scepticism as demonstrative of moral and political nihilism (194) assumes an
opponent of straw. For the challenge that Baudrillard presents is not the rejection of political
purchase, but a rigorous resistance to the acceptance of the virtual as or in place of the real:
Resist the probability of any image or information whatever. Be more virtual than events
themselves, do not seek to re-establish the truth, we do not have the means, but do not be duped,
and to that end re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they come. Turn deterrence
back against itself. Be meteorologically sensitive to stupidity. (Baudrillard, The Gulf War 66-67)
Norris reads this reference to "stupidity" as denying any "operative difference between truth
and falsehood, veridical knowledge and its semblance" (12), and precluding any form of ethico-political
accountability that depends upon a notion of the "real" (194). Nevertheless, Baudrillard's position is more
properly seen as denoting a profound and abiding suspicion of a "reality" whose primary
referent is the simulations of American war games.
Moreover, the tone of Baudrillard's essays is far from equivocal. At times his writing exhibits a very black reductio
ad absurdum humour: So you say this was a clean, minimalist war with little "collateral damage"?
Why stop there--war? what war? (Patton 7). The prevailing tone is ironic, however. The logic of deterrence
(the sustained denial of the possibility of war) has come to supplant the actuality of war; violence can only take
place as a sterilised simulation of itself.18 In an extended sexual metaphor, the military--which thrives on particular
forms of male sexuality--is emasculated by its dependence on virtual pornography.19
Baudrillard also appears to be aware of these criticisms. In stating, as he did just a few weeks before the UN
deadline expired, that the proposed war would not take place, he acknowledged the dangers of such an approach in a
postscriptum:
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To demonstrate the impossibility of war just at the moment when it must take place, when the signs of its occurrence
are accumulating, is a stupid gamble. But it would have been even more stupid not to seize the opportunity.
(Baudrillard, The Gulf War 28)
In pursuing such a "fatal strategy," Baudrillard plays upon his own belief that writing should
be less a representation of reality than its transfiguration (Patton 6). He has subsequently suggested
that in time and with a little imagination, it may be possible to read The Gulf War Did Not Take Place as if it were a
science fiction novel (qtd. in Gane 203).
James Der Derian, by contrast, argues that such an approach may be more effective than that
presented by the modernist school of criticism. Der Derian states that theorists who attempted to
construct a critical and universal counter-memory were easily isolated as anti-American and
dismissed as utopian (177). Adopting a poststructuralist approach to such political encounters
may well bring with it the danger that no new pragmatic basis for justice and truth will
emerge. Nevertheless, he argues,
...better strategically to play with apt critiques of the powerful new forces unleashed by
cyberwar than to hold positions with antiquated tactics and nostalgic unities. (178)
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AT: You Defend Extinction

Our argument isnt a defense of terrorism or a defense of the SQ it
comes to understand the symbolic order that gives the spectacle of
suffering its power this theoretical critque enables an effective praxis
13.1
From Princess Diana to 9/11, Jean Baudrillard has been the prophet of the postmodern media spectacle, the
hyperreal event. In the 1970s and 80s, our collective fascination with things like car crashes,
dead celebrities, terrorists and hostages was a major theme in Baudrillard's work on the symbolic
and symbolic exchange, and in his post-9/11 "L'Esprit du Terrorisme," he has taken it upon himself to decipher
terrorism's symbolic message. He does so in the wake of such scathing critiques as Douglas Kellner's Jean
Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1989), which attacked Baudrillard's theory as
"an imaginary construct which tries to seduce the world to become as theory wants it to be, to follow the
scenario scripted in the theory" (178). Did Baudrillard seduce 9/11 into being--is he terrorism's theoretical guru?--or
did he merely anticipate and describe in advance the event's profound seductiveness?
To Kellner and other critics, Baudrillard's theory of postmodernity is a political as well as an intellectual failure:
Losing critical energy and growing apathetic himself, he ascribes apathy and inertia to the universe.
Imploding into entropy, Baudrillard attributes implosion and entropy to the experience of (post) modernity. (180)
To be sure, Baudrillard's scripts and scenarios have always been concerned with the implosion of the global
capitalist system. But while Baudrillard's tone at the end of "L'Esprit du Terrorisme" can certainly be called
apathetic--"there is no solution to this extreme situation--certainly not war"--he does not suggest that there
are no forces in the universe capable of mounting at least a challenge to the system and its
sponsors (18).
As in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) and Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard again suggests
that terrorism is one such force, and that it functions according to the rule of symbolic exchange. Terrorism
can be carried out in theoretical/aesthetic terms, the terms Baudrillard would obviously
prefer, or in real terms, that is, involving the real deaths of real people, a misfortune
Baudrillard warns against.2 Though he states clearly "I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the
others are with their weapons," he is characteristically ambivalent in relation to "real"
terrorism, since the real is always in question, and perhaps also because ambivalence is Baudrillard's own brand of
theoretical terrorism (Simulacra 163). One moment of his thought is the utopian dream of radicality and reversal, a
revolution of symbolic exchange against the system, and the other moment is one of profound pessimism: "The
system...has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference."
In Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard wrote that systemic nihilism and the mass
media are to blame for the postmodern human condition, which he describes as a
combination of "fascination," "melancholy," and "indifference." Against the system and its
passive nihilism, Baudrillard proffers his own brand of what might be termed active nihilism,
a praxis that includes theoretical and aesthetic "terrorism," but not, in the end, the bloody acts
of actual violence his theory accounts for. The terrorist acts of 9/11, as his theory predicted, were destined to be
absorbed by the system's own narrative, neutralized by the very mass media they sought to exploit.
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AT: How Does the Alt Change the World?

We dont know what a world without spectacle would look like but thats
the point
BANASH University of Iowa 2002, Activist Desire, Cultural Criticism, and the Situationist International
http://www.reconstruction.ws/021/Activist.htm
<20> At best, the events of 1968 provided the S.I. an opportunity to reach a larger audience at a volatile point, but they didn't
fundamentally alter its role. In essence, the S.I. merely intensified its efforts to present an alternative that, given the social
upheaval, had a slightly better chance to to find an audience that could hear what they had been advocating all along.
<20> That the Situationists failed in 1968 is not surprising. Consider that the
Situationists were not simply in

favor of a revolution that would shift power into the hands of the disenfranchised.
Rather, they hoped for a revolution that would not only actualize a shift in power,
but transform the processes of power itself. The S.I. was advocating a revolution
that operated totally outside the alienated forms of the spectacle. Certainly the
S.I.'s endorsement of the worker's occupation of the factories would seem to align
their theory with a practical politics. However, for the revolution to have succeeded
in the S.I.'s terms, individuals would have had to actualize a complete
transformation. Just as in the pre-1968 days, the S.I. was still calling for the development of
alternative forms of subjectivity and social organization that would transform the
very roots of how individuals constituted themselves as subjects within and against
the spectacular society that had produced them . As if this were not enough, members of the
S.I. had no clear conception of how to effect such a change, and they could give no
more than hints of what such a change might look like . It would be a constructed
situation, which only select members of the S.I. had experienced in any form that could be articulated. It would be something
like the maps of psychogeography, or the dtourned pages of the S.I. journal. It would be something that no
one had ever seen before.
Criticizing the production of the spectacle is good necessary prerequisite

to reconstructing society
BANASH University of Iowa 2002, Activist Desire, Cultural Criticism, and the Situationist International
http://www.reconstruction.ws/021/Activist.htm
However, what is most interesting in the text is not its ostensible content, a literal, intelligible history, or its status as a founding text, but the way in which this
organizational principal is undercut, even thwarted, by the fragments that are brought together presumably to tell that very story. Ostensibly a history, it becomes a
work that questions the immediate possibility of that project by presenting that history from the perspective of an unrealized Situationist future. In Lipstick Traces
Marcus explains that as a memoir, Debord's
book was also a prophesy. To follow its story one needed

information Debord withheld -- even the words "L'Internationale Lettriste," which never
appeared. But one also needed the ability to imagine a reinvented world...a new,
"situationist" civilization, shared by millions, finally covering the globe (164).
Without the realization of that world, Memoires remains for us something that "would be
experienced not as things at all, but as possibilities" (166). <25> To understand Memoires, and
to argue for its absolute relevance to our own moment, I want to begin by invoking Debord's
concept of the spectacle. As anyone who has read The Society of the Spectacle will remember, Debord
states that "the spectacle is NOT a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship
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between people that is mediated by images" (12). Debord isn't so much taking on the prevalence of the
image itself as he is the particular form of mediation images constitute. For Debord, the spectacle is akin to
Adorno's concept of the culture industry or Jameson's culturalized horizon. The images (TV, film,
advertisements, etc.) are one-way identic communications that provide no possibility for a
dialectical engagement or response. Each individual subject is silenced, forced to absorb the
instrumental meanings of this totalizing system. As Debord puts this, "by means of the
spectacle, the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of
self-praise" (19). <26> If Debord had not so clearly formulated these concepts during the creation of Memoires,
they nonetheless animate the book, which is composed of fragments of the spectacle itself. As early as the Letterist
International, Debord was negatively gesturing at the spectacle in the concept of
dtournement. The critique that animates this concept is one of cooption. To produce new
works of art within the traditional categories means playing by the rules, being subsumed
under those spectacular discourses. On the other hand, to conduct terrorist raids on the particulars
of those discourses and liberate the particulars of those works holds the potential of creating
revolutionary sense and desire. The images that perfected separation and political
impotence could now assume nonidentic meanings, meanings that allowed one to both
construct a critique and imagine a reinvented world.
<27> To take Debord's project in terms of Adorno, Memoires is the creation of an autonomous artwork. The use of dtournement shifts the emphasis to the nonidentic possibilities of the given collage elements. As a history it must, as
Adorno would approve, fail, since the collaged particulars are always outstripping their function, never content to carry on a single, intelligible meaning. And yet, in Adorno's sense, it is also a unique example of enigmatic political
commitment within the horizon of postmodernism, for Memoires is a profoundly political work, though not in any readily instrumentalizable register. Though I don't have the space to execute a cover to cover reading of Memoires, I
would like to look closely at both its first and final pages. These pages are far more spar than many of the collages in the book, but they both highlight the tense relationships of form that animate the entire work.
<28> The first line of Memoires (reading right to left, top to bottom, a convention the book doesn't impose) is a fragment of two sentences: "A memory of you? Yes, I want." Though the reader knows, from the title page, that this
sentence has been ripped out of its original context, there is no indication of its original source. Thus it is not identical with any subject. Instead, this fragment invokes the concepts of memory and desire without specific objects. One
of Jorn's lines carries the eyes from this fragment to another, in the middle of the page, which reads "it is a subject profoundly soaked in alcohol." Jorn's line spreads out into a blob just above this fragment, creating a block that puts
the emphasis on this second fragment. Whatever the subject or object of this memory or desire, it is to be taken in terms intoxication, both literally and metaphorically.
Continues
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AT: How Does the Alt Change the World?

Continued
<29> The second line of Memoires, "of lights, of shadows, of figures," underscores the indeterminacy of the elements of the text. Literally, it invokes a play of the identic and nonidentic. It suggests that each fragment could be read in
terms of its original context or colloquial meaning, but that these will shift into shadow or light, constitute different figures depending on how they are read. Though the fragments may constitute recognizable figures at points, they
will do so only transiently. Again, another line of Jorn's descends from this fragment, crossing others, and trailing off at the page's final deceleration: "Listen well, I will, all the same, represent these events and explain the
considerations." This line gestures at the totality of the work as the literal history that Marcus reduces it to, but the emphasis is not with this line. At best, it is an ironic gesture at the failed totality of the work, a marker of the
traditional desire for wholeness and understanding that the book undercuts. It isn't that history is not present, but it has become a figure that slips in and out in the play of light and shadow. In short Memoires does not present a
totalizing climax, a point where the reader could make sense in the mode this fragment suggests. Rather, Jorn's line takes this desire and holds it in tension with other fragments and their gestures towards the nonidentic.
<30> The emphasis on the right side of the page rests in the middle, at the crossings of lines that accumulate into another shape. Here, two fragments exist close to one another: "it is for you" over "full of discord and dread." The "you"
of this first fragment is wonderfully ambiguous. In its original context no doubt it referred to a specific individual. However, it now enters into the play of light and shadow, suggesting the reader of Memoires, the speaker or addressee
of the first fragment, the mysterious Barbra of the fragment further up the page, or even the speaker of the final line of the page. Resonating with this very play, the fragment below, "full of discord and dread," associates the
asubjective, nonidentic confusion of the speaker and referent of this ambiguous "you." Mirroring these three middle fragments, the left side of the page contains two other fragments: "people observe the thresholds of silence" and "this
curious system of narrative," which also gesture at the construction of the work itself, calling into question the very possibility of it speaking to anyone intelligibly, but the emphasis is not on these fragments, as Jorn's lines begin at
them as almost nothing and move toward the right half of the page. This curious narrative is not something just different, but something that leads to the discord and dread of nonidentic becomings.
<31> I would not say that this is the only possible, or even the best, reading of the page -- the play of the fragments and lines invites multiple readings, and these pages are transformed by the pages that follow, by the resonances the
book creates as it is read. However, I would resist the temptation to reduce these fragments to an intelligible history. Looked at closely, that history slips in and out, and the fragments themselves always destabilize or overreach their
identic roles in such a narration. As the fragments enter into becomings with one another, such a total organizing structure can only fail. However, at the level of the aesthetic, it is this failure that constitutes Memoires as a political
moment. To reduce Memoires to an intelligible history as the founding moment of the S.I. separates it from its active powers, reinscribing it within the spectacle. Such representations of it are less than attentive to the literal force field
of antagonisms it creates.
<32> In Adorno's sense, Memoires is political to the extent that it breaks up the monolithic
discourse of the spectacle and its powers of identic thought. However, this is not politics in
the activist sense we have come to value through our fear of anything that might be labeled,
however speciously, quietist. As Adorno explains in his essay "Commitment,"
it is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of
the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads. In fact, as soon as committed works
of art do instigate decisions at their own level, the decisions themselves become
interchangeable . . . the work of art becomes an appeal to subjects, because it is itself nothing other than a
deceleration by a subject of his own choice or failure to choose (304).
Like Adorno's committed work of art, Memoires resists an easy translation into a practical choice. Rather, its
form gestures at an alternative engagement with the materials of the spectacle. In this it
does rupture the discourse of the spectacle, but it does so by creating the sense of a future
that has not been realized, that, as Marcus points out, forces one to think from the perspective of
a Situationist world that does not exist. In short, this is a project that exists only as theory.
How, exactly, would one translate this sense into an activist practice? Neither Memoires nor later
Situationist writings or practices answer this question. However, this fact should not tempt us to label
this a quietist work. To push Adorno's metaphor, the space created by a book like Memoires
allows us to take the gun from our heads, if only for a moment. Yet, within that moment,
there is the chance to imagine a world otherwise, and that possibility surely plays a role in
developing the desire necessary to someday realize such a world, or, at the least, it creates
a critical difference which questions the one-dimensional sense that coordinates our
spectacular lives. The relative neglect of Memoires underscores the difficulty cultural critics
have when the concepts of a work cannot be readily aligned with a political project. If critics
invoke the Debord of 1968 as an example of heroic activism, they all but suppress the
moment of Memoires where theory is the only expression possible.
<33> The final page of Memoires is composed of one fragment and a simple series of Jorn's painted lines. The
fragment reads "I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my century." This fragment, rife with irony, marks an
alterian desire. The beautiful language of traditional art, the endless discourse of the spectacle, all that is certainly
invoked in this statement. But, more than that, to make it beautiful in Debord's sense requires
that this statement shudder at the spectacle. Underneath this fragment, in red, the color associated with
the most intense collages of the text, the curving lines invoke motions culminating in an amorphous shape, perhaps
the desires of the text itself centrifugally creating a kind of critical mass. If Memoires is more than a history,
it is less than a political program, and this is precisely its success. What is a practical
political program, even an oppositional program, but an intelligible choice already available
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to the extent that it is articulate? Memoires lives on because it is inarticulate, its power and
potential indexed by the silence of the critics.
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AT: You Ignore Suffering

Commodifying suffering distorts is social meaning
KLEINMAN AND KLEINMAN Professor and Research Associate - Medical Anthropology
and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School 1996, Daedalus, Wntr 1996 v125 n1 p1(23)
SUFFERING IS ONE OF THE EXISTENTIAL GROUNDS of human experience ; it is a defining
quality, a limiting experience in human conditions.(1) It is also a master subject of our mediatized
times. Images of victims of natural disasters, political conflict, forced migration, famine, substance abuse,
the HIV pandemic, chronic illnesses of dozens of kinds, crime, domestic abuse, and the deep privations of
destitution are everywhere. Video cameras take us into the intimate details of pain and misfortune.
Images of suffering are appropriated to appeal emotionally and morally both to
global audiences and to local populations. Indeed, those images have become an
important part of the media. As "infotainment" on the nightly news, images of victims are
commercialized; they are taken up into processes of global marketing and business
competition. The existential appeal of human experiences, their potential to mobilize popular
sentiment and collective action, and even their capability to witness or offer testimony are
now available for gaining market share. Suffering, "though at a distance ," as the French
sociologist Luc Boltanski tellingly expresses it, is routinely appropriated in American popular culture ,
which is a leading edge of global popular culture.(2) This globalization of suffering is one of the more
troubling signs of the cultural transformations of the current era : troubling because
experience is being used as a commodity, and through this cultural representation
of suffering, experience is being remade, thinned out, and distorted.
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___________
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**Alternative
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Alternative- Transpersonal Solvency

Our alternative of reconnecting with the individual of politics seeks to
transcend psychological predispositions, constituting a reconnection with
everything, and ensuring survival
Stanislav Grof, International Journal of Humanities and Peace, Vol. 17, 2001 Consciousness
evolution and planetary survival: psychological roots of human violence and greed: paper
presented at the Thirteenth International Transpersonal Conference entitled Spirituality,
Ecology, and Native Wisdom in Killarney, Ireland
These changes deepen and extend even farther when the process of experiential selfexploration reaches the transpersonal level. What began as psychological probing of
the unconscious psyche now automatically becomes a philosophical quest for the
meaning of life and a journey of spiritual discovery. People who connect to the
transpersonal domain of their psyche tend to develop a new appreciation for
existence and reverence for all life. One of the most striking consequences of
various forms of transpersonal experiences is spontaneous emergence and
development of deep humanitarian and ecological concerns. It is based on an almost
cellular awareness that the boundaries in the universe are arbitrary and that each of
us is identical with the entire web of being. It is suddenly clear that we cannot do
anything to nature without simultaneously doing it to ourselves. Differences
among people now appear to be interesting and enriching rather than
threatening, whether they are related to sex, race, color, language, political
conviction, or religious belief. It is obvious that a transformation of this kind would
increase our chances for survival if it could occur on a sufficiently large scale.
Our form of interpersonal and transpersonal connection is the only

method for self actualization of violence and destruction
Stanislav Grof, International Journal of Humanities and Peace, Vol. 17, 2001 Consciousness
evolution and planetary survival: psychological roots of human violence and greed: paper
presented at the Thirteenth International Transpersonal Conference entitled Spirituality,
Ecology, and Native Wisdom in Killarney, Ireland
We seem to be involved in a dramatic race for time that has no precedent in the
entire history of humanity. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of
life on this planet. If we continue the old strategies which in their consequences are
clearly extremely destructive and self-destructive, it is unlikely that the human
species will survive. However, if a sufficient number of people undergoes a process of
deep inner transformation, we might reach a level of consciousness evolution that will
bring us to the point of deserving the name given to our species--homo sapiens.
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Alternative- Mortality Solvency
The time has come to embrace our own mortality and break down the
drive for immortality- this itself changes the prospect of war
It is time, in the Spanish philosopher Unamuno's words, "to consider our mortal destiny
without flinching." 50 This, lamentably, is easier said than done because the human instinct
that clings to life flees from death as the very prototype of evil, and because each singular
individual is able to counter the observed fact of mortality with entire categories of
exceptions. Such solipsistic boasts have been identified by George Santayana as follows:
Continues
[*18] How, then, do we end these terrible wars? Most important, we must first understand
them as manifestations of humankind's unwillingness to accept personal death. Death
defines world politics because individuals wish to escape death. The ironies are staggering,
but the connections persist and remain unexamined.
We must move past fantasies of immortality by accepting the

meaningless of our own demise, shattering the frame sustaining
immortality
But we are back at the beginning. How may we be instructed to accept our own personal
mortality? Epicurus had an answer. In his Letter to Menoeceus, he counsels:
Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil
consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right
understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because
it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for
immortality. 53
More than two thousand years later, Santayana settled upon similar conclusions:
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the
unreflective creation . . . the truth of mortality. . . . The more we reflect, the more we live in
memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of
death; yet, without our knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have
raised us, in a way, above mortality. 54
As it is memory that makes mortality an incontestable truth, says Santayana, so it is also
memory that opens to us all an ideal immortality, an [*19] "immortality in representation,"
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an opportunity to accept the knowledge of natural death as an occasion to "live in the

spirit."
Through the acceptance of death, then, each moment of life may become vastly more rich in
joy, meaning and potentiality. Detached from the falsehood that existence can conquer
temporality, each individual may experience an authentic notion of immortality, one that
"quickens his or her numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, the truth of those
moments and their inalienable values." 55
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AlternativeMove Beyond Nuclear War

Only moving beyond the fear of nuclear destruction can create the
grounds for ethical action the unassimilable and repetitive trauma of our
own future deaths eliminates the possibility for responsibility
SAINT-AMOUR Assistant Professor of English Pomona College 2000
Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 59-82
The notion of a proleptic traumatic symptom, of a repressed that returns from the future,
would appear to make nonsense, too, of the temporal and causal assumptions [End Page 61]
basic to current understandings of historical trauma. Working largely from the Freudian lexicon of repression, repetition, remembering,
and working through, the field of trauma studies has oriented itself around memory work that restores a conventional temporal sequence and hierarchy by seeking to reduce the domination of the
. Traumatic neuroses, according to Freud, are inaugurated by experiences of shock or

violence so extreme as to be unassimilable in their present tense . The traumatic event, as Geoffrey Hartman puts
present by the past
it, is "registered rather than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls directly into the psyche," where its "exceptional presence"
is bound up with the fact that it has not been fully or conventionally experienced [537]. As a result, the impact of the traumatic event is felt belatedly, after a period of
latency, through symptoms that often include the return of repressed memories and the compulsive repetition of behavior, gestures, dreams, and fantasies associated
with the traumatic event. As Cathy Caruth and others have noted, traumatic dreams and flashbacks that replay the repressed event or image differ from other dreams
and fantasies in their literalness, their seeming exemption from the distortive, encryptive operations of the dreamwork. In part because of its literal and insistent return,
the traumatic past remains transgressively present as revenant, haunting, possession,

dominating the present rather than receding, as it should, into the past. The survivor who
experiences this return often acts out the trauma, repeating in the present scenes or
behavior whose origins are in past instances of unassimilated, and often unassimilable,
violence.
According to this model, the proper work of mourning should at least partially restore the
pastness of the past and enable the survivor of trauma to reinvest in the present. Furthermore, the
process and the stakes of working through are not solipsistic but importantly social. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra asserts that "Through
memory work, especially the socially engaged memory work involved in working through, one is able to distinguish between past and present and to recognize
something as having happened to one (or one's people) back then which is related to, but not identical with, here and now" [66]. LaCapra later makes explicit that
"ethically
responsible agency, including consideration for others," is one of the high

sociopolitical stakes of working through, insofar as the survivor trapped in acting out past scenes of traumatic violence and ethical
impossibility (for example, the survivors of death camps who were forced to expose, exploit, persecute, or kill fellow prisoners on threat of their own deaths or the
deaths of those they cherished) may be less capable of such agency in the present:
When the past becomes accessible to recall in memory, and when
language functions to provide some measure of

conscious control, critical distance, and perspective, one has begun the arduous process of working over and through the trauma in a fashion that may
never bring full transcendence of acting out (or being haunted by revenants and reliving the past in its shattering intensity) but which may enable
processes of judgment and at least limited liability and ethically responsible agency. These
processes are crucial for laying ghosts to rest, distancing oneself from haunting revenants,
renewing an interest in life, and being able to engage memory in more critically tested
senses. [Writing 91, 90]
If a symptomatic effect can precede its traumatic cause, however, and if temporality and causality are
reversed, then what becomes of the goals of restoring the pastness of the past, reinvesting in
the present, and reconstituting the trauma survivor as ethically responsible agent? What becomes of
the ethical stakes of working through traumatic symptoms [End Page 62] if we imagine that at least some of those symptoms might precede trauma, traveling back
through time as it were from the future, or even the merely possible future, to the present? To be sure, such a hysteron proteron occurs with a marked frequency in
fictional treatments of historical trauma. 3 Such anachronisms and time travels might powerfully suggest, among other things, how the singularity of a traumatic event
can manifest itself in a perceived leveling of past and future into identical orientations of the symptom: time, for the survivor, is spatialized, such that the traumatic
event can seem to scatter the shrapnel of its symptoms evenly across the past and the future. But aren't such reversals and recursions either deliberate literary conceits
or observations about the pathological temporality perceived by the trauma survivor, rather than evidence that symptoms might "really" precede traumatic causes?
Zizek's account of traumatic symptoms in The Sublime Object of Ideology, interestingly, enacts just such a reversal of the conventional temporality in which
symptoms point back to their origins in unassimilated past traumas, and the repressed returns from a past to which it can be at least partially reaffixed through memory
work. Zizek's discussion of the time travel of the symptom begins with Lacan's reference to a Norbert Wiener parable in the first Seminar. There, Lacan asserts that the
unconscious is made of "imaginary fixations which could not have been assimilated to the symbolic development" of the subject's history; as a result, it is "something
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which will be realized in the Symbolic, or, more precisely, something which, thanks to the symbolic progress which takes place in the analysis, will have been" [Lacan
158, qtd. in Zizek 55].The orientation of analysis, then, is not fundamentally toward the recuperation of a past traumatic event but rather toward a future in which the
islanded traumatic symptom will have been encompassed within a retrospective sense. If working through has a tense, in other words, it is the future anterior, the "will
have been" that proleptically crystallizes a view of the past as seen from the vantage of the future. Zizek continues:
The Lacanian answer to the question: From where does the repressed return? is therefore,
paradoxically: From the future. Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not
discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively the
analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and
meaning [...] the symptom as a "return of the repressed" is precisely such an effect which precedes its cause (its
hidden kernel, its meaning), and in working through the symptom we are precisely "bringing about
the past"we are producing the symbolic reality of the past, long-forgotten traumatic
events. [55-57]
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________________
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**Alternative Blocks
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AT: No Alternative/Causes Nihilism 1/2

1. Our Friedland and Beres evidence warrants that the manifestations of
the Affs repression of death is a culture that desires to create
meaningless action to prevent a confrontation with death. This frenetic
activity destroys the possibility for truly progressive action.
2. The kritik does not preclude plan action were criticizing certain
justifications for action presented in the 1AC do NOT let the affirmative
paint our kritik as a generic statism or capitalism argument. Under the
framework of the alternative, the plan could still be advocated or passed,
as long as the justification didnt utilize the survivalist framework we
critique.
3. Massumi and Zournazi say that only by separating hope from our fear of
death and calculability of life can we empower ourselves. Uncertainty
about the future allows us to embrace maneuverability of our future and
bring a sense of potential to the situation. Looking at the world as door
that can close only boxes us in a world of horror and disempowerment.
They have conceded that our alternative embraces a different type of
politics, a politics of hope, rather than reject it.
4. Santos says the belief that there is no alternative forms the basis for
genocidal fascism. Cycles of violence and exploitation are perpetuated in
the name of their inevitability the ultimate conclusion to the
affirmatives logic is the suicidal destruction of the world.
5. The affirmatives methodology alleviates specific symptoms with a

treatment whose side effects make the disease of capitalist bio-power
even worse. It turns the everyday self into an active nihilist, conditioned
to respond to crisis again and again.
Brian Massumi; Associate Professor of Communications at the Universit de Montral;
Everywhere You Want to Be: An Introduction to Fear; 2002; http://www.textz.com
Power mechanisms can also be defined, perhaps more fundamentally, by the temporal mode in which
they operate. They may seize upon the futurity of the future-past, in which case they can be
characterized as strategies of surveillance: on the look-out for the event. Or they may seize upon its
dimension of anteriority, in which case they are statistical and probabilistic: analyze and quantify the
event as it happened. The past tense in the Timex ad went along with a fixation on numbers: 85-foot
fall, 2,500-foot altitude, inches from the runway, 25-minute flight before landing, aged 52, 160-pound
sled, 27 days and 345 miles, three blizzards ... Mechanisms of surveillance and of statistical
probabilization buckle into prediction. A power word for prediction is deterrence. Deterrence
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is the perpetual co-functioning of the past and future of power: the empty present of
watching and weighing with an eye to avert. It is the avoidance of the accident on the basis
of its past occurrence. It is power turned toward the event: in other words, as it approaches
the subject-form, the virtual. Power under late capitalism is a two-sided coin. One side of it
faces the subject-form. On that side, it is deterrence. Deterrence by nature determines
nothing (but potential: the potential for the multiform disaster of human existence). On the
other side, power is determining. There, discipline, biopower, and testing give disaster a
face. They bring specificity to the general condition of possibility of deterrence by applying it
to a particular found body. They give a life-form content. A self is selected (produced and
consumed). The in-between of the subject-form and the self, of the generic identity and
specific identity--the come and go between deterrence and discipline/biopower/testing,
between the virtual and the actual--is the same intensive and extensive terrain saturated by
the capitalist relation. Power is coincident with capital as social selection and probabilistic
control (Deleuze 1990). Power is capitalization expressed as a destiny. But in this
postequilibrium world of deterrence in which the accident is always about to happen and
already has, disorder is the motor of control. And destiny in the final analysis is only the
necessity of chance: the inevitability of the event, the evanescence of consumptive
production, a life spent, death.
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AT: No Alternative/Causes Nihilism 2/2

6. Turn Interpassivity The plan doesnt actually get done if the judge
votes Aff. Claiming not to be nihilist merely because they speak out on
behalf of action, the Affirmative participates in interpassive action,
constantly speaking about change and progressive action as a
replacement for actual action.
Slavoj Zizek, Prof Philosophy @ U. Ljubljana, Repeating Lenin,
www.lacan.com/replenin, 1997
One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely
NOT to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which
then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against
the global capital?"), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one
follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act
WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates : those who "really want to do something to
help people" get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere,
Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even
supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say,
denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which
use child labor) - they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a
certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing
things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really
changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of
"Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!
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AT: Alternative Doesnt Solve Case

1. The kritik does not preclude plan action were criticizing certain
framework of the alternative, the plan could still be advocated or passed,
as long as the justification didnt utilize the survivalist framework we
critique.
2. Our argument is that by refusing to engage in calculability games and,

rather, express our unconditional hope for the future, we can prevent
atrocities. Our ethic is a straight turn to their case because fear calculates
difference in attempts to destroy otherness, which is impacted by our
Santos, Zimmerman, and Foucault evidence. Our alternative of rejecting
these fear based calculations and embracing hope allows for an ethic of
love and joy towards difference, which restores value to life through
freeing us of the shackles of the ascetic ideal.
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AT: Radical Alternative Destroys the Movement

1. Our alternative isnt that radical... chilling out and having faith that we
wont blow up if we talk about something meaningful seems pretty damn
easy to me. They havent proven an internal link to this argument.
2. The kritik does not preclude action were criticizing certain

framework of the alternative, action could still be advocated or plans
passed, as long as the justification didnt utilize the survivalist framework
we critique.
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AT: Permutation 1/2

First, the text of your do both permutation still has the judge vote
negative in addition to advocating plan. Sticking teams to texts is key to
check abusive rebuttal clarifications to spike out of block responses, and
increases good text writing, which makes the discussion more educational.
Second- the Affirmatives presentation is dangerous PRECISELY because

fantasies of immortality have so much appeal. People, more than
anything, want to believe they will live forever. When presented with the
choice, nearly anyone would choose the fantasmatic construction over its
transversal only the alternative alone can possibly cause change.
Third, a combination of psychic repression and confrontation can only

deform the disruptive aspects. The success of the alternative is
dependent on its ability to avoid fantasmatic politics.
Yannis Stavrakakis, Research Fellow at the School of Politics at the University of
Nottingham, Lacan and the Political, 1999
Since, however, Lacanian
political theory aims at bringing to the fore
again and again,
the lack in the Other, the
same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage
itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. Is it really possible and consistent to point to the lack in the Other and, at
the same time, to attempt to fill it in a quasi-utopian move? Such a question can also be posed in ethical or even strategic terms. It could be argued of
course that Homers vision of psychoanalytic politics does not foreclose the recognition of the impossibility of the social but that in his schema this
recognition and the promise to eliminate it (as part of a quasi-utopian regulative principle) go side by side, that in fact this political promise is legitimized
by the conclusions of psychoanalytic political theory. But this coexistence is nothing new. This recognition of the impossibility of society, of an
if presented against the

background of this disorder the final harmonious order promised by a utopian fantasy acquires
hegemonic force. The problem is that all this schema is based on the elimination of the first moment, of the recognition of
impossibility. The centrality of political dislocation is always repressed in favor of the second moment, the
utopian promise. Utopian fantasy can sound appealing only if presented as the final solution to the
problem that constitutes its starting point. In that sense, the moment of impossibility is only acknowledged in order to
be eliminated. <He Continues. . .> What I want to suggest is that in Homers schema psychoanalytic politics reoccupies
the ground of traditional fantasmatic politics. The result is that this fantasmatic conception of politics ends up
imposing its demands on the psychoanalytic part of the argumentation . Thus, the latter part is
necessarily deformed: if it is not recognized in its radical constitutivity, the impossibility of society, the irreducibility of the real within the social,loses all its power. In that sense, the ultimate consequence of Homers argumentation is the following: the absorption of Lacanian
political theory by radical quasi-utopianism will offer left-wing radicalism the hegemonic appeal entailed
in the articulation of one more signifier (psychoanalysis) in this signifying chain, but psychoanalytic political
theory has nothing to gain beyond its own deformation . Well, it doesnt sound like a very good deal. In fact,
antagonism that cross-cuts the social field, constitutes the starting point for almost every political ideology. Only
articulating Lacanian theory with fantasmatic politics is equivalent to affirming the irrelevance of lacanian theory for radical politics
since this articulation presupposes the repression of all the political insights implicit in Lacans reading and highlighted in this book. The alleged
irrelevance of Lacan for radical politics is also the argument put forward by Collier in a recent article in Radical Philosophy. Colliers argument is that since It is capitalism that shatters
our wholeness and disempowers us (as if without capitalism we would be on the road to utopia; obviously, capitalism occupies the structural position of the antichrist in this sort of leftist
preaching), then Lacans theory is, in fact, normalizing capitalist damage, precisely because alienation is so deep for Lacan that nothing can be done to eliminate it (Lacan is deeply
pessimistic, rejecting cure or happiness as possible goals, my emphasis). Thus Lacan has nothing to offer radical politics. Something not entirely surprising since, according to Collier,
psychological theory in general has no political implications whatsoever. The conclusion is predictable: ,Let us go to Freud and Klein for our psychotherapy [Lacan is of course excluded]
and to Marx and the environmental sciences for our politics, and not get out lines crossed (Collier, 1998 41-3). Surprisingly enough this is almost identical with Homers conclusion:
Lacanian theory is OK as an analytical tool but let us go back to Marx for our ideological seminar and our utopian catechism!
it is necessary to resist all such reoccupations of traditional fantasmatic

politics. At least this is the strategy that Lacan follows on similar occasions. Faced with the alienating dimension of every identification, Lacan located the end of analysis beyond
It is clear that from a Lacanian point of view
identification. Since utopian or quasi-utopian constructions function through identification it is legitimate, I think, to draw the analogies with the social field. If analysis resists the
reoccupation of the traditional strategy of identification although it recognizes its crucial, but alienating, role in the formation of subjectivity why should psychoanalytic politics, after
unmasking the crucial but alienating character of traditional, fantasmatic, identifactory politics, reoccupy their ground? This rationale underlying the Lacanian position is not far away
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from what Beardsworth articulates as a political reading of Derrida. For Beardsworth, deconstruction also refuses to implicate itself in traditional politics, in the local sense of politics in
Beardsworths terminology:
In its affirmative refusal to advocate a politics, deconstruction forms, firstly, an account of why all political projects fail. Since the projection of any decision has ethical
implications, deconstruction in fact generalizes what is meant by the political well beyond the local sense of politics. In this sense it becomes a radical critique of
institutions.
(Beardsworth, 1996: 19)
the radicality and political importance of the lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its
distance from the fantasmatic politics, from politics in the traditional sense, which is not the same as saying that
psychoanalysis is apolitical: in fact, it becomes political precisely by being critical of traditional politics,
Similarly,
exactly because, as argued in the previous chapter, the political is located beyond the utopian or quasi-utopian
sedimentations of political reality.
Fourth, the perm severs, our alternative has the judge reject the
affirmative to shatter the silence surrounding death in order to tear down
the taboo. Advocating the alternative in any way stops them from
advocating their discourse, making the affirmative a moving target,
allowing them to spike out of links, which is a voting issue for fairness and
education. They will make the argument that they can kick advantages,
but thats only true if we make a defensive link argument, which we
didnt.
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AT: Permutation 2/2

Fifth- It doesnt solveA. Our friedland evidence- the permutation is essentially
conservative politics as it gives into the Wests current war on
death. The permutations attempt to coopt the radical potential
of our alternative is just another piece of the road towards
immortality.
B. Both pieces of Beres evidence- the permutation inevitably

collapses upon itself as the same types of representations of
violence and fear that promote the herd mentality and state
centric thought are advanced in the permutation- its
fundamentally a concession to demands on the state and the
sacrilization of mortality.
C. Stengers, Massumi, and Zournazi say predictability and the

uncertainty of hope are mutually exclusive. The permutation is
incapable of transcending a politics of fear because fear opposes
difference. This means the permutation can never engage in the
act of affirmation of life because linking our hope and joy for the
present to a solution for the future based on our fear of death
destroys the disruptiveness of our ethic.
Sixth, extend the 1NC Havel evidence, theyre conceding our distinction
and hierarchy between ideology and action which means they cant win
the permutation. The thanatophobic mode of thought they subscribe to
not only creates the reality we live in it is also independently more
important than the action taken itself.
Seventh- The Obsession Disad- The permutation is fundamentally a plea

for just one more try at representation, constituting the same neurotic
pleas that undermine progress away from current ideologies
Marc Weeks, and Frederic Maurel, Voyages Across the Web of Time; Angkarn, Nietzsche
and Temporal Colonization, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, September 1st, 1999
Angkarn is referring here to a repetition of sounds, a cyclicity which may or may not impede progression. When this
structural metaphor is transferred to contemporary social, political and economic domains, it is readily conceptualized as an
inertia or resistance to change, particularly in a culture such as Thailand's, acutely conscious of its dramatic shift from rural
cycles to the linearity of "progressive" urban development. However, while we would not defend the kind of nostalgia
Angkarn does indeed occasionally indulge in, it appears that the question of time and its relationship to progress has, like
everything else, become peculiarly complex in the context of a globalizing free market that imposes a seemingly ineluctable
momentum. [11] Recent problematics of time and movement in the West, which has undergone the transition from agrarian
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to technological free market more gradually and yet no less profoundly, increasingly force analysis outside the dichotomy of
present versus past tense, the dynamic versus the static. Ben Agger, for example, in elaborating his theory of "fast
an obsession, an intoxication with rapid movement and

transformation for its own sake may actually undermine progress by rendering
considered resistance impossible: "My problem is how the world stays the same. It
does so by changing -- deepening ideology, moronizing everyday life, suppressing
critique." [12] The French philosopher of postmodemity Jean Baudrillard has likewise
discerned a paradoxically conservative effect in the culture of speed, of "movement for
movement's sake".
capitalism" observes that
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AT: Permutation 2NR

(ONLY IF YOU HAVE TIME) Extend our number 1, the theory argument. As per the
text of their permutation, youd do the plan and VOTE NEGATIVE to reject the
affirmative to shatter the silence surrounding death. This means we still win the
round in the world of their permutation.
Extend the #3-
The Stavrakakis evidence.
The obsessive action we criticize is most effective when combined with a

disturbing kernel of the Real that it can cover up. The perm allows the
Aff to present a total lack of order, exposing people to the holes in
ideology, but at that crucial moment of confrontation and anxiety, offers
to fill in the holes with fantasmatic demands continuing the wests war
against mortality. The portrayal of our ability to avoid death makes the
comfort of illusory order all the more desirable.
The Number Four- Advocating the alternative in any way necessarily

stops them from advocating the plan- makes them a moving target,
allowing them to spike out of all our offense mid-round, which is
unpredictable.
Its also infinitely regressive with no limit on how much we can sever- that
is a voting issue for fairness and education.
The Number Five- They conceded ALL of our reasons why the perm
cant solve
a. Friedland says the perm co-opts our alternative. It only feeds into the
Wests war on death. For them to win the perm they gotta win they dont
link.
b. Beres says the perm will collapse on it self. Their representations only
promote the herd mentality and state centric thought that is functionally a
concession to demands for immortality.
c. Stengers, Massumi, and Zournazi say predictability and hope are

mutually exclusive. The perm cant transcend fear because fear and hope
are dichotomous by nature. Linking hope and joy to our fear of
death destroys the disruptiveness of our ethic.
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AT: Permutation Coalitions

1. Turn The attempt to unite different groups together into a harmonic
coalition is predicated on a set of fantasies. The ideas of harmony through
difference and cooperation through liberal-democratic structures not only
ensure the structural failure of any coalition they also are the
supplement to an abandonment of the fight against liberal-democratic
consumerism itself.
Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, The Plague Of
Fantasies. 1998
When one is dealing with a universal structuring principle, one always automatically assumes that in principle,
precisely it is possible to apply this principle to all its potential elements, so that the principles empirical non-
A symptom, however, is an element which

has to
remain an exception, that is, the point of suspension of the universal principle: if the
universal principle were to apply also to this point, the universal system itself would
disintegrate.
realization is merely a matter of contingent circumstances.
although the non-realization of the universal principle it appears to hinge on contingent circumstances
In the paragraphs on civil society in his Philosophy of Right, Hegel demonstrates how the growing class of rabble [Pobel] in modern
civil society is not an accidental result of social mismanagement , inadequate government measures, or simple economic bad luck:
the inherent structural dynamic of civil society necessarily gives rise to a class which is excluded from its benefits (work, personal
dignity, etc.) a class deprived of elementary human rights, and therefore also exempt from the duties toward society, an element
within civil society that negates its universal principle, a kind of non-Reason inherent in Reason itself in short, its symptom. Do we
not witness the same phenomenon in todays growth of an underclass which is excluded, sometimes even for generations,f rom the
benefits of liberal-democratic affluent society? Todays exceptions (the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanent unemployed) are
the symptom of the late capitalist universal system, the permanent reminder of how the immanent logic of late capitalism works:
the proper capitalist utopia is that through appropriate measures (affirmative action and other forms of state intervention for
progressive liberals; the return to self-care and family values for conservatives), this exception could be in the long term and in
is not an analogous utopianism at work in the notion of a rainbow

coalition: in the idea that, at some utopian moment to come, all progressive struggles (for gay
and lesbian rights; for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities; the ecological struggle; the feminist struggle; and so on) will
be united in a common chain of equivalences?
principle, at least abolished. And
The necessary failure here is structural: it is not simply that, because of the empirical complexity of the situation, all
particular progressive fights will never be united, that wrong chains of equivalences will always occur (say, the enchainment of the
occurrences of
wrong enchainments are grounded in the very structuring principle if todays progressive
politics of establishing chains of equivalences: the very domain of the multitude of
particular struggles, with their continuously shifting displacements and condensations, is
sustained by the repression of the key role of economic struggle. The Leftist politics of the
chains of equivalences among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the
abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system that is, to the tacit
acceptance of capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics as the
unquestioned framework of our social life.
fight for African-American ethnic identity with patriarchal and homophobic attitudes), but, rather, that
2. Obviously those who oppose the fear of death arent going to be

joining forces with those who support it. . .We could have brought my dog
in to tell you that. That, however, does not mean we reject all Leftist
politics different from ourselves.
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3. There argument assumes a completely different forum. The purpose of

a coalition is to work through traditional structures of political power to
influence legislation. However, this form of political participation is
obsolete in a post-modern world politicians will ignore the demand,
elites will create loopholes to bypass it, and the media will spin it as antipatriotic. Only by reconstructing debate as a site of micropolitical
resistance, and ignoring the supposed benefits of representative politics,
can we reclaim the political sphere, solving the rightist takeover their
evidence refers to and avert extinction through biopolitical control.
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________________
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**Framework Blocks
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Framework 2nc
They have conceded our last piece of evidence in the 1nc, our Havel
evidence, which damns them. The affirmatives method of thought process,
methodology and ideology is ripe with implications all its own.
Contemporary ideology has come to replace the power of the sword as
ideology provides power its legitimacy and coherence. In short, ideology
IS reality, more important then action itself.
This framework for the debate of evaluating claims based on

representations serves to test the affirmatives truth claims by subjecting
them to both negative and positive claims, serving to shape policy
implications, not the other way around.
Frameworks Institute, 03,
http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/strategicanalysis/index.shtml
Quite simply, framing refers to the subtle selection of certain aspects of an issue in
order to cue a specific response; as researchers have shown, the way an issue is
framed explains who is responsible, and suggests potential solutions conveyed by
images, stereotypes, messengers, and metaphors. The advantage of strategic frame
analysis is that it allows the research to document and deconstruct the frames
currently in the public consciousness and to understand their impact on public policy
preferences. Additionally, it allows us to test and validate, through different disciplines,
both the negative frames and the potential positive reframes that can further an
issue's salience. Finally, the effectiveness of the recommendations we make can be
demonstrated; while we hope we are "creative" in our approach to communications,
our findings are rooted in the social and cognitive sciences. We can explain what works
and why it works, and demonstrate this across the research.
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AT: Fiat Good 2NC 1/2

1. Not responsive- we are impact turning the fundamental justifications for
the plan TO BE passed. You would still vote neg as a policy maker because
their policy has a bad impact calculus.
2. Counter Interpretation- The affirmative should have to defend the

justifications for the 1AC before we evaluate fiat.
A. This solves all their judge intervention arguments- our criticism
interplays with the 1AC.
B. Its best for education, giving us all knowledge we can use in day-today operations and is the only way to prevent government atrocities
from being committed through fantasmatic policymaking. Extend
Stavrakakis
3. External predictability the word resolved is on the left side of the

colon, means we the debaters must stand resolved and the reasons why
are to be justified. No reason it has to be policymaking.
4. Education
A. They do not teach a THING about real policymaking. Congressional
bills arent 2 sentences long without funding recommendations.
B. Policymaking skills can be learned under our interpretation equally

well. The issues pertinent now wont be pertinent by the time we
might have positions in office. However, the way we think, act, and
align ourselves politically will have actual value in terms of policy
making and read world.
C. An unfair debate about important issues is still better than an

absurd well-played game. Well win the race to the middle.
5. Turn- Defending the Status Quo forces us to defend things like racism
and sexism- another predictable framework is necessary for negative
ground.
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6. Our interpretation increases affirmative ground equally to negative

ground- affirmatives can be run such that they have impacts in our
framework.
7. Even if they win fiat is good

A. Still evaluate our impacts The plans result in a perpetuation of
status quo harms. If we win our link argument, well win their
impacts replicate.
B. Still endorse our alternative even within the framework of

policymaking you can vote negative for your own symbolic death. We
read solvency evidence saying that allots space for hope.
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AT: Fiat Good 2NC 2/2

8. The framework links to our criticism The drive to save traditional
debate from the radicals who threaten it IS the logic of Western
colonization and extermination of the Other. Our Santos evidence
indicates this logic lies at the root of the case harms and negates the
value to life.
(ONLY READ IF YOU HAVE TIME)

9. Turn Biopower
Utilizing fiat denies the possibility for debate to be used as an instrument
of micro political resistance, ensuring alienation of citizens from the
political sphere and guaranteeing biopolitical control, which is impacted
by our Foucault evidence.
Jessica J. Kulynych, Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and postmodern
participation, Polity, Winter, 1997
Performative resistance recognizes disciplinary power, enables action in the face of that
power, enables innovation in deliberation, and thus allows us to see the world of political
action differently. Consequently, it is possible, and more meaningful, to conceptualize
contemporary participation as a performative rather than a representative action. The failure
to reconceptualize political participation as resistance furthers an illusion of democratic
control that obscures the techniques of disciplinary power and their role in global strategies
of domination, fundamentally missing the real, although much more humble opportunities
for citizens to "take part" in their own "governance." Accepting the idea of participation as
resistance has two broad implications that fundamentally transform the participation debate.
First, it widens the parameters of participation to include a host of new actors, activities, and
locations for political action. A performative concept redirects our attention away from the
normal apparatus of government and economy, and therefore allows us to see a much
broader range of political actions. Second, it requires that we look anew at traditional
participatory activities and evaluate their performative potential.
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AT: Fiat Good 2NR

Go to the bottom of the fiat debate first- even if we lose our counter
interpretation- well still win. Our kritik proves the plan is a perpetuation
of the status quo harms and their impacts will only replicate in the future.
Absent our alternative, you can still vote negative as an acceptance of
your own symbolic death, which would open up space for hope and joy in
the present.
Go to the counter interpretation- the aff should defend their justifications.

Our interpretation is inclusive of theirs, so they have to win inclusion of
anything else is bad to win. They have no offense1. Our interpretation just fiat plus, solves policymaking because we
allow for a world of uniqueness based policy debate too.
2. Political issues change. Our criticism gives you knowledge you can
use now and in the future in terms of policymaking and real world.
3. Our interpretation is the most inclusive, so well win the race to the
middle.
The only argument they can go for is fairness but they concede that our
interpretation is more externally predictable because the word resolved is
on the left side of the colon, means debaters must stand resolved and the
reasons why are to be justified.
AND Our interpretation only forces you to defend your 1AC, solves
narratives and judge intervention arguments.
Additionally, we open equal ground for the affirmative and negative. They
concede affs can be run with impacts in our framework.
Heres our Offense1. The kritik proves that how we frame a policy proposal is as
important as the policy itself. The plan is useless without knowing
how to achieve it without destroying meaning.
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2. Defending the Status Quo destroys negative ground- it forces us to

defend racism and sexism. Theres no speaker points to dock in out
rounds.
3. Stavrakakis says that our inclusion is key to stand up against the

government and prevent governmental atrocities from being
committed through fantasmic policymaking.
4. Santos says the drive to save traditional debate from the radicals
justifies WESTERN COLONIZATION and EXTERMINATION of the other.
This allows ethical claims to be ignored and negates the value to
life. Counterfeit existence outweighs fairness and ground.
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______________
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**Realism Blocks
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AT: Realism Good 2NC 1/2

1. The fear of death negates the value to life because we would
constantly have to look over our shoulders; every person and action could potentially do
harm to us.
2. Their focus on structural violence wholly misses the point - if we

reorient violence as a behavior then it is quite likely that we can avert
realism itself.
Susanne Kappeler, freelance writer, author, and teacher in England, The Will to Violence:
The Politics of Personal Behavior, 1995, pg. 2-3
Violence is perceived as a phenomenon for science to research and for politics to get a grip on. But
violence is not a phenomenon: it is the behavior of people, human action which may be
analysed. What is missing is an analysis of violence as action not just as acts of violence, or the cause of its effects, but
as the actions of people in relation to other people and beings or things. Feminist critique, as well as other political critiques,
has analysed the preconditions of violence, the unequal power relations which enable it to take place. However, under the
it is
becoming standard to argue as if it were these power relations which cause the violence.
Underlying is a behaviourist model which prefers to see human action as the exclusive
product of circumstances, ignoring the personal decision of the agent to act , implying in
pressure of mainstream science and a sociological perspective which increasingly dominates our thinking,
turn that circumstances virtually dictate certain forms of behaviour. Even though we would probably not underwrite these
propositions in their crass form, there is nevertheless a growing tendency, not just in social science, to explain violent behavior by its
circumstances. (Compare the question, Does pornography cause violence?) The circumstances identified may differ according to the politics of
the explainers, but the method of explanation remains the same. While consideration of mitigating circumstances has its rightful
place in a court of law trying (and defending) an offender, this does not automatically make it an adequate or sufficient
practice for political analysis. It begs the question, in particular, What is considered to be part of the circumstances (and by
whom)? Thus in the case of sexual offenders, there is a routine search on the part of the tabloid press or the professionals of violence for
experiences of violence in the offenders own past, an understanding which is rapidly solidifying in the scientific model of a cycle of violence.
That is, the relevant factors are sought in the distant past and in other contexts of action, while a crucial factor in the present context is ignored,
namely the agents decision to act as he did. Even politically oppositional groups are not immune to this mainstream sociologizing. 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 the result of racist oppression. 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
these explanations
ignore the fact that not everyone experiencing the same oppression uses
violence, that is, that these circumstances do not cause violent behavior. They
overlook, in other words, that the perpetrator has decided to violate, even if this decision
was made in circumstances of limited choice.
contribute to it. Although such oppression is a very real part of an agents life context,
3. Prefer the specificity of our evidence. Our Beres, Santos and Foucault
evidence outline that wars can ONLY be waged based on the process we
are describing; all conflicts in the 20th century rely on this process. Our
kritik takes out the ability to engage in these wars. Consequently, the turn
has no impact.
4. Our alternative solves realism and restors the value to life. This cards
on fire.
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Louis Rene Beres, Prof of I. Law at Purdue, Intl Journal on World Peace, No. 3, Volume 16,
September 1st, 1999
How, then, do we end these terrible wars? Most important, we must first understand them as
manifestations of humankind's unwillingness to accept personal death. Death defines world
politics because individuals wish to escape death. The ironies are staggering, but the connections persist and
remain unexamined. Freed from their unwillingness to accept the finitude of life, individuals could finally agree upon
a descralization of states, upon a covenant with all other individuals to treat the political as a
secular realm of unalterably mundane limits. With such an agreement, the passion for "victory" would be
greatly abridged, and the rationale of war between states severely impaired. Over time, every polis
could become a cosmopolis, and the "realism" of power struggles between states could be
revealed for what it has always been, a "religious" myth. But we are back at the beginning. How
may we be instructed to accept our own personal mortality? Epicurus had an answer. In his letter to Menoeceus, he counsels:
Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us . For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is
a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the

mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes
away the craving for immortality. More than two thousand years later, Santayana settled upon similar conclusions: In endowing us
deprivation of sensation, And therefore
with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation... the truth of mortality....The more we reflect, the more
we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it, perhaps, this very
conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality. As it is memory that makes mortality an incontestable truth, says Santayana, so it
is also memory that opens to us all an ideal immortaliy, an "immortality in representation," an opportunity to accept the knowledge of natural death as an
By accepting death, then, each moment of life becomes vastly more rich in
joy, meaning and potentiality. Detached from the falsehood that existence can conquer temporality, each
occasion to "live in the spirit."
individual may experience an authentic notion of immortality, one that "quickens his numbered moments with a
vision of what never dies, the truth of those moments and their inalienable values."
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AT: Realism Good 2NC 2/2

5. Santos says the belief that there is no alternative to realism forms the
basis for genocidal fascism. Cycles of violence and exploitation are
perpetuated
in the name of their inevitability the ultimate conclusion

to the negatives logic is the suicidal destruction of the world.
6. Theres no link- their argument assumes some kind of political or policy action in
order to merit and impact. Our alternative is not to abandon the state. In a world of our
alternative, states would still exist and would be able to pursue their own interests. They
just wont wage wars. If we win the framework debate it become a non-issue because it
is not a representation we employ ie it requires policy level action to have an impact.
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AT: Realism Good 2NR

Our Kappeler evidence is DAMNING for them- it indicates that
violence is personal rather than institutional and realism and any
other structural institution cannot force people to fight.
Reorienting behavior averts the bad parts of realism. YOU GOT
NOTHIN.
Extend our Beres evidence from the 2NC- here is where well win. Beres
says that only when we abandon our fear of death, can we build bridges of
understanding that make the realist power struggles between states
unnecessary. The status quo realism makes life meaningless. Our
alternative transforms realism, they havent got a single answer to this
evidence.
Extend Santosa) Their argument is what allows for genocidal fascism to be

perpetuated through the belief in its inevitability.
b) Also realism forms the basis for neo-liberal violence; justifies statesanctioned cruelty and destruction of the other to save oneself.
Negates the value to life.
(If you have time, read the rest)
Additionally, our evidence is more on point than theres. They concede

wars can ONLY be waged based on the process we are describing; all
conflicts in the 20th century rely on this process. Our kritik takes out the
ability to engage in these wars.
They concede our alternative doesnt abandon the state. States can still exist and would
be able to pursue their own interests, just not wage wars.
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AT: Threats Are Real

1. This is interesting- but irrelevant. Were not running threat
construction. Also well win that even if threats were real, if you didnt
fear them, they wouldnt be a threat.
2. There is no objective condition of danger
David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing

Security, 1998, pg. 1-2
Danger is not an objective condition. It [sic] is not a thing that exists independently of
those to whom it may become a threat. To illustrate this, consider the manner in which
the insurance industry assesses risk. In Francois Ewalds formulation, insurance is a
technology of risk the principal function of which is not compensation or reparation,
but rather the operation of a schema of rationality distinguished by the calculus of
probabilities. In insurance, according to this logic, danger (or, more accurately, risk) is
neither an event nor a general kind of event occurring in reality.. . but a specific mode
of treatment of certain events capable of happening to a group of individuals . In other
words, for the technology of risk in insurance, Nothing is a risk in itself; there is no
risk in reality But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all depends on how one
analyzes the danger, considers the event. As Kant might have put it, the category of
risk is a category of the understanding; it cannot be given in sensibility or intuition.2 In
these terms, danger is an effect of interpretation. Danger bears no essential,
necessary, or unproblematic relation to the action or event from which it is said to
derive. Nothing is intrinsically more dangerous for insurance technology than anything
else, except when interpreted as such.
3. Danger is not an objective condition. No interpretation is universally

true
Ronnie D Lipschutz, Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, After Authority 20 00 p.51
That security might be, therefore, socially constructed does not mean that there are
not to be found real, material conditions that help to create particular interpretations
of threats, or that such conditions are irrelevant to either the creation or undermining
of the assumptions underlying security policy. But enemies often imagine their Others
into being, via the projections of their worst fears onto the Other (as the United States
did with Japan in the late 1980s and with China in the 1990s). In this respect, their
relationship is intersubjective. To the extent that each acts on these projections,
threats to each other acquire a material character. In other words, nuclear-tipped
ICBMs are not mere figments of our imagination, but their targeting is a function of
what we imagine their possessors might do to us (I return to this point in chapter 4).
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_____________
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**Theory Blocks
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AT: Performative Contradiction Other Positions

1. No impact to contradiction- This is the definition of a gateway
argument: the aff has to prove their impact calculus is a good one before
we can continue.
2. We only advocate ONE gateway argument off ONE link- we cant say that
the affs impact calculus is both death good and death bad and ctiticize
both. This answers their multiple contradictory worlds and strategic skew
arguments.
3. These gateway arguments NEED to be conditional statements

otherwise these types of arguments wouldnt be read because the time
trade off isnt fair between the aff and the neg. If we win the impact to the
K we win its educational to debate it.
4. We arent performing anything, this is merely a critical disad with an

alternative dont hold us to a higher standard than you would a
counterplan with politics net benefit. This only means we cant go for
both in the 2NR, there is zero impact to our performance being tainted.
Vote for the alternative, not for the team that read it.
5. If you think it is a double turn, concede one of the two and see if you
win. If you grant us the disad, then the kritik links to both equally and
you vote negative on presumption. If you grant us the kritik, then the
judge rejects the disad along with the Aff case. Unfortunately for you,
rejecting the disad doesnt mean we lose, but rejecting the case means
you do lose.
6. There is no abuse you couldve just cross-applied our kritik to the

position you think it linked to, and then link turned the K, or conceded the
other position didnt link to the kritik and impact turned it. If your
performative contradiction argument is true, it just proves we gave you
extra ground and you failed to use it strategically.
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AT: Performative Contradiction Kritiks Impact is Death

1. You obviously werent paying much attention to the 1NC. We dont
think that death is a good thing thatd be asinine. In the presentation of
the 1AC, the Affirmative felt compelled to speak out about the necessity of
preserving life. Our Weeks and Maurel evidence indicates that this desire
occurs due to a phobic overreaction to deaths passivity. The negative, on
the other hand, accepts deaths inevitability and confronts the repression.
Our Harmon evidence indicates that this allows us to engage in a rational
discourse about death, where we can act to avoid nuclear war without
repressing deaths inevitability.
2. Even if they win that both teams link to the Weeks and Maurel evidence
equally, it isnt a reason to reject us.
B. You wouldnt reject a counterplan with a politics net benefit because

it linked to federalism as much as the plan. We dont have to win
that no evidence we read links to our alternative just that it is
preferable to the plan.
C. The Beres evidence is still a net benefit to the alternative, because it

is specific to state action in the name of preventing death. Using
death prevention as a justification for state action creates a
framework that makes perpetual war inevitable.
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AT: PIKs Bad
1. The alternative is not a PIK. We have a text that advocates NONE of

your plan, and well stick to it throughout the whole round. If you win
your framework for the round, which is fiat, then we can not possibly claim
your plan as offense. Our framework for the round is that only
justifications are important. We arent advocating your plan we just
think its irrelevant. Under our framework for the round, the judge
doesnt decide based on whose plan is better, so obviously plan good
arguments arent offense for you.
2. If you somehow let them pin us with this, PIKS are Sweet
A. Ground The aff gets the entirety of their defense of the 1AC
advantages as offense against us. You said preserving death was
good for a reason, right? Defend it!
B. Education If the aff gets to use the plan as offense, critical

questions will almost never be examined, which makes all of our fiat
good answers offense.
C. And it is legitimate- we dont rely on the PIC to win the round. We

can concede the endpoint of the plan but criticize the way that you
get there. The net benefit i.e. our criticism impact turns your
affirmative. And theres literature on the net benefit, which proves
that its predictable and viable.
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Fear of Death Critique Index

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EVAZON

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

Death Kritik Index 1/3

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

Death Kritik Index 2/3

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Alternative- Nuclear War Solvency........................................................................... 54

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

Death Kritik Index 3/3

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Rather than constructing a dialogue of death, society

The affirmative replicates this evangelism of fear through its constructions

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

Link- Nuclear War

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

Alternative- Nuclear War Solvency

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

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FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

In a paradoxical attempt to rebel against death, humans turn to promises

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

The Affs discourse of apocalyptic scenarios absent plan action motivates

This drive to constantly acquire and consume transforms the world

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

The attempts to control, manage, and ensure safety of the population is

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

Text: Vote negative to shatter the silence surrounding death through an

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

The best political stance is to reject calculations of probability and policy

Probability is very interesting for all the

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

this creates the possibility of hope and the

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

Massumi, Associate Professor of Communications at the Universit de Montral, and

Change; New York: Routledge; p. 241-242

like a scream of possibility, a babble of

it's your participation that makes it real. That's

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, The Post-Development Reader,

FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

Pure War 1NC

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Pure War 1NC

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FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

2. Negates the Value to Life- In an attempt to create permanent

3. Bioplitical Control- The panopticon is most applicable in this