Open source michigan dubs

1AC
Decisions, Incisions The Excluded Third, Included A while back, a passer-by came in, frozen stiff. Chilled,
iced, stiff, immobile,
exhausted-it is the snake stretched out on the snow one winter's day. It asked for
nothing; it was hibernating perhaps. A villager walking by, on his own land (note this well), gathers
up the snake, brings it inside, stretches it out by the fire, where it immediately begins to awaken. From the
outside to the inside, from numbness to life , from sleep to anger, from indifference to hatred: from cold to hot. The passer-by asked for a haven,
a bed and some food, soup, victuals-to sleep under the same roof. Asked for but did not negotiate; it is not a question of price: the satyr's
hospitality is free.Thenceforth the risk is there, quite literally; one is at the other's mercy. On
the contrary, in the villager's house, another country rat. As his action is meritorious-charity, my good sir-it is a
question of rent. Rent, that is to say, a price for a space, a payment for territory. The one who is at home is my lessee: this double
locative is a veritable hornet's nest where regulated hospitality passes many a time to
hostility. Having come back from the cold into the warmth, the insect attacks: ingrate, says the villager, such is my pay! But he figures
wrong. The serpent is not a lessee; he was not looking for a haven; he was answered without having called. He was given an uncalled-for opinion.
Someone made himself the serpent's benefactor, savior, and father. You are sleeping quite
peacefully, and when you wake you find yourself in debt. You live with no other need, and suddenly,
someone claims to have saved your country, protected your class, your interests, your
family, and your table. And you have to pay him for that, vote for him, and other such
grimaces. Thus the serpent awakens obliged to another. Something to get angry about. But, moreover, the
villager was taking a walk at home, then goes into his house, still at home. As far as he is concerned, he never changed territories, never crossed a
border. For himself, he is at home. On the contrary, the serpent does change. It was undoubtedly in its nest and finds itself in a foreign land. More
than having been given a spot, his own has been taken away. Another debt. Thus
when the balance sheet is drawn up,
the demanded payment is turned around. And the host is less a host than he thought. Less
hospitable than he thought. Undoubtedly hostile, that's the thorny part, the hot spot. Who
has to pay? The litigation is serious. Who is the host and who is the guest? Where is the gift and
where is the debt? Who is hospitable, who is hostile, again the same�ord, the same thing: * No third to judge in this case. It is true that
elsewhere the third opens the oyster and eats it, devours the weasel and the rabbit, which surely means that he judges, that is to say; he decides,
that is to say, he slices [tranche] . Like the esquire trenchant. We are drowning in words and in language. Host is subject, object, friend
�e!!�_m.y':"'Decide then. Yes, immediately:To decidds to cut. The vlllager thus takes up his hatchet. Notice: he does not judge, does not decide;
he slices in three [tranche] . Trancher, a medieval word, from trz'nz'care, from the Vulgar Latin for "to cut in three. " Thus: he takes his hatchet ,
slices the animal in three, making three serpents from two blows, a trunk, a tail, and a head. Perrin Dandin slices the pilgrims' oyster correctly:
crunches it and gives a shell to each. The arithmetic works out right: he takes the booty and sends the other two on their way, each with a
worthless shell. Can this calculation be generalized? Which is the third part? Or who or what is the third, in this logic of the trenchant decision? Is
the third excluded or not? Here we have a trio valent logic where we expected only a bivalent one. t The same at the head, the other at the tail, or
being at the head and nonbeing at the tail, and this middle trunk that is both same and other, being and nonbeing, and so forth. I think, however,
that it can be decided. Here, La Fontaine, fol. lowing Phaedrus or Aesop, writes from the peasant's point of view. Death to ingrates. At least we
understand here that gratitude, in the hard logic of exchange, bears the risk of life or death. I have just
written "'You can understand why the great hunter, face to face with the Eternal One, Saint Julian, becomes the Hospitaller. I shall speak of these
curious hunts. t"All of you who say that hot and cold or any two such principles are All, what is it that you attribute to both of them when you say
that both and each are? What are we to understand by this 'are'? Is this a third principle besides those two others, and shall we suppose that the
All is three, and not two any longer?" (Plato , The Soph ist, 243D-E). 24 The Parasite from the other point of view, that of the serpent. Which of
the two is the ingrate, I ask you? Who among you allows himself to be displaced, carried from his home territory, permits himself to be the
passive object of another's whim, that of the first passer-by? Who would thank, moreover, the one who decides for you? That would be the same
as giving recognition to professional politicians. To those who see and consider others as if they were rocks, cold stones. To those who force
others to be only objects, which can then be carried. To those who are astonished when the passive object
suddenly wakes up and lashes out in anger. The one who did not lash out against his benefactors, saviors, and fathers
would be forgetting all his duties, as would he who did not pass from cold passivity to the heat of battle. Ready to die. Sliced in three. I was saying
that it could be decided. Look for a third before reaching for the hatchet. Strike but listen first. Let's try the ingrates, says the snake in the bag. My
life is in your hands, the snake says to the man ; cut me up but be aware that you are the ingrate. We'll go to the cow; let her be the judge. She
says: I give my milk and my children to man and he has never given me anything but death. The steer, a new third party who will judge, says that
he works and is beaten in return and that his life is ended with a sacrifice on the altar of the gods. All of them give to man, then, who never gives
anything in return. But let us descend to the level of the tree. It gives shelter, decoration, flowers, fruits, and shade. And in return for its wages or
more accurately for its rent-for it shelters and produces a territory-it is felled. The tree judges ' man to be an ingrate. Man milks the cow, makes
the steer work, makes a roof from the tree; they have all decided who the parasite is. It is man. Everything is born for him, animals and beings. In
the moral, La Fontaine is euhermerist, sociologist, or politician enough to please his reader. The great and powerful, he says, act this way. Yes, of
course, but the others? The farmer of the cow, the carpenter of the roof, and the priest who kills the steer are not great people. History says so
without symbols, without translations or displacements. But history hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and
everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking, never
giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of giving in his favor when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When he is dealing with his kind, he
continues to do so; he wants to be the parasite of man as well. And his kind want to be so too. Hence rivalry. Hence
the sudden,
explosive perception of animal humanity, hence the world of animals of the fables. If my kind
were cattle, calves, pigs, and poultry, I could quietly maintain with them the same relations I have with nature. Such is the peaceful dream of my
contemporaries, descendants, and ancestors. Always talking, never giving, staying in a good position in irreversible logic. The louse is a man for
the wolf. M,hor!, move aroun��!!J..�tamQ���.:. The Lion's Share The Simple Arrow You remember the relation of order and of him who
plays to the hilt in the position of the king. * The one who occupies this site receives everything and gives nothing in exchange. This defines a
space where a wild den is at the extreme limit. If I were a fox, I would tell you why: I would see how to get in but not how to get out. All flows are
oriented to the aforementioned position, and none come from it. All the footprints point toward the lion's den, but none come away. A rigorous
diagram of a space structured by the relation of order, bearing a maximized point. Oddly enough, here, it is the spot of power, of absolute power,
that of the lion, the king's place. But it is also a trap, an open maw. He who is well-placed has the right to eat the others. It is always a question of
a meal, of visitors, and of guests. What does the lion give in exchange for his good? Nothing? Not entirely. An edict, a document, a passport, words
and writing. He pays for his meal in well-turned, well-written phrases. And thus he is in the position of a parasite, a universal parasite. One day
we will have to understand why the strongest is the parasite� that is to say, the weakest�why the one whose only function is to eat is the one
who commands. And speaks. We have just found the place of politics. Why? Invert the described space and you will see the king grown old. He
does not receive visits and game but is kicked, bitten, butted. He is excluded and sacrificed. He dies twice from the donkey's kick. The maximized
point suddenly is minimized. The host/guest is universal, eater of all and eaten by all. *"Le J eu du loup," in Hermes I V. La distribution, pp. 89-
104. 26 Logics 27 The rats, the country- and the city-dweller, have shown us that the system of parasites in stepladder formation is not very
different ( from an ordinary system. Who will ever know if parasitism is an obstacle to its proper functioning or if it is its very dynamics? Daily,
general patterns of behavior depend on the answer to this question. If we eliminate these tie-ups, would a system still remain? Is the system a set
of constraints on our attempts at optimization, or do these latter, quite simply, produce the system itself? The question is asked globally here. In
the case of the lion, it is asked locally. The
space is full of relations of order. All lines go in one direction,
none in the other. They literally go to one opening: the gaping maw of the universal
parasite. Or to a common misery: the broken back of the universal victim. Questions: is the king victim
or parasite, is the parasite king or victim? It is l the same question, not asked of the whole network, but at a local division, a single point of the
system, undoubtedly at its extremum. It is the same question as that of the host/guest. But here we already have an idea (a rare one) of what
might be a point of decision: the den where the game is eaten ravenously and where, one day, someone else risks being cut up. The space is
strewn with simple arrows, pointing in only one direction.

Serres 7 (Michel, professor of philosophy at Clermont-Ferrand, Vincennes, Paris since

1969, full professor of the history of science at Stanford University since 1984, elected to
the French Academy in 1990, “The Parasite,” University of Minnesota Press, 2007)//glen

Contemporary formations of immigration policy disperse hospitality to subjects

upon having identified them by name and in law. In this way, hospitality itself
becomes conditioned on the knowledge the self has of the other.
Kakoliris 15. Gerasimos, Assistant Professor in the Sector of Philosophy in the Department of
Philosophy, Pedagogy & Psychology @ the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,
Greece. “Jacques Derrida on the Ethics of Hospitality,” The Ethics of Subjectivity, 2009, pp. 144-
156. // JE
During the 1990s, and until his death in October 2004, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) wrote extensively on the
ethics of hospitality. Derrida often identifies a concept from the Western heritage and employs it to address critically a specific and
concrete context. In this case, it is the rising hostility of European governments towards immigrants. In an analysis that is at once
historical, conceptual, and thematic , Derrida attempts to bring out the logic that governs the concept of
hospitality. The logic that Derrida identifies as conditioning the concept of hospitality within Western
tradition takes the form of a tension, a contradiction, an antinomy or a double imperative. On
the one hand, there is the law of unlimited hospitality that ordains the unconditional reception
of the other, whoever he or she is: that is, the provision of hospitality to a stranger without
conditions, restrictions and returns. The law of absolute, pure, unconditional, hyperbolic
hospitality, asks us to say "yes" to the newcomer [arrivantJ, before any determination, before
any prevention, before any identification - irrespective of being a stranger, an immigrant, a
guest or an unexpected visitor. On the other hand, there are the conditional laws (in the plural) of
hospitality, which, while they establish a right to and a duty in hospitality, they
simultaneously place terms and conditions on hospitality (political, juridical, moral), ordaining
that this right should be given always under certain conditions: as, for example, that they
should exist certain restrictions in the right of entry and stay of the foreigner. Moreover, the
reciprocity of the commitment that conditions this notion of hospitality entails that the
foreigner does not only have a right: he or she also has, reciprocally, obligations, as it is often

recalled, when someone wishes to reproach him or her for bad behavior. The right to hospitality
subsumes the reception, the welcome that is given to the foreigner under a strict and
restrictive jurisdiction. From the point of view of a right to hospitality, the guest, even when
he or she is well received, is mainly a foreigner; he or she should remain a foreigner. Certainly,
hospitality is a debt to the guest, but it remains conditioned and conditional. If, for example, he or she
does not possess a right to hospitality or a right to asylum, each new arrival is not accepted as a guest.
Without this right, he or she can enter one's "home," the "house" of the host, only as a "parasitize" - as
illegal, clandestine, subject to arrest or deportation. In the context of unconditional hospitality, Derrida makes
special reference to lmmanuel Kant, who, in the third article entitled "The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be limited to Cond itions of
Universal Hospitality" of his essay Towards Perpetual Peace, defines "universal hospitality" as the right of a stranger not to be
treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing
his destruction; but, so long as he peacefully occupies his place. one may not treat him with hostility.(i In addition, Kant limits the
right to hospitality to a "right of visit," in virtue of an initial common possession of the surface of earth, and not to a "right of
residence (a right of residence would presuppose a special convention between nation-states, demanding that the foreigner is a
citizen of another nation·state). To Kant's IIconditional" hospitality, Derrida will oppose unconditional" or "pure"
hospitality, which is without conditions and which does not seek to identify the newcomer, even if
he is not a citizen. For Derrida, absolute or unconditional hospitality presupposes a rupture with
hospitality under the current sense, with conditional hospitality, with the right to or pact of
hospitality. As he explains in Of Hospitality: ... absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and
that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but
to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them
arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a
pact) or even their names . Derrida reminds us that, even though hospitality begins with the question that someone
addresses to the person that comes (something that appears very human and occasionally expresses love: "tell me your name, what
should I call you, I who am call ing on you, I who wa nt to call you by your name?"),8 nevertheless, the foreigner, according
to the laws of conditional hospitality, is somebody to whom, in order to receive him or her,
someone begins by placing the question about his or her name: he or she ordains him or her
to declare his or her identity and to give guarantees about it. To ask, however - to learn who
the other is, to ask for the other to be identified before I accept or reject my obligation to
welcome him or her - means to render my moral obligation conditional on me and my
knowledge of the other. Hospitality, nevertheless, in order to be "real," "true" hospitality,
should not discriminate. It should be open to indiscriminate otherness even if it risks always
opening the door to its own undoing . In this sense, " pure" hospitality is a risk, because we cannot
determine who will be our guest or how he or she will behave as a guest. Consequently, hospitality, for
Derrida, obeys the fo llowing paradox with regard to whether we should or should not ask questions, to call someone by his or her
name or not: Hospitality presupposes the call or the mnemonic recall of the proper name in its pure possibility (" it's to you, yourself,
that I say 'come,' 'enter"'), and at the same time the obliteration of the proper name itself (If/come,' 'enter,' 'whoever you are and
whatever your name, your language, your sex, your species may be, be you human, an imal, or divine ... "').9 Even though these
two regimes of hospitality - the unconditional law of hospitality, in its universal singularity, and
the conditional (plural) laws of hospitality - are heterogeneous, irreducible, they do, however,
resemble each other. This is because, on the one hand the conditional laws of hospitality would cease to be laws of
hospitality if they were not guided by the law of unconditional hospitality: if they were not inspired by it, if they did not aspire to it,
if, indeed, they did not demand it. Political and moral action needs to be related to a moment of
unconditional or infinite responsibility in order not to be reduced to the demands of the
moment: that is, it should be based on a moment of universality that exceeds the pragmatic
demands of a certain context. Therefore, the laws of hospitality need the law of absolute
hospitality in order to place them and to keep them in an incessant progressive movement/ to
improve them.

Unconditional hospitality challenges how we ought to make sense of the topic

itself. Rather than as a means to legalize this or that category of immigration,
we opt for the prior and unconditional affirmation of undecideability,
vulnerability and maximal risk in the act of opening one’s borders to the other.
The 1AC represents an unconditional commitment to these ethical principles
that necessitates putting the subject at risk, but that acceptance of risk
dethrones the will to mastery, holding the host as the ultimate arbiter of life,
and is the necessary precondition for ethics and value to life.
Mubirumusoke 11 (Mukasa, Professor at Boston College, “Georges Bataille and the Ruinous
Role of Nonknowledge in Derrida's Unconditional Hospitality” p. 9-11)

In inner experience, the self’s radical openness and outpouring naturally entails risk. The
subject risks itself as it knows itself, literally. Inner experience requires exposure to a world
beyond comprehension, and, moreover, to the other beyond comprehension.
“‘Communication’ cannot proceed from one full and intact individual to another,” Bataille
writes. “It requires individuals whose separate existence is risked.”24 The risk of self follows
from the same logic as before: one risks the dissolution of one’s self-enclosed identity. And, as
a moment of inner experience, it marks an ontological risk that occurs and persists as one exists
and inhabits the realm of nonknowledge and is exposed to the otherness of community.
Therefore, one is always already at risk of losing oneself in relation to the other insofar as one
is always already exposed to the other that permeates, and thus challenges, the self-
The desired mastery of self and other that
possessed Cartesian subject.
accompanies any attempt at acquiring knowledge is replaced by the
helplessness and abandonment of inner experience. For Derrida’s unconditional
hospitality, the exposure to the risk of the other takes on a similar indispensable position. In
contrast to the rules and regulations that govern conditional hospitality, Derrida suggests a
lawless welcoming of the guest. When one decides, from the other within, to expose oneself to
the guest beyond the restrictions of customs and knowledge, there is risk. On the one hand,
there is the obtrusive fact of risking physical danger: “For unconditional hospitality to take
place” explains Derrida, “you have to accept the risk of the other coming and destroying the
place.”25 The other may be a robber, a murderer, a predator of any sort, and by opening
oneself unconditionally to the guest, one runs the inevitable risk that this will be the last time
you welcome anyone. Yet, on the other hand, there remains the risk that Bataille has in mind, a
risk that belongs intrinsically to modalities of nonknowledge such as unconditional
hospitality. At its core, Derrida’s unconditional hospitality presents a challenge: a challenge to
risk one’s sense of self. Derrida’s call to open one’s borders completely to the other is
fundamentally an ontological call. Hospitality entails that one must not only risk one’s physical
self, but also one’s own knowledgeable self and one’s knowledgeable world. Opening oneself in
this manner would be the only means of acknowledging and respecting the other as
completely and heterogeneously other. All knowledge-mediated gestures must be rejected at
the threshold. While it may seem that asking a person his or her name or offering someone a
drink would be an indispensable hospitable gesture, these offerings must, at the very least, be
suspended. Bataille would agree with Derrida on this point: Language inscribes the other into
logic of exchange and therefore cannot accompany a true acknowledgment of otherness. On
this issue Derrida suggests, “We have come to wonder whether absolute, hyperbolic,
unconditional hospitality doesn’t consist in suspending language,”26 while Bataille more
aggressively asserts, “Profound communication demands silence.”27 Once you attach rules,
such as those implied in language and discourse, to this encounter, the guest’s otherness
retracts and becomes assimilated as something homogenous and precisely not other. Then
there runs the greater risk of objectifying the other, viewing the other as something at one’s
own disposal, and as the end of one’s mastery. Objectification should never serve as the
grounds for ethics; although at times in history it has and with devastating costs. However,
before one can even deny objectification and come to terms with the wager of exposure, it must
be clear that the other that arrives always already exposes the host, always already disrupts the
other within the host. The ontological risk of hospitality occurs before the decision, with the
arrival of the other and the summons of the host to the threshold. That is to say, the risk
always already exists simply by virtue of the other’s existence. At the sound of a knock, your
ontological self becomes exposed to otherness and otherness to you. At this point, before the
threshold, the other is outside the host’s normal predication of knowledge: she does not
know his name, why he is there, or who he is. The host is very much exposed to this other—
and often times this other to the host. Therefore, the host is already ruptured at the threshold.
For Derrida it thus becomes a matter of whether you are to embrace this primordial exposure to
the other, this challenging of the self by the community of inner experience, or if you are to
close it off by asking for a gift, asking for a name, or by making other knowledgefounded
demands. These options situate the undecidability that precedes the decision of hospitality,
but in order for hospitality to actually occur, the host must pick the former options and wager
on vulnerability. Unconditional hospitality, and the possibility of ethics, demands full
exposure—a Nietzschean amor fati. It asks of the host to affirm the exposure that the other
has always already created and only with this complete affirmative embrace of the other do we
have hospitality and the possibility of ethics. Only by trying to defer the knowledgeable
relationship that the other summons with her knock can the discourse of ethics begin. With
this choice, the host assumes an agency that acknowledges the guest as other and therefore
as someone who can participate in an ethical discourse. The host approaches the other as an
individual who warrants ethical consideration.28 Derrida’s claim that hospitality demands
radical openness reflects a challenge for the self to embrace its openness, and in doing so,
willfully suspend the mastery allotted to him as a subject who can know and who employs
rules. We must not forget, however, that along with this unprecedented demand, Derrida also
contests its possibility. “If there is such a thing” says Derrida of true hospitality, “I’m not
sure.”29

Conditional hospitality relies on paper walls, biometric surveillance regimes,

and eugenics, all of which are responsible for irreparable violence.
Fotou 16 (Maria Fotou holds a PhD in Political Science from the London School of Economics.
"Ethics of Hospitality: Envisaging the stranger in the contemporary world," June 2016,
{mbawmb} Department of International Relations of the London School of Economics,
http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3403/1/Fotou_Ethics_of_Hospitality.pdf, accessed 9-27-2018)

After Kant and with the strengthening and improvement of the administrative organisation of the
nation-state going hand-in-hand with the birth of independent states in 19th and early 20th century Europe following the fall
first of the Ottoman and later of the Austro-Hungarian empires, we observe a turn towards a more biopolitical
understanding of hospitality. Censuses, metrics, passports and other identification documents
experience a great proliferation from the late 19th century to the First World War and even greater systematisation
after that (Torpey, 1999). Following the dramatic easing of restrictions of movement after the Napoleonic wars during the mostly
peaceful European 19th century, “paper walls” are increasingly raised against migration, mainly
affecting migrants from the non-Western world but also any Other who may be considered
undesirable by the receiving states. Below, I explore briefly two crucial scholarly moments describing this turn that I
think best help us understand the biopolitical understanding of hospitality and Otherness. The first is Michel Foucault’s
observations on the birth of biopower and biopolitics and the second is Hannah Arendt’s ruminations on
the results of the lack of hospitality in the European 20th century: the stateless Other, the horrific violence that was
experienced by this Other during the Second World War and the framework of rights that seeked to redress it. 1.2.4.1 Foucault and
biopouvoir Michel Foucault first discusses the term biopower (biopouvoir) in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will To
Knowledge (1998 [1976]) and at his 1979 series of lectures at the Collège de France with the title “La naissance de la biopolitique”,
which due to his early death have remained largely unpublished. There he
attempts a historical analysis which
leads to the current practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects through
“an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies
and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of biopower” (Foucault, 1998:140).
According to him (Foucault, 1998:135–159), the power over life (take a life or let live), which until the 17th century belonged
to the sovereign, has shifted towards the “power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death”,
towards “a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer,
optimize, and multiply it”, and it has evolved along two basic poles. The first pole focused on the body as a
machine and involved “disciplining, optimization of capabilities, (…) increase of usefulness, (…)
integration into systems of efficient and economic controls” (Foucault, 1998:138–9) and was represented by
schools, universities, workshops and the army. The second focused on the body as species and its biological processes: propagation
of the species, mortality, life expectancy, longevity. Demographics, birth rates, migration controls, public health, housing,
etc., were just a few of the aforementioned diverse techniques used to control and modify the processes of life.
Thus, the power over life, biopower, was organised around these two poles and these techniques. The timing of this shift was not
accidental either, as it took place along with the development of capitalism: “ the controlled insertion of bodies into
the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to
economic processes ” (Foucault, 1998:140–1) were indispensable for capitalism’s existence . “Life” and
“living being” (le vivant) come to the forefront of political regulation and new economic strategies. With the rise of capitalism, the
“Western man gradually learns what it means to be a living species in a living world, to have a
body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces
that could be modified...” (Foucault, 1998:142). This fact, that life and its reproductive and other bodily processes become
regulated at the same time as they come to occupy the epicentre of political life, is something radical new. “For millennia, man
remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal
whose politics places his existence 62 as a living being in question” (Foucault, 1998:143). The repercussions of this shift included
ruptures in the pattern of the scientific discourse, the proliferation of technologies and regulations regarding
the body, its health, living conditions, etc. Most importantly, though, biopower has affected the juridical system. With
the continuous need for regulatory and corrective mechanisms, the law and the judicial institutions had to be “increasingly
incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on)” and become adjusted to a new right: “the ‘right’
to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs” (1984:267) even if in the end, death is administered. How
Citizenship, migration controls, surveillance, productivity and health
does this affect hospitality?

metrics of prospective labour migrants, medical screenings (Wiebe, 2008), eugenics guidance
regarding reproduction – these are only some of the biopolitical instruments that have made
possible the differentiation and regulation of populations in favour of the nation-state’s social
and territorial demarcation. While Foucault is mainly focusing on the biopolitics within the state,41 his
considerations apply to migration and issues of hospitality as well. Such instruments ignore the
suffering and the violence migration entails, which in turn “arise from bordering practices that
police us/them relations inherited in the colonial present” (Bagelman, 2015 referring to Foucault’s 1979
interview on the Vietnamese refugee problem). They are , however, taken up and inscribed in the laws of

hospitality , especially after the Second World War and the massive population movements it caused, as can be seen in the
post-1948 legal framework and the language of rights referring to migration flows, asylum
granting and refugee assistance . These rights interest Hannah Arendt in her discussion about statelessness and the
importance of the human rights framework for hospitality, to which I turn next.

The immigration regime relies performative social control – deportation,

detentions, and ICE raids are all unique forms of psychological trauma that
must be resolved.
Brotherton and Tosh, 18 - “The Sociology of Vindictiveness and the Portable Alien”, David C.
Brotherton, Professor of Sociology, Urban Education, and Criminal Justice at John Jay College,
CUNY and Sarah Tosh, The Graduate Center, PhD Candidate in Sociology, CUNY in Immigration
Policy in an Age of Punishment: Detention, Deportation, and Border Control, April 2018, eds.
Brotherton and Ketsedemas

deportation hearing as theater of

IMMIGRATION HEARINGS AS PLAYS OF VINDICTIVENESS In a previous work, I described the an exile play and likened the dramas of this process to Artaud’s

cruelty we see all the norms and rituals expected of protocols embedded in legal
concept.26 In such hearings,

codes of behavior and discourse before an audience of

performed by a range of players— judges, lawyers, deportable subjects, translators, correctional officers— usually

family members and friends of the deportable individual . Outwardly, the hearing appears as an example of due process, as lawyers pitch their claims for and against
the deportable alien and the judge presides over the contest, using his or her best judgment and good faith to make an interpretation of the law and its limits. As we have previously noted, these laws come from another branch of the government and are

these laws are anything but neutral edicts affecting all

supposedly indicative of the checks and balances of a functioning, healthy democracy. But as we have also noted,

equally; rather, they are an effort to restore or maintain a constructed social order in what is
presumed to be an open society Such laws were designed to weed out the “bad”
. , as we witness in these hearings,
immigrant from the “good,” the filth that despoil the sanitized nation- state, which is the
ideological and historical source of their vindictiveness They are based in the “inherently .27

performative nature of the concept of homeland security, with a focus on the constitutive role of the migrant as outsider.”28 Consequently, the hearings, since
they are both legally and morally predicated on highly contradictory reasoning and antihumanistic premises, naturally become messy encounters between the aggrieved, imperiled transgressor and his or her lawyer and those state agents dedicated to upholding a

certain type of social order no matter the cost. In the following, a former detainee who was recently released due to the threat of domestic violence if she is returned talks about her recent experience in a hearing. At the time of this
informal interview, she was at another hearing in support of a friend who was about to be exiled. In this case, the judge is clearly performing his role as moral arbiter in the firm belief that drugs brought into the country and those who transport them are a scourge

has been “othered” as the subject- object of

on society, as befits the theater of fear and condemnation in the long- standing war- on- drugs campaign. Ms. D.

dramatized evil During the detention

, and the same is happening to her friend B., who has been held for six months in detention based on her conviction as a drug mule ten years previously.29

period, B. lost one of her children to a former husband who filed a complaint saying she was , an

unfit due to her being incarcerated

“ ” mother ; her other child was placed in the care of another family member. Ms. D. attends this hearing with another friend, both of whom were locked up for months

the trials and tribulations she has already suffered due to her family life being
with B. and know her story intimately, including

completely upended by the deportation regime . The immigration lawyer in this case knows well the dramaturgy involved in all these cases and has pleaded repeatedly to the judge to
release B. on bond so that she may return to her teenage children, both of whom have been severely affected by the trauma of being separated from their mother. The following are field notes taken from the time we are waiting to enter the court. Remarkably in
this case, the drama of the courtroom worked in B.’s favor. The pews were filled with B.’s friends and family, and the lawyer was extremely well prepared, seemingly more so than the government lawyer, who did not muster the usual objections to releasing the
deportable subject on bond. B. said very little in her defense but implored the judge that she needed to get back to her children, which appeared to cause the judge some discomfort. In this particular setting, the performance of vindictiveness had its limits. The
humanism of the moment finally outweighed the essentialist presumptions built into the laws and the obligations of judges to be loyal defenders of the nation’s imaginary social and cultural borders. The messiness of social life finally got th e upper hand in the

courtroom, and the judge sided with ambiguity rather than with the binary constructions inserted by that Texas congressman and his allies more than two decades ago. Ms. M. discusses her recent
experiences in a detention facility on the East Coast, where she spent four months. It was not a private facility run by a vast global security company like CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of

as a form of trauma, an
America) but rather a state prison facility— paid for by and operated on behalf of taxpayers— that leases out part of its space to ICE. Ms. M. recounts her time spent there

experience so emotionally jarring and psychologically invasive that she requires ongoing therapy
to recover from it . She also refers to the prevalence of solitary confinement as a form of punishment used to enforce social control in this se tting. In another interview carried out within the same facility, Mr. P. concurred with Ms. M.’s

According to all the testimonies of the

experiences and sentiments, but since the interview was done in situ, his words carry feelings of dread, pain, and suffering that are more immediate.

detainees, these spaces of detention are rife with vindictive practices by guards, administrators,
and even lawyers, some of whom enter the facility and tell the subjects they have no way out of
their removal proceedings so they had better accept their fate .30 This is Mr. C. after be- ing released from the same fa cil i ty as Ms. M. and Mr. P. A number

the treatment of detainees as prison

of researchers and investigative journalists have written about these spaces, emphasizing the lack of oversight that continues to be the norm,

inmates instead of subjects in administrative limbo , and the push to extract profits in privately run facilities as corporations reduce the costs of detention and thus reduce t he

Rather than simply serving the legal purpose of administrative confinement,

services and treatment offered to their charges.31

the 250 or so facilities around the United States where immigrants are detained function as
spaces of vindictiveness, where immigrants are punished in myriad ways for the crime of being
the other . The fact that Congress has put in place a bed mandate of thirty- four thousand detainees per day speaks to the symbolic significance of immigrant detention in delineating immigrant detainees as criminals and emphasizing the

The punitive function of immigration detention is further underscored by the

government’s prioritization of their punishment.32

conditions of the spaces themselves . About one- third of detainees are held in detention centers run by ICE or private companies, with the other two- thirds held in county and city jails contracted by

ICE.33 Detention standards are not mandatory, and those that do exist are based on those created for jails and prisons.34 Furthermore, “while ICE is nominally in control, the often disparate practices of dif fer ent member agencies and facilities result in a general

Detainees not only feel the punitive force of separation from their families but
lack of coordina- tion in policies.”35

report physical violence and dehumanizing searches by guards, as well as insufficient and
inedible food, unhygienic conditions, uncomfortable temperatures, steady disregard of routine
medical care, and failure of facilities to respond to urgent medical situations .36 It is worth noting that until now, there has not been

What we see essentially in these settings is the

a single ethnographic account of any of these facilities, even though they have been in existence for more than two de cades.

same vindictive culture and set of practices that characterize and are symptomatic of the entire
deportation regime These spaces are the result of the penal institutional approach that the state
.

has specifically chosen to apply to detained subjects we encounter similar displays of . Therefore,

authoritarian power that are the norm in most prisons organized as total institutions In other .

western European countries, such detention facilities are run on completely different premises ,

But in the United States, these detention spaces mimic

with more attention paid to the human rights of the subjects and to the collateral consequences for families.

the punitive culture that has infiltrated many other social institutions apart from prisons A .

hallmark of this culture is the dehumanization of the incarcerated subject, just as we see the
pathologization of deportable subjects in immigration hearings and the fetishization of judicial
rules and rituals a dehumanizing
. Based on her research in Ecuador with the families of detained mi grants and previously detained deport- ees, human geographer Nancy Hiemstra concurs that
culture runs throughout the detention and deportation process , from the way that administrators refer to detainees as “bodies” to the way that authority

these spaces are “structured in such a way that anyone with power
figures treat immigrants in actual spaces of detention. She reports that

over detainees can become a ‘petty sovereign with discretion to make decisions that lead to ,’ ”

the neglect of detainees’ basic needs and the , and that employees display negative perceptions of detainees’ worth; ste reo types of mi grants as immoral, dishonest, and criminal;

perception that migrants “get what they deserve .”37 Detainees’ bodies are marked as criminal by facility uniforms, and they arrive in court wearing these uniforms and with their

Despite their legal status as civil detainees, subjects in detention become extensions of
hands manacled.

the imprisoned multitude . What purpose does it serve to place such subjects in solitary confinement, for example? Why separate so many subjects from their families? Why are so many subjects incarcerated to begin with

There is no rational necessity behind such practices, which grow out of a

when they could be living with their family and friends?

par ticular political and social order and its ideologies of containment Such ideologies are .

infused with the same vindictive assumptions that have been applied historically to othered
populations but that get recycled and expanded by new generations of agents of the security
state These mechanisms for internal social control among primarily nonwhite immigrant
.

populations increasingly rely on interlocking systems of policed segregation, digital surveillance,

physical terror, and eventual mass exile These practices of vindictiveness are simply other .38

forms of legal violence that have developed extraordinary crossover possibilities, whether it be
raiding homes in Long Island under the auspices of ridding society of violent gangs or the
rejection of Central American children at the Texas border to show other refugees that the
United States will “defend” its borders .39 Immigration lawyer #4 sums up the deportation regime’s vindictive culture and practices through recounting the experience of his latest case. The female
deportable subject he is referring to is in her late thirties and was diagnosed in her early twenties with paranoid schizophrenia. She had suffered enormously from various physical and mental ailments over the last fifteen years, had been committed three times to
mental health institutions, had been mostly cared for by her mother when out, and had a long history of serious drug use and physical abuse by men. Several years before, she had been gang raped and left for dead on a beach near Coney Island, thereafter spending
a month in a coma after being diagnosed with post- traumatic stress disorder before being released back to her elderly mother. Almost two years ago she was picked up for “turni ng tricks” in South Brooklyn, and then somehow ICE intervened and she was suddenly
in deportation proceedings, which she simply could not comprehend. I attended two of her hearings, during which she cried continuously on seeing her mother, and it was clear to all in the court that this was a person in serious distress and if exiled would be dead in
a very short time. Nonetheless, she was held in a detention facility for eighteen months against the very explicit advice of two social workers and a psychiatrist who examined her, all warning of a serious deterioration in her mental health. At each of the six hearings,

The deportable subject is

the government lawyer opposed her receiving bond and called for her expedited removal. This is the sociology and culture of vindictiveness in all its various aspects and dynamics.

dehumanized, caught in impossible legal entanglements, and moved from space to space under
conditions of extreme du- ress, while family and friends suffer irreparable collateral damage,
and for what? the majority of deportees are in proceedings for minor
As we read in the works of so many authors in this book,

transgressions despite the insistence of, Obama and Trump that we are targeting the Presidents

“criminals” among the immigrant population This was particularly — those who do not deserve the privilege of staying in the United States. claim

ironic from Obama, who admits that the criminal justice system systematically
President

overincarcerates, racially profiles, hands down irrational sentences, and is in need of serious
reform There is
. In this chapter, we argue fundamentally that the system of forced repatriation is irrational, is inhuman, and reproduces social practices and norms that have little to do with a functioning, open democratic society.

really no legitimacy left to countenance the continuation of the deportation regime which is why ,

it relies so heavily on the culture of vindictiveness it produces to give it life while ignoring the
bloody mess of so- called border control it leaves in its wake .

Aesthetics of the border culminate in destabilizing interventions – Terror of the

unknown, illiberal other is the root cause of all humanitarian crises.
Wydra 2015. Harald, PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute
in Florence. Holden Fellow in Politics of St Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge
and Director of Studies in HSPS. "Spells of the sacred in a global age." Journal of International
Political Theory 11.1 (2015): 95-110.
http://ipt.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/11/1/95.full.pdf

Varieties of the sacred in a global world Contemporary

processes of globalisation feature a myriad of fractures
of identity and transgression of boundaries. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismemberment of ex-Yugoslavia, for
instance, prompted desires for collective redemption by nationhood or ethnic purity. Massacres,

terrorism, ethnic cleansing and the possibility of nuclear self-annihilation are the demonic
side to support new transcendent frames. Yet, the end of the Cold War in Europe also accelerated the globalisation of
economic life, inter-cultural communications and the transmission of social and political norms, thus contributing to the world-wide expansion of the
democratic imagination (Connolly, 1997: 194). The revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, the subsequent coloured revolutions in postSoviet states or
the recent ‘Arab spring’ are indebted to the aspirational political imagination of the liberal West, which – to a large extent – produced the imagined
democratic quality of these events in the first place. In Eastern Europe, for instance, the triumph of liberal monism imposed democracy in a politically

non-negotiable goal (Wydra, 2007). Yet, the ‘liberal’ side can become quickly the dark side of democracy. The
Bosnian catastrophe and the Yugoslav wars symbolised how the discourse of democratic
humanism was powerless in preventing genocide, ethnic cleansing and civil war . Global processes are
reflected in the agonistic contests that occur in increasingly pluralistic and diverse democracies. Democratic states require a transcendent frame which
ritually performs their collective identity as citizens. Many forms of the civil sacred persist despite the costs invested and the relative indifference
professed by the citizenship. The constitutionally defined ethos of a demos, for instance, expresses a moral commitment, which is determined against a
constitutive outside. It ‘celebrates a supposed unique moral identity, wisdom, and, yes, superiority of the authors of the constitution, the people, the
constitutional demos, when it wears the hat of constituent power and, naturally, of those who interpret it’ (Weiler, 2009: 108). This constitutional
imaginary provides safeguards against sovereign power. Yet, law and sovereignty are bound to each other. The view that the legal order is an
expression of reason is incomplete (Kahn, 2008: 122). Since 9/11 at the latest, the threat of terror has made Western states very vulnerable. Under
such conditions, law cannot absorb and mediate every form of sacrificial violence. In modernity, the sacred migrated from constitutional law and the
symbolism of the king’s two bodies to cultural practices, judicial mechanisms and ethical imperatives. Yet, nation states mobilised conscripts who had

their bodies destroyed on the battlefield, as a proof of ultimate sovereign power. In ordinary times, the boundaries between the
criminal and the enemy are clear: In extraordinary times, we lose our bearing . It is not clear in which
direction the resolution will occur. That depends less on the structural characteristics of law and sovereignty than on the perception of threat. And that
we do not control. Before 9/11, many thought globalisation meant that law would now rule everywhere. After 9/11, the ticking time bomb asks
whether there is a politics beyond law. (Kahn, 2008: 168) The terrifying nature of mass atrocities exercises fascination precisely because of their
destructiveness against innocent victims (Humphrey, 2002: 76–90). The phenomenon of ‘religious terrorism’ in the twenty-first century combines the
spiritualisation of the enemy and the return of sacrificial ritual. Suicide bombing generates particular horror in Westerners (Asad, 2007: 90–92). It
makes apparent its own constitutive outside, which is in the ‘limitless pursuit of freedom, the illusion of an uncoerced interiority that can withstand the
force of institutional disciplines’ (Asad, 2007: 91–92). In as far as the law in liberal democratic states is based on warfare and violence, one might even
suggest that suicide terrorism is constitutive of liberalism’s self-identification. As the return of torture in the United States suggests, there is a space in

which the political imagination of constitutional states requires the politics of sovereignty through the return to sacrificial violence . Sovereignty
expresses its presence by inspiring awe through forms of sacrifice beyond the law (Kahn, 2008: 34).
Terror and torture are reciprocal forms of creating and sustaining political meaning .
Nevertheless, the sacrality of personhood has become a hallmark of the early twentyfirst century (Joas,
2011: 18–19). Ideas of equality and empathy were internalised in the mid-eighteenth century and encapsulated in the American declaration of
Independence in 1776 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 (Hunt, 2007). Massive social and political changes created new experiences,
new social contexts and corresponding pressures to enshrine the reality of social relations in positive law. The charismatisation of reason or the

In the late twentieth century,

abolition or repression of slavery at the end of the eighteenth century prepared a new humanism.

we can talk of the rise of a new transcendent of humanity (Canto-Sperber, 2010). The sweeping idea of
human rights filled a void left by the failure of other more political secular utopias and the
collapse of collective notions of human emancipation (Moyn, 2012). As anthropologist Didier Fassin (2012) put it,
humanitarian reason has become a potent and morally untouchable
taboo. The politics of precarious lives has transformed collective efforts to alleviate human
suffering into a new sacred. ‘Where inequalities have reached an unprecedented level,
humanitarianism elicits the fantasy of a global moral community that may still be viable and the
expectation that solidarity may have redeeming powers’ (Fassin, 2012: xii). Humanitarian reason
appears as an attempt at redemption under conditions of globalised suffering, tragedy and
despair. It oscillates between the pathos of assistance to the suffering and the desire
for domination. The world wars and several genocidal atrocities have produced an ‘empire
of trauma’ (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009). Narratives of trauma and victimhood are not the result of the dissemination of a
scientific concept and of psychiatric practice. They are rather the ‘product of a new relationship to time and memory, to
mourning and obligations, to misfortune and the misfortunate’ (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009: 276–278). The concept of trauma changed the status of
the wounded soldier, the accident survivor and the individual hit by misfortune from that of suspect to that of the entirely legitimate victim. The
ideological revolution of trauma, however, risks obliterating the diversity and complexity of experiences. If survivors of disasters or the subjects of
suffering are fixed in their negative identity and predefined representations, the humanitarian reason of protecting victimhood can assume powers of
an ideology. The claims of victims for rights, compensation and rehabilitation may assert the equal humanity of all suffering people. Yet, they are
actually fundamentally divisive. Precisely in the epoch of humanitarian reason, redemption through destruction has made a powerful return. In
religiously motivated terrorism, for instance, suicide bomb attacks immolate innocent victims and thus commit a bloody sacrifice, harking back once
more to archaic practices. They thus de-symbolise the victim and its status as Innocent and re-symbolise him – following archaic models – as being
guilty (Juergensmeyer, 2000). From a mimetic perspective, this return to archaic forms of sacrifice has different implications. While victimhood

originally signified a selective advantage, the global interconnectedness has produced a new dilemma : We are all potential or real
victims now. Feeding the social imaginary with myths of a victim nation has not only marked
social imaginaries of collective victimhood in Israel and Palestine but has also reached the
liberal West. After 9/11, ‘we are all Americans’. Our enmities are always ‘legitimate’, so we
cannot admit to ‘scapegoating’. Nevertheless, the world is full of scapegoats. The dilemma in a global
world is this: On the one hand, religious ethics, possibly the only stabilising force, have been overwhelmed by events, by self-conscious mimetic
individuals who think they are free and insist on their authenticity and their false differences. On the other hand, this
globalised empathy
for victims has also increased the self-attribution of the label ‘victim’ in the modern world. Often,
killing others is justified by externalising guilt and revisiting on others, in scapegoating
transfers of pain, the wrongs inflicted on one’s own community. Thus, self-
victimisation has a creative role in bolstering political identities, and not only in crisis-ridden
communities such as in Northern Ireland, ex-Yugoslavia, Kashmir or Israel. The many and various victims of the Holocaust
themselves became embattled in a fight about the singularity and the uniqueness of the memory of the Holocaust, relative to other victims of Nazism

Victimhood becomes an aspirational model of identity-formation

and other genocides (Chaumont, 1997).

(Girard, 2010; Wydra, 2013). The polarising representations of victimhood illustrate the non-agentive,

unconscious force of globalisation. The inimical attitudes of antagonists are prior to their
intentions. What appears asymmetrical from the inside view – each rival has the impression that the other has attacked first – is revealed as
Self-attributed collective victimhood provides a moral right for
symmetrical from the outside view.

the initiation of hostilities against others. Military resources and strategic goals of states vary
enormously from those of warlords or suicide bombers. Yet, justifications
of killings insist on the uniqueness,
righteousness and legitimacy of one’s own cause. Rivals model their ‘autonomous’ decisions
after the other’s perceived intentions. One’s own defensive attitude (fear of weapons of
mass destruction) avenges (potential) internal casualties by producing (such as in the
second Iraq War) hundreds of thousands of civilian victims. The victim’s identity is
mimetically constituted by disfiguring and de-humanising the enemy as ‘cosmic’ enemies, often
seen as the incarnation of evil. Western liberal discourse responds with the protection of
individual rights or the toleration of minorities, which rest on the belief in autonomy and
difference. Under extraordinary conditions of expulsion, persecution and forced
crossing of borders, however, difference is not about acceptance and tolerance but
enforces exclusion (James, 1995: 1–2). Such exclusion is marked by differences in bodies, skin or
gender. Taking the Uduk community that after 1987 was repeatedly forced to flee Sudan and to seek shelter in Ethiopia, Wendy James argues that
combatants and humanitarian agencies required the self-identification of the persecuted in
terms of ethnic and religious terms. Being marked as a Christian community excluded them from their home, which was ruled by
Islamic militants. The ‘choice’ of Christian belief here is largely driven by forced expulsion of refugees. As a consequence, the idea that

democracy protects life, liberty and prosperity of individuals makes sense only if it
incorporates the bio-political quests for purity. Markers of impurity, therefore, come into focus only if contrasted with
spaces or practices that command full respect, piety and veneration. As Nietzsche put it, Kant’s ‘categorical imperative smells of cruelty’ (Nietzsche,
1997, vol. 2, 806).It thus works, in Goethe’s terms as ‘the power that wants evil but always produces the good’. (Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets
das Gute schafft.) If diametrically opposed ethical choices produce commonly acknowledged forms of moral obligation, this is nothing short of the
miraculous, the key to the phenomenon of the sacred (das Heilige) (Nietzsche, 1997, vol. 2, 612).With Carl Schmitt (2005), this applies also to the
sovereignty of regimes: ‘The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology’ (p. 36). The constitutive role of the sacred A critic might
well reject the claim that complex global processes can sustain conceptions of an inscrutable remainder, a miraculous space that will remain veiled to
the eye of the observer. The cases of secular political utopias, humanitarian government or democratic states under threat are examples of the
demonic forces of the sacred. They leave no space for the political. Political religions such as Soviet communism and Nazism, but also forms of political
Islam, draw on messianic eschatologies and the belief in redemptive catastrophes. Political enquiry refuses to abide by claims to sacrality because
references to mysterious truths challenge tenets of radical critique. Critical analysis needs to ‘humanise’ motives of governments, collective groups or
terrorists alike. It cannot accept justifications that are beyond what is measurable, quantifiable, transparent and subject to scrutiny. It needs to
rationalise unspeakable atrocities such as terrorist acts as driven by causality, be it social conditions, individual rationality or strategic aims. Developed
in post-World War II Western Germany, theories of communicative action in the public sphere reject awe-inspiring mysteries. Jürgen Habermas (1981),
for instance, suggested that in deliberative publics the sacred fuses with linguistic and communicative processes (pp. 118–122). In this sense, it is not
really necessary for it to be present, to be practiced or to be performed. Modern thought of the liberal-utilitarian school has therefore rejected public
sacrifices as incompatible with reason. Such forms of epistemological fundamentalism overlook that people choose to accept representations as veiled

reality. While in ‘normal’ conditions people cannot be literally sacrificed today, more covert
forms of archaic sacrifice flourish. The political imagination in democratic societies, so to
speak, is in a constant dialogue with the constitutive role of ‘originary’ violence . The
people are simultaneously the source of power and its victims as the state can expect its own
members to kill enemies and to die for the nation (Agamben, 1998). Self-conscious ‘liberal’
democracies such as the United States or Australia conceal their ‘forgotten’ violent origins.
The sacrifice of citizens on the battlefield would have the sacred function of salvation
or redemption of the nation: No freedom without sacrifice has been one of the
rallying cries from Pericles through Abraham Lincoln up to Winston Churchill, to the
use of torture and preventive drone attacks in the ‘war against terror’. We cannot live
if others don’t die for us. Such interpretive readings of domestic conflict transformed socially
divisive violence in order to use sacrifice as a healing for the post-conflict
political citizenship. Moreover, critics of the sacred operate themselves within cultural frames in which critical scrutiny acquires
transcendent value. The taboo of the singularity of Auschwitz and Holocaust was at stake when the
historians’ debate erupted in West Germany during the mid-1980s. Habermas’ ultimate goal was to convert the taboo
into practices of prohibition through an imperative of democratic discourse, which would
maintain the silence and ritualistic awe in the face of the atrocities of the Holocaust . The question,
therefore, is not to subordinate the political to the religious or the sacred. Rather, we have to recognise that ‘the state creates

and maintains its own sacred space and history’ (Kahn, 2011: 19). The overriding concern of the secularism of
the French state (laïcité) is precisely with ‘transcendent values (the neutrality of the state, the separation

of ‘religion’ from politics, the ‘sacredness’ of the republican compact) and not with immanent goods such as the
distribution of resources’ (Asad, 2006: 514). Similarly, the democratic peace thesis operates within a wider

cultural frame, which draws on current theories of international morality that have been
designed to perpetuate the supremacy of dominant Anglo-American power. Political judgments about
the morally good or evil, the ‘civilised’ and the ‘barbaric’, or the friend and enemy rely on historically and experientially concrete backgrounds. Political
communities draw their moral strength and duration in time from the beliefs of bound spirits (gebundende Geister) (Nietzsche, 1997: 586). This
‘binding of spirits’ can be understood as processes of framing, which are unconscious and non-agentive. A variation on this theme is Wittgenstein’s
(1972) argument that language and the perception of the world are grounded on inherited background. Meaning is always conditional upon a form of
life: I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the
inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false. (On Certainty, §94) The background of human action cannot be fully revealed
by cognitive scrutiny or accumulation of knowledge. Rather it relies on various modes of embodied intentionality. As Charles Taylor (2007) put it, ‘We
are in fact all acting, thinking, and feeling out of backgrounds and frameworks which we do not fully understand’ (p. 387). Semiotic studies of political
discourse have argued that the ‘foreground’ – master narratives, public transcripts, official discourse or ethically accepted behaviour – rests on
backgrounds that are historically given, temporally finite, a shared and experienced cultural horizon of meaning. Constructions of social reality draw on
the tension between the ‘background’, that is, the ‘agentive context’ of the highly personalised social relations and the foreground (Searle, 1970). The
prohibition of torture, for instance, became an enforceable norm against a set of background expectations that saw the protection of individuals from
authoritarian states as paramount. In the post -9/11 environment, the background expectations of conceiving rights have significantly shifted with the
new situation (Kahn, 2008: 74). When a democratic constitutional state is a terrorist target, those background expectations change. Now it is that state
that needs protection from individual terrorists. The foreground of legitimising narratives has all but concealed backgrounds of purification. How could
people of different social, ethnic or economic background converge on one single body of citizenship? If the sacred means the wholeness of the world,
it ‘occurs’ to people rather than being produced by them. In the extraordinary, contemporaries are always confused between different potential
options. They are rooted in passions and ‘irrational’ processes. The storm of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 in Paris captures the collective effervescence in
the extraordinary (Sewell, 2005). The mysterium tremendum provoked by crowd violence had a fundamental impact on the National Assembly who
sanctioned this act of violence as a legitimate act of popular sovereignty. What Machiavelli formulated theoretically as occasione and Tocqueville later
on theorised as opportunity could be exemplified by the powerful speech act of the East Germans in the Autumn of 1989. As of some unspecified
moment in October 1989, the term ‘We are the people’ galvanised the country and the world. A couple of weeks later, this term was supplanted by the
politically powerful ‘We are one people’. Another such example is Estonia’s singing revolution of 1988–1989, where large mass demonstrations united
the participants – on 11 September 1988 up to 300,000 people in the same arena for a singing Estonia Festival – with an emotionally high voltage,
making the function of speech, song and slogans magical (Vogt, 2005: 26). This miracle of Estonia (Eesti ime) is a charismatic moment, a limit situation
where the measure and boundaries of the politically desirable and feasible are redefined symbolically. This irrationality also applies to ethical choices.
How can an evil person become a morally good one? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 formulated the sacred status of inalienable
human rights. Yet, during the incipient Cold War and the crises of de-colonisation, this secular re-foundation of natural law did not alleviate the fate of
millions of expelled in the wake of World War II. Moreover, political leaders active in the pursuit of international guarantees of human rights infringed
the spirit of precisely such rights (Joas, 2011: 278–279). The President of Czechoslovakia, Eduard Beneš, championed the cause of internationally
binding human rights but also initiated the expulsion of millions Germans and Hungarian after 1945. Jan Smuts, twice South African prime minister and
responsible for the design of Apartheid policy, was a key figure in conceiving the League of Nations. He also wrote the preamble to the United Nations
(UN) Charter in 1945. The making of sacred values is irreducible to intentionality or morality. The crucial point is that cosmic notions of ‘one people’ in a
democratic citizenship or ‘one humanity’ in the logic of humanitarian reason emerge, rather than being crafted or ‘made’. They depend on emotional
acts of bonding, which are ritually performed and, in the long run, become transcendent cultural frames. The sacred occurs to people in the face of
broken promises, imminent danger, disaster and the risk of ‘anything goes’. People do not really cognitively ‘know’ what occurs. With its focus on the
affective and ‘irrational’, liminality disturbs the ingrained ‘level of analysis’ thinking in international relations (Mälksoo, 2012). It emphasises the
fundamental ontological inter-connection between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’, the domestic and the international. Both
the democratic imagination and humanitarian reason connect the high and the low. This connection binds, so to speak, without foundation,
justification or causality. The
democratic imagination and the politics of humanitarian reason are two
main areas of quests for sacrality that balance fractures and help people to find reassurance
before existential insecurity and ‘shield against terror’ (Berger, 1967). My concern here has been to shift the vantage
point for the understanding of global processes from external processes of security, justice or economic structures to internal and self-reflective
processes of meaning-making. The search for markers of certainty in liminal globality has to overcome dualistic understandings of a before and after,
outside and inside, friend and enemy. If the sacred relates to awe-inspiring authority and inalienable values, we have to capture collective backgrounds
as the hinges in which quests for sacrality perform a hinge function. Human beings need symbolic limits and boundaries in order to sustain larger
meaningful and coherent moral and symbolic worlds. Under conditions of the extraordinary of liminal globality, the sacred and politics are not binary
opposites, but complementary.

Thus the plan: The United States federal government should end its restrictions
on legal immigration.
Unconditionally opening the border is the only ethical option.
Deterritorialisation must be total – Liberal compromises hold our politics
hostage and justify relapse.
Fotou 16 (Maria Fotou holds a PhD in Political Science from the London School of Economics.
"Ethics of Hospitality: Envisaging the stranger in the contemporary world," June 2016,
{mbawmb} Department of International Relations of the London School of Economics,
http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3403/1/Fotou_Ethics_of_Hospitality.pdf, accessed 9-27-2018)

Benhabib argues that a

post-Westphalian conception of sovereignty will need to address migration
and cross-border movements on their own terms and without subsuming them under
distributive justice (2004b). The right to cross borders, she further maintains, belongs with other human freedoms and
should not be dependent upon the outcome of the redistributive measures briefly sketched above. Philosopher Phillip Cole concurs
with this and sets as a goal for ethical philosophy that it define the grounds for a human right to freedom of international movement
(Cole, 2000). Liberal
political philosophy, as it stands and of the kind explored above, he argues, not only is in a
stalemate when it comes to addressing the ethics of migration, but it is essentially
confounded, incoherent and at odds with its core principles. While liberal political philosophy is
committed, according to Cole, to the moral equality of all persons and makes concessions to the
arguments in favour of open borders, sooner or later most of its pro-open borders strands end
up finding reasons for restrictions, “often on the grounds that as it [i.e., restrictions] is such a
widely accepted practice in liberal democratic states, a justification must be possible” (2000:13).
So even if it does not follow the argument about identity (Walzer) or nationality (Miller) and therefore makes no appeal to
community or nation but instead to values more central to the liberal tradition such as order, equality and welfare, liberal
philosophy still seeks to justify the division between members and nonmembers, and is still
concerned with the boundaries of membership or with what can morally justify the exclusive
membership practices of modern states . Hence, it again fails to address the paradox of citizenship as a basis of
community: liberal states may indeed be made of liberal equal polities of free and equal citizens,
but at the same time these same polities rest upon the existence of outsiders who are refused a share
of the goods of the liberal community. Membership of these communities is taken for granted by liberal political
philosophy, based on the assumption that the question of belonging and membership has been
answered in a way that satisfies liberal principles – an assumption that remains “highly questionable”, since
membership suffers from the same defect that distribution does, namely that of arbitrariness,
especially when natural and historical contingencies are taken into account (2000:5). citizenship makes a clear
distinction with regard to who can participate in the political community and who cannot, and
this is at odds with the moral equality of persons. Doing away with the two viable liberal options which ascribe to
moral equality a limited role (either by recourse to community identity or nation or to more central values such as public order,
welfare etc.), leaves us, Cole maintains, with a third option, which resembles a “Hobbesian landscape”: admitting that liberal
coherence (between moral equality and migration constraints on the state level) cannot be
achieved, that exclusive membership practices are non-liberal or illiberal, and thus leaving
liberal states to do whatever is in their interests and in the interests of their citizens. If open
borders are rejected, there is no other option . Therefore, political philosophy as a
normative discourse (“and this is what I take liberal political philosophy to be” Cole remarks) comes to an end at
the national border (2000: 12–13). Equality however remains important: it is the ultimate political value for Dworkin (1981),
but for Cole, as for Kymlicka (1996), it should function as an aspiration and not as a basis for any theory of justice. Moving from the
negative critique of the weakness of liberal political theory and of exclusionary practices of migratory regimes (2000), Cole in his
later work (2011, 2012) orients his argument towards a positive definition of a human right to freedom of international movement.
He believes that this should be defined in the context of an egalitarian theory of global justice, which does not just take for granted
the priority of either individual liberty over collective concerns or of human rights (2012:2). The right to freedom of international
movement should instead be “embedded in a wider perspective of what global justice requires, connecting theories of rights, justice
and the ethics of migration (…) [and it] must give people the power to resist global domination and exploitation, giving them control
over when, where, why and how they migrate, rather than the opening of international borders alone”. Open to more radical
approaches, such as the unpacking of the nation state itself and the exploration of different models of postnational citizenship, Cole
contemplates the possibility of the membership in a global political community, in which freedom of mobility constitutes an integral
part. This vision might still be “sketchy, if not flimsy”, but for Cole it could and should constitute a valid project for current political
thought (2012). Finally, Chandran Kukathas takes issue with both discussions of justice and the right to exit when it comes to
immigration, in an effort “to defend immigration against critics of all stripes, and also to defend immigration against some of its less
enthusiastic friends” (2005:207). Kukathas does not approve of the justice debate, considering justice as unattainable among
multicultural societies and their irresolvable disagreements, arguing that one has to remain “suspicious of feasibility considerations,
particularly when they lead us to morally troubling conclusions” (ibid.) Benhabib attempts to follow Cole’s cue in a different way, by
focusing on a theory of just membership; she sketches it as follows: recognising the moral claim of refugees and asylees to first
admittance; a regime of porous borders for immigrants; an 118 injunction against denationalization and the loss of citizenship rights,
and the vindication of the right of every human being “to have rights,” that is, to belong to some human community. The right to
have rights entails a defence of the universal status of personality – i.e., of being a legal right bearer-for each and every human
being. The status of alienage ought not to denude one of fundamental rights. Furthermore, just membership also defends the claim
to citizenship on the part of the alien when and if she has fulfilled certain conditions. Permanent alienage is not only incompatible
with a liberal democratic understanding of human community; it is also a violation of human rights. This claim to membership must
be accommodated by practices that are non-discriminatory in scope, transparent in formulation and execution, and justiciable when
violated by states. The doctrine of state sovereignty, which has so far shielded naturalisation, citizenship and denationalization
decisions from scrutiny by international as well as constitutional courts, must be challenged on these grounds as well (2004b:1786–
1787, her emphasis). Despite her stated intentions, this theory of just membership and cosmopolitan rights seem equally to suffer
from some normatively problematic claims. For instance, the implication that the values of Western liberal democracies have
universal validity is key. The idea of unproblematically defending the “universal status of personality” is a case in point.
Everyone, despite their background, is expected to enter into a moral conversation concerning such
universal statuses. It is no longer a hypothesis, since it is simply taken for granted: refugees,
migrants and strangers unquestionably share core values of the cosmopolitan and liberal kind.
Similarly, Benhabib envisages a new, “post-metaphysical” view of cosmopolitanism , inspired by Kant and

“grounded upon the common humanity of each and every person and his or her free will
which also includes the freedom to travel beyond the confines of one’s cultural, religious, and
ethnocentric walls” (2004a:40), as a response to the migratory dilemma. She thus argues for a right to
membership for the migrant and visitor. Soon after, she betrays her own recommendation by suggesting that the
tensions created by the presence of migrants and refugees and their claim to membership should be addressed through
Habermasian discourse ethics, which however foresee that “only those norms and normative institutional arrangements are valid
which can be agreed to by all concerned under special argumentation situations named discourses” (2004a:13). Whilst the debate
around Habermasian discourse ethics cannot be addressed fully 119 here, it is surprising how, after having recognised the precarious
nature of migrants, Benhabib then expects them to participate as equal members in a skewed dialogue, since “in the end any
‘dialogue’ on Habermasian terms turns out to be one-sided and exclusive” (Hutchings, 2005:155). It is exactly this set of weaknesses
that poststructuralism helps us address. I explore how it does it next. 2.4 Poststructuralism and Ethics As stated in 2.1, my project is
particularly interested in the way that hospitality envisages irregular and undocumented migrants and in the
ethical approach that best accommodates them. I am proposing that this best approach is a poststructuralist understanding of
autoimmunitary hospitality ethics. I have chosen to focus on poststructuralism, because I find it to be the only approach that, when
addressing the difficulties for ethics discussed earlier, adds another, but this time useful, one, by undertaking to show how
complex, non-static social structures and constructs of power, of gender and of other kinds,
define not only our constitution and actions but also our normative considerations. By
emphasising this complexity and insisting on a multi-layered, essentially open understanding
of Otherness, poststructuralist hospitality ethics refrain both from viewing the world as ideal
and homogeneous and from the need (that is also a trap) to provide prescriptions of what is
ethically acceptable or just in such a world. With an eye to avoiding a series of polarisations – between ethics and
IR, state vs. individual, structure vs. agency – poststructuralists attempt to theorise the ethical in a global context while keeping the
Other centre stage. I look below at how poststructuralist ethics does this. 2.4.1 Poststructuralist IR In her overview chapter on
Poststructuralism in IR (2009), Maja Zehfuss focuses mainly on these exact two pillars: subjectivity and responsibility. She does so in
“an attempt to understand without resort to external authorities or transcendental values” moral and political systems
“proceed[ing] from an interdependency of caring and responsibility that cannot be separated from the pluralism and relativism of
multiple 120 identities” (Der Derian, 1997:57). David Campbell’s work can perhaps be considered the first and most elaborate in this
vein in IR scholarship. Focusing on the idea of deterritorialisation, i.e., “of moving away from supposedly
secure grounds and reportedly rock-like foundations” (1993:91), Campbell proposes a rethinking of ethics,
along with a recasting of the Self’s identity opposite Alterity, in order to address the intricacies of the contemporary world. This
identity of the subject incorporates ethics in order to exist in opposition to traditional
approaches, which see ethics as “a set of rules and regulations adopted by autonomous agents”
(Campbell, 1993:92). As a result, it is in the responsibility towards the Other that subjectivity and selfhood is created in a radically
interdependent state of relationality, argues Campbell; and in this connection he refers directly to Levinas’ book about sovereignty
and ethics in the context of the Gulf War narratives in 1993. He expands on the same topic by advocating the “ affirmation of
alterity” (1998a:3, 182, 206) in order to address new, post-Cold War forms of violence, defined by
“ethnic” and “nationalist” traits. In his book National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia, he argues
that the failure to affirm alterity, i.e., to recognise “the radical interdependence of being that flows from our
responsibility to the [O]ther”, is the reason why the West failed in its response to Bosnia
(1998a:191). Such a principle should not be confined to a normative framework of tolerance but instead should aim towards
possible emancipations84 of the Other, even if this means the engendering of antagonism and conflict. In essence, affirming
alterity goes beyond the narrow and static confines of tolerance and maintains that the active
affirmation of alterity must involve the desire to actively oppose and resist – perhaps, depending on
the circumstances, even violently – those forces that efface, erase or suppress alterity (206). To envisage the form of a political life
that will embody such affirmation, Campbell thinks, one has to turn to Derrida, 85 to move in essence from the
Levinasian unconditional responsibility towards the Other to the stage of a decision (or of
undecidability, to be more exact). In his work on re-conceptualising and re-politicising humanitarianism (1998b), it is exactly
this move that enables the opposition and resistance mentioned above, far from traditional,
normative and prescriptive ethical frameworks.86

In order to avoid the consequences of conditional hospitality, we address the

otherness in ourselves and call for the unconditional acceptance of the other as
other, prior to their arrival, prior to the possibility of a single threat. We accept
maximal risk. Ethics comes in the moment of separation between what is
ethical and the logic of opportunity cost, traditional agency and the will to
mastery. Give all of that up for the possibility of ethics beyond condition
Mubirumusoke 11 (Mukasa, Professor at Claremont McKenna, “Georges Bataille and the
Ruinous Role of Nonknowledge in Derrida's Unconditional Hospitality” p. 2-5)

Traditionally, the decision of the host finds refuge in the laws set for hospitality. In an interview
entitled Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility, Derrida explains that traditional hospitality
belongs to the same logic as gift-giving. In other words, the laws of hospitality function within
the economy of an exchange.3 The gift of traditional hospitality must be accompanied with a
gift that recognizes the hospitality such as a greeting card, beer, or perhaps even the simple
exchange of a name. The laws of hospitality, therefore, prescribe that the host’s decision follows
from the logic of a reciprocal exchange. Within this exchange the host’s sovereignty is not only
affirmed in the moment of decision at the threshold, but also confirmed with the gift. The gift
reinscribes the host as master, as the one who demands, and commands, tangible recognition
of her position as the self-identifiable opposite of the guest. At this point we can see why
Derrida would rearticulate this traditional schema of hospitality as conditional. Traditional
hospitality defines itself at a threshold where the host’s decision is presumed to be
conditioned by a predictable logic of reciprocation. It is as if the host, once brought face-to-
face with the other, must find refuge from otherness—both the stranger’s and his own
otherness—by affirming and employing laws that establish a recognizable and repeatable
order. The homogeneity these laws seek both masks and wards off any expected
contestation of the established order. Thus, the very foundation of hospitality, welcoming
the other, requires that the host’s decision function as a cog within the hospitality machine.
In this machine, the other is not welcomed as other, but rather as another already
appropriable cog. The other’s foreignness is not enjoyed and celebrated as foreign, but is
instead appropriated and muffled by the stranger’s ability to comply with the laws, i.e., the
ability to provide a gift in return. For Derrida true hospitality cannot subsume the other and
therefore cannot participate in this machine of homogenization. To redefine hospitality, a
reinterpretation of the decision at the threshold is necessary. To free hospitality from the
conditions that reduce the other into an economy of knowledge and sameness, the decision of
hospitality must be unconditional, without laws. Unconditionality would allow the hospitable
gesture to emerge freely from the host. For Derrida, simply following through to a self-
determined end undermines the very possibility of free decision. In fact, Derrida argues that a
decision is not determined by the “self” per se, but rather that “for a decision to be made, it
must be made by the other in myself.”4 The conception of decision as arising out of “the other
in me” highlights the inadequacy of any decision that anticipates and follows from the laws of
conditional hospitality. I must appeal to the other in me—the other outside the realm of
knowledge—because the self-present me, such as me as host before a threshold with a guest
on the other side, is always already inscribed within a calculable economy of knowledge and
exchange. Derrida recognizes that even within the raw experience of an encounter with the
other, the host is still subject to laws of identification and appropriation. Therefore, while these
laws and the knowledge they provide are indispensable to my decision, they nevertheless will
subject me to a logic that pre-determines the decision. Derrida explains, “If we knew what to
do, if I knew in terms of knowledge what I have to do before the decision, then the decision
would not be a decision. It would be the application of a rule, the consequence of a premise,
and there would be no problem, there would be no decision.”5 With conditional hospitality, no
decision, in the Derridian sense, actually occurs; rather, the logic of exchange has already
anticipated and determined the host’s response to the foreigner. And, as discussed above, this
conditional relationship necessarily reduces the otherness of the guest into the logic of
sameness and knowledge, even though “decision, an ethical or a political responsibility, is
absolutely heterogeneous to knowledge.”6 To avoid the consequences of conditional
hospitality, a decision should arise from the otherness within me that absconds from laws of
conditional hospitality and calls forth the unconditional acceptance of the other as other.
Decisions must therefore be difficult and even terrible, but only from difficulty and terror can
the host emerge from the paralysis of undecidability and invoke the otherness that is shared
with the guest as opposed to the sovereignty that is not. With this account of the decision in
mind, unconditional hospitality requires the absence of any traditional agency. The host as
sovereign of the house withdraws from her selfidentifiable place of mastery, freeing the
otherness within and opening herself to the otherness without. Derrida envisions this
hospitable gesture rhetorically as a split of the self. He explains, “There would be no
responsibility or decision without some self-interruption, neither would there be any hospitality;
as master and host, the self in welcoming the other, must interrupt or divide himself or herself.
This division is the condition of hospitality.”7 Unconditional hospitality exposes the division of
the master and thus suspends her mastery over the home. Accompanying the suspension of
mastery, unconditional hospitality also requires the host to welcome any other, all others, the
absolute other, no questions asked. The tether to conditions must be completely snapped.
Thus, “if you exclude the possibility that the newcomer is coming to destroy your house—if
you want to control this and exclude in advance this possibility—there is no hospitality. In this
case, you control the borders, you have custom officers, you have a door.”8 An absolute
exposure of this sort should engender absolute fright and absolute emptiness. To be
absolutely open to anyone would entail an exposure that leaves every bit of the host outside the
host, as if she had poured herself out, like Zarathustra’s sun, to the other she does not know and
refuses to know. This unconditionality is what Derrida demands. There must be no moment of
exchange; there must be no check points; there must be utter and complete exposure: this is
the only suitable gift. To further explicate what unconditional hospitality entails, Derrida also
problematizes the functioning of language at the threshold of hospitality. “Does hospitality
consist in interrogating the new arrival?” asks Derrida, “Does it begin with the question
addressed to the newcomer: what is your name .... Or else does hospitality begin with the
unquestioning welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question and the
name.”9 The host cannot even ask the other his or her name; this traditionally amicable offer
involves a notion of exchange, of familiarity, of identity, of knowledge. Therefore , even this
seemingly benign discursive practice must be excluded in the decision of unconditional
hospitality. However, while complete openness radically excludes logos, even to the extreme of
forbidding language from hospitality, it also, in the same gesture, radically includes the other.
“The awaited guest is not only someone to whom you say ‘come’” says Derrida, “but
‘enter,’...occupy me, take place in me.”10 Moreover, with this occupation, “ the master of the
house is at home, but nonetheless he comes to enter his home through the guest.”11
Derrida’s statement sounds counterintuitive, but in fact is not: the guest allows the master to
“enter his home” because the guest calls forth the other within the host. An encounter with the
foreign other, through the decision of unconditional hospitality, provides the host with a
complete picture of her home, which must consist of both the self and the other within. The
heterogeneous singularity of the guest opens the host to her own infinite singularity, thus
exposing an impassible distance and yet, “this separation, this dissociation is not only a limit, but
it is also the condition of the relation to the other, a non-relation as relation,” and this is the
shared moment of hospitality.12

Untimely intervention is critical to create a counter-discourse—your ballot must

refuse to participate in the dealings of security
Calkivik 10. (PhD in Poli Sci @ Univ Minnesota (Emine Asli, 10/2010, "DISMANTLING
SECURITY," PhD dissertation submitted to Univ Minnesota for Raymond Duvall,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/99479/1/Calkivik_umn_0130E_11576.pdf)
It is this self-evidence of security even for critical approaches and the antinomy stemming from dissident voices reproducing the
language of those they dissent from that constitutes the starting point for this chapter, where I elaborate on the meaning of
dismantling security as untimely critique. As mentioned in the vignette in the opening section, the
suggestion to
dismantle security was itself deemed as an untimely pursuit in a world where lives of millions were
rendered brutally insecure by poverty, violence, disease, and ongoing political conflicts. Colored by the
tone of a call to conscience in the face of the ongoing crisis of security, it was not the time, interlocutors argued, for self-indulgent
critique. I will argue that it
is the element of being untimely, the effort, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “to brush
history against the grain” that gives critical thinking its power.291 It might appear as a trivial discussion to
bring up the relation between time and critique because conceptions of critical thinking in the discipline of International Relations
already possess the notion that critical thought needs to be untimely. In the first section, I will tease out what this notion of
untimeliness entails by visiting ongoing conversations within the discipline about critical thought and political time. Through this
discussion, I hope to clarify what sets apart dismantling security as untimely critique from the notion of untimeliness at work in
critical international relations theory. The latter conception of the untimely, I will suggest, paradoxically calls on critical thought to
be “on time” in that it champions a particular understanding of what it means for critical scholarship to be relevant and responsible
for its times. This notion of the untimely demands that critique be strategic and respond to political
exigency, that it provide answers in this light instead of raising more questions about which questions could be raised or what
presuppositions underlie the questions that are deemed to be waiting for answers. After elaborating in the first section such
strategic conceptions of the untimeliness of critical theorizing, in the second section I will turn to a different sense of the untimely by
drawing upon Wendy Brown’s discussion of the relation between critique, crisis, and political time through her reading of
Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”292 In contrast to a notion of untimeliness that demands strategic thinking and
punctuality, Brown’s exegesis provides a conception of historical materialism where critique
is figured as a force of
disruption, a form of intervention that reconfigures the meaning of the times and “contest[s]
the very senses of time invoked to declare critique ‘untimely’.”293 Her exposition overturns the
view of critique as a self-indulgent practice as it highlights the immediately political nature of critique and
reconfigures the meaning of what it means for critical thought to be relevant.294 It is in this sense of the
untimely, I will suggest, that dismantling security as a critique hopes to recover. I should point out that in this discussion my
intention is neither to construct a theory of critique nor to provide an exhaustive review and evaluation of the forms of critical
theorizing in International Relations. Rather, my aim is to contribute to the existing efforts that engage with the question of what it
means to be critical apart from drawing the epistemological and methodological boundaries so as to think about how one is
critical.295 While I do not deny the importance of epistemological questions, I contend that taking time to think about the meaning
of critique beyond these issues presents itself as an important task. This task takes on additional importance within the context of
security studies where any realm of investigation quickly begets its critical counterpart. The rapid emergence and institutionalization
of critical terrorism studies when studies on terrorism were proliferating under the auspices of the so-called Global War on Terror
provides a striking example to this trend. 296 Such instances are important reminders that, to the extent that epistemology and
methodology are reified as the sole concerns in defining and assessing critical thinking297 or “wrong headed refusals”298 to get on
with positive projects and empirical research gets branded as debilitating for critical projects, what is erased from sight is the
political nature of the questions asked and what is lost is the chance to reflect upon what it means for critical thinking to respond to
its times. In his meditation on the meaning of responding and the sense of responsibility entailed by writing, Jean-Luc Nancy
suggests that “all writing is ‘committed.’” 299 This notion of commitment diverges from the programmatic sense of committed
writing. What underlies this conception is an understanding of writing as responding: writing is a response to the voice of an other.In
Nancy’s words, “[w]hoever writes responds” 300 and “makes himself responsible to in the absolute sense.”301 Suggesting that
there is always an ethical commitment prior to any particular political commitment, such a notion
of writing contests the notion of creative autonomy premised on the idea of a free, self-legislating subject who responds. In other
words, it discredits the idea of an original voice by suggesting that there is no voice that is not a response to a prior response. Hence,
to respond is configured as responding to an expectation rather than as an answer to a question and responsibility is cast as an
“anticipated response to questions, to demands, to still-unformulated, not exactly predictable expectations.”302 Echoing Nancy,
David Campbell makes an important reminder as he suggests that as international relations scholars “we are always already
engaged,” although the sites, mechanisms and quality of engagements might vary.303 The question, then, is not whether
as scholars we are engaged or not, but what the nature of this engagement is. Such a re-framing of the
question is intended to highlight the political nature of all interpretation and the importance of developing an “ethos of political
criticism that is concerned with assumptions, limits, their historical production, social and political effects, and the possibility of
going beyond them in thought and action.”304 Taking as its object assumptions and limits, their historical production and social and
political effects places the relevancy of critical thought and responsibility of critical scholarship on new ground. It
is this ethos
of critique that dismantling security hopes to recover for a discipline where security operates
as the foundational principle and where critical thinking keeps on contributing to security’s
impressing itself as a self-evident condition. Critical Theory and Punctuality Within the context of International Relations,
critical thought’s orientation toward its time comes out strongly in Kimberley Hutchings’s formulation.305 According to Hutchings,
no matter what form it takes, what
distinguishes critical international relations theory from other forms
of theorizing is “its orientation towards change and the possibility of futures that do not
reproduce the hegemonic power of the present .”306 What this implies about the nature of critical thought is
that it needs to be not only diagnostic, but also self-reflexive. In the words of Hutchings, “all critical theories lay claim to some kind
of account not only of the present of international politics and its relation to possible futures, but also of the role of critical theory in
the present and future in international politics.” 307 Not only analyzing the present, but also introducing the question of the future
into analysis places political time at the center of critical enterprise and makes the problem of change a core concern. It is this
question of change that situates different forms of critical thinking on a shared ground since they all attempt to expose the way in
which what is presented as given and natural is historically produced and hence open to change. With their orientation to change,
their efforts to go against the dominant currents and challenge the hegemony of existing power relations by
showing how contemporary practices and discourses contribute to the perpetuation of
structures of power and domination, critical theorists in general and critical security studies specialists in
particular take on an untimely endeavor. It is this understanding of the untimely aspect of critical thinking that is
emphasized by Mark Neufeld, who regards the development of critical approaches to security as “one of the
more hopeful intellectual developments in recent years.”308 Despite nurturing from different theoretical traditions
and therefore harboring “fundamental differences between modernist and postmodernist commitments,” writes Neufeld, scholars
who are involved in the critical project nevertheless “share a common concern with calling into question ‘prevailing social and power
relationships and the institutions into which they are organized.’” 309 Thedesire for change—through being untimely and
making the way to alternative futures that would no longer resemble the present—have led some scholars to
emphasize the utopian element that must accompany all critical thinking. Quoting Oscar Wilde’s
aphorism—a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, Ken Booth
argues for the need to restore the role and reputation of utopianism in the theory and practice of international politics. 310
According to Booth, what goes under the banner of realism—“ethnocentric self-interest writ large”311 — falls far beyond the
realities of a drastically changed world political landscape at the end of the Cold War. He describes the new reality as “an egg-box
containing the shells of sovereignty; but alongside it a global community omelette [sic] is cooking.”312 Rather than insisting on the
inescapability of war in the international system as political realists argue, Booth argues for the need and possibility to work toward
the utopia of overcoming the condition of war by banking on the opportunities provided by a globalizing world. The point that
critical thought needs to be untimely by going against its time is also emphasized by Dunne and Wheeler, who assert that, regardless
of the form it takes, “critical
theory purport[s] to ‘think against’ the prevailing current” and that
“[c]ritical security studies is no exception” to this enterprise.313 According to the authors, the function of critical
approaches to security is to problematize what is taken for granted in the disciplinary
production of knowledge about security by “resist[ing], transcend[ing] and defeat[ing]…theories
of security, which take for granted who is to be secured (the state), how security is to be
achieved (by defending core ‘national’ values, forcibly if necessary) and from whom security is
needed (the enemy).”314 While critical theory in this way is figured as untimely, I want to suggest that this notion of
untimeliness gets construed paradoxically in a quite timely fashion. With a perceived disjuncture between writing the world from
within a discipline and acting in it placed at the center of the debates, the performance of critical thought gets evaluated to the
extent that it is punctual and in synch with the times. Does critical thought provide concrete guidance and prescribe what is to be
done? Can it move beyond mere talk and make timely political interventions by providing solutions? Does it have answers to the
strategic questions of progressive movements? Demanding that critical theorizing come clean in the court of these questions, such
conceptions of the untimely demand that critique respond to its times in a responsible way, where being responsible is understood
in stark contrast to a notion of responding and responsibility that I briefly discussed in the introductory pages of this chapter
(through the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and David Campbell). Let me visit two recent conversations ensuing from the declarations of
the contemporary crisis of critical theorizing in order to clarify what I mean by a timely understanding of untimely critique. The first
conversation was published as a special issue in the Review of International Studies (RIS), one of the major journals of the field.
Prominent figures took the 25th anniversary of the journal’s publication of two key texts—regarded as canonical for the launching
and development of critical theorizing in International Relations—as an opportunity to reflect upon and assess the impact of critical
theory in the discipline and interrogate what its future might be. 315 The texts in question, which are depicted as having shaken the
premises of the static world of the discipline, are Robert Cox’s 1981 essay entitled on “Social Forces, States, and World Orders”316
and Richard Ashley’s article, “Political Realism and Human Interests.”317 In their introductory essay to the issue, Rengger and
Thirkell-White suggest that the essays by Cox and Ashley—followed by Andrew Linklater’s Men and Citizens in the Theory of
International Relations318 —represent “the breach in the dyke” of the three dominant discourses in International Relations (i.e.,
positivists, English School, and Marxism), unleashing “a torrent [that would] soon become a flood” as variety of theoretical
approaches in contemporary social theory (i.e., feminism, Neo-Gramscianism, poststructuralism, and post-colonialism) would get
introduced through the works of critical scholars.319 After elaborating the various responses given to and resistance raised against
the critical project in the discipline, the authors provide an overview and an assessment of the current state of critical theorizing in
International Relations. They argue that the central question for much of the ongoing debate within the critical camp in its present
state—a question that it cannot help but come to terms with and provide a response to—concerns the relation between critical
thought and political practice. As they state, the “fundamental philosophical question [that] can no longer be sidestepped” by critical
International Relations theory is the question of the relation between “knowledge of the world and action in it.”320 One of the
points alluded to in the essay is that forms of critical theorizing, which leave the future “to contingency, uncertainty and the
multiplicity of political projects” and therefore provide “less guidance for concrete political action”321 or, again, those that
problematize underlying assumptions of thought and “say little about the potential political agency that might be involved in any
subsequent struggles”322 may render the critical enterprise impotent and perhaps even suspect. This point comes out clearly in
Craig Murphy’s contribution to the collection of essays in the RIS’s special issue. 323 Echoing William Wallace’s argument that critical
theorists tend to be “monks,”324 who have little to offer for political actors engaged in real world politics, Murphy argues that the
promise of critical theory is “partially kept” because of the limited influence it has had outside the academy towards changing the
world.Building a different world, he suggests, requires more than isolated academic talk; that it demands not merely “words,” but
“deeds.”325 This, according to Murphy, requires providing “knowledge that contributes to change.”326 Such knowledge would
emanate from connections with the marginalized and would incorporate observations of actors in their everyday practices. More
importantly, it would create an inspiring vision for social movements, such as the one provided by the concept of human
development, which, according to Murphy, was especially powerful “because it embodied a value-oriented way of seeing, a vision,
rather than only isolated observations.”327 In sum, if critical theory is to retain its critical edge, Murphy’s discussion suggests, it has
to be in synch with political time and respond to its immediate demands. The second debate that is revelatory of this conception of
the timing of critical theory—i.e., that critical thinking be strategic and efficient in relation to political time—takes place in relation
to the contemporary in/security environment shaped by the so-called Global War on Terror. The theme that bears its mark on these
debates is the extent to which critical inquiries about the contemporary security landscape become complicit in the workings of
power and what critique can offer to render the world more legible for progressive struggles.328 For instance, warning critical
theorists against being co-opted by or aligned with belligerence and war-mongering, Richard Devetak asserts that critical
international theory has an urgent “need to distinguish its position all the more clearly from liberal imperialism.”329 While scholars
such as Devetak, Booth,330 and Fierke331 take the critical task to be an attempt to rescue liberal internationalism from turning into
liberal imperialism, others announce the “crisis of critical theorizing” and suggest that critical writings on the nature of the
contemporary security order lack the resources to grasp their actual limitations, where the latter is said to reside not in the realm of
academic debate, but in the realm of political practice.332 It is amidst these debates on critique, crisis, and political time that
Richard Beardsworth raises the question of the future of critical philosophy in the face of the challenges posed by contemporary
world politics.333 Recounting these challenges, he provides the matrix for a proper form of critical inquiry that could come to terms
with “[o]ur historical actuality.”334 He describes this actuality as the “thick context” of modernity (“an epoch, delimited by the
capitalization of social relations,” which imposes its own philosophical problematic—“that is, the attempt, following the social
consequences of capitalism, to articulate the relation between individuality and collective spirit”335 ), American unilateralism in the
aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the growing political disempowerment of people worldwide. Arguing that
“contemporary return of religion and new forms of irrationalism emerge, in large part, out of the failure of the second response of
modernity to provide a secular solution to the inequalities of the nation-state and colonization,”336 he formulates the awaiting
political task for critical endeavors as constructing a world polity to resist the disintegration of the world under the force of capital.It
is with this goal in mind that he suggests that “responsible scholarship needs to rescue reason in the face irrational war”337 and that
intellectuals need to provide “the framework for a world ethical community of law, endowed with political mechanisms of
implementation in the context of a regulated planetary economy.”338 He suggests that an aporetic form of thinking such as Jacques
Derrida’s—a thinking that “ignores the affirmative relation between the determining powers of reason and history”339 —would be
an unhelpful resource because such thinking “does not open up to where work needs to be done for these new forms of polity to
emerge.”340 In other words, critical thinking, according to Beardsworth, needs to articulate and point out possible political avenues
and to orient thought and action in concrete ways so as to contribute to progressive political change rather than dwelling on the
encounter of the incalculable and calculation and im-possibility of world democracy in a Derridean fashion. In similar ways to the
first debate on critique that I discussed, critical thinking is once again called upon to respond to political time in a strategic and
efficient manner. As critical inquiry gets summoned up to the court of reason in Beardsworth’s account, its realm of engagement is
limited to that which the light of reason can be shed upon, and its politics is confined to mapping out the achievable and the doable
in a given historical context without questioning or disrupting the limits of what is presented as “realistic” choices. Hence, if untimely
critical thought is to be meaningful it has to be on time by responding to political exigency in a practical, efficient, and strategic
manner. In contrast to this prevalent form of understanding the untimeliness of critical theory, I will now turn to a different account
of the untimely provided by Wendy Brown whose work informs the project of dismantling security as untimely critique. Drawing
from her discussion of the relationship between critique, crisis, and political time, I will suggest that untimely
critique of
security entails, simultaneously, an attunement to the times and an aggressive violation of their
self-conception . It is in this different sense of the untimely that the suggestion of dismantling security needs to be situated.
Critique and Political Time As I suggested in the Prelude to this chapter, elevating security itself to the position of major protagonist
and extendinga call to “dismantle security” was itself declared to be an untimely pursuit in a
time depicted as the time of crisis in security. Such a declaration stood as an exemplary moment (not in the sense
of illustration or allegory, but as a moment of crystallization) for disciplinary prohibitions to think and act otherwise—perhaps the
moment when a doxa exhibits its most powerful hold. Hence, what
is first needed is to overturn the taken-for-
granted relations between crisis, timeliness, and critique. The roots krisis and kritik can be traced back to the
Greek word krinõ, which meant “to separate”, to “choose,” to “judge,” to “decide.”341 While creating a broad spectrum of
meanings, it was intimately related to politics as it connoted a “divorce” or “quarrel,” but also a moment of decision and a turning
point. It was also used as a jurisprudential term in the sense of making a decision, reaching a verdict or judgment (kritik) on an
alleged disorder so as to provide a way to restore order. Rather than being separated into two domains of meaning—that of
“subjective critique” and “objective crisis”—krisis and kritik were conceived as interlinked moments. Koselleck explains this
conceptual fusion: [I]t wasin the sense of “judgment,” “trial,” “legal decision,” and ultimately “court” that crisis achieved a high
constitutionalstatus, through which the individual citizen and the community were bound together. The “for and against”
wastherefore present in the original meaning of the word and thisin a manner that already conceptually anticipated the appropriate
judgment. 342 Recognition of an objective crisis and subjective judgments to be passed on it so as to come up with a formula for
restoring the health of the polity by setting the times right were thereby infused and implicated in each other.343 Consequently, as
Brown notes, there could be no such thing as “mere critique” or “untimely critique” because critique always entailed a concern with
political time: “[C]ritique as political krisis promise[d] to restore continuity by repairing or renewing the justice that gives an order
the prospect of continuity, that indeed ma[de] it continuous.”344 The breaking of this intimate link between krisis and kritik, the
consequent depoliticization of critique and its sundering from crisis coincides with the rise of modern political order and
redistribution of the public space into the binary structure of sovereign and subject, public and private.345 Failing to note the link
between the critique it practiced and the looming political crisis, emerging philosophies of history, according Koselleck, had the
effect of obfuscating this crisis. As he explains, “[n]ever politically grasped, [this political crisis] remained concealed in historico-
philosophical images of the future which cause the day’s events to pale.”346 It is this intimate, but severed, link between crisis and
critique in historical narratives that Wendy Brown’s discussion brings to the fore and re-problematizes. She turns to Walter
Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and challenges conventional understandings of historical materialism, which
conceives of the present in terms of unfolding laws of history.347 According to Brown, the practice of critical theory
appeals to a concern with time to the extent that “[t]he crisis that incites critique and that critique engages itself
signals a rupture of temporal continuity , which is at the same time a rupture in political
imaginary .”348 Cast in these terms, it is a particular experience with time, with the present, that Brown suggests Benjamin’s
theses aim to capture. Rather than an unmoving or an automatically overcome present (a present that is out of time), the
present is interpreted as an opening that calls for a response to it. This call for a response highlights the idea
that, far from being a luxury, critique is non-optional in its nature. Such an understanding of critical thought is premised on a
historical consciousness that grasps the present historically so as to break with the selfconception of the age. Untimely
critique transforms into a technique to blow up the present through fracturing its apparent
seamlessness by insisting on alternatives to its closed political and epistemological
universe .349 Such a conception resonates with the distinction that Žižek makes between a political
subjectivity that is confined to choosing between the existing alternatives—one that takes the limits of
what is given as the limits to what is possible—and a form of subjectivity that creates the very set of
alternatives by “transcend[ing] the coordinates of a given situation [and] ‘posit[ing] the
presuppositions’ of one's activity” by redefining the very situation within which one is
active.”350 With its attempt to grasp the times in its singularity, critique is cast neither as a breaking free from the weight of
time (which would amount to ahistoricity) nor being weighed down by the times (as in the case of teleology).351 It conceives
the present as “historically contoured but not itself experienced as history because not necessarily
continuous with what has been.”352 It is an attitude that renders the present as the site of “non-
utopian possibility” since it is historically situated and constrained yet also a possibility since it is not historically
foreordained or determined.353 It entails contesting the delimitations of choice and challenging the

confinement of politics to existing possibilities . Rather than positing history as existing objectively outside of
narration, what Brown’s discussion highlights is the intimate relation between the constitution of political subjectivity vis-à-vis the
meaning of history for the present. It alludes to “the power of historical discourse,” which Mowitt explains as a power “to estrange
us from that which is most familiar, namely, the fixity of the present” because “what
we believe to have happened to
us bears concretely on what we are prepared to do with ourselves both now and in the
future.”354 Mark Neocleous concretizes the political stakes entailed in such encounters with history—with
the dead—from the perspective of three political traditions: a conservative one, which aims to reconcile
the dead with the living, a fascist one, which aims to resurrect the dead to legitimate its
fascist program , and a historical materialist one, which seeks redemption with the dead as the
source of hope and inspiration for the future.355 Brown’s discussion of critique and political time is significant
for highlighting the immediately political nature of critique in contrast to contemporary invocations that cast it as a self-indulgent
practice, an untimely luxury, a disinterested, distanced, academic endeavor. Her attempt
to trace critique vis-à-vis its
relation to political time provides a counter-narrative to the conservative and moralizing
assertions that shun untimely critique of security as a luxurious interest that is committed to
abstract ideals rather than to the “reality” of politics—i.e., running after utopia rather than modeling “real
world” solutions. Dismantling security as untimely critique entails a similar claim to unsettle the accounts of
“what the times are” with a “bid to reset time.”356 It aspires to be untimely in the face of the
demands on critical thought to be on time; aims to challenge the moralizing move , the call to
conscience that arrives in the form of assertions that saying “no!” to security, that refusing to
write it, would be untimely . Rather than succumbing to the injunction that thought of political possibility is to be
confined within the framework of security, dismantling security aims to open up space for alternative
forms, for a different language of politics so as to “stop digging” the hole politics of security
have dug us and start building a counter-discourse. Conclusion As an attempt to push a debate that is fixated on
security to the limit and explore what it means to dismantle security, my engagement with various aspects of this move is not
intended as an analysis raised at the level of causal interpretations or as an attempt to find better solutions to a problem that
already has a name. Rather, it tries to recast what is taken-for-granted by attending to the conceptual
assumptions, the historical and systemic conditions within which the politics of security plays
itself out. As I tried to show in this chapter, it also entails a simultaneous move of refusing to be a disciple
of the discipline of security . This implies overturning not only the silent disciplinary protocols
about which questions are legitimate to ask, but also the very framework that informs those
questions. It is from this perspective that I devoted two chapters to examining and clarifying the proposal to dismantle security
as a claim on time. After explicating, in Chapter 4, the temporal structure that is enacted by politics of security and elaborating on
how security structures the relation between the present and the future, in this chapter, I approached the question of temporality
from a different perspective, by situating it in relation to disciplinary times in order to clarify what an untimely critique of security
means. I tried to elaborate this notion of the untimely by exploring the understanding of untimeliness that informs certain
conceptions of critical theorizing in International Relations. I suggested that such
a notion of the untimely
paradoxically calls on critical thought to be on time in the sense of being punctual and
strategic. Turning to Wendy Brown’s discussion of the relation between critique and political time, I elaborated on the sense of
untimely critique that dismantling security strives for—a critique that goes against the times that are
saturated by the infinite passion to secure and works toward taking apart the architecture of
security.

Forgoing unconditional hospitality on account of fear of loss makes ethics

impossible by destroying the possibility of genuine relationality and
constructing a self-sustaining state of mass insecurity.
Bauman 11. [2011, Zygmunt Bauman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds,
“Collateral damage: Social inequalities in a global age,” pg. 45-66]

Having rescinded its previous programmatic interference with market-produced existential

uncertainty and insecurity , and having on the contrary proclaimed that the removal, one by one, of the residual constraints imposed on profit-oriented activities was the prime task of any political power that cares for the

the contemporary state must seek other, non-economic varieties of vulnerability and
well-being of its subjects,

uncertainty on which to rest its legitimacy. That alternative seems to have been recently located
spectacularly
(first and most in the issue of safety fears of
, but by no means exclusively, by the recent US administration) personal : current or portending, overt or hidden, genuine or putative

the threats to human bodies pandemics criminal activities

, possessions and habitats – whether arising from and unhealthy diets or lifestyle regimes, or from , anti-

the ‘underclass’
social conduct by global terrorism
, or most recently . Unlike the existential insecurity born of the market, which is if anything all too genuine, profuse, visible and obvious for comfort, that

alternative insecurity with which the state hopes to restore its lost monopoly on the chances of
redemption must be artificially beefed up, or at least highly dramatized to inspire a sufficient
volume of fears, and at the same time outweigh, overshadow and relegate to a secondary
position the economically generated insecurity about which the state administration can do
next to nothing, nothing being what it is particularly eager to do. Unlike market- in the case of the

generated threats to livelihood and welfare, the gravity and extent of the dangers must to personal safety

be presented in the darkest of colours, so that the non-materialization of the advertised threats
and the predicted blows and sufferings can be applauded as a great victory of (indeed, anything less than predicted disasters)

governmental reason over hostile fate : as a result of the laudable vigilance, care and good will of state organs. In France, the Chirac versus Jospin presidential duel of 2002 degenerated as early as in
its preliminary stages into a public auction in which both competitors vied for electoral support by offering ever harsher measures against criminals and immigrants, but above all against immigrants who breed crime and the criminality bred by immigrants. 2 First of
all, body, personal possessions, home, neighbourhood). On 14 July 2001 Chirac set the infernal machine in motion, announcing the need to fight ‘that growing threat to safety, that rising flood’ in view of an almost 10 per cent increase in delinquency in the first half
of the year (also announced on that occasion) and declaring that a ‘zero tolerance’ policy was bound to become law once he was re-elected. The tune of the presidential campaign had been set, and Jospin was quick to join in, elaborating his own variations on the
shared motif (though, unexpectedly to the main soloists, but certainly not to sociologically wise observers, it was the extreme right-wing voice of Le Pen that rose to the top as the purest and so the most audible). On 28 August, Jospin proclaimed ‘a battle against
insecurity’, vowing ‘no laxity’, while on 6 September Daniel Vaillant and Marylise Lebranchu, his ministers of internal affairs and justice, respectively, swore that they wouldn’t show any tolerance of delinquency in any form. Vaillant’s immediate reaction to the
attacks in the United States on 11 September had been to increase the powers of the police aimed principally against the juveniles of the ‘ethnically alien’ banlieues , the housing estates outside Paris where, according to the official version (the version convenient to
the officials), the devilish concoction of uncertainty and insecurity poisoning Frenchmen’s lives was brewed. Jospin himself went on castigating and reviling, in ever more vitriolic terms, the ‘angelic school’ of the softly-softly approach, which he had sworn never to
belong to in the past and never join in the future. The auction went on, and the bids climbed skywards. Chirac promised to create a ministry of internal security, to which Jospin responded with a commitment to a ministry ‘charged with public security’ and the
‘coordination of police operations’. When Chirac brandished the idea of locked centres for confining the juvenile delinquents, Jospin echoed the promise with a vision of ‘locked structures’ for them, outbidding his opponent with the prospect of ‘sentencing on the
spot’. No reminder is needed that little if anything has changed since. More than to anything else, Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s successor, owed his convincing electoral success to playing on popular fears a nd the desire for a strong power able to arrest and fight back
against the further fears bound to plague the future. He goes on using the same game to chase away from the newspaper headlines the news of the unemployment figures relentlessly rising under his presidency and the relentless fall in the incomes of the majority
of the French. To do that, he resorts to the tested expedient of collapsing the issue of existential security into that of street violence, and street violence into that of the newcomers from the poor regions of the planet. A mere three decades ago, Portugal was
(alongside Turkey) the main supplier of the ‘guest workers’ the German burghers feared would despoil their homely townscapes and undercut their social compact, the foundation of their security and comfort. Today, thanks to its sharply improved fortunes, Portugal
has turned from a labour- exporting into a labour- importing country. The hardships and humiliations suffered while earning bread in foreign countries have been promptly forgotten, 27 per cent of Portuguese have declared that neighbourhoods infested with crime
and foreigners are their main worry, and the newcomer politician Paulo Portas, playing a single, fiercely anti-immigration card, helped a new right-wing coalition into power (just as Pia Kiersgaard’s Danish People’s Party did in Denmark, Umberto Bossi’s Northern
League in Italy, the radically anti-immigrant Progress Party in Norway – and virtually all the mainstream parties in the Netherlands; in other words, in countries that not so long ago sent their children to faraway lands to seek the bread their homelands were unable
to offer). News like this easily makes it to the front page (like the panic-mongering, xenophobic title aimed at ruffling feathers, ‘UK plan for asylum crackdown’, in the Guardian of 13 June 2002; no need to mention the banners on the tabloid front pages … ). The main
bulk of the planet-wide immigrant phobia stays hidden from Western Europe’s attention (indeed, knowledge), however, and never makes it to the surface. ‘Blaming the immigrants’ – the strangers, the newcomers, and particularly the newcomers among the
strangers – for all aspects of social malaise (and first of all for the nauseating, disempowering feeling of 3 while countries too poor to attract significant numbers of neighbours desperately seeking a livelihood, like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary or Slovakia, turn their

A permanent state of alert:

wrath against the usual suspects and stand-by culprits: local but drifting, shunning fixed addresses, and therefore perpetual ‘newcomers’ and outsiders, always and everywhere – the Gypsies.

dangers proclaimed to be lurking just around the next corner, oozing and leaking from terrorist
camps masquerading as Islamic religious schools and congregations from immigrant-populated ,

banlieues , from the underclass-infested mean streets, the ‘rough districts’ incurably contaminated by violence, the no-go areas of big cities; paedophiles and other sex offenders on the loose, obtrusive beggars, blood-thirsty juvenile gangs, loiterers

Reasons to be afraid are many; since their genuine number and intensity are impossible to
and stalkers …

calculate from the perspective of narrow personal experience, yet another, perhaps the most
powerful reason, to be frightened is added: one does not know where and when the words of
warning will turn into flesh Contemporary menaces are as a rule distantly
. , and particularly the most horrifying among them,

located, concealed and surreptitious, seldom close enough to be directly witnessed and very
rarely accessible to individual scrutiny Most of us would never have learned of – for all practical purposes invisible.

their existence were it not thanks to the panics inspired and boosted by the mass media and
the alarming prognoses composed by experts and swiftly picked up, endorsed and reinforced
by cabinet members and trade companies hurrying as they do to turn all that excitement into –

political or commercial profit. it is possible

As we, ‘the ordinary people’ occupied with our individual small-scale daily affairs, know of those awesome but faraway dangers only indirectly, ,

to manipulate our
indeed much too easy, attitudes; to play down or silence the dangers that promise no
– public –

political or financial gains, while grossly inflating, or even inventing, others, better suited to
politically or commercially profitable exploitation . But as Moazzam Begg, a British Muslim arrested in January 2002 and released without charge after three years spent at Baghram
and Guantanamo Bay prisons, rightly points out in his book, published in 2006 under the title Enemy Combatant , the overall effect of a life lived under virtually incessant security alerts, such as warmongering, justifications of torture, arbitrary imprisonment and

terror, is to ‘have made the world much worse’. Whether worse or not, I would also add: not a bit more secure; most certainly, the world today feels considerably less secure
than it did a dozen or two dozen years ago . It looks as though the paramount effect of the profuse and immensely costly extraordinary security measures undertaken in the last decade has

Sowing the seeds of fear produces rich

been a deepening of our sense of danger , of risk , and of insecurity . And little in the present tendency promises a speedy return to the comforts of security.

crops in politics and trade; and the allure of an opulent harvest inspires seekers of political and
commercial gain to break open ever new lands to fear-growing plantations security … In principle,

concerns and ethical motivations are at cross-purposes: the prospects of security and the
intensity of ethical intentions are at loggerheads . What casts security and ethics in principled
opposition to each other (an opposition excruciatingly difficult to overcome and reconcile) is the contrast between divisiveness and
communion Security generates an interest in
: the drive to separate and exclude which is endemic to the first versus the inclusive, unifying tendency constitutive of the second.

spotting risks and sorting them out for elimination, and for that reason it targets potential
sources of danger as objects of ‘pre-emptive’ exterminating action, unilaterally undertaken. The targets

Targeted individuals and groups or categories of individual are

of this action are by the same token excluded from the universe of moral obligation.

denied human subjectivity and recast as objects pure and simple, located irrevocably at the
receiving end of action. They become entities whose sole relevance (the only aspect taken into consideration when their treatment is planned)

to those applying the ‘security measures’ on behalf of those whose security is presumed or
declared to be under threat is the threat they already constitute, may constitute, or may
credibly be charged with constituting The incapacitation of the humanity of . Denial of declared immaterial, if listened to at all.

the targets of action goes far beyond passivity that ascribed by Emmanuel Levinas, the greatest French ethical philosopher, to the Other as the object of ethical responsibility

(according to Levinas, the Other commands me by his weakness , not strength; he gives me orders by refraining from giving them; it is the unassumingness and the silence of the Other that trigger my ethical impulse). Using Levinas’s vocabulary, we may say that

casting others as ‘security problems’ leads to an effacing of ‘face’ – a metaphoric name for those aspects of the
Other that put us in a condition of ethical responsibility and guide us to ethical action.
Incapacitating that face as a potential force evoking or awakening the moral impulse is (unarmed, non-coercive)

the hub of what is understood by ‘dehumanization’. Inside the ‘universe of moral obligations’ ,

Moazzam Begg’s three-year imprisonment without a crime, and torture administered to squeeze out
of him an admission of guilt to (retrospectively) justify it, would be an outrage and an
atrocity. Deprived of ethically significant ‘face’ by the fact of being classified as a security
threat and thereby evicted from the universe of moral obligations, Begg was however a
legitimate object of ‘security measures’ , declared by the same token to be ethically indifferent or neutral (‘adiaphoric’ in my vocabulary) by definition.

Utilitarianism causes genocide.

Santos 3 2003, Boaventura de Souza Santos is a Professor of Sociology at the University of
Coimbra, “Collective Suicide?”, Bad Subjects, Issue # 63 ,
http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php

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 in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in 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 that is 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 its 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 the
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 infinitely reproduce 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 favour. 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 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. Is
it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically,
sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and
the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social,
political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the
maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers, both
when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of
primitive accumulation, legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by
definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed . In today's version, the period of primitive

accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization

of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction.

Fear of death is grounded in phallicized whiteness and capitalism

Winnubst 6 Shannon Winnubst, professor of Women’s and gender studies at Ohio State
University, Queering Freedom, pg. 183

For Bataille, the servility to utility is displayed particularly in the temporality of such a world—
the temporality of anticipation . Returning again to the role of the tool, he writes, In efficacious activity man
becomes the equivalent of a tool, which produces; he is like the thing the tool is, being itself a
product. The implication of these facts is quite clear: the tool’s meaning is given by the future, in what the tool will
produce, in the future utilization of the product: like the tool, he who serves—who works—has the value of that which will be later,
not of that which is. (1988–91, 2:218) The
reduction of our lives to the order of utility forces us to
project ourselves endlessly into the future . Bataille writes of this as our anguished state,
caused by this anticipation “that must be called anticipation of oneself . For he must apprehend himself
in the future, through the anticipated results of his action” (1988–91, 2:218). This is why advanced
capitalism and phallicized whiteness must ground themselves in a denial of death: death
precludes the arrival of this future . It cuts us off from ourselves, severing us from the future
self that is always our real and true self. Resisting the existential turn, however, Bataille refuses to read this
denial of death as an ontological condition of humanity. For Bataille, this is a historical and
economic denial, one in which only a culture grounded in the anticipation of the future must
participate. He frames it primarily as a problem of the intellect. In the reduction of the world
to the order of utility, we have reduced our lives and experiences to the order of instrumental
reason . This order necessarily operates in a sequential temporality, facing forward toward the time when the results will be
achieved, the questions solved, the theorems proved—and also when political domination will be ended and ethical an- guish
quieted. As Bataille credits Hegel for seeing, “knowledge is never given to us except by unfolding in time” (1988–91, 2:202). It never
appears to us except, finally, “as the result of a calculated effort, an operation useful to some end” (1988–91, 2:202)—and its utility,
as we have seen, only drives it forward toward some future utility, endlessly. There are always new and future
objects of thought to conquer and domesticate. Within this order of reason, death presents the
cessation of the very practice of knowledge itself. Severing us from the future objects of
thought and from our future selves, “death prevents man from attaining himself” (1988–91, 2:218).
As Bataille explains, “the fear of death appears linked from the start to the projection of oneself into a future time, which [is] an
effect of the positing of oneself as a thing” (1988–91, 2:218). The
fear of death derives from the subordination
to the order of utility and its dominant form of the intellect, instrumental reason. While death is
unarguably a part of the human condition, for Bataille the fear of death is a historically habituated response,
one that grounds cultures of advanced capitalism and phallicized whiteness . In those frames of late
modernity, death introduces an ontological scarcity into the very human condition: it represents
finitude, the ultimate limit . We must distance ourselves from such threats, and we do so most
often by projecting them onto sexualized, racialized, and classed bodies . But for Bataille, servility
to the order of knowledge is as unnecessary as servility to the order of utility . To die
humanly , he argues, is to accept “the subordination of the thing” (1988– 91, 2:219), which places us in the
schema that separates our present self from the future, desired, anticipated self: “to die humanly is to have of the future being, of
the one who matters most in our eyes, the senseless idea that he is not” (1988–91, 2:219). But if
we are not trapped in the
endless anticipation of our future self as the index of meaning in our lives, we may not be anguished by
this cessation: “If we live sovereignly, the representation of death is impossible, for the present is

not subject to the demands of the future ” (1988–91, 2:219). To live sovereignly is not to escape
death, which is ontologically impossible . But it is to refuse the fear, and subsequent attempts
at disavowal, of death as the ontological condition that defines humanity . Rather than trying to
transgress this ultimate limit and prohibition, the
sovereign [person] man “cannot die fleeing. He [it] cannot
let the threat of death deliver him over to the horror of a desperate yet impossible flight ”
(1988–91, 2:219). Living in a temporal mode in which “anticipation would dissolve into NOTHING ”
(1988–91, 2: 208), the
sovereign man [person] “lives and dies like an animal” (1988–91, 2:219). He lives
and dies without the anxiety invoked by the forever unknown and forever encroaching
anticipation of the future. As Bataille encourages us elsewhere, “Think of the voracity of animals, as
against the composure of a cook ” (1988–91, 2:83).
2AC
 T-AoS
Counter interpretation – legal immigration is permanent residence
Cheng et al. 4 — Anthony W. Cheng, Economist at the Social Security Administration, et al.,
2004 (“A Stochastic Model of the Long-Range Financial Status of the OASDI Program,” Report by
the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Chief Actuary, Actuarial Study Number 117,
September, Available Online at https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study117.pdf,
Accessed 06-20-2018, p. 6-8)
[Notes: 1. “OASDI (Old-Age, Survivors, Disability Insurance) is the most significant part of the Social Security Disability program. It is designed to ensure
continuing income for those who are retired, surviving spouses and dependent children of workers who have died, and those who qualify for Social
Security Disability.” https://www.disabilitybenefitscenter.org/glossary/old-age-survivors-disability-insurance 2. “Stochastic modeling is a form of
financial modeling that includes one or more random variables. The purpose of such modeling is to estimate how probable outcomes are within a
forecast to predict conditions for different situations. The Monte Carlo simulation is one example of a stochastic model; when used for portfolio
evaluation, various simulations of how a portfolio may perform are developed based on probability distributions of individual stock returns.”

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stochastic-modeling.asp] C. Immigration Total immigration is defined here as legal

immigration minus legal emigration plus net other immigration . Each component is modeled separately. 1.
Legal Immigration Legal immigration is defined as persons lawfully admitted for permanent
residence into the United States.7 The level of legal immigration largely depends on legislation which
basically serves to define and establish limits for certain categories of immigrants. The
Immigration Act of 1990, which is currently the legislation in force, establishes limits for three
classes of immigrants: family-sponsored preferences, employment-based preferences, and
diversity immigrants. However, no numerical limits currently exist for immediate relatives of U.S.
citizens. Historical data for legal U.S. immigration for years 1901 through 2002 are from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.8 Legal
immigration averaged nearly one million per year from 1900 through 1914, then decreased substantially to about 23,000 in 1933. Since the mid-1940s,
legal immigration increased steadily to over one million in 2002. An ARMA(4,1) equation was selected and parameters were estimated using the entire
range of historical data. The R-squared value was 0.92. Figure II.2 presents the actual and fitted values. The modified equation is: IMt = IMtTR +1.08imt-
1 −0.54imt-2 +0.69imt-3 −0.31imt-4 + εt +0.49εt-1. (3) In this equation, IMt represents the annual level of legal immigration in year t; IMtTR represents
the projected level of legal immigration from the TR04II in year t; imt represents the deviation of the annual level of legal immigration from the TR04II

2. Legal Emigration Legal

value in year t; and εt represents the random error in year t. [end page 6] [Graph Omitted — see URL]

emigration is defined as the number of persons who lawfully leave the United States, and are no
longer considered to be a part of the Social Security program. Although annual emigration data are not collected in
the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the level of emigration for the past century roughly totaled one-fourth of the level of legal
immigration. Using the Census estimates as an approximate guide, the parameters of Equation (3) are multiplied by one-fourth.3 The modified
equation is: EMt = EMtTR +0.27emt-1 −0.13emt-2 +0.17emt-3 −0.08emt-4 + εt +0.12εt-1. (4) In this equation, EMt represents the annual level of legal
emigration in year t; EMtTR represents the projected annual level of legal emigration from the TR04II in year t; emt represents the deviation of the

3. Net Other Immigration

annual level of legal emigration from the TR04II value in year t; and εt represents the random error in year t.

Net other immigration is defined as the annual flow of persons into the United States minus the
annual flow of persons out of the United States who do not meet the above definition of legal
immigration or legal emigration . Thus, net other immigration includes unauthorized persons and
those not seeking permanent residence . [end page 7] Since complete data does not exist for net other immigration, we rely on
indirect measurements from the U.S. Census Bureau for our estimate. The Census Bureau accomplishes this by comparing two consecutive decennial
census populations, applying known components of change, and assigning the residual to net other immigration. The annual level of net other
immigration is assumed to follow a random walk. The modified equation is of the form: ΔΟt = ΔΟtTR + εt; Ο2003 = Ο2003TR. (5) In this equation, ΔΟt
represents the change in the annual level of net other immigration in year t; ΔΟtTR represents the projected annual change in the level of net other
immigration consistent with the TR04II in year t; and εt represents the random error in year t. The equation is initialized with Ο2003 = Ο2003TR, the
level of net other immigration in 2003 from the TR04II. Footnotes in this card: 7 For more detailed information, refer to the Yearbook of Immigration
Statistics - uscis.gov/graphics/shared/aboutus/statistics/ybpage.htm. 8 Formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). 9 It is
important to note that legal emigration is simulated independently from legal immigration.
 ASPEC
The USFG is an agent
American Heritage Dictionary 2K [Dictionary.com]
The: Used before a noun, and generally stressed, to emphasize one of a group or type as the
most outstanding or prominent: considered Lake Shore Drive to be the neighborhood to live in
these days.
 Miller DA
North Korean lashout claims sabre-rattling
The Guardian 16, (The Guardian, News Agency, “North Korean rhetoric has reached new
heights – and the world is losing patience,”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/23/north-korea-rhetoric-pyongyang-
us-china-nuclear-destruction, //VZ)

In 2016 the Korean pendulum has swung back into crisis mode. This began on 6 January with
North Korea’s fourth nuclear test in a decade, closely followed on 7 February by a successful
satellite launch – which doubles as a partial test for launching a ballistic missile. So far, so normal . North Korea conducts both kinds
of test every few years. This swift one-two, while deplorable, was hardly unexpected . With the nominally
ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) set to hold its first full congress for 36 years in May, fireworks were guaranteed. This is how Kim Jong-un makes his wretched subjects feel good about themselves, and about

The US and South Korea have both lost patience. Ominously for Kim, even China is
him. What is new this time is the fierce reaction.

fed up. The US Congress, with rare speed and bipartisan unanimity – though no fruit hangs lower than North Korea –
passed a tough new bilateral sanctions bill. UN sanctions, previously weak to ensure Chinese and Russian support, are much
more severe this time. The Philippines swiftly impounded two North Korean vessels; Chinese
ports are turning away others. South Korea has shut the Kaesong industrial complex – the last inter-Korean joint venture left from the “sunshine” era of greater political and
commercial contact. The US and South Korea stage large and lengthy joint war games every spring. This year’s, Foal
Eagle, which began on 7 March and continues until 30 April, has been beefed up to be the biggest ever. Though avowedly a defensive exercise, this includes rehearsals for Oplan 5015, which envisages attacking
North Korea’s nuclear sites and “decapitating” the top leadership. Not to defend Kim’s appalling and reckless regime, but you can see why he is unnerved. He never expected so robust a reaction to routine
provocations. No doubt he deserves it. But will backing him into a corner bring him to heel? Or might it backfire, prompting him to lash out? As the distinguished expert Andrei Lankov put it, North Korea now has

We have been here before, and survived; 2013 saw a spring of North Korean sabre-
nothing to lose.

rattling, for no clear reason, which ended as suddenly as it began. In fresh tensions last August, shots were fired across the
 Obamacare DA
Biomedical security causes bioimperialism – Every pathogen must be
neutralized at the expense of the foreign other
Terry 17. Jennifer, Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California,
Irvine; Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz, History of Consciousness. “Attachments To
War: Biomedical Logics And Violence In Twenty-First-Century America.” Duke University Press,
Durham and London, November, 2017.
Chapter 4 focuses on pathogens used in war and confronts a situation in which the bodies of soldiers are not ultimately exceptional.
Instead, in the face of imminent and emergent pathogens, all bodies are conceived as
potentially threatened or threatening, and some more threatening than others. Ordinary
people become attached to war through a terrified sense of being quietly and covertly
attacked at the micro level by new and more virulent mutating germs, viruses, and toxins,
whether by intentional acts or accidental exposure. Bodies are in this sense potentially both
targets and weapons—victims and vectors—in the apocalyptic framing of ominous doom.
War is waged on, through, and with microscopic pathogens. Panic is a marketing tool. Fear is
an investment stimulator for biotechnology companies developing products to detect, treat,
and contain imminent and predicted biological threats. Counterterror biotechnical strategies
are speculative in two main ways: seeing into the future is a central dynamic of the emerging
global health apparatus, where threat detection and risk assessment have taken on
apocalyptic proportions. Making bets on what products may be most effective in containing
and countering emergent pathogenic agents involves financial speculation on not yet existing
but absolutely necessary biotechnology. There is no territorial or temporal limit to the new
bio-imperialism emanating out of the U.S. state’s investment in securing life against biological
threats. Life must be secured on a global scale in the name of domestic defense, a planetary
project driven by fearful intuitions and end-of-the-world scenarios. National security,
warfare, and biomedical logics form a nexus in which deliberate violence—war—is bound up
with far-reaching aspirations about improving life. Biomedical logics associate medicine with
an ethic of care . As such, when they are mobilized in domestic policing or in imperial military
operations, they function to obscure the causes and effects of violence. This obfuscation accounts for
some of the ways attachments to war manifest: an affective investment in care resides at the heart
of the biomedicine-war nexus . Discourses of care authorize security measures that divide the
beneficial from the deleterious, the healthy from the pathological, and those who deserve
security from those who threaten it, at home and in overseas military interventions.
Biomedical logics form part of the nation’s arsenal and an integral part of its surveillance
apparatus, organized around the tropes of defense and security. They gain considerable
momentum when fear, dread, and xenophobic paranoia expand the militarization of
everyday life in the name of homeland security. They operate in allegorical renderings in which
warfare and mechanisms aimed at ensuring national security are conceived as medical
operations. Within these allegories biomedical logics serve as epistemological tools—devices
for thinking—used by military strategists to draw up battle plans and to carry out
counterinsurgency operations in imperial occupations . They play an important role in the destroy-and-
build dynamics through which new disciplinary regimes are imposed upon occupied
communities. Military strategists exploit medicine’s ethic of care to carry out covert
operations that actually undermine the health and security of the very people the operations
are claiming to liberate. Biomedical logics rationalize violence and, through their association
with an ethic of care, attach people to war.

Obamacare doesn’t solve disease and makes it worse – aggregate data and
research
Katebi 17 (Charlie Katebi – health policy analyst based, 4-20-2017, "Obamacare May Increase
Doctor Visits, But Isn't Making Anyone Healthier," Federalist,
http://thefederalist.com/2017/04/20/obamacare-may-increase-doctor-visits-isnt-making-
anyone-healthier/)

a new study published in

Ever since President Donald Trump won the White House, Democrats, interest groups, and even some Republicans have argued that rolling back Obamacare would harm the health of millions. But

the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests Obama’s healthcare law does little to
actually improve patient’s health outcomes. The research shows that while Obamacare
expanded patient access to doctors, nurses, and hospitals, it’s provided little-to-no actual
health benefits . The authors analyzed data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, an annual medical survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control. After two years of
observations, survey respondents reported they enjoyed greater access to health insurance,
primary care, and routine check-ups. Yet the authors observed almost zero overall
improvement in physical health after the patients got covered by Obamacare. Other studies
have come to similar conclusions. After Oregon expanded their Medicaid program through a
lottery in 2008, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compared the health
of individuals selected to enroll in Medicaid versus those who remained uninsured . After two years, they observed

But they saw no improvement in blood pressure,

Medicaid recipients visited the doctor more, utilized more preventive care, and consumed more prescription drugs.

cholesterol, or blood sugar relative to the uninsured. Medicaid enrollees even visited the
emergency room more frequently Health Spending Doesn’t Guarantee Good Health . As these studies demonstrate,

But health statisticians estimate medical care only determines

patients will indeed take advantage of their expanded healthcare coverage.

around 11 percent of one’s health. By contrast, individual behavior, personal circumstances, and
genetics are far greater determinants of personal health. Health insurance can play an important
role in protecting individuals against the crushing financial burdens of rare, catastrophic health
care episodes But Obamacare has pushed health insurance above and beyond this vital role
. , by

mandating insurers cover a comprehensive list of routine “essential health benefits.” These include doctor’s visits, preventive care, pediatric services, and more. This misguided push by government planners to subsidize comprehensive insurance comes at an
enormous cost to taxpayers. In 2016, the federal government spent an estimated $110 billion expanding coverage through Obamacare’s insurance subsidies and Medicaid expansion. And over the next deca de, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the

healthcare law will spend an additional $1.9 trillion on health insurance of little value to patients. Increasing Enrollment Hurts Needy Patients Funding
artificially-comprehensive insurance also hurts patients Ever since the federal government .

began offering states preferential funding to expand Medicaid to relatively healthy able-bodied
adults, states have diverted resources away from caring for the truly needy. Nearly 600,000 individuals with mental illnesses,
developmental disabilities, and traumatic brain injuries sit on waiting lists across the country for home and community-based services. After Arkansas expanded Medicaid to 300,000 able bodied adults, their waiting list for disabled patient services grew 25 percent.
Seventy-nine children and adults died waiting for care. Fortunately, reform-minded policy makers want to return health insurance to its traditional role. The American Health Care Act promises to end Obamacare’s requirement that states cover routine health
benefits for every Medicaid recipient. Without these mandated benefits, states will be free to shift able-bodied Medicaid recipients into inexpensive catastrophic coverage and redirect Medicaid funding towards truly needy beneficiaries. The AHCA would also let

private health insurers offer less comprehensive coverage without essential benefits .
No bioterror impact
Revill ’17 [Dr. James Revill, Research Fellow with the Harvard Sussex Program at SPRU, Past as
Prologue? The Risk of Adoption of Chemical and Biological Weapons by Non-State Actors in the
EU, European Journal of Risk Regulation, 8 (2017), pp. 626–642,
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/6B824CDE0E25FD86AC3D0BD07822A743/S1867299X17000356a.pdf/div-
class-title-past-as-prologue-the-risk-of-adoption-of-chemical-and-biological-weapons-by-non-
state-actors-in-the-eu-div.pdf]

[t]he complexity of
The second factor is “the perceived complexity of the innovation in terms of adoption and use”.40 This is important in the innovation literature, as Rogers remarked, “

an innovation, as perceived by members of a social system, is negatively related to its rate of adoption”.41 Several scholars of
terrorist innovation have also highlighted the issue of complexity;42 or, as Cragin et al have stated, “[h]ow simple or complex a
technology appears affects perceptions of how risky it will be to adopt.”43 In most cases terrorist groups appear to have largely opted for

the simplest pathway towards the achievement of their goals and the weapons used tend to be
vernacular, functional devices drawing on local and readily-available materials, rather than
sophisticated, “baroque” technologies . This is certainly the case with IEDs, the history of which is characterised largely by incremental innovations – although
nevertheless frequently effective ones – with many means of delivery recycled from the past.44 Complexity can therefore be seen as important in the adoption of technology by terrorists generally, but is perhaps
particularly acute in the case of CBW technology. Some CBW can be relatively simple: “chlorine-augmented, vehicle-borne IEDs,” as employed by Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) from 2006 to 2007 are not sophisticated
weapons.45 Attacks on chemical production facilities, an apparent tactic of Serbian forces in the early to mid-1990s,46 employed relatively simple technologies – specifically explosives – with toxicity a secondary
by-product. Direct contamination of food,47 drink48 or healthcare products49 does not require particularly sophisticated technology for the purposes of delivery – although may require some considerable skill to
culture and scale-up a biological agent – and has been a common approach in European CBW incidents.50 Similarly, the contamination of water systems, something familiar to Europe,51 can also be relatively
easily attempted. However, in most cases such methods of dissemination have generated results that are far short of the “mass destruction” that CBW are associated with, although this does not mean such a

mass casualty attacks still

possibility can be ignored by those working on public health preparedness. Although some relatively simple approaches could cause significant harm,

require considerable expertise, something particularly acute in the context of biological

weapons.52 The most effective route to weaponising biology is arguably through the process of aerosolising
agents, something recognised mid-way through the last century as opening up the theoretical possibility of using biological weapons on a gigantic scale.53 However, realising such
theoretical potential is difficult and it took states decades to develop more predictable
biological weapon s,54 and even then such weapons were acutely vulnerable to environmental
factors .55 For non-state groups such complexity has proven a significant barrier to CBW
development. By means of an example, one of the best-resourced biological weapons programs, that of Aum
Shinrikyo, failed variously because the group acquired the wrong strain, contaminated
fermenters and were faced with insurmountable production and dissemination difficulties.56
There are of course exceptions, such as the 2001 anthrax Letter Attacks in the US. However, if one accepts
the conclusions of the FBI that this sophisticated attack with aerosolised anthrax in the US postal system was perpetrated
by a US biodefence researcher, Dr Bruce Ivins,57 it is an exception that proves the rule . To
circumvent the difficulties with aerosolisation, arguably one could use human-to-human transmissible biological
agents as part of a suicide bioterror operation. There are good reasons for concern over how crude suicide bioterrorists could employ such a tactic. However, the use of highly

contagious agents is also poorly predictable and would have to deal with social factors, such as
the “spatial contact process among individuals”, which can spell “out the difference between large-scale epidemics and abortive ones”.58 The
counter to this argument is the growing access to data and the changing human geography of
the life sciences. Some 83% of European households reportedly are online, effectively allowing access to what is a growing
body of available data on CBW, including so-called bioterrorist “recipes” and “blueprints” that are
available in both mainstream scientific as well as more subversive literatures online. It is also clear that there is a changing human geography in European life sciences (for peaceful purposes), with the emergence

This is compounded by
of 30 DIY-bio groups located in Europe59 and some 80 European teams in the international Genetically Engineered Machines (IGEM) competition in 2016.60

reports that groups such as Daesh have deliberately sought to recruit foreign fighters “including
some with degrees in physics, chemistry, and computer science, who experts believe have the ability to manufacture lethal weapons
from raw substances”.61 Whilst it would be unwise to ignore such developments, there is a need for caution in looking at the extent to
which new technologies and geographies will facilitate the adoption of chemical and
biological weapons by groups seeking to target European countries. First, data is not information, and information is not
knowledge, let alone the tacit knowledge required for CBW .62 In many cases a degree of determination
and dedication will be required merely to separate online fantasy from fact and identify
operationally useful information (of relevance to the European context) from nonsense (or information pertinent to contexts other than Europe). Second, with new
technologies there is the potential for such tools to enable some, but certainly not all, actors, and even then new technologies bring new challenges.

CRISPR, gene editing technology is currently seen as a particular source of promise and peril, which purportedly enables “even
largely untrained people to manipulate the very essence of life”.63 As much may be technically true, yet “untrained
people” would nonetheless require some guidance in identifying suitable areas of genetic
structures to manipulate. Moreover, CRISPR would only get aspiring weaponeers so far, with the
process of culturing, scaling-up and weaponisation still requiring considerable attention and
interdisciplinary skills, typically generated through “large interdisciplinary teams of scientists,
engineers, and technicians ”,64 in order to be effective . Indeed, for all the progress in science and
technology, biological weapons are still not used, in part, because of the complexity of such
weapons; and the chemical weapons that are used today are largely the same as the chemical weapons of 100 years ago. As Robinson noted “It remains the case today that, in the design of CBW,
increasingly severe technological constraint sets in as the mass-destruction end of the spectrum is approached: the greater and more assured the area-

effectiveness sought for the weapon, the greater the practical difficulties of achieving it”.65
1AR