Death Cult Kritik

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Death Cult K
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The affs invocation of death impacts is necrophilia, a blind obsession with body counts that ends in extinction. Vote neg to reject death impactsthis is a gateway issueif they win death impacts are good, the rest of the 1NC applieswe wont cross-apply to prove links Erich Fromm 64, PhD in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922, psychology prof at MSU in the 60s, Creators and
Destroyers, The Saturday Review, New York (04. January 1964), pp. 22 -25 People are aware of the possibility of nuclear war; they are aware of the destruction such a war could bring with it--and yet they seemingly make no effort to avoid it. Most of us are puzzled by this behavior because we start out from the premise that people love life and fear death. Perhaps we should be less puzzled if we questioned this premise. Maybe there are many people who are indifferent to life and many others who do not love life but who do Wlove death. There is an orientation which we may call love of life (biophilia); it is the normal orientation
among healthy persons. But there is also to be found in others a deep attraction to death which, following Unamuno's classic speech made at the University of Salamanca (1938), I call necrophilia. It is the attitude which a Franco general, Milln Astray, expressed in the slogan "Long live death, thus provoking Unamunos protest against this "necrophilous and senseless cry." Who is a n ecrophilous person? He is one who is attracted to and fascinated by all that is not alive, to all that is dead; to corpses, to decay, to feces, to dirt. Necrophiles are those people who love to talk about sickness, burials, death. They come to life precisely when they can talk about death. A clear example of the pure necrophilous type was Hitler. He was fascinated by destruction, and the smell of death was sweet to him. While in the years of success it may have appeared that he wanted only to destroy those whom he considered his enemies, the days of the Gtterdmmerung at the end showed that his deepest satisfaction lay in witnessing total and absolute destruction: that of the German people, of those around him, and of himself. The necrophilous dwell in the past, never in the future. Their feelings are essentially sentimental; that is, they nurse the memory of feelings which they had yesterday--or believe that they had. They are cold, distant, devotees of "law and order." Their values are precisely the reverse of the values we connect with normal life; not life, but death excites and satisfies them. If one wants to understand the influence of men like Hitler and Stalin, it lies precisely in their unlimited capacity and willingness to kill. For this they' were loved by the necrophiles. Of the rest, many were afraid of them and so preferred to admire, rather than to be aware of, their fear. Many others did not sense the necrophilous quality of these leaders and saw in them the builders, saviors, good fathers. If the necrophilous leaders had not pretended that they were builders and protectors, the number of people attracted to them would hardly have been sufficient to help them seize power, and the number of those repelled by them would probably soon have led to their downfall. While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the necrophilous principle is all that which does not grow, that which is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to
approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. All living processes, feelings, and thoughts are transformed into things. Memory, rather than experience--having, rather than being--are what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object--a flower or a person--only if he possesses it; hence, a threat to his
possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. That is why we find the paradoxical reaction that he would rather lose life than possession, even though, by losing life, he who possesses has ceased to exist. He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life. He is deeply afraid of life, because it is disorderly and uncontrollable by its very nature. The woman who wrongly claims to be the mother of the child in the story of Solomon's judgment is typical of this tendency; she would rather have a properly divided dead child than lose a living one. To the necrophilous person justice
means correct division, and they are willing to kill or die for the sake of what they call, justice. "Law and order" for them are idols, and everything that threatens law and order is felt as a satanic attack against their supreme values. The necrophilous person is attracted to darkness and night. In mythology and poetry (as well as in dreams) he is
attracted to caves, or to the depth of the ocean, or depicted as being blind. (The trolls in Ibsen's Peer Gynt are a good example.) All that is away from or directed against life attracts him. He wants to return to the darkness {23} of the womb, to the past of inorganic or subhuman existence. He is essentially oriented to the past, not to the future, which he hates and fears. Related to this is his
craving for certainty. But life is never certain, never predictable, never controllable; in order to make life controllable, it must be transformed into death; death, indeed, is the only thing about life that is certain to him.
The necrophilous person can often be recognized by his looks and his gestures. He is cold, his skin looks dead, and often he has an expression on his face as though he were smelling a bad odor. (This expression could be clearly seen in Hitler's face.) He is orderly and obsessive. This aspect of the necrophilous person has been demonstrated to the world in the figure of Eichmann. Eichmann was fascinated by order and death. His supreme values were obedience and the proper functioning of the organization. He transported Jews as he would have transported coal. That they were human beings was hardly within the field of his vision; hence, even the problem of his having hated or not hated his victims is irrelevant. He was the perfect bureaucrat who had transformed all life into the administration of things. But examples of the necrophilous character are by no means to be found only among the inquisitors, the Hitlers and the Eichmanns. There are any number of individuals who do not have the opportunity and the power to kill, vet whose necrophilia expresses itself in other and (superficially seen) more harmless ways. An example is the mother who will always be interested in her child's sickness, in his failures, in dark prognoses for the future; at the same time she will not be impressed by a
favorable change nor respond to her child's joy, nor will she notice anything new that is growing within him. We might find that her dreams deal with sickness, death, corpses, blood. She does not harm the child in any obvious way, yet she may slowly strangle the child's joy of life, his faith--in growth, and eventually infect him with her own necrophilous orientation. My description may have given the impression that all the features mentioned here are necessarily found in the necrophilous person. It is true that such divergent features as the wish to kill, the worship of force, the attraction to death and dirt, sadism, the wish to transform the organic into the inorganic through "order" are all part of the same basic orientation. Yet so far as individuals are concerned, there are considerable differences with respect to the strength of these respective trends. Any one of the features mentioned here may be more pronounced in one person than in another. Furthermore, the degree to which a person is necrophilous in comparison with his biophilous aspects and the degree to which a person is aware of necrophilous tendencies and rationalizes them vary considerably from person to person. Yet the concept of the necrophilous type is by no means an abstraction or summary of various disparate behavior trends. Necrophilia constitutes a fundamental orientation; it is the one answer to life that is in complete opposition to life ; it is the most morbid and the most dangerous among the orientations to life of which man is capable . It is true perversion; while living, not life but death is loved--not growth, but destruction. The necrophilous person, if he dares to be aware of what he feels, expresses the motto of his life when he says: "Long live death!" The opposite of the necrophilous orientation is the biophilous one; its essence is love of life in contrast to love of death. Like necrophilia, biophilia is not constituted by a single trait but represents a total orientation, an entire way of being. It is manifested in a person's bodily processes, in his emotions, in his thoughts, in his gestures; the biophilous orientation expresses itself in the whole man. The person who fully loves life is attracted by the process of life in all spheres. He prefers to construct, rather than to retain. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new to the security of finding the old confirmed . He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. His approach to life is functional rather than mechanical . He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, by reason, by his example--not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things. He enjoys life and all its manifestations, rather than mere excitement. Biophilic ethics has its own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life (this is the main thesis of Albert Schweitzer, one of the great representatives of the love of life--both in his writings and in his person), and all that enhances life. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, {24} cuts it into pieces. Thus it is from the standpoint of life-ethics that the Bible mentions as the central sin of the Hebrews: "Because thou didst not serve thy Lord with joy and gladness of heart in the abundance of all things." The conscience of the biophilous person is not one of forcing oneself to refrain from evil and to do good. It is not the superego described by .Freud, a strict taskmaster employing sadism against oneself for the sake of virtue. The biophilous conscience is motivated by its attraction to life and joy; the moral effort consists in strengthening the life loving side in oneself. For this reasons the biophile does not dwell in remorse and guilt, which are, after all, only aspects of self-loathing and sadness. He turns quickly to life and attempts to do good. Spinoza's Ethics is a striking example of biophilic morality. "Pleasure," he says, "in itself is not bad but good; contrariwise, pain in itself is bad." And in the same spirit: "A
free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life." Love of life underlies the various
versions of humanistic philosophy. In various conceptual forms these philosophies are in the same vein as Spinoza's; they express the principle that the same man loves life; that man's aim in life is to be attracted by all that is alive and to separate himself from all that is dead and mechanical. The dichotomy of biophilia-necrophilia is the same as Freud's life-and-death instinct. I believe, as Freud did, that this is the most fundamental polarity that exists. However, there is one important difference. Freud assumes that the striving toward death and toward life are two biologically given tendencies inherent in all living substance that their respective strengths are relatively constant, and that there is only one alternative within the operation of the death instinct--namely, that it can be directed against the outside world or against oneself. In contrast to these assumptions I believe that necrophilia is not a normal biological tendency, but a pathological phenomenon--in fact, the most malignant pathology that exists in mail. What are we, the people of the United States today, with respect to necrophilia and biophilia? Undoubtedly our spiritual tradition is one of love of life. And not only this. Was there ever a culture with more love of "fun" and excitement, or with greater opportunities for the majority to enjoy fun and excitement? But even if this is so, fun and excitement is not the same as joy and love of life; perhaps underneath there is indifference to life, or attraction to death? To answer this question we must consider the nature of our bureaucratized, industrial,
mass civilization. Our approach to life becomes increasingly mechanical. The aim of social efforts is to produce things, and. in the process of idolatry of things we transform ourselves into commodities . The question here is not whether they are treated nicely and are well fed (things, too, can be treated nicely); the question is whether people are things or living beings. People love mechanical gadgets more than living beings. The approach to man is intellectualabstract. One is interested in people as objects, in their common properties, in the statistical rules of mass behavior, not in living individuals. All this goes together with the increasing role of bureaucratic methods. In giant centers of production, giant cities, giant countries, men are administered as if they were things; men and their administrators are transformed into things, and they obey the law of things . In a bureaucratically organized and centralized industrialism, men's tastes are manipulated so that they consume maximally and in predictable and profitable directions. Their intelligence and character become standardized by the ever-increasing use of tests, which select the mediocre and unadventurous over the original and daring .
Indeed, the bureaucratic-industrial civilization that has been victorious in Europe and North America has created a new type of man. He has been described as the "organization man" and as homo consumens. He is in addition the homo mechanicus. By this I mean a "gadget man," deeply attracted to all that is mechanical and inclined against all that is alive. It is, of course, true that man's biological and physiological equipment provides him with such strong sexual impulses that even the homo mechanicus still has sexual desires and looks for women. But there is no doubt that the gadget man's interest in women is diminishing. A New Yorker cartoon pointed to this very amusingly: a sales girl trying to sell a certain brand of perfume to a young female customer recommends it by remarking, "It smells like a new sports car." Indeed, any observer of men's behavior today will confirm that this cartoon is more than a clever joke. There are
apparently a great number of men who are more interested in sports-cars, television and radio sets, space travel, and any number of gadgets than they are in women, love, nature, food; who are more stimulated by the manipulation of non-organic, mechanical things than by life. Their attitude toward a woman is like that toward a car: you push the button and watch it race. It is not even too farfetched to assume that homo mechanicus has more pride in and is more fascinated by, devices that can kill millions of
people across a distance of several thousands of miles within minutes than he is frightened and depressed by the possibility of such mass destruction. Homo mechanicus still likes sex {25} and drink. But all these pleasures are sought for
in the frame of reference of the mechanical and the unalive. He expects that there must be a button which, if pushed, brings happiness, love, pleasure. (Many go to a psychoanalyst under the illusion that he can teach them to find the button.) The homo mechanicus becomes more and more interested in the manipulation of machines, rather than in the participation in and response to life. Hence he becomes indifferent to life, fascinated by the mechanical, and eventually attracted by death and total destruction. This affinity between the love of destruction and the love of the mechanical may well have been expressed for the first time in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto (1909). "A roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on a shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We wish to glorify war--the only health-giver of the world-militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill the contempt for woman." Briefly then, intellectualization, quantification, abstractification, bureaucratization, and reification--the very characteristics of modern industrial society--when applied to people rather than to things are not the principles of life but those of mechanics. People living in such a system must necessarily become indifferent
to life, even attracted to death. They are not aware of this. They take the thrills of excitement for the joys of life and live under the illusion that they are very much alive when they only have many things to own and to use. The lack of protest against nuclear war and the discussion of our "atomologists" of the balance sheet of total or half-total destruction show how far we have already gone into the "valley of the shadow of death."1 To
speak of the necrophilous quality of our industrial civilization does not imply that industrial production as such is necessarily contrary to the principles of life. The question is whether the principles of social organization and of life are subordinated to those of mechanization, or whether the principles of life are the dominant ones . Obviously, the industrialized world has not found thus far an answer, to the question posed here: How is it possible to create a humanist industrialism as against the bureaucratic mass industrialism that rules our lives today? The danger of nuclear war is so grave that man may arrive at a new barbarism before he has even a chance to find the road to a humanist industrialism. Yet not all hope is lost; hence we might ask ourselves whether the hypothesis developed here could in any way contribute to finding peaceful solutions. I believe it might be useful in several ways. First of all, an awareness of our pathological situation, while not yet a cure, is nevertheless a first step. If more
people became aware of the difference between love of life and love of death, if they became aware that they themselves are already far gone in the direction of indifference or of necrophilia, this shock alone could produce new and healthy reactions. Furthermore, the sensitivity toward those who recommend death might be increased. Many might see through the pious rationalizations of the death lovers and change their admiration for them to disgust. Beyond this, our hypothesis would suggest one thing to those concerned with peace and survival: that every effort must be made to weaken the attraction of death and to strengthen the attraction of life. Why not declare that there is only one truly
dangerous subversion, the subversion of life? Why do not those who represent the traditions of religion and humanism speak up and say that there is no deadlier sin than love for death and contempt for life? Why not encourage our best brains--scientists, artists, educators--to make suggestions on how to arouse and stimulate love for life as opposed to love for gadgets? I know love for gadgets brings profits to the corporations, while love for life requires fewer things and hence is less profitable. Maybe it is too late. Maybe the neutron bomb, which leaves entire cities intact, but without life, is to be the symbol of our civilization . But again, those of us who love life will not cease the struggle against necrophilia.
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Death debating causes mass violence and genocide over 80 studies prove. Solomon, Psych Brooklyn Clg, Greenberg, Psych U Ariz, & Pyszczynski, Psych U Colorado, 2K
(Current Directions in Psychological Science 9.6, Sheldon, Jeff, and Tom, Fear of Death and Social Behavior) Terror management theory posits that awareness of mortality engenders a potential for paralyzing terror, which is assuaged by cultural worldviews: humanly created, shared beliefs that provide individuals with the sense they are valuable members of an enduring, meaningful universe (self-esteem), and hence are qualified for safety and continuance beyond
death. Thus, self-esteem serves the fundamental psychological function of buffering anxiety. In support of this view, studies have shown that bolstering selfesteem reduces anxiety and that reminders of mortality intensify striving for self-esteem; this research suggests that self-esteem is critical for psychological equanimity. Cultural worldviews serve the fundamental psychological function of providing the basis for death transcendence. To the extent this is true, reminders of mortality should stimulate bolstering of ones
worldview. More than 80 studies have supported this idea, most commonly by demonstrating that making death momentarily salient increases liking for people who support ones worldview and hostility toward those with alternative worldviews. This work helps explain human beings dreadful history of intergroup prejudice and violence: The mere existence of people with different beliefs threatens our primary basis of psychological security; we therefore respond by derogation, assimilation efforts, or annihilation. Why has history been plagued by a succession of appalling ethnic cleansings? Archaeologists have found bas-reliefs from 1100 B.C. depicting Assyrian invaders practice of killing indigenous people by sticking them alive on stakes from groin to shoulder. These xenophobic propensities reached their zenith in the 20th century, when Hitlers Nazi regime perpetuated the most extensive effort at genocide in history, and have continued to resurface throughout the world in places such as Cambodia, Rwanda,
Yugoslavia, and the United States where in 1999 A.D. at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two Nazi-influenced teenagers massacred schoolmates, seemingly provoked by threats not to material well-being, but to the abstract entity known as selfesteem.
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1. Trivialization. Death debating causes an aesthetic fascination with the spectacle of death. This denies the choice to avoid death impacts. Jean Baudrillard, Dartmouth BM Hack, 93
(Symbolic Exchange and Death trans Iain Grant, p. 185-7) Pursued and censured everywhere, death springs up everywhere again. No longer as apocalyptic folklore, such as might have haunted the living imagination in certain epochs; but voided precisely of any imaginary substance, it passes into the most banal reality, and for us takes on the mask of the very principle of rationality that dominates our lives. Death is when everything
functions and serves something else, it is the absolute, signing, cybernetic functionality of the urban environment as in Jac ques Tatis film Play-Time. Man is absolutely indexed on his function, as in Kafka: the age of the civil servant is the age of a culture of death. This is the phantasm of total programming, increased predictability and accuracy, finality not only in material things, but in fulfilling desires. In a word, death is confused with the law of value and strangely with the structural law of value by which everything is arrested as a coded difference in a universal nexus of relations. This is the true face of ultra-modern death, made up of the faultless, objective, ultrarapid connection of all the terms in a system. Our true necropolises are no longer the cemeteries, hospitals, wars, hecatombs; death is no longer where we think it is, it is no longer biological, psychological, metaphysical, it is no longer even murder: our societ ies true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank spaces from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where the worlds sterilized memories are frozen. Only the dead remember everything in something like an immediate eternity of knowledge, a quintessence of the world that today we dream of burying in the form of microfilm and archives, making the entire world into an archive in order that it be discovered by some future civilization. The cryogenic freezing of all knowledge so that it can be resurrected; knowledge passes into immortality as sign-value. Against our dream of losing and forgetting everything, we set up an opposing great wall of relations, connections and information, a dense and inextricable artificial memory, and we bury ourselves alive in the fossilized hope of one day being rediscovered. Computers are the transistorized death to which we submit in the hope of survival. Museums are already there to survive all civilizations, in order to bear testimony. But to what? It is of little importance. The mere fact that they exist testifies that we are in a culture which no longer possesses any meaning for itself and which can now only dream of having meaning for someone else from a later time. Thus everything becomes an environment of death as soon as it is no longer a sign that can be transistorized in a gigantic whole, just as money reaches the point of no return when it is nothing more than a system of writing. Basically, political economy is only constructed (at the cost of untold sacrifices) or designed so as to be recognized as immortal by a future civilization, or as an instance of truth. As for religion, this is unimaginable other than in the Last Judgment, where God recognizes his own. But the Last Judgment is there already, realized: it is the definitive spectacle of our crystallized death. The spectacle is, it must be said, grandiose. From the hieroglyphic schemes of the Defense Department or the World Trade Center to the great informational schemes of the media, from siderurgical complexes to grand political apparatuses, from the megapolises with their senseless control of the slightest and most everyday acts: humanity, as Benjamin says, has everywhere become an object of contemplation to itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own
destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations [tr. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, London: Jonathan Cape: 1970], p. 244) For Benjamin, this was the very form of fascism, that is to say, a certain exacerbated form of ideology, an aesthetic perversion of politics, pushing the acceptance of a culture of death to the point of jubilation. And it is true that today the whole system of political
economy has become the finality without end and the aesthetic vertigo of productivity to us, and this is only the contrasting vertigo of death. This is exactly why art is dead: at the point of saturation and sophistication, all this jubilation has passed into the spectacle of complexity itself, and all aesthetic fascination has been monopolized by the system as it grows into its own double (what else would it do with its gigantic towers, its satellites, its giant computers, if not double itself as signs?). We are all victims of production become spectacle, of the aesthetic enjoyment [jouisseance], of delirious production and reproduction, and we are not about to turn our backs on it, for in every spectacle there is the immanence of the catastrophe. Today, we have made the vertigo of politics that Benjamin denounces in fascism, its perverse aesthetic enjoyment, into the experience of production at the level of the general system. We produce the experience of a de-politicised, de-ideologised vertigo of the rational administration of things, of endlessly exploding finalities. Death is immanent to political economy, which is why the latter sees itself as immortal. The revolution too fixes its sights on an immortal objective, in the name of which it demands the suspension of death in the interests of accumulation. But immortality is always the monotonous immortality of a social paradise. The revolution will never rediscover death unless it demands it immediately. Its impasse is to be hooked on the end of political economy as a progressive expiry, whereas the demand for the end of political economy is posed right now, in the demand for immediate life and death. In any case, death and enjoyment highly prized and priced, will have to be paid for throughout political economy, and will emerge as insoluble problems on the day after the revolution. The revolution only opens the way to the problem of death, without the least chance of resolving it. In fact, there is no day after, only days for the administration of things. Death itself demands to be experienced immediately, in total blindness and total ambivalence. But is it revolutionary? If political economy is the most rigorous attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to political economy.
2. Body Counts. Death debating reduces peoples lives to numbers for debaters to consume in their game. Jean Baudrillard, Dartmouth BM Hack, 93
(Symbolic Exchange and Death trans Iain Grant, 162-3, 173-5, manpower is left deliberately in) 2. More importantly, that everyone should have a right to their life (habeas corpus habeas vitam) extends social jurisdiction over death. Death is socialized like everything else, and can no longer be anything but natural, since every other death is a social scandal: we have not done what is necessary. Is this social progress? No, it is rather the progress of the social, which even annexes death to itself. Everyone is dispossessed of their death, and will no longer be able to die as it is now
understood. One will no longer be free to live as long as possible. Amongst other things, this signifies the ban on consuming ones life without taking limits into account. In short, the
principle of natural death is equivalent to the neutralization
of life.
28 The same goes for the question of equality in death: life must be reduced to quantity (and death therefore to nothing) in order to adjust it to democracy and the law of equivalences. [Baudrillard Continues p. 173-5] The same objective that is inscribed in the monopoly of institutional violence is accomplished as easily by forced survival as it is by death: a forced life for lifes sake (kidney machines, malformed children on life-support machines, agony prolonged at all costs, organ transplants, etc.). All these procedures are equivalent to disposing of death and imposing life, but according to what ends? Those of science and medicine? Surely this is just scientific paranoia, unrelated to any human objective. Is profit the aim? No: society swallows huge amounts of profit This 'therapeutic heroism is characterised by soaring costs and 'decreasing benefits': they manufacture unproductive survivors_ Even if social security can still be analysed as 'compensation for the labour force in the interests of capital, this argument has no purchase here_ Nevertheless: the system is facing the same contradiction here as with the death penalty. it overspends on the prolongation of life because this system of values is essential to the strategic equilibrium of the whole; economically: however, this overspending unbalances the whole_ What is to be done? An economic choice becomes necessary, where we can see the outline of euthanasia as a semi-official doctrine or practice_ We choose to keep 30 per cent of the uraemics in France alive (36 per cent in the USA!). Euthanasia is already everywhere, and the ambiguity of making a humanist demand for it (as with the 'freedom' to abortion) is striking: it is inscribed in the middle to long term logic of the system. All this tends in the direction of an increase in social control. For there is a clear objective behind all these apparent contradictions: to ensure control over the entire range of life and death. From birth control to death control, whether we execute people or compel their survival (the prohibition of dying is the caricature, but also the logical form of progressive tolerance), the
essential thing is that the decision is withdrawn from them: that their life and their death are never freely theirs, but that they live or die
according to a social visa. It is even intolerable that their life and death remain open to biological chance, since this is still a type of freedom. Just as morality commanded you shall not kill', today it commands: 'You shall not die', not in any old way. anyhow, and only if the law and medicine permit. And if your death is conceded you, it will still be by order . In short: death proper has been abolished to make room for death control and euthanasia strictly speaking, it is no longer even death, but something completely neutralised that comes to be inscribed in the rules and calculations of equivalence: rewriting-planning-programming-system. It must be possible to operate death as a social service, integrate it like health and disease under the sign of the Plan and Social Security. This is the store of 'motel-suicides' in the
USA, where, for a comfortable sum, one can purchase one's death under the most agreeable conditions (like any other consumer good); perfect service, everything has been foreseen, even trainers who give you back your appetite for life, after which they kindly and conscientiously send the gas into your room, without torment and without meeting any apposition. A service operates these motelsuicides, quite rightly paid (eventually reimbursed?). Why did death not become a social service when: like everything else: it is functionalised as individual and computable consumption in social input and output?
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1. Double-Bind. Either severs death impacts or doesnt solve. Makes the aff a moving target and destroys negative strategy. 2. Severance destroys accountability. Sandra Harris, Prof Emeritus Nottingham Trent, Karen Grainger, Lect Communications Sheffield Hallam, & Louise Mullany, Linguist U Nottingham, 6 (Discourse Society 17, The pragmatics of political apologies)
In reply to an audience member who responded to this statement by Patricia Hewitt by shouting You havent, and the prolonge d applause for another woman who argued that Mr Blairs conference apology really meant That is saying Im able to apologize but Im not actually apologising, Ms Hewitt made the following statement to the Question Time audience: I certainly want to say that all of us, from the Prime Minister down, all of us who were involved in making an incredibly difficult decision are very sorry and do apologize for the fact that that information was wrong but I dont think we were wrong to go in. It was primarily these words which sparked off the very considerable public debate and controversy which followed. Major newspapers headlined Ms Hewitts apology the next day; a member of the Government appeared on the Radio 4 early morning Today programm e; clips from Question Time appeared on the news the next evening; BBC News invited its listeners worldwide to respond by expressing their views as to whether Patricia Hewitt was right to apologise online; Michael Howard (the then Leader of the Opposition) further demanded an apology from the Prime Minister in Parliament the following week in Prime Ministers Question Time (13 October 2004). At a time when it had become increasingly clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and the Prime
Ministers decision to go to war in Iraq was being undermined by arguments not so much concerning the validity of intelligence reports but as to how they were interpreted and used by the Government, it is interesting that the controversy should centre not only on the increasing demand for a political apology but on the substance and nature of that apology. If we look at what Ms Hewitt actually said, she uses both of the explicit Ifid words, i.e.
sorry (intensified) and apologise. She emphasizes by way of explanation that the decision to go to war was an incredibly difficult one and that the [intelligence] information was wrong. Moreover, she also in her statement assumes some kind of collective responsibility; her apology is on behalf not only of the Prime Minister but of all of us who were involved. Thus, on the surface, this looks very like an apology, and, indeed, it was widely reported in the media as the first direct apology to be made by a sen ior member of the Government. It is interesting to note how The Daily Telegraph (9/10/04: 10), for example, defines such a speech act. Miss Hewitt issued her direct apology, using the word sorry, contrasting this usage with Mr Blair and other ministers, who have studiously avoided using the word sorry in this context. Downing Street, on the other hand, claimed that Ms Hewitt was not saying anything that Mr Blair had not said already, i.e. All she was doing was echoing precisely what the Prime Minster had said, which is, of co urse, that we regret the fact that some information was wrong (cited in The Daily Telegraph, 9/10/04 ). In a sense, Downing Street is right. In terms of the taxonomy of the strategies which constitute an apology as an identifiable speech act, Ms Hewitt has used both the explicit Ifid words, but her collective responsibility is a spurious one, since it relates to an offence committed (implicitly) by the intelligence services (producing wrong information) rather than the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister. Hence, the Ifid sorry becomes necessarily sorry as regret, as the Downing Street statement which followed Hewitts apology makes explicit. Because sorry as
regret carries no acceptance of responsibility or accountability, the offence becomes an implicit part of the explanation, even a justification for an incredibly difficult decision. Reparation, forbearance,
absolution are not appropriate in such circumstances. Moreover, Ms Hewitt concludes her apology with a statement (but I dont think we were wrong to go in) which contradicts the demand made by the questioner, i.e. that the Prime Mi nister should apologize for taking the British nation to war in Iraq. However, though nearly all forms of media who report the Question Time encounter refer to Hewitts statement as an apology, thus at least implicitly categorizing it as such, most of them do call into question in various ways its nature and substance. The many viewers who responded to BBC News are even more critical and also, perhaps surprisingly, more discerning, despite the fact that the invitation was headlined: Ms Hewitt is the fi rst senior member of the government to make a direct apology for the intelligence failings and the question worded as Was Patricia Hewitt right to apologise? Does the apology draw a line u nder the debate over WMD?, all of which accept as a presupposition that an apology has been made. The most frequent question raised by both the press and viewers has to do with accountability, i.e. that a proper apology involves the acceptance of personal respons ibility for the offence by the apologizer. Hence, Patricia Hewitts apology is faulty both because shes apologizing for something for which she bears no responsibility (What does Patricia Hewitt have to do with the security services?, as one viewer asks) and for the wrong offence, i.e. that it was the Prime Ministers misrepresentation of the intelligence reports, not the intelligence reports in themselves, which was wrong (I asked him [the Prime Minister] very specifically about the way in which he misrepresented the intelligence that he received to the country. Why can he not bring himself to say sorry for that? Michael Howard in the House of Commons, 13 October 2004). Both the press and large numbers of viewers, like Michael Howard, question the acceptability of Hewitts remarks on these grounds. Perhaps partly because Hewitts apology comes to exemplify what is seen as the failure of a number of leading politicians to accept accountability, viewers, like the press, also question the ultimate significance of political apologies which appear to be unconnected with meaningful action, both in terms of rectifying the damage caused by the offence (An apology wont bring back the lives of the servicemen lost, nor the civilians, nor rectify the damage, nor pay back the 5bn cost, nor call off the insurgents and terrorists, nor free Ken Bigley BBC News, World Edition 09/10/04) and as an indication of the (lack of) seriousness of the politicians sense of remorse (The only apology that I would accept is the apology of resignation BBC News, World Edition 09/10/04). Examining the controversy which followed Ms Hewitts Question Time statement has highlighted the complexity of political apologies in relationship to t he interpersonal types usually explored in the apology literature or at least has demonstrated that different types of complexity are involved. First of all, it is clear that the use of one of the two explicit Ifids (sorry and apologize) appear to be cruc ial according to the
judgements/evaluations of both the press and viewers in order to categorize what a politician says as an apology. The widespread categorization of Patricia Hewitts statement by the press as the first direct apology by a senior minister appears to relate to her use of these Ifids. Tony Blairs conference statement, on the other hand (I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I cant, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam) is ambiguous in its use of can as to whether that speech act is actually being performed, and the clear emphasis is, in any case, on his refusal to apologize for the act cited in the latter half of the sentence. Indirection in a political apology is likely to be perceived negatively as evasion and shiftiness. Second, there are clearly disputes over who should apologize; hence, the reaction of much of the press and many viewers who write in online that Patricia Hewitt is not the appropriate person to apologize for something for which she had minimal or no responsibility. There is also the question of the offence itself, which in the Question Time challenge by the studio audience is related to the decision to go to war in Iraq, but in the apology becomes that the information provided by the intelligence services was wrong. And, perhaps most significant, to whom is the apology being made? Who are the victim/s? Unlike Mr Blairs apology for the injustice to those wrongly convicted for the IRA pub bombings , where the victims are named, there are no victims indicated in Ms Hewitts apology. The implication in the studio audience challenge is that it is the British people to whom an apology for the decision to go to war in Iraq should be addressed, for having been misled, but the implications are probably even wider than that. (If there is an implicit meaning in the apology statement itself, it is that the Government itself has been victimized by having been provided with faulty intelligence, especially since Ms Hewitt clearly states that the act of going to war itself was not wrong.) In addition, Ms Hewitts statement is made in the immediate context in answer to a question raised by a member of the studio audience, but the reaction of that audience certainly demonstrates that they regard the apology a s directed at the entire audience rather than at the specific individual. Ms Hewitt knew that her statement was also being heard by the unseen wider audience who are watching the programme and must have anticipated that it would be taken up by the press, repeated and published for a wider public yet. Who the victim/s are and the nature of the offence are clearly disputed territory which the apology does little to clarify. Clearly, the political stakes for the Prime Minister are incredibly high, and whatever his current beliefs about Iraq or the demands of a substantial number of the British public for an apology for taking the country to war on the basis of faulty (or misrepresented) intelligence, Tony Blair is unlikely ever to issue a political apology which would satisfy the basic conditions of those demands according to viewer judgements (an Ifid token + an expression which indicates acceptance of responsibility and/or blame for wrongdoing) or to resign (absolution).1 Conclusions We would agree with Luke (1997) that the apology has become a form of political speech with increasing significance and power (p. 344), and across the political spectrum on a global scale has, arguably, become one of the most prominent of public speech acts. Even though it may not as yet be the age of the apology, the relative lack of interest in the political apology as a generic type of discourse by sociolinguistics and pragmatics is both surprising and unwarranted, since they demonstrate some revealing differences as well as significant areas of overlap with the type of interpersonal and individual apologies which have been the primary focus of the now considerable amount of apology research. For example, much of the existing literature on apologies, following Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), adopts a face-needs perspective, seeing the apology as basically a negative politeness strategy which is aimed mainly at the redress of Face Threatening Acts (see Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987; Goffman, 1971; Holmes, 1995, 1998). It is certainly the case that many types of political apologies do represent a potentially serious loss of face for politicians, which may be why they are frequently so eager to apologize for things for which they cannot be held accountable. But to approach political apologies by means of face-oriented definitions is often not particularly helpful and highlights some of the important differences with the interpersonal data on which such definitions are most often based. Holmes (1998), for instance, defines apologies as follows: An apology is a speech act addressed to Bs face-needs and intended to remedy an offense for which A takes responsibility, and thus to restore equilibrium between A and B (where A is the apologizer, and B is the person offended). (p. 204) Clearly, this is a definition which assumes that it is two individuals who are involved in the process of apologizing and that addressing the face-needs of the person offended is the primary motive for the speech act, with the restoring of equilibrium its main goal. Such definitions do not take us very far in understanding the significance and issues raised by political apologies. Given the magnitude of some of the offences we have considered, describing what the apology addresses as the fa ce-needs of the person offended seems neither accurate nor en lightening. To claim that it is the face-needs of Samantha Roberts which are in some way damaged or that she is the person offended seems somehow to trivialize events which are of a very serious nature. Nor would these terms be very helpful in describing the motives held by the various persons and groups who call on the British Prime Minister to apologize for taking the country to war in Iraq or for allegedly misrepresenting the intelligence reports to members of Parliament. Moreover, the process of restoring equilibrium is again likely to be a much more complex process if it can be achieved at all than is the case when apologies are negotiated between individuals acting in a private capacity. Indeed, its hard to imagine how Robinsons (2004) notion of a preferred response (one which offers absolution to the apologizer rather than merely accepting the apology) could possibly be applicable in the case of most political apologies. Even in the instance of fairly low level offences such as the British diplomat who described Nottingham as a more dangerous place than Saudi Arabia, city officials agreed to accept the apology rather than to offer absolution to the offender. However, Holmes emphasis on the apologizers accepting responsibility for the offence and Robinsons argument that Apologizing is an essential component of the maintenance of social harmony because it communica tes awareness and acceptance of moral responsibility for offensive behavior (2004: 292) both foreground the essential sen se of morality which generates the need for such apologies and which goes well beyond face-needs. What Samantha Roberts demands is an apology from the Minister for Defence which explicitly accepts his own moral responsibility for the actions which led to h er husbands death. From both the press and viewers, Ms Hewitts political apology produces responses which are concerned essentially with morality,
i.e. what is right or wrong, what the politician/s should or should not do; and these responses most often centre on the question of accepting personal responsibility. Eelen (2001: 249) argues in conjunction with new directions in politeness theory that morality is
no longer regarded as a fixed higher-order set of rules that determine the individuals behaviour, but as something that people do to or with each other. This seems to us an arguable point but one which is overstated. Though what constitutes an acceptable political apology may not be based on a fixed higher-order set of rules, there does seem to exist a cultural consensus that is morally grounded and goes beyond the merely individual response, i.e. it is right for a politician to offer an apology in which s/he explicitly accepts responsibility for his/her own acts and wrong to attempt to evade that responsibility. This is not to deny that the political apology is a contested concept or that it not only arises out of discourse struggle but generates further struggle and controversy. It is that very discourse struggle which is, indeed, part of their interest for linguists and which is reflected in the substantial amount of media coverage and public debate that political apologies often provoke. However, once again, we would argue that apologies, nearly always regarded in apology research as a quintessential politeness strategy, are more than an argumentative social tool with which the individual can accomplish things (Eelen, 2001: 249) and also that political apologies are perceived as more than a politeness strategy. It is interesting that the British data on political apologies which we have examined contains no references at all to the question of (im)politeness, though that too frequently evokes impassioned public debate. Like Eelen, Mills (2003) also regards apologies as a contested concept and stresses the importance of evaluation. Apologies are often composed of elements which cannot be recognised easily by eithe r
interactants or analysts as unequivocal apologies (p. 111). Hence, apologies cannot be considered to be a formal linguistic entity (p. 222) but rather a judgement made about someones linguistic performance (p. 112). This, again, is probably true in a genera l sense, and as we maintained earlier, apologies are unlikely ever to be defined precisely as a fixed set of semantic components. However, once again, though the evaluative component is highly significant, the responses (from both media and public) to the political apologies in our data are more than merely individuals making disparate judgements about someones linguistic performance. They do instead, we would argue, reflect a set of cultural expectations as to what constitutes a valid apology as a formal speech act, and, as such, contain also a quite considerable degree of predictability. Indeed, it is in large measure the fact that listeners and viewers do have a sense of
what constitutes an unequivocal apology that perpetuates the discourse struggle. In contrast to many apologies between individuals, which may take a wide variety of forms and often contain a high degree of implicitness, it seems to be crucial if political apologies are to be regarded as valid by those to whom they are addressed that they are not implicit or ambiguous, i.e. that they contain an explicit Ifid (sorry and/or apologize) and that there is an (explicit) acceptance of
personal responsibility for a stated act which has been committed by the apologizer. The widely expressed cynicism with regard to political apologies which are made by major politicians long after the events concerned have occurred and for which they cannot be accountable reflects these cultural expectations, along with the clear sense that apologies are morally grounded.
Thats key to value to life and education. Jerry Blitefield, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, 6
(Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9.4, Book Reviews) Wayne Booth, who passed away in October 2005, has long been rhetoric's most ardent ambassador, having pressed his claim for
rhetoric's value in the halls of literature, science, and philosophy. With his last book and self-described "manifesto" The Rhetoric of RHETORIC, Booth takes his message beyond the intramural back-chatter of academe and straight to the public at large. His case: "that the quality of our lives, moment by moment, depends upon the quality of our rhetoric" (171), and that the discursive, ethical, and epistemic impoverishment of contemporary democratic politics and culture results from practicing bad rhetoric, what he calls rhetrickery"dangerously, often deliberately, deceptive [rhetoric]: just plain cheating
that deserves to be exposed . . . the art of producing misunderstanding" (x). As a mend, Booth posits that by reviving rhetorical education across the board, by attuning the general population upward toward heightened rhetorical
awareness, rhetorical hucksters and cardsharpsfrom shady politicians and corporations to the shading presswould find no
truck among the people. Or at least a lot less.
2NC AT Alt Doesnt Solve

Voting neg sets a precedent for educational settings that reject the commodification of death Austin Kutscher, President of the Foundation of Thanatology and Professor Columbia University, 80
(Death & Existence, p. Foreward) Within the educational setting, interdisciplinary relationships are altering the perspectives of those who must make decisions on
the care of terminally ill patients, the members of their families, and other involved professional staff. The approaches to and expectations from therapeutic modalities are being broadened by new explorations into the ethics and values which should be automatically considered whenever human lives are being cared for. Philosophical enlightenment adds indispensable historical clarification to scientific interventions on behalf of the dying and the bereaved. Philosophy relates death to human existence and the quality of life the essential quality of human existence itself that engages the consciences of those who would offer us humanistic medicine. Compassion and knowledge are the springs from which flow trust and faith, without which man can live only a
task is to know how and when decisions can be made, to proceed thoughtfully while making them, to distinguish between what can and cannot be done and what should and should not be done. In analyzing death, in interpreting its every significant nuance, Professor Carse advances the cause of all who delve into the meaning of life. Mere survival is not enough to provide nourishment for the soul of man. The message to be read in Philosophy and in Thanatology is the same: Life is a treasure which mankind must cherish a treasure whose value increases exponentially when one being bestows solace on and acts to give love to humankind, collectively and
most deprived and barren existence. The individually.
Voting neg solves: A. Deterrence Alfred C. Snider, Edwin Lawrence Assistant Professor of Forensics - University of Vermont, 4
(http://debate.uvm.edu/ReplyFrank.doc, date from Archive.org, article also cites 2002 articles) The challenges to the game of debate mentioned in my essay also directly address this. The critical move in debate, where debaters step outside of the traditional box to analyze the ethical issues of argumentative perspectives and to analyze the language employed in a debate belies this concern. Almost all American debaters know that making a racist or sexist comment in a debate is one of the easiest ways to lose a ballot, as the opposing team is likely to make that the only issue in the debate, and the judge will make an example of you. There is no time in debate history when falsification and
fabrication of evidence has been better monitored or when the behavior of debaters as regards evidence has been better. This may be more due to the ability to check the evidence used by others, but it still is the case. This sort of ethical dimension of argument
and presentation has been made an issue in the decision. Winning at all costs could cost you the win.
B. Corrective justice Alfred C. Snider, Edwin Lawrence Assistant Professor of Forensics - University of Vermont, 84
(The National Forensic Journal, II, Fall, Ethics in Academic Debate)
Ethics concerns codes of behavior, specifically in the "ought to" or "should" sense of behavior. Duke notes that the ethics of game use is a very important issue.5 While an issue of importance should be dealt with by strict criteria in the game design process, this is not possible, since many ethical considerations cannot be anticipated during the design process and must be dealt with during the play of the game itself. In attempting to compose an ethical code for the game of debate, the options are either to state a small number of criteria which lack precision or to produce a long list of criteria which restrict the options of the participant. Almost all
philosophical disputations which attempt to determine whether a given pattern of behaviors is "ethical" or not give special attention to the particulars of the situation and the ends which are at issue. While murder is seen as
unethical behavior by most individuals, never-theless these same individuals might find it tolerable if it was committed in self-defense. Once we begin formulating ethical guidelines we are soon lost in a sea of "if. . . then" statements designed to take situational factors and the desirability of certain ends into account. What is true of general ethical guidelines is also true of ethical guidelines for debate. Recognizing that ethical considerations probably must be dealt with inside a given debate situation, it seems appropriate to opt for the course of generating a small number of generally applicable ethical standards.
2NC AT PerfCon
1. The team that starts reading death impacts should lose because it denies the other team the choice to avoid death impacts. A. Death impacts cause a race to the bottom. Deaths finality forces us to read death impacts as well or risk being outweighed. William A. Reinsmith, Prof Humanities Philadelphia Coll Pharm and Sci, 90
(Science and Spirit May, http://www.worldandi.com/public/1990/may/ns7.cfm) Numerous critics within and without the medical establishment have asked whether, in our technological age, the age-old ethic of preserving life has metamorphosed into a need to control life , to let no scent of death intrude-especially in our decision making. However, the deeper issue, which sets rigid limits to the debate, is not the need to master death or the refusal to acknowledge its existence, gut rather technological society's belief in the utter finality of death.
B. Even if we didnt read a death impact, the need to make impact comparisons forces us to talk about death once it is initially introduced. 2. No pre-meditated murder. Our link comes from the initial introduction of death impacts because it denies the choice to avoid talking about death altogether. 3. Key to education. Kutscher says gateway kritiks force multi-level thinking crucial in education. 4. Key to Strategic thinking. Gateway kritiks force the aff to think on a variety of key strategic levels. Developing that multi-level thinking is key to policy, thats Kutscher. 5. Key to Topicality. Their standard means we cant run T at the same time as engaging the case because T says debating that case is uneducational. 6. Key to CPs. Their standard means we cant run CPs to solve the case at the same time as turning the case, crushing neg strategic options and hurting best policy option. 7. Key to Perms. Their standard means the aff cant both impact turn a CP and perm it. 8. No Abuse. We said we wouldnt cross-apply to prove the link, means no strategy skew. 9. 2NR choice checks. They get the last speech to defend against only one world. 10. Time skew inevitable. We would have run another CP or T violation or disad. 11. Reject the argument, not the team. These are just reasons Death Cult is bad.
2NC AT Framework
1. No rez basis. The resolution sets a limit on the aff, not the neg. Otherwise we cant make theory arguments or topical CPs. This makes their framework arbitrary, justifying no politics framework. 2. Its what we do, not what we justify. Infinite number of frameworks is a reason to evaluate the debate on a case-by-case basis to avoid subjective determinations of what might be fair. 3. If we need a framework, ours is theirs plus the requirement that teams must defend how they debate, which includes discourse. 4. Gateway kritiks of death are key to education because they tell us how to decide to decide. Kutscher says thats crucial in educational settings. 5. Reciprocal. We allow the aff to kritik neg discourse. 6. Justifies racist discourse. Racist discourse and gendered language kritiks prove the need for the ballot as a remedy for bad rhetoric. Our K is key to education. Irving Zaretsky, Professor of Anthropology University of Chicago, 79
(Death and Existence, p. v) Of central importance in the life of every person is the confrontation of ones own mortality and thereby the development of an orientation on worldview toward life and death with which to shape the quality and content of daily conduct. Although every persons worldview is personally derived, it is not completely idiosyncratic; rather, it is culturally patterned and socially determined. Our socialization process, from infancy, provides us with only the initial raw material from which to develop our personal belief system.
Discourse kritiks key to ethics Roxanne Doty, Professor of Political Science Arizona State University, 96
(Imperial Encounters, p. 170-1)
North-South relations have been constituted as a structure of deferral. The center of the structure (alternatively white man, modern man, the United States, the West, real states) has never been absolutely present outside a system of differences. It has itself been constituted as tracethe simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself (ibid.). Because the center is not a fixed locus but a function in which an infinite number of sign substitutions come into play the domain and play of signification is extended indefinitely (Derrida 1978: 280). This both opens up and limits possibilities, generates alternative sites of meanings and political resistances that give rise to practices of reinscription that seek to reaffirm identities and relationships. The inherently incomplete and open nature of discourse makes this reaffirmation an ongoing and never finally completed project. In this study I have sought, through an engagement with various discourses in which claims to truth have been staked, to challenge the validity of the structures of meaning and to make visible their complicity with practices of power and domination. By examining the ways in which structures of meaning have been associated with imperial practices, I have suggested that the construction of meaning and the construction of social, political, and economic power are inextricably linked. This suggests an ethical dimension to making meaning and an ethical imperative that is incumbent upon those who toil in the construction of structures of meaning. This is especially urgent in North-South relations today: one does not have to search very far to find a continuing complicity with colonial representations that ranges from a politics of silence and neglect to constructions of terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, and international drug trafficking, and Southern immigration to the North as new threats to global stability and peace. The political stakes raised by this analysis revolve around the question of being able to "get beyond" the representations or speak outside of the discourses that historically have constructed the North and the South. I do not believe that there are any pure alternatives by which we can escape the infinity of traces to which Gramsci refers. Nor do I wish to suggest that we are always hopelessly imprisoned in a dominant and allpervasive discourse. Before this question can be answeredindeed, before we can even proceed to attempt an answerattention must be given to the politics of representation. The price that international relations scholarship
pays for its inattention to the issue of representation is perpetuation of the dominant modes of making meaning and deferral of its responsibility and complicity in dominant representations.
Rhetoric key to policy Cori E. Dauber, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, 1
(Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4.4, The Shots Seen 'Round the World)
The impact the Mogadishu images have had on American foreign policy is clear. But their impact is not inescapable or inevitable. It is based on the incorrect assumption that people can only read images unidirectionally. No matter how similar, no matter how powerfully one text evokes another, every image is unique. Each comes from a different historical situation, is placed within a different story, and offers an ambiguous text that can be exploited by astute commentators. Images matter profoundly, but so do their contexts and the words that accompany them. The implications of this shift in interpretation are potentially profound. Mogadishu, or the mention of a potential parallel with Mogadishu, need not be a straightjacket or a deterrent to the use of American power. Rhetoric, whether discursive or visual, has real power in the way events play out. What this article makes clear is that rhetoric (and therefore rhetorical analysis) also has power in the way policy is shaped and defined. In a recent book on the conflict in Kosovo, the authors note that when the president spoke to the nation on the night the air war began, he immediately ruled out the use of ground forces. This was done, they argue, due to fears that leaving open the possibility of ground force participation would sacrifice domestic public and congressional (and allied) support for the air war. But "publicly ruling out their use only helped to reduce Milosevic's uncertainty regarding the likely scope of NATO's military actions," 109 and possibly to lengthen the air war as a result. Yet, they report, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, "who authored the critical passage in the president's speech, maintains that 'we would not have won the war without this sentence.'" 110 It would be difficult to find more direct evidence for the profound impact and influence public rhetoric and debate have--and are understood to have--on policy, policymaking, and policymakers at the highest level. That means that rhetorical analysis can have a role to play and a voice at the table before policies are determined. Academic rhetoricians, through their choice of projects and the formats in which they publish, can stake a claim to having an important voice at the table--and they should do so.
2NC AT Dollimore
Dollimores warrants all flow neg. 1. Obsession over death. Dollimore says Baudrillard is bad because he obsesses over death. This is consistent with our kritik, which says debaters should not be obsessed with death. 2. We arent about denying death. Their cards indict Baudrillards separate and irrelevant claim that society denies death. We are making the opposite argument. We are saying it is dangerous to talk about death because its linked to desire, and their author agrees. Ramn E. Soto-Crespo, Assistant Professor of Humanistic Studies - University of Wisconsin, 2K
(Textual Practice 14.3, p. 439)
Of course, this is not the first time that such an attempt has been made, though it has not been attempted in quite these terms before. Most recently, Jonathan Dollimore has brought to our attention the various ways in which the Western tradition has dealt with loss. In his recent book, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (1998), Dollimore emphasizes the desiring relationship to
death in Western culture, arguing that death is internal rather than opposed to desire, and therefore that death motivates cultural development.2 My contribution to this extensive study lies in my attempt to accentuate a forgotten relation to
loss and its potential for praxis in psychoanalysis and Marxism, two of the major shapers of twentieth-century thought. For instance, where Dollimore sees a relationship to death, in Marx, in which death is socialized and becomes a burden to revolutionary praxis, I bring forth a relation to loss in Marx that is conducive to a possibility of praxis (p. 215). Thus this essay attempts to think an unthought loss of subjectivity through an exploration of psychoanalysis and contemporary Marxisms forgettings. I begin by elucidating the complex linkages between fantasy, loss, sexuality and subjectivity in the works of Freud, Lacan, and Laplanche and Pontalis. Second, I discuss Bruce Finks proposal for a developmental narrative of subjectivity in clinical practice, and the theoretical implications this entails. In addressing Fink, I embark upon a critique of the psychoanalytic notion of lack. This involves me in an apparently technical distinction between lack and loss, a distinction that I argue has broad political implications beyond the psychoanalytic clinic. Third, I problematize the subject of lack appropriated by post-Marxism, speci cally, in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. I conclude by introducing Marxs praxis of the subject of loss, offering an alternative rendering of Marx from those of classical, post- and Lacanian Marxism, in order to suggest a solution to some impasses of the psychoanalytic tradition.3
3. The passage they quote concludes that how we frame death does have an effect on social control. Jonathan Dollimore, Sociologist University of Sussex, 98
(Death, Desire and Loss p. 226-7)
In 1966 Marcuse added a Political Preface to Eros and Civilization, criticizing the 1955 text for its unjustified optimism. The tone is now severer and confrontational. Marcuse admits to having underestimated the emergence of new, more insidious and effective, forms of social control. He voices the frustrated sense that freedom is at once possible and impossible: liberation is the most realistic, the most concrete of all historical possibilities and at the same time the most rationally and effectively repressed the most abstract and remote possibility (p.xv). The reason for this is the democratic introjection of the masters into their subjects. No philosophy or theory can undo this. At first sight this preface takes even further the socializing of the death drive. We are told that the new political struggle is no longer between eros and thanatos, because the powers that be have eros on their side, even to the extent of protecting, perpetuating and enlarging life at least for those who comply with repression (p. xx). Yet the preface ends by evoking one of Freuds most provocative remarks about the death drive: By nature the young are in the forefront of those wh o live and fight for Eros against Death, and against a civilization which strives to shorten the detour to death while controlling the means for lengthening the detourToday the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight. (p. xxv) In the passage Marcuse here alludes to, Freud declares not only that the aim of all life is death, but that an organisms apparent resistance of death is not so much an affirmation of the desire to live but a desire to find its own way back to death. This resistance is due only to the frustration of external circumstances; rather like a river compelled to wind its way to the sea, life is a series of complicated dtours or circuitious paths to death (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 311). Marcuse seems to be saying that an oppositional politics cannot
eliminate but can only extenuate the death drive prolonging rather than shortening the detour and in doing even this it must of necessity become violent. This becomes especially significant in the context of the Third World; arguably
the optimism of the original text with regard to the elimination of scarcity, the erotics of passivity as the basis of a new reality principle, and the elimination of the need for alienated labour, was tenable only if the Third Worlds relationship with the First was i gnored. In the new grim tone is a residue of tragedy; the political struggle has necessarily partaken of the violence of the dominant order (aggression can be turned against the aggresor), and those struggling for freedom, including the philosophers of praxis, have now themselves become purveyors of Death (pp. xx, xi).
4. Their cards continually assert that death is bad. We agree. Thats why we shouldnt trivialize it.
2NC AT Beres
1. Beres says we need to discuss policy, but has no warrants for including death impacts. Our K proves death debating decreases good policymaking. 2. Beres votes neg. The paragraphs above their card proves he thinks the suppression of death impacts is a pre-requisite to meaningful policy education. Louis Rene Beres, professor of international law at Purdue University, 6/5/03
(Journal and Courier, Anarchy and international law on an endangered planet)
For us, other rude awakenings are unavoidable, some of which could easily overshadow the horrors of Sept. 11. There can be little doubt that, within a few short years, expanding tribalism will produce several new genocides and proliferating nuclear weapons will generate one or more regional nuclear wars. Paralyzed by fear and restrained by impotence, various governments will try, desperately, to deflect our attention, but it will be a vain effort. Caught up in a vast chaos from which no real escape is possible, we will learn too late that there is no durable safety in arms, no ultimate rescue by authority, no genuine remedy in science or technology. What shall we do? For a start, we must all begin to look carefully behind the news. Rejecting superficial analyses of day-to-day events in favor of penetrating assessments of world affairs, we must learn quickly to distinguish what is truly important from what is merely entertainment. With such learning, we Americans could prepare for growing worldwide anarchy not as immobilized objects of false contentment, but as authentic citizens of an endangered planet . Nowhere is it written that we people of Earth are forever, that humankind must thwart the long-prevailing trend among all planetary life-forms (more than 99 percent) of ending in extinction. Aware of this, we
suppression of purposeful fear
may yet survive, at least for a while, but only if our collective is augmented by a complementary wisdom; that is, that our personal
mortality is undeniable and that the harms done by one tribal state or terror group against "others" will never confer immortality.
This is, admittedly, a difficult concept to understand, but the longer we humans are shielded from such difficult concepts the shorter will be our time remaining. We must also look closely at higher education in the United States, not from the shortsighted stance of improving test scores, but from the urgent perspective of confronting extraordinary threats to human survival. For the moment, some college students are exposed to an occasional course in what is fashionably described as "global awareness," but such exposure usually sidesteps the overriding issues: We now face a deteriorating world
system that cannot be mended through sensitivity alone; our leaders are dangerously unprepared to deal with catastrophic deterioration; our schools are altogether incapable of transmitting the indispensable visions of planetary restructuring. To institute productive student confrontations with survival imperatives, colleges and universities must soon take great risks, detaching themselves from a time-dishonored preoccupation with "facts" in favor of grappling with true life-or-death questions. In raising these questions, it will not be enough to send some students to study in Paris or Madrid or Amsterdam ("study abroad" is not what is meant by serious global awareness). Rather, all students must be made aware - as a primary objective of the curriculum - of where we are heading, as a species, and where our limited survival alternatives may yet be discovered. There are, of course, many particular ways in which colleges and universities
could operationalize real global awareness, but one way, long-neglected, would be best. I refer to the study of international law. For a country that celebrates the rule of law at all levels, and which explicitly makes international law part of the law of the United States - the "supreme law of the land" according to the Constitution and certain Supreme Court decisions - this should be easy enough to understand. Anarchy, after all, is the absence of law, and knowledge of international law is necessarily prior to adequate measures of world order reform. Before international law can be taken seriously, and before "the blood-dimmed tide" can be halted, America's future
leaders must at least have some informed acquaintance with pertinent rules and procedures. Otherwise we shall surely witness the birth of a fully ungovernable world order, an unheralded and sinister arrival in which only a shadowy legion of gravediggers would wield the forceps.
3. Beres is a hypocritical hack. We have two cards to prove this: Louis Rene Beres, Prof Intl Law Purdue, 94 (Arizona Journal of Intl and Comparative Law, Spring)
Fear of death, to summarize, not only cripples life, it also creates entire fields of premature corpses. But how can we
be reminded of our mortality in a productive way, a way that would point to a new and dignified polity of private selves and, significantly, to fewer untimely deaths? One answer lies in the ethics of Epicurus, an enlightened creed whose prescriptions for disciplined will are essential for international stability. The creed of Epicurus is not the caricatural hedonism so falsely associated with the philosopher, but an independence of desire and a freedom from fear -- of death especially. When, therefore, in the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus maintains that pleasure is "the end," he says explicitly: [W]e do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in sensuality, as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind. For it is not continuous drinkings and revellings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit. 67 Sober reasoning, above all, turns our confidence towards death and our caution towards the fear of death. Aware that Socrates called such fears "bogies,"
Epictetus says, in Book II, Chapter I of the Discourses: What is death? A bogy. Turn it round and see what it is: you see it does not bite. The stuff of the body was bound to be parted from the airy element, either now or hereafter, as it existed apart from it before. Why then are you vexed if they are parted now? For if not parted now, they will be hereafter. Why so? That the revolution of the universe may be accomplished, for it has need of things present, things future, and things past and done with. 68 We are each "a little soul, carrying a corpse," as Marcus Aurelius says, citing Epictetus, but what sort of soul bears such a heavy burden? Is it the soul of the [*23] Platonic tradition described by Descartes as "in its nature entirely independent of the body, and in consequence that it is not liable to die with it"? 69 Such questions of metaphysics lie far beyond the purview of a political scientist -- even one who has been freed from the tyrannies of vacant empiricism -- but they must be raised before we can ask the next question: How can we best liberate citizens from the "bogy" of death in order to rescue an endangered planet from nefarious definitions of self-determination? To answer such questions we need not contrast Descartes with the Epicureans, or with Spinoza, Locke or Hume. All we need to recognize is, as Santayana notes in Volume Three of The Life of Reason, that "everything moves in the midst of death." 70 Raised by this understanding "above mortality," the triumphant soul of constantly perishing bodies acknowledges that everything, everywhere, is in flux, and that even the most enduring satisfactions are not at odds with personal transience. But let us take leave of the metaphysical, and return to the vastly more concrete realm of international affairs. What, exactly, must be done to bring individuals to the liberation offered by Santayana? Very little, if anything! "Immortal reason," Santayana notwithstanding, will not wean our minds from mortal concerns. Perhaps, over time, humankind will envisage the eternal and detach its affections from the world of flux, but that time seems to be far in the future. For now, we must rely on something else, something far less awesome and far more mundane. We must rely on an expanding awareness that States are not the Hegelian "march of God in the world," but the vicars of annihilation and that the triumph of the herd in world politics only hastens the prospect of individual death. V. DEATH, REALPOLITIK AND PLANETIZATION: CREATING AUTHENTIC SELFDETERMINATION This, then, is an altogether different kind of understanding. Rather than rescue humankind by freeing individuals from fear of death, this perspective recommends educating people to the truth of an incontestable relationship between death and geopolitics. By surrendering ourselves to States and to traditional views of self-determination, we encourage not immortality but premature and predictable extinction. It is a relationship that can, and must, be more widely understood.
And
Louis Rene Beres, Prof Intl Law Purdue, 96 (http://www.freeman.org/m_online/feb96/beresn.htm) Fear of death, the ultimate source of anxiety, is essential to human survival. This is true not only for individuals, but also for states. Without such fear, states will exhibit an incapacity to confront nonbeing that can hasten their disappearance. So it is today
with the State of Israel. Israel suffers acutely from insufficient existential dread. Refusing to tremble before the growing prospect of collective disintegration - a forseeable prospect connected with both genocide and war - this state is now unable to take the necessary steps toward collective survival. What is more, because death is the one fact of life which is not relative but absolute, Israel's blithe unawareness of its national mortality deprives its still living days of essential absoluteness and growth. For states, just as for individuals, confronting death can give the most positive reality to life itself. In this respect, a cultivated awareness of nonbeing is central to each state's pattern of potentialities as well as to its very existence. When a state chooses to block off such an awareness, a choice currently made by the State of Israel, it loses, possibly forever, the altogether critical benefits of "anxiety."
2NC AT Baudrillard Bad

1. None of these cards apply. These all criticize Baudrillards theory of simulation and symbolic exchange, not his isolated argument about death games. Make them prove their cards are actually responsive. 2. The warrant in their evidence proves you should vote neg. Their cards criticize Baudrillard for obsession with imaginary symbolic exchange. Our argument says death debating causes a similar obsession with death instead of healthy policymaking. 3. Baudrillard is right. Robert J. Antonion, U Kansas, 2K
(American Journal of Sociology, After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism)1
The idea of autoreferential culture, one of the most widely debated facets of postmodernization, holds that culture operates according to its own autonomous logic, free from modern theory's formative sociological substrates (e.g., Durkheimian association or Marxian class or value). This view emphasizes a split between the "signifier" and "signified" (i.e., symbolic codes lack shared conceptual and external referents or common meanings and objects) and consequent semiotic determination (e.g., Baudrillard 1983a, 1983b; Jameson 1984, pp. 6062, 8088; 1991; Bauman 1992, pp. 14955; Kumar 1995, pp. 10148; Eagleton 1996, pp. 1415, 12135). Extreme positions treat culture as a totally autonomous "regime of signification" (i.e., signifiers circulate in a purely contingent manner and all "real" factors, alleged as "beneath" or "behind," are "simulated"). They reduce society to an all-encompassing "cultural surface" that is unconstrained by "material" or "structural" factors. Modern theorists and many postmodernists attack this position for its radical culturalism, but they still concede that it expresses a major qualitative or postmodern shift in cultural experience that weakens the social and the ability to represent it. They see postmodern "depthlessness" as a "cultural dominant" or pervasive facet of bounded domains of the mass media, consumer culture, the arts, and certain other major parts of sociocultural life. Modern theorists theorize postmodernism as a "logic" of late capitalism, but they warn that the culture's simulated appearance subverts their own claims about its "depth" determinants (e.g., Jameson 1984, 1991; Bell 1996; Harvey 1989; Eagleton 1996). They reject arguments about total autonomy and total fragmentation, but they still contend that postmodern culture undermines audiences' capacities to grasp, assimilate, apply, or even take seriously their theories or other systematic efforts to analyze or intervene in social life. The difference between extreme and moderate positions may be less than modern theorists wish to admit. Their very heated critiques of the process reveal a fear that Baudrillard is right; that the line between TV and the rest of culture has been elided (1990).
2NC AT Censorship
Censorship is inevitable and this instance is good can discuss death whenever you want, but it becomes meaningless and counterproductive within the debate game. Butler votes neg some speech regulation is justified Fleche, Michigan Institute of Technology, 99 (Theatre Journal 51.3, muse)
Rather than offer prescriptions, Butler uses her own writing to illustrate the power of resignification. In her
rhetorical readings of Supreme Court decisions, for example, the justices' words become surprisingly rich and suggestive. She is herself an expert resignifier. Resignifying words, Butler acknowledges, does not take away their hurt. She does think that sometimes people should be prosecuted for injurious speech and that universities might need to regulate speech--but
should do so only when they have "a story to tell" about its harmful effects. She is not opposed to all speech regulation. But Excitable Speech asks whether regulation makes it easier or harder to reappropriate speech, and why we fear to take
the exciting risk of language, where a threat might also be a promise.
Butlers scholarship is awful and her politics allows violence Nussbaum, law and ethics at University of Chicago, 2/22/99 (New Republic, ebsco)
What precisely does Butler offer when she counsels subversion? She tells us to engage in parodic performances, but she warns us that the dream of escaping altogether from the oppressive structures is just a dream: it is within the oppressive structures that we must find little spaces for resistance, and this resistance cannot hope to change the overall situation. And here lies a dangerous quietism. If Butler means only to warn us
against the dangers of fantasizing an idyllic world in which sex raises no serious problems, she is wise to do so. Yet frequently she goes much further. She suggests that the institutional structures that ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society, and the continued inequality of women, will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to find pockets of personal freedom within them. "Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially." In other words: I cannot escape the humiliating
structures without ceasing to be, so the best I can do is mock, and use the language of subordination stingingly. In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change. Isn't this like saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and subverting it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance ? Yet it is a fact that the institution of slavery can be changed, and
was changed--but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval. It is also a fact that the institutional structures that shape women's lives have changed. The law of rape, still defective, has at least improved; the law of sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist before; marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical control over women's bodies. These things were changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as their
answer, who thought that power, where bad, should, and would, yield before justice. Butler not only eschews such a hope, she takes pleasure in its impossibility. She finds it exciting to contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced that she must remain
such. She tells us--this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power--that we all eroticize the power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change. Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure. Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler's focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But when a major theorist tells women in
desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than it actually has. Excitable Speech, Butler's most recent book, which provides her analysis of legal controversies involving pornography and hate speech, shows us exactly how far her quietism extends. For she is now willing to say that even where legal change is possible, even where it has already happened, we should wish it away, so as to preserve the space within which the oppressed may enact their sadomasochistic rituals of parody. As a work on the law of free speech, Excitable Speech is an unconscionably bad book. Butler shows
no awareness of the major theoretical accounts of the First Amendment, and no awareness of the wide range of cases such a theory will need to take into consideration. She makes absurd legal claims: for example, she says that the only type of speech that has been held to be unprotected is speech that has been previously defined as conduct rather than speech. (In fact, there are many types of speech, from false or misleading advertising to libelous statements to obscenity as currently defined, which have never been claimed to be action rather than speech, and which are nonetheless denied First Amendment protection.) Butler even claims, mistakenly, that obscenity has been judged to be the equivalent of "fighting words." It is not that Butler has an argument to back up her novel readings of the wide range of cases of unprotected speech that an account of the First Amendment would need to cover. She just has not noticed that there is this wide range of cases, or that her view is not a widely accepted legal view. Nobody interested in law can take her argument seriously. But let us extract from Butler's thin discussion of hate speech and pornography the core of her position. It is this: legal prohibitions of hate speech and pornography are problematic (though in the end she does not clearly oppose them) because they close the space within which the parties injured by that speech can perform their resistance. By this Butler appears to mean that if the offense is dealt with through the legal system, there will be fewer occasions for informal protest; and also, perhaps, that if the offense becomes rarer because of its illegality we will have fewer opportunities to protest its presence. Well, yes. Law does close those spaces. Hate speech and pornography are extremely complicated subjects on which feminists may reasonably differ. (Still, one should state the contending views precisely: Butler's account of MacKinnon is less than careful, stating that MacKinnon supports "ordinances against pornography" and suggesting that, despite MacKinnon's explicit denial, they involve a form of censorship. Nowhere does Butler mention that what MacKinnon actually supports is a civil damage action in which particular women harmed through pornography can sue its makers and its distributors.) But Butler's argument has implications well beyond the cases of hate speech and pornography. It would appear to support not just quietism in these areas, but a much more general legal quietism--or, indeed, a radical libertarianism. It goes like this: let us do away with everything from building codes to non-discrimination laws to rape laws, because they close the space within which the injured tenants, the victims of discrimination, the raped women, can perform their resistance. Now, this is not the same argument radical libertarians use to oppose building codes and anti-discrimination laws; even they draw the line at rape. But the conclusions converge. If Butler should reply that her argument pertains only to speech (and there is no reason given in the text for such a limitation, given the assimilation of harmful speech to conduct), then we can reply in the domain of speech. Let us get rid of laws
against false advertising and unlicensed medical advice, for they close the space within which poisoned consumers and mutilated patients can perform their resistance! Again, if Butler does not approve of these extensions, she needs to make an argument that divides her cases from these cases, and it is not clear that her position permits her to make such a distinction. For Butler, the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight. In this way, her pessimistic erotic anthropology offers support to an amoral anarchist politics. [continues] Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful
Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler's hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.
***AT: FEAR GOOD
2NC Defense
1. We are not saying fear of death is bad. We are saying that debaters should not be allowed to talk about death because talking about death trivializes death. 2. Gut Check. If they really believed their extinction impact, they wouldnt be here. If they cause activism, make them prove it. 3. We can fear death without debating it. Most policy articles and Congress debates prove. 4. Even if they win a risk of their turn, we still outweigh. A. Death talk outside debate solves their offense, but talk within debate definitely causes our impact. B. Our impact comes first. The death cult destroys good policymaking so the benefit of death talk doesnt happen.
2NC Offense
*Death impacts decrease our fear of death. Heather Anne Harder, Ph.D. in Education, 1993
(Exploring Life's Last Frontier, http://www.innerself.com/Miscellaneous/afraid_dying.htm)
One of the most important things to know is that you can prepare now for death and you can even enjoy the preparation process. Preparing for death can enrich your living experiences. Once you can look death in the eye and feel nothing but pleasant, yet mild, anticipation, then life becomes much more enjoyable. This epitaph taken from a headstone in Ashby, Massachusetts, describes the basic truth. Remember, friends, as you pass by, as you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you must be. Prepare yourself to follow me. You are well-advised to prepare yourself for death. But whether you are ready or not, when your self-determined hour arrives you will pass to the next dimension. Your hour is determined by you and your council -- not the little you that operates in the conscious mind, but the greater You that operates in harmony with Divine Source. This higher self, as it is often referred to, maintains the direct connection to the Divine Source. A little preparation can make the death experience more pleasant and thus more peaceful for you as well as those you leave behind. Here are some suggestions for this preparation. TALKING ABOUT DEATH Allow yourself to talk about death as a part of life. I assure you, you do not bring death closer to you by talking about it, and you may make yourself more comfortable with the concept. By avoiding the topic you shroud it in mystery and shame. It becomes one of those topics that we don't talk about in polite society. Upon death you will create your own death experience based on what you believe. Therefore, the clearer you are about what you want and expect to happen, the better off you will be. Read and examine the near-death experiences of others. Discuss with friends what you read. Do these books and articles describe a hell? Do you want one? Play with the concepts and words involved with death. This allows you and others to adjust to a death reality. Talking about your thoughts and concepts helps you to clarify your own views. It forces you to synthesize and articulate your reality. It is at this point that you are able to revise or adjust your own faulty thinking. Even if you do not, at first, have an accurate reality of death, the process of open forum allows you to open to a variety of possibilities. While Mom was in the hospital, she and I had an opportunity to discuss death. Although she was very confused and scared of death, she listened to my views and shared her own. She talked about what she wanted to happen (and how) if she died. At this point no one believed that she would be dead in less than two months. The conversation was one I shall always remember and treasure. A colleague at the university, Don, and I discussed the recent death of a co-worker. We talked about death -- his beliefs and mine. It was to be our last conversation, for he died just a few days later. These conversations help to acclimate people to the transition process. Neither Don or Mom knew consciously that they were soon to die. Yet both felt the need to discuss death. It is important to be comfortable enough with the topic to discuss it when the conversation arises. Often there is an inner knowing and a need to discuss death as the hour approaches, much like the impending birth of a child is discussed. People have taken the topic of death, and even the words associated with it, and made them naughty -- something we don't speak aloud in public. Children are shushed or quickly diverted if they bring up the topic. Our society is "death-a-phobic" and it's time this is changed. By becoming comfortable with the words and concepts, when the magic moment arrives and you discover that you are dead, you won't be so shocked. Many people have a difficult time
accepting their own death simply because of the shock value of the word. Ignoring and suppressing the idea of death throughout your life actually empowers the word. So take the power away from the words and concept of death by verbalizing and getting comfortable with them. Make the words "death" and "dead" as familiar as the word "birth" and "life". Birth and death are both times of transition. They imply a change from one dimensional form to another. You don't see people going to pieces because someone gave birth like you do when people (especially themselves) die. Yet birth is much more traumatic and generally unpleasant to the one experiencing it. Death is a much easier transition. A WORKING REALITY OF DEATH Take a minute to imagine the following scene. You find yourself inside a large cube or box. It can be of any material you choose. You are completely enclosed in this box. There are no doors or windows, no way to get in or out. You do not know how you got in or how to get out. As you imagine yourself in this box, what are your reactions? What thoughts or feelings do you have? Remain in this imaginary state for a minute or so to fully experience your feelings. STOP! DON'T READ ANY FURTHER UNTIL YOU HAVE TAKEN A MINUTE TO EXPERIENCE THIS SENSATION! Good. Did you feel panic? How about curiosity? There are a multitude of reactions, and yours are perfectly normal regardless of what they were. Your reactions to this exercise are similar to those you might experience as you pass into death. Now reexamine your reactions to the box, only apply these to death. How do you feel about death? Don't judge yourself, simply examine. You now have a starting point from which to examine your current death beliefs. For our second exercise, imagine yourself walking down a path. Create your path; notice the details. Is it wide, narrow, smooth, rough, beautiful, not-so-beautiful, straight, or winding? You decide. After you walk for awhile you come to a wall. The wall can be any form you like, but it must run across your path and stretch so far that you cannot walk around it. Create the wall now! Now move beyond the wall. What do you see? Take a minute to experience this vision. Relax and play with the images. Don't read on until you have experienced this! No fudging! This path represents your view of your life. Was your life easy or rough? Was your path well worn, or are you blazing new trails? Was your path straight or winding? If you did not like your path, know that you have full power to change it any time you choose. You can add plants, flowers -- in short, create any path you choose
whenever you choose. Examine the wall. Was it high and solid or low and insubstantial? What kind was it? How did you move beyond the wall? Was it hard? What were your reactions to moving beyond the wall? What did you find on the other side? The wall represents the separation of life and death. Beyond the wall is your symbolic subconscious view of the afterlife. Now reexamine your images. If you do not like what you experienced, simply choose a new creation and construct new images. There are no right answers, yet, at the same time, all answers are right. Your answers represent a combination of what you have been conditioned to believe about death and your personal reality of death. If you are happy with your subconscious death reality, that's great. If you are uncomfortable with your symbolic representation of death, then create a new one as you read on. Death need not be scary. In fact, in many ways death can be compared to going away to college. It may cause a little apprehension at first. The change may even produce some stress. But after awhile you can actually become excited about the prospect of going away to your great new adventure. There are many who would even say you are lucky to be going. Death is even easier than college because there is no packing to do, no tuition to pay, nor written exams to take. As you get comfortable with the concept of death, then you can begin to let go of any fearful notions of death.
Allow yourself to have a variety of death options, all pleasant. This allows you to stay open and receptive to your own unique death adventure when it occurs, which may be different from the one you have created. If, however, the concept of death still makes you tremble with fear, and you can't leave it in such an unformed and unpleasant condition, then take a few moments to create your own picture of what death will be like for you. Play this image over and over until it becomes your new reality of death. Thus, when you die you will automatically create this familiar reality. Eventually the actual reality will pierce your awareness, but this created reality will be a pleasant first encounter, certainly much better than fear or panic.
2NC AT Generic
Talking about death decreases fear of death. Tom Anderson, Ph.D. Psychotherapist , 97
(Death Talk auth. Glenda Fredman, Intro p. xi
When our series was conceived years ago, we were inspired by the power of systemic thinking and the possibility of putting these ideas into practice in a range of different settings. Death Talk is exactly the kind of book we had in mind. It distils very difficult sophisticated clinical work into a simple language and simple technique for talking to children, making it accessible to a much wider range of practitioners than trained psychotherapists and family therapists. The book is about the healing power of conversation. It
gives numerous examples of children and their families being released from the grip of sadness, isolation, and fear by talking about their own experiences of death. Not only does the author, Glenda Fredman, tackle head-on the great taboo
subject, but she embues the reader with the conviction that an open, respectful conversation about death will, in itself, bring about therapeutic change.
Only voting neg to actively avoid death impacts causes fear of death. Leora Kuttner, Clinical Pyschologist / Professor, Pediatrics, University of British Columbia, 1
(http://www.familypractice.ubc.ca/forum/talk_FacingFear.html) Death is something we all have in common. Yet our culture - western culture - actively avoids the consideration of death, and anything that may prepare us for death. How then, can we learn to face our fear of death, and what,
exactly are those fears? Facing death means challenging our beliefs and our definition of life. Facing death means facing loss, gradual or sudden. The loss of abilities. The loss of body control. Becoming dependent - or perhaps being alone. Facing death means facing a change in our way of being as we know it, and like it, and facing losses that we don't want to know about. Facing death not only means facing the unknown but also changes in what we did know. For some people, the fear of death is about the unknown of death. For many people it's the fear of suffering as one approaches death. "Suffering is one of the greatest fears of all. But the pain can be controlled, managed, eased. Even big pain," Dr. Kuttner said. This is where health care professionals truly make a huge difference - in easing pain and providing the close contact, comfort, support, human understanding, and relief of body aches and discomfort.
Turn Mystery A. Talking about death increases our comfort with it. Heather Anne Harder, Ph.D. in Education, 1993
(Exploring Life's Last Frontier, http://www.innerself.com/Miscellaneous/afraid_dying.htm) Allow yourself to talk about death as a part of life. I assure you, you do not bring death closer to you by talking about it, and you may make yourself more comfortable with the concept. By avoiding the topic you shroud it in
mystery and shame. It becomes one of those topics that we don't talk about in polite society. B. Keeping death mysterious makes us fear it more Michael Bronson, Assoc Degrees in Science and Comp Electronics, Correction Officer, Author, 2K
(http://www.biblehelp.org/feardeath.htm)
The fear of death is a universal phenomenon. No matter where you go in the world, you will always find large numbers of people who are afraid of dying. The reason for fearing death is obvious: Death is the greatest mystery of all. As mentioned in the previous chapter (Fear, the Predator of our Peace), fear of the unknown is incredibly powerful. Since death is considered the biggest "unknown" of all, many people, including some Christians, find death terrifying.
2NC AT Nuclear Fear

*The more we talk about nuclear war the less we fear it the turn is linear. Carol Cohn, Senior Fellow, CGO and Wellesley College, 87
(Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, June, 43, Slick Ems, Glick Ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters) MY CLOSE ENCOUNTER with nuclear strategic analysis started in the summer of 1984. I was one of 48 college teachers attending a summer workshop on nuclear weapons, strategic doctrine, and arms control that was held at a university containing one of the nation's foremost centers of nuclear strategic studies, and that was cosponsored by another institution. It was taught by some of the most distinguished experts in the field, who have spent decades moving back and forth between academia and governmental positions in Washington. When at the end of the program I was afforded the chance to be a visiting scholar at one of the universities' defense studies center, I jumped at the opportunity. I spent the next year immersed
in the world of defense intellectuals--men (and indeed, they are virtually all men) who, in Thomas Powers's words, "use the concept of deterrence to explain why it is safe to have weapons of a kind and number it is not safe to use." Moving in and out of government, working sometimes in universities and think tanks, they create the theory that underlies U. S. nuclear strategic practice. [Continues] In other words, what I learned at the program is that talking about nuclear weapons is fun. The words are quick, clean, light, they trip off the tongue. You can reel off dozens of them in seconds, forgetting about how one might interfere with the next, not to mention with the lives beneath them. Nearly everyone I observed--lecturers, students, hawks, doves, men, and women--took pleasure in using the words; some of us spoke with a self-consciously ironic edge, but the pleasure was there nonetheless. Part of the appeal was the thrill of being able to manipulate an arcane language, the power of entering the secret kingdom. But perhaps more important, learning the language gives a sense of control, a feeling of mastery over technology that is finally not controllable but powerful beyond human comprehension. The longer I stayed, the
more conversations I participated in, the less I was frightened of nuclear war. How can learning to speak a language have
such a powerful effect? One answer, discussed earlier, is that the language is abstract and sanitized, never giving access to the images of war. But there is more to it than that. The learning process itself removed me from the reality of nuclear war . My energy was focused on the challenge of decoding acronyms, learning new terms, developing competence in the language--not on the weapons and the wars behind the words. By the time I was through, I had learned far more than an alternate, if abstract, set of words. The content of what I could talk about was monumentally different.
We must oppose nuclear war without talking about it the reverse causes obsession. Mick Broderick, Assoc Dir Center for Millennial Studies, 92
(http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/~mickbrod/postmodm/m/text/witness.html, Antithesis 6.1)
However, the sleight-of-hand superpower oxymoron that is "arms control" fumbles occasionally, slipping into brinkmanship. The habituation of Mutually Assured Destruction across a generation escalates towards potent fears of apocalypse, both dreaded and desired. The maxim of this secular, post-Hiroshima atomic age must be, surely, "to avoid nuclear war, we must first imagine it". In order to apprehend this imaginary signifier, we have dredged our unconscious fears, desires and fantasies . Richly inscribed by the apocalyptic metatext of history as genre, these phantoms are exposed for public consumption and
spectatorship -- visions of the end simultaneously prophetic and proscriptive. To face Armageddon either
individually or collectively, to continually peer at the unthinkable event, we give witness to a primary desire to foresee our own death. Nuclear war, its imaginary signifier and its cathartic textuality (e.g. film, television) encourages the audience to participate in not only the death of the subject, but the post-structural death of the author and the death of the species. The precise site and moment of signification comes with the nuclear explosion. A true totem of the atomic age, the mushroom cloud dwarfs all which precedes or follows it. It is the temporal and narrative nodal point from which we assess the (human) text. It is a sublime object at once striking terror and awe. It is the Alpha and Omega connoting universal death and, contrarily, selective rebirth. Nuclear war, at the moment of ignition, is the anticipated eschatological juncture -- literally end-time. In apocalyptic discourse it becomes the radical intervention into linear human causality by the external cosmos operating outside of our spatio-temporal strictures, ushering-in the millennium. Indeed, for fundamentalists nuclear rupture connotes transcendental 'rapture'.3 All of this philosphico-theological baggage is present when we observe the nuclear sublime.4 It's echo can be found in the feeble pseudo-religious, yet spontaneous, discourse employed by observers of atomic detonations right from the original Trinity blast, where some scientists half-expected to witness the ignition of the atmosphere and with it the extinction of all life on the planet. Thanatos and Sadistic Scopophilia Susan Sontag has described the
innurring effect of cinematic disaster, particularly evident in Japaneses science-fiction films acting as metaphors for the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.5 Psychologist Robert Lifton
has clinically charted pathologies of denial and psychic numbing when confronting nuclear issues.6 While both are correct, unfortunately neither acknowledge the pleasure afforded audiences by such imagery of global conflagration. Cinematically, preHiroshima iconography of disaster, catastrophe and cataclysm employed the 'natural' devastations of tidal deluge, the tempests of hurricane, cyclone and typhoon, or the rumblings of earthquakes and volcanic erruptions. In Dr Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb [1963] director Stanley Kubrick recognised the inherent beauty of the mushroom cloud as well as its horror, a truly sublime image, instilling both awe and terror in its audience. Kubrick's genius was to merge Swiftian social critique with
Pentagon/Atomic Energy Commission footage with a song of absence/presence ("We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when...") which could be read as either ironic apocalypse or proclaiming a new world order. Wittingly or unwittingly, as
spectators we often embrace apocalypse, or desire some form of unconscious, idealized notion of it. For
example, in Dr Strangelove, Major Kong straddles a 20 megaton thermonuclear bomb as it plummets towards a soviet ICBM site hollering inane Texan warwhoops. The huge missile jutting from his flanks, an atomic phallus which he whips in a masturbatory frenzy, stetson in hand, his image and voice trailing off into the background leaving a final few seconds of silence before the screen is engulfed in the brilliant over-exposure of nuclear detonation, the perfect oneness of jouissance where the intersecting vectors of sex, death and speed collide headfirst in an orgasmic explosion of fission, fucking and fallout.5
2NC AT Genocide
Discussing death from genocide in debate makes genocide more likely. Robert Meister, Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, 5
(Postmodern Culture 15.2, Never Again: The Logic of the Neighbor and the Logic of Genocide) My general claim about the function of genocide in the global ethic of the neighbor is that it functions like Freud's argument about the role of parricide in the ethics of the family. In the new global ethics of "never again," however, the collectivity is not
seen as a type of family, but as a type of neighborhood in which spatial rather than generational relations predominate. Like all foundational acts, genocide is constitutively outside the sovereign power that (from time to time) calls a group, even a "world community," into being. The gnocidaire is the quintessential criminal against humanity as such, the inhuman monster to whom "terrorists," for example, must now be compared; genocide has become the morally incomparable act that is constantly subject to repetition. In fin-de-sicle human rights discourse, genocide becomes the wish that an imaginary sovereign power makes taboo--unthinkable because it is repressed, and for that very reason at the root of all our conscious fears. The presumed unthinkability of genocide--the repression, not the absence, of the wish--is thus both the founding premise of the fin-de-sicle Human Rights Discourse and the stated goal of most human rights advocacy.18 The recollection of genocidal experiences from the victims' standpoint, however, is the overt subject matter of many histories and of much science fiction.19 On its surface, this literature claims to warn us of the dangers of genocide so that we will fear and avoid them at all costs.20 At a deeper level, however, the fear of genocidal victimhood and our enhanced imagination of it are also troubling. What does it really mean, after all, to imagine genocide, to fear it, and to avoid it at all costs? Is it not ultimately this political mindset that has made "thinkable" in the twentieth century the genocides of which some otherwise civilized nations have become capable? For them, the thinkability of
has been a defense (by projection) against their heightened ability to imagine themselves as the objects of genocidal intent.21 As the world embarks on the twenty-first century, genocide has
ethnic cleansings and extermination never been more thinkable--especially the genocide of which we may be victims. It has now become almost conventional to argue for the existence of genocide, for example in Darfur, by publishing photographs of dead bodies and daring the viewer to refuse empathy.22
2NC AT Environment
Ecological horror stories in debate destroy effective environmental policy. Holly Doremus, Professor of Law, University of California at Davis, 2K
(Washington & Lee Law Review, 57 Wash & Lee L. Rev. 11, Winter) The stories we tell to explain and justify our view of the relationship of humanity with nature are important determinants of the policies we adopt and the attitudes we develop. To date we have relied on three primary discourses to
explain why and how the law should protect nature. These discourses are all valid. Nature is an important material resource for human use, a unique esthetic resource for human enjoyment, and most people agree that we have some kind of ethical obligation to protect nature. While the discourses themselves are both valid and inevitable, the forms in which they have been brought to
the political debate limit our ability to respond to, and even our ability to fully perceive, the problem of nature protection. The ecological horror story encourages us to view nature solely as a bundle of resources for human consumption or convenience, to rely on cost-benefit accounting in making decisions about what parts of nature we should protect, and to ignore the loss of nature short of catastrophic ecological collapse. The wilderness story teaches us that
nature is defined by our absence, and encourages us to establish a limited number of highly protected reserves. The story of Noah's ark allows us to believe we are facing a short-term crisis, resolvable through straightforward temporary measures. None of these stories addresses the crux of the modern nature problem, which is where people fit into nature. In order to address the boundary conflicts, distributional issues, and conflicts between discourses that currently plague our efforts to protect nature, we must find ways to address those issues in our political conversation. We already have a substantial number of building blocks that could contribute to a new discourse about people and nature. Constructing such a discourse should be a high priority in the new millennium for those who hope nature will survive into the next one.
Framing environmental protection around death discourse destroys effective policymaking. Holly Doremus, Professor of Law, University of California at Davis, 2K
(Washington & Lee Law Review, 57 Wash & Lee L. Rev. 11, Winter) Notwithstanding its attractions, the material discourse in general, and the ecological horror story in particular, are not likely to generate policies that will satisfy nature lovers. The ecological horror story implies that there is no reason to protect nature until catastrophe looms. The Ehrlichs' rivet-popper account, for example, presents species simply as
the (fungible) hardware holding together the ecosystem. If we could be reasonably certain that a particular rivet was not needed to prevent a crash, the rivet-popper story suggests that we would lose very little by pulling it out. Many environmentalists, though, would disagree. n212 Reluctant to concede such losses, tellers of the ecological horror story highlight how close a catastrophe might be, and how little we know about what actions might trigger one. But the apocalyptic vision is less credible today than it seemed in the 1970s. Although it is clear that the earth is experiencing a mass wave of extinctions, n213 the complete elimination of life on earth seems unlikely. n214 Life is remarkably robust. Nor is human extinction probable any time soon. Homo sapiens is adaptable to nearly any environment. Even if the world of the future includes far fewer species, it likely will hold people. n215 [*47] One response to this credibility problem tones the story down a bit, arguing not that humans will go extinct but that ecological disruption will bring economies, and consequently civilizations, to their knees. n216 But this too may be overstating the case. Most ecosystem functions are performed by multiple species. This functional redundancy means that a high proportion of species can be lost without precipitating a collapse. n217 Another response drops the horrific ending and returns to a more measured discourse of the many material benefits nature provides humanity. Even these more plausible tales, though, suffer from an important limitation. They call for nature protection only at a high level of generality. For example, human-induced increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels may cause rapid changes in global temperatures in the near future, with drastic consequences for sea levels, weather patterns, and ecosystem services. n218 Similarly, the loss of large numbers of species undoubtedly reduces the genetic library from which we might in the future draw useful resources. n219 But it is difficult to translate these insights into convincing arguments against any one of the small local decisions that contribute to the problems of global warming or biodiversity loss. n220 It is easy to argue that the material impact of any individual decision to increase carbon emissions slightly or to destroy a small amount of habitat will be small. It is difficult to identify the specific straw that will break the camel's back. Furthermore, no unilateral action at the local or even national level can solve these global problems. Local decisionmakers may feel paralyzed by the scope of the problems, or may conclude that any sacrifices they might make will go unrewarded if others do not restrain their actions. In sum, at the local level at which most decisions affecting nature are made, the material discourse provides little reason to save nature. Short of the ultimate catastrophe, the material benefits of destructive decisions frequently will exceed their identifiable material costs. n221 [*48]
Repeating ecological horror stories destroys effective relationships with nature Holly Doremus, Professor of Law, University of California at Davis, 2K
(Washington & Lee Law Review, 57 Wash & Lee L. Rev. 11, Winter) The dominant stories in our current political discourse do not help us do that. The ecological horror story gives us no reason to see ourselves as a part of nature or to value contact with nature . The wilderness story tells us that we are not part of
nature and should stay away from it. The Noah story tells us that we may have to share space with nature to weather a crisis but does not encourage an ongoing relationship with nature. If we are to maintain species, ecosystems, or wild nature in the long term we
must develop such a relationship. Because we cannot avoid contact with nature, we must learn how to live with it. We also must learn to resolve the inevitable conflicts among persons over the extent to which nature should remain outside human control and over the conflicting uses, both consumptive and non-consumptive, to which we might put nature. Because the current stories do not address these issues, they offer at best only incomplete solutions to the nature problem.
at: fear good defense

Fear of death is inevitable, but repression is best Alistair Conwell, Author, Nov-Dec 2K
(http://www.theosophical.org/theosophy/questmagazine/novdec2000/conwell/) Psychologist Gregory Zilboorg elucidates further, "If this fear [of death] were as constantly conscious, we should not be able to function normally. It must be properly repressed to keep us living with any modicum of comfort. . . . We may take it for granted that the fear of death is always present in our mental functioning. . . . No one is free of the fear of death" (Reanney 1995).

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Georgetown 2010-11 [File Name]

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principle of natural death is equivalent to the neutralization

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2NC AT Perm do Both

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2NC AT Alt Doesnt Solve

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suppression of purposeful fear

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2NC AT Baudrillard Bad

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***AT: FEAR GOOD

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2NC AT Nuclear Fear

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