Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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The realism work was put out in a separate file (which you will have access to on the cd we will send this work out to the
individual labs electronically. While some is repetitive with the seniors lab, there is also other literature included (like Murray)
We did not put out answers to every criticism written at camp, since the criticisms all came with answers. However, we did put
out additional evidence to most of the criticisms, which you should use as supplements to your answer files
Many of the cards can be used to answer multiple Ks (ex. Truth exists/good, pragmatism, etc). Familiarize yourself with the
file so you can find answers to all the ks
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AT: Fear of Nukes Peace and Survival................................49
AT: Fear of Nukes Disarm Bad (Weapons key to peace)....50
AT: Fear of Nukes Key to Denuclearize..............................51
AT: Nuclearism Permutation Solvency...............................52
AT: Nuclearism Alternative More Numbing..................53
AT: Nuclearism Images of Nuclear Discourse Key.............54
AT; Nuclearism- Nuclear weapons are morally acceptable....55
AT: Chaloupka Krishna evidence........................................56
AT: Non-violence Alternative Holocaust........................57
AT: Non-violence Alternative Genocide........................58
AT: Non-violence Alternative Increases Violence...............59
AT: Non-violence Alternative Increases Violence...............60
AT: Non-violence Alternative Increases Violence...............61
AT: Non-violence Violence Key to Peace...........................62
AT: Non-violence Alternative Unnecessary (Violence not a threat)
63
AT: Non-violence Alternative Impossible (nonviolence relies on violence)
AT: Non-violence Love = Impossible..................................65
AT: Non-violence Perm Solvency.......................................66
AT:Kappeler Permutation Solvency....................................67
AT: Cuomo Negative Peace Key to Positive Peace.............68
AT: Cuomo Permutation Solvency......................................69
AT: Terror Talk Alternative Terrorism............................70
AT: Terror Talk Alternative Terrorism............................71
AT: Terror Talk Language Key to Win WOT......................72
AT: Terror Talk Freedom Fighters Worse..........................73
AT: Images of Suffering Images good.................................74
AT: Language K Suppression of language bad....................75
AT: Language K Suppression of language bad....................76
AT: Language K Censorship Bad........................................77
AT: Language K Alt Fails....................................................78
AT: Identity Politics Essentialist..........................................79
AT: Borders K Borders key to peace...................................81
AT: Borders K Borders key to ethnic cleansing..................82
AT: Borders K Preserves Liberty.........................................83
AT: Santos Alt Fails.............................................................85
AT: Santos Alt Fails.............................................................86
AT: Santos Alt Fails.............................................................87
AT: Biopower Alt fails.........................................................88
AT: Biopower Alt Fails (Biopower Can Be Good)..............89
AT: Biopower Alt Fails (Biopower Can Be Good)..............90
AT: Biopower Key to Democracy.......................................91
AT: Biopower Key to Democracy.......................................92
AT: Biopower Key to Democracy.......................................93
AT: Biopower Key to Democracyy.....................................94
AT: Biopower Key to Value to Life (AT: Bare Life)...........95
AT: Biopower AT: Its Racist...............................................96
AT: Biopower AT: Its Racist...............................................97
AT: Foucalt Permutation Solvency......................................98
AT: Foucalt Permutation Solvency......................................99
AT: Foucalt No Link + Essentialism.................................100
AT: Foucalt Alt Fails = Essentialist...................................101
AT: Foucalt Alt Suffering.............................................102
AT: Foucalt Alt = Contradictory........................................103
AT: Foucalt No Alternative................................................104
AT: Foucalt No Alternative................................................105
AT: Foucalt No Alternative................................................106
AT: Foucalt No Alternative (Nihilism)..............................107
AT: Kritiks of Rights State Action Key.............................108
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AT: Agamben Alt Fails......................................................110
AT: Agamben Alt Violence (Ignores Suffering)............111
AT: Agamben Alt No Rights (Rights Good).................112
AT: Agamben Alt destroys democracy and rights.............113
AT: Agamben Alt collapse the state..............................114
AT: Agamben Singularity destroys politics.......................115
AT: Agamben Alt fails.......................................................116
AT: Agamben AT: Humanitarianism..................................117
AT: Calculations Bad Calculations Good..........................118
AT: Calculations Bad Calculations Good..........................119
AT: Otherization Plan key prevent extermination.............120
AT: Otherization Responsibility to Other Exists...............121
AT: Deconstruction K Permutation Solvency....................122
AT: Otherization Responsibility to Other Exists...............123
AT: Lacan Essentialism.....................................................124
AT: Lacan Essentialism.....................................................126
AT: Lacan Essentialism.....................................................127
AT: Lacan Essentialism.....................................................128
AT: Lacan - Essentialism......................................................129
AT: Lacan AT: Lacan is not Essentialist............................130
AT: Lacan Conservatism....................................................131
AT: Lacan Conservatism....................................................132
AT: Lacan Conservatism....................................................133
AT: Lacan Violence...........................................................134
AT: Lacan Violence...........................................................135
AT: Lacan Alternative Doesnt Solve Case.......................136
AT: Stavrakakis Permutation Solvency.............................137
AT: Psychoanalysis Action Key.........................................138
AT: Psychoanalysis Alternative Fails................................139
AT: Utopias Bad Utopias Good.........................................140
AT: Utopian Fantasies Bad Utopias Good.........................141
AT: Traverse the Fantasy Utopias Good.............................142
AT: Traversing the Fantasy Fantasies Good......................143
AT: Traverse the Fantasy Fantasies = Inevitable (alt fails)145
AT: Traversing the Fantasy Fantasy destroys symbolic order146
AT: Traversing the Fantasy - Leads to bare life...................147
AT: Zizek Alt Violence..................................................148
AT: Zizek Alt Violence.................................................149
AT: Zizek Alt Violence.................................................150
AT: Zizek Alt Violence.................................................151
AT: Zizek Alt Fails.............................................................153
AT: Zizek Alt Fails.............................................................154
AT: Zizek Alt Fails.............................................................155
AT: Zizek Alt Fails (Reinscribes Capitalism)....................156
AT: Zizek Perm Solvency..................................................157
AT: Deleuze and Guattari Alt Fails....................................158
AT: Badiou Permutation Solvency....................................159
AT: Badiou State Key........................................................160
AT: Badiou Plan solves the criticism.................................161
AT: Badiou Human rights good.........................................162
AT: Badiou No Link..........................................................163
AT: Badiou Doublebind.....................................................164
AT: Badiou I/L to Lacan....................................................165
AT: Badiou Alternative fails..............................................166
AT: Badiou Alternative fails..............................................167
AT: Badiou Alternative fails..............................................168
AT: Normativity Normativity Good..................................169
AT: Normativity Normative Thought Inevitable...............170
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AT: Normativity Normative Thought Inevitable...............171
AT: Normativity Alternative Fails.....................................172
AT: Normativity Alternative Fails.....................................173
AT: Normativity Alternative Fails.....................................174
AT: Normativity Alternative Fails (Ommission)...............175
AT: Normativity Schlag ignores oppressed voices reifies oppression 176
AT: Normativity Alternative = Inaction.............................177
AT: Normativity Nihilistic and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. .178
AT: Empire Must Work Through The Empire (your alt fails)179
AT: Empire Must Work Through The Empire (your alt fails)180
AT: Empire Plan = key (US better alt to Empire)..............181
AT: Empire Alternative Terrorism................................182
AT: Empire Alternative Terrorism................................183
AT: Empire Alternative Violence..................................184
AT: Empire Alternative Violence..................................185
AT: Empire Alternative Justifies Holocaust......................186
AT: Empire Globalization Good........................................187
AT: Empire Globalization Good........................................188
AT: Empire Globalization Key to Democracy...................189
AT: Empire Capitalism Good (their alt = utopian)............190
AT: Empire US leadership good (alt fails)........................191
AT: Empire US action solves crisis management (MNCs)192
AT: Empire Alternative Fails (Lack of empiricism/proof..193
AT: Empire Alternative Fails (Multitude Bad)..................194
AT: Empire Alternative Fails (Multitude Bad)..................195
AT: Empire Alt Suffering (No rule of law)...................196
AT: Empire Imperialism Inevitable...................................197
AT: Empire Imperialism Inevitable...................................198
AT: Empire Capitalism Inevitable.....................................199
AT: Empire Capitalism Inevitable.....................................200
AT: Empire No Tech Revolution.......................................201
AT: Empire AT: Sovereignty Links....................................202
AT: Empire AT: Nation-State Links...................................203
AT: Empire Borders Links.................................................204
AT: Empire MNCs.............................................................205
AT: Empire AT: Biopower Impact.....................................206
AT: IR Fem Focus on identity exclusion......................207
AT: IR Fem Focus on identity exclusion......................208
AT: IR Fem Focus on identity Exclusion (shatters movement)
209
AT: IR Fem Focus on identity Exclusion (shatters movement)
210
AT: IR Fem Reify Difference Falsely (Alt Fails)..............211
AT: IR Fem Makes Discipline Meaningless (Alt Fails)....212
AT: IR Fem Ignores Suffering of Men..............................213
AT: IR Fem Alt Fails..........................................................214
AT: IR Fem No Gender Bias.............................................215
AT: IR Fem Permutation (Realism)...................................216
AT: Anthropocentrism Anthro Romance nature = extinction
217
AT: Anthropocentrism Anthro key to action/ecological conscience (alt fails) 218
AT: Anthropocentrism Anthro key to protect environment/ecological conscience (alt fails)
AT: Anthropocentrism Anthro Wont Hurt the Environment220
AT: Anthropocentrism Humans and Nature are not zero-sum221
AT: Anthropocentrism Perm Solves Best..........................222
AT: Global local: Permutation Solvency...........................223
AT: Global local: Global Action Good..............................224
AT: Global local: Global Action Good..............................225
AT: Global local Alt Ignores Human Rights...................226
AT: Global local: No Alternative.......................................227
AT: Global local: Checks on globalization now (no need for global state)
228
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AT: Nietzsche /Nihilism Replicates Status Quo Problems 229
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism Results in No Value to Life.........230
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism Justifies Holocaust......................231
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism Justifies Holocaust......................232
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism Leads to Classism.......................233
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism Justifies Terrorism.......................234
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism Root of all violence.....................236
AT: Nietzsche /Nihilism Leads to Violence.......................237
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism AT: Christianity...........................238
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism Alt Fails.......................................239
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism Alt Fails.......................................240
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism Alt Fails (Power Relations).........241
AT: Nietzsche/Nihilism Alt Fails (Superman)...................242
AT: Hiedegger Alt Fails.....................................................243
AT: Hiedegger Alt Fails.....................................................244
AT: Hiedegger Alt Suffering/Extinction.......................245
AT: Hiedegger Alt fails (justifies Holocaust)....................246
AT: Hiedegger Alt Fails (justifies Holocaust)...................247
AT: Hiedegger Hes a Nazi................................................248
AT: Hiedegger Humanism Good.......................................249
AT: Hiedegger Humanism Good.......................................250
AT: Hiedegger Humanism Good.......................................251
AT: Spanos Alt Fails..........................................................252
AT: Spanos Alt Fails..........................................................253
AT: Baudrillard No Alt......................................................254
AT: Baudrillard No Alt......................................................255
AT: Baudrillard Alt reintrench modernism........................256
AT: Baudrillard Alt ignores exploitation and destruction..257
NEG INDICTS OF RORTY/PRAG..................................258
NEG INDICTS OF RORTY/PRAG..................................259
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in committing itself to what it calls "theory," this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like
religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast
quasi-cosmological perspective. Stories about the webs of power and the insidious influence of a hegemonic ideology do for
to say that,
this Left what stories about the Lamanites did for Joseph Smith and what stories about Yakkub did for Elijah Muhammad. What stories about
blue-eyed devils are to the Black Muslims, stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural leftiststhe only thing they
really want to hear. To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world
in which the citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which
democratic politics has become a farce. It is a world in which all the day lit cheerfulness of Whitmanesque hypersecularism has been
lost, and in which "liberalism" and "humanism" are synonyms for naivetefor an inability to grasp the full horror of our situation. I have argued
in various books that the philosophers most often cited by cultural leftistsNietzsche, Heidegger, Fou-cault, and
Derridaare largely right in their criticisms of Enlightenment rationalism. I have argued further that tra- ditional
liberalism and traditional humanism are entirely compatible with such criticisms. We can still be old- fashioned
reformist liberals even if, like Dewey, we give up the correspondence theory of truth and start treating moral and
scientific beliefs as tools for achieving greater human happiness, rather than as representations of the intrinsic nature of reality. We can be this kind of liberal even after we turn our backs on Descartes, linguistify subjectivity, and see
everything around us and within us as one more replaceable social construction. But I have also urged that insofar as these
antimetaphysi-cal, anti-Cartesian philosophers offer a quasi-religious form of spiritual pathos, they should be relegated to private life
and not taken as guides to political deliberation. The notion of "infinite responsibility," formulated by Emmanuel Lev-inas
and sometimes deployed by Derridaas well as Der- rida's own frequent discoveries of impossibility, unreacha-bility, and
unrepresentabilitymay be useful to some of us in our individual quests for private perfection. When we take up
our public responsibilities, however, the infinite and the unrepresentable are merely nuisances. Thinking of our responsibilities in these terms is as much of a stumbling-block to effective political organization as is the sense of sin.
Em-phasizing the impossibility of meaning, or of justice, as Der- rida sometimes does, is a temptation to Gothicizeto view
democratic politics as ineffectual, because unable to cope with preternatural forces. Whitman and Dewey, I have argued,
gave us all the ro- mance, and all the spiritual uplift, we Americans need to go about our public business. As Edmundson remarks, we should not
allow Emerson, who was a precursor of both Whitman and Dewey, to be displaced by Poe, who was a pre- cursor of Lacan. For purposes of
thinking about how to achieve our country, we do not need to worry about the cor- respondence theory of truth, the
grounds of normativity, the impossibility of justice, or the infinite distance which sepa- rates us from the other. For
those purposes, we can give both religion and philosophy a pass. We can just get on with try- ing to solve what Dewey called "the problems of
men." To think about those problems means to refrain from thinking so much about otherness that we begin to acquiesce in
what Todd Gitlin has called, in the title of a recent book, "the twilight of common dreams." It means deriving our moral identity, at least in part,
from our citizenship in a dem-ocratic nation-state, and from leftist attempts to fulfill the promise of that nation.
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one of the essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo
is the shedding of its semi-conscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties. This
Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for "the system" and start trying to
construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the
academyand, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They
still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms
no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will re- quire the
cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America as Disneylandas a country of simulacraand to
start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary
suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action.13 Nothing would do more to resurrect the American
Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list
think about these latter questions, we begin to realize tha t
endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and
of those who clean the professionals' toiletsmight revitalize leftist politics.14 The problems which can be cured by governmental
action, and which such a list would canvass, are mostly those that stem from selfishness rather than sadism. But to
bring about such cures it would help if the Left would change the tone in which it now discusses sadism. The preSixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us
black, white, and brownare Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the
"platoon" movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic back- grounds fighting and dying side by side. By contrast, the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in
our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than ignore it. The distinction between the old strategy and the new is important.
The choice between them makes the difference between what Todd Gitlin calls "common dreams" and what Arthur Schlesinger calls "disuniting America." To take pride in being black or gay is
an entirely reasonable response to the sadistic humiliation to which one has been subjected. But insofar as this pride prevents someone from also taking pride in being an American citizen, from
thinking of his or her country as capable of reform, or from being able to join with straights or whites in reformist initiatives, it is a political disaster. The rhetorical question of the "platoon"
movies"What do our differences matter, compared with our commonality as fellow Americans?"did not commend pride in difference, but neither did it condemn it. The intent of posing that
If the cultural
Left insists on its present strategyon asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to
cease noticing those differencesit will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of
national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections. I doubt that any
such new way will be found. Nobody has yet suggested a viable leftist alternative to the civic religion of which Whitman and
Dewey were prophets. That civic religion centered around taking advantage of traditional pride in American citizenship
by substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country's principal goal. We were sup- posed to love our
country because it showed promise of being kinder and more generous than other countries. As the blacks and the gays,
among others, were well aware, this was a counsel of perfection rather than description of fact. But you cannot urge national political
renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope
it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather
than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of
becoming actual.
question was to help us become a country in which a per- son's difference would be largely neglected by others, unless the person in question wished to call attention to it.
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Her final point leaps on certain connotations of utopian, but not Rorty's connotations. Is a utopia,
literally, a "nowhere"? It may have become one for Suprematism and the arts under Stalin, but
Rorty does not oppose utopias to political dog-fighting. Surely he would see King's "I Have a
Dream" speech as politics at its best, and so would I. Surely he would find debates about whether
the Democrats have an independent vision to be eminently practical.
A pragmatist might see talk about rights as misleading from time to time, since these fictions
based on political and social structures are not facts of nature. That only means, however, that
rights are fair, utopian claims with a potentially revolutionary impact. Marx may have attacked
utopian socialism in the name of dialectical materialism, but Marxism attracted adherents based
on hopes for the future.
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women's history, black history, gay studies, Hispanic-American studies, and migrant studies. This has led Stefan
Collini to remark that in the United States, though not in Britain, the term "cultural studies" means "victim studies." Collini's choice of phrase has been resented, but he was making a good point: namely, that such programs were
cre-ated not out of the sort of curiosity about diverse forms of human life which gave rise to cultural anthropology,
but rather from a sense of what America needed in order to make itself a better place. The principal motive behind
the new di-rections taken in scholarship in the United States since the Sixties has been the urge to do something for
people who have been humiliatedto help victims of socially accept-able forms of sadism by making such sadism
no longer ac-ceptable
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Coalfield War,13 and the passage of the Wagner Act as with the march from Selma, the Berkeley free-speech demonstrations, and Stonewall. Each new generation of
asking whether or not Walter Reuther's attempt to bourgeoisify the auto workers was objectively reactionary. It would also help if they emphasized the similarities
rather than the differences between Malcolm X and Bayard Rustin, between Susan B. Anthony and Emma Goldman, between Catharine MacKinnon and Judith
Butler.
The sectarian divisions which plagued Marxism are manifestations of an urge for purity which the Left would
be better off without. America is not a morally pure country. No country ever has been or ever will be. Nor will any
country ever have a morally pure, homogeneous Left. In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your
principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts. The Left in America has made
a lot of progress by doing just that. The closest the Left ever came to taking over the government was in 1912, when a Whitman enthu- siast, Eugene Debs, ran for
president and got almost a million votes. These votes were cast by, as Daniel Bell puts it, "as un- stable a compound as was ever mixed in the modern history of political chemistry." This
compound mingled rage at low wages and miserable working conditions with, as Bell says, "the puritan conscience of millionaire socialists, the boyish romanticism of a Jack London, the pale
Christian piety of a George Herron, ... the reckless braggadocio of a 'Wild Bill' Haywood, ... the tepid social-work impulse of do-gooders, ... the flaming discontent of the dispossessed farmers,
the inarticulate and amorphous desire to 'belong' of the immi- grant workers, the iconoclastic idol-breaking of the literary radicals, . . . and more." 14 Those dispossessed farmers were often racist,
nativist, and sadistic. The millionaire socialists, ruthless robber barons though they were, nevertheless set up the foundations which sponsored the research which helped get leftist legislation
We need to get rid of the Marxist idea that only bottom-up initiatives, conducted by workers and peasants who
have somehow been so freed from resentment as to show no trace of prejudice, can achieve our country. The his-tory
of leftist politics in America is a story of how top-down initiatives and bottom-up initiatives have interlocked. Top-down
passed.
leftist initiatives come from people who have enough security, money, and power themselves, but never-theless worry about the fate of people who have less. Exam-ples of such initiatives are
muckraking exposes by journalists, novelists, and scholarsfor example, Ida Tar bell on Stan- dard Oil, Upton Sinclair on immigrant workers in the Chicago slaughterhouses, Noam Chomsky on
the State De-partment's lies and the New York Times's omissions. Other ex- amples are the Wagner and Norris-Laguardia Acts, novels of social protest like People of the Abyss and Studs Lonigan,
the clos-ing of university campuses after the American invasion of Cambodia, and the Supreme Court's decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and Romer v. Evans. Bottom-up leftist initiatives
come from people who have little security, money, or power and who rebel against the unfair treatment which they, or others like them, are receiv-ing. Examples are the Pullman Strike, Marcus
Garvey's black nationalist movement, the General Motors sit-down strike of 1936, the Montgomery bus boycott, the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the creation of Cesar
Chavez's United Farm Workers, and the Stonewall "riot" (the beginning of the gay rights movement). Although these two kinds of initiatives reinforced each other, the people at the bottom took
the risks, suffered the beatings, made all the big sacrifices, and were sometimes murdered. But their heroism might have been fruitless if leisured, educated, relatively risk-free people had not
joined the struggle. Those beaten to death by the goon squads and the lynch mobs might have died in vain if the safe and secure had not lent a hand.
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analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Partynamely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwells Outer Party will
be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionalsLinds overclass, the people like you and me. The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out
smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the
individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their
prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues.7 The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhereto keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans
their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.8 The first response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second
comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to the marginally employed people who can most easily be
recruited into right-wing populist movements. Union members in the United States have watched factory after factory close, only to reopen in Slovenia, Thailand, or
response
Mexico. It is no wonder that they see the result of international free trade as prosperity for managers and stockholders, a better standard of living for workers in developing countries, and a very much worse
standard of living for American workers. It would be no wonder if they saw the American leftist intelligentsia as on the same side of the managers and stockholdersas sharing the same class interests. For we
intellectuals, who are mostly academics, are ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization. To make things worse, we often seem more interested in the workers of the
democracies are heading into a Weimarlike period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments . Edward Luttwak, for example,
has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized
developing world than in the fate of our fellow citizens. Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized
unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will
realize that suburban white-collar workersthemselves desperately afraid of being downsizedare not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point,
something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for
a strongman to vote forsomeone will assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salemen, and postmodernist professors will no
longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis novel It Cant Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will
consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossesed? It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth century, no longer
have a Left. Since nobody denies the existence of what I have called
the cultural Left, this amounts to an admission that that Left is unable to engage in national
politics.
It is not the sort of the Left which can be asked to deal with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would
have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of
talking less about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The first is that
. It should try
to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and Whitman might
be achieved. In support of my first suggestion, let me cite a passage from Deweys Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses his exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now going on under the
rubric of individualism versus communitarianism. Dewey thought that all discussions which took this dichotomy seriously suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions
under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want is light upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a
logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another. Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociopolitical theory
conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a rightist maneuver, one which supplies the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the
established order.9 For such ascents are now more common on the Left than on the Right. The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the
established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique. When one of todays academic leftists says that some topic has been inadequately
theorized, you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left
think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacans impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they
say, is accomplished by problematizing familiar concepts. Recent attempts to subvert social institutitons by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many
it is almost
impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of
a law, a treaty, a candidate or a political strategy. Even though what these authors theorize is often something very concrete and near at handa curent TV show, a media
celebrity, a recent scandalthey offer the most absract and barren explanations imaginable. These futile attempts to philosophize ones way into
political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial
approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations . These result in
thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worts. The authors of these purportedly subversive books honestly believe that the are serving human liberty. But
an intellec- tual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which
is called "power." This is the name of what Edmund- son calls Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook." 10
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State Good
Making demands on the state is critical to progressive changes. History proves that nonstatist movements, such as their alternative, are total failures.
Grossberg, Professor of Communications at the University of Illinois, 1992 [Lawrence, We Gotta Get Out of
This Place, p. 390-391]
But this would mean that the Left could not remain outside of the systems of governance. It has sometimes to
work with, against and with in bureaucratic systems of governance. Consider the case of Amnesty International, an
immesely effective organization when its major strategy was (similar to that of the Right) exerting pressure directly on
the bureaucracies of specific governments. In recent years (marked by the recent rock tour), it has apparently
redirected its energy and resources, seeking new members (who may not be committed to actually doing anything;
memebership becomes little more than a statement of ideological support for a position that few are likely to oppose)
and public visibility. In stark contrast, the most effective struggle on the Left in recent times has been the dramatic
(and, one hopes continuing) dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. It was accomplished by mobilizing popular
pressure on the institutions and bureaucracies of economic and governmental institutions and it depended on a
highly sophisticated organizational structure. The Left too often thinks that it can end racism and sexism and
classism by changing people's attitudes and everyday practices (e.g. the 1990 Balck boycott of Korean stores in New
York). Unfortunately, while such struggles may be extremely visible, they are often less effective than attempts to
move the institutions (e.g.,banks, taxing structures, distributors) which have put the economic realtions of bleack
and immigrant populations in place and which condition people's everyday practices. The Left needs institutions
which can operate within the system of governance, understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by
which power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that power can be
challenged. The Left assumed for some time now that, since it has so little access to the apparatuses of agency, its
only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more
visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of decision making power. Otherwise the
Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation and the other
social disgraces of our world, although it is individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to
do so, they must act with organizations, and within the systems of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as
well as responsibility) to fight them.
Denying the centrality of the state destroys all hope of changing it. We must analyze state
policy in order to understand it and reorient it
Krause & Williams, 1997 Prof. Political Sci. at Geneva Graduate Institute of Intl Studies and Asst. Prof. Political
Sci. at University of Southern Main [Keith and Michael, Critical Security Studies, Pg, XV-XVI]
These (and other) critical perspectives have much to say to each other in the construction of a critical theory of
international relations and, in turn, to contemporary security studies. While elements of many approaches may be
found in this volume, no one perspective dominates. If anything, several of the contributions to this volume stand
more inside than outside the tradition of security studies, which reflects our twofold conviction about the place of
critical perspectives in contemporary scholarship. First, to stand too far outside prevailing discourses is almost certain
to result in continued disciplinary exclusion. Second, to move toward alternative conceptions of security and security
studies, one must necessarily reopen the questions subsumed under the modem conception of sovereignty and the
scope of the political. To do this, one must take seriously the prevailing claims about the nature of security.
Many of the chapters in this volume thus retain a concern with the centrality of the state as a locus not only of
obligation but of effective political action. In the realm of organized violence, states also remain the preeminent
actors. The task of a critical, approach is not to deny the centrality of the state in this realm but, rather, to understand
more fully its structures, dynamics, and possibilities for reorientation. From a critical perspective, state action is
flexible and capable of reorientation, and analyzing state policy need not therefore be tantamount to embracing the
statist assumptions of orthodox conceptions. To exclude a focus on state action from a critical perspective on the
grounds that it plays inevitably within the rules of existing conceptions simply reverses the error of essentializing the
state. Moreover, it loses the possibility of influencing what remains the most structurally capable actor in
contemporary world politics.
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State Good
Failure to understand the state and interact with it guarantees our destruction
Spanier, Ph. D. from Yale and teacher at the University of Florida, 1990 [John, Games Nations Play, Pg. 115]
Whether the observer personally approves of the "logic of behavior" that a particular framework seems to suggest is
not the point. It is one thing to say , as done here, that the state system condemns each state to be continually
concerned with its power relative to that of other states, which, in an anarchical system, it regards as potential
aggressors. It is quite another thing to approve morally of power politics. The utility of the state-system framework is
simply that is points to the "essence" of state behavior. It does not pretend to account for all factors, such as moral
norms, that motivate states. As a necessarily simplified version of reality, it clarifies what most basically concerns and
drives states and what kinds of behavior can be expected. We, as observers, may deplore that behavior and the
anarchical system that produces it and we may wish that international politics were not as conflictual and violent as the
twentieth century has already amply demonstrated. We may prefer a system other that one in which states are so
committed to advancing their own national interests and protecting their sovereignty. Nevertheless, however much
we may deplore the current system and prefer a more peaceful and harmonious world, we must first understand the
contemporary one if we are to learn how to "manage" it and avoid the catastrophe of a nuclear war.
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State Good
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true feminist, Otto Weininger's assertion that, although women are "ontologically false," lacking the proper ethical
stature, they should be acknowledged the same rights as men in public life, is infinitely more acceptable than the
false elevation of women that makes them "too good" for the banality of men's rights.
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Role-playing debates promote prepare us for real world activism by giving us a better
understanding of how policy works, making us affective agents to achieve change. This
allows us as individuals to become actors who could indeed transform international
politics.
Joyner 1999 [Christopher, Professor international Law @ University of Georgetown, Teaching International Law:
Views from an international relations political scientist].
The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives. First, students on each team must work together
to refine a cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign policy issue confronting the
United States. In this way, they gain greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas faced by policy makers.
Second, as they work with other members of their team, they realize the complexities of applying and implementing
international law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States policy and international legal
principles, either by reworking the former or creatively reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates
forces students to become familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States foreign policy agenda and the
role that international law plays in formulating and executing these policies. 8 The debate thus becomes an excellent
vehicle for pushing students beyond stale arguments over principles into the real world of policy analysis, political
critique, and legal defense.
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considerable importance in a real world setting. Recent college and high school topics include energy policy, prison
reform, care for the elderly, trade policy, homelessness, and the right to privacy. These topics are notable because
they exceed the knowledge boundaries of particular school subjects, they reach into issues of everyday life, and they
are broad enough to force students to address a variety of value appeals. The explosion of "squirrels," or small and
specific cases, III the 1960s and 1970s has had the effect of opening up each topic to many different case
approaches. National topics are no longer of the one-case variety (as in 1955's "the U.S. should recog nize Red
China"). On the privacy topic, for example, cases include search and seizure issues, abortion, sexual privacy,
tradeoffs with the first amendment, birth control, information privacy, pornography, and obscenity. The multiplicity
of issues pays special dividends for debaters required to defend both sides of many issues because the value criteria
change from round to round and evolve over the year. The development of flexibility in coping with the
intertwining of issues is an essential component in the interconnection of knowledge, and is a major rationale for
switch-side debate.]
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Debate is key to forming effective public decisions and tying education to the real world.
Muir, 1993 (Star A, Department of Communications at George Mason University, A Defense of the Ethics of
Contemporary Debate, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 26, No. 4, pg. 286-287)
A third point about isolation from the real world is that switch-side debate develops habits of the mind and
instills a lifelong pattern of critical assessment. Students who have debated both sides of a topic are better voters, Dell writes, because of "their
habit of analyzing both sides before forming a conclusion. "33 O'Neill, Laycock and Scales, responding in part to Roosevelt's indictment, iterated the basic position in
1931:
Skill in the use of facts and inferences available may be gained on >either side of a question without regard to convictions. Instruction ~and
practice in debate should give young men this skill. And where these matters are properly handled, stress is not laid on getting the speaker to
think rightly in regard to the merits of either side of these questions-but to think accurately on both sides.
Reasons for not taking a position counter to one's beliefs (isolation from the "real world," sophistry) are largely outweighed by the benefit of such mental habits
throughout an individual's life.
The jargon, strategies, and techniques may be alienating to "outsiders," but they are also paradoxically integrative as well. Playing the game of
debate involves certain skills, including research and policy evaluation, that evolve along with a debater's
consciousness pf the complexities of moral and political dilemmas. This conceptual development is a basis for the
formation of ideas and relational thinking necessary for effective public decision making, making even the game of
debate a significant benefit in solving real world problems.
Switch side debate allows us to debate issues, not necessarily endorse themthis gives us
space to experiment with different ideas.
Muir, 1993 (Star A, Department of Communications at George Mason University, A Defense of the Ethics of
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Contemporary Debate, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 26, No. 4, pg. 288)
The role of switch-side debate is especially important in the oral defense of arguments that foster tolerance without
accruing the moral complications of acting on such beliefs. The forum is therefore unique in providing debaters with attitudes of tolerance without committing them
to active moral irresponsibility. As Freeley notes, debaters
are indeed exposed to a multivalued world, both within and between the
sides of a given topic. Yet this exposure hardly commits them to such mistaken values. In this view, the divorce
of the game from the real world can be seen as a means of gaining perspective without obligating students to
validate their hypothetical structure through immoral actions.
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It is morally and pedagogically correct to teach about ethics, and the skills of moral analysis rather than
doctrine, and to set out the arguments for and against tolerance and pluralism. All of this is undone if you
also imply that all the various in compatible views about abortion or pornography or war are equally right,
or likely to be right, or deserving of respect. Pluralism requires respecting the right to hold divergent
beliefs; it implies neither tolerance of actions based on those beliefs nor respecting the content of beliefs.
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Imagining what someone else would do is the epitome of switch side debateits key to
critiquing our assumptions.
Muir, 1993 (Star A, Department of Communications at George Mason University, A Defense of the Ethics of
Contemporary Debate, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 26, No. 4, pg. 292-293)
The values of tolerance and fairness, implicit in the metaphor of debate as a game, are idealistic by nature.
They have a much greater chance of success, however, in an activity that requires students to examine and
understand both sides of an issue. In his description of debating societies, Robert Louis Stevenson questions the
prevalence of unreasoned opinion, and summarizes the judgment furthered in this work:
Now, as the rule stands, you are saddled with the side you disapprove, and so you are forced, by
regard for your own fame, to argue out, to feel with, to elaborate completely, the case as it stands
against yourself; and what a fund of wisdom do you not turn up in this idle digging of the vineyard!
How many new difficulties take form before your eyes! How many superannuated arguments
cripple finally into limbo, under the glance of your enforced eclecticism! . . . It is as a means of
melting down this museum of premature petrifactions into living and impressionable soul that we
insist on their utility.")
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We must combine the modern and the postmodern to solve for the shortcomings of each
Best & Kellner, Department of Philosophy at University of Texas-El Paso, 1998 [Steven & Douglas,
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/illuminations/kell28.htm, Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future]
The postmodern turn which has so marked social and cultural theory also involves conflicts between modern and
postmodern politics. In this study, we articulate the differences between modern and postmodern politics and argue
against one-sided positions which dogmatically reject one tradition or the other in favor of partisanship for either the
modern or the postmodern. Arguing for a politics of alliance and solidarity, we claim that this project is best served
by drawing on the most progressive elements of both the modern and postmodern traditions. Developing a new
politics involves overcoming the limitations of certain versions of modern politics and postmodern identity politics
in order to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to the challenges of the coming millennium.
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difference. Their pleas for "ethnopluralism" transmute plans to repatriate immigrants into a left-sounding antiimperialist strategy championing the autonomy of all cultural groups and their right to exert sovereignty in their
living space. Claiming to counter
"antiwhite racism," they argue that multiculturalism serves global capitalism's merciless leveling and that only exclusionary monoculture nurtures
genuine cultural diversity. They also pose "green" agendas to protect their homelands from overpopulation, overdevelopment, and other ravages
of the neoliberal "New World Order" and latest and most exploitative phase of Enlightenment.16 They often deploy New Age spiritualism,
inscribed in pagan or early Christian symbols, to foster reenchantment and remythologization. Following the New Left and today's postmodernist
cultural left, the New Right stress the ascendancy of cultural politics. Reshaping radical conservatism for postmodern times, they employ
cultural studies' favorite forerunner theorist, Antonio Gramsci, an icon of their fusion of left and right and use his idea of "cultural hegemony"
against the liberal left (e.g., Sunk 1990, pp. 14, 29-41).
Eatwell holds that the New Right's "ideological core" is little changed from first-generation radical conservatism's "holistic-national
radical Third Way" (1997, p. 361; emphasis in original). Recently resurrected and appropriated by the New Right, the original Weimar-era
approaches bear the imprint of radical tribalism.17 Following Nietzschean antisociology, they charged that modern
theorists elevate "decadent" values into guiding ideals and that their universalist grand narratives of modernization
produce pernicious leveling of cultural particularity. They were influenced strongly by Nietzsche's antiliberalism and total critique
of modernity, but they reformulated his ideas into nationalist visions that he rejected. Inverting the idea of a progressive shift
from homogenous tribes, rooted in "ethnos," to plural modern societies, based on "demos," radical conservatives held that modern theory affirms
normatively an actual descent from animate cultural diversity to souless universal technocracy They contended that modern
democracy's melding of diverse ethnic groups into a mass "society" destroys their distinctive cultural identities. 18 In
their view, it dissolves cultural community into atomized, selfish, impersonal economic relations. Radical conservatives decried liberal-
left efforts to impose formal and substantive equality, holding that allegedly suppressed natural inequalities ought to
be cultivated and employed within the ranks of the domestic sociopolitical order. Overall, they envisioned an "organic"
hierarchy of corporate groups and loyal subjects, regimented in a pseudo-communal way under natural leaderships.19 Heidegger held that
"Europe lies in a pincers between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same"; that is, their economism and instrumentalism causes
a "darkening of the world" or "always-the-same-ness" (1961, pp. 36-39). In his view, the hegemonic modern emphasis on technical rationality
turns people into a timid, powerless, mediocre, nihilistic mass or a totally homogenized technological civilization devoid of cultural creativity
Heidegger and other radical conservatives contended that capitalism and socialism are both rooted in the West's characteristic universalis tic
rationalism. Still manifesting this exhausted cultural complex, they held, left-wing "revolution" cannot forge a genuinely new culture. They still
considered communism an especially dangerous and formidable enemy, fearing that its antiliberal communalism, statism, and internationalism
could forge the solidarity and discipline that are lacking in liberal democracy They believed that the left could grab political power, but that
would merely harden the grip of bankrupt Western civilization. They thought that communism's instrumentalist, egalitarian rationalization
would suppress all opposition and be the bane of all culture. Radical conservatives hoped that radical segments of the cultural
left, sharing their virulent hatred of liberal institutions and belief that bourgeois culture was totally spent, would join
a "revolution from the right" aimed at demolishing sociocultural modernity and putting modern technology in the service a
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conservatives saw the political spectrum as a sharply bowed horseshoe; the extreme
left occupies an opposite, but proximate end of the continuum. They hoped that left radicals would give up on their
failed revolution and make the short jump to the extreme right, closing the "ends of a horseshoe" and encircling the
common liberal enemy (Kolnai 1938, pp. 113, 235).
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Benoist's direction is visible in his friendly references to Schmitt and other radical conservatives and in his
equation of modern democracy with extreme domination and exhaustion (i.e., total atomization, instrumentalization, and
homogenization). Seeing capitalist globalization as the cause of today's Third World diaspora, he holds that receiving states, countries of origin, and transplanted
people themselves would all benefit from the repatriation of immigrants. He claims that such a move is the only way to preserve difference and foster a heterotopia
of autonomous cultures or Schmittian pluriverse; only homogenous ethnically unified communities are capable of sustaining the type of collective identities needed
to resist neoliberalism's grim reaper. Like Schmitt, Benoist stresses incommensurable culture, rather than biological difference. He rejects traditional racism and
espouses cultural relativism and tolerance, but he argues that cultural differences cannot be mediated communicatively or regulated by common norms.23 His
self-described "postmodern" move is supposed to counter the West's hegemonic rationalism and cultural imperialism,
especially the allegedly corrosive force of its universal human rights and abstract notions of equality (which he argues
serve liberal economism and homogenization). He treats democratic universalism and egalitarianism as protototalitarian
tendencies, and he suggests that Stalinism and Nazism are rooted in liberal democratic culture's evaporation of particularity and that they provide a staging
point for an organicist inversion of modern democracy. Benoist's convergence with postmodernism's politicized strong program is
transparent, except that following more consistently the logic of radical perspectivism's break with the
communication model, he argues that cultural diversity can never be preserved in a multicultural society (Benoist 199394a, 1993-946, 1995; Taguieff 1993-94a; Sunk 1990, pp. 125-51).
Benoist claims to champion the "direct democracy" of the ancient Greek polis, but, like earlier radical conservatives, he leaves vague the actual mechanisms of
political rule. He does imply, however, that they would invert liberal democracy. Praising the Greek polis for averting liberal fragmentation and paralysis and, thus,
Benoist sees "ancient democracy" as "genuine democracy." He attributes its cultural and political
integration to the convergence of "demos and ethnos"; that is, citizenship was based on "common ancestry" or the "reverse" of liberal orders
where equal rights derive from "the natural equality of all." He is aware that citizens of "ancient democracy" were usually a
being "a community of citizens,"
hereditary status order of landed and militarized propertyholders that relied on ruthless extraction from unfree slave
and serf strata and that did not extend equal rights to women. Seeing such dominance and subordination as a
natural facet of organic particularity, he asserts that "a certain hierarchical structure" does not diminish the
democratic status of such regimes. His idea of ancient "liberty" inverts today's liberal democratic usages of the term. Rather than
"emancipation from the collectivity," he argues, ancient liberty affirmed the individual's bond to the community and
stressed "inheritance" and "adherence." Accordingly, he held that the "'liberty' of an individual-without heritage, i.e., of a
deracinated individual, was completely devoid of any meaning." He also states casually that "slaves were excluded from voting not because they
were slaves, but because they were not 'citizens' [i.e., not members of one of the polis's constituent phratries or clans]." In his view, the most vital facet of the polis
was its exclusion of outsiders. Conversely, today's hegemonic principles of universal citizenship and human equality preclude his preferred "aristodemocracy"
(Benoist 1991). Benoist praised ancient imperial regimes for similar reasons as the polis; they recognized individuals only through their membership in legally
empowered corporate groupings or status orders (religions, ethnic groups, communities, and nations). By contrast to the modern nation-state's principle of voluntary
association and countervailing power of individual rights, ancient groups were compulsory and had sweeping power over their flocks. For today, Benoist advises,
"Imperial principle above, direct democracy below" (Benoist 1993-94a, p. 97). His hoped-for federated European monocultures, where political rights would be tied
to ethnos, would empower compulsory groupings, forging communitarianism with an iron glove (Walzer 1997, pp. 14-19). The undemocratic features of the
premodern polis, the empire, and the feudal state disappear in Benoist's rendering. Ignoring pervasive force and dependency, he praises their "democratic" facets,
"spiritual character," solidarity, and integration of the "one and the many" (all emanating from the centrality of "ethnos" and participation limited by status-group
membership) (Benoist 1993-946). He redefine's "direct democracy" as hierarchical monoculture, which overcomes today's normative emphases on universal
citizenship, equal participation, and individual freedom. Posed as a revolutionary "alternative" to mass democracy and liberal institutions, his position, like earlier
This direction
is manifested in his unproblematical description of the Weimar radical conservative Ernst Junger's "democracy of
the state," or hierarchical order, based on "Prussian principles of command," where "liberty and obedience are one"
radical conservative arguments for "organic democracy," points toward protofascist pseudocommunity rather than self-governing Gemeinschaft.
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(Benoist 1998a, 1998&).24 Equating modern democracy with spiritless mediocrity, decadence, and deracination, Benoist postures when he expresses appreciative
views of North American communitarians, who he must know aim to enliven the very types of representative democracy and liberal institutions that he despises.
Claiming that everyone pretends to support democracy today, Benoist employs the term for his own purposes (1991, p. 26). His effort to locate himself as an "organic
communitarian" who embraces "community" and "difference" manifests the postmodern split of signifier and signified (Benoist 1993-94a).
Pitting "community" and "ethnos" against "society" and "demos," radical conservatives break with modern theory or the sociological presuppositions of modern
democracy. They see the "universe of the particular," or self-enclosed collective identities, as the only bulwark against homogenization. Against universalism and
human rights, they hold that divergent cultures cannot reach shared understandings or be judged by common standards. Their
radical perspectivism
parallels the essentialist standpoint philosophies of postmodernism's politicized strong program. However, they
propose an exclusionary monoculture that follows consistently from their break with the communication model.
Their inherently conflictive view of intergroup relations treat power-knowledge and dominance-subordination as all-pervasive defining forces
among the tribes. Most important, they transform the ideals of freedom and autonomy from qualities of individual citizens
to attributes of a unitary, collective political subject. The radical conservative strategy of strengthening the political
center and empowering groups over individuals is posed, today, as therapy for the homelessness, fragmentation, and
unconstrained, nihilistic individualism that allegedly inhere in the neoliberal political economic regime and in cultural
postmodernization. However, the total state lurks behind their
critique.
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and individual ethical questions: Ought society to forbid (or discourage) certain applications
of computers? Forbid (or discourage) research on computers per se? Forbid (or discourage)
research on quantum electronics? On solid-state physics? On quantum mechanics? And
likewise for individual scientists and technologists. (Clearly, an affirmative answer to these
questions becomes harder to justify as one goes down the list; but I do not want to declare
any of these questions a priori illegitimate.) Likewise, sociological questions arise, for
example: To what extent is our (true) knowledge of computer science, quantum electronics,
solid-state physics and quantum mechanics -- and our lack of knowledge about other
scientific subjects, e.g. the global climate -- a result of public-policy choices favoring
militarism? To what extent have the erroneous theories (if any) in computer science,
quantum electronics, solid-state physics and quantum mechanics been the result (in whole
or in part) of social, economic, political, cultural and ideological factors, in particular the
culture of militarism?9 These are all serious questions, which deserve careful investigation
adhering to the highest standards of scientific and historical evidence. But they have no
effect whatsoever on the underlying scientific questions: whether atoms (and silicon
crystals, transistors and computers) really do behave according to the laws of quantum
mechanics (and solid-state physics, quantum electronics and computer science). The
militaristic orientation of American science has quite simply no bearing whatsoever on the
ontological question, and only under a wildly implausible scenario could it have any bearing
on the epistemological question. (E.g. if the worldwide community of solid-state physicists,
following what they believe to be the conventional standards of scientific evidence, were to
hastily accept an erroneous theory of semiconductor behavior because of their enthusiasm
for the breakthrough in military technology that this theory would make possible.)
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Defending truth claims is less dangerous than attacking them policy solutions are
necessary to achieve progress and prevent policy paralysis
Fierlbeck 1994 [Katherine, Associate Professor of Political Science at Dalhousie University, Review Author
Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions, History and Theory, Vol 33, No 1,
February, p. 107-113]
In many respects, even the dismally skeptical post-modernists are too optimistic in their allegiance to post-modern
ideas. As many others have already pointed out, post-modernism offers little constructive advice about how to
reorganize and reinvigorate modern social relations. "The views of the post-modern individual," explains Rosenau,
"are likely neither to lead to a post-modern society of innovative production nor to engender sustained or contained
economic growth." This is simply because "these are not post-modern priorities"(55). Post-modernism offers no
salient solutions; and, where it does, such ideas have usually been reconstituted from ideas presented in other times
and places.[9] What we need are specific solutions to specific problems: to trade disputes, to the redistribution of
health care resources, to unemployment, to spousal abuse. If one cannot prioritize public policy alternatives, or
assign political responsibility to address such issues, or even say without hesitation that wealthy nations that
steadfastly ignore pockets of virulent poverty are immoral, then the worst nightmares of the most cynical postmodernists will likely come to life. Such an overarching refusal to address these issues is at least as dangerous as
any overarching affirmation of beliefs regarding ways to go about solving them. Post-modernism suffers from -and is defined by -- too much indeterminacy. In order to achieve anything, constructive or otherwise, human beings
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must attempt to understand the nature of things, and to evaluate them. This can be done even if we accept that we
may never understand things completely, or evaluate them correctly. But if paralysis is the most obvious political
consequence of post-modernism, a graver danger lies in the rejection of the "Enlightenment ideals" of universality
and impartiality. If the resounding end to the Cold War has taught us anything, it should be that the opposite of
"universalism" is not invariably a coexistence of "little narratives": it can be, and frequently is, some combination of
intolerance, local prejudice, suspicion, bigotry, fear, brutality, and persecution. The uncritical affiliation with the
community of one's birth, as Martha Nussbaum notes, "while not without causal and formative power, is ethically
arbitrary, and sometimes ethically dangerous -- in that it encourages us to listen to our unexamined preferences as if
they were ethical laws."[10]
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facts (like the first two cited here) matter a great deal.
Still, Ross is correct that, at a sociological level, maintaining the demarcation line between science and pseudoscience serves -among other things -- to maintain the social power of those who, whether or not they have formal scientific credentials, stand on
science's side of the line. (It has also served to increase the mean life expectancy in the United States from 47 years to 76 years in
The rejection of objective reality fosters irresponsibility and forecloses possibilities for
social changeonly truth claims allow us to combat the dominant ideologies of elites
Sokal, Professor of Physics at New York University, 1996 (A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html)
Why did I do it? While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious. What
concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a
particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective
realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical
relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text raises important questions that no scientist should ignore -- questions, for
example, about how corporate and government funding influence scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to
further the discussion of these matters.
my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political.
Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply
meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts
and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much
contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious
In short,
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truths -- the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious
language.
Social Text's acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory -- meaning postmodernist literary theory --
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The left needs to evaluate both ethical and rational interests to achieve true political change
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Love
Anger without love soon becomes sterile or uncontrolled, while love without anger can still
inspire a movement. But there is no need to choose; love and anger are compatible. Nothing
could better symbolize anger than the powerful bolt-cutters with which the Greenham Common
women routinely destroy the fence surrounding the cruise missile site. Nothing could better
symbolize love than the webs of twine and ribbon and memorabilia with which they decorate the
same fence. We suspect it is this combination the anger not rancid, the love not languid
that has captured the imaginations of peace activists around the world.
Love is compatible with fear as well. As we suggested earlier, some evidence indicates that
people are more affected by fear appeals targeted at their loved ones than by those aimed at
themselves. Ironically, one of the classic studies from the early 1960s tried to persuade citizens
to support community fallout shelters; strong fear appeals threatening family safety worked
better than threats to the individual.(17)
But love is not compatible with psychic numbing. Just as numbness interferes with the ability to
love freely, so active love drives away the numbness. Antinuclear activists almost universally
report that they remain active less for themselves than for those they love, and that without love
they could not stay with the fight. This is not to suggest that these activists are more loving than
their neighbors, only that their love helps them stay active and that their activism is a powerful
expression of love. It is relevant that the children of activists are far more confident of their
futures than most children.(18)
Just as activists rely on love to keep them going, one can mobilize the uninvolved by talking
about the people, places, and values one holds dear and encouraging listeners to do the same.
Something or someone to fight for is as indispensable to activism as something or someone to
fight against.
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Violence is inevitable only through our abilities to use moral outrage, fear and action can
we hope to contain it
Adams 86 (David, Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University and Director of the Unit for the International
Year for the Culture of Peacem Role of Anger in the Consciousness Development of Peace Activists: Where
Physiology and History, International Journal of Psychophysiology,Volume 4, page 157-164 1986,
http://www.culture-of-peace.info/psychophysiology/title-page.html.)
To summarize the argument of this paper, we may chart a series of transformations that have occurred during the
course of evolution which have enabled the offense behavior common to all mammals to serve-among its many
functions-a special function in human history. The first transformation involves a new set of motivating stimuli for
offense which consists of certain actions of the target, rather than more enduring attributes of that animal. Second,
and still at the level of primate evolution, there is a process of internalization by which the young animal learns
which actions are to be punished, and by which the adults guide their own punishing anger. Third, at the level of
human society, there develops the ability to conceptualize institutions and social systems and to respond to their
actions with punishment and anger, just as one might respond to the immoral actions of another individual. And,
finally, there is the ability to incorporate this moral outrage into a complex pattern of consciousness development,
including action, affiliation and analysis by which individuals become powerful forces in history.
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Anger is Key to peace movements, only moral condemnation is effective at spurring peace
movements
Adams 86 (David, Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University and Director of the Unit for the International
Year for the Culture of Peacem Role of Anger in the Consciousness Development of Peace Activists: Where
Physiology and History, International Journal of Psychophysiology,Volume 4, page 157-164 1986,
http://www.culture-of-peace.info/psychophysiology/title-page.html.)
In a dialectical view of history, the role of the individual actor may be seen in terms of his response to historical
contradictions. In this case we may speak of the contradiction of war and peace. The contemporary peace activist is
raised in an educational, religious political system that claims to oppose war. Having acquired and adopted these
values, the peace activist reacts with anger when he or she perceives the nation and its leaders are engaging in
practices that threaten to provoke or maintain a policy of war. The individual activist, in his moral reactions, reflects
the historical contradiction. Evidence suggests that it is precisely those members of a society who have most
strongly acquired the moral values of the society who become the most angry and active to resolve the
contradictions. And further, we may suppose that the more the society tries to suppress his activity, the more the
activist is confirmed in his outrage against the society's injustice. Repression may, at least in some cases, feed the
flames of discontent.
In the historical context, anger may be characterized as the personal fuel in the social motor that resolves the
institutional contradictions that arise in the course of history. Perhaps the best known illustration of this in our own
cultural history is the anger of Jesus and the Old Testament prophets. The prophets, like the peace activists of our
own day, point to moral standards which they learned from the society and condemn the practices of the society in
the light of those standards.
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and can't tolerate, and the negative consequences of denying them. The
emotions we call "negative" are energies that get our attention, ask for
expression, transmit information and impel action. Grief tells us that we
are all interconnected in the web of life, and that what connects us also
breaks our hearts. Fear alerts us to protect and sustain life. Despair asks
us to grieve our losses, to examine and transform the meaning of our lives,
to repair our broken souls. Each of these emotions is purposeful and
useful - if we know how to listen to them.
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Fear of Death is key to human survival confronting death is key to state and individual
existence
Beres 96 (Louis Rene, Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue University, Feb.,
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."
Fear is key to value to life, survival and transcending evil
Greenspan 2003 (Miriam, Pioneer in the Area of Womens Psychology, Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The
Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair, Excerpt of Chapter Three - How Dark Emotions Become Toxic,
http://www.miriamgreenspan.com/excerpts/chapterThreeEx.html )
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Grief, fear, and despair are primary human emotions. Without them, we would be less than human, and less likely
to survive. Grief arises because we are not alone, and what connects us to others and to the world also breaks our
hearts. Grieving our losses allows us to heal and renew our spirits. Fear alerts us to protect our survival, extending
beyond our instinct for self-preservation to our concern for others. Despair asks us to find meaning in the midst of
apparent chaos or meaninglessness. Making meaning out of suffering is the basis of the human capacity to survive
evil and transcend it.
The purposefulness of these dark emotions is evident when we can experience them mindfully, tolerate their
intense energies, and let them be. Unfortunately, we dont learn how to do this in a culture that fears and devalues
them. Emotion-phobia toxifies dark emotions, leaving our hearts confused and numb, depressed and anxious,
isolated and lonely. In emotion-phobic culture, we internalize the idea that befriending what hurts will hurt us,
whereas suppressing and avoiding it will make us feel better. We only end up feeling worse. The cultural baggage
we carry weighs us down, a major impediment to the art of emotional alchemy.
But we werent born with our bias against the dark emotions. We can change what we believe and how we react to
grief, fear, and despair. We can transform the way we experience these emotions and begin to taste the freedom and
power of letting our emotions be.
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Nowhere is it written that Israel is forever, or that presumptions of collective immortality are
purposeful to Israel's security. Stepping into imaginations of death in order to prevent
annihilation, Israel must quickly discover, in the immanent abyss of nonbeing, the course of
direction toward life. Drawing upon the anxiety of death's immanence in the life of every nation,
the People of Israel could nurture the Angst that is now antecedent to national endurance.
Israel cannot afford to be "liberated" from existential anxiety. It must, instead, feel that the Third
Temple Commonwealth is problematic, that collective extinction represents the end point of the
same continuum that contains collective vitality, and that preservation as a state cannot be
detached from reasonable intimations of disappearance. Left uncontrolled, anguish can become
an unbearable hindrance, but disregarded entirely, it can become the source of unalterable
despair.
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it is his turn.
beings actually die, not only a few, rather all of them, each and every one of us, when
This dialectic - in which I look away from myself to others or from others to myself, uniting us under the universal lot of transitoriness is no solution to the problem of
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Advocating a plan to address harms of nuclear war overcomes the problem of numbing
Sandman and Valenti 86 (Peter and JoAnn, Professor of Human Ecology at Rutgers and Preeminent Risk
Communications Expert published over 80 articles and books on various aspects of risk communication, Scared stiff
or scared into action, , Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1986, pp. 1216,
http://www.psandman.com/articles/scarstif.htm)
WHEN THE MOVEMENT against nuclear weapons celebrates its heroes, a place of honor is
reserved for Helen Caldicott, the Australian pediatrician who revived Physicians for Social
Responsibility (PSR) in 1978 and made it the vehicle for her impassioned antinuclear crusade. In
countless communities since then, Caldicott has briskly narrated the devastation that would result
if a small nuclear warhead exploded right here and now. Thousands of activists trace their
movement beginnings to a Helen Caldicott speech, wondering if it wouldn't help reverse the
arms race just to make everyone sit through that speech and each week hundreds of activists
do their best to give the speech themselves.
Nonetheless, PSR Executive Director Jane Wales, while acknowledging a huge debt to Caldicott,
said in 1984 that the time for the bombing runs (as insiders call the speech) was past. We
knew it was past when someone interrupted the speech one evening, actually interrupted it, and
said, We know all that, but what can we do? In a 1985 newsletter, similarly, Sanford Gottlieb
of United Campuses to Prevent Nuclear War warned that many students were being numbed by
the emphasis on nuclear blast, fire and radiation in courses on nuclear war and were therefore
feeling more impotent and depressed than before the class began.(1) Perhaps the first broad
awareness that shock therapy may not be the best therapy came, ironically, in 1983 in the weeks
preceding the broadcast of the television film The Day After, when Educators for Social
Responsibility and others worried that the program might do children more harm than good. The
Day After turned out to be less frightening than expected, but other films (Threads, Testament,
and Caldicotts own The Last Epidemic) raise the same worry and not just for children.
In the following analysis of the fear of nuclear Armageddon and its implications for antinuclear
advocacy, we will argue that most people are neither apathetic about nuclear war nor actively
terrified of it but rather, in Robert Jay Liftons evocative phrase, psychically numbed; that it is
ineffective to frighten audiences who have found a refuge from their fears in numbness; and that
there exist more effective keys to unlocking such paralysis.
THE CENTRAL ENIGMA of antinuclear activism is why everyone is not working to prevent
nuclear war. Activists who can understand those who disagree about what should be done are
bewildered and frustrated by those who do nothing. Such inaction is objectively irrational; as
Caldicott asked in a 1982 cover article in Family Weekly, Why make sure kids clean their teeth
and eat healthy food if theyre not going to survive?(2)
Advocates of all causes chafe at their neighbors lack of interest. When the issue is something
like saving whales or wheelchair access to public buildings, the problem is usually diagnosed as
apathy. Psychiatrist Robert Winer argues that the same is true of the nuclear threat, which most
of us experience as remote, impersonal, and vague. For Winer, one of the genuinely tragic
aspects of the nuclear situation is that immediacy may be given to us only once and then it will
be too late to learn.(3) There is obviously some truth to this view. When asked to describe their
images of nuclear war, people do tend to come up with abstractions and those with more
concrete, immediate images are likely to be antinuclear activists.(4)
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Fear of nuclear weapons has prevented their use deterrence has checked conflict
Rajaraman 2002 (Professor of Theoretical Physics at JNU, 2002 [R., Ban battlefield nuclear weapons, 4/22/2,
The Hindu, http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/04/22/stories/2002042200431000.htm[
There were a variety of different reasons behind each of these examples of abstinence from using nuclear weapons.
But one major common factor
contributing to all of them has been an ingrained terror of nuclear devastation. The well documented images of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the awesome photographs of giant mushroom clouds emerging from nuclear tests in the
Pacific and the numerous movies based on nuclear Armageddon scenarios have all contributed to building up a deep
rooted fear of nuclear weapons. This is not limited just to the abhorrence felt by anti-nuclear activists. It permeates
to one extent or another the psyche of all but the most pathological of fanatics. It colours the calculations, even if not
decisively, of the most hardened of military strategists. The unacceptability of nuclear devastation is the backbone of
all deterrence strategies. There is not just a fear of being attacked oneself, but also a strong mental barrier against
actually initiating nuclear attacks on enemy populations, no matter how much they may be contemplated in war
games and strategies. As a result a taboo has tacitly evolved over the decades preventing nations, at least so far, from
actually pressing the nuclear button even in the face of serious military crises.
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Fear of nuclear war is good its key to stopping the use of nuclear weapons and creating a
more peaceful society
Futterman, 1991 (JAH, Livermore lab researcher, 1995, Mediation of the Bomb, online,
http://www.dogchurch.org/scriptorium/nuke0
I could say that if I didn't do it, someone else would, but that answer was rejected at Nuremberg.
(It's also a better reason to leave the weapons program than to stay.) I continue to support the u
business with my effort for many reasons, which I discuss throughout this piece. But mostly, I do
it because the fear of nuclear holocaust is the only authority my own country or any other has
respected so far when it comes to nationalistic urges to make unlimited war. As William L. Shirer
states in his preface to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Touchstone Books, New York,
1990),
"Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of
Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on
the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase
of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile, and of
rockets which can be aimed to hit the moon."
Now this contrasts with the argument of those who would "reinvent government" by putting up
bureaucratic roadblocks to maintaining the reliability of the US nuclear arsenal through research
and testing. They reason that if the reliability of everyone's nuclear arsenals declines, everyone
will be less likely to try using them. The problem is that some "adventurer-conqueror" may arise
and use everyone's doubt about their arsenals to risk massive conventional war instead. An
expansionist dictatorship might even risk nuclear war with weapons that are simpler, cruder, less
powerful, much riskier (in terms of the possibility of accidental detonation) but much more
reliable than our own may eventually become without adequate "stockpile stewardship."[14]
But the inhibitory effect of reliable nuclear weapons goes deeper than Shirer's deterrence of
adventurer-conquerors. It changes the way we think individually and culturally, preparing us for
a future we cannot now imagine. Jungian psychiatrist Anthony J. Stevens states, [15]
"History would indicate that people cannot rise above their narrow sectarian concerns without
some overwhelming paroxysm. It took the War of Independence and the Civil War to forge the
United States, World War I to create the League of Nations, World War II to create the United
Nations Organization and the European Economic Community. Only catastrophe, it seems,
forces people to take the wider view.
Or what about fear? Can the horror which we all experience when we contemplate the possibility
of nuclear extinction mobilize in us sufficient libidinal energy to resist the archetypes of war?
Certainly, the moment we become blas about the possibility of holocaust we are lost. As long as
horror of nuclear exchange remains uppermost we can recognize that nothing is worth it. War
becomes the impossible option. Perhaps horror, the experience of horror, the consciousness of
horror, is our only hope. Perhaps horror alone will enable us to overcome the otherwise
invincible attraction of war."
Thus I also continue engaging in nuclear weapons work to help fire that world-historical warning
shot I mentioned above, namely, that as our beneficial technologies become more powerful, so
will our weapons technologies, unless genuine peace precludes it. We must build a future more
peaceful than our past, if we are to have a future at all, with or without nuclear weapons a fact
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we had better learn before worse things than nuclear weapons are invented. If you're a
philosopher, this means that I regard the nature of humankind as mutable rather than fixed, but
that I think most people welcome change in their personalities and cultures with all the
enthusiasm that they welcome death thus, the fear of nuclear annihilation of ourselves and all
our values may be what we require in order to become peaceful enough to survive our future
technological breakthroughs.[16]
In other words, when the peace movement tells the world that we need to treat each other more
kindly, I and my colleagues stand behind it (like Malcolm X stood behind Martin Luther King,
Jr.) saying, "Or else." We provide the peace movement with a needed sense of urgency that it
might otherwise lack.
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Lifton 01 (Robert Jay, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at John Jay College, Illusions of the
second nuclear age, World Policy Journal. New York: Spring 2001. Vol. 18, Iss. 1; pg. 25, 6 pgs)
The trouble is that in other ways the dangers associated with nuclear weapons are greater than ever: the continuing
weapons-- centered policies in the United States and elsewhere; the difficulties in controlling nuclear weapons that
exist under unstable conditions (especially in Russia and other areas of the former Soviet Union);2 and the eagerness
and potential capacity of certain nations and "private" groups to acquire and possibly use the weapons. In that sense,
the nuclear quietism is perilous. Or, to put the matter another way, we no longer manifest an appropriate degree of
fear in relation to actual nuclear danger. While fear in itself is hardly to be recommended as a guiding human
emotion, its absence in the face of danger can lead to catastrophe.
We human animals have built-in fear reactions in response to threat. These reactions help us to protect ourselves-to
step back from the path of a speeding automobile, or in the case of our ancestors, from the path of a wild animal.
Fear can be transmuted into constructive planning and policies: whether for minimizing vulnerability to attacks by
wild animals, or for more complex contemporary threats. Through fear, ordinary people can be motivated to pursue
constructive means for sustaining peace, or at least for limiting the scope of violence. Similarly, in exchanges
between world leaders on behalf of preventing large-scale conflict, a tinge of fear-sometimes more than a tinge- can
enable each to feel the potential bloodshed and suffering that would result from failure.
But with nuclear weapons, our psychological circuits are impaired. We know that the weapons are around-and we
hear talk about nuclear dangers somewhere "out there" -but our minds no longer connect with the dangers or with
the weapons themselves. That blunting of feeling extends into other areas. One of the many sins for which advocates
of large nuclear stockpiles must answer is the prevalence of psychic numbing to enormous potential suffering, the
blunting of our ethical standards as human beings.
In the absence of the sort of threatening nuclear rhetoric the United States and Russia indulged in during the 1980s,
we can all too readily numb ourselves to everything nuclear, and thereby live as though the weapons pose no danger,
or as though they don't exist. To be sure, we have never quite been able to muster an appropriate level of fear with
respect to these weapons-one that would spur us to take constructive steps to remove the threat. We have always
been able to numb ourselves in this regard, which must be seen as a basic human response to a threat that is
apocalyptic in scope and so technologically distanced as to be unreal. But there were at least brief moments when
we would awaken from our nuclear torpor.
Now there is little but torpor. The weapons have been accepted as belonging on our planet no less than we do, as if
they were part of nature-like great trees or mountains that are old, established, immovable-rather than technological
instruments of genocide that we ourselves have created.
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But this situation is different we now confront potential enemies with enough force to
convince them that they have no hope of seizing control of the world in the first place. So I help
maintain that deterrence, a paradoxical, insufficient, but necessary part of making peace. I do
other parts in my spare time.
Still, there is the notion that because I did research related to nuclear weapons, I deserve a
greater portion of guilt for what happens if they are used. Let me point out that even the antinuclear activists contribute to the nuclear weapons business, because they make war on nuclear
weapons instead of making peace. They are shooting the bearer of the bad news that we can't
make global war safely anymore. It's as if they want war to be safer, so that humanity can
continue as before, making wars that only kill some of us. I hand them back the guilt[20] some of
them wish to hand me.
In particular, I sometimes consider those who engage in anti-war or anti-nuclear actions
(including some scientists who eschew defense research for moral reasons) without ever doing
any actual peace-making to be in the same category that Dante seems to have placed Pope
Celestine V. Celestine apparently abdicated the papacy out of fear that the worldliness that one
must take on as Pope would jeopardize his salvation. Of him and his kind Dante says, [21]
"...These are the nearly soulless,
whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise.
They are mixed here with that despicable corps
of angels who were neither for God nor Satan,
but only for themselves. The High Creator
scourged them from Heaven for its perfect beauty,
and Hell will not receive them since the wicked
might feel some glory over them."
In other words, I think that those who engage in peace protests without engaging in the
enfranchisement of the disenfranchised, the empowerment of the powerless, and the deterrence
of the willfully destructive may be serving their own desire to be morally pure, more than the
cause of peace. Instead of acknowledging the difference between forcefully confronting a bully
and being one, they advocate passivity, which just encourages the bully.
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Internationally, peace requires empowerment of some groups that seem eager to earn the hatred
of the civilized world like the Palestinians. Now that nuclear deterrence and economic
necessity have combined to bring about more freedom, empowerment, and therefore peace in
Europe, the Middle East is one of the next hot-spots for triggering a nuclear war. In order to have
peace, the world must empower the Palestinians to determine their political and economic
destiny, while at the same time it must deter them from warring with Israel. Such empowerment
and deterrence will require the active involvement of the Islamic nations who thus far have been
unwilling to empower the Palestinians to engage in much beyond stone-throwing and terrorism.
May the Palestinians awaken to how they have been used by their brethren.
So we need to make peace, at home and abroad. Before you demonstrate to make your town a
nuclear-free zone or to stop nuclear testing, [12] consider what you can do to enlarge someone's
freedom, or to help them obtain the power to determine a better life for themselves. In other
words, rather than fight against nuclear weapons or even against war, try making peace.
Meanwhile, I do what I can to make waging unlimited war dangerous, and preparation for it
expensive. I can provide palliative treatment, but you, physicians/patients, must heal yourselves.
Or to put it more bluntly, as long as we continue to express our human nature in
disenfranchising, disempowering ways, we will cling to armament nuclear or worse to
distance ourselves from our own nearness to war.
Weapons Testing and Prolif are necessary to develop smaller, safer nuclear weapons,
without testing wed still be pointing massive bombs at each other
Futterman, 1991 (JAH, Livermore lab researcher, 1995, Mediation of the Bomb, online,
http://www.dogchurch.org/scriptorium/nuke0
NOW, regardless of the possibility that the present world without nuclear weapons may be
unstable against conventional world war.
They are also oblivious to the idea that even a nuclear test ban can carry some risk to future
generations. If the comprehensive test moratorium of the early sixties had held, we would have
more multi-megaton weapons and more total megatons of explosive capability in the US and CIS
arsenals than we do today. In other words, the world grew technically safer from nuclear winter
during the cold war because of continued nuclear testing of new nuclear designs. Moreover,
consider the devices that are incorporated into nuclear weapons to prevent their unauthorized
use: how can we trust that they actually can prevent such use without testing them? Now the
proliferation of nuclear weapons may make it necessary for us to develop ways to detect[23] and
flexible responses to deter nuclear terrorism (including ways to disable terrorist nuclear
explosives).
I would hesitate to preclude such development given the present state of the world.
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[Species awareness means awareness of human choice: "This is not the End of Timeunless we choose
to make it so. We need not accept the death sentence . . . .We are not powerless." By choosing instead a
human future, we arein the words of the Polish Solidarity leader Adam Michnik"defending hope."
And "hope is important. Perhaps more important than anything else." Hope is greatly enhancedas is the
acceptance of individual mortalityby the sense of reasserting the immortality of the species. The task is
intensified by the psychological upheavals we can expect in connection with the millennial transition of
the year 2000. Whatever the millennial imagery, we must recognize that the hopeful future is not an
apocalyptic heavenly peace but rather expanded awareness on behalf of human continuity.
This adaptation will not eliminate peoples need to define themselves in relation to otherness, but it can
begin to subsume that otherness to larger human commonality. It must include struggles against
widespread oppression and drastic human inequities by invoking the kind of originality in political
action that has taken place in the Solidarity movement in Polandand in related movements in Hungary,
East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgariaand was so cruelly frustrated in the student movement in
China: Political action that enlarges, rather than blights or destroys, human possibilities. This speciesoriented approach would defy the given models of defiance.
No one can claim knowledge of a single, correct path. Rather, there must be endless combinations of
reflection and action and, above all, the kind of larger collective adaptation we have been discussing. At
the same time, we must remain aware of persisting genocidal arrangements and expressions of genocidal
mentality. We cannot afford to stop thinking. Nor can we wait for a new Gandhi or Saint Joan to
deliver us. Rather, each of us must join in a vast projectpolitical, ethical, psychologicalon behalf of
perpetuating and nurturing our humanity. We are then people getting up from their knees to resist
nuclear oppression. We clear away the thick glass that has blurred our moral and political vision. We
become healers, not killers, of our species.]
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Dissociation is called forth to cover over and deny ignorance. Not only are we much more ignorant about
what we call nuclear war than we care to admit, but "we don't know how much we do or do not know
about it." Since, as the Israeli philosopher Avner Cohen points out, "we do not really know how to
conceive of nuclear warfare as a concrete actuality, how it could be properly kept under control and how it
might be brought to termination," it is less than responsible to claim how such an event could be
"managed, controlled or concluded." But all evidence suggests that "no matter what nuclear war might be,
it would not be the kind of rule-governed practice" often assumed on the basis of past wars. And while the
principle of deterrence has a long history in political and military practice going back to the time of the
Greek city-states, the consequences, should deterrence fail and the deterrer act on his threat, were always
limited: after the war and destruction, there would be recovery and resumption of life. Precisely the
present absence of those limits "should deterrence fail," the un certainty or unlikelihood of any significant
amount of human life remaining, radically distinguishes nuclear deterrence from that tradition.
Dissociation, especially in the form of psychic numbing, helps blur that distinction by denying not only
our ignorance but also what we can be expected to know.
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The Nazis, who with their "Master Race" ideology admitted only so-called "Aryans" to the
category of human, provide an example counter to that of the British. There were some
successful acts of non-violent confrontation against the Nazis, like King Christian of Denmark's
public declaration that he would wear the yellow star if it were introduced in his country. He did
so in response to the Nazi practice of ordering Jews to wear yellow-starred armbands so that the
Nazis could more easily isolate them from their surrounding society. That many Danes followed
their king's example helped camouflage many Jews until they could escape to Sweden in fishing
boats. [5] Now this resistance worked partly because the Nazis considered the Danes to be
"Aryans" like themselves. Had the Poles tried the same thing, the Nazis would have been
perfectly happy to use the event as an excuse for liquidating more Poles. Rather than awaken the
Nazis' moral sense, non-violent confrontation on the part of the Poles would probably have
enabled the Nazis to carry out their agenda in Poland more easily. The other reason these acts
succeeded was that overwhelming violence of the Allies had stretched the Nazi forces too thin to
suppress massive action by a whole populace, and eventually deprived the Nazis of the time they
needed to find other ways to carry out their "final solution."
In other words, non-violence resistance alone would have been very slow to work against the
Nazis, once they had consolidated their power. And while it slowly ground away at the evil in the
Nazi soul, how many millions more would have died, and how much extra time would have been
given to Nazi scientists trying to invent atomic bombs to go on those V-2 rockets? The evil of
Nazism may well have expended itself, but perhaps after a real "thousand-year Reich," leaving
a world populated only by blue-eyed blondes. In other words, if the world had used non-violence
alone against the Nazis, the results may have been much worse those of the war.[6]
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unavoidable in the face of totalitarian savagery. Still, it must remain a means of last resort. Repeatedly, he warns that
violence breeds violence. Havel is not, however, a pacifist, as that term applies to Quakers or others who organize peace
movements. n40 Although the regime Havel and his fellow dissidents resisted for more than thirty years accused them of terrorist tactics and
plots, they conscientiously sought legal justification for their resistance, using the letter even of unjust laws to manifest support for the principle
of legality. Their attitude was "fundamentally hostile to the notion of violent change--simply because it places its faith in violence," Havel writes
in one place. He immediately restates the point, however, in a powerfully significant parenthesis: "the 'dissident' attitude can only accept
violence as a necessary evil in extreme situations, when direct violence can only be met by violence and where
remaining passive would in effect mean supporting violence." n41 He recalls us to the tragic blindness of European
pacifism that helped to prepare the ground for World War II. He points to the fact that the Czechs sent troops to the
Persian Gulf and stood willing to contribute to a U.N. force in the former Yugoslavia. But he is at pains to condemn violence
used as a quick fix to change political systems--the sacrifice of human beings here and now for "abstract political visions of the future." The
problems in human society "lie far too deep to be settled through [*55] mere systemic changes, either governmental or technological." n42
Havel writes and thinks out of a unique humanist tradition that has been continuous in Czech history. He has specifically identified with the
humanism of the founder of the Czech state, Tomas Masaryk, who regarded "ethical, aesthetic and scientific categories" as "no less real than
bread and butter." Masaryk felt the need for a social revolution "more moral and less materialistic than that envisaged by the Marxists." Like
Havel, he hoped to avoid violence, but he does not rule it out altogether. His language is as circumspect as Havel's: We must consistently reject
every act of violence; otherwise we shall never be able to disentangle ourselves from violence. We may, should, must protect, defend
ourselves. In extreme cases with the sword. But even in self-defense we must restrain ourselves from new, active acts of violence. n43
In an address prepared for delivery at a 1985 peace conference, Havel explains the reticence of Europeans to join Western peace
movements as rooted in the skepticism of those who have already been burned by succumbing to other forms of
utopianism, specifically the Stalin-Leninist variety, which grotesquely deformed its utopian principles as soon as it
got power. The very word "peace" has been drained of all content by the European experience of "peace in our
time." n44 The Western version of peace sounds far too much like appeasement. Havel speculates whether World War II, with its millions of
corpses, could have been avoided if the Western democracies had stood up to Hitler forcefully and in time. He ascribes to the Czech people as a
whole the firmly rooted idea that the inability to risk, in extremis, even life itself to save what gives it meaning and a
human dimension leads not only to the loss of meaning but finally and inevitably to the loss of life as well--and not
one life only but thousands and millions of lives. n45
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Violent conquest is usually wrong (the Just Package). Forcibly imposing one's values and goals on another, aside
from its general immorality, can create smoldering resentment, grievance, and hostility that later may burst into
greater conflict and violence. Nonetheless, in some exceptional conflict situations, the only resolution possible or
desirable may be through conquest: a test of strength and the unambiguous violent defeat of the other side--as of
Hitler's Germany. To believe that conflict should always be resolved through negotiation, mediation, and
compromise invites an aggressor to assume that what is his is his, but what is yours is negotiable. Resisting
aggression forces a test of interests, capabilities, and will--if the aggressor so wants it. And this may be a faster,
ultimately less conflictful, less violent way of resolving conflict than conciliation or appeasement.
In resisting aggression, gauge different power responses. Do not automatically respond to aggression in kind. The
most effective response is one which shifts power to bases which can be employed more effectively, while lessening
the risk of violent escalation. And respond proportionally. To meet aggression in equal measure is legitimate, while
overreaction risks escalation to a more extended and intense conflict, and underreaction appears weak and risks
defeat and repeated aggression.
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Following the logic of this idiocy, we should elevate Hitlers holocaust and South Africas apartheid into noble
ideals simply because some illiterate thugs were willing to shed blood on their behalf. Thankfully, we do nothing of
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the sort.
Just what sort of freedom do people like De La Vega think bin Laden and the Taliban are fighting for? Freedom to
throw acid in the faces of unveiled women? Freedom to torture and murder gays, Jews, and atheists? Anyone
suggesting a similarity between the values of Martin Luther King and Mullah Omar ought to put down the placard,
quit the protest, and hide their head in shame. The Islamic fascists have brought nightmare to life in their own lands,
while their ideology calls for its export. To profess pacifism in the face of such horror is to appease evil itself.
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Anti-political movements inevitably give way to elitist and authoritarian violence and
intolerance
Steger 00 (Manfred B., Professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University,
Gandhis Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power, 2000)
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While justifiably exposing the instrumentalism of power politics, such moralizing forms of politics also tend to aid
the formation of an undemocratic, elitist political culture that serves as the fertile soil for much less tolerant social
forces. The authoritarian tendencies of antipolitical politics become especially transparent in the intolerant idiom of
radical cultural nationalists who inscribe notions of patriotic duty and purity into the construction of the ideal national citizen and the ideal
leader. Even Gandhi flirted with such authoritarian notions when he imagined the creation of a nonviolent army of disciplined satyagrahis who
would acquire political legitimacy through virtuous acts of "terrible self-discipline, self-denial and penance." Exercising their authority "as lightly
as a flower," they would help India fulfill its true destiny as the world's first nonviolent nation without engaging in conventional power' politics
and without recreating the morally corrupt institutions of modern politics. Gandhi's dream of merging moral charisma and political
power explicitly drew on the Platonic notion of a dictatorship of the virtuous few who were best equipped to
establish a just political order. Such rare "prophets or supermen would realize the ideal of ahimsa in its
fullness, and ultimately redeem the whole of society. However, as the violent history of Indian nationalism has
shown, this highly idealized construction of a politics of purity spearheaded by leaders of superior moral fiber has
also proven itself incapable of producing exclusivist sentiments and heinous acts of communal violence.
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Even when non-violence does succeed, it does so by rallying the majority of the population
toward whom it is directed to stop the direct perpetrators of injustice by force the force of law
in the form of the police, the prisons, and the polls force that necessarily includes the threat of
violence. In other words, non-violent resistance harnesses (or co-opts), rather than eliminates
violence.
In fact, non-violence is sometimes even helped by the threat of violence to achieve its objectives.
The non-violence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was complemented by the willingness to use
"any means necessary" of Malcolm X. These two men were sending white America the same
message concerning justice and racial equality. If whites failed to respond to the message stated
gently, whites would be given the opportunity to respond to it stated violently. It took both
statements to achieve the progress made thus far.
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provide a new supply of Indian troops to replenish the depleted British army. Constituting a "strange phenomenon in one who preached non-violence," Gandhi's recruiting activities were once
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our soldiers go and stand before them [Germans] weaponless and will not use explosives and say, 'We will die of your blows', then, I am sure our Government will win the war at once."28 At the
same time, he was well aware of the fact that such action was almost tantamount to suicide, leading either to the death of the Indian recruits serving in the British army at the hands of the
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The stage has been set for this: NATO, under U.S. leadership, established the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991 and the Partnership for
Peace in 1994, to reach out to, and collaborate with, its former Warsaw Pact adversaries. These developments are a powerful sign that the Cold
War is over and therefore, by implication, that nations are undergoing a shift from a narrow world view based on national security to a
comprehensive one based on common security.
Hence, the United States and its security partners are conceptually able to move beyond negative into positive peace. What this will entail in
Bosnia is for the United States and its NATO and other partners to remain there long enough to ensure that negative peace holds. At the same
time, they should work with international governmental and nongovernmental (including conflict resolution) organizations, and with the
conflicting parties, to pursue, achieve, and maintain positive peace.
With secure negative peace as a point of departure, positive peace in Bosnia begins with the reconstruction
of the country.
But lest the United States and its partners repeat the failure of the European Union to achieve positive peace in the Bosnian city of Mostar through substantial
investments in rebuilding Mostar's infrastructure, this reconstruction must reflect a comprehensive peacebuilding strategy -- reconciliative as well as physical -- over a
period of time.
Some frameworks that could be useful in guiding U.S.-led activities in this regard are:
the "contingency model" of Ron Fisher and Loraleigh Keashly, which matches an intervention with the intensity of a given conflict, and then follows up
with other interventions designed to move the parties toward positive peace;
the "multi-track framework" of IMTD's Ambassador John McDonald and Louise Diamond, which combines the resources of nongovernmental conflict
resolution practitioners with those of the business and religious communities, media, funders, and others as well as governmental actors, in the pursuit of
positive peace; and
my own design for a "new European peace and security system" which combines elements of these and other frameworks within the context of the
OSCE.
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Intervening in such conflicts may mean "taking casualties," particularly in cases where one party is attempting to
impose a genocidal "final solution" on another, as in Rwanda or Bosnia . In such situations, the use of an appropriate
amount of force to achieve negative peace may be a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of positive peace. We
should not, in such cases, allow the U.S. experience in Somalia to prevent us from acting. Genocide in Rwanda or Bosnia does, sooner or later,
affect the interests of the United States and others. The use of such extreme violence to "resolve" conflicts anywhere in the world is not only morally reprehensible,
but constitutes a model for others to emulate, perhaps increasing the costs of dealing with it later on.
The implicit emphasis here on early warning and early action is part of the gist of conflict resolution: being
proactive instead of reactive. A proactive approach to problem solving worldwide is in the U.S. national interest. This means, among other
things, pursuing a bipartisan U.S. foreign policy to avoid the necessity of having to issue unrealistic timelines in any future deployment of forces,
plus paying the massive U.S. debt to the United Nations so that the United States can more credibly and effectively lead in the debate over U.N.
reform as well as in efforts to craft effective international responses to problems worldwide.
Effective international responses imply working synergistically with other regional international organizations -- including the Organization of
African Unity, the Organization of American States, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -- to facilitate dealing with local problems, as
well as working with the OSCE, NATO, the European Union (EU) and NGOs engaged in conflict resolution, in dealing with Bosnia and other
conflicts in Europe.
The United States -- where conflict resolution is most advanced as an applied field -- cannot afford not to lead on this one: the "political will" of
others and our common security depend on it.
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particular
approach or
according to such principles would admittedly be difficult to construct and even more difficult to administer. It would, however, be more that merely comprehensive.
It would be a microcosm of the world and therefore a laboratory in which to experiment with the actual building of
creative peace among groups and individuals of the most divergent persuasions.
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HonestReporting's position is that a deliberate attack against a civilian target, anywhere in the world, is most
accurately referred to as a "terrorist attack," for two fundamental reasons:
It has become common English usage to use "terrorism" to describe these horrific events (as per the definition
above), and it therefore is the most accurate term available.
The post-9/11 political climate is characterized by a struggle between radical Islamic groups and western
democracies. The repeated Islamist targeting of innocent western civilians to further jihadist goals is understood by
the great majority of world to lie beyond the pale of legitimate political struggle. The term "terrorism" is therefore
necessary to differentiate between this wholly illegitimate method of warfare and legitimate methods, as defined by
the Fourth Geneva Convention.
When media outlets refuse to use the term "terrorism" to describe what are clearly terrorist acts, they both depart
from common usage, and in effect (if not in intent) embolden those who use the mass murder of civilians to further
their ideological goals. And since the language of news coverage has an extremely powerful effect on popular
opinion, this refusal to call terror "terror" confers a degree of legitimacy to the horrific acts, in the minds of millions
of media consumers.
Double standards in media coverage:
As HonestReporting has repeatedly documented, while media outlets often use the accurate term "terrorism" in other world contexts, when it comes to Palestinian
terrorist attacks on Israelis the term is rarely used. This double standard is particularly evident when comparing terrorist attacks in Israel and elsewhere that occurred
nearly simultaneously, or in very similar physical circumstances. A few recent examples:
In the beginning of April, 2003 an Iraqi army officer killed five American soldiers by blowing himself up in a taxi. In Netanya that week, a Palestinian ignited his
explosive belt at the entrance to a cafe, injuring 50 Israelis. The Associated Press listed the Iraqi attack among other historical "terror attacks against the U.S. military,"
but AP coverage of the Netanya blast referred to the bomber as a Palestinian "militant."
In May, 2003 the New York Times launched a new, special section of their news site called "Threats and Responses: Targeting Terror." Recent deadly terror attacks
in Chechnya, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines were included, but absolutely no reference was made to two terrorist attacks in Israel during that period.
In October, 2003 suicide bombers killed a number of American soldiers in Iraq, and 19 Israelis in a Haifa cafe. The San Jose Mercury News reported on Iraq:
"Suicide bombers unleashed a wave of terror in the Iraqi capital Monday..." But in Israel, the Mercury News reported no "terror."
Editors' positions:
On Jan. 4, 2004, the executive editor of the Miami Herald expressed his paper's commitment to call terror "terror," despite the overriding concern for evenhandedness:
It's Herald policy to use the most neutral language available in a given situation. We, too, label those who fight for a cause as militants. But unlike some of our
we see a line where a militant becomes a terrorist and we don't shy away from the latter word. When a
suicide bomber blows up a bus carrying innocent civilians, it's an act of terrorism, not militancy.
colleagues,
The Herald is the latest in a string of papers to recently address this issue head-on, however belatedly.
Here's an overview of the positions that ombudsmen and editors at various papers have expressed (Note particularly the distinction between al Qaeda and Hamas that
the Orlando Sentinel, Boston Globe and Washington Post attempt to make):
The quite similar claims by the Orlando Sentinel, Boston Globe, and Washington Post demand attention, since both attempt to justify the non-use of the term
"terrorism" in the specific context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These editors posit that since Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad are
"resisting occupation," "at war," and have "nationalistic ambitions," the term "terrorism" may not apply to their actions even brutal attacks on Israeli civilian buses
and restaurants. At the same time, the editors are willing to accept the use of the term to describe al Qaeda terrorist acts.
Their logic is faulty for a number of reasons:
Palestinian Arab terrorism against Jews in the decades before and after 1948 long preceded the 1967 war that created the disputed (or "occupied") territories.
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Hamas and Islamic Jihad have repeatedly clarified, in official documents and statements, that their goal is not the creation of an independent Palestinian state, but
rather the genocidal elimination of all Jewish presence in the region.
Palestinian terrorist groups have strong affiliations with global Islamist terrorist groups and regimes, and are not merely "regional" in scope.
Even in the context of warfare, deliberate attacks against civilian targets are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and therefore demand being described as
terrorism.
Conclusion:
The latest wave of Palestinian terrorism, including over 100 suicide bombings since September 2000, has caused the brutal murder of 664 Israeli civilian lives. Israeli
policy and action regarding the Palestinian people and leadership must be understood in the context of this unprecedented assault on a Western democracy.
As the West unites against barbaric Islamic terrorism that now also haunts continental Europe, it is essential that Israel's struggle against Palestinian terror be properly
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Calling terrorists freedom fighters is wrongterrorists are different, since they kill
civilians.
Ganor, 2001 (Boaz, Director of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism Defining Terrorism,
http://www.ict.org.il/articles/define.htm, May 16)
The foreign and interior ministers of the Arab League reiterated this position at their April 1998 meeting in Cairo. In
a document entitled Arab Strategy in the Struggle against Terrorism, they emphasized that belligerent activities
aimed at liberation and self determination are not in the category of terrorism, whereas hostile activities against
regimes or families of rulers will not be considered political attacks but rather criminal assaults.[7] Here again we
notice an attempt to justify the means (terrorism) in terms of the end (national liberation). Regardless of the
nature of the operation, when we speak of liberation from the yoke of a foreign occupation this will not be
terrorism but a legitimate and justified activity. This is the source of the clich, One mans terrorist is another mans
freedom fighter, which stresses that all depends on the perspective and the worldview of the one doing the defining.
The former President of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, made the following statement in April 1981, during the
visit of the Libyan ruler, Muamar Qadhafi: Imperialists have no regard either for the will of the people or the laws
of history. Liberation struggles cause their indignation. They describe them as terrorism.[8]
Surprisingly, many in the Western world have accepted the mistaken assumption that terrorism and national
liberation are two extremes in the scale of legitimate use of violence. The struggle for national liberation would
appear to be the positive and justified end of this sequence, whereas terrorism is the negative and odious one. It is
impossible, according to this approach, for any organization to be both a terrorist group and a movement for national
liberation at the same time.
In failing to understand the difference between these two concepts, many have, in effect, been caught in a semantic
trap laid by the terrorist organizations and their allies. They have attempted to contend with the clichs of national
liberation by resorting to odd arguments, instead of stating that when a group or organization chooses terrorism as a
means, the aim of their struggle cannot be used to justify their actions (see below). Thus, for instance, Senator
Jackson was quoted in Benyamin Netanyahus book Terrorism: How the West Can Win as saying,
The idea that one persons terrorist is anothers freedom fighter cannot be sanctioned. Freedom fighters or
revolutionaries dont blow up buses containing non-combatants; terrorist murderers do. Freedom fighters dont set
out to capture and slaughter schoolchildren; terrorist murderers do . . . It is a disgrace that democracies would allow
the treasured word freedom to be associated with acts of terrorists.[9]
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Representations of suffering are vital to identifying human needs and necessary social
action
Kleinman and Kleinman 1996 [Arthur, Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology and
Professor of Anthropology at Harvard, Joan, Research Association at Medical Anthropology Program at Harvard,
The appeal of experience; the dismay of images: cultural appropriations of suffering in our times,
Daedalus v125.n1 (Wntr 1996): pp1(23)]
Our critique of appropriations of suffering that do harm does not mean that no appropriations are valid. To conclude
that would be to undermine any attempt to respond to human misery. It would be much more destructive than the
problem we have identified; it would paralyze social action. We must draw upon the images of human suffering in
order to identify human needs and to craft humane responses.
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Regulating speech makes re-appropriating speech impossible only by using language can
resignification occur
Fleche 99 (Anne, Assistant Professor of English at Boston College, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theatre_journal/v051 /51.3fleche.html)
Excitable Speech might seem surprising to readers of Butler's previous work. Having argued, in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, that
bodies and subjects are constructed in the cultural forms that articulate them, Butler now argues that to speak is not quite the same
as
to act. For Butler the conservative conflation of speech and act is neither performative nor, in her sense of the word, constructionist, because it argues for a notion
of free speech that presumes an unconstrained, sovereign subject.
Butler considers this problem and its possible remedies in her analyses of Supreme Court decisions, anti-pornography arguments, and the policy against homosexuals
in the military. In every instance, she complicates the relation of speech to act, by introducing fantasy, linguistic instability, and temporality, arguing against censorship
and the legal redress of hate speech and for its critical re-articulation. The key move in the analysis comes in the opening chapter, "On Linguistic Vulnerability," where
Butler deconstructs the relation of the body to speech. Working from texts by Toni Morrison and Shoshana Felman, Butler argues that language and the body are
neither strictly separable nor simply the same, but speak together, as it were, to produce the effect known as the social speaking subject. Thus verbal threats, for
example, are also, in some way, bodily ones: "[T]he body is the blindspot of speech, that which acts in excess of what is said, but which also acts in and through what
is said" (11). Once the body/speech relation is deconstructed, censorship, with its assumptions of causality between word and act, becomes even more troubling.
between the performative and the referential" (125). To close this gap is to leave no remedy for hate speech short of
state intervention, and the state is certainly not neutral. Butler points out that the Supreme Court has tended to protect racist behavior as
speech, while restricting pornographic literature. In censoring pornography, the court appears to agree with feminist arguments that pornographic representation is a
the policy against gays in the military assumes that to identify oneself as a homosexual is to act
upon another person in a homosexual way, to make such an identification "contagious," as Butler puts it. And yet, in a
case of cross burning, the Supreme Court found that when he burned a cross in front of a black family's house, a white
teenager was expressing a "viewpoint" in the "free marketplace of ideas" (53). These decisions imply that language
should not have power to do what it says, but that the state, in regulating speech, should. When speech becomes
injurious act in some cases and remains free speech in others, it is clear that a theory of speech, and not a legal
remedy, is what is most urgently needed.
discriminatory act. Similarly,
Consequently, Butler opposes linguistic determinism and the "anti-intellectualism" of the academy's efforts to return to "direct" speech.
Language is politically and socially useful, she argues, precisely to the extent that it is "excitable"--by which she means "out of
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tainted or unusable: the terms of legibility produce the possibility of breaking silence, of thwarting exclusion, and of
acting "with authority without being authorized" (157), as in the civil disobedience of Rosa Parks. [End Page 348]
Rather than offer prescriptions, Butler uses her own writing to illustrate the power of resignification. In her rhetorical readings of Supreme
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
Excitable
Speech asks whether regulation makes it easier or harder to reappropriate speech, and why we fear to take the exciting risk of
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
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Regulating language destroys the hope of true emancipation. We must be able to resignify
derogatory terms to defuse their injurious abilities
Disch 99 (Lisa, Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Minnesota, Judith Butler and the
Politics of the Performative, jstor)
Judith Butler's longstanding political concern has been to discern what in the structure of subjectivity makes it so
difficult to shift from moralized to politicized mobilization and so easy to fall into identity politics and the politics of
scapegoating. In The Psychic Life of Power, she analyzes the psychic and social process of subject formation to
disclose the investments that stand in the way of "the development of forms of differentiation [that could] lead to
fundamentally more capacious, generous, and 'unthreatened' bearings of the self in the midst of community" (CR,
140). In Excitable Speech, she rebuts the work of the theorists who introduced hate speech into the legal arsenal.
Whereas they share her premise that we are linguistic beings, Butler charges that in advocating speech codes,
censorship, and other regulatory approaches to linguistic injury, hate speech theorists destroy "something
fundamental about language and, more specifically, about the subject's constitution in language" (ES, 27). Butler
proposes to counter injurious speech with "subversive resignification": the insubordinate use of a derogatory term or
authoritative convention to defuse its power to injure and to expose "prevailing forms of authority and the
exclusions by which they proceed" (ES, 157-58). These two books are especially important for answering the charge
that poststructuralist critics of humanism demolish political agency when they take issue with autonomy. Butler's
theory of "insurrectionary" speech acts opens up the possibility of an agency that does not fantasize "the restoration
of a sovereign autonomy in speech" but, rather, plays our dependency on sanctioned forms of address into an
everyday resistance (ES, 145,15). Insurrectionary speech does considerable theoretical work to break the impasse
between autonomy and determinism that stalls many discussions of political agency in "postliberatory times" (The
Psychic Life of Power [PL], 18). And although this contribution is significant, it may strike some readers as incomplete. Butler is more attentive to examples where dominant institutions (such as the courts and the military) have
subversively resignified potentially insurrectionary initiatives (such as hate speech) than she is to instances where
performative agency has transformed the status quo. Even if Butler's own examples do not establish it as such, I will
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argue that the "politics of the performative" is a politics of insurrection. First, I offer a brief summary of Butler's
concepts "heterosexual matrix," "heterosexual melancholy," and "gender performativity," as these are indispensable
to appreciating her recent writings.
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not said, she argues, that power will be coopted by conservative elements to defeat liberal causes and minority
rights. State power will also curtail the freedom of speech of private individuals that is the very basis for effective
antidotes to derogatory name calling. DeCew, however, painstakingly reviews the legal and philosophical history of privacy rights as
well as current debates about its scope and status before she takes on the question of whether feminists have any interest in preserving a private
sphere. For DeCew, too, a major target is MacKinnon, specifically her argument that leaving alone the privacy of home and family means leaving
men alone to abuse and dominate women. DeCew argues that decisions that protect the use of sexually explicit materials in the home, consensual
sex practices in private, and personal decisions about abortion are in the interest of women as well as men, even though in some cases, such as
wife beating, there may be overriding considerations that justify state intervention. Both authors argue persuasively for a more careful look at the
dangers lurking behind calls for state action. For Butler, the danger is that the state becomes arbiter of what is and is not
permissible speech, allowing rulings that the erection of burning crosses by the Ku Klux Klan is protected speech
but that artistic expressions of gay sexuality or statements of gay identity are actions rather than speech and so are
not protected. The danger DeCew sees is that once the right to privacy is denied or narrowly defined, the state can, on the grounds of
immorality, move into women's personal lives to interfere with sexual expression, whether homosexual or heterosexual, or with the right to
choose an abortion established in Roe v. Wade. Both DeCew and Butler, however, provide alternative remedies for the admitted harm that state
action is intended to redress. For DeCew, the right to privacy is not absolute; like freedom, it can be overridden by other rights thus the state
can intervene in domestic abuse cases because of the physical harm being done. Butler's remedy for harmful hate language is more deeply rooted
in postmodern theories of the speaking subject. Given the postmodern view that the subject can never magisterially use a lan -
guage with fixed meanings according to clear intentions, it is always possible to subvert the conventional meanings
of words. What is said as a derogatory slur"nigger," "chick," "spic," or "gay," for example can be "resignified," that is,
returned in such a manner that its conventional meaning in practices of discrimination and abuse is subverted. Butler
gives as examples the revalorization of terms like "black" or "gay," the satirical citation of racial or sexual slurs, reappropriation in street
language or rap music, and expressions of homosexual identity in art depicting graphic sex. These are expressions that any erosion
in
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which, by cutting off this regress, would bring us out from contingency and convention and into the Truth. Foucault is saying that we are gradually losing our grip on
the "metaphysical comfort" which that Philosophical tradition provided-its picture of Man as having a "double" (the soul, the Noumenal Self) who uses Reality's own
language rather than merely the vocabulary of a time and a place. Finally, Heidegger is cautioning that if we try to make Language into a new topic of Philosophical
inquiry we shall simply recreate the hopeless old Philosophical puzzles which we used to raise about Being or Thought.
This last point amounts to saying that what Gustav Bergmann called "the linguistic turn" should not be seen as the logical positivists saw it-as enabling us to ask
Kantian questions without having to trespass on the psychologists' turf by talking, with Kant, about "experience" or "consciousness." That was, indeed, the initial
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not
Radical,"
<Zizeks popularity results largely from the apparent way out that he provides from the cul-desac in which radical
theory, and in particular radical postmodern theory, has found itself. Zizek is of course not the first author to attack
postmodernists, post-structuralists and post-Marxists on grounds of their lack of radical ambition on the terrain of
politics. To take a couple of examples from amongst the many, Sharon Smith asserts that [t]he politics of identity do
not offer a way forward for those genuinely interested in transforming society. ... The emphasis on lifestyle ... is the
guarantee that such movements will remain middle class.4 Murray Bookchin similarly argues that subjectivist
claims about the impossibility of formulating an objective criterion of rationality or good are an indulgence we
can ill afford - the condition of the world is far too desperate.5 These critiques, however, are rooted in an old left
prone to essentialism, unfounded objective claims and simplifying vulgarisations precisely the reasons for the
popularity of postmodern approaches. Objections to spurious claims about an objective answer to the present
problems, to class and other reductionisms which risk perpetuating voicelessness, and to dogmatism and theoretical
rigidity are often well-founded, even if those who make such criticisms appear disturbingly liberal in their
orientations. Thus, left activists genuinely interested in confronting the liberal capitalist status quo find themselves
trapped between politically radical but theoretically flawed leftist orthodoxies and theoretically innovative but
politically moderate post-theories.>
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<The conventional wisdom among scholars and policymakers opposes solving ethnic conflicts by drawing new
borders and creating new states. This view, however, is flawed because the process of fighting civil wars imbues the
belligerents with a deep sense of mistrust that makes sharing power after the conflict difficult. This is especially true
in ethnic civil wars, in which negotiated power-sharing agreements run a high risk of failing and leading to renewed
warfare. In light of these problems, this article argues that partition should be considered as an option for ending
severe ethnic conflicts. The article shows how failure to adopt partition in Kosovo has left that province in a semipermanent state of limbo that only increases the majority Albanian population's desire for independence. The only
route to long-term stability in the regionand an exit for international forcesis through partition. Moreover, the
article suggests that the United States should recognize and prepare for the coming partition of Iraq rather than
pursuing the futile endeavor of implementing power-sharing among Iraq's Shi'ites, Kurds, and Sunnis.>
Kosovo proves that borders are key to prevent wars
Downes, 2k6 (Alexander Downes, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke, More Borders, Less Conflict?: Partition as a Solution to
Ethnic Civil Wars, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sais_review/v026/26.1downes.html)
Trepidation over Kosovo's future status makes both ethnic communities reluctant to part with their weapons.
According to a report by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, "Faced with an uncertain future and constant
wondering about whether conflict will ensue once again, people may want to keep weapons to provide protection
and security if the situation once again becomes precarious."20 Comments by both Serbs and Albanians confirm this
motivation. According to an Albanian tour guide in Drenica, for example, "Nobody knows if another war is going to
happen or not. If they don't give us independence, that might mean that the Serbian forces will be allowed to come
backand most people here don't want to be caught empty-handed when that happens." Serbs, for their part, believe
that self-help is the only way to safeguard themselves from vengeful Albanians. As one Serb from Gracanica
commented, "We believe that none of the security forces operating in Kosovo at the moment are able to fully protect
the Serbs, so we have to look out for ourselves."21
Partition allows for more security than power sharing or dissolving borders.
Downes, 2k6 (Alexander Downes, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke, More Borders, Less Conflict?: Partition as a Solution to
Ethnic Civil Wars, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sais_review/v026/26.1downes.html)
<In this article, I argue that partitiondefined as separation of contending ethnic groups and the creation of
independent statesshould be considered as an alternative to power-sharing and regional autonomy as a means to
end civil wars. Partition does not require groups to disarm and make themselves vulnerable to devastating betrayal.
Nor do formerly warring groups have to cooperate and share power in joint institutions. Partition also satisfies
nationalist desires for statehood and fills the need for security. In cases of severe ethnic conflict, when perceptions
of the adversary's malign intentions are so entrenched as to impede any agreement based on a single-state solution,
partition is the preferred solution. >
<The poor record of negotiated settlements in ethnic civil wars that leave borders intact, whether or not they are
facilitated by third-party intervention, suggests that a new approach might be necessary: one based on partition
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rather than power-sharing. In this model, third parties would intervene not to turn back the clock to the pre-war
situation, but to inflict a decisive defeat on one side or the other. This would reduce the likelihood that the defeated
party would think it could gain anything by resorting to war in the future. In those cases where a third party
intervenes on behalf of ethnic rebels, military victory will result in partition. Partition can only lead to peace,
however, if it is accompanied by ethnic separation. Interveners should work to make sure that the states are as
ethnically homogeneous as possible so as to reduce the likelihood of future cleansing, rebellions by the remnant
minority for union with its brethren in the other state, or war to rescue "trapped" minorities. Finally, both sides
should be militarily capable of defending themselves, and the borders between them should be made as defensible as
possible to discourage aggression, either by following natural terrain features or by building demilitarized zones or
other barriers.[End Page 54] >
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<Recently, however, scholars have begun to challenge this single-state-solution orthodoxy, arguing instead that
dividing states and creating new borders may be a way to promote peace after ethnic civil wars. One view, [End
Page 49] represented by Chaim Kaufmann, stresses that ethnic civil wars cannot end until contending groups are
separated into homogeneous ethnic enclaves. When groups are intermingled, each side has an incentive to attack and
cleanse the other. Once separation is achieved, these incentives disappear. With the necessary condition for peace in
place, political arrangements become secondary. Unless ethnic separation occurs, Kaufmann argues, all other
solutions are fruitless because ethnic intermingling is what fuels conflict.3>
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Borders allow citizens to live in a setting that resembles the society they desire
Moriss 2k4 (Andrew P. Moriss, Professor of Business Law and Regulation at Case Western Reserve University,
Borders and Liberty, http://209.217.49.168/vnews.php?nid=6081, July 2004)
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<The second way that borders further liberty is that they allow diversity in law and other community norms, letting
each individual find the setting that most resembles the type of society he or she desires. Everyone in Ohio need not
agree on how to organize town activities: I can live in a township with few taxes and few services, and my more leftwing colleagues at the university who prefer a more interventionist society can live in Cleveland Heights, a suburb
with an aggressive central-planning mentality and high taxes.>
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Santos is wrongwe must develop a curious mentality and revive cooperation to achieve
change.
Caraa, 2001 (Joo, Director of the Science Department at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Ceremonial
Inadequacy: In Search of a New Enlightenment, European Journal of Social Theory 4(3), pg. 289-290)
[Again, they can only be contained in the context of a new narrative. Here, too, Santos points his finger cleverly
to solidarity, to conceiving the other as a producer of knowledge. According to what modern biology teaches us,
each major step in the history of life in the universe - and eight such steps have been identified so far, from
replicating molecules to primate societies (Maynard Smith and Szathmary, 2000) - has been the outcome of
cooperation. It results from a cooperative effort between different species that henceforth behave and reproduce like
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a new one. This is the same as stating that hierarchical behaviour only brings more of the same, whereas
cooperation is a mechanism for generating complex behavior, eventually leading to emerging properties and
sustainable action.
The time is ripe for developing an attitude of curious perspective, of operating simultaneously at different
scales. We humans were born on the Earth. Let us not turn this blue planet into a senseless graveyard.]
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Alt cant solveit is too weak to overcome the epistemological breaks in knowledge.
Wagner, 2001 (Peter, Professor of Social and Political Theory at the European University Institute in Florence,
Epistemology and Critique, European Journal of Social Theory 4(3), pg. 284)
[The opening passage about Thorstein Veblen in Boaventura de Sousa Santos's article is breathtakingly brilliant.
It is not so much the idea of going back to Veblen for a discussion about the relation between economics and the
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other social sciences, or about the epistemology of the social sciences in general, that strikes one as original. Rather,
the force lies in the sudden move after the author already appeared to have his reader prepared for a critique of
economics from a historical-institutionalist perspectiveagainst Veblen whose important insights did not prevent
him from advocating a delirious racial anthropology as an alternative. The strike hits. Is it not indeed the case that
too many scholars in the social sciences spend their time elaborating sophisticated critiques, while their own
alternatives remain weaker and are often as much, if not more, subject to valid objections as the approaches they
criticizeif they are spelled out in any detail at all?
Boaventura de Sousa Santos himself does aim at developing alternatives while at the same trying to avoid
Veblens fatewith success, I dare say, since it is difficult to envisageeven a hundred years from nowthat
somebody could call his constructive ideas delirious. In great sympathy with his project of an epistemology of
seeing and the rewarding richness of its presentation here, it seems worth pointing to a basic tension in it, a tension
which I think needs to be resolved to pursue the project further.]
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Santos fails to acknowledge that knowledge and power are permanenteconomic power is
intrinsically tied to knowledge.
Caraa, 2001 (Joo, Director of the Science Department at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Ceremonial
Inadequacy: In Search of a New Enlightenment, European Journal of Social Theory 4(3), pg. 288)
The difficulty of the analysis, however, resides in treating the situation of knowledge without explicit reference
to the overarching presence of power. In my view, this has a blurring effect. The entanglement of knowledge with
power constitutes the foundation from which criteria for truth are derived in any society. Knowledge cannot be
dissociated from power. The deployment of power always involves the constitution of a domain of knowledge from
which its own legitimation and cultural identity can be derived; concurrently, as Michel Foucault pointed out, the
rules that govern the operation of this body of knowledge involve a set of power relations. Therefore, we can say
that knowledge and power mirror each other, to the extent that the conditions for the enactment of both spring from
their mutual coexistence. In all epochs and communities each configuration of power, or knowledge, has set its
indelible mark on the other.
This is why we can ascertain that the Renaissance was premodern, i.e. not yet fully modern. It had some
dimensions that were later to be part of the unfolding of modernity but, in essence, its character was different. The
liberation of the energies of free enterprise, the scientific revolution, the emergence of national churches, the
institution of bourgeois states, are all mutually reinforcing, and essential for the affirmation of European peoples in
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the globe.
A new worldview emerged, not in connection with any direct religious belief, but with a marked spatial
character. The central question in this geometric worldview is the search for grand symmetries that correspond to
invariance principles, which, in turn, originate in the absolute, eternal laws of nature. Nature is seen as obeying to
Law. Time is a parameter. The Universe originated as space. Mankind (and its representatives, the European
peoples) were in command of the world.
But free enterprise was not solely a principle but a form of organization, of social relations, of action. Economic
power, in its m modern incarnation of industrialization, would certainly promote its own body of knowledge,
economics. In economics the issue of capital is pivotal, as one can easily guess. Santos points out deftly the
problems and limitations of mainstream economics; but it is not clear if he believes that some of the difficulties a re
related to a change in the nature of capitalthe emergence of a new type of capital, as proposed by Manuel Castells,
informational capitalnot yet understood by theory, or to a phasing out of the energies of modernity.]
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autonomous, selfreliant subjectivity on which a modern state had to rely in its citizenry.96 Or, to give another
common example from the period, children removed from their families after being subjected by parents or other
relatives to repeated episodes of violence or rape were being manipulated by biopolitical technocrats, and were often
abused in new ways in institutions or foster families; but they were also being liberated. Sometimes some forms of
the exercise of power in society are in some ways emancipatory; and that is historically significant.
Further, of course we must ask whether it is really true that social workers and social agencies attempts to
manipulate people worked. My own impression is that social policy makers grew increasingly aware, between the
1870s and the 1960s, that their own ends could not be achieved unless they won the cooperation of the targets of
policy. And to do that, they had to offer people things that they wanted and needed. Policies that incited resistance
were sometimes with glacial slowness, after stubborn and embittered strugglesde-emphasized or even
abandoned. Should we really see the history of social welfare policy as a more or less static (because the same thing
is always happening) history of the imposition of manipulative policies on populations? I believe a more complex
model of the evolution of social policy as a system of social interaction, involving conflicting and converging
demands, constant negotiation, struggle, and above all mutual learning would be more appropriate. This is a
point Abram de Swaan and others have made at some length; but it does not appear to have been built into our
theory of modernity very systematically, least of all in German history.97>
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regarded as less a failure than a series of bold experiments that do not come to an end with the year 1933. The
failure of political democracy is not the same as the destruction of the laboratory. Thus, the coming of the Third
Reich was not so much a verification of Weimars singular failure as the validation of its dangerous potential. 59
Fritzsches was a wonderful metaphor for Weimar Germany, a period of enormous creativity and experimentation in any number of fields; and it
is surely also a fruitful way to conceive of the relationship between Weimar and Nazi Germany. And yet again, as Fritzsches more skeptical
comments pointed out the laboratory didnt simply stay open; the experimenters didnt simply keep experimenting; not all the
experiments simply kept running under new management.60 Particular kinds of experiments were not permitted in
the Third Reich: those founded on the idea of the toleration of difference ; those that defined difference as a psychological,
political, or cultural fact to be understood and managed, rather than as a form of deviance or subversion to be repressed or eliminated; those
founded on the idea of integration through selfdirected participation (as opposed to integration through orchestrated
and obedient participation); and those that aimed at achieving a stable pluralism. There were many such experiments under
way in the Weimar period; given the extent to which the political fabric of the Weimar Republic was rent by ideological differences, they were
often of particular importance and urgency.
Many of those experiments appeared to be failing by the end of the 1920s; and that in itself was a critically important reason for the appeal of the
ideas championed by the Nazis. The totalitarian and biological conception of national unity was in part a response to the apparent failure of a
democratic and pluralist model of social and political integration. And yet, many of those very same experiments were revived,
with enormous success, after 1949. Examples from my own field of research might include the development of a
profession of social work that claimed to be a value-neutral foundation for cooperation between social workers of
radically differing ideological orientation; the development of a psychoanalytic, rather than psychiatric,
interpretation of deviance (neurosis replaces inherited brain defects); and the use of corporatist structures of governance
within the welfare bureaucracy. These mechanisms did not work perfectly. But they were a continuation of
experiments undertaken in the Weimar period and shut down in 1933; and they did contribute to the stabilization
of a pluralist democracy. That was not a historically trivial or selfevident achievement , either in Germany or elsewhere. It
required time, ingenuity, and a large-scale convergence of long-term historical forces. We should be alive to its importance as a
feature of modernity.
As Fritzsches review makes clear, then, much of the recent literature seems to imply that National Socialism was a product
of the success of a modernity that ends in 1945; but it could just as easily be seen as a temporary failure of
modernity, the success of which would only come in the 1950s and 1960s. As Paul Betts recently remarked, we should
not present the postwar period as a redemptive tale of modernism triumphant and cast Nazism as merely a
regressive interlude. But neither should we dismiss the fact that such a narrative would be, so to speak, half true
that the democratic welfare state is no less a product of modernity than is totalitarianism.
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of National Socialism does not thwart a realistic assessment of modern biopolitics. Much of the literature leaves one
with the sense that a modern world in which mass murder is not happening is just that: a place where something is
not yet happening. Normalization is not yet giving way to exclusion, scientific study and classification of
populations is not yet giving way to concentration camps and extermination campaigns. Mass murder, in short, is the
historical problem; the absence of mass murder is not a problem, it does not need to be investigated or explained.
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analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the
profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic
welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all , again, it has
nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter
Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is
always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not
successfully produce health, such a system can and historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and
policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National
Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and
participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of
biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly
narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or imperative of increasing liberalization.
Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the
unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the
1970s in Germany.90
Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are
characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of
people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power
relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of
constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our
understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering.
This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are
regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not
opposites, in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very
different ways of organizing it. The concept power should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression,
manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively the
same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and
effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive elements (like the
various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like
totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather
circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create multiple modernities, modern
societies with quite radically differing potentials.
them from this very broad perspective. But that
Biopolitics is not the problem in and of itself its biopolitics deployed in totalitarians
societies which is bad our strengthening of democratic structures prevents, not causes,
their impact
Dickinson, University of Cincinnati, 2004
(Edward Ross, Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central
European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March)
In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucaults ideas have fundamentally directed attention away from institutionally
centered conceptions of government and the state . . . and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and its microphysics.48 The broader, deeper, and less
But the powerproducing effects in Foucaults microphysical sense (Eley) of the construction of social bureaucracies and social
knowledge, of an entire institutional apparatus and system of practice ( Jean Quataert), simply do not explain Nazi
visible ideological consensus on technocratic reason and the ethical unboundedness of science was the focus of his interest.49
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policy.50 The destructive dynamic of Nazism was a product not so much of a particular modern set of ideas as of a
particular modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrous potential of those ideas. What was critical
was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, which occurred everywhere in Europe.
Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments and disciplines were organized and used, and the
external constraints on them. In National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian conception of social
management focused on the power and ubiquity of the vlkisch state. In democratic societies, biopolitics has
historically been constrained by a rights-based strategy of social management. This is a point to which I will return shortly. For now,
the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the state.
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The purpose of biopolitical actions of the state is to increase the welfare and happiness of
society
Ojakangas, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Finland, 2005
(Mika, Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power, Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 5-28, May)
<To say that biopower stands outside the law does not yet mean that it stands outside state power. On the
contrary, as we have already noted and as Foucault himself has shown, it was precisely the modern sovereign state
that first started to use biopolitical methods extensively for the care of individuals and populations. Undoubtedly,
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the original purpose of these methods was to increase state power, but its aim has also been, from the beginning, the
welfare of the individual and of the entire population, the improvement of their condition, the increase of their
wealth, their longevity, health and even happiness71 happiness of all and everyone (omnes et singulatim): The
sole purpose of the police, one of the first institutional loci of the nascent bio power, is to lead man to the utmost
happiness to be enjoyed in this life, wrote De Lamare in Treaty on the Police at the beginning of the eighteenth
century.72 According to Foucault, one should not, however, concentrate only on the modern state in looking for the
origin of biopower. One should examine also the religious tradition of the West, especially the JudeoChristian idea
of a shepherd as a political leader of his people. 73>
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that does not follow from the logic of biopower but from the logic of the sovereign power. Racism is, in other words, the
only way the sovereign power, the right to kill, can be maintained in biopolitical societies: Racism is bound up with workings of a State that is
90
obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. Racism is, in other words, a
91
discourse quite compatible with biopolitics through which biopower can be most smoothly transformed into the form of sovereign
power.
becomes a demonic combination of sovereign power and bio power, exercising sovereign means for bio political
ends. In its most monstrous form, it becomes the Third Reich. For this reason, I cannot subscribe to Agambens thesis, according
93
to which biopolitics is absolutized in the Third Reich. To be sure, the Third Reich used biopolitical means it was a state in which insurance
94
and reassurance were universal and aimed for biopolitical ends in order to improve the living conditions of the German people but so did
many other nations in the 1930s. What distinguishes the Third Reich from those other nations is the fact that, alongside its biopolitical apparatus,
it erected a massive machinery of death. It became a society that unleashed murderous power, or in other words, the old sovereign right to take
95
life throughout the entire social body, as Foucault puts it. It is not, therefore, biopolitics that was absolutized in the Third Reich as a
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matter of fact, biopolitical measures in the NaziGermany were, although harsh, relatively modest in scale compared to some presentday welfare
states but rather the sovereign power:
This power to kill, which ran through the entire social body of Nazi society, was first manifested when the power to take
life, the power of life and death, was granted not only to the State but to a whole series of individuals, to a considerable
number of people (such as the SA, the SS, and so on). Ultimately, everyone in the Nazi State had the power of life and
death over his or her neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing, which effectively meant doing away with the
96
people next door, or having them done away with.
The only thing that the Third Reich actually absolutizes is , in other words, the sovereignty of power and therefore,
the nakedness of bare life at least if sovereignty is defined in the Agambenian manner: The sovereign is the one
with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men
act as sovereigns. 97>
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Because
Foucault filters out the internal aspects of the de velopment of law, he can inconspicuously take a third and decisive
step: Whereas the sovereign power of Classical formations of power is constituted in concepts of right and law, this
normative language game is supposed to be inapplicable to the disciplinary power of the modern age; the latter is
suited only to empirical, at least nonjuridical, concepts having to do with the factual steering and organization of the behavioral
modes and the motives of a population rendered increas ingly manipulable by science: "The procedures of normalization come to be ever more
the sovereignty of the people. This kind of regime is, after all, correlated with those normalizing forms of punishment that constitute the proper theme of Discipline and Punish.
constantly engaged in the colonization of those of the law. I believe that all this can explain the global functioning of what I would call a society of normalization." 33 As the transition from
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Foucaults alternative is internally contradictory: It either has no true political effect, or, if
successful, it disproves itself by creating a new hegemonic discourse to discipline
Habermas, Permanent Visiting Professor at Northwestern, 1987 (Jrgen, The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity, p. 279)
Foucault's historiography can evade relativism as little as it can this acute presentism. His investigations are
caught exactly in the self-referentiality that was supposed to be excluded by a naturalistic treatment of the problematic of validity. Genealogical historiography is supposed to make the practices of power, precisely in their discourse-constituting achievement, accessible to
an empirical analysis. From this perspective, not only are truth claims confined to the discourses within which they arise; they exhaust their entire significance in the func tional
contribution they make to the self-maintenance of a given totality of discourse. That is to say, the meaning of validity claims consists in the power effects
they have. On the other hand, this basic assumption of the theory of power is self-referential; if it is correct, it must destroy
the foundations of the research inspired by it as well. But if the truth claims that Foucault himself raises for his genealogy of
knowledge were in fact illusory and amounted to no more than the effects that this theory is capable of releasing within the
circle of its adherents, then the entire undertaking of a critical unmasking of the human sciences would lose its point. Foucault
pursues genealogical historiography with the serious intent of getting a science underway that is superior to the mismanaged human sciences. If, then, its superiority cannot be
expressed in the fact that something more convincing enters in place of the convicted pseudo-sciences, if its superiority were
only to be expressed in the effect of its suppressing the hitherto dominant scientific discourse in fact, Foucault's theory would exhaust itself in the politics of
theory, and indeed in setting theoretical-political goals that would overburden the capacities of even so heroic a one-man enterprise. Foucault is aware of this. Con sequently, he would like to
single out his genealogy from all the rest of the human sciences in a manner that is reconcilable with the fundamental assumptions of his own theory. To this end, he turns
genealogical historiography upon itself ; the difference that can establish its preeminence above all the other human sciences is to be demonstrated in the history of its
(2)
own emergence.
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Totalizing critiques of law ignore its potential and undeniable past achievements.
Practically applying philosophy to reform can tap into the perfectibility of a truly
democratic state
McCarthy, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Northwestern, 1987
(Thomas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Introduction, p. XV-XVII)
Habermass disagreements with Foucault certainly do not amount to a blanket rejection of this critical perspective on power-knowledge
configurations. It is the totalization of critique that he objects to, the transformation of the critique of reason by reason which from Kant to Marx had taken
on the sociohistoncal form of a critique of ideology into a critique of reason tout court in the name of a rhetorically affirmed other of reason. On his view, the real
problem is too little rather than too much enlightenment, a deficiency rather than an excess of reason. And he
supports this view with a double-edged critique of Foucaults totalization, one edge applying to the transcendental-historiographic aspect of
genealogy, the other to its social-theoretical aspect. Briefly, he argues that Foucault cannot escape the performative contradiction involved
in using the tools of reason to criticize reason; this has the serious consequence of landing his genealogical
investigations in a situation embarrassingly similar to that of the sciences of man he so tellingly criticized. The ideas of
meaning, validity, and value that were to be eliminated by genealogical critique come back to haunt it in the spectral forms of presentism, relativism, and cryptonormativism. On the other
hand, the social-theoretical reading of modernity inspired by the theory of power turns out to he simply an inversion of the standard humanist reading it is meant to replace. It is, argues
The essentially ambiguous phenomena of modern culture and society are flattened down onto
the plane of power. Thus, for example, the internal development of law and morality, which on his view bears
effects of emancipation as well as of domination, disappears from Foucaults account of their normalizing functions.
It is precisely the ambiguity of rationalization processes that has to be captured, the undeniable achievements as well
as the palpable distortions; and this calls for a reconstructed dialectic of enlightenment rather than a totalized
critique of it. As I mentioned at the outset, Habermass strategy is to return to the counterdiscourse of modernity neglected by Nietzsche and his followers in which the principle of
Habermas, no less one-sided:
a self-sufficient, self-assertive subjectivity was exposed to telling criticism and a counterreckoning of the cost of modernity was drawn up. Examining the main crossroads in this
counterdiscourse, he points to indications of a path opened but not pursued: the construal of reason in terms of a noncoercive intersubjectivity of mutual understanding and reciprocal recognition.
Returning to the first major crossroad, he uses this notion to reconstruct Hegels idea of ethical life and to argue that the other of reason invoked by the post-Nietzschcans is not adequately
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mobilized in practice. This yields a counterposition to the post-Nietzschean privileging of the extraordinary limit experiences of aesthetic, mystical, or archaic provenance. If
situated reason is viewed as social interaction, the potential of reason has to be realized in the communicative practice of ordinary, everyday life. The social practice Habermas has in mind
cannot, however, be identified with Marxs conception of labor; in his view, productive activity is too specific and too restricted a notion to serve as a paradigm of rational practice. Furthermore,
it harbors an idealist residue labor as constitutive of a world in alienated form that has to be reappropriated that needs to be overcome if we are to get definitively beyond the paradigm of
subjectivity. The solution he opposes to the simple elimination of the subject is a kind of determinate negation: If communicative action is our paradigm, the decentered subject remains as a
participant in social interaction mediated by language. On this account, there is an internal relation of communicative practice to reason, for language use is oriented to validity claims, and
validity claims can in the end be redeemed only through intersubjective recognition brought about by the unforced force of reason. The internal relation of meaning to validity means that
communication is not only always immanent that is, situated, conditioned but also always transcendent that is, geared to validity claims that are meant to hold beyond any local
context and thus can be indefinitely criticized, defended, revised: Validity claims have a Janus face. As claims, they transcend any local context; at the same time, they have to be raised here and
now and be de facto recognized . The transcendent moment of universal validity bursts every provinciality asunder; the obligatory moment of accepted validity claims renders them carriers of
a context-bound everyday practice a moment of unconditionality is built into factual processes of mutual understanding the validity laid claim to is distinguished from the social currency of
a de facto established practice and yet serves it as the foundation of an existing consensus. This orientation of communicative action to validity claims admitting of argument and
counterargument is precisely what makes possible the learning processes that lead to transformations of our world views and thus of the very conditions and standards of rationality. In sum, then,
Habermas agrees with the radical critics of enlightenment that the paradigm of consciousness is exhausted. Like
them, he views reason as inescapably situated, as concretized in history, society, body, and language. Unlike them,
however, he holds that the defects of the Enlightenment can only be made good by further enlightenment. The
totalized critique of reason undercuts the capacity of reason to be critical. It refuses to acknowledge that
modernization bears developments as well as distortions of reason. Among the former, he mentions the unthawing
and reflective refraction of cultural traditions, the universalization of norms and generalization of values, and the
growing individuation of personal identities all prerequisites for that effectively democratic organization of society through which
alone reason can, in the end, become practical.
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Hopelessness accompanies lost innocence. Cynicism or nihilism become the only alternatives for
those who spurn all ethical and political foundations. By refusing to paint a picture of a better future, Foucault is
said to undercut the impetus to struggle. Others focus on Foucault's development of a tool kit whose contents are to be employed to deconstruct the
apparatuses of modern power. Yet the danger remains that Foucault's hyperactive tool-kit users will be unprincipled activists,
Luddites at best, terrorists at worst. In either case, Foucault provides no overarching theoretical vision. Indeed,
Foucault is upfront about his rejection of ethical and political theories and ideals. I think that to imagine another system is to
extend our participation in the present system, Foucault stipulates . Reject theory and all forms of general discourse. This need for
theory is still part of the system we reject. 10 One might worry whether action is meant to take the place of thought.
normative position.
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Foucault is caught in a constant struggle to fight power structures, which leads to nihilism
Hicks, Professor and chair of philosophy at Queens College of the CUNY, 2003
(Steven V., Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond, Foucault and Heidegger: Critical
Encounters, Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, p. 109, Questia)
<Hence, the only ethico-political choice we have, one that Foucault thinks we must make every day, is simply to
determine which of the many insidious forms of power is the main danger and then to engage in an activity of
resistance in the nexus of opposing forces. 72 Unending action is required to combat ubiquitous peril. 73 But
this ceaseless Foucauldian recoil from the ubiquitous power perils of normalization precludes, or so it would
seem, formulating any defensible alternative position or successor ideals. And if Nietzsche is correct in claiming
that the only prevailing human ideal to date has been the ascetic ideal, then even Foucauldian resistance will
continue to work in service of this ideal, at least under one of its guises, viz., the nihilism of negativity. Certainly
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Foucault's distancing of himself from all ideological commitments, his recoiling from all traditional values by which
we know and judge, his holding at bay all conventional answers that press themselves upon us, and his keeping in
play the twists and recoils that question our usual concepts and habitual patterns of behavior, all seem a close
approximation, in the ethicopolitical sphere, to the idealization of asceticism.>
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discussion of the Sonderkommando: This mimesis, this identification or imitation or exchange of roles between oppressor and victim, has provoked much discussion. . . . I do not know, and it
does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that
to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of
The conceptualization of the gray zone as a transhistorical and trans-subjective site of culpability, in
which victims become executioners and executioners become victims, thus conflates the positions of Muslims, Prominents,
Kapos, and SS in a gesture that reaches beyond the concentration camp experience to include us in a general condition
of traumatic culpability. This blurring of subject positions leads to a vision of inescapable guilt, in which we are
always already collectively steeped in the eliminationist logic that led to the concentration camp and continue
unknowingly to perpetuate its violence. But just as this vision posits an ever-encroaching web of complicity, it also, paradoxically, proposes an
infinitely elastic notion of victimhood. If we are obscurely complicit with the logic of the soccer match, the irrealization of violence in daily life,
we are also comparably violated by the historical trauma of the camps. The generalization of complicity and
victimization not only dismantles the historical specificity of the camps and the survivors testimonies. It also, more
disturbingly, coopts the figure of the victim as an other who is but an avatar of ourselves, a point I will address in a moment.
truth. (Drowned, 50)
Agambens philosophy does not apply to politics biopolitics is an empty term that
ultimately blocks critical thought
Virno, Professor of Linguistic Philosophy, 2002
(Paolo, University of Cosenza, 'General intellect, exodus, multitude. Interview with Paolo Virno', Archiplago
number 54, published in English at http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno2.htm)
<Agamben is a problem. Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no political
vocation. Then, when Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it into an ontological
category with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinion, he is very wrong-headed.
The problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power. When there
is a commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on the other
hand, that labor-power is only one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power
is a paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply
the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the
living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential. Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other
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hand, use biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the
biopolitical - in relation to the birth of liberalism - that Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a discourse over
the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides,
covers problems instead of being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word
with an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my
fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that
says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a serious content in the term,
however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what
serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.>
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Agamben obscurely suggests that the true horror of the camps is woven into the very normalcy of daily
sociopolitical life, a nameless violence circulating between spectator and spectacle, consumer and product, like the shifting
dynamic between victim and executioner staged in the soccer match. The collective we interpellated by Agamben are cast as baffled and
complicit witnesses to, if not consumers of, sanctioned maskings of a violence that remains a perfect and eternal cipher. Even more troubling than the loss of
context, definition, and specificity in this allegorical treatment of the soccer match is Agambens conflation of literal
and metaphorical survival. We secondary witnesses and spectators of athletic events and television broadcasts are identified with the
camps survivors (or primary witnesses) and made to share their anguish and shame (hence the anguish and shame of the survivors. . . . but hence also
our shame).14 To imagine that our actions and beliefs may inadvertently participate even by distractionin the violences around
us is a seductive point. Few have articulated it with more power than Albert Camus, in his postwar novel La peste. Tarrou, one of the characters participating in the resistance to
Indeed,
the plague that overtakes the city, claims that we are all pestiferes, plague-ridden, that each one of our daily acts and choices may end up colluding in unforeseen, hidden ways with the workings
of violence. In a similar context, Alain Resnais and Jean Cayrols documentary, Nuit et brouillard, concludes with a powerful interpellation, beckoning its spectators to acknowledge their past and
continued implication within the ideology of extermination deployed in the camps.15 Yet Camus, Resnais, and Cayrol legitimately appealed to historically concrete instances of complicity
defeat, he watches a Sonderkommando defiantly shout out Comrades, I am the last one! before being executed for his participation in the revolt that blew up a Birkenau crematorium? Or the
wave of nausea gripping the narrator of Borowskis short story, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen as he participates in divesting the truckloads of prisoners entering the camps of
What we must question, then, is the impulse toward identification enabling Agamben to posit himself as
survivor-witness (I, like the witnesses, instead view this match, this moment of normalcy, as the true horror of the camp), thereby assimilating the positions of primary and
their possessions?
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is particularly problematic,
secondary witnessing. To
in this instance
for it is Nyiszli, and
not Primo Levi, who reports the soccer game. Further, the ambiguities of Nyiszlis position as pathologist to Dr. Mengeles experiments make it difficult to transparently assume his place.16
Agambens extension of shame, guilt, and trauma, of responses to the affective and bodily experiences occurring in
the extreme conditions of the camps to us and now disregards the irreducible particularity of the gray zone. It
also erodes the very real differences between those who inhabited that zone (the distinction, for example, between Miklos Nyiszli and Primo
Levi) as well as the multiple gaps separating us (readers of testimonies, spectators of a continuous figurative soccer match) and the survivor-witnesses.17
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<21. At its most fundamental, right is the right to something, and within the realm of natural rights or rights of the
human being, it has been principally concerned with rights against oppression and inequality in order to realize a
potential for freedom. Citizen rights have at their basis quite different values, namely, a range of political and
property rights to be realized within and not against the State. This is not to say that law associated with human
rights is not, at times, itself an external form of oppression - but natural or human right is also able to offer
something quite different. The term needs to be used advisedly because of the problematic connotations it has but
there is a tradition of natural right containing anticipatory elements of human dignity in which forms of justice as
ethically-based community survive, and it is this tradition, I would argue, which needs to be renewed. We can see
this in all struggles for human dignity in which unsatisfied demands exist for overcoming the lack of freedom of
exploitation and constraint; the inequality of degradation and humiliation; the absence of community in egoism and
disunity. And so too can we view this via the necessary reference point that a critique of right provides: by
acknowledging the hypocrisy of law or the distance between intention and realization we have an important basis for
distinguishing between the problem of right and its complete negation, such as we would see under despotic,
fascistic rule. The use and abuse of right is not the same thing as a complete absence of right, and understanding
this is vital to being able to comprehend where and in what ways democratic, constitutional States become, or are,
fascistic. Natural right, or the right of the human being, occupies a space of interruption in the divide between law
and ethicality that can, on occasion, act as to reintroduce a radical pathos within right. Agamben is unable to allow
for any of this because, for him, rights are without any basis in human respect, their institutional representation
guaranteeing the logic of only the police, the market and, ultimately, the 'extermination camps'.>
Rights are key to challenging the StateAgambens critique cant connect to reality
Daly, Research Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the Australian National University, 2004
(Frances, Australian National University, The Non-citizen and the Concept of Human Rights, borderlands,
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm)
<24. The context of rights is one that is frequently unstable, and, as such, it is important to clearly assess the place of
rights within our present conditions of unfreedom. Often as a result of their denial, human rights currently act so as
to allow a questioning of the assumed authority of the State. Indeed, without a sense of rights it would be
difficult for us to understand the current absence of real freedom. If we consider the contemporary struggles of
the 'Sans Papiers' in France, the several hundred thousand people whose refusal of the label 'illegal' and fight for
documentation is premised on the basis that the undermining of rights is merely a way of attacking the value of
dignity for all, we can see a clear example of the possibility that can be realized through right. The Sans Papiers are
well-known for their questioning of the assumptions of immigration policies, such as the existence of quotas,
detention camps and deportations, and they argue cogently for an end to frontiers themselves. Madjigune Ciss
argues that the initiatives of those claiming their rights are basic to the survival of communities (Ciss, 1997: 3).
This is done on the basis of an appeal to rights of justice and egalitarianism. Indeed, it is not possible to understand
this emancipatory struggle outside a conception of rights.
25. Agamben views all such setting out of rights as essentially reintegrating those marginalized from citizenship into
the fiction of a guaranteed community. Law only "wants to prevent and regulate" (Agamben, 2001: 1) and it is
certainly the case that much law does but within rights, I argue, we can also detect a potential for justice. In
contrast, Agamben contends that legal right and the law always operate in a double apparatus of pure violence and
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forms of life guaranteed by a Schmittian 'state of emergency' (Agamben, 2000: 43). And although he recognizes the
dire consequences of a state of emergency with the eradication of the legal status of individuals, he views this as the
force of law without law, as a mystical or fictional element, a space devoid of law, an 'empty legal space', or 'state of
exception' as Carl Schmitt refers to it, that is essential to the legal order (Carl Schmitt, 1985: 6). What is then
eliminated here is any sense of how the appeal to rights brings into question institutionalized unfreedom and why
this underlying insufficiency between the idea of right and real need is opposed by those attempting to expand the
realm of human rights. The problem with this strategy for doing away with any distinction and placing the refugee in
a position of pure potentiality is that, instead of liberating or revolutionizing the place of the refugee, it creates an
eternal present that is unable to connect the very real reality of difference with a critique of the society that
victimizes the refugee in the manner with which we are currently so familiar.>
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needs to be understood is, firstly, why values of freedom and equality have such a limited and fragile place within
conditions of such inordinate legalism, and, secondly, what the absence of freedom, which the cause of human rights
inevitably suggests, means for the installation of any such rights. Without such an understanding we are left with a
gestural politics that contains a posture of radicalism but one which fails to connect the aspirations of those who are
struggling to achieve elementary rights with a vision of a world that could accord them a degree of dignity. To
acknowledge this is not to be seduced by concepts of right or law, but is rather to refuse the denial of a radical
questioning of the possibilities with which a discourse presents us. Benjamin's understanding of a genuinely
messianic idea is something that is "not the final end of historical progress, but rather its often failed and finally
accomplished interruption" (Benjamin, 1974: 1231). We find this in values that resist exploitation and assaults upon
human dignity. And it is this realm that currently requires urgent, emphatic and significant renewal.>
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<TD: In that regard, my sense is that you both recognize the power of Giorgio Agamben's argument in Homo Sacer concerning the extraordinary violence of
sovereignty at the end of modernity and yet you seek to overcome what may (not too unjustly) be thought of as a terrifying passivity that his position could result in.
MH: Our argument in Empire does share some central concerns with Agamben's Homo Sacer, particularly surrounding the notions of sovereignty and biopower.
Agamben brilliantly elaborates a conception of modern sovereignty based on Carl Schmitt's notions of the decision on the exception and the state of emergency, in
which the modern functioning of rule becomes a permanent state of exception. He then links this conception to the figure of the banned or excluded person back as far
as ancient Roman law with his usual spectacular erudition. The pinnacle and full realization of modern sovereignty thus becomes the Nazi concentration camp: the
But still none of that addresses the passivity you refer to. For that we have to look instead at Agamben's notions of life and biopower. Agamben uses the term
"naked life" to name that limit of humanity, the bare minimum of existence that is exposed in the concentration camp. In the final analysis, he explains, modern
biopower is this power to rule over life itself. What results from this analysis is not so
much passivity, I would say, but powerlessness. There is no figure that can challenge and contest sovereignty. Our
critique of Agamben's (and also Foucault's) notion of biopower is that it is conceived only from above and we
attempt to formulate instead a notion of biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules
over life. (In this sense, the notion of biopower one finds in some veins of ecofeminism such as the work of Vandana Shiva, although cast on a very different
register, is closer to our notion of a biopower from below.) What we are interested in finally is a new biopolitics that reveals the
struggles over forms of life.>
sovereignty rules over naked life and
Agamben ignores the actual differences between liberal democracy and totalitarianism and
only thinks in absolutes
Heins, Visiting Professor of Political Science at Concordia University and Senior Fellow at the
Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, 2005
(Volker, Giorgio Agamben and the Current State of Affairs in Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Policy, 6
German Law Journal No. 5, May, http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=598)
<Agamben is not interested in such weighing of costs and benefits because he assumes from the outset that taking
care of the survival needs of people in distress is simply the reverse side of the modern inclination to ignore
precisely those needs and turn life itself into a tool and object of power politics . By way of conclusion, I will indicate briefly how
his view differs from two other, often no less shattering critiques of modern humanitarianism. Martti Koskenniemi warned that humanitarian demands and human
rights are in danger of degenerating into "mere talk."[47] The recent crisis in Darfur, Sudan, can be cited as an example for a situation in which the repeated invocation
of human rights standards and jus cogens norms, like those articulated in the Genocide Convention, might ultimately damage those norms themselves if states are
unwilling to act on them.[48] This criticism implies that human rights should be taken seriously and applied in a reasonable manner.
Both David Kennedy and Oona Hathaway have gone one step further by taking issue even with those who proved to be serious by joining treaties or engaging in
advocacy. In a controversial quantitative study, Hathaway contended that the ratification of human rights treaties by sets of given countries not only did not improve
human rights conditions on the ground, but actually correlated with increasing violations.[49] In a similar vein, David Kennedy radicalized Koskenniemi's point by
arguing that human rights regimes and humanitarian law are rather part of the problem than part of solution, because they "justify" and "excuse" too much.[50] To
some extent, this is an effect of the logic of legal reasoning: marking a line between noncombatants and combatants increases the legitimacy of attacking the latter,
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granting privileges to lawful combatants delegitimizes unlawful belligerents and dramatically worsens their status. On the whole, Kennedy is more concerned about
the dangers of leaving human rights to international legal elites and a professional culture which is blind for the mismatch between lofty ideals and textual
articulations on the one side, and real people and problems on the other side.[51]
Whereas these authors reveal the "dark sides" of overly relying on human rights talk and treaties, the moral fervor of activists or the routines of the legal profession,
Agamben claims that something is wrong with human rights as such, and that recent history has demonstrated a deep affinity between the protection and the
infringement of these rights. Considered in this light, the effort of the British aid organization Save the Children, for instance, to help children in need both in Britain
and abroad after World War I faithful to George Bernard Shaw's saying, "I have no enemies under seven"is only the flip side of a trend to declare total war on
others regardless of their age and situation. This assertion clearly goes far beyond the voices of other pessimists.
Agamben's work is understandable only against the backdrop of an entirely familiar mistrust of liberal democracy and its ability to cultivate nonpartisan moral and
According to Agamben, democracy does not threaten to turn into totalitarianism, but rather both
regimes smoothly cross over into one another since they ultimately rest on the same foundation of a political
interpretation of life itself.[52] Like Carl Schmitt, Agamben sees the invocation of human rights by democratic governments as well as the "humanitarian
legal perspectives.
concept of humanity"[53] as deceptive manouvers or, at least, as acts of self-deception on the part of the liberal bourgeois subject. The difference between Agamben
and Schmitt lies in the fact that Schmitt fought liberal democracy in the name of the authoritarian state, while Agamben sees democracy and dictatorship as two
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<According to this basic Principle of Distinction, modern humanitarian action is directed towards those who are
caught up in violent conflicts without possessing any strategic value for the respective warring parties. Does this
imply that classic humanitarianism and its legal expressions reduce the lives of noncombatants to the "bare life" of
nameless individuals beyond the protection of any legal order? I would rather argue that humanitarianism is itself an
order-making activity. Its goal is not the preservation of life reduced to a bare natural fact, but conversely the
protection of civilians and thereby the protection of elementary standards of civilization which prevent the exclusion
of individuals from any legal and moral order. The same holds true for human rights, of course. Agamben fails to
appreciate the fact that human rights laws are not about some cadaveric "bare life", but about the protection of
moral agency.[33]
His sweeping critique also lacks any sense for essential distinctions. It may be legitimate to see "bare life" as a
juridical fiction nurtured by the modern state, which claims the right to derogate from otherwise binding norms in
times of war and emergency, and to kill individuals, if necessary, outside the law in a mode of "effective
factuality."[34] Agamben asserts that sovereignty understood in this manner continues to function in the same way
since the seventeenth century and regardless of the democratic or dictatorial structure of the state in question. This
claim remains unilluminated by the wealth of evidence that shows how the humanitarian motive not only shapes the
mandate of a host state and nonstate agencies, but also serves to restrict the operational freedom of military
commanders in democracies, who cannot act with impunity and who do not wage war in a lawless state of nature.
[35]
Furthermore, Agamben ignores the crisis of humanitarianism that emerged as a result of the totalitarian
degeneration of modern states in the twentieth century. States cannot always be assumed to follow a rational selfinterest which informs them that there is no point in killing others indiscriminately. The Nazi episode in European
history has shown that sometimes leaders do not spare the weak and the sick, but take extra care not to let them
escape, even if they are handicapped, very old or very young. Classic humanitarianism depends on the existence of
an international society whose members feel bound by a basic set of rules regarding the use of violencerules
which the ICRC itself helped to institutionalize. Conversely, classic humanitarianism becomes dysfunctional when
states place no value at all on their international reputation and see harming the lives of defenseless individuals not
as useless and cruel, but as part of their very mission.[36]>
Agambens theory is outdated. Modern humanitarian law has no exceptions and apply to
all individuals
Heins, Visiting Professor of Political Science at Concordia University and Senior Fellow at the
Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, 2005
(Volker, Giorgio Agamben and the Current State of Affairs in Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Policy, 6
German Law Journal No. 5, May, http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=598)
<The political/humanitarian divide is indeed a real one, but Agamben is inaccurate when he holds (a) that
humanitarian law and human rights are essentially the same thing, and (b) that human rights are apolitical in the
sense of being outside the scope of serious political conflicts or unenforcable outside the domestic jurisdiction of
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states. While Agamben places civil rights within the political realm, he simultaneously seems to attribute the
acceptance of presumably apolitical human rights not to the salience of transnational legal norms, but to the
contingency of humanitarian feelings. Even Hannah Arendt indicted in her own day the harmlessness of human
rights groups and discovered "an uncanny similarity" between their language and that of certain "societies for the
prevention of cruelty to animals."[8] Today, however, we have good reasons to reject this rigid dualism of enforcable
civil rights versus merely declaratory human rights as outdated.
Agamben is certainly right to draw a broad analogy between humanitarianism and human rights law, although he
skips the important issue of how the two relate to each other. Both bodies of law share the objective of protecting
individuals under any circumstances. As Agamben seems to realize, the classic separation between the law of war
and law of peace, which limited the applicability of human rights to the latter, was gradually replaced after 1945 by
legal opinions and treaties containing clear stipulations regarding basic human rights obligations which cannot be
suspended even in times of war or other public emergencies. Thus, both Article 27 of the American Convention on
Human Rights (ACHR) and Article 15 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) list a number of "non-derogable" human rights, including the rights to life and the
right of belief, which are to be applied without exception in all circumstances.[9]>
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That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, "that justice exceeds law and calculation, that the
unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as alibi for staying out of juridico-political
battles, within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and others."91 Indeed, "incalculable justice
requires us to calculate." From where does this insistence come? What is behind, what is animating, these
imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship that
because of its undecidability multiplies responsibility, and the fact that "left to itself, the incalculable and giving
(donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be reap-propriated by
the most perverse calculation."92 The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty, a duty that
inhabits the instant of madness and compels the decision to avoid "the bad," the "perverse calculation," even
"the worst." This is the duty that also dwells with deconstruction and makes it the starting point, the "at least
necessary condition," for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms. And it is a duty that responds to
practical political concerns when we recognize that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences " we recognize all too well
without yet having thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist
fanaticism."93
Furthermore, the duty within the decision, the obligation that recognizes the necessity of negotiating the possibilities provided by the impossibilities of justice, is not
content with simply avoiding, containing, combating, or negating the worst violence though it could cer tainly begin with those strategies. Instead ,
this
responsibility, which is the responsibility of responsibility, commissions a "utopian" strategy. Not a strategy that is
beyond all bounds of possibility so as to be con sidered "unrealistic," but one which in respecting the necessity of
calculation, takes the possibility summoned by the calculation as far as possible, "must take it as far as possible,
beyond the place we find our selves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond
the distinction between national and international, pub lic and private, and so on."94 As Derrida declares, "The
condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of
the impossible: the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible
invention."'1'' This leads Derrida to enunciate a proposition that many, not the least of whom are his Habermasian critics, could hardly have expected: "Nothing
seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without
treating it too lightly and forming the worst complicities."96>
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<The theme of undecidability gives us the context of the decision, but in and of itself undecidability does not provide an account of the decision that would satisfy the
concern raised by Critchley. "Decisions have to be taken. But how? And in virtue of what? How does one make a decision in an undecidable terrain?" 85 These
questions point to the nub of the problem, for sure, but they are issues that do not go unnoticed in Der-rida's work. They are of particular concern for Derrida in "Force
of Law." In that essay, subsequent to making the case for the intrinsic deconstructibility of the law and noting how this is good news for politics and historical
Derrida argues that the law's deconstructibility is made possible by the undeconstructibility of justice. Justice
is outside and beyond the law. "Justice is the experience of the impossible."86 Justice is not a principle, or a
foundation, or a guiding tradition. Justice is infinite, and in a favorable comparison to Levinas's notion of justice
"the heteronomic relation to others, to the faces of otherness that govern me, whose infinity I cannot thematize
and whose hostage I remain."87 In these terms, justice is like the pre-original, an-archic relation to the other, and
akin to the undecidable. It represents the domain of the im possible and the unrepresentable that lies outside and
beyond the limit of the possible and the representable. But it cannot be understood as "utopian," at least insofar as
that means the opposite of "realistic." It is not indeterminate. It is undecidable. It is that which marks the limit of the
possible; indeed, it is that which brings the domain of the possible into being and gives it the ongoing chance for
transformation and re-figuration, that which is one of the conditions of possibility for ethics and politics.
In this context, justice enables the law, but the law is that which "is never exercised without a decision that cuts, that
divides."88 The law works from the unrepresentable and seeks to represent; it takes from the im possible and
conceives the possible; it is embedded in the undecidable but nevertheless decides. Nonetheless, "the undecidable
remains caught, lodged, at least as a ghost but an essential ghost in every decision, in every event of decision. Its ghostliness deconstructs from
within any assurance of presence, any certitude or any supposed criteriology that would assure us of the justice of
the decision, in truth of the very event of a decision."89
The undecidable within the decision does not, however, prevent the decision or avoid its urgency. As Derrida
observes, "a just decision is al ways required immediately, 'right away' " This necessary haste has un avoidable
consequences because the pursuit of "infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or
hypothetical imperatives that could justify it" are unavailable in the crush of time. Nor can the crush of time be
avoided, even by unlimited time, "because the moment of decision, as such, always remains a finite moment of
urgency and precipitation." The decision is always "structurally finite," it "always marks the interruption of the
juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it." This is why, invoking
Kierkegaard, Derrida declares that "the instant of decision is a madness."90
The finite nature of the decision may be a "madness" in the way it renders possible the impossible, the infinite character of justice, but Derrida argues for the
necessity of this madness. Most importantly, although Derrida's argument concerning the decision has, to this point, been con cerned with an account of the
procedure by which a decision is possible, it is with respect to the necessity of the decision that Derrida be gins to formulate an
account of the decision that bears upon the content of the decision. In so doing, Derrida's argument addresses more
directly more directly, I would argue, than is acknowledged by Critchley the concern that for politics (at least for a progressive politics) one
must provide an account of the decision to combat domination.
progress,
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<In this contemporary milieu, a 1934 essay by Emmanuel Levinas ("Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism")
has been republished with a preface offering a different account of danger. In that short note, Levinas argued that the
origins of National Socialism's "bloody barbarism" were not to be found in an aberration of reasoning or an accident
of ideology, but rather in "the essential possibility of elemental Evil into which we can be led by logic and against
which Western philosophy had not sufficiently insured itself." 4 Moreover, the possibility of evil as a product of
reason, something against which Western philosophy had no guard, was "inscribed within the ontology of a being
concerned with being." As such, this possibility remains a risk: it "still threatens the subject correlative with being as
gathering together and as dominating," even though this subject (the subject of liberalism and humanism) is "the
famous subject of transcendental idealism that before all else wishes to be free and thinks itself free." 5
In this statement, Levinas offered the core of a thought developed over the last six decades, a thought with the
potential to chart an ethical course for subjects implicated in deconstruetion but who want to resist destruction.
Levinas's philosophythat of ethics as first philosophy is "dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the
Nazi horror,"6 and from under the shadow of Auschwitz seeks to install a disposition that will prevent its
repetition.7 Yet this summons is not answeredby the admonition to return to the dominant moral-philosophical dis course of modernity with its traditional concept of responsibility, where ethics is most often understood in terms of
the moral codes and commands pertaining to autonomous agents (whether they be individuals or states). 8 For
Levinas, being beholden by reason to elements of that tradition was the basis upon which the Holocaust (among
other related atrocities) was possible.9 Instead, Levinas argues that in order to confront evil it is the totalities of that
moral-philosophical discourse that must be contested, for " political totalitarianism rests on an ontological
totalitarianism."10
The critique of "ontological totalitarianism" puts Levinas in tension with the legacies of (Greek) philosophy, at least
insofar as Levinas understands that philosophy to have been dominated by a way of thinking in which truth is
equivalent to presence. "By this I mean an intelligibility that considers truth to be that which is present or copresent,
that which can be gathered or synchronized into a totality that we would call the world or cosmos.'"" That which is
Other is thereby reduced to the Same. This transformation is considered by Levinas to be an "alchemy that is
performed with the philosopher's stone of the knowing ego," a being concerned with being. 12 "Political
totalitarianism" originates in this privilege granted to presence because it disenables and resists an understanding
of that which cannot be thematized, the "otherwise than Being."13 In this context, antisemitism as one of the
bases for the Nazi horror is more than "the hostility felt by a majority towards a mi nority, nor only xenophobia,
nor any ordinary racism." Instead, it can be understood as "a repugnance felt for the unknown within the psyche of
the Other, for the mystery of its interority or... a repugnance felt for the pure proximity of the other man, for sociality
itself."14
However, there is for Levinas another tradition of thought that takes us in this otherwise direction: the Hebraic (as
opposed to Hellenic) tradition.15 Although Levinas does not discount the Greek tradition's capacity to understand the
interhuman realm as presence, he argues that this realm "can also be considered from another perspective the eth ical or biblical perspective that transcends the Greek language of intel ligibility as a theme of justice and concern
for the other as other, as a theme of love and desire, which carries us beyond the infinite being of the world as
presence."16 Levinas cannot therefore be understood as be ing bound by an either/or logic through which one
tradition is rejected in favor of another. Instead, he argues that "the interhuman is thus an interface: a double axis
where what is 'of the world' qua phenomenological intelligibility is juxtaposed with what is 'not of the world' qua
ethical responsibility."17
This double axis of presence and absence, identity and alterity, "essence and essence's other," stands as "the ultimate
relationship in Being," the "irreducible structure upon which all the other structures rest."18 It is that which
constitutes, or reterritorializes, the space the "null-site," a nonplace of a place of responsibility, subjectivity,
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Using the state is the only way to fulfill our infinite responsibility to the other
Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1999
(David, The Deterritorialization of Responsibility, Moral Spaces, Eds. Michael J. Shapiro & David Campbell, p. )
<Moreover, the spatial dimension foregrounded by the third party's disturbance and the resultant need for justice is
associated with the state. "Who is closest to me? Who is the Other?... We must investigate carefully. Legal justice
is required. There is need for a state."57 Equally, in Otherwise Than Being, Levinas writes that "a problem is
posited by proximity itself, which, as the immediate itself, is without problems. The ex traordinary commitment of
the other to the third party calls for control, a search for justice, society and the State."58 Indeed, Levinas has an
approving view of the state, regarding it as "the highest achievement in the lives of western peoples,"59 something
perhaps attributable to his contestable interpretation of the legitimacy of the state of Israel. 60>
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<Levinas's thought radically refigures our understanding of responsibil ity, subjectivity, and ethics, for the meaning
of each is implicated in the other: "[Responsibility [is] the essential, primary and fundamental structure of
subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics... does not supplement a preceding existential base;
the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility."20 Of these concepts, responsibility
is perhaps the most important because, for Levinas, being is a radically interdependent condition, a con dition made
possible only because of my responsibility to the Other:
Responsibility for the Other, for the naked face of the first individual to come along. A responsibility that goes
beyond what I may or may not have done to the Other or whatever acts I may or may not have committed, as if 1
were devoted to the other man before being devoted to myself. Or more exactly, as if 1 had to answer for the other's
death even before being. A guiltless responsibility, whereby I am none the less open to an accusation of which no
alibi, spatial or temporal, could clear me. It is as if the Other established a relationship or a relationship were
established whose whole intensity consists in not presupposing the idea of community.21
This responsibility is unlike that associated with the autonomous moral agents of traditional conceptions. It is "a
responsibility without limits, and so necessarily excessive, incalculable, before memory... a responsibility before
the very concept of responsibility."22 It is a responsibility that is pre-original, an-archic, and devolved from an
"infrastructural alterity,"23 and thus reworks our understanding of both subjectivity and ethics.
Responsibility understood as such refigures subjectivity because the very origin of the subject is to be found in its
subjection to the Other, a subjection that precedes consciousness, identity, and freedom, does not therefore
originate in a vow or decision, and ergo cannot be made possible by a command or imperative.24 In other
words, subjects are constituted by their relationship with the Other. Their being is called into question by the prior
existence of the Other, which has an unremitting and even accusative hold on the subject. Moreover, and this is what
re-articulates ethics, this relationship with the Other means that one's be ing has to be affirmed in terms of a right to
be in relation to the Other:
One has to respond to one's right to be, not by referring to some abstract and anonymous law, or judicial entity, but
because of one's fear for the Other. My being-in-the-world or my "place in the sun," my being at home, have these
not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or
driven out into a third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing? 25
Having decentered subjectivity by making it an effect of the relationship with the Other, Levinas's thought recasts
ethics in terms of a primary responsibility that stakes our being on the assertion of our right to be. As Levinas
declares, "We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics." 26 In turn, the
recasting of ethics reinforces the decentering of subjectivity:
Ethical subjectivity dispenses with the idealizing subjectivity of ontology, which reduces everything to itself. The
ethical "I" is subjectivity precisely insofar as it kneels before the other, sacrificing its own liberty to the more
primordial call of the other. The heteronomy of our response to the human other, or to God as the absolutely other,
precedes the autonomy of our subjective freedom. As soon as I acknowledge that it is "I" who am responsible, I
accept that my freedom is anteceded by an obligation to the other. Ethics redefines subjectivity as this
heteronomous responsibility, in contrast to autonomous freedom.27
Levinas's philosophy of ethics as first philosophy is clearly in accord with the demise of universality as signalled by
"the end of philosophy," especially as his enterprise has been animated by a concern for the po litical consequences
of Being, ontology, and totality. At the same time, and partly because its truly radical nature goes beyond the
confines of either/or logic, it can be argued that there remains an important moment of universality in Levinas's
thought. It is to be found paradoxically in "the very particularity" of the obligation to the Other.28 We are all in
that circumstance, and it is thus universal, a form of transcendence. Not the transcendence of an ahistorical ego or
principle, but transcendence in the sense that alterity, being's other, is a necessity structured by differance rather than
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ontology, which effects a transcendence without presence. 29 As Levinas observes, "The fundamental experience
which objective experience itself presupposes is the experience of the Other."30>
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<The affinities between "Levinasian ethics" and "Derridean deconstruction" are considerable. Most notably, alterity
incites ethics and responsibility for each, as both depend on the recognition of a structural condition of alterity prior
to subjectivity and thought. As Derrida argues in defense of the proposition that deconstruction entails an
affirmation, "[Deconstruction is, in itself, a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons or
motivates it. Deconstruction is therefore vocation a response to a call...The other precedes philosophy and
necessarily invokes and provokes the subject before any genuine questioning can begin. It is in this rapport with the
other that affirmation expresses itself."71 As such, "Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an
openness towards the other."72
Deconstruction's unconditional affirmation has enabled Simon Critchley to argue that the question of ethics and
deconstruction is not one of deriving an ethics from deconstruction, but of recognizing that decon struction has a
basic ethicality, that it takes place ethically, because of its orientation to the call of the other. But, for Critchley,
deconstruction alone "fails to navigate the treacherous passage from ethics to politics,"73 and requires the supplement
of Levinas's unconditional responsibility to traverse this passage. The Levinasian fortification is effective because
"for Levinas ethics is ethical for the sake of politicsthat is, for the sake of a new conception of the organization of
political space." In consequence, Critchley's argument (although it is not specifically intended as a critique of
Derrida) is that "politics provides the continual horizon of Levinasian ethics, and that the problem of politics is that
of delineating a form of political life that will repeatedly interrupt all attempts at totalization."74>
<But the concern about politics in Derrida articulated by Critchley is not about politics per se, nor about the
possibilities of political analysis, but about the prospects for a progressive, radical politics, one that will demand
and thus do more than simply permit the decision to resist domination, exploitation, oppression, and all other
conditions that seek to contain or eliminate alterity. Yet, again, I would argue that the above discussion
demonstrates that not only does Derridean deconstruc tion address the question of politics, especially when
Levinasian ethics draws out its political qualities, it does so in an affirmative antitotalitarian manner that gives its
politics a particular quality, which is what Critchley and others like him most want (and rightly so, in my view). We
may still be dissatisfied with the prospect that Derrida's account cannot rule out forever perverse calculations and
unjust laws. But to aspire to such a guarantee would be to wish for the demise of politics, for it would install a new
technology, even if it was a technology that began life with the markings of progressivism and radicalism . Such
dissatisfaction, then, is not with a Derridean politics, but with the necessities of politics per se, necessities that can
be contested and negotiated, but not escaped or transcended.
It is in this context that the limits of the Levinasian supplement proposed by Critchley as necessary for
deconstruction become evident. While it is the case that Levinas's thought is antagonistic to all totaliz ing forms of
politics, recognizing the way that ontological totalitarian ism gives rise to political totalitarianism, I argued above
that the limit of its critical potential is exposed by the question of the state. In this regard, insofar as Derridean
deconstruction requires the Levinasian supplement, that supplement itself needs to be supplemented, and supple mented with recognition of the manner in which deconstruction's af firmation of alterity deterritorializes
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responsibility, and pluralizes the possibilities for ethics and politics over and beyond (yet still including) the
state.107>
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<Notwithstanding the interrelated nature of the norm of the interhuman and the rules of governance, in the shift to
morality Levinas argues that ethics "hardens its skin as soon as we move into the political world or the impersonal
'third' the world of government, institutions, tribunals, prisons, schools, committees, and so on."66 This
"hardening of the skin" is a manifestation of the way in which Levinas understands politics to involve "a totalizing
discourse of ontology,"67 a discourse most evident in arguments enunciated by and for the state. Nonetheless, in his
discussion of the shift from ethics to morality, Levinas exhibits a less sanguine attitude to the state than noted above:
If the moral-political order totally relinquishes its ethical foundation, it must accept all forms of society, including
the fascist or totalitarian, for it can no longer evaluate or discriminate between them. The state is usually better than
anarchy but not always. In some instances fascism or totalitarianism, for example the political order of the
state may have to be challenged in the name of our ethical responsibility to the other. That is why ethics must remain
the first philosophy.68
Even though Levinas's limited reservations about the state are here restricted to the nature of (domestic) political
order, the idea that "the state may have to be challenged in the name of our ethical responsibil ity to the other" at least
allows for the possibility of extending political action in terms of the ethical relation beyond the bounds suggested
by Levinas's previous reflections on the third party and the state. There is no doubt, however, that to fulfill the
promise of Levinas's ethics with respect to international politics, this possibility for challenge has to be carried a
good deal further. Moreover, I would argue, this possibility for challenge has to be pursued in order to maintain
fidelity with Levinas's conviction that neither politics nor warfare can obliterate the relation ship of the self to
the other as a relation of responsibility. Indeed, this endeavor might be thought of in terms of making Levinas's
thought more "Levinasian," for pursuing this possibility of challenge flows from the recognition that "injustice
not to mention racism, nationalism, and imperialism begins when one loses sight of the transcendence of the
Other and forgets that the State, with its institutions, is informed by the proximity of my relation to the Other."69>
Our relationship to the other is always necessary, not matter the circumstances. We cannot
say no or it is not my responsibility
Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1999 (David, The
Deterritorialization of Responsibility, Moral Spaces, Eds. Michael J. Shapiro & David Campbell, p. )
<Levinas's thought is appealing for rethinking the question of responsibility, especially with respect to situations like
the Balkan crisis, because it maintains that there is no circumstance under which we could declare that it was not our
concern. As Levinas notes, people can (and obviously do) conduct their relationship to the Other in terms of
exploitation, oppression, and violence. But no matter how allergic to the other is the self, "the relation to the other,
as a relation of responsibility, cannot be totally suppressed, even when it takes the form of politics or war fare." In
consequence, no self can ever opt out of a relationship with the other: "[l]t is impossible to free myself by saying,
'It's not my concern.' There is no choice, for it is always and inescapably my concern . This is a unique 'no choice,'
one that is not slavery."'37
This unique lack of choice comes about because in Levinas's thought ethics has been transformed from something
independent of subjectivity that is, from a set of rules and regulations adopted by pregiven, autonomous agents
to something insinuated within and integral to that subjectivity. Accordingly, ethics can be understood as something
not ancillary to the existence of a subject; instead, ethics can be appre ciated for its indispensability to the very being
of the subject. This argument leads us to the recognition that "we" are always already ethically situated, so making
judgments about conduct depends less on what sort of rules are invoked as regulations and more on how the
interdepen-dencies of our relations with others are appreciated. To repeat one of Levinas's key points: "Ethics
redefines subjectivity as this heteronomous responsibility, in contrast to autonomous freedom."'38
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their operation is connotative: they are received rather than read (1984, 232), and open only to a readerly and not a writerly
interpretation. A myth is a second-order signification attached to an already-constructed denotative sign, and the
ideological message projected into this sign is constructed outside the context of the signified. A myth is therefore, in
Alfred Korzybskis sense, intensional: its meaning derives from a prior linguistic schema, not from interaction with the world in its complexity.
Furthermore, myths have a repressive social function, carrying in Barthess words an order not to think (1997, 59). They
are necessarily projected onto or imposed on actual people and events, under the cover of this order. The triumph of literature in the Dominici
trial (2000, 43-6) consists precisely in this projection of an externally-constructed mythical schema as a way of avoiding
Specific analyses are referred back to this underlying structure as its necessary expressions, without apparently
being able to alter it; for instance, those who triggered the process of democratization [in eastern Europe] are not those who today enjoy
its fruits, not because of a simple usurpation but because of a deeper structural logic (iek, 1992a, 27). In most instances, the mythical
operation of the idea of constitutive lack is implicit, revealed only by a rhetoric of denunciation. For instance, Mouffe
accuses liberalism of an incapacity to grasp the irreducible character of antagonism (1993, 1-2), while iek claims that a dimension is
lost in Butlers work because of her failure to conceive of trouble as constitutive of gender (1994, 71). This language of denial
which is invoked to silence critics is a clear example of Barthess order not to think: one is not to think about the
idea of constitutive lack, one is simply to accept it, under pain of invalidation. If someone else disagrees, s/he
can simply be told that there is something crucial missing from her/his theory. Indeed, critics are as likely to be accused of
being dangerous as to be accused of being wrong.
One of the functions of myth is to cut out what Trevor Pateman terms the middle level of analytical concepts, establishing a short-circuit
between high-level generalizations and ultra-specific (pseudo-)concrete instances. In Barthess classic case of an image of a black soldier saluting
the French flag, this individual action is implicitly connected to highly abstract concepts such as nationalism, without the mediation of the
particularities of his situation. (These particularities, if revealed, could undermine the myth. Perhaps he enlisted for financial reasons, or due to
threats of violence). Thus, while myths provide an analysis of sorts, their basic operation is anti-analytical: the analytical
schema is fixed in advance, and the relationship between this schema and the instances it organizes is hierarchically
ordered to the exclusive advantage of the former. This is precisely what happens in Lacanian analyses of specific
political and cultural phenomena. iek specifically advocates sweeping generalisations and short-cuts between
specific instances and high-level abstractions, evading the middle level.
The correct dialectical procedure can be best described as a direct jump from the singular to the universal, bypassing the mid-level of
particularity. He wants a direct jump from the singular to the universal, without reference to particular contexts (Butler, Laclau and iek,
2000, 239-40). He also has a concept of a notion which has a reality above and beyond any referent, so that, if reality does not fit it, so much
the worse for reality (Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000, 244). The failure to see what is really going on means that one sees more, not less, because
libidinal perception is not impeded by annoying facts (see Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000, 248). iek insists on the necessity of the gesture of
externally projecting a conception of an essence onto phenomena (1994, 62-3), even affirming its necessity in the same case (anti-Semitism) in
which Reich denounces its absurdity (iek, 1994, 74; Reich, 1974, 30-1). This amounts to an endorsement of myths in the Barthesian sense, as
well as demonstrating the dialectical genius of the likes of Kelvin McKenzie.
Lacanian analysis consists mainly of an exercise in projection. As a result, Lacanian explanations often look more propagandistic
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or pedagogical than explanatory. A particular case is dealt with only in order to, and to the extent that it can, confirm the alreadyformulated structural theory. Judith Butler criticizes ieks method on the grounds that theory is applied to its examples, as if
already true, prior to its exemplification. The theory is articulated on its self-sufficiency, and then shifts register only for the
pedagogical purpose of illustrating an already accomplished truth. It is therefore a theoretical fetish that disavows the conditions of its own
emergence (Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000, 26-7). She accuses Laclau of developing a model of explanation which reduces social movements to
a single logic of claim-making. Using this method, [w]e become meta-commentators on the conditions of possibility of political life without then
bothering to see whether the dilemmas we assume to pertain universally are, in fact, at work in the subject we purport to judge (Butler, Laclau
and iek, 2000, 169). The moment at which, for instance, a specific law is taken to express the Law as a prior concept, Lacanians adopt a
credo of faith; this is the moment in which a theory of psychoanalysis becomes a theological project. Such simplification is a way
to avoid the rather messy psychic and social entanglement involved in studying specific cases (Butler, Laclau and iek,
2000, 155-6). Similarly, Dominick LaCapra objects to the idea of constitutive lack because specific losses cannot be
adequately addressed when they are enveloped in an overly generalised discourse of absence Conversely, absence at a
foundational level cannot simply be derived from particular historical losses (1999, 698). Attacking the long story of conflating absence with
loss that becomes constitutive instead of historical (1999, 719), he accuses several theorists of eliding the difference between
absence and loss, with confusing and dubious results, including a tendency to avoid addressing historical
problems, including losses, in sufficiently specific terms, and a tendency to enshroud, perhaps even to etherealise,
them in a generalised discourse of absence (1999, 700). Unlike structural absences, traumatic historical events are always determined
by specific circumstances (1999, 725). For instance, referring to ieks remark that explanations of the Holocaust and the Gulag are so many
attempts to elude the fact that we are dealing with the real which returns as the same traumatic kernel in all civilisations (1989, 50), LaCapra
remarks that iek performs an extreme and extremely dubious theoretical gesture of reducing specific events to
mere manifestations of an underlying structure (1999, 727). (LaCapra, however, revives the idea of constitutive lack in his concept of
general or structural absence - absence as absence or untranscendable structural trauma [1999, 722] - which simply displaces the problem of
surplus lack into one of how one tells whether a phenomenon is a contingent lack or a structural absence). Daniel Bensad draws out the
political consequences of the projection of absolutes into politics. The fetishism of the absolute event involves a suppression
of historical intelligibility, necessary to its depoliticization. The space from which politics is evacuated becomes
a suitable place for abstractions, delusions and hypostases. Instead of actual social forces, there are shadows and
spectres (2002, 7).
The operation of the logic of projection is predictable. According to Lacanians, there is a basic structure (sometimes called a
ground or matrix) from which all social phenomena arise, and this structure, which remains unchanged in all
eventualities, is the reference-point from which particular cases are viewed. For instance, iek, replying to criticisms of
Lacanian film theory that its concept of the gaze never expresses anything which arises concretely in a film, states that the gaze, which is a
structural/essential category, is prior to instances of eyes and sight (Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000, 260). The fit between theory and evidence
is constructed monologically by the reduction of the latter to the former, or by selectivity in inclusion and reading of examples. At its simplest, the
Lacanian myth functions by a short-circuit between a particular instance and statements containing words such as all, always, never,
necessity and so on. A contingent example or a generic reference to experience is used, misleadingly, to found a
claim with supposed universal validity. For instance, Stavrakakis uses the fact that existing belief-systems are based
on exclusions as a basis to claim that all belief-systems are necessarily based on exclusions (1999, 63-4), and claims that
particular traumas express an ultimate impossibility (1999, 84-5). Similarly, Laclau and Mouffe use the fact that a particular antagonism can
disrupt a particular fixed identity to claim that the social as such is penetrated and constituted by antagonism as such (1985, 125-9). Phenomena
are often analysed as outgrowths of something exterior to the situation in question. For instance, ieks concept of the social symptom
depends on a reduction of the acts of one particular series of people (the socially excluded, fundamentalists, Serbian paramilitaries, etc.) to a
psychological function in the psyche of a different group (westerners).
The real is a supposedly self-identical principle which is used to reduce any and all qualitative differences
between situations to a relation of formal equivalence. This shows how mythical characteristics can be projected from the outside,
although it also raises a different problem: the under-conceptualization of the relationship between individual psyches and collective phenomena
in Lacanian theory. Too often, the denial of a dividing-line between the two is used as an excuse for simply flitting
between them, as if there is no difference between analysing a single individual and a social conflict. Lacanians
frequently avoid questions of agency (iek has more to say about class struggle than classes, for instance), and a related tendency for
psychological concepts to acquire an ersatz agency similar to that of a Marxian fetish. The Real or antagonism occurs in phrases which have
it doing or causing something.
As Barthes shows, myth offers the psychological benefits of empiricism without the epistemological costs. Tautology, for instance, is a minor
ethical salvation, the satisfaction of having militated in favour of a truth without having to assume the risks which any somewhat positive
search for truth inevitably involves (1997, 61). It dispenses with the need to have ideas, while treating this release as a stern morality.
Tautology is a rationality which simultaneously denies itself, in which the accidental failure of language is magically identified with what one
decides is a natural resistance of the object (1997, 152-3).
This passage could almost have been written with the Lacanian Real in mind. The characteristic of the Real is precisely that one
can invoke it without defining it (since it is beyond symbolization), and that the accidental failure of language, or
indeed a contingent failure in social praxis, is identified with an ontological resistance to symbolization projected
into Being itself. For instance, ieks classification of the Nation as a Thing rests on the claim that the only way we can determine it is
by empty tautology, and that it is a semantic void (1990, 53). Similarly, he claims that the tautological gesture of the Master-Signifier, an
empty performative which retroactively turns presuppositions into conclusions, is necessary, and also that tautology is the only way historical
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change can occur (1994, 43, 59). He even declares constitutive lack (in this case, termed the death drive) to be a tautology (1994, 50).
Lacanian references to the Real or antagonism as the cause of a contingent failure are reminiscent of Robert
Teflons definition of God: [a]n explanation which means I have no explanation (cited Bufe ed., 1995,188). An ethics
of the Real is a minor ethical salvation which says very little in positive terms, but which can pose in macho terms
as a hard acceptance of terrifying realities. It authorizes truth-claims - in Laclaus language, a reality which is before our
eyes (1990, 97), or in Newmans, a harsh reality hidden beneath a protective veil (2001, 53) - without the attendant risks. Some Lacanian
theorists also show indications of a commitment based on the particular kind of euphoric enjoyment Barthes associates with myths. Laclau in
particular emphasizes his belief in the exhilarating significance of the present (1990, 98), hinting that he is committed to euphoric investments
generated through the repetition of the same.>
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seems to be a need to restore an illusion of closure, the need for metacommunication to operate in a repressive
rather than an open way. This need arises because the mythical concept of constitutive lack is located in an
entire mythical narrative in which it relates to other abstractions. In the work of Laclau and Mouffe, this expresses itself in
the demand for a hegemonic agent who contingently expresses the idea of social order as such.
One should recall that such an order is impossible, since antagonism is constitutive of social relations, and that the
hegemonic gesture therefore requires an exclusion. Thus, the establishment of a hegemonic master-signifier is
merely a useful illusion. The alternative to demanding a master-signifier - an illusion of order where there is none - would be to reject the
pursuit of the ordering function itself, and to embrace a rhizomatic politics which goes beyond this pursuit. In Laclau and Mouffes work,
however, the need for a social order, and a state to embody it, is never questioned, and, even in Zizeks texts, the
Act which smashes the social order is to be followed by a necessary restoration of order (e.g. 1989, 211-12). This
necessity is derived ontologically: people are, says iek, in need of firm roots (Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000, 250). The tautological gesture
of establishing a master-signifier by restrospectively positing conditions of an object as its components, thereby block[ing] any further inquiry
into the social meaning of what it quilts (i.e. repressive metacommunication), is a structural necessity (1993, 49). This is because discourse itself
is in its fundamental structure authoritarian. A distortion introducing non-founded violence into language is necessary, and with Lacan, the
master is an impostor, yet the place occupied by him cannot be abolished, since the very finitude of every discursive field imposes its structural
necessity. The role of the analyst is not to challenge the place of the master, but to occupy it in such a way as to expose its underlying
contingency (1992c, 103). The master-signifier, also termed the One, demonstrates the centrality of a logic of place in
Lacanian theory. Badiou accomplishes the ultimate gesture of obedience to King Abacus in specifying mathematics - the core of many logics
of place - as the root of being-as-being (i.e. in itself). When all particularity is stripped away, what remains is mathematics (2001, 130). His
position on revolutionary change is similar to ieks. It is inevitable, even destiny, that every truth or revolutionary break should return to
the logic of normalization (2001, 70). The truth-event is fated to disappear (2001, 72), and truth can only change the content of opinion (i.e.
everyday symbolic discourse), not destroy it (2001, 80). Lacanians assume that constitutive lack necessitates the construction of
a positive space which a particular agent can fill (albeit contingently). The empty place of power in liberal-democratic Lacanian
texts such as those of Laclau, Mouffe, Stavrakakis and Newman is not empty at all, since it involves a particular (though changing) positivity. An
empty place of power would involve, not an agent who adopts the empty position, but a simple absence of the
position, or in other words, the destruction of the state and the free emergence of rhizomatic networks with no determinate centre.
Therefore, the commitment to master-signifiers and the state involves a continuation of an essentialist image of
positivity, with lack operating structurally as the master-signifier of Lacanian theory itself (not as a subversion of
positivity, but as a particular positive element).>
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resistances to their arguments (i.e. an outside) as the result of the object they are studying (i.e. as an inside) (2001c, 174). The fixed structure of
Lacanian theory is strongly operative in resultant arguments, although it is concealed to some extent by an apparent reluctance on the part of
Lacanian theorists to engage in metacommunicative dialogue about their theoretical claims. This allows a smoothly-flowing rhetoric
within which they can subsume contemporary events and specific subjects of analysis. However, beneath this
rhetoric, the essentialist basic structure and the myth of constitutive lack call the shots.
One even finds at times an open reference to lack as an essence. For instance, Laclau and Mouffe refer to negativity
and antagonism as foundational and grounding (1985, 145, 193; c.f. Newman, 2001, 153), Newman refers to the emptiness at the heart of place and comes close
to admitting his own essentialism (2001, 50-1), Stavrakakis refers to the Real as inherent in human experience (1999, 87) and Laclau admits privileging the moment of negativity (1990, 17).
iek at times embraces essentialism and his entire analysis is unashamedly ontological. Sometimes, Lacanians
imply the existence of an element in human nature which necessitates conflict. Mouffe refers to an element of hostility among human beings
and denounces others for rejecting the idea that violence is inherent in human nature, and Newman cites Lacans view that constitutive lack is almost natural (Mouffe, 2000, 130-2; Newman,
Most often, one finds the essentialism of constitutive lack concealed beneath a simple change of words .
this allows an
essentialism at the level of form to be combined with an anti-essentialism at the level of content. For instance, iek
2001, 144).
Instead of essential, one might say radical, constitutive, primordial, fundamental, basic or indivisible, and
takes the term constitutive to mean the story of everyone (1992c, 74), i.e. more-or-less the same as a universal essence.
One way in which Lacanian theorists differentiate themselves from essentialism is by reference to the idea of
constitutive lack as negativity. For instance, Laclau claims that he does not pose his theory as a full awareness of
objectivity because antagonism is the limit of all objectvity and has no objective meaning of its own (1990, 17).
Therefore, in Stavrakakiss terms, Lacanian theory is supposedly breaking down the limits between thought and non-thought, encircling rather than symbolizing lack (1999, 82-3), and creating a
Such claims are misleading. They may apply to the arguments of (say) Derrida or
Korzybski, but the syntax and grammar of Lacanian theory is not such as to permit such an opening. Constitutive
lack appears in Lacanian rhetoric as an entity with a positive name, such as the Real, and instances of lacking are
frequently nominalized or explained by reference to it. As Butler asks, assuming sociality and conceptualization to have a limit,
space within thought for an awareness of its own limits.
why are we compelled to give a technical name to this limit, the Real, and to make the further claim that the subject is constituted by this
foreclosure? The use of technical nomenclature opens up more problems than it solves. Indeed, it could even be a
gesture of discursive control in its own right. Are we using the categories to understand the phenomena, or
marshalling the phenomena to shore up the categories in the name of the father? (Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000,
152). Perhaps it involves social significations reified as prediscursive (1993, 195). In any case, to say that the real
resists symbolization is already to symbolize it (1993, 207).
The technical term operates in much the same way as in positivistic theories, where the use of a noun turns a set of observed facts into a law. Lack (in the sense of the verb to lack) is
explained by means of a nominalized lack (for instance, the failure of society by the fact of antagonism), and the various versions of nominalized lack are arranged in sentences involving the verb
to be. It is not simply a relation of dislocation but a theoretical entity in its own right. For instance, class struggle is that on account of which every direct reference to universality is
biased, dislocated with regard to its literal meaning. Class struggle is the Marxist name for this basic operator of dislocation (iek, 1997a, 217). One might compare this formula to the
statement, I dont know what causes dislocation. iek also refers to the universal traumatic kernel which returns as the Same throughout all historical epochs, epochs which should be
conceived as a series of ultimately failed attempts to deal with the same unhistorical, traumatic kernel (1992c, 81). Dallmayr similarly writes of Laclau and Mouffes concept of antagonism
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that negativity designates not simply a lack but a nihilating potency, a nihilating ferment with real effects (1987, 287, 292-3). Stavrakakis differentiates negativity, an ontological concept of
that which shows the limits of the constitution of objectivity, from contingent instances of negativities (2003, 56) and Newman writes of a creative and constitutive absence (2001,142).
Badious Real - more situated than the rest, yet still an ontological necessity - has the same positive role. Hence, at the heart of every situation, at the foundation of its being, there is a situated
void, around which is organised the plenitude of the situation (2001, 68). This void is a specific element, so that the event names the void insofar as it names the not-known of the situation
(2001, 69), and it must name the one true central void of the situation (2001, 72). This notion of the void as positivity - as something already present in the situation which motivates change - is
the only substantial difference between Badious truth-events and Kuhns paradigm-shifts. (It would seem to mean taking, for instance, the lack of factories before the industrial revolution to be
an active, positive element which the revolution named, a real void rather than something constructed retrospectively out of a situation open to many different developments; this is certainly
how Badiou reads the rise of quantum physics) . Butler notes that the real that is a rock or a kernel or sometimes a substance is also, and sometimes within the same sentence, a loss, a
negativity (1993, 198). Constitutive lack is a positivity - an operator of dislocation, a nihilating element - in the Lacanian vocabulary. It is this process of mythical construction which
One can
only avoid an I-dont-know being underdefined if one misrepresents it mythically. The idea of constitutive lack
is equivalent to a concept of a positive element in human nature which necessitates conflict with others. For
instance, the claim that the political is a dimension inherent to society and which determine[s] our [i.e.
humans] very ontological condition (1993, 3) could be rephrased as a claim that it is natural to hate or fight. Many of
allows lack to be defined precisely, and which therefore meets (for instance) Newmans criterion that it be less radically underdefined than Derridas concept of lack (2001, 132).
the conservative authors who intermittently litter the references of Lacanian political theory (e.g. Schmitt and Hobbes) are explicitly committed to
a negative conception of human nature.>
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psychosis by defining it as not neurosis. The absence of a positive discussion of psychosis - its reduction to a
failure of the construction of neurotic subjectivity - is evidence of the all-pervasive operation of the mythical model
of a core structure. It also allows psychosis to return as the repressed element in Lacanian theory itself, the
element it must deny to survive as a theoretical edifice. For Badiou, for instance, one must avoid challenging the reign of
opinion (phatic discourse), as this leads to madness (2001, 84). The Deleuzian schizo contrasts favourably with the Lacanian masochist as the
psychological basis for a radical line of flight.>
Lacanian theory places itself in a double bind either it loses its universalist status or it
links back into what it critiques.
Robinson, Professor of Politics at Nottingham University, 2004 (Andrew, The Political Theory of Constitutive
Lack: A Critique, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/)
<The idea of constitutive lack is supposed to entail a rejection of neutral and universal standpoints, and it is this
rejection which constructs it as an anti-essentialist position. In practice, however , Lacanians restore the idea of a
universal framework through the backdoor: the universality of a statement such as that there is no neutral
universality is constructed so as to privilege whichever side in a conflict accepts the statement more completely.
Acceptance or awareness of the fundamental ontological level becomes the very neutral standpoint of
objectivity it claims to obliterate, reasserting essentialism in the very act of denying it. Take, for instance, ieks claim that
a true Leninist is not afraid to assume all the consequences, unpleasant as they may be, of realizing his political project [A] Leninist, like a
conservative, is authentic [because] fully aware of what it means to take power and to exert it (2001b, 4). Can one find a clearer example of a
claim to a status of authenticity due to a position of ontological privilege, in this case a privilege conferred by awareness of the underlying
lack? It should be added that this is by no means the only reference to authenticity in ieks work. The Act, his primary ethical concept, is
constructed around a reference to authenticity, defined in exclusion of the various instances of false acts and shirking of the Act . Beneath
the idea that there is no neutral universality lurks a claim to know precisely such a neutral universality and to
claim a privileged position on this basis. A consistent belief in contingency and anti-essentialism entails scepticism about the idea of
constitutive lack. After all, how does one know that the appearance that experience shows lack to be constitutive reflects
an underlying universality, as opposed to the contingent or even simulated effects of a particular discourse or
episteme? Alongside its opponents, shouldnt Lacanian theory also be haunted by its own fallibility and
incompletion? There is a paradox in the idea of radical choice, for it is unclear whether Lacanians believe this should be applied reflexively.
Is the choice of Lacanian theory itself an ungrounded Decision? If so, the theory loses the universalist status it
implicitly claims. If not, it would seem to be the kind of structural theory it attacks. A complete structural theory
would seem to assume an extra-contingent standpoint, even if the structure includes a reference to constitutive lack.
Such a theory would seem to be a radical negation of the incompletion of I dont know.>
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regards phrases involving words such as constitutive, primordial and irreducible. The idea of a constitutive Idont-know is virtually meaningless. If it could be rendered meaningful, it would seem to mean something along the lines of the idea
that inquiry and creation are motivated by gaps in knowledge. It would not preclude (for instance) learning something one does not know, and
therefore, it does not have the reductive and limiting effects of the idea of constitutive lack (for instance, that all
social organization is reducible to antagonism). This suggests that, in Lacanian theory, the I-dont-know gesture is reified into
something else: it has a silent -ity on the end, and relates to instances of I dont know in much the same way that Germanness relates to
individual Germans.>
Lacan mischaracterizes the nature of conflict he rules out the possibility of antagonism
arising from any specific, contextual causes.
Robinson, Professor of Politics at Nottingham University, 2004 (Andrew, The Political Theory of Constitutive
Lack: A Critique, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/)
the idea of constitutive lack is radically incompatible with the idea that specific conflicts
result from specific, contextual causes. Mouffe distances her view explicitly from any idea that conflicts have a
contingent and empirical basis (2000, 19, 48). She insists that far from being merely empirical or epistemological, the obstacles to
rationalist devices are ontological (2000, 98). This does, not, however, stop her from claiming to have provided an analysis
which explains how specific antagonisms arise (1993 2; c.f. Laclau, 1996, 17). Even more clearly, iek constructs his idea that lack
<It should be added that
is a feature of desire as such in opposition to the idea that alienation results from present, contingent capitalist conditions (1990, 56) and
denounces the idea of contingency as an incapacity of concepts to grasp a complex reality as incompatible with the idea of the Real (Butler,
Laclau and iek, 2000, 216). Guattaris critique of psychoanalysis makes clear the myths which underlie it. Psychoanalysis transforms
and deforms the unconscious by forcing it to pass through the grid of its system of inscription and representation.
For psychoanalysis, the unconscious is always already there, genetically programmed, structured, and finalized on
objectives of conformity to social norms (1996, 206).>
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12), Newman claims that Lacans theory of lack is not essentialist or foundational (2001, 10), Laclau denies that he believes in a ground
(1990, 27) and Mouffe claims to be anti-essentialist (1993, vii). Isnt this hostility to essentialism a decisive criticism of my analysis? It is
indeed the case that much of Lacanian theory makes itself acceptable in a critical theory/cultural studies context by
appealing to anti-essentialism, contingency and indeterminacy, but such verbal commitments do not
fundamentally alter its mythical structure. It is revealing that Lacanians rarely define concepts such as
essentialism, because any possible distinction between (say) an essence and a constitutive element, or between a ground and a
primordial character, would have to be extremely precise and technical, and since there is a recurrent suggestion, overwhelming in some
passages (e.g. Laclau, 1990, 186), that the Lacanian concept of essentialism simply means not Lacanianism. Lacanians
assume that the idea of a founding negativity is not essentialist, whereas any idea of an autonomous positive or affirmative force, even if
constructed as active, undefinable, changing and/or incomplete, is essentialist (e.g. Newman 2001, 77, 149).>
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as environmental crisis, famine or political repression, carries a large danger that a contingent phenomenon will be
labelled as constitutive and thereby placed beyond criticism. For instance, the argument that, since existing food production is
sufficient for the worlds population, the existence of famine is an intolerable indictment of the world trade system and global power relations
would be severely damaged by a Lacanian claim that an inclusive distribution system is an impossible totalitarian fantasy. Contingent
explanations - for instance, that the current famine in southern Africa is a result of IMF demands that governments sell food stocks - are in
competition with the Lacanian mythical gesture of explaining shortages and conflicts by reference to a constitutive impossibility of completion.
Even if Lacanians believe in surplus/contingent as well as constitutive lack, there are no standards for distinguishing
the two. How does one tell an expression of constitutive lack from an effect of a particular regime of power, or for
that matter from an imagined, nonexistent bogeyman? Perhaps all instances fall into the former category anyway: if it is not
possible to know whether any specific impasse is an instance of constitutive lack or not, it is not possible to know
that any of them are, and there is therefore no basis for claiming with any certainty that constitutive lack exists . (iek
effectively admits that no element in the world is Real per se, reducing his affirmation of the idea to a suggestion that its rejection would lead to
liberal conclusions [iek and Salecl, 1996, 41-2]. This suggests that he is prepared to affirm whatever he must affirm to avoid a conclusion he
has decided in advance to view as unacceptable - a far flight from his official image as a daredevil revealing repressed truths). Even if
constitutive lack exists, Lacanian theory runs a risk of misdiagnoses which have a neophobe or even reactionary
effect. To take an imagined example, a Lacanian living in France in 1788 would probably conclude that democracy
is a utopian fantasmatic ideal and would settle for a pragmatic reinterpretation of the ancin regime. Laclau and
Mouffes hostility to workers councils and ieks insistence on the need for a state and a Party (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, 178; iek,
2002b, 296-7; 1997a, 157) exemplify this neophobe tendency. The construction of (for instance) the relation between colonizer
and colonized in terms of constitutive antagonism (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 129) turns colonialism into an
expression of an unchangeable ontology and impedes the possibility of anti-colonial rebellion. It is also interesting that
Newman begins his book with an intention to destroy the place of power, but concludes with the view that this is impossible. Instead of the
anarchic desire to destroy hierarchy, he demands that power merely be reinterpreted and displaced (2001, 37, 118-19). The pervasive
negativity and cynicism of Lacanian theory offers little basis for constructive activity. Instead of radical
transformation, one is left with a pragmatics of containment which involves a conservative de-problematization of
the worst aspects of the status quo. The inactivity it counsels would make its claims a self-fulfilling prophecy by
acting as a barrier to transformative activity.
To conclude, the political theory of constitutive lack does not hold together as an analytical project and falls short
of its radical claims as a theoretical and political one. It relies on central concepts which are constructed through the
operation of a mythical discourse in the Barthesian sense, with the result that it is unable to offer sufficient openness to
engage with complex issues. If political theory is to make use of poststructuralist conceptions of contingency, it would do better to look to
the examples provided by Deleuze and Guattari, whose conception of contingency is active and affirmative. In contrast, the idea of
constitutive lack turns Lacanian theory into something its most vocal proponent, iek, claims to attack: a plague of
fantasies.>
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129). If this is the case for iek, the ultra-radical Marxist-Leninist Lacanian, it is so much the more so for his more moderate adversaries.
Jason Glynos, for instance, offers an uncompromizing critique of the construction of guilt and innocence in anti-crime rhetoric, demanding that
demonization of deviants be abandoned, only to insist as an afterthought that, [o]f course, this does not mean that their offences should go
unpunished (2001, 98, 109). Similarly, Mouffes goal is to improve the efficiency of liberal-democratic politics by
removing the effects of occultation resulting from the refusal to accept antagonism (1993, 140, 146). Badiou,
meanwhile, expends a good deal of space attacking the inanities of idle, phatic discourse (in his language,
opinion), only to identify it with sociality in general and thereby declare it a necessity (2001, 50-1, 79). Lacanian
theory tends, therefore, to produce an anything goes attitude to state action: because everything else is
contingent, nothing is to limit the practical consideration of tactics by dominant elites. The only change is a
change in interpretation, as iek admits (1997a, 90-1). After all, the subject can change nothing: the role of the Act is
merely to add oneself to reality by claiming responsibility for the given (1989, 221).>
The myth of constitutive lack paralyzes politics and progressive action its attempted
universal over-application translates to a command not to think, and thus fail to affect
real change.
Robinson, Professor of Politics at Nottingham University, 2004 (Andrew, The Political Theory of Constitutive
Lack: A Critique, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/)
<There is more than an accidental relationship between the mythical operation of the concept of constitutive lack
and Lacanians conservative and pragmatist politics. Myth is a way of reducing thought to the present : the isolated signs
which are included in the mythical gesture are thereby attached to extra-historical abstractions. On an analytical level, Lacanian theory can be
very radical, unscrupulously exposing the underlying relations and assumptions concealed beneath officially-sanctioned discourse. This
radicalism, however, never translates into political conclusions: as shown above, a radical rejection of anti-crime
rhetoric turns into an endorsement of punishment, and a radical critique of neo-liberalism turns into a pragmatist
endorsement of structural adjustment. It is as if there is a magical barrier between theory and politics which
insulates the latter from the former. One should recall a remark once made by Wilhelm Reich: You plead for happiness in life, but
security means more to you (1974, 27). Lacanians have a radical theory oriented towards happiness, but politically, their
primary concern is security. As long as they are engaged in politically ineffectual critique, Lacanians will denounce
and criticize the social system, but once it comes to practical problems, the order not to think becomes
operative.
This magic barrier is the alibi function of myth. The short-circuit between specific instances and high-level
abstractions is politically consequential. A present evil can be denounced and overthrown if located in an analysis with a middle
level. The Lacanian gesture, however, is instead to present the evil and then add a word such as always to it.
In this way, a present problem becomes eternal and social change becomes impossible. At the very most, such
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change cannot affect the basic matrix posited by Lacanian theory, because this is assumed to operate above history.
In this way, Lacanian theory operates as an alibi: it offers a little bit of theoretical radicalism to inoculate the
system against the threat posed by a lot of politicized radicalism (cf. Barthes, 2000, 41-2). In Laclau and Mouffes version,
this takes the classic Barthesian form: yes, liberal democracy involves violent exclusions, but what is this compared to the desert of the real
outside it? The iekian version is more complex: yes, there can be a revolution, but after the revolution, one must return to the pragmatic tasks
of the present. A good example is provided in one of ieks texts. The author presents an excellent analysis of a Kafkaesque incident in the
former Yugoslavia where the state gives a soldier a direct, compulsory order to take a voluntary oath - in other words, attempts to compel consent.
He then ruins the impact of this example by insisting that there is always such a moment of forced choice, and that one
should not attempt to escape it lest one end up in psychosis or totalitarianism (1989, 165-6). The political function
of Lacanian theory is to preclude critique by encoding the present as myth.>
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Lacanian theory is to accept lack, whereas the logic of a non-mythical idea of contingency is to use opportunities
for openness as a basis for creativity. The difference between mythical and non-mythical versions leads
politically to the difference between acceptance of blockages and attempts to overcome them. Psychologically, it
involves the difference between reactive and active character-structures. Lacanian theories involve a strong commitment to slave morality, as
exemplified by Laclaus insistence that every chain of equivalence involve a unity against an external threat (1996, 57), Norvals advocacy of the
use of apartheid as a bogeyman in South African politics (in Laclau 1990, 157) and Mouffes demand for submission to rules (1993, 66-9), but
also in ieks revolutionary insistence on the need for masochistic self-degradation, subjective destitution and identification with a Master
and a Cause (e.g. 2002b, 253-4; 2001a, 77-8; 1999, 212, 375-8), not to mention his directly reactive insistence that self-awareness amounts to
awareness of the negative, of death and trauma, prior to any active identification or articulation (Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000, 256-7). This is
a reterritorializing contingency which fits closely with the operation of capitalist ideology, where under
conditions we recognize as desperate, we are told to alter ourselves, not the conditions, because the self is
conceived as a decisionist founder (Nielsen, 1978, 168-70). The alternative is a difference which is not reified into a positive
negativity. According to Deleuze, there are two models of contingency: the creative power of the poet, and the politicians denial of difference so
as to prolong an established order. It is for the latter that negation (lack) is primary, as if it were necessary to pass through the misfortunes of rift
and division in order to be able to say yes. For the poet, on the other hand, difference is light, aerial and affirmative. There is a false profundity
in conflict, but underneath conflict, the play of differences, differences which should be affirmed as positive and not overcoded by negativity
(1994, 50-4). Deleuze and Guattari radically oppose the Lacanian model of desire. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is,
rather, the subject which is lacking in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject Desire and its object are a unity Desire is a machine, the
object of desire also a connected machine (1977, 26). Ours is no art of mutilation, but of excess, superabundance, amazement, declares Hakim
Bey. Though truly fearful things exist in the world, they can perhaps be overcome - on the condition that we build an aesthetic on the
overcoming rather than the fear (1991, 37, 78). A constitutive I-dont-know, if such a concept is thinkable, would involve precisely such a free
play of differences, and not, to use ieks term, the good terror which ensures that this free play is brought to a halt
(Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000, 326; iek, 2002b, 311). It is through the mythical construction of constitutive
lack that Lacanian theory is able to derive a drive for order from a starting-point of contingency.>
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stultifying world of suffocating Good which is unbearable precisely because it lacks the dimension of violence and
antagonism. It is, he says, boring, repetitive and perverse because it lacks the properly political attitude of Us against Them (2001a,
237-8). It therefore eliminates the element of unconditional attachment to an unattainable Thing or Real, an element which is the core of
humanity (2001c, 8-9; iek and Salecl, 1996, 41-2). It delivers what iek fears most: a pallid and anaemic, self-satisfied, tolerant peaceful
daily life. To rectify this situation, there is a need for suffocating Good to be destroyed by diabolical Evil (2000a, 122). Why not violence?
he rhetorically asks. Horrible as it may sound, I think its a useful antidote to all the aseptic, frustrating, politically correct pacifism (2002c,
80). There must always be social exclusion, and enemies of the people (Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000, 92). The resulting
politics involves an ethical duty to accomplish an Act which shatters the social edifice by undermining the fantasies which sustain it (1997a, 74).
As with Mouffe, this is both a duty and an acceptance of necessity. By traversing the fantasy the subject accepts the void of his nonexistence
(1999, 281). Baudrillard takes a position similar to ieks, denouncing an empty world in which [e]ven the military has lost the privilege of usevalue, the privilege of real war (1995, 28). His critique of the Gulf
(non-)War has an overtone of distaste for the sanitization of war and the resultant loss of the dimension of antagonism: if this were a real war, it
would be more acceptable. Elsewhere, he denounces simulation for the absence of violence and death. Completely expunged from the political
dimension, it is dependent on production and mass consumption. Its spark has disappeared; only the fiction of a political universe is saved
(1988, 181).
On a political level, this kind of stance leads to an acceptance of social exclusion which negates compassion for its
victims. The resultant inhumanity finds its most extreme expression in ieks work, where todays mad dance,
the dynamic proliferation of multiple shifting identities awaits its resolution in a new form of Terror (Butler, Laclau
and iek, 2000, 326), Badious, in which the ethics of truth is always more or less combative and requires the singular operation of naming
enemies (2001, 75), and Baudrillards, where the spirit of terrorism is accredited with the ultimate ethical status as the
absolute, irrevocable event (2002, 17) which can make the system collapse under an excess of reality (1983, 120). It is also present,
however, in the toned-down exclusionism of authors such as Mouffe. Hence, democracy depends on the possibility of drawing a frontier between
us and them, and always entails relations of inclusion-exclusion (2000, 43). No state or political order can exist without some form of
exclusion experienced by its victims as coercion and violence (1993, 145), and, since Mouffe assumes a state to be necessary , this means
that one must endorse exclusion and violence. (The supposed necessity of the state is derived from the supposed need for a mastersignifier or nodal point to stabilize identity and avoid psychosis, either for individuals or for societies). What is at stake in the division between
these two trends in Lacanian political theory is akin to the distinction Vaneigem draws between active and passive nihilism (1994, 178-9).
The Laclauian trend involves an implied ironic distance from any specific project, which maintain awareness of its contingency; overall,
however, it reinforces conformity by insisting on an institutional mediation which overcodes all the articulations. The iekian version
is committed to a more violent and passionate affirmation of negativity, but one which ultimately changes
very little. The function of the iekian Act is to dissolve the self, producing a historical event. After the revolution, however,
everything stays much the same. For all its radical pretensions, ieks politics can be summed up in his attitude to neo-liberalism: If it
works, why not try a dose of it?(iek and Salecl, 1996, 32). The same can be said of Badiou, whose ostensibly radical commitments do not
prevent him from making a virtue of moderation (2001, 91) and insisting that the Good is Good only to the extent that it does not aspire to render
the world good. Thus, the power of a truth is also a kind of powerlessness (2001, 85). There is no History other than our own;
there is no true world to come. The world as world is, and will remain, beneath the true and false [and] beneath Good and Evil (2001, 85).
The phenomena which are denounced in Lacanian theory are invariably readmitted in its small print, and
this leads to a theory which renounces both effectiveness and political radicalism.>
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challenge it, because its political effects are to paralyse radical theory. It provides a very weak basis for any
kind of politics, and certainly no basis for a radical or transformative agenda. It is, in short, a surrogate radicalism, a
theoretical placebo which does not live up to the promises it makes.1`
This article examines this paradigm through a critique of its founding concept. In contrast to the claims of authors such as Laclau to have escaped
the essentialism of classical political theory, I shall demonstrate that the idea of constitutive lack involves the reintroduction of
myth and essentialism into political theory. I shall demonstrate that Lacanian political theory cannot meet its claims to be radical and
anti-essentialist, and its central arguments are analytically flawed. First of all, however, I shall outline the parameters of this new theoretical
paradigm.
A new paradigm: the concept of lack in political theory
The concept of constitutive lack arises across a number of theories and under a number of labels (e.g. the Real, the Thing, antagonism and the
political). It emerged initially as an ontological concept in the work of Jacques Lacan, the focus of much adulation among the authors discussed
here. Badiou goes as far as to say that a philosophy is possible today, only if it is compatible with Lacan (1999, 84). There is already in Lacan
(and Althusser) an imperative to embrace or accept the lack at the root of the social. He explicitly states that the question of ethics is to be
articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the Real (1988, 11). It is this imperative which provides the starting-point
for the kind of politicized Lacanianism with which this paper is concerned.
The basic claim of Lacanian theory is that identity - whether individual or social - is founded on a lack. Therefore, social relations
are always irreducibly concerned with antagonism, conflict, strife and exclusion. Chantal Mouffe, for instance, writes of the
primary reality of strife in social life (1993, 113), while Slavoj iek seeks an ethics grounded in reference to the traumatic Real which resists
symbolization (1997a, 213). [L]ack (castration) is original; enjoyment constitutes itself as stolen (1990, 54). According to Stavrakakis, the
Real is inherent in human experience and doesnt stop not being written (1999, 87). Hence, the primary element of social life is a negativity
which prevents the emergence of any social whole. In Mouffes words, [s]ociety is the illusion that hides the struggle and antagonism
behind the scenes, putting the harsh reality of antagonism behind a protective veil (1993, 51, 53). For Newman, [w]ar is the reality, whereas
[s]ociety is the illusion that hides the struggle and antagonism behind the scenes (2001, 51). For Stavrakakis, personal trauma, social crisis
and political rupture are constant characteristics of human experience (2003, 56). Such claims have political consequences, because
they rule out the possibility of achieving substantial improvements (whether reformist or revolutionary) in any
area on which this fundamental negativity bears. The dimension of antagonism is, after all, ineradicable (Mouffe,
2000, 21).
Instead of the imperative to overcome antagonism which one finds in forms as diverse as Marxian revolution and deliberative democracy,
Lacanian political theory posits as the central political imperative a demand that one accept the underlying lack and the constitutive character of
antagonism. While the various authors disagree about the means of achieving this, they agree on its desirability. Lacanian theory thus entails an
ethical commitment to create conflict and antagonism. This ethics mostly expresses itself via a detour into ontology: the ethical imperative is to
accept or grasp the truth of the primacy of lack, and the accusation against opponents is that they fall into some kind of fallacy (illusion,
delusion, blindness, failure to accept, and so on). At other times, however, one finds a direct ethical advocacy of exclusion and
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114). He also calls for a symbolisation of impossibility as such as a positive value (Butler, Laclau and iek, 2000, 199). Badiou, meanwhile,
insists that ethics remain confined by the Real. At least one real element must exist that the truth cannot force (2001, 85).>
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Plan is a pre-requisite for their alternativewe must first establish a fantasy before we can
traverse it
Stavrakakis, Teaching Fellow in Government at the University of Essex, 1999 [Yannis, Lacan and the
Political , p. 161]
Freud was, in fact, the first to connect politics with the impossible. In his view, politics, together with psychoanalysis and education, constitutes
an impossible profession. But if democratic politics is attempting something ultimately impossible, that is to say institutionalizing social lack, in
fact even if this quasi-utopian move, this is a quasi utopia structured around its own negation; it negates the idea of its absolute realization, in
other words this is a quasi-utopia beyond fantasmic politics. If there is an Aufhebung in Lacan, it is one in which Hegels progress is replaced by
the anti-utopian avatars of a lack (Lacan in Evans, 1996a:43). Thus way, what is altered is not only the positive content of politics (utopian
visions are replaced by the language games around a recognition of lack, which means that happiness is no longer a legitimate political objective
although a better society definitely is) but also the support giving coherence to this positive content (the fantasmatic support is traversed by this
recognition of lack). Moreover, if this is a quasi-utopian or utopian move, it can only be a utopian negation of utopia (remember Lacans metalinguistic negation of meta-language in the first note of the introduction). Perhaps the fantasmatic structure of utopia can only be traversed after
we situate and orient ourselves within its dangerous ground; fantasy has to be constructed before it is traversed. In addition, one has to keep in
mind that the crossing of utopian fantasy does not entail the disappearance of the social symptom but a new modality of interacting with it. To
this we will return in the last chapter of this book. In any case, this new modality, even if one still wants to call it utopian, has important
repercussions for our life: it neutralizes the catastrophic effects or by-products of utopian visions. And this is something fundamental.
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All this suggests why it is problematic to equate this knowingness with liberation. In 'You May!,' an
article recently published in the London Review of Books (particularly interesting because it is a more
deliberately accessible statement of the aims of his project), Zizek surveys what he sees as evidence of
the dominant attitude of 'refiexiveness' in the postmodern permissive society. In the apparent absence of
the symbolic order to instruct us in our social behaviour, 'all our impulses, from sexual orientation to
ethnic belonging, are more and more experienced as matters of choice' (Zizek, 1999a, 1): one can choose
how to be seduced, how to rewrite one's psychological history, how to be racist. Even psychoanalytic
symptoms have 'lost their innocence,' and are shaped according to the subject's knowledge of
psychoanalytic theory (Zizek, 1999a, 2). This means that the law no longer operates via repression and
the imposition of a strict social hierarchy, but effectively sponsors our acts of transgression, demanding
that we 'Enjoy!'. Zizek's argument is to emphasize, firstly, that although on the face of it something has
changed in the nature of our relation to the big Other, beneath the surface things are still the same. The
apparent endorsement of our transgressive acts by the Other only creates new guilts and anxieties: 'Our
postmodern reflexive society which seems hedonistic and permissive is actually saturated with rules and
regulations which are intended to serve our well-being (restrictions on smoking and eating, rules against
sexual harassment)' (Zizek, 1999a, 5). With the demise of one kind of adherence to the law comes another
in its place. The second aspect of his argument is to wonder: if the law regulates our enjoyment, where is
the potential for subversion?>
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Creating an imaginary order is the only way to deconstruct the oppressive legal and
political order
Milovanovic, Professor in Criminal Justice at Northeastern Illinois, 1994 [Dragan, 8 Emory International Law
Review 67, l/n]
<Accordingly, the Imaginary Order is also necessarily integral to a transformative politics. An integration of the three Orders is
therefore necessary for a bona fide statement on an alternative transformative politics and law. Only in this way are oppressive
legal structures deconstructed and an alternative legal and political order reconstructed. Given the existence of legal abstractions
such as the juridic subject, linear forms of reasoning, circumscribed codifications of signifieds, dualistic conceptualizations of
social reality, and forms of hate or revenge politics historically inherent in many "humanistic" movements--all of which support
hierarchy--genuine change only can take place by way of this transpraxis. Thus, the next section of this Essay considers Cornell's
work, which has focused on the Imaginary Order as a potential vista for "what could be".>
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<Zizek occupies a rather paradoxical position for a Marxist. His aim to 're-hystericize' the subject, to
return it to its questioning function, has an obvious correlation with his stated commitment to
emancipation (in his prefaces to The Ziiek Reader and The Ticklish Subject). But where Marxist 'ideology
critique' is, as a rule, geared towards demystifying ideology in order to achieve some kind of greater
awareness which can contribute to social change, so deeply rooted in the psychic structure is Zizek's idea
of the fantasy that there can be no change: we cannot deal in any other way with the void at the heart of
ourselves. Ideology, in other words, is not just inevitable, but valuable, because without it we would lapse
into neurosis sor even psychosis. The implication of his analysis of contemporary culture is that exposing
the fantasies which glue our being together might enable us to traverse them. But this is prob lematic, and
not only because it brings us up against the familiar difficulty with psychoanalytic attempts to transpose
the personal onto the collective who would be the equivalent of the analyst? Zizek's notion of the
ideological fantasy does not suggest it is a pathological symptom in the psyche of the subject: it is
perfectly normal. Time and again he explains how our experience of social reality depends upon 'a certain
as if: 'we act as if we believe in the almight-iness of bureaucracy, as if the President incarnates the Will of
the People, as if the Party expresses the objective interest of the working class'. But he also reminds us
that if we do not act in this way 'the very texture of the social field disintegrates' (Zizek, 1989, 36)and
this is an outcome of a quite different order to political revolution.>
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This is the shock. This is the disbelief. Not the shattering of an illusion but the shattering of those real people and
their real bodies. Not the shattering of a virtual reality, but the erasing of what was real. This is why the people of
New York wept in the streets, why the tears and grief will continue. And this is why, in their grief, the survivors will
struggle to preserve a memory of what was real, and to keep this memory of what was real from evanescing into
someone else's symbol, or fantasy, or tool. Were the real lives they led less real for any happiness or peace they
achieved? Are the unfathomable sufferings of Rwanda and what happened in Sarajevo to be the measure of what is
most real?
And yet in Zizek's writing, what happened on September 11 is not real but symbolic, as it seems to have been for the
murderers, too: "the actual effect of these bombings is much more symbolic than real." We are just "getting a taste
of" what goes on around the world "on a daily basis." OK, perhaps we are insulated and ignorant. But where are
5,000 innocents being incinerated by murderers on a daily basis?
If Zizek is saying that Americans should be more knowledgeable about the lives and sufferings of other peoples
whose lives and sufferings are entangled with America's own history, then who would disagree? If Zizek is saying
that American power and its direct involvement in international affairs create a special responsibility for our
educational systems and our media to provide us with a knowledge of global matters that we have not yet achieved,
then who would disagree? If he is saying that Americans should comprehend more deeply how people in other parts
of the world comprehend us, once more, who would disagree? If he is saying that real understanding of
geographically distant others is endangered and distorted by the fantasies of film and television, are there educated
Americans who have not heard this? Is the struggle to educate a democratic citizenship adequate to our time and the
realities of globalization unique to the United States? That would be hard to believe. However, it must be conceded
by all that the U.S. faces one special difficulty and so a special but obligatory struggle here. Many of its citizens will
never have a first hand experience of Europe or the Middle East or Africa or Asia or even South America. I can drive
or fly 3,000 miles and never leave my country. At best, I can get to Mexico or Canada. This would take someone
living in France through all of Europe and into central Asia, or into the center of Africa. The problems of truly
comprehending these others whose languages are rarely spoken anywhere near you and into whose actual presence
you will never come are not trivial.
But Zizek seems to be saying something more than all of this. He seems to know more than most of us know. He
knows that "the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of the
'real life' itself, its reversal into a spectral show." This is difficult to comprehend. Is this the "ultimate truth" about a
real nation, about real people, about a real, existing economic system, about an ethical theory, about a fantasy of real
people, or about movies or television or what? The problem may be that many of us cannot imagine that
"capitalism" (is it one thing?), which is after all something historical, has an "ultimate truth."
And it is difficult to understand what he is asking at the end: "Or will America finally risk stepping through the
fantasmatic screen separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world, making the longoverdue move from 'A thing like this should not happen HERE!' to 'A thing like this should not happen
ANYWHERE!'." Of course, to abandon the "here" for the "anywhere" would be foolish. We are in real bodies in real
places with real limitations and with real work to do. It is not simply a "fantasmatic screen" that deeply attaches
people in a unique way to the sufferings of their neighbors and their fellow citizens.
But the demand that Zizek makes is neither unfamiliar nor inappropriate. It is more than worth pursuing. What can
we do to work to see that what the people of New York City suffered on September 11 does not happen
anywhere,;neither in the U.S. nor anywhere else? The reactions of the American government now threaten regions
all over the world and seriously threaten liberty and privacy and tolerance in the United States. The American past
carries humanitarian successes and catastrophic failures and genocide. Perhaps fantastic critique has a role to play.
Certainly we must struggle to sustain serious social criticism through threatening times, but unless we are simply
displaying critical virtuosity, we must achieve a kind of criticism that is reasonably concrete, less pretending to
ultimate truths of history, more capable of acknowledging the real suffering of real people, criticism that is not too
proud to descend to the practicable.
What do we seek now? First, to avert a catastrophe. We must undo the terrorist networks and prevent American
anger and power from leading us into the catastrophic roles that seem to have been scripted for us. Five thousand
innocents are murdered in New York City. That is more than enough. Every dead innocent fuels more anger, either
from the powerless or from the powerful. Averting an escalation of global violence is the immediate and pressing
task. Undoing and weakening the terrorist networks, withdrawing support from them, arresting the guiltyeveryone
who is not already a monster must be persuaded to join in this. Restraining American power and calming American
angerall Americans must work tirelessly on this in their own ways. Steadily and powerfully and consistently
exposing and addressing and undoing the intolerance that threatensall Americans must engage in this struggle.>
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Zizek's theory of the ideological fantasy suggests how complex and powerful our relationship with
ideology is. Ideology isn't something that cleverly tricks us, making us believe in something we don't.
Rather it is effective precisely because it acknowledges what it cannot explain, and because it appeals to
precisely the same sense of'enjoy-meanf which threatens to blow it apart. Generally speaking, the theory
of ideology before Zizek suggested that we conformed because we didn't know what we were really
doing. Zizekinfluenced here by the work of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk 12 argues that
ideology is more a matter of knowing what we do is false but still doing it anyway, just as we know that
the lagoon scenario acted out by stewardesses is unlikely to save us in a plane crash but still go along
with it. Ideology is something that itself yields enjoyment: we adhere to the Law because it appeals to our
enjoyment. This is also why Zizek thinks any theory of contemporary politics or society needs to take
account of'enjoyment as a political factor'. In a number of books (For They Know Not What They Do, The
Metastases of Enjoyment and The Sublime Object of Ideology) Zizek explores the role played by
enjoyment and the fantasy in oppressive elements of our culture, like totalitarian regimes and racist and
homophobic groups. Such communities are held together, he suggests, by the fact that the Law promises a
kind of enjoyment as much as it prohibits it. This relationship is secured through the fantasies they share
(about, say, the figure of the Jew) which serve both sides of the Law: order and transgression. Zizek's
writings on culture and ideology demonstrate how late capitalism always supported by its 'familiar,'
'liberal democracy'-sustains its dominant position by ensuring that the subject colludes in his/her own
subjugation. The idea of knowing what we're doing but still doing it anyway can explain what Sloterdijk
calls the 'cynical reasoning' evident in postmodern culture. Nowadays, we all know that presidents lie, yet
we still support them. We know that advertisers exaggerate the value of their products, yet we still buy
them. More than previous forms, postmodern ideology continually flaunts its own ideological operations:
post-ironic advertising draws attention to the whole sham of advertising and its own hyperbole, TV
generates endless programs based on the out-take, or what goes on behind the scenes.>
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<For Zizek ideology is nothing less than the way we cope with the truth that subjectivity and social
reality are each constructed around a traumatic void. Ideology is thus much more complex than Marxist
critique has hitherto realized. When we take into account the real, Zizek says, 'it is no longer sufficient to
denounce the "artificial" character of the ideological experience, to demonstrate the way the object
experienced by ideology as "natural" and "given" is effectively a discursive construction, a result of a
network of symbolic overdetermination' (Zizek, 1991a, 129). Zizek thus complicates two key tenets of
ideology critique, the notion that ideology is a particular kind of discourse, and the idea that there is an
alternative 'reality' behind the false one maintained by ideology. Ideology does preserve a false version of
reality, but behind it is the real, a realm beyond signification, not another symbolic order. The key to
Zizek's argument is the Lacanian conception of fantasy, defined by Lacan as the relation of the barred
subject to the objet a ($Oa). The function of fantasy is to fill the void created by the real. It creates a
space, a kind of blank screen on which the subject's desires can be projected. In this way, fantasy realizes
desire-not in the sense of satisfying it, but by bringing it out in the open, giving it a shape. And this is
precisely what ideology does. One of the most striking aspects of Zizek's theory of ideology is his
insistence that, though it might seem otherwise, fantasy serves to support ideology rather than challenge
it. It is natural to think of fantasy as an escape into a realm of wish-fulfilment, divorced from reality, but
Zizek emphasizes that reality actually depends upon subscribing to the fantasy. This accounts for another
revision of Althusser's theory. Many readers of his work have pointed out that Althusser does not
satisfactorily explain why the subject is so willing to be interpellated. Zizek suggests that it is because
there is something fundamentally attractive about ideology which goes beyond its content. We sense the
symbolic order is a purely bureaucratic mechanism designed to keep us in our subject positions. We also
intuitively apprehend the real is beneath it all the while. Fantasy is what enables us to cover up this
knowledge and continue to function as normal subjects, to continue to make life 'meaningful' in the
symbolic.
Zizek demonstrates that there is a characteristic doubleness about ideology. The ideological fantasy
manages to cover up the real and persuade us to accept the logic of the symbolic, but by doing so draws
attention to the fact that the real is what the symbolic order is built upon and is continually ready to
shatter it. One of his best examples concerns the familiar safety rituals we are taken through on
aeroplanes as they take off. He asks:
Aren't they sustained by a fantasmatic scenario of how a possible plane-crash will look? After a gentle landing on
water (miraculously, it is always supposed to happen on water!), each of the passengers puts on the life-jacket and,
as on a beach toboggan, slides into the water and takes a swim, like a nice collective lagoon holiday experience
under the guidance of an experienced swimming instructor.11
In this scenario, the fantasy enables us to imagine that we will be safe in the event of a plane crash, even
though we know perfectly well this is unlikely to be the case. Thus, the fantasy simultaneously covers up
the real and draws attention to it. It expresses the very thing, the horrible reality of a plane crash, which
has been repressed, which cannot otherwise be symbolized. The mechanism works on a more explicitly
political level, too. In Looking Awry Zizek gives a reading of two films which portray persecutory
totalitarian worlds, Terry Gilliams's Brazil and Rainer Fassbinder's Lili Marleen. Each film is named after
the popular song which resounds throughout, and which functions in two contradictory ways: as a support
for the prevailing totalitarian order, a kind of signature-tune for the dominant ideology, making it all seem
unified and attractive, but also as a 'fragment of the signifier permeated with idiotic enjoyment'. Each
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song is 'on the verge of transforming itself into a subversive element that could burst from the very
ideological machine by which it is supported' (Zizek, 1991a, 129). Brazil ends with the apparent defeat of
its hero, who has been broken by savage torture, only for him to escape his oppressors by whistling
'Brazil'.>
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not
Radical,"
<The Act thus reproduces in the socio-political field the Lacanian concept of traversing the fantasy. Traversing the
fantasy involves accepting that there is no way one can be satisfied, and therefore a full acceptance of the pain ...
as inherent to the excess of pleasure which is jouissance, as well as a rejection of every conception of radical
difference.68 It means, contra Nietzsche, an acceptance of the fact that there is no secret treasure in me,69 and a
transition from being the nothing we are today to being a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically
made rich through the very awareness of its lack.70 It involves being reduced to a zero-point or ultimate level
similar to that seen in the most broken concentrationcamp inmates,71 so the role of analysis is to throw out the
baby... in order to confront the patient with his dirty bathwater,72 inducing, not an improvement, but a transition
from Bad to Worse, which is inherently terroristic.73 It is also not freedom in the usual sense, but prostration
before the call of the truth-event,74 something violently imposed on me from the Outside through a traumatic
encounter that shatters the very foundation of my being.75 In true Orwellian fashion, Zizek claims that in the Act,
freedom equals slavery; the Act involves the highest freedom and also the utmost passivity with a reduction to a
lifeless automaton who blindly performs its gestures.76>
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not
Radical,"
<As becomes evident class struggle is not for Zizek an empirical referent and even less a category of Marxisant
sociological analysis, but a synonym for the Lacanian Real. A progressive endorsement of class struggle means
positing the lack of a common horizon and assuming or asserting the insolubility of political conflict.16 It therefore
involves a glorification of conflict, antagonism, terror and a militaristic logic of carving the field into good and
bad sides, as a good in itself.17 Zizek celebrates war because it undermines the complacency of our daily routine
by introducing meaningless sacrifice and destruction.18 He fears being trapped by a suffocating social peace or
Good and so calls on people to take a militant, divisive position of assertion of the Truth that enthuses them.19
The content of this Truth is a secondary issue. For Zizek, Truth has nothing to do with truth-claims and the field of
knowledge. Truth is an event which just happens, in which the thing itself is disclosed to us as what it is.20
Truth is therefore the exaggeration which distorts any balanced system.21 A truth-effect occurs whenever a work
produces a strong emotional reaction, and it need not be identified with empirical accuracy: lies and distortions can
have a truth-effect, and factual truth can cover the disavowal of desire and the Real.22
In this sense, therefore, Lenin and de Gaulle, St Paul and Lacan are all carriers of the truth and therefore are
progressive, radical figures, despite the incompatibility of their doctrines. Such individuals (and it is always
individuals) violently carve the field and produce a truth-effect. That de Gaulle and the Church are political rightists
is of no importance to Zizek, since he redefines right and left to avoid such problems. He also writes off the
human suffering caused by carving the field as justified or even beneficial: it has a transcendental genesis in the
subject, and its victims endure it because they obtain jouissance from it.23 The structural occurrence of a truth-event
is what matters to him - not what kind of world results from it. This is a secondary issue - and anyway one that he
thinks is impossible to discuss, since the logic of liberal capitalism is so total that it makes alternatives
unthinkable.24 One should keep the utopian possibility of alternatives open, but it should remain empty, awaiting a
content.25>
Zizeks alternative requires a mass of violence only equated by the most repulsive acts in
history, such as the Holocaust
Robinson and Tormey, Professors of Politics at Nottingham University, 2003
(Andrew
and
Simon,
"Zizek
is
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.tormey/articles/Zizeknotradical.pdf)
not
Radical,"
<Secondly, Zizek implies that Lenin must in some sense have understood that the revolution would necessarily betray itself, and that all
revolutions are structurally doomed to fall short of whatever ideals and principles motivate them. He also implies that the success or failure of a
revolution has nothing to do with whether the modes of thought and action, social relations and institutions which follow are at all related to the
original revolutionary ideals and principles. What matters is that power is held by those who identify with the symptom, who call themselves
Proletarian. Zizek therefore endorses the conservative claim that Lenins utopian moments were Machiavellian
manoeuvres or at best confused delusions, veiling his true intentions to seize power for himself or a small elite : Lenin
was the ultimate political strategist.121 That Zizek endorses the Lenin figure despite endorsing nearly every accusation against Lenin serves to
underline the degree to which Zizeks politics are wedded to conservative assumptions that repression, brutality and terror
are always with us. Rejecting the claim that politics could be otherwise, Zizek wishes to grasp, embrace and even
revel in the grubbiness and violence of modern politics. The moment of utopia in Russia was for Zizek realised
when the Red Guards succumbed to a destructive hedonism in moments of Bataillean excess.122 The only difference for Zizek
between leftist ethics and the standpoint of Oliver North, the Taleban, the anti-Dreyfusards and even the Nazis is that such rightists legitimate
their acts in reference to some higher good, whereas leftists also suspend the higher good in a truly authentic gesture of suspension.123 The
Soviet Terror is a good terror whereas the Nazi one is not, only because the Soviet terror was allegedly more total,
with everyone being potentially at risk, not only out-groups.124 Zizek goes well beyond advocating violence as a
means to an end; for Zizek, violence is part of the end itself, the utopian excess of the Act. The closest parallel is the
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nihilism of Nechaevs Catechism of a Revolution which proclaims that everything is moral that contributes to the
triumph of the revolution; everything that hinders it is immoral and criminal.125 As Peter Marshall comments in his digest
of anarchist writings and movements, the Catechism is one of the most repulsive documents in the history of terrorism.
One can only speculate what he would have made of Repeating Lenin.126 >
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not
Radical,"
<Zizeks politics are not merely impossible, but potentially despotic, and also (between support for a Master,
acceptance of pain and alienation, militarism and the restoration of order) tendentially conservative. They serve only
to discredit the left and further alienate those it seeks to mobilise. Instead, a transformative politics should be a
process of transformation, an alinear, rhizomatic, multiform plurality of resistances, initiatives, and, indeed, acts,
which are sometimes spectacular and carnivalesque, sometimes prefigurative, sometimes subterranean, sometimes
rooted in institutional change and reform, sometimes directly revolutionary. Zizeks model of the pledged group,
bound together by the One who Acts, is entirely irrelevant to the contemporary world and would be a step
backwards from the decentred character of current leftradical politics. Nor need this decentring be seen as a
weakness as Zizek insists. It can be a strength, protecting radical politics from self-appointed elites, transformism,
infiltration, defeat through the neutralisation of leaders, and the threat of a repeat of the Stalinist betrayal. In
contrast with Zizeks stress on subordination, exclusivity, hierarchy and violence, the tendency of anti-capitalists and
others to adopt anti-authoritarian, heterogeneous, inclusive and multiform types of activity offer a better chance of
effectively overcoming the homogenising logic of capitalism and of winning support among wider circles of those
dissatisfied with it. Similarly, the emphasis on direct action - which can include ludic, carnivalesque and non-violent
actions as well as more overtly confrontational ones - generates the possibility of empowerment through
involvement in and support for the myriad causes which make up the anti-capitalist resistance. This resistance stands
in stark contrast to the desert of heroic isolation advocated by Zizek, which, as Laclau puts it, is a prescription for
political quietism and sterility.154
Zizek is right that we should aim to overcome the impossibilities of capitalism, but this overcoming should involve
the active prefiguration and construction in actuality of alternative social forms , not a simple (and actually
impossible) break with everything which exists of the kind imagined by Zizek. It is important that radicals invoke
utopias, but in an active way, in the forms of organisation, disorganisation, and activity we adopt, in the spaces
we create for resistance, and in the prefiguration of alternative economic, political and social forms. Utopian
imaginaries express what is at stake in left radicalism: that what exists does not exist of necessity, and that the
contingency of social institutions and practices makes possible the overthrow of existing institutions and the
construction or creation of different practices, social relations, and conceptions of the world. The most Zizek allows
to radicals is the ability to glimpse utopia while enacting the reconstruction of oppression . Radicals should go
further, and bring this imagined other place into actual existence. Through enacting utopia, we have the ability to
bring the no-where into the now-here.>
not
Radical,"
Furthermore, despite Zizeks emphasis on politics, his discussion of the Act remains resolutely individualist - as
befits its clinical origins. Zizeks examples of Acts are nearly all isolated actions by individuals, such as Mary Kay
Letourneaus defiance of juridical pressure to end a relationship with a youth,89 a soldier in Full Metal Jacket
killing his drill sergeant and himself,90 and the acts of Stalinist bureaucrats who rewrote history knowing they
would later be purged.91 This is problematic as a basis for understanding previous social transformations, and even
more so as a recommendation for the future. The new subject Zizek envisages is an authoritarian leader, someone
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capable of the inherently terroristic action of redefining the rules of the game.92 This is a conservative, if not
reactionary, position. As Donald Rooums cartoon character Wildcat so astutely puts it, I dont just want freedom
from the capitalists. I also want freedom from people fit to take over.93>
Regarding social structures, furthermore, Zizek consistently prefers overconformity to resistance. For him,
disidentification with ones ideologically-defined role is not subversive; rather, an ideological edifice can be
undermined by a too-literal identification.94 Escapism and ideas of an autonomous self are identical with ideology
because they make intolerable conditions liveable;95 even petty resistance is a condition of possibility of the
system,96 a supplement which sustains it. To be free of the present, one should renounce the transgressive
fantasmic supplement that attaches us to it,97 and attach oneself instead to the public discourse which power
officially promotes.98
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not
Radical,"
<The paradox of this defence of Lenin is that it reproduces almost exactly the conservative account of why Lenin
should be renounced as a messianic totalitarian despot. This is the Lenin of Bertram D. Wolf, Leonard Shapiro and
Adam B. Ulam, the Lenin of the Gulag and the Evil Empire, the Lenin whose Bolshevism proved to be less a
doctrine than a technique of action for the seizing and holding of power,110 the big bad wolf so important for Cold
War and anti-left propaganda - that is, the very image of Lenin that generations of leftleaning scholars have been
trying to qualify, undermine, challenge or rebut.111 Zizeks endorsement of this Lenin illustrates in stark terms
why his project should be rejected by those seeking to advance a left agenda. Zizeks Leninism shows the primacy
of the category of the Act within his own approach. What he admires in the figure Lenin has little to do with
Lenins motives and objectives, about which he says little; nor does he endorse progressive aspects of the Bolshevik
ideology or programme, such as radical decentralisation, land reform and workers control. What he admires is how
Lenins ruthlessness supposedly enabled him to traverse the fantasy and accomplish an Act. Thus, the fact that the
revolution was betrayed, that it (or its successors) ate its own children and created a new Master and a new Order
through horrific purges in contradiction to its own proposed goals, are not to be regretted, but should for Zizek be
celebrated as evidence of the authenticity of the Leninist Act.112 That the regime which eventually emerged was
violent and terroristic is not problematic for Zizek: Acts are necessarily terroristic and sweep their initiators up in
a truth-event regardless of their will, and the most one can do is claim responsibility for what occurs .113 Further,
they are on Zizeks account supposed to produce a new Order and a new Master. It remains unclear why one should
support the Leninist Act, if this is the Leninism on offer.
As a historical account, this reading of Lenin is problematic. Zizek seems to feel he has little need for evidence to
back his claims; he cares about the empty usefulness of the Lenin signifier, not the historical Lenin - although his
account rests on the assumption that he is saying something relevant to this Lenin and to the historical Russian
Revolution. To take a few examples of the selectivity of Zizeks reading, Lenin specifically rejected orgiastic
releases of energy,114 and tried to restrain the worst excesses of the Cheka.115 Between Lenins mad position in
April and the Revolution in October, there were the July Days and the text Marxism and Insurrection, where Lenin
specifically renounced the idea of taking a revolutionary position without mass support. Lenins late texts show that
he did not take unconditional responsibility for the betrayal/failure of the revolution, but rather regretted and tried to
amend many of the developments to which he had contributed.116 These are just a few examples of a problem of
empirical inaccuracy which plagues much of Zizeks work.
What is more pertinent for our purposes is that Zizeks position on Lenin confirms the basic conservatism of his
political stance. Firstly, it involves an intentionalist Great Men approach to history which ignores the subaltern
strata. Echoing conservative readings, such as Bertram Wolfs Three Who Made a Revolution, Zizek assumes a
Master is necessary for social change. As a political strategy this is in turn a formula for a messianic, leaderfixated, authoritarian politics, with change delivered to the hapless masses by a Leader. Lenin is a Messiah and
commitment to him is a leap of faith.117 The theorists role is to identify or generate such a leader, rather than to
identify means whereby ordinary people can actively achieve their own liberation or emancipation. The leader
becomes a social engineer who should be given every opportunity to manipulate others to produce an authentic
Event.118 Zizeks formula of returning the masses message in its true-inverted form is indistinguishable from Mao
Zedongs slogan from the masses, to the masses.119 The anamorphic (distortingreflective) process Zizek
advocates is a manifesto for those who would substitute for others while claiming to represent them. Even the Lenin
of What is to be Done? would have blanched at such an approach, and with good reason. Zizeks model of the
revolutionary party is that of what Sartre terms a pledged group with individuals tied to each other through
identification with the Cause and the Leader, where in the name of our fidelity to the Cause we are ready to
sacrifice our elementary sincerity, honesty and human decency - whereas, according to Sartre, revolutions are made
by fused groups, directly mobilised around immediate concerns.120 Lenin was well aware that the party alone
could not make a revolution (Marxism and Insurrection), and, though sometimes surrounded by sycophants, he was
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notoriously wary of any attempt to identify the revolutionary process directly with the party leadership.>
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not
Radical,"
<How can one overcome capitalism without imagining an alternative? Zizeks answer relies on his extension of
Lacanian clinical principles into social analysis. For Zizek, every social system contains a Symbolic (social
institutions, law, etc.), an Imaginary (the ideologies, fantasies and pseudo-concrete images which sustain this
system), and a Real, a group which is extimate to (intimately present in, but necessarily external to) the system, a
part of no part which must be repressed or disavowed for the system to function. Zizek identifies this group with
the symptom in psychoanalysis, terming it the social symptom. Just as a patient in psychoanalysis should identify
with his or her symptom to cure neuroses, so political radicals should identify with the social symptom to achieve
radical change. This involves a statement of solidarity which takes the form We are all them, the excluded nonpart - for instance, we are all Sarajevans or we are all illegal immigrants.26 By identifying with the symptom,
one becomes for Zizek a proletarian, and therefore touched by Grace.27 Thus even academics like Zizek can
perform an authentic Act while retaining their accustomed lifestyles simply by identifying with anathemas
thrown at them by others.28 Since the social symptom is the embodiment of the inherent impossibility of society,
identification with it allows one, paradoxically, to recover a radical politics which is rendered unthinkable and
impossible by the present socio-symbolic system.29 Identification with the symptom is not an external act of
solidarity. Zizek does not accept a division between individual and social psychology, so he believes identifying
with the social symptom also disrupts ones own psychological structure. This identification involves neither the
self-emancipation of this group nor a struggle in support of its specific demands, but rather, a personal act from the
standpoint of this group, which substitutes for it and even goes against its particular demands in pursuit of its
ascribed Truth.30>
Zizek offers no guide to a successful deconstruction of the system his theory is a recipe for
fragmentation of progressive individuals.
Robinson and Tormey, Professors of Politics at Nottingham University, 2003
(Andrew
and
Simon,
"Zizek
is
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.tormey/articles/Zizeknotradical.pdf)
not
Radical,"
<As useful as such a reading is, this is not the Zizek who emerges on closer examination. Regarding where radicals - especially active radicals - should proceed from
here and now, Zizeks work offers little to celebrate. The relevance of a politics based on formal structural categories instead of lived historical processes, which
Zizeks alternative cannot escape the current social system he merely shifts oppression
from one group to another.
Robinson and Tormey, Professors of Politics at Nottingham University, 2003
(Andrew
and
Simon,
"Zizek
is
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.tormey/articles/Zizeknotradical.pdf)
not
Radical,"
<So the Act is a rebirth - but a rebirth as what? The parallel with Lacans concept of traversing the fantasy is crucial, because, for Lacan, there is no escape from the
symbolic order or the Law of the Master.
We are trapped in the existing world, complete with its dislocation, lack, alienation and
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antagonism, and no transcendence can overcome the deep structure of this world, which is fixed at the level of
subject-formation; the most we can hope for is to go from incapable neurosis to mere alienated subjectivity. In
Zizeks politics, therefore, a fundamental social transformation is impossible. After the break initiated by an Act, a
system similar to the present one is restored ; the subject undergoes identification with a Cause,77 leading to a
new proper symbolic Prohibition revitalised by the process of rebirth,78 enabling one effectively to realize the
necessary pragmatic measures,79 which may be the same ones as today, e.g. structural adjustment policies.80 It is possible to start a
new life by replacing one symbolic fiction with another.81 As a Lacanian, Zizek is opposed to any idea of realising utopian fullness. Any change in the basic structure
of existence, whereby one may overcome dislocation and disorientation, is out of the question. However, he also rejects practical solutions to problems as a mere
an Act neither solves concrete problems nor achieves drastic improvements; it merely removes
blockages to existing modes of thought and action. It transforms the constellation which generates social
symptoms,83 shifting exclusion from one group to another, but it does not achieve either drastic or moderate
concrete changes. It means that we accept the vicious circle of revolving around the object [the Real] and find jouissance in it, renouncing the myth that
displacement.82 So
jouissance is amassed somewhere else.84 It also offers those who take part in it a dimension of Otherness, that moment when the absolute appears in all its
fragility, a brief apparition of a future utopian Otherness to which every authentic revolutionary stance should cling.85 This absolute, however, can only be
glimpsed. The leader, Act and Cause must be betrayed so the social order can be refounded. The leader, or mediator, must erase
himself [sic] from the picture,86 retreating to the horizon of the social to haunt history as spectre or phantasy.87 Every Great Man must be betrayed so he can assume
his fame and thereby become compatible with the status quo;88 once one glimpses the sublime Universal, therefore, one must commit suicide - as Zizek claims the
Bolshevik Party did, via the Stalinist purges (When the Party Commits Suicide).>
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not
Radical,"
<Thirdly, Zizeks view of Lenin also shows that his revolution cannot be extensively transformative; it can suspend
the symbolic order, but must later restore it. Thus, Zizek identifies, not with the transformative agenda of The State and
Revolution or the early reforms such as workers control of factories, democratisation of the army and decentralisation of decision-making which hardly figure in his account - but rather, with Lenins determination to restore order even at the cost of abandoning
such transformations, to take on the burden of taking over, to take responsibility for the smooth running of the
social edifice and become the One who assumes the ultimate responsibility, including a ruthless readiness to break
the letter of the law to guarantee the systems survival.127 The heroic dimension of revolution occurs when the Stalinist
ritual, the empty flattery which holds together the community, which is a dimension... probably essential to language as such, necessarily
replaces the revolutionary moment.128 What Zizek is telling left radicals, therefore, is to abandon the notion of the state as a source of violence
and to see it as part of the solution to, rather than the problem of, reordering social life . Zizek sees the state as a useful ally, and an
instrument through which to impose the good terror. He denounces anti-statism as idealist and hypocritical,129 and attacks the
anticapitalist movement for lacking political centralisation.130 Zizek does not offer an alternative to statist violence; in Zizeks world (to
misquote an anarchist slogan), whoever you fight for, the state always wins . Opponents of the war in Afghanistan and the arms
trade, of police racism and repression against demonstrators, will find no alternative in Zizek - only a new
militarism, a good terror and yet another Cheka. Zizeks concept of socialisation, virtually his only concrete proposal for
social change, further confirms his authoritarianism. Since he applies it in areas such as gene patenting cyberspace, CCTV and
scientific knowledge,131 it cannot mean workers control, let alone workers management. Presumably, therefore, it must mean control by the
state, i.e. socialisation by the big Other under the control of the master-signifier, a conclusion confirmed by Zizeks use of the terms
socialisation and state control as interchangeable.132 If so, its extension to these areas is threatening, not liberating: Zizek is giving a green
light to eugenicists, Internet censors and Lysenkoites. Zizek admits that his approach reduces privacy and openly advocates
academic censorship and secret police.133 Gene patenting and CCTV should be eliminated, not socialised, while science and the
Internet are potential areas of freedom in which only the production process should be collective. Zizeks approach is closer to what Marx attacks
as barracks communism than to the Marxist idea of socialisation of the means of production. Zizek also defends the Stalinist view that social
issues should be dealt with in reference to their effect on production, not their human dimension.134 >
Zizeks politics of impossibility leaves progressive leftists without any guide to change.
Robinson and Tormey, Professors of Politics at Nottingham University, 2003
(Andrew
and
Simon,
"Zizek
is
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.tormey/articles/Zizeknotradical.pdf)
not
Radical,"
<Enter Zizek. Zizek offers an alternative to traditional left radicalisms and postmodern anti-essentialist
approaches, especially identity politics. For Zizek, radical democracy accepts the liberal-capitalist horizon, and so
is never radical enough.6 Against this alleged pseudo-radicalism, Zizek revives traditional leftist concepts such as
class struggle.7 However, he ignores the orthodox left meaning of such terms, rearticulating them in a
sophisticated Hegelian and Lacanian vocabulary. His dramatic impact on radical theory is therefore unsurprising. To
take one example, Sean Homers praise for Zizek is based on this supposed reinvigoration of radicalism and
Marxism.8 Though Homer is sceptical about Zizeks Lacanianism, he declares that Marxism has always been
much more to the fore of Zizeks work than many of his commentators have cared to acknowledge.9 Zizek, he
claims, is reopening the repressed issue of the Marxian and Althusserian legacy, and calling for [u]topian
imaginaries which allow us to think beyond the limits of capitalism.10 For Homers Zizek the point is to be anticapitalist, whatever form that might take.11 And though he attacks the problem of Zizeks Lacanian categories,
especially the Real, Homer clearly sees Zizeks work as a step towards the revitalised Marxist radicalism he
advocates.12 Problems remain, however. Zizeks version of class struggle does not map on to traditional
conceptions of an empirical working-class, and Zizeks proletariat is avowedly mythical.13 He also rejects
newer forms of struggle such as the anti-capitalist movement and the 1968 uprisings thereby reproducing a problem
common in radical theory: his theory has no link to radical politics in an immediate sense.14 Nevertheless, he has a
theory of how such a politics should look which he uses to judge existing political radicalisms. So how does Zizek
see radical politics emerging?
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Zizek does not offer much by way of a positive social agenda. He does not have anything approximating to a
programme, nor a model of the kind of society he seeks, nor a theory of the construction of alternatives in the
present. Indeed, the more one looks at the matter, the more difficult it becomes to pin Zizek down to any line or
position. He seems at first sight to regard social transformation, not as something possible to be theorised and
advanced, but as a fundamental impossibility because the influence of the dominant symbolic system is so great
that it makes alternatives unthinkable.15 A fundamental transformation, however, is clearly the only answer to the
vision of contemporary crisis Zizek offers. Can he escape this contradiction? His attempt to do so revolves around a
reclassification of impossibility as an active element in generating action. Asserting or pursuing the impossible
becomes in Zizeks account not only possible but desirable. So how then can the left advance its impossible
politics? How is a now impossible model of class struggle be transformed into a politics relevant to the present
period?>
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adds: "My dream is to combine an extremely dark, pessimistic belief that life is basically horrible and contingent,
with a revolutionary social attitude."
AS PHILOSOPHY, Zizek's argument is breathtaking, but as social prescription, "dream" may be an apt word. The
only way to combat the dominance of global capitalism, he argues, is through a "direct socialization of the
productive process"an agenda that is unlikely to play well in Slovenia, which is now enjoying many of the fruits of
Western consumer capitalism. When pressed to specify what controlling the productive process might look like,
Zizek admits he doesn't know, although he feels certain that an alternative to capitalism will emerge and that the
public debate must be opened up to include subjects like control over genetic engineering. Like many who call for a
return to the primacy of economics, Zizek has only the most tenuous grasp of the subject.
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not
Radical,"
<Caught in the Act The answer is that Zizek does not see impossibility as a barrier to action. Rather, he sees it as a sign of the purity and
authenticity of a particular action, i.e. of what he identifies as an authentic Act. For Zizek, an authentic, radical Act necessarily comes
from the repressed Real, and involves the return of this repressed impossibility. It necessarily, therefore , surprises not only conformist
observers, but the actor; it surprises/transforms the agent itself.37 The Act therefore opens a redemptive
dimension via a gesture of sublimation, of erasing the traces of ones past and beginning again from a zeropoint.38 Such an Act is for Zizek a transcendental necessity for subjective action, a quasi-transcendental unhistorical condition of possibility
and impossibility of historicisation.39
The Act, which for Zizek is the sole criterion of whether ones politics are radical, is a structural or formal category, defined (in principle)
internally and radically separated from anything which does not meet its criteria . All alternatives - even those which share Zizeks
hostility to liberal capitalism, and including some which fit particular formal requirements of an Act - which fall
short of the criteria of full Acts are for Zizek necessarily complicit in capitalism. At best, they are hysterical false
acts, providing a pseudo-radical pseudo-resistance which actually sustains capitalism by contributing to its
phantasmic supplement.40 Acts have several formal criteria which Zizek formulates differently on different occasions. Firstly,
someone who Acts must identify with the symptom, thereby revealing a repressed Truth and bringing the Real to the surface. Secondly, they
must suspend the existing symbolic system, including its ethics, politics, and systems of meaning and
knowledge;41 an Act is nihilistic and extra-, even anti-, ethical (at least as regards any conception of the good). Since Zizek denies the
existence of radical social, cultural or psychological difference, he believes that everyone is equally trapped by the dominant symbolic system, so
any break with it must come from beyond meaning and positive ethics. The commitment an Act generates must be
dogmatic; it cannot be refuted by any argumentation and is indifferent to the truth-status of the Event it refers to.42
An Act has its own inherent normativity, refusing all external standards;43 an Act (or Decision) is circular and
tautological,44 based on a shibboleth,45 and incomprehensible except from the inside.46 It is a response to an ethical injunction
beyond ordinary ethical norms, so that although what I am about to do will have catastrophic consequences for my well-being and for the wellbeing of my nearest and dearest, none the less I simply have to do it, because of the inexorable ethical injunction.47 The Act resolves all
problems in a single, all-encompassing Terror which bypasses particularities and violently stops the mad dance of shifting identities, operating
instead to ground a new political universality by opting for the impossible, with no taboos, no a priori norms...
respect for which would prevent us from resignifying terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice.48 An Act is symbolic
death,49 creatio ex nihilo and self-grounded.50 It is the outcome of an ethics grounded in reference to the traumatic Real which resists
symbolisation, i.e. to an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology ,51 a self-referential abyss,52 an excessive gesture
irreducible to human considerations and necessarily arbitrary.53 The suspension of ethical, epistemological and political standards
is not a necessary consequence of a Zizekian Act - it is a defining feature. It is necessary so a new system can be built from
nothing,54 and anything short of a full Act remains on enemy terrain.55 >
not
Radical,"
<What we want to suggest in this paper is that whilst Zizeks recent work is intellectually radical this is not, despite
appearances to the contrary, a radicalism that left politics can draw sustenance or hope from. Zizek, that is, does not
offer an alternative that is genuinely progressive or transformative, but only the empty negativity of what Raoul
Vaneigem terms active nihilism.3 This negativity breaks with the present but undermines, rather than generates a
meaningful politics of resistance to the system. What Zizek delivers falls short of its promise. Zizeks position
should therefore be exposed and opposed by those concerned with advancing left-radical goals and anti-capitalist
resistance.>
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not
Radical,"
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<At this point, the reader has to wonder if the OPs policy of strict non-participation in the state really stands up. The
OP declares with some pride that we never vote, just as in the factories, we keep our distance from trade
unionism (LDP, 12.02.95: 1).26 The OP consistently maintains that its politics of prescription requires a politics of
non-vote. But why, now, this either/or? Once the state has been acknowledged as a possible figure of the general
interest, then surely it matters who governs that figure. Regarding the central public issues of health and education,
the OP maintains, like most mainstream socialists, that the positive tasks on behalf of all are incumbent upon the
state (LDP, 10.11.94: 1).27 That participation in the state should not replace a prescriptive externality to the state is
obvious enough, but the stern either/or so often proclaimed in the pages of La Distance politique reads today like a
displaced trace of the days when the choice of state or revolution still figured as a genuine alternative.>
We should combine Badious generic conception of being with our description of the
specific, which doesnt result in depiction of the singular
Peter Hallward, lecturer in the French Department at Kings College, translator of Badious works, 2003,
Badiou: A Subject to Truth, p. 274
At each point, the alternative to Badious strictly generic conception of things is a more properly specific
understanding of individuals and situations as conditioned by the relations that both enable and constrain their
existence. In order to develop this alternative, it is essential to distinguish scrupulously between the specific and
what might be called the specified (Badious objectified).5 Actors are specific to a situation even though their
actions are not specified by it, just as a historical account is specific to the facts it describes even though its
assessment is not specified by them. The specific is a purely relational subjective domain. The specified, by
contrast, is defined by positive, intrinsic characteristics or essences (physical, cultural, personal, and so on). The
specified is a matter of inherited instincts as much as of acquired habits. We might say that the most general
effort of philosophy or critique should be to move from the specified to the specificwithout succumbing to the
temptations of the purely singular. Badiou certainly provides a most compelling critique of the specified. But he
hasat least thus far inadequate means of distinguishing specified from specific. The result, in my view, is an
ultimately unconvincing theoretical basis for his celebration of an extreme particularity as such.
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<We know that Badious early and unequivocally hostile attitude to the state has considerably evolved. Just how far
it has evolved remains a little unclear. His conception of politics remains resolutely anti-consensual, anti-representative, and thus anti-democratic (in the ordinary sense of the word). A philosophy today is above all
something that enables people to have done with the "democratic" submission to the world as it is (Entretien avec
Alain Badiou, 1999: 2). But he seems more willing, now, to engage with this submission on its own terms. La
Distance politique again offers the most precise points de repre. On the one hand, the OP remains suspicious of any
political campaign for instance, electoral contests or petition movements that operates as a prisoner of the
parliamentary space (LDP, 19-20.04.96: 2). It remains an absolute necessity [of politics] not to have the state as
norm. The separation of politics and state is foundational of politics. On the other hand, however, it is now equally
clear that their separation need not lead to the banishment of the state from the field of political thought (LDP,
6.05.93: 1).24 The OP now conceives itself in a tense, non-dialectical vis--vis with the state, a stance that rejects
an intimate cooperation (in the interests of capital) as much as it refuses any antagonistic conception of their
operation, any conception that smacks of classism. There is to no more choice to be made between the state or
revolution; the vis--vis demands the presence of the two terms and not the annihilation of one of the two (LDP,
11.01.95: 3-4). Indeed, at the height of the December 95 strikes, the OP recognised that the only contemporary
movement of dstatisation with any real power was the corporate-driven movement of partial de-statification in
the interests of commercial flexibility and financial mobility. Unsurprisingly, we are against this withdrawal of the
state to the profit of capital, through general, systematic and brutal privatisation. The state is what can sometimes
take account of people and their situations in other registers and by other modalities than those of profit. The state
assures from this point of view the public space and the general interest. And capital does not incarnate the general
interest (LDP, 15.12.96: 11). Coming from the author of Thorie de la contradiction, these are remarkable words. >
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Philosophy at the University of Essex, 2004, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of
<Badiou is not mistaken, of course, in suggesting that the discourse of human rights has come to provide a crucial ideological
cover for economic and cultural imperialism, not to mention outright military intervention. No one doubts the murderous
hypocrisy with which the Western powers, led by the US, have invoked the language of human rights in recent years. But 'human
rights' have also been a rallying call for many activists around the globe. In the form of the Helsinki Accords, they were a major
focus for the East European opposition in the years leading up to 1989- They were equally important tactically for Latin
America's struggle against the dictatorships, and continue to provide a vital political point of leverage for many indigenous
populations, not to mention the Tibetans, the Burmese, the Palestinians. The United States, as is well known, continues to refuse
recognition to the recently established International Criminal Court, fearful, no doubt, that members of its own armed forces, and
perhaps of former administrations, could be amongst those arraigned before it.>
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Philosophy at the University of Essex, 2004, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of
< In fact, the structure of Badious thought seems remarkably similar, in some respects, to that of Levinas,
despite his attack on Levinass grounding of ethics in a principle of alterity which transcends mere finite
experience (F 23/22). For both thinkers set up an exaggerated contrast between the conatus of the human being
as a natural being, and the irruption of an event which breaks the cycle of self-preservation, constituting the
subject of a process which, as Badiou says, has nothing to do with the interests of the animal and has
eternity for its destiny. Although it is not the face of the Other, and the trace of the divine which this discloses,
but the event of truth as a rare and incalculable supplementation (CT 72), which breaks through the oppression
of the totality in Badiou, nonetheless a contrast emerges between the immanence of the domain of natural life
and its transcendent interruption. But Levinas merely offers one contemporary parallel, of course. In general,
Badious ethical thought can be placed squarely within the tradition that understands the ethical demand as
exceeding, almost by definition, our finite human capacities to satisfy it. Resolutely opposed to any form of
hedonism (every dehnition of Man based on happiness is nihilist [E 35/37]), Badiou poses the question: how do
we escape from the animals desire to grab its socialized chance and find our way towards the Good as the
superhumanity of humanity? (E 30/32).>
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French at Kings College, London, 2004, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of
One implication of this last point is easily generalized. Badiou insists on the rare and unpredictable
character of every truth. On the other hand, we know that every truth, as it composes a generic or
egalitarian sampling of the situation, will proceed in such a way as to suspend the normal grip of the state
of its situation by eroding the distinctions used to classify and order parts of the situation. Is this then a
criterion that subjects must presume in advance or one that they come to discover in each case? If not the
former, if truth is entirely a matter of post-evental implication or consequence, then there can be no clear
way of distinguishing, before it is too late, a genuine event (which relates only to the void of the situation,
i.e. to the way inconsistency might appear within a situation) from a false event (one that, like September
11th or the triumph of National Socialism, reinforces the basic distinctions governing the situation). But if
there is always an initial hunch which guides the composition of a generic set, a sort of preliminary or
prophetic commitment to the generic just as there is, incidentally, in Cohens own account of generic
sets, insofar as this account seeks to demonstrate a possibility implicit in the ordinary extensional
definition of set25 then it seems difficult to sustain a fully post-evental conception of truth. In short: is
the initial decision to affirm an event unequivocally free, a matter of consequence alone? Or is it tacitly
guided by the criteria of the generic at every step, and thereby susceptible to a kind of anticipation?>
<
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<The major and immediate inspiration for Badiou's ethics is his 'master' Jacques Lacan. Lacan's search for an ethics of
psychoanalysis provides Badiou with the model for a procedure-specific approach, and Lacan's famous imperative 'do not give
up on your desire [ne pas ceder sur son desir],'" furnishes him with an abstract principle valid for every such procedure. For to
be thus faithful to the peculiarity of your desire first requires 'a radical repudiation of a certain idea of the good', 9 that is, the
repudiation of all merely consensual social norms (happiness, pleasure, health . . .) in favour of an exceptional affirmation whose
'value' cannot necessarily be proved or communicated. Examples from the Lacanian pantheon include Antigone in her cave,
Oedipus in his pursuit of the truth, Socrates condemned to the hemlock, Thomas More in his fidelity to Catholicism, Geronimo in
his refusal to vield to an inevitable defeat. . . ."* Desire cares no more for the approval of others than for our own happiness.
Rather, the ethical question 'is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the Real [reel]',11 that
is to say, the traumatic, irreducible, essentially asocial and asymbolic particularity of your experience. Since your 'normal' conscious life (your psychological 'status quo') is structured around the repression of this Real, access to it must be achieved through
an 'essential encounter'1'2 (i.e. what Badiou will call an event, a happening which escapes all structuring 'normality'). Ethics is
what helps the subject to endure this encounter, and its consequences. Thus guided by an ethics of the Real, analysis can lead,
with time, to 'the advent of a true speech and the realization by the subject of his history'. 13 (Beckett's stubborn persistence - T
can't go on, I will go on' - is, for Badiou, exemplary of such a real ization.)14>
B. Lacanian
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Badiou cannot provide any criteria to judge the authenticity of the event you should err
on the assumption that the alternative will maintain fidelity to a false event, and thats
what Badiou names as the primary evil
Peter Dews, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, 2004, Think Again: Alain Badiou and
the Future of Philosophy, p. 110-111
Viewed from a sceptical perspective, it might seem that Badious thought, and the conception of ethics
to which it gives rise, embodies an uneasy compromise between the antinomian impulses typical of
postmodernism, on the one hand, and the mainstream philosophical tradition. Badiou is tough on
postmodern conceptions of the end of philosophy (cf. MP 726/2745), yet his own position seems to
continue the valorization of the singularity and unpredictability of the disruptive event typical of
poststructuralism and post-modernism while seeking to endow this event
<
with all the prestige of a more classical notion of truth. As we have seen, whilst Badion asserts that the destiny of
truths is universal, he makes clear the status of such universality is not amenable to any form of discursive
investigation or assessment. He openly states: What arises from a truth-process [] cannot be communicated.
Communication is only suited to opinions []. In all that concerns truths there must be an encounter. The
Immortal that I am capable of being cannot be spurred in me by the effects of communicative sociality, it must
be directly seized by fidelity (E 47/51). Of course, this claim inevitably raises the question of how we
distinguish authentic from inauthentic truth-events, how we determine the genuineness of the disclosure to which
subjects are called to be faithful. And, to his credit, Badiou acknowledges that this is a crucial problem for his
position. The constant emphasis on the singular, incommunicable character of the event of truth on the one hand,
combined with its extension into a universal ethical claim, raises all too clearly the possibility of a false, coercive
universality. And it is precisely this possibility which, for Badiou, lies at the heart of evil.>
Badious desire to separate politics from the state makes politics itself impossible
Daniel Bensaid, professor at the University of Paris VIII and leading member of the Ligue Commiuniste
Revolutionnaire, 2004, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, p. 99-100
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Yet in Badiou, the intermittence of event and subject renders the very idea of politics problematic. According to
him, politics defines itself via fidelity to the event whereby the victims of oppression declare themselves. His
determination to prise politics free from the state in order to subjecrivize it, to deliver it from history in order to
hand it over to the event, is part of a tentative search for an autonomous politics of the oppressed. The
alternative effort, to subordinate politics to some putative meaning of history, which has ominous echoes in
recent history, is he suggests to incorporate it within the process of general technicization and to reduce it to the
management of state affairs. One must have the courage to declare that, from the point of view of politics,
history as meaning or direction does not exist: all that exists is the periodic occurrence of the a priori conditions
of chance. However, this divorce between event and history (between the event and its historically determined
conditions) tends to render politics if not unthinkable then at least impracticable (PP 18).
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Badious alternative is obsessed with the purity of the event it marginalizes itself and
cant produce lasting change
Daniel Bensaid, professor at the University of Paris VIII and leading member of the Ligue Commiuniste
Revolutionnaire, 2004, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, p. 101
If the future of a truth is decided by those who catty on and who hold to this faithful decision to carry on, the militant summoned by the rare if not exceptional idea
The
absolute incompatibility between truth and opinion, between philosopher and sophist, between event and history,
leads to a practical impasse. The refusal to work within the equivocal contradiction and tension which bind them
together ultimately leads to a pure voluntarism, which oscillates between a broadly leftist form of politics and its
of politics seems to be haunted by the Pauline ideal of saintliness, which constantly threatens to turn into a bureaucratic priesthood of Church, State or Party.
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philosophical circumvention. In either case, the combination of theoretical elitism and practical moralism can
indicate a haughty withdrawal from the public domain, sandwiched between the philosophers evental truth and the
masses subaltern resistance to the worlds misery. On this particular point, there exists an affinity between Badious philosophical radicality and
Bourdieus sociological radicality. Haunted by the epistemological cut that forever separates the scientist from the sophist and science from ideology, both Badiou
and Bourdieu declare a discourse of mastery. Whereas a politics that acts in order to change the world establishes itself precisely in the wound left by this cut, in the
site and moment in which the people declare themselves. Detached from its historical conditions, pure diamond of truth, the event, just like the notion of the
have rightly pointed out that the antinomies of order and event, of police and politics, render radical politicization impossible and indicate a move away from the
Leninist passage a lacte. Unlike the liberal irresponsibility of leftism, a revolutionary politics assumes full responsibility for the consequences of its choices.
Carried away by his fervour, Zizek even goes so far as to affirm the necessity of those consequences no matter how unpleasant they may be. But in light of this
centurys history, one cannot take responsibility for them without specifying the extent to which they ate unavoidable and the extent to which they contradict the initial
act whose logical outcome they claim to be. Thus, what must be re-examined is the whole problem of the relation between revolution and counter-revolution, (between
October and the Stalinist Thermidor.
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Badious refusal to engage real historical and political events and structures dooms his
politics to a level of abstraction that renders them useless
Daniel Bensaid, professor at the University of Paris VIII and leading member of the Ligue Commiuniste
Revolutionnaire, 2004, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, p. 98
In what does this ripeness of circumstances consist? How is it to be gauged? Badiou remains silent on this score.
By refusing to venture into the dense thickets of real history, into the social and historical determination of
events, Badious notion of the political tips over into a wholly imaginary dimension: this is politics made
tantamount to an act of levitation, reduced to a series of unconditioned events and sequences whose exhaustion
or end remain forever mysterious. As a result, history and the event become miraculous in Spinozas sense a
miracle is an event the cause of which cannot be explained. Politics can only flirt with a theology or aesthetics
of the event. Religious revelation, according to Slavoj Zizek, constitutes its unavowed paradigm. Yet the
storming of the Bastille can be understood only in the context of the Ancien Regime; the confrontation of June
1848 can be understood only in the context of urbanization and industrialization; the insurrection of the Paris
Commune can be understood only in the context of the commotion of European nationalities and the collapse of
the Second Empire; the October Revolution can be understood only in the particular context of capitalist
development in Russia and the convulsive outcome of the Great War.
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[ As Hilary Putnam concisely states, "the elimination of the normative is attempted mental suicide." n49 I would
refine Putnam's observation by including paranoid distanciation within the scope of mental suicide. Professor Schlag
writes powerfully, invariably capturing my interest and leading me to important new insights. However, his effort to
distance himself from the normative legal language that is our heritage falls short, as it must. I congratulate Schlag
for his skill in destroying some of the most cherished talismans in our legal vocabulary, including the rule of law.
But destruction is never total. In the wake of destruction we inevitably chart new paths in the maze. Legal theory
properly is viewed not as an attempt to escape the maze of normative legal thought, but as an effort to develop
shared strategies for navigating through the maze. Forging a path, rather than finding an exit, is the goal. That is
enough for me.]
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Schlags refusal to delineate a precise object of his critique causes his kritik to be co-opted
into the very normative system he challenges while he ignores key normative structures we
need to criticize.
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Conaghan, Professor @ Kent Law School, 2003 (Joanne, Beyond Right and Reason: Pierre Schlag, the Critique of
Normativity, and the Enchantment of Reason: Schlag in Wonderland, Miami Law Review, April, Lexis)
Nevertheless, Schlag's refusal to delineate with any precision the object of his critique is not a risk-free strategy. One difficulty
arising is that reason remains deliciously ephemeral throughout, assuming a [*550] dream-like, shadowy quality that at times
heightens its allure and triggers a desire to capture and contain it. This is of course a reflection of Schlag's own ambivalence
towards reason, signalled in particular by his use of the word "enchantment" n29 to denote our (his?) affinity to it. Schlag's
portrayal of reason is that of a siren, a femme fatale, who simultaneously entices and deceives. And, while he urges us endlessly
to recognize her pathological tendencies, we remain suspicious that he is still in her thrall. More importantly, however, the
nebulous quality of Schlag's invocations of reason is misleading and belies the prescriptive content of the notion(s) he deploys.
Reason, for Schlag's purposes, is bounded in ways he does not openly acknowledge. Woven within the fabric of his critique is a
particular perspective from which reason's purposes are derived and its shortcomings identified and assessed.
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Attempts to free ourselves from normative discourse will only result in practical terror.
Habermas, 1990 (Jurgen, Professor a Goethe University in Frankfurt, Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of
Philosophical Justification, The Communicative Ethics Controversy, edited by Benhabib and Dallmayr, pg. 99100)
If the skeptic has followed the argumentation that has gone on in his presence and has seen that his
demonstrative exit from argumentation and action oriented to reaching understanding leads to an existential dead
end, he may finally be ready to accept the justification of the moral principle we have proposed and the principle of
discourse ethics we have introduced. He does so, however, only to now draw upon the remaining possibilities for
argumentation; he calls into question the meaning of a formalistic ethics of this kind. Rooting the practice of
argumentation in the lifeworld contexts of communicative action has called to mind Hegel's critique of Kant, which
he will now bring to bear against the cognitivist.
Albrecht Wellmer has formulated this objection as follows:
In the idea of a discourse free from domination we only seem to have gained an objcective criterion for assessing
the practical rationality of individuals or societies. In reality it would be an illusion to believe that we could
emancipate ourselves from the normatively charged facticity of our historical situation with its traditional values and
criteria of rationality and see history as a whole, and our poisition in it, from the sidelines, so to speak. An attempt
in this direction would end only in theoretical arbitrariness and practical terror.
There is no need for me to reiterate the counterarguments Wellmer develops in his brilliant study. What I will do
instead is to briefly review those aspects of the critique of formalism I that deserve consideration.]
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has to accommodate itself to imperatives that flow not from principles but from strategic necessities. On the one
hand, the problem posed by an ethics of responsibility that is mindful of the term oral dimension is in essence trivial,
since the perspective that an ethics of responsibility would use for a future-oriented assessment of the indirect effects
of collective action can be derived from discourse ethics itself. On the other hand, these problems do give rise to
questions of a political ethics, which deals with the aporias of a political practice whose goal is radical emancipation
and which must take up those themes that were once part of Marxian revolutionary theory.
These limitations of practical discourses testify to the power history has over the transcending claims and
interests of reason. The skeptic for his part tends to give an overdrawn ac count of these limits. The key to
understanding the problem is that moral judgments, which provide "demotivated" answers to "decontextualized"
questions require offsetting compensation. If we are clear about the feats of abstraction to which univer salistic
moralities owe their superiority to conventional ones, the old problem of the relationship between morality and
ethical life appears in a different, rather trivial light.]
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Discourse relies on information from the outside; without engaging in the real world,
change is impossible.
Habermas, 1990 (Jurgen, Professor a Goethe University in Frankfurt, Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of
Philosophical Justification, The Communicative Ethics Controversy, edited by Benhabib and Dallmayr, pg. 100101)
[The principle of discourse ethics makes reference to a procedure, namely, the discursive redemption of
normative claims to validity. To that extent, discourse ethics can properly be characterized as formal, for it provides
no substantive guidelines but only a procedure: practical discourse. Practical discourse is not a procedure for
generating justified norms but a procedure for testing the validity of norms that are being proposed and
hypothetically considered for adoption. This means that practical discourses depend on content brought to them
from outside. It would be utterly pointless to engage in a practical discourse without a horizon provided by the life world of a specific social group and without real conflicts in a concrete situation in which the actors considered it
incumbent upon them to reach a consensual means of regulating some controversial social matter. Practical
discourses are always related to the concrete point of departure of a disturbed normative agreement. These
antecedent disruptions determine the topics that are "up" for discussion. This procedure, then, is not formal in the
sense that it abstracts from content. Quite the contrary is true. In its openness, practical discourse is dependent upon
contingent content being "fed" into it from outside. In discourse this content is subjected to a process in which
particular values are ultimately discarded as being not susceptible to consensus. The question now arises whether
this very selectivity might not make the procedure unsuitable for resolving practical questions.]
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Schlag disregards the material world and deliberately ignores the oppressed in his critique
of reason.
Conaghan, Professor @ Kent Law School, 2003 (Joanne, Beyond Right and Reason: Pierre Schlag, the Critique of
Normativity, and the Enchantment of Reason: Schlag in Wonderland, Miami Law Review, April, Lexis)
[Thus, one arrives at yet another striking omission in Schlag's critique: it would seem that the material world and its
corporeal inhabitants are missing. This is an ideational investigation unencumbered by the messiness and
unpredictability of bodies or the dreary cataloguing of material disadvantage and suffering. Schlag's concerns are of
a different kind, namely to chronicle the extent of self-delusion characterizing American legal academics and
question the integrity and rightness of the positions they adopt. His is a study of intellectual moves, of the "rhetorical
tricks" n17 and "Noble Scams" n18 passed off as legal reasoning, thus leading one reviewer cynically to remark that
"for [Schlag], American law is a mind-game that is not played well enough." n19
Now, it may fairly be protested that this is a scurrilous statement, that Schlag's work constitutes a strong challenge to
those who doggedly persist in the mind games of the academy. It may also be argued that Schlag does recognize the
grave implications of legal mind games: law is, he has acknowledged, a field of pain and death, n20 and reason, he
maintains, plays a central role in legitimizing the "ritualized forms of violence ... incarceration, killing, plunder,
extortion and so on" n21 of which legal practices comprise. But, as I read on, the suspicion still lingers. Surely
reason fails not just in the pages of law reviews, but also in the apologies for and rationalizations of material and
social practices [*548] which yield inequality, deprivation, oppression, and hurt. Why does he shrink from talking
with any particularity about these all too important implications of the legal mind game? And where are the voices
of the unequal, deprived, oppressed, and hurt? Why are they not here? What role does reason play in suppressing
them? (As it turns out, quite a lot.) And, if reason does suppress them, why does Schlag's critique not set them free?
In this article, I seek to answer some of these questions by probing the extent to which the omissions I have
identified unselfconsciously reflect the discursive frames Schlag is attacking. I want to track the consequences of
this reflection. My overriding concern is the extent to which Schlag's preoccupation with the foibles of the
mainstream legal academy may unduly inhibit the intellectual and political potential of his work. I believe such
potential is there, and, far from counselling the jettisoning of Schlag's work--as others, attentive to his omissions,
have done n22--I urge progressive legal scholars to take it seriously but not to take it on faith. In particular, I
consider it both appropriate and constructive to call Schlag on what appears to be a glaring lack of engagement with
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the implications of positionality and its relationship to power. This seems to me to be the greatest omission in The
Enchantment of Reason. It does not betray sufficient consciousness of its own standpoint, let alone that of those who
are cast in its shadows. n23 As a consequence, it never fully escapes the frame, the grid, the web that reason
weaves.]
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however, after reading The Enchantment of Reason, from assuming that they were. For similar reasons, race too is
rendered invisible, and with it the concerns of critical race theorists. People of color have long had ample grounds
for regarding the mind/body dichotomy as suspect, its philosophical endorsement having too long co-existed with
material practices with which it contradicts. Thus, the narratives of critical race theorists are, to a significant extent,
narratives of and about the body. n118 They are a direct challenge to academic discourses that render the body
immaterial. Race is a lens that spotlights particularity because the general has been [*569] formed in the image of
whiteness. Thus, the project of embodiment has strategic implications for critical race theorists as well as feminists.
More importantly, the mind/body dichotomy implicates reason directly in racist and sexist beliefs and practices.]
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presuppositions. "A collection of discourses that in their strategic maneuvering have precluded the possibility of
being discursive, have succeeded not just in being destructive, but in being self-destructive." n35 When the
hermeneutics of suspicion is pushed to the point of paranoia, the critical effort dissolves into a selfdescribed
irrelevance.]
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AT: Empire Must Work Through The Empire (your alt fails)
The Empires pursuit of total control creates contradictions and a paradox of power the
unification within Empire is key to resistance.
Wolfe, 2001 (Alan, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, The
Snake, The New Republic Online, October 4th, http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_04)
But Hardt and Negri will have none of this talk of human nature, or use value, or labor power. Capital will exploit
wherever and whatever it can. With bio-power in command, our bodies are no longer irreducibly ours. Our bodies
have instead turned against themselves; they are the very instruments by which we are controlled by forces external
to us. We therefore have to "recognize our posthuman bodies and minds" and see ourselves "for the simians and
cyborgs we are" before we can begin to unleash whatever creative powers we may have left over. But all is not lost
for us simians and cyborgs. Unlike the writers of the Frankfurt School, who also emphasized the authoritarian
character of contemporary capitalism, writers such as Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, who are the true
intellectual heroes of Empire, recognize that efforts at total control create contradictions of their own. Here, in prose
that insults language, is how Hardt and Negri summarize what they have understood: "The analysis of real
subsumption, when this is understood as investing not only the economic or only the cultural dimension of society
but rather the social bios itself, and when it is attentive to the modalities of disciplinarity and/or control, disrupts the
linear and totalitarian figure of capitalist development." What this means is that under Empire there emerges a
"paradox of power" in which all elements of social life are unified, but the very act of unification "reveals a new
context, a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularizationa milieu of the event." Even when
Empire seems to rule everywhere and over everything, there are opportunities for resistance, if only those
opportunities can be grasped and seen.]
The negatives alternative is wrong resistance can only succeed by working within the
conditions of the Empire.
Foster, 2001 (John Bellamy, editor of Monthly Review and author of Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature and
The Vulnerable Planet, Imperialism and Empire Monthly Review, http://www.monthlyreview.org/1201jbf.htm)
Empire, the name they give to this new world order, is a product of the struggle over sovereignty and
constitutionalism at the global level in an age in which a new global Jeffersonianismthe expansion of the U.S.
constitutional form into the global realmhas become possible. Local struggles against Empire are opposed by
these authors, who believe that the struggle now is simply over the form globalization will takeand the extent to
which Empire will live up to its promise of bringing to fruition the global expansion of the internal U.S.
constitutional project (p. 182). Their argument supports the efforts of the multitude against Empirethat is, the
struggle of the multitude to become an autonomous political subjectyet this can only take place, they argue, within
the ontological conditions that Empire presents (p. 407).
Acting within Empire offers the greatest potential for revolution against modern regimes of
power.
Bliwise, 2001 (Robert J. Empire: Not So Evil, Duke Magazine, November-December,
http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/dukemag/issues/111201/empire.html)
But Hardt and Negri don't regard this web of relationships as just some new brand of imperialism. Rather, they
envision the end of imperialism, which involved nation-states vying for economic advantage. Empire suggests
optimism about Empire: Because it disperses power and resists any kind of central control, it has great democratic
potential. "Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than did the modern regimes of power," according to the
book, "because it presents us, alongside the machine of command, with an alternative: the set of all the exploited and
the subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them." As they declare
near the end of the book, "the fact that against the old powers of Europe a new Empire has formed is only good
news." ]
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AT: Empire Must Work Through The Empire (your alt fails)
Opposition to the Empire cannot occur at a local level; it can only come from within the
system.
Pederson, 2001 (David, Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from U of Michigan, Geohistorical Maps Within,
Against, and Beyond Empire, The New Centennial Review,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v001/1.3pedersen.html)
[At such a crossroads, where exactly is one left to stand "in and against" Empire? The authors dismiss the possibility
of any kind of "localist position" that exists outside and in opposition to global Empire and criticize contemporary
political projects that heed such a reified logic as well as some theorists whom they claim are complicit. Instead,
opposition must come from within Empire through the power of what they refer to as the res gestae. To develop this
point, the authors "flirt with Hegel" as they call it, by arguing that the construction of Empire is good in itself but not
for itself. In other words, it has been called into being by a worldwide collective project and a desire for liberation
from the nation-state imperial system, and in this way Empire has ended colonialism and imperialism. But Empire
has not ceased to exploit brutally those who form part of its origins. In a formulation that reflects their reading of
Hegel, Hardt and Negri state that "the end of the dialectic of modernity has not resulted in the end of the dialectic of
exploitation" (43). From within this space of exploitation where there is no outside, the immanent possibilities of
overcoming Empire reside. Flirtation with Hegel now ends abruptly. The authors emphatically state that they will
not repeat "the schema of an ideal teleology that justifies any passage in the name of a promised end" (47). What
they propose instead is an approach that is "nondialectical and absolutely immanent." This love-hate relationship
with dialectic spirals at the theoretical core of the book and is the source of both its promise and its limitations. [End
Page 306] ]
Political action is essential to unite the multitude and overthrow the Empire.
Anderson, 2002 (Brian, Senior Editor of City Journal, The Ineducable Left, First Things, February 2002, pg. 4044, http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0202/articles/anderson.html)
Yet, all is not lost. Even as Empire seduces, Hardt and Negri hold, it is sowing the seeds of its possible destruction.
Gestating within the womb of economic globalization is a counterEmpire, led by the multitudethe authors
standin for Marxs proletariat. The multitude are all those that dont fit neatly into the global capitalist economy.
Havenots across the planet, the antiglobalization movement, the L.A. rioters, Latin revolutionaries, innercity
blacks, drug addicts, antifamily women, drag queens, body piercers, Islamic radicals, and anyone else who rejects
bourgeois valuestogether they constitute the nomadic againstmen of the multitude. Just as the Christians of the
late Roman Empire colonized its spiritual universe from within, so the multitude will overcome the new Empire.
The political task of the third millennium, the authors believetheyre not vulgar historical determinists, they stress,
so political action is essentialwill be to help bring this multitude together so that it can forge an alternative
political organization of global flows and exchanges that will one day take us through and beyond Empire.
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Hardt and Negris claims that it is good to be against the West make it impossible to justify
intervention, even against acts of terrorism
Wolfe, 2001 (Alan, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, The
Snake, The New Republic Online, October 4th, http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_04)
[We cannot know, of course, whether Hardt and Negri, in the light of the recent atrocities at the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, will want to change their minds about the progressive potential of Islamic fundamentalism. But
their book gives no grounds on which such attacks can be condemned. For if being against the West is the sine qua
non of good and effective protest, well, no one could accuse the murderers in New York and Washington of not
being against Western hegemony. And if it is true, as Hardt and Negri blithely claim, that efforts to find legitimate
reasons for intervening in world affairs are only a smokescreen for the exercise of hegemonic power, then the way is
cleared for each and every illegitimate act of global intervention, since in the postmodern world of this book no
justifiable distinctions between good and evil acts can ever be made.]
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Materialism and Empirocriticism (or, for that matter, from one of Osama bin Ladens terrifying manifestos). After
September 11, the authors illiberal, terrorist language seems obscene.
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Hardt and Negris alternative is support for a terror-ridden mechanism of stepping away
from the best economic system yet devised because of its poisonous brew of bad ideas, it
belongs on the library bookshelf next to Mein Kampf.
Balakrishnan, Political Science Professor at University of Chicago and member of the editorial board of New
Left Review, 2000 (Gopal, Hardt and Negris Empire, New Left Review, September-October,
http://newleftreview.org/A2275)
Apolitical abstraction and wildeyed utopianism, a terroristic approach to political argument, hatred for flesh and
blood human beings, nihilism: Empire is a poisonous brew of bad ideas. It belongs with Mein Kampf in the library
of political madness.
Do Empires many fans really believe their own praise? Does Time really think its smart to call for the
eradication of private property, celebrate revolutionary violence, whitewash totalitarianism, and pour contempt on
the genuine achievements of liberal democracies and capitalist economics? Would Frederic Jameson like to give up
his big salary at Duke? To ask such questions is to answer them. The far lefts pleasure is in the adolescent thrill of
perpetual rebellion. Too many who should know better refuse to grow up. The ghost of Marx haunts us still.
For all its infantilism, the kind of hatred Hardt and Negri express for our flawed but decent democratic capitalist
institutionsthe best political and economic arrangements man has yet devised and the outcome of centuries of
difficult trial and erroris dangerous, especially since its so common in the university and media. It seems to
support Islamist revolutionary hopes, the increasingly violent antiglobalization movement, and kindred political
lunacies. September 11 has reminded us of the fragility of our freedom and prosperity. But the continued influence
of the far left, which some mistakenly dismiss as inconsequential, can weaken our collective will to protect
ourselves from our enemies. Why fight for a political and social order that is so contemptible?
Empire is rooted in anarchist rhetoric which praises acts of terrorism and denies the
existence of totalitarianism
Wolfe, 2001 (Alan, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, The
Snake, The New Republic Online, October 4th, http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_04)
The anarchist flavor of Empire is conveyed most strikingly by its romanticization of violence. Although by now
everyone knows that there are terrorists in this world, there are no terrorists in Hardt and Negri's book. There are
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only people who are called terrorists, "a crude conception and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police
mentality." Terms such as "ethnic terrorists" and "drug mafias" appear within quotation marks, as if no serious
revolutionary could believe that there were such things. "Totalitarianism" is another pure construct, simply an
invention of cold war ideology, that has been used to "denounce the destruction of the democratic sphere...."
Certainly the term has little to do with actual life in the Soviet Union, which Hardt and Negri describe as "a society
criss-crossed by extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom."
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Their alternative demands violence Hardt and Negri believe the multitude can only be
successful through barbarianism.
Balakrishnan, Political Science Professor at University of Chicago and member of the editorial board of New
Left Review, 2000 (Gopal, Hardt and Negris Empire, New Left Review, September-October,
http://newleftreview.org/A2275)
[The counterEmpire is possible only after modernityincluding the universal solvent of global capitalismhas
dissolved the certainties of all earlier ages. Hardt and Negris multitude is a Promethean power, born with the
modern ages emancipation of the human will from the moral constraints of religion and human nature. Today there
is not even the illusion of a transcendent God, the authors proclaim. The mythology of the languages of the
multitude interprets the telos of the earthly city, torn away by the power of its own destiny from any belonging or
subjection to a city of God, which has lost all honor and legitimacy. Human nature is a mirage too. We must
embrace our posthuman identities as monkeys and cyborgs, Hardt and Negri aver. Humanism after the death of
Man, the authors call their stark vision of man as demiurge. The multitude represents an uncontainable force, an
excess of value with respect to every form of right and law. Beyond good and evil, it will create and recreate the
human world in a secular Pentecost. Hardt and Negri, dreaming of Communist Supermen, view the American
Declaration of Independence and the Marxinspired revolutions of the twentieth century as anticipatory signs of the
coming liberation.
These epochal transformations will require a cleansing bloodletting. The new barbarians of the multitude must
destroy with an affirmative violence and trace new paths of life through their own material existence. Hardt and
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Negris language bristles menacingly at the multitudes bourgeois enemies: Who wants to see any more of that
pallid and parasitic European ruling class that led directly from the ancien rgime to nationalism, from populism to
fascism, and now pushes for a generalized neoliberalism? Who wants to see more of those ideologies and those
bureaucratic apparatuses that have nourished and abetted the rotting European elites? And who can still stand those
systems of labor organization and those corporations that have stripped away every vital spirit?]
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Globalization increases world prosperity and freedom Hardt and Negri provide no
evidence to the contrary.
Balakrishnan, Political Science Professor at University of Chicago and member of the editorial board of New
Left Review, 2000 (Gopal, Hardt and Negris Empire, New Left Review, September-October,
http://newleftreview.org/A2275)
[Inseparable from the failure to think politically, Hardt and Negri, like the rioters endlessly disrupting World Trade
Organization meetings, offer no evidence to support their basic charge that economic globalization is causing wide
scale planetary misery. Predictably, this past summer, as the G8 meeting got underway in Genoa, Italy, the New
York Times chose these two joyful Communists to write a lengthy oped extolling the virtues of anti
globalization rioters.
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The truth about globalization is exactly the reverse of what Hardt and Negri assert. Globalization is dramatically
increasing world prosperity and freedom. As the Economists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out,
in the half century since the foundation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the world economy
has expanded sixfold, in part because trade has increased 1,600 percent; nations open to trade grow nearly twice as
fast as those that arent; and World Bank data show that during the past decade of accelerated economic
globalization, approximately 800 million people escaped poverty.]
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Hardt and Negris call to reject the Empire is incompetent it lacks data, proof, and
empiricism.
Wolfe, 2001 (Alan, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, The
Snake, The New Republic Online, October 4th, http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_04)
Most of Empire is an exercise in nominalism, in the attempt to name, rather than to describe, to analyze, or even to
condemn, the new order that its authors see emerging. Although it is presumably devoted to outlining the contours of
a new mode of production, the book contains no data, offers no effort to demonstrate who owns what or holds power
over whom, and provides no indicators of any of the deplorable conditions that it discusses. As if once again to
distinguish itself from Marx, Empire, like the left Hegelians whom Marx once attacked, moves entirely at the level
of ideas. Unlike the left Hegelians, however, Hardt and Negri handle ideas incompetently.]
The notion of refusing the Empire will fail due to Hardt and Negris false view of social
production.
Post, 2002 (Charlie, member of Solidaritys National Committee, Review: Empire and Revolution, International
Viewpoint Magazine, http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/article.php3?id_article=435)
The notion of the multitude confronting the Empire, at all points and through all acts of refusal, rests on the
questionable claims that production has been informationalised and social production has become decentred and
smoothly diffused across the globe. As we have seen, the reality is quite different: industrial production remains
dominant within capitalism, and the centres of industrial production remain geographically concentrated in the
advanced capitalist north and select parts of the south. Not surprisingly, the potential and actual power of
industrial working class activity has diminished in the past thirty years.
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Clearly twenty years of political defeats and economic restructuring at the hands of capital, undermine the
confidence and ability of workers to take action at the point of production and in the streets. However, in the past
decade we have begun to see a turn-around in the class struggle, that again demonstrates the power of organized
workers in strategic sectors of the economy. Beginning with the public sector strikes in France - spearheaded by the
transport, postal and telecommunications workers - we have seen a new rise of industrial action across western
Europe, and to a lesser extent in the US (the UPS strike in 1997 being the most important example).
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The multitude will never be unifiedthe workers will stand for different objectives, fail
to communicate, and desire to murder each other.
Wolfe, 2001 (Alan, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, The
Snake, The New Republic Online, October 4th, http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_04)
[Never saying so explicitly, the authors of this book, in identifying their hopes with such disparate movements of
protest whatever their targets or their political coloration, are throwing over the most central proposition of
Marxism: class consciousness. Workers no longer need to be aware of themselves as workers in order to bring down
capitalism. They need not develop a revolutionary strategy, for under contemporary conditions "it may no longer be
useful to insist on the old distinction between strategy and tactics." They do not even need to be workers. All that is
required is that they set themselves up against power, whatever and wherever power happens to be.
Never mind that movements that do so can stand for wildly different objectives an open society here, a closed
society there; or that they are also, as Hardt and Negri point out, often unable or unwilling to communicate with
each other. Indeed, as Hardt and Negri do not point out, they might, if they had the chance, prefer to kill one
another. But this lack of communication and mutual appreciation "is in fact a strength rather than a weakness."
Traditional Marxism aimed to find the weakest link in the capitalist system and to exploit it. But there are no more
weak links. Capital has become so pervasive that it exposes itself nowhere, but this means that it is really exposed
everywhere. Protest movements simply cannot be peripheral: since there is no center, there is no periphery.
Everything that dissents even "piercings, tattoos, punk fashion and its various imitations" foreshadows the
stirrings that are necessary to challenge the new forms that capitalism is taking.]
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Hardt and Negri admit they have no idea how the multitude will rise up and throw over the
multitude.
Wolfe, 2001 (Alan, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, The
Snake, The New Republic Online, October 4th, http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_04)
[And redemption will come from the multitude, who despite their oppression under empire or Empire remain
pure in heart. In them, one can see the emergence of the new city that will put us at one with the world. Unlike
Augustine's, of course, their city cannot be the divine one, since "the multitude today...resides on the imperial
surfaces where there is no God the Father and no transcendence." Instead, they will create "the earthly city of the
multitude," which the authors esoterically define as "the absolute constitution of labor and cooperation." About the
practical question of how this can be done, Hardt and Negri have nothing significant to say. "The only response that
we can give to these questions is that the action of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to
confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire." This, too, is a
Christian conception of revolution. We cannot know how we will be saved; we must recognize that if only we have
faith, a way will be found.]
Voting for the critique will not affect the overall trends of globalization Hardt and Negri
have no means to operationalize their alternative
Wolfe, 2001 (Alan, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, The
Snake, The New Republic Online, October 4th, http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_04)
[ But such a sensible and decent left will not emerge if Empire a lazy person's guide to revolution has its way.
The authors of this book, having taken no steps to learn anything about what globalization actually is and what its
continuation would actually mean, cannot inspire their readers to do likewise. Rather than developing a tutorial
attitude toward protest, bringing to younger militants the knowledge of history and the wisdom of experience, they
glorify know-nothingism and turn obsequious before fascists. Instead of reminding protesters that politics is a
demanding business, they romanticize the self-indulgence of punks and freaks. Faced with the difficulties of
constructing a theoretical account of how an ever-changing capitalism has changed once again, they paper over their
contradictions with jargon and borrow promiscuously from every academic fashion. There is indeed corruption in
the contemporary world and none more noteworthy in this context than the intellectual corruption that can enable
a book as shabby as this one to be taken seriously by anyone.]
Empire does nothing to advance the goals of the left it pretends that revolution is easily
achievable.
Wolfe, 2001 (Alan, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, The
Snake, The New Republic Online, October 4th, http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_04)
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Empire is to social and political criticism what pornography is to literature. It flirts with revolution as if one society
can be replaced by another as easily as one body can be substituted for another. It gives academic readers the thrill
of engaging with the ideas of the New Left's most insurrectionary days, all the while pretending that the author of
these ideas is an "independent researcher and writer," as Harvard's book jacket calls Negri, while secretly hoping
imagine the glamour in radical academic circles that this would give him! that he really was guilty of the acts for
which he was imprisoned. For angry militants who have never read Bakunin but who understand in their gut that
every destructive urge is a creative one, Empire offers the support of professors who are supposed to know what
they are talking about; and if one is too busy running through the streets to grasp the full implications of what Homi
K. Bhabha says about binary divisions, or to reflect on Althusser's reading of The Prince, one can at least come away
rinsed in the appropriate critique. Empire is a thoroughly non-serious book on a most serious topic, an outrageously
irresponsible tour through questions of power and violence questions that, as we cannot help but remember as we
mourn our dead in Manhattan and Washington, demand the greatest responsibility on the part of both writers and
readers.]
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The new form of imperialism exercised by the United States cannot be equated with
colonial takeoverthe emphasis on free trade is too strong.
Steinmetz, Associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, 2003 [George, The State of
Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism, Public Culture 15.2
(2003) 323-345, p. project muse]
[There are at least two crucial differences between this nascent (neo)imperialism and colonialism. The first
distinction is especially important for the inhabitants of the periphery. Imperialism, unlike colonialism, allows
powerful members of the periphery to retain at least nominal control over their own states, even if peripheral states
and economies are still subject to asymmetrical pressures from the core and to the uncontrollable dynamics of global
capitalism. The difference between imperialism and colonialism also matters for the analysis of the core countries.
Were we to diagnose current American policy as moving toward a form of colonialism, this would suggest a decline
rather than a reconsolidation of American hegemony. It would also predict tendencies toward the formal control of
peripheries by other core powers, as in the late-nineteenth-century scramble. Niall Ferguson (2001: 79), among
many others, claims to discern such a colonial trend since September 11: he perceives the movement of the United
States "from informal to formal imperialism" and toward the creation of a "new kind of colony." Tellingly, this
diagnosis is summarized as a "White Man's Burden" rather than a "rich man's burden," calling attention to the "rule
of difference" that distinguishes colonial from noncolonial states (Chatterjee 1993; Steinmetz 2002).
Yet the United States is not taking control of peripheral governments, nor does it seem to be focusing primarily on
securing markets in particular parts of the periphery for specifically American capital. Critics of the new national
security policy have failed to emphasize its differences from both the decentered multilateralism of Empire and the
channeled direct control of colonial governance. In addition to preserving American military and political
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supremacy, the goals of the Bush administration, according to its September 2002 paper on national security, include
"igniting" a "new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade." Indeed, free trade is described
here as a basic "moral principle" (White House 2002: 17-20). 9 Whatever one's views of the drawbacks of free
[End Page 333] trade for poor and developing countries and of the limits of the American version of democracy that
is to be exported with it, this program cannot be equated with colonial takeover. Even in the discussions of a postwar
occupation of Iraq, U.S. planners have been quick to insist that there is no intention of installing a permanent
colonial government. 10 And one characteristic of the campaign in Afghanistan has been a division of labor
between the United States, which has arrogated to itself responsibility for overall decision making and military
interventions, and the European powers, which have been left with the responsibility for postwar sociopolitical
reconstruction and transferring power to an Afghan-controlled government (Ignatieff 2002).]
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Hardt and Negri concede that Empire only exists as a concept collapse of capitalism is not
inevitable
Kimball, co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion and on Board of Advisor of the Gilder-Lehrman
Institute of American History at St. Johns College, 2001 (Roger, The New Anti-Americanism, The New
Criterion, Vol. 20, No. 2, http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/oct01/empire.htm)
[Empire is Hardts and Negris term for that transnational, capitalist entityor perhaps it is a process: it is difficult
to saythat has supposedly succeeded the nation state. (The nation state they regard as a dinosaur that is well on its
way to the dust-bin of history.) Hence Empire is not coterminous with the United States, though Hardt and Negri
clearly believe that the U.S. figures prominently in the architecture of Empire. In fact, what they call Empire does
not really exist. Hardt and Negri sometimes come close to acknowledging this (though a page later they are
populating Empire with all sorts of powers and attributes). In their preface, Hardt and Negri boldly claim that
Empire is not a metaphor but a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach.
The words theoretical approach should send a shiver down the spine of any sensible person. The burden of their
remark is to declare intellectual open season. When it comes to applying a theoretical approach to a concept, the
bottom line is: anything goes. Still, using a capital letter whenever Empire is mentioned was a sound rhetorical
move. It helps to give this airy nothing local habitation and a name, and people who are reassured by being told that
something is not a metaphor but a concept will be grateful for that. Eakins writes that Hardt and Negri believe
Empire is good news. In truth, they excoriate it on virtually every page. In Empire corruption is everywhere,
they write in one typical passage. It is the cornerstone and keystone of domination. One of their central questions
is how the multitude (their term for what Marx called the proletariat) can become political and overcome the
central repressive operations of Empire. (The answer, which comes on page 400: We cannot say at this point.)
Does this sound like good news? No, Hardt and Negri do not regard Empire as good news. They regard it as Marx
regarded capitalism: something so bad that it would necessarily perish of its own badness. (Marx, being a Hegelian,
substituted contradictions for badness in order to invest the process with the appearance of logical necessity, but
there is no reason to dignify that philosophical sleight-of-hand by perpetuating the linguistic solecism.)
Eakins is also wrong to suggest that Empire may represent the Next Big Idea. This is mainly because Empire is
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based on a laughably tiny idea, and one that is also old and wrong. The idea, again, is Marxs idea about the
inevitable collapse of capitalism. It seemed big once upon a time. It is now as thoroughly discredited as an historical
or political idea can be. Hardt and Negri gussy up Marx with a formidable panoply of New Age rhetoric about
globalization. But the creaking you hear as you make your way through the book is the rusty grinding of the
dialectic: it goes nowhere, it means nothing, but it keeps creaking along.]
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The reality of the capitalist world economy is quite different. It is true that the percentage of workers employed in
industry - the production of material goods and services - has declined continuously for over a century. As Harry
Braverman argued in his classic Labor and Monopoly Capital, [5] this is the inevitable result of capitalisms
continuous mechanization of production, and the resultant reduction in the percentage of workers needed to produce
goods. However, the number of industrial workers, in most industrialized societies, has remained stable or grown
slightly. Even more important, the proportion of total output industrial workers produce has increased over the past
fifty years. [6]]
Hardt and Negri refuse to accept the reality of the permanent existence of capitalismthis
makes all their judgments ridiculous.
Kimball, co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion and on Board of Advisor of the Gilder-Lehrman
Institute of American History at St. Johns College, 2001 (Roger, The New Anti-Americanism, The New
Criterion, Vol. 20, No. 2, http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/oct01/empire.htm)
It is not just the style of Empire that is rebarbative. Its judgments are too. They are mostly a tapestry of Marxist
chestnuts updated for contemporary circumstances. Remember the Cold War? Leftist dogma maintains that it is
impossible that the United States won the Cold War. Ergo, the fact that the United States did win itthat the policies
of the Reagan administration brought about the collapse of the Soviet Unionmust be denied at every turn. So it is
business as usual when Hardt and Negri solemnly assure us that the United States did not defeat the socialist
enemy in the Cold War; rather The Soviet Union collapsed under the burden of its own internal contradictions.
Internal contradictions? We require permits for handguns: why not for lethal concepts such as the HegelianMarxist dialectic? Its careless use is clearly a public intellectual-health hazard. The dialectic is the ultimate sophists
tool. Marx himself realized this. In an 1857 letter to Engels about an election prediction, Marx wrote: Its possible that I shall make an ass of
myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way .
Hardt and Negri are not as cautious as the master. They are adept at deploying the dialectic, but they havent
mastered the art of duplicitous ambiguity. Thus they baldly conclude that the Gulf War was really an operation of
oppressionperpetrated, of course, not by Saddam Hussein but by the United States. The Los Angeles riots they
describe as one of the most radical and powerful struggles of the final years of the twentieth century. High praise
indeed! Most of us, looking back over the history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century, would conclude that
there was no international proletarian revolution as Marx predicted there would be. But according to Hardt and
Negri such a judgment would be superficial and short-sighted: actually, they write, the proletariat won because
nation states are not as powerful now as they once were.
I suspect that part of the reason Empire is such a hit in the academy is its superior insulation. Hardt and Negri have
sealed every point of ingress: no hint of reality is allowed to seep in. The single greatest embarrassment to Marxist
theory has always been the longevity of capitalism. It was supposed to implode from internal contradictions long
ago. But here it is 2001 and capitalism is still going strong and making the world richer and richer. Attempting to
explain this is the greatest test of a Marxists ingenuity. Here is how Hardt and Negri handle the problem:
As we write this book and the twentieth century draws to a close, capitalism is miraculously healthy, its
accumulation more robust than ever. How can we reconcile this fact with the careful analyses of numerous Marxist
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authors at the beginning of the century who point to the imperialist conflicts as symptoms of an impending
ecological disaster running up against the limits of nature?
They offer three hypotheses for this imponderable situation. One, that capitalism has reformed itself and so is no
longer in danger of collapse (an option they dismiss out of hand). Two, that the Marxist theory is right except for the
timetable: Sooner or later the once abundant resources of nature will run out. Threewell, it is a little difficult to
say what the third hypothesis is. It has to do, they say, with the idea that capitalisms expansion is internal rather
than external, that it subsumes not the noncapitalist environment but its own capitalist terrain that is, that the
subsumption is no longer formal but real. I wont attempt to explain this for the simple reason that I havent a clue
about what it means.
Is there any important option they have neglected? Could it, just possibly, be that the careful analyses of numerous
Marxist authors was just plain wrong? This is a possibility apparently too awful to contemplate, for Hardt and
Negri never raise it.]
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The imperial state has not disappearedthe rise of the nation state in the world economy
proves.
Petras, 2001 (James, Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, Empire With Imperialism, Rebelion:
Petras Essays in English, October 29, http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/negri010102.htm)
[ Let us start with Negri's and Hardt's (NH) assertion of the decline of the nation or imperial state. Their argument
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for a state-less empire exaggerates the autonomy of capital from the state and parrots the false propositions of the
free market ideologues who argue that the "world market" is supreme. Contrary to NH, in the contemporary world,
the national state, in both its imperial and neo-colonial form, has expanded its activity. Far from being an
anachronism, the state has become a central element in the world economy and within nation- states. However, the
activities of the state vary according to their class character and whether they are imperial or neo-colonial states.
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MNCs do not exist absent from the state Hardt and Negri fail to recognize the combined
forces of MNCs and imperial states
Petras, 2001 (James, Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, Empire With Imperialism, Rebelion:
Petras Essays in English, October 29, http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/negri010102.htm)
Assumption 5: Globalist theorists like NH write of an 'imperial system' as opposed to imperialist states (preface),
as if one could not exist without the other. The 'system' has no 'center' since all states have lost their special
significance before the all powerful MNC who dominate markets. Systems approaches fail to recognize the class and
institutional power of nationally owned and directed banks and industries. Even more fatal, the systems theorists fail
to link the structures, operations, legal codes and linkages between imperial states, the multi- national corporations
and their offspring in the IFI's and the vast reach of their power and concentration of profits, interest, rents and
royalties in the imperialist countries. The 'system' is derived from and is sustained by the combined forces of the
imperial state and its MNCs. To abstract from the specificities of ownership and state power in order to describe an
imperial system is to lose sight of the basic contradictions and conflicts, the inter-state imperial rivalries and the
class struggles for state power.
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most recent book, Worldinjj Women, a section titled "A (personal) politics of location," in which her
identity as a woman, a feminist, and an academic, makes apparent her particular (marginal) identities and
group loyalties.96 Similarly, Christine Sylvester, in the introduction to her book, insists, "It is important to
provide a context for one's work in the often-denied politics of the personal." Accordingly, selfdeclaration reveals to the reader that she is a feminist, went to a Catholic girls school where she was
schooled to "develop your brains and confess something called 'sins' to always male forever priests," and
that these provide some pieces to her dynamic objectivity.97 Like territorial markers, self-identification
permits entry to intellectual spaces whose sovereign authority is "policed" as much by marginal
subjectivities as they allege of the oppressors who "police" the discourse of realism, or who are said to
walk the corridors of the discipline insuring the replication of patriarchy, hierarchical agendas, and
"malestream" theory. If Sylvester's version of feminist postmodernism is projected as tolerant, perspectivist, and encompassing of a multiplicity of approaches, in reality it is as selective, exclusionary, and
dismissive of alternative perspectives as mainstream approaches are accused of being.]]
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[[Problems of this nature, however, are really manifestations of a deeper, underlying ailment endemic to
discourses derived from identity politics. At base, the most elemental question for identity discourse, as
Zalewski and Enloe note, is "Who am I?" The personal becomes the political, evolving a discourse
where self-identification, but also one's identification by others, presupposes multiple identities that are
fleeting, overlapping, and changing at any particular moment in time or place. "We have multiple
identities," argues V. Spike Peterson, "e.g., Canadian, homemaker, Jewish, Hispanic, socialist.""" And
these identities are variously depicted as transient, polymorphic, interactive, discursive, and never fixed.
As Richard Brown notes, "Identity is given neither institutionally nor biologically. It evolves as one
orders continuities on one's conception of oneself." 102 Yet, if we accept this, the analytical utility of
identity politics seems problematic at best. Which identity, for example, do we choose from the many that
any one subject might display affinity for? Are we to assume that all identities are of equal importance or
that some are more important than others? How do we know which of these identities might be transient
and less consequential to one's sense of self and, in turn, politically significant to understanding inter national politics? Why, for example, should we place gender identity onto-logically prior to class, sexual
orientation, ethnic origin, ideological perspective, or national identity?" 13 As Zalewski and Enloe ask,
"Why do we consider states to be a major referent? Why not men? Or women?" 104 But by the same token,
why not dogs, shipping magnates, movie stars, or trade regimes? Why is gender more constitutive of
global politics than, say, class, or an identity as a cancer survivor, laborer, or social worker? Most of all,
why is gender essentialized in feminist discourse, reified into the most pre eminent of all identities as the
primary lens through which international relations must be viewed? Perhaps, for example, people
understand difference in the context of identities outside of gender. As Jane Martin notes, "How do we
know that difference . . . does not turn on being tat or religious or in an abusive relationship?""15 The
point, perhaps flippantly made, is that identity is such a nebulous concept, its meaning so obtuse and so
inherently subjective, that it is near meaningless as a conduit for under standing global politics if only
because it can mean anything to anybody.
For others like Ann Tickner, however, identity challenges the assumption ot state sovereignty.
"Becoming curious about identity formation below the state and surrendering the simplistic assumption
that the state is sovereign will," Tickner suggests, "make us much more realistic describers and explainers
of die current international system."106 The multiple subjects and their identities that constitute the nationstate are, for Tickner, what are important. In a way, of course, she is correct. States are constitutive
entities drawn from the amalgam of their citizens. But such observations are somewhat trite and banal and
lead International Relations into a devolving and perpetually dividing discourse based upon everemergent and transforming identities. Surely the more important observation, however, concerns the
bounds of this enterprise. Where do we stop? Are there limits to this exercise or is it a boundless project?
And how do we theorize the notion of multiple levels of identities harbored in each subject person? If
each of us is fractured into multiple identities, must we then lunge into commentaries specific to each
group? Well we might imagine, for example, a discourse in International Relations between white
feminist heterosexual women, white middle class heterosexual physically challenged men, working class
gay Latinos, txansgendered persons, ethnic Italian New York female garment workers, and Asian lesbian
ecofeminists. Each would represent a self-constituted knowledge and nomenclature, a discourse reflective
of specific identity-group concerns. Knowledge and understanding would suffer from a diaspora,
becoming unattainable in any perspicacious sense except in localities so specific that its general
understanding, or inter-group applicability, would be obviated. Identity groups would become so
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splintered and disparate that International Relations would approach a form of identity tribalism with each
group forming a kind of intellectual territory, jealously policing its knowledge borders from intrusions by
other groups otherwise seen as illegitimate, nonrepresentative, or opposed to the interests of the group.
Nor is it improbable to suppose that identity politics in International Relations would evolve a realpolitik
between groups, a realist power-struggle for intergroup legitimacy or hegemonic control over par ticular
knowledges or, in the broader polity', situations of intergroup conflict. With what legitimacy, for example,
do middle class, by and large white, affluent, feminist, women International Relations scholars speak and
write for black, poor, illiterate, gay, working class, others who might object, resist, or denounce such
empathetic musings? The legitimacy with which Sylvester or Enloe write, for example, might be
questioned on grounds of their identities as elite, educated, privileged women, unrepresentative of the
experiences and realities of those at the coal face of international politics.]
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The Alt doesnt solveRadical disagreements within the feminist framework will hinder
your movement. A holistic feminist advocacy cant solve.
Jarvis 2k [DSL, International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, February, University of South
Carolina Publishing, pg. 146]
[[But if the call to begin afresh the study of international relations resounds loudest among feminists, the
respective approaches they proffer fall victim to radical disagreement. Postmodern feminism, feminist
postmodernism, feminist empiricism, cultural feminism, or standpoint feminism, to name but a few, are
among the many feminisms whose respective approaches either embrace women, reject their existence
altogether, invoke the categories of gender, sexuality, patriarchy, or masculinism, or wish to repudiate all
of these on the basis of their socially constructed nature. For feminists, the conundrum is manifest by
problems of identity, representation, and language. Simply to "add women and stir" presupposes the
subordinate importance of gender and, more importantly, that the category "women" is ubiquitous. For
some feminists, for example, we can never really know "who are women," "where are women," or even
"what are women."31 Do women really exist or is the category "women" merely inscribed by patriarchal
norms that represent little more than socially constructed fabrications? And if women do exist, does this
singular noun presuppose a shared experience, a sisterhood, in short, a sex similarity? Attempting to
dismantle the masculinist hegemony of International Relations thus proves discursive for feminists who
tend to divaricate between two dominant schools of thought. These we might term con-structivist or
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epistemological feminism, and the second essentialist, onto-logical or standpoint feminism. 33]]
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Relations are now so porous as to be meaningless. If, as Martin Griffiths and Terry O'Callaghan suggest, "Anyone
can 'join' IR, regard- less of their formal training," is there any longer an intrinsic meaning or purpose to what we do
other than engage in academic musings for their own sake? 121 Does this mean, for example, that no formal training or grounding
in world politics will suffice as preparation for studying them, that there is no core to our subject, no central conccrns or rccurring themes that
warrant at least rudimentary attention if one is to have an elementary grasp of things international? The obliteration of intellectual
boundaries, the suggestion that there is "no valid distinction between the international and domestic spheres,"I21 and
that all issues are germane to International Relations supposes that we can not only "forget IR theory," as Roland
Bleiker urges, but read, write, and research anything of nominal interest to us and call this international politics.
Birigit Weiss's vision of container art exhibitions or Cynthia Enloe's reflections on the posthuman body-the cyborg-threatens not just to expand
the vistas of our discipline but, in doing so, make us little more than a compendium of the visual arts, science fiction, identities, personal stories,
and research whims whose intellectual agendas are so disparate as to be meaningless. Indeed, precisely how this makes for better
knowledge and a better understanding of global politics or how such agendas or concerns are related to global events
and processes, we are never told. The only objective evident in the new identity politics seems to be the
"transgression of boundaries," where everything no matter how disparate is assumed to be related to international
politics and where the purview of our disciplinary lenses are counseled to have no focus but be encompassing of all
things social, political, and economic.
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kill each other at a far greater rate than they do women, commit suicide at a rate almost three times that of women,
constitute about 80 percent of the homeless in the United States, throughout virtually every community in the world
live shorter lives than do women, and in the developed world suffer a mortality rate due to disease twice that for
women.
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Their alternative is nihilistit rejects all forms of political action that could improve the
way society views gender.
Whitworth, Assistant Professor of Political Science York University, 1994
(Sandra, Feminism and International Relations: Towards a Political Economy of Gender in Interstate and NonGovernmental Institutions, p. 22-23)
This points also to the serious limitations involved in feminist post-modernist understandings of 'social construction'.
While acknowledging that identities and meanings are never natural or universal, postmodernists locate the
construction of those meanings almost exclusively in the play of an ambiguously defined power, organised through
discourse. This means that identities and meanings are constructed in the absence of knowing actors, and more importantly, that there is very
little that knowing actors can do to challenge those meanings or identities. The ways in which power manifests itself, the particular
meanings and identities that emerge, seem almost inevitable. They are unrelated to prevailing material conditions or
the activities of agents and institutions. Similarly, critics may describe the play of power in the construction of
meaning, but cannot participate in changing it.63 As Marysia Zalewski writes: The post-modernist intention to
challenge the power of dominant discourses in an attempt to lead those discourses into disarray is at first glance
appealing, but we have to ask what will the replacement be? If we are to believe that all is contingent and we have
no base on to which we can ground claims to truth, then 'power alone will determine the outcome of competing truth
claims'. Post-modernist discourse does not offer any criteria for choosing among competing explanations and thus
has a tendency to lead towards nihilism - an accusation often levelled at the purveyors of post-modernism and to which they seem
unable to provide any answer, except perhaps in the words of one post-modernist scholar 'what's wrong with nihilism'?64 Postmodernists are
equally post-feminist, a title they sometimes adopt, for their analysis loses sight of the political imperatives which inform
feminism: to uncover and change inequalities between women and men. As Ann Marie Goetz suggests, when many
of the issues surrounding women and international relations are ones which concern the very survival of those
women, postmodernism's continued back-pedalling and disclaimers are not only politically unacceptable, they are,
more importantly, politically irresponsible.
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explored. That the reality of any situation can be gauged from personal narratives based exclusively upon perception
makes for bad social science and leads, ultimately, to destructive debates that hurl about subjective accusations. 141
Witness, for example, the claims of matriarchal superiority when standpoint feminists insist that "women have a distinctive,
superior view of the world, distinctive because shaped by those features of their experiences that distinguish them from men, superior on the . . .
basis that the oppressed are capable of a higher form of awareness than the oppressor."142 This is simply inverted patriarchy, premised on little
more than fanciful whims about the innate characteristics of women vis-a-vis men. It replicates the privileging of one gender over
another and discharges all hope of equality between genders on the basis of merit alone. Moreover, it invokes a
crude and unsubstantiated argument derived through intuition, that women feel more deeply, are better knowers, and
thus have better understandings of international politics. But how is this different from patriarchal-chauvinist claims
that men are more rational, logical, strategic and women more emotional, less reasoned, and captive to their
biological cycles? Both such arguments are equally as preposterous and need to be abandoned, not invoked as a
means forward for understanding international relations. More obviously, such silly methods tend toward a perverse
hierarchical index of who suffers the most, who bears the most burden, feels the most hurt.
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Only the permutation solves working within the realist framework is the only way to
deny nihilism and include those outside of the feminist circle necessary for change
Keohane 1991
(Robert, Professof of International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, International
Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint, Gender and International Relations, ed. Rebecca Grant
and Kathleen Newland, p. 46-7)
It seems to me that this post-modernist project is a dead end in the study of international relations - and that it
would be disastrous for feminist international relations theory to pursue this path. Of course I am aware that social
knowledge is always value laden and that objectivit y is an aspiration rather than an accomplishment. But I object
to the notion that because social science cannot attain any perfectly reliable knowledge, it is justifiable for
students of society to 'obliterate the validity of reality' . 2 4 I also object to the notion that we should happily accept
the existence of multiple incommensurable epistemologies, each equ al l y valid. Such a view seems to me to lead
away from our knowledge of the external world and ultimately to a sort of nihilism. Hawkesworth argues that 'the
world is more than a text' and that feminists should avoid 'the postmodernist tendency to reject all reasons'."' I
would go further and say that agreement on epistemological essentials constitutes a valuable scientific asset that
should not be discarded lightly. With such agreement, people with different commensurable terms can perhaps come
to an agreement with the aid of evidence. As philosophers of science such as Imre Lakatos have argued, the
invalidity of naive falsificationism does not destroy the possibility of establishing standards for scientific research:
participants in the process apply criteria having to do with resolution of anomalies, discovery of new facts, and what
Lakatos calls 'the requirement of continuous growth'.26
A major aim of science, even social science, is to provide us with a common set of epistemological tools, in a
discipline, for ascertaining the nature of reality and therefore testing the adequacy of our theories. This is not to
pretend that any knowledge is perfectly 'objective': clearly our values, our upbringing, our bodily experiences and
our positions in society - gender, class, culture, race -all affect what we believe. But science has the value of
narrowing gaps in belief by providing common standards to test beliefs, and therefore disciplining our minds,
protecting us to some extent from bias. The very difficulty of achieving social scientific knowledge is an argument
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for cherishing rather than discarding social science and the aspiration for a more or less unified epistemology.
I fear that many feminist theorists of international relations may follow the
c u r r e n t l y fashionable path of fragmenting epistemology, denying the possib i l i t y of social science. But I think
this would be an intellectual and moral disaster. As Linda Alcoff points out, 'post-structuralist critiques of subjec t i v i t y pertain to the construction of all subjects or they pertain to none. . . . Nominalism threatens to wipe out
feminism itself.' 2 7 That is, feminist theory cannot be without a positive standpoint it cannot be only adversarial.
Retreating to post-modern adversarial analysis would foreclose the relations that could be regarded as valuable by
people outside the feminist circle. Scientifically, it would lead away from what 1 think feminist theory should do:
generate novel hypotheses that could then be evaluated with evidence, in a way that could lead to convincing
results. Politically, as Hawkesworth declares,
should postmodernism's seductive text gain ascendancy, it will not be an accident that power remains in the
hands of the white males who currently possess it. In a world of radical inequality, relativist resignation
reinforces the status quo.28>
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Eco-theologians, like Matthew Fox and a host of others, are heard calling for an "end to
anthropocentrism". Human beings, they urge, should no longer consider themselves as the center of creation, having "dominion" over
the animal world because Genesis, wherein this natural hierarchy is first declared, is said to be outdated, fit only for demythologization. Moreover
they press their views urgently, suggesting that Holy Mother the Planet will "die" if the new course is not taken. And because
their
theories are essentially the fruit of religious apostasy, they will brook no opposition. They have
replaced God the Father with the morally indifferent Earth-Mother. All that matters to this new goddess is that she become efficiently organized.
Under the pretext of doing precisely that new modalities of power are being put in place worldwide. These
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naturalness of human moral categorization of the external world.' This human concern with categorizing the natural
world demonstrates that because we do not interact with an entity called 'nature' or the 'environment', there can be no
single moral principle to govern this multifaceted and complex relation. In short, such moral categories and the
process of categorization are partly constitutive of that relation.
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ethical platform upon which actual, concrete human-nature conflicts and decisions can be resolved, and upon which
green politics can base itself.
Anthropocentrism must be the basis of our green politics the K fails in its rejection
Barry, lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University, 1999 [John, Rethinking Green Politics, p. 12]
This chapter looks at deep ecology as the pre-eminent ecocentric approach within green moral theory. The aim of
this chapter is not to offer a comprehensive overview of deep ecology, but to argue that as it stands deep ecology is
insufficient to ground green political claims and policy prescriptions. The basic argument is that deep ecology is
unable to provide the necessary normative basis for green political theory. A central reason for this failure is that
deep ecology's non-anthropocentrism is premised on a false understanding of anthropocentrism. Allied to this is the
particular understanding of morality and ethics within deep ecology, an understanding which gives little attention to
the collective, intersubjective character of the ethical as a sphere of human action. The aim of this chapter is to clear
the ground for the argument in the next where it is argued that anthropocentric moral reasoning is not only perfectly
legitimate but fundamentally necessary to green politics if the gap between its political and philosophical claims is
to be overcome.
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Barry, lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University, 1999 [John, Rethinking Green Politics, p. 35]
We may think of environmental virtue as having to do with the refinement of moral discernment in regard to the
place of nature as a constitutive aspect of the human good. The cultivation of environmental virtues can then be
regarded as a matter of discerning the place nature has within some particular human good or interest. A more
positive statement would be to say that those who destroy nature are motivated by an unnecessarily narrow view of
the human good, and that 'what they count as important is too narrowly confined' (Hill, 1983: 219). In so doing the
inherent plurality of the 'human good' is occluded. That is, forms of anthropocentrism which narrow the human good
and human interests can be criticized as vices, or potential vices. At the same time, those who destroy nature also
often have a mistaken appreciation of the 'seriousness' (Taylor, 1989) of the human interest or good in the service of
which nature is destroyed. However, to reject anthropocentrism is not the solution, but is rather itself a vice of which
we need to be aware. A virtue approach is thus anthropocentric in that its reference point is some human good or
interest, but as argued in the next chapter, this ethical (as opposed to metaphysical) anthropocentrism is compatible
with including considerations of non-human interests and welfare.
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<The Stoics stress that to be a citizen of the world one does not need to give up local
identifications, which can frequently be a source of great richness in life. They suggest that we
think of ourselves not as devoid of local affiliations, but as surrounded by a series of concentric
circles. The first one is drawn around the self; the next takes in one's immediate family; then
follows the extended family; then, in order, one's neighbors or local group, one's fellow citydwellers, one's fellow countrymen -- and we can easily add to this list groupings based on ethnic,
linguistic, historical, professional, gender and sexual identities. Outside all these circles is the
largest one, that of humanity as a whole. Our task as citizens of the world will be to "draw the
circles somehow toward the center" (Stoic philosopher Hierocles, 1st 2nd CE), making all human
beings more like our fellow city dwellers, and so on. In other words, we need not give up our
special affections and identifications, whether ethnic or gender-based or religious. We need not
think of them as superficial, and we may think of our identity as in part constituted by them. We
may and should devote special attention to them in education. But we should work to make all
human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern, base our political deliberations on
that interlocking commonality, and give the circle that defines our humanity a special attention
and respect. >
Our argument is not that we should eliminate local levels, but rather that the global levels
should be looked a first
Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at University of Chicago Law School, 1994
<This clearly did not mean that the Stoics were proposing the abolition of local and national forms of political
organization and the creation of a world state. The point was more radical still: that we should give our first
allegiance to no mere form of government, no temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the
humanity of all human beings. The idea of the world citizen is in this way the ancestor and source of Kant's idea of
the "kingdom of ends," and has a similar function in inspiring and regulating moral and political conduct. One
should always behave so as to treat with equal respect the dignity of reason and moral choice in every human being.
It is this conception, as well, that inspires Tagore's novel, as the cosmopolitan landlord struggles to stem the tide of
nationalism and factionalism by appeals to universal moral norms. Many of the speeches of the character Nikhil
were drawn from Tagore's own cosmopolitan political writings. >
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<Asked where he came from, the ancient Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes replied, "I am a citizen of the world."
He meant by this, it appears, that he refused to be defined by his local origins and local group memberships, so
central to the self-image of a conventional Greek male; he insisted on defining himself in terms of more universal
aspirations and concerns. The Stoics who followed his lead developed his image of the kosmou polits or world
citizen more fully, arguing that each of us dwells, in effect, in two communities -- the local community of our birth,
and the community of human argument and aspiration that "is truly great and truly common, in which we look
neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun" (Seneca, De Otio). It is this
community that is, most fundamentally, the source of our moral obligations. With respect to the most basic moral
values such as justice, "we should regard all human beings as our fellow citizens and neighbors" (Plutarch, On the
Fortunes of Alexander). We should regard our deliberations as, first and foremost, deliberations about human
problems of people in particular concrete situations, not problems growing out of a national identity that is
altogether unlike that of others. Diogenes knew that the invitation to think as a world citizen was, in a sense, an
invitation to be an exile from the comfort of patriotism and its easy sentiments, to see our own ways of life from the
point of view of justice and the good. The accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any human being
might have been born in any nation. Recognizing this, his Stoic successors held, we should not allow differences of
nationality or class or ethnic membership or even gender to erect barriers between us and our fellow human beings.
We should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity,
our first allegiance and respect. >
Working global allows us to have self knowledge, solve our problems better, and allows us
to recognize the value of each and every person
Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at University of Chicago Law School, 1994 [Martha,
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism, The Boston Review, www.soci.niu.edu/~phildept/Kapitan/nussbaum1.html]
<Stoics who hold that good civic education is education for world citizenship recommend this attitude on three
grounds. First, they hold that the study of humanity as it is realized in the whole world is valuable for selfknowledge: we see ourselves more clearly when we see our ways in relation to those of other reasonable people.
Second, they argue, as does Tagore, that we will be better able to solve our problems if we face them in this way. No
theme is deeper in Stoicism than the damage done by faction and local allegiances to the political life of a group.
Political deliberation, they argue, is sabotaged again and again by partisan loyalties, whether to one's team at the
Circus or to one's nation. Only by making our fundamental allegiance that to the world community of justice and
reason do we avoid these dangers.
Finally, they insist that the stance of the kosmou polits is intrinsically valuable. For it recognizes in persons what is
especially fundamental about them, most worthy of respect and acknowledgment: their aspirations to justice and
goodness and their capacities for reasoning in this connection. This aspect may be less colorful than local or national
traditions and identities -- and it is on this basis that the young wife in Tagore's novel spurns it in favor of qualities in
the nationalist orator Sandip that she later comes to see as superficial; it is, the Stoics argue, both lasting and deep.>
<We make headway solving problems that require international cooperation. The air does not obey national
boundaries. This simple fact can be, for children, the beginning of the recognition that, like it or not, we live in a
world in which the destinies of nations are closely intertwined with respect to basic goods and survival itself. The
pollution of third-world nations who are attempting to attain our high standard of living will, in some cases, end up
in our air. No matter what account of these matters we will finally adopt, any intelligent deliberation about ecology
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-- as, also, about the food supply and population -- requires global planning, global knowledge, and the recognition
of a shared future. >
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<But is it sufficient? As students here grow up, is it sufficient for them to learn that they are
above all citizens of the United States, but that they ought to respect the basic human rights of
citizens of India, Bolivia, Nigeria, and Norway? Or should they, as I think -- in addition to giving
special attention to the history and current situation of their own nation -- learn a good deal more
than is frequently the case about the rest of the world in which they live, about India and Bolivia
and Nigeria and Norway and their histories, problems, and comparative successes? Should they
learn only that citizens of India have equal basic human rights, or should they also learn about
the problems of hunger and pollution in India, and the implications of these problems for larger
problems of global hunger and global ecology? Most important, should they be taught that they
are above all citizens of the United States, or should they instead be taught that they are above all
citizens of a world of human beings, and that, while they themselves happen to be situated in the
United States, they have to share this world of human beings with the citizens of other countries?
I shall shortly suggest four arguments for the second conception of education, which I shall call
cosmopolitan education. But first I introduce a historical digression, which will trace
cosmopolitanism to its origins, in the process recovering some excellent arguments that
originally motivated it as an educational project. >
In this sense, we may conclude that we are living through the (gradual or sudden?) demise of the old world order
and the (slow or sudden?) birth of a new one. Economically, this new order is based on an increased level of global
economic integration and unison. Politically, however, it is premised on the need to translate grassroots participatory
political action into increasingly popular democratic forms of governance at local, national, regional, and global
levels (Gills 2000c; 2001). Moreover, it is also based on a real need to combine the peoples and social forces of
North and South in new ways, bringing together new coalitions drawn from movements around the world. The
governments and the corporations of the world must now listen to and accommodate the demands of the peoples of
the whole world, who represent the voice of the governed. This new reality, which in my view is an objective one
and not mere idealism, therefore requires a new [*169] paradigm. This new paradigm of world order must be based
profoundly on multicivilizational dialogue and universal inclusion. Rather than a political order based on one nation,
we are moving toward the need for a political order based on one humanity, and only democratic norms can
accommodate such a form of governance.
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AT: Global local: Checks on globalization now (no need for global
state)
A centralized state is unnecessary, we have a system of checks and balances to check back
globalization
Brecheretal, Historian, Activist, and Analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, 2000 [Jeremy, Tim Costello and
Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below, p. 42-43]
<A centralized global state is not required to address these prob lems. Indeed, the difficult}7 of establishing such an
institution and the equally important difficulty of making it democratically accountable make such a state a dubious
objective for the advocates of globalization from below. But supranational regulation does not require such
centralization; the pattern of overlapping authority and multi ple loyalties that is now emerging suggests the
possibility of a system of checks and balances within an emerging global polity.19 As Filipino activist and scholar
Walden Bello put it,
Today's need is not another centralized global institution, reformed or unreformed, but the deconcentration and
decentralization of institutional power and the creation of a pluralistic system of institutions and organizations
interacting with one another amid broadly defined and flexible agreements and understandings.2"
Instead of counterposing local, national, global, and other levels of power , advocates of globalization from below
should argue for a strengthening in both state and civil society at every level of those non-market functions that are
necessary to protect people and planet. People need to be empowered at even,' level vis-a-vis corporations and the
market. The needed non-market functions should be initiated at any appropriate level, in state and/or civil society, in
ways that strengthen the grassroots movement and raise those at the bottom.21>
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having become free for his humanity, has freely taken the universe into his power and disposition (N, 4:248).
In summary, Nietzsche tried to combat the nihilism of the ascetic ideal (e.g., the collapse of the Christian table of values) by bringing forth new nonascetic values that
would enhance rather than devalue humanity's will to power. According to Heidegger, however ,
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Nietzsches philosophies were the driving forces behind Hitlers dictatorship - - placing
supreme value on the higher man legitimizes all atrocities
May, 99, (Simon, College Research Fellow in Philosophy @ Birkbeck College, Nietzsches Ethics and his War on
Morality, Nietzsches ethic versus morality: The new ideal, p. 132-133)
An apologist for Nietzsche might suggest that his ethic is not alone in effectively legitimizing inhumanity. He might
argue, for example, that some forms of utilitarianism could not prevent millions being sacrificed if greater numbers
could thereby be saved; or that heinous maxims could be consistently universalized by Kant's Categorical
Imperativemaxims against which Kant's injunction to treat all human beings as ends in themselves would afford
no reliable protection, both because its conception of 'humanity' is vague and because it would be overridden by our
duty, as rational agents, to respect just such universalized maxims. To this apologist one would reply that with
Nietzsche there is not even an attempt to produce a systematic safety net against cruelty, especially if one judges
oneself to be a 'higher' type of person with life-enhancing pursuitsand, to this extent, his philosophy licenses the
atrocities of a Hitler even though, by his personal table of values, he excoriates anti-Semitism and virulent nationalism. Indeed, to that extent it is irrelevant
whether or not Nietzsche himself advocates violence and bloodshed or whether he is the gentle person described by
his contemporaries. The reality is that the supreme value he places on individual life-enhancement and selflegislation leaves room for, and in some cases explicitly justifies, unfettered brutality.
In sum: the point here is not to rebut Nietzsche's claim that 'everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man' serves his enhancement 'as much as its opposite does' (BGE, 44my emphasis)for such
. It is rather to suggest that the necessary balance between danger and safety
which Nietzsche himself regards as a condition for flourishing (for example, in this quote from BGE, 44) is not vouchsafed by his
extreme individualism. Indeed, such individualism seems not only self-defeating, but also quite unnecessary: for
safeguards against those who have pretensions to sovereignty but lack nobility could be accepted on Nietzsche's
theory of value as just another 'condition for the preservation' of 'higher' types. Since the overriding aim of his attack
on morality is to liberate people from the repressiveness of the 'herd' instinct, this unrelieved potential danger to the
'higher' individual must count decisively against the successand the possibility of successof his project.
a rebuttal would be a major ethical undertaking in its own right
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Nazism is about
the "medicalisation of killing". Its genocidal impulses were implicit within a bio-medical vision and its vast, selfproclaimed programmatic task of racial and eugenic-hygiene. On an unprecedented scale it would assume control of
the human biological future, assuring health to positive racial stock and purging humanity of its sick, degenerative
elements. Its vision of "violent cure", of murder and genocide as a "therapeutic imperative", Lifton argues, resonates with
such Nietzschean themes.40
While every generation may emphasize their particular Nietzsche, there can be little doubt that in the first half of
this century various European political circles came to regard him as the deepest diagnostician of sickness and
degeneration and its most thoroughgoing regenerative therapist. "The sick", he wrote, "are man's greatest danger; not
the evil, not the 'beasts of prey'."41 To be sure, as was his wont, he employed these notions in multiple, shifting ways, as metaphor and irony (he even has a section on
form or not, there are clear informing parallels with key Nietzschean categories and goals. From one perspective, as Robert Jay Lifton has recently persuasively argued,
"ennoblement through degeneration"42) but most often, most crucially, it was represented (and understood) as a substantial literal danger whose overcoming through drastic measures was the
Although he was not alone in the wider nineteenth-century quasibio-medical, moral, discourse of "degeneration"43 - that highly flexible, politically adjustable tool that cut across the
ideological spectrum, able simultaneously to locate, diagnose and resolve a prevalent, though inchoate, sense of
social and cultural crisis through an exercise of eugenic labeling and a language of bio-social pathology and
potential renewal44 - he formed an integral part in defining and radicalizing it. He certainly constituted its most important conduit into the
emerging radical right. What else was Nietzsche's Lebensphilosophie , his reassertion of instinct and his proposed transvaluation whereby the
healthy naturalistic ethic replaced the sickly moral one (a central theme conveniently ignored or elided by the current post-structuralist champions of
precondition for the urgent re-creation of a "naturalized", non-decadent humankind.
Nietzsche). "Tell me, my brothers", Zarathustra asks, "what do we consider bad and worst of all? Is it not degeneration}'"15 In this world, the reassertion of all that is natural and healthy is
dependent upon the ruthless extirpation of those anti-natural ressentiment sources of degeneration who have thoroughly weakened and falsified the natural and aristocratic bases of life. Over and
over again, and in different ways, Nietzsche declared that "The species requires that the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish".46
The Nazi bio-political understanding of, and solution to "degeneration", as I have tried to show here and elsewhere,
was in multilayered ways explicitly Nietzsche-inspired. From the World War I through its Nazi implementation,
Nietzschean exhortations to prevent procreation of "anti-life" elements and his advocacy of euthanasia, of what he
called "holy cruelty" - "The Biblical prohibition 'thou shalt not kill'", he noted in The Will to Power, "is a piece of naivete compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life
to decadents: 'thou shalt not procreate!'. . . Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted - that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be antinature itself as morality!"47 both inspired and provided a "higher" rationale for theorists and practitioners off such measures.48
The translation of traditional anti-Jewish impulses into genocide and the murderous policies adopted in different
degrees to other labeled outsiders (Gypsies, physically and mentally handicapped, homosexuals, criminals, inferior Eastern peoples and Communist political enemies)
occurred within the distinct context of this medico-bio-eugenic vision. There were, to be sure, many buildingblocks that went into conceiving and implementing genocide and mass murder but I would argue that this
Nietzschean framework of thinking provided a crucial conceptual precondition and his radical sensibility a partial
trigger for its implementation.
Related to but also going beyond these programmatic parallels and links we must raise another highly speculative, though necessary, issue: the vexed question of enabling preconditions and
psychological motivations. Clearly, for events as thick and complex as these no single theoretical or methodological approach or methodology will suffice. Yet, given the extraordinary nature of
the events, more conventional modes of historical analysis soon reach their limits and demand novel answers (the study of Nazism has provided them in abundance, some more, some less
convincing49). I am not thus claiming exclusiveness for the Nietzschean element at this level of explanation, but rather arguing for his continued and important relevance. To be sure, of late,
many accounts of the ideas behind, and the psychological wellsprings enabling, mass murder have been, if anything, anti-Nietzschean in content. For Christopher Browning it was hardly
Nietzschean intoxication, the nihilistic belief that "all is permitted", that motivated the "ordinary killers" - but rather prosaic inuring psychological mechanisms such as group conformity,
deference to authority, the dulling powers of alcohol and simple (but powerful) processes of routinization.50 For George L. Mosse, far from indicating a dynamic anti-bourgeois Nietzschean
revolt, the mass murders represented a defense of bourgeois morality, the attempt to preserve a clean, orderly middle-class world against all those outsider and deviant groups that threatened it.51
These contain important insights but, in my view, leave out crucial experiential ingredients, closely related to the Nietzschean dimension, which must form at least part of the picture. At some
point or another, the realization must have dawned on the conceivers and perpetrators of this event that something quite extraordinary, unprecedented, was occurring and that ordinary and middleclass men were committing radically transgressive, taboo-breaking, quite "un-bourgeois" acts.52 Even if we grant the problematic proposition that such acts were done in order to defend
bourgeois interests and values, we would want to know about the galvanizing, radicalizing trigger that allowed decision-makers and perpetrators alike to set out in this direction and do the deed.
To argue that it was "racism" merely pushes the argument a step backward, for "racism" on its own -while always pernicious - has to be made genocidal.
We are left with the issue of the radicalizing, triggering forces. These may be many in number but it seems to me
that Nietzsche's determined anti-humanism (an atheism that, as George Lichtheim has noted, differs from the Feuerbachian attempt to replace theism with
humanism33), apocalyptic imaginings and exhortatory visions, rendered such a possibility, such an act, conceivable in the
first place (or, at the very least, once thought of and given the correct selective readings easily able to provide the
appropriate ideological cover). This Nietzschean kind of thought, vocabulary and sensibility constitutes an important
(if not the only) long-term enabling precondition of such radical elements in Nazism. With all its affinities to an
older conservatism, it was the radically experimental, morality-challenging, tradition-shattering Nietzschean
sensibility that made the vast transformative scale of the Nazi project thinkable. Nietzsche, as one contemporary
commentator has pointed out, "prepared a consciousness that excluded nothing that anyone might think, feel, or do,
including unimaginable atrocities carried out on a gigantic order".54
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Of course, Nazism was a manifold historical phenomenon and its revolutionary thrust sat side by side with petit-bourgeois, provincial, traditional and conservative impulses.55 But surely,
beyond its doctrinal emphases on destruction and violent regeneration, health and disease, the moral and historical
significance of Nazism lies precisely in its unprecedented transvaluations and boundary-breaking extremities, its
transgressive acts and shattering of previously intact taboos. It is here - however parodistic, selectively mediated or debased
- that the sense of Nazism, its informing project and experiential dynamic, as a kind of Nietzschean Great Politics
continues to haunt us.
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that "the eternal feminine draws us higher," the author of Beyond Good and Evil wrote: "I do not doubt that every nobler woman will resist this faith, for she believes the same about the Eternal-
The theme of the "strength" of not questioning the structure of power that serves the interests of a privileged class is
not simply anti-liberal to the point of malice (as Nietzsche suggests in the aphorism that precedes this one). It is anti-critical to the point of malice. These
statements on women, the working class, and the need of the privileged class for thoughtless and obedient "slaves"
are not simply isolated opinions on Nietzsche's part, as sometimes they tend to be read. They are logically tied to
other notions that Nietzsche is commended for holdingsuch as the distinction between the "superior" person and
the "herd," the belief in a "strong" culture, and even the love of one's fate. The fact that we ignore the concrete side of the issue while holding on
to the more abstract side shows that in this case we are much less logical than Nietzsche, for we are the ones caught in a logical dilemma, while Nietzsche is not. Nietzsche, however, is caught in
a much larger type of contradiction even though his logic is tight with respect to the connection between elitism and oppression. This is the contradiction between his intended affirmation of life
and his reactionary and nihilistic politics. Still, the political implications of Nietzsche's thought can be turned around to some extent if we ask: was not Nietzsche correct in insisting upon a
logical connection between a "strong" masculine ideal, a "strong" culture, and a blind system of political exploitation and psychological repression? Is it not true that if the goal of one's values is
to implement a "strong" patriarchal system where a few will command and the rest will obey, it is then foolish to allow moral codes which favor the notions of the universal brotherhood and
sisterhood of human beings? Does not the morality of universal human dignity entail in theory, if not also in practice, the elimination of all forms of elitism, domination, and oppression? In
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The criminal allure of terrorist groups and the cynicism of those who join them are additional reasons why it is a mistake to conciliate or appease a group like the IRA with political
concessions. Their political goals may be subsidiary to their criminal interests, and like any criminal enterprise they can be driven out of business only by the force of the law. Equally, to express
surprise that they tarnish political ideals with squalid tactics, or that they seem to be indifferent to the costs that their violence imposes on the communities they purport to represent, would be to
misunderstand their real nature and purpose.
Not all terrorists, however, are moral cynics. Not all terrorist groups use politics as an excuse for other straightforwardly violent ends. There are other groups whose
political purposes are genuine, but who nonetheless end up turning violence into a way of life. These are the groups
that have the characteristics, not of criminal gangs, but of fanatic sects. Here nihilism takes the form, not of
believing in nothing, but of believing in too much. What I mean is a form of conviction so intense, a devotion so
blind, that it becomes impossible to see that violence necessarily betrays the ends that conviction seeks to achieve.
Here the delusion is not tragic, as in the first case, because believers are not trapped into violence by the conduct of
the other side. Nor is it cynical: for these are true believers. They initiate violence as a sacred and redemptive duty.
This is the third path to nihilism, the fanatical use of high principle to justify atrocity. What is nihilistic is the belief
that such goals license all possible means, indeed obviate any consideration of the human costs. Nihilism here is
willed indifference to the human agents sacrificed on the altar of principle. Here nihilism is not a belief in nothing at
all; it is, rather, the belief that nothing about particular groups of human beings matters enough to require
minimizing harm to them.
The high principles commonly used to justify terrorism were once predominantly secular--varieties of conspiratorial Marxism--but today most of the justifying ideologies are religious. To call
religious justifications of violence nihilistic is, of course, to make a certain kind of value judgment, to assert that there cannot be, in principle, any metaphysical or God-commanded justification
for the slaughter of civilians. From a human rights standpoint, the claim that such inhumanity can be divinely inspired is a piece of nihilism, an inhuman devaluation of the respect owed to all
persons, and moreover a piece of hubris, since, by definition, human beings have no access to divine intentions, whatever they may be.
The hubris is not confined to vocalizing divine intention. It also consists in hijacking scriptural tradition. The devil can always quote scripture to his use, and there is never a shortage in any
faith of texts justifying the use of force. Equally, all religions contain sacred texts urging believers to treat human beings decently. Some may be more universalistic in these claims than others.
Some may confine the duties of benevolence to fellow believers, while others may extend these duties to the whole of humankind. But whatever the ambit of their moral concern, all religious
teaching offers some resistance to the idea that it is justifiable to kill or abuse other human beings. This resistance may range from outright condemnation to qualified justification as a last resort.
nihilist use of religious doctrine is one that perverts the doctrine into a justification for inhuman deeds and ignores
any part of the doctrine which is resistant to its violent purposes. The nihilism here engages in a characteristic
inversion: adjusting religious doctrine to rationalize the terrorist goal, rather than subjecting it to the genuine
interrogation of true faith.
A
It is unnecessary here to document the extent to which Al Qaeda has exploited and distorted the true faith of Islam. To take but one example, the tradition of jihad, which refers to the
obligation of the believer to struggle against inner weakness and corruption, has been distorted into an obligation to wage war against Jews and Americans. In the hands of Osama bin Laden, the
specifically religious and inner-directed content of jihad has been emptied out and replaced by a doctrine justifying acts of terror. This type of religious justification dramatically amplifies the
political impact of terrorist actions. When Al Qaeda strikes, it can claim that it acts on behalf of a billion Muslims. This may be a lie, but it is an influential one nonetheless.
Appropriating religious doctrine in this way also enables the group to offer potential recruits the promise of martyrdom. Immortality complicates the relationship between violent means and
political ends, for the promise of eternal life has the effect of making it a secondary matter to the suicide bomber whether or not the act achieves anything political at all. What matters most is
securing entry into Paradise. Here political violence becomes subservient not to a political end but to a personal one.
Once violent means cease to serve determinate political ends, they take on a life of their own. When personal
immortality becomes the goal, the terrorists cease to think like political actors, susceptible to rational calculation of
effect, and begin to act like fanatics.
It is not easy to turn human beings into fanatics. In order to do so, terrorist groups that use suicide bombers have to create a cult of death and sacrifice, anchored in powerful languages of
belief. Osama bin Laden used an interview with an American journalist in May I998 in Afghanistan to justify terrorism in the language of faith:
The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah, the tyrants, the traitors who commit acts of treason against
.
What is noticeable here is the use of religion not just to justify killing the infidel but to override the much more
serious taboo against killing fellow believers. The function of nihilism here is to recast real, living members of the
Islamic faith as traitors deserving death. Nihilism takes the form of nullifying the human reality of people and
turning them into targets.
their own countries and their own faith and their own prophet and their own nation
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nihilism, whether real or imagined, leads [*357] inexorably to authoritarian responses and to the
rise of ideology. The second phenomenon which gave rise to our particular predicament thus emerged from the conversion of subjective moral judgment into ideology. Whether
Polanyi so cogently has noted,
derived from the twentieth century revolutions based on socialism or Marxism, on the human rights movement, or on a resurgence of neo-conservatism, the intellectual roots of such movements
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If there is
no common basis for law or morality other than through a subjective or ideological construct, then the question is
not what values underpin a particular legal system, but how one's subjective preferences may be infused with power,
strategy and tactics throughout the general community or imposed by coercion. The lawyer-advocate has long used various techniques based
Marxist thinkers -- Habermas, Foucault and Berger and other non-legal critical scholars -- have gained influence in legal scholarship which finds them to be useful analytic tools.
on pragmatic ideas of progress, the frontier and change. These have been associated with the romanticism of the defender of the poor and downtrodden, the fighter for civil rights, the humanrights warrior and the social reformer, who use courts and law as instruments of social change. In this construct, law as a secular system has no normative content that is not ultimately subjective.
If God is dead, all things are morally possible. The main claim to legitimacy or validity rests in process; namely that the advocates who represent a particular morality or a particular social
philosophy fight and prevail as warriors and advocates in an existing decisionmaking process, akin to chivalry, aimed at changing official behavior or custom by fighting injustice, admittedly a
subjective construct. Once, however, the subjective advocacy model of changing the social structure is an accepted way of life, the natural reaction is that sauce for the goose is sauce for the
gander. If the objective validity of the normative system tacitly is rejected by those who seek to change it, then radicals holding an opposite belief might just as well produce a similar claim by an
activism with subjective preferences even more firmly rooted within the vices of common life. The dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis that seemed to move outward from the subjective to
an objective world-view could work for the radical right just as well as for the Marxist left!
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Nietzsche says that Christ's followers mutilated his teaching so much that, were He here today, He would not recognize it as His own; and he, moreover, refers to the New Testament in a
decidedly uncomplimentary way, calling it (as we have seen earlier) a literary fraud, an invention of ideas. We may well ask the pertinent question therefore, What, according to Nietzsche, is
Christ's real teaching? If the New Testament is not Christ's teaching, then where are we to look for it? Does Nietzsche mean that Christ's teaching in reality was opposed to the New Testament
and really conformed more to his own ideal of great teaching in Thus Spake Zarathustra? If Nietzsche calls the New Testament a 'literary fraud', what justification has he for regarding Jesus as a
It is
without any historical evidence. No wonder Nietzsche displays uncertainty and inconsistency4 in his opinion of the
Founder of Christianity (i.e. Christ, not Paul). Nietzsche is doubtless right in his insistence on the fact that the
Gospels are the outcome of the very Early Church, but to dismiss all the teaching contained therein as frauds and
inventions designed purely for ends of self-interest is a huge blunder. The New Testament reflects the current
conceptions of the Early Church concerning Christ, His life, teaching, and work; but if the teaching contained
therein is purely invention and a weapon of power in the hands of the masses, then a fortiori to speak of Christ at all
is sheer nonsense, for the Gospels supply the primary data for a portrait of Christ together with His teaching.
Nietzsche's 'inconceivable corruption' (to use Nietzsche's own phrase) of the New Testament can only be put down
to a mind coloured by preconceived ideas and irrational, unscientific prejudice. He attempts (and the attempts are
not very convincing) to fit all the facts into his particular theory and schemes of things. With Nietzsche, it is a
question of rnal-adjusting the facts to suit his arguments. He gives the facts a little twist and so they are found to
support his thesis. We can only smile at his weak attempts to explain the life and teaching of Christ. To hit upon an isolated
decadent or disillusioned dreamer? If the New Testament represents ideas invented by the early Christians, then it stands to reason that Nietzsche's scanty portrait of Christ is false.
saying like the so called cry of despair and disillusionment from the Cross (i.e. 'My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?') and base a belief on it is dangerous.6 One strongly suspects that
in the light of recent research in New Testament criticism, Nietzsche would be constrained to discard some of his theories regarding the New Testament. We should do well to remind the reader at
this point that Nietzsche is a poor hand at New Testament exegesis. His interpretation, for instance, of the Book of Revelation found in The Genealogy of Morals (p. 54) is entirely false.
(Organized Christianity has always had to suffer at the hands of men who are not competent New Testament scholars at all and are not recognized as such, yet who dogmatize freely on the
interpretation of the Bible. A modern instance of this is found in George Bernard Shaw's Adventures of a Black Girl in her Search for God.)
Furthermore, to speak of Jesus as out of touch with reality and living in a vain world of dreams and images, is a
complete misrepresentation of the facts. (We saw just previously that Nietzsche is hardly competent to pass any judgment at all on Christ in face of his peculiar theory
of the New Testament.) The Idealist and the Realist are both perfectly blended in Jesus. He was well aware of the facts and contradictions of life; He was alive to the reality of sin; His
sayings and parables reveal that He was constantly in touch with the actual. His temptations show that He
underwent great moral and spiritual conflicts which did not leave Him when He left the wilderness. No other
great teacher has had such command of the problems of life as Jesus or been so thoroughly acquainted with its
sorrow and pain. We might add here that Nietzsche himself, living his hermit life in Italy and Switzerland, was
hardly the man to speak of Jesus as out of touch with the reality of life. It was Nietzsche who was the vain dreamer,
not Christ. It was Nietzsche who withdrew himself from the surge of an angry world, not Christ.
Nietzsche opposes Christianity - - his ideas sought to strip Christianity of its values
Jaspers, 63, (Karl, German psychiatrist and philosopher Nietzsche and Christianity, Introduction, p. 1)
The shocking savagery of Nietzsche's stand against Christianity is well known. To quote an example: "If one
equivocates nowadays in his relation to Christianity, I will not give him the last finger of my two hands. Here there
is only one righteousness: utter rejection." Nietzsche proceeds to unmask Christianity with indignation and
contempt, in a style which runs from calm inquiry to strident pamphleteering. Christian realities are stripped bare
under an extraordinary wealth of aspects. Absorbing the logic of earlier oppositions, Nietzsche became the new
fountainhead of anti-Christianity, which had perhaps never before been so radical and so aware of its ultimate
implications.
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The alternative fails - - calls for overcoming nihilism reinstates the notion of self division
which results in a constant state of nihilism
Schutte, 84, (Ofelia, assistant professor of philosophy @ University of Florida, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without
Masks, Conclusion, p. 190)
Traditionally, the answer to the split between Nietzsche's critique of human life and his affirmation of life has been
to explain his reaction against human weakness as a reaction against nihilism. His position might be justified this
way if one viewed the rejection of human nature not as a devaluation of human nature as such but as a rejection of
the nihilism that has "overtaken" humanity. Certainly, Nietzsche's workat least significant portions of itlends
support to this hypothesis. Nevertheless, his analysis of nihilism is insufficiently radical. It does not point to the
dualism inherent in the notions of strong versus weak, of master versus slave. In order to overcome nihilism, one
must transcend all forms of dualism, not merely some of them. The use of the notion of nihilism as one of two poles
of an opposition between "right" and "wrong" must also be avoided. If "nihilistic" human life stands to "lifeaffirming" human life as evil to the good, and if, furthermore, one considers the "prolific" forces as being
commanded by "destiny" to chastise the "evil" forces, then one falls back precisely upon the problem of self-division
that plagues the nihilistic consciousness. The question that emerges out of this is whether it is indeed possible for
human beings to transcend dualism.
Nietzsches theories dont apply - - the only way to effectively criticize Western culture is to
experience it
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Jay, 88, (Martin, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History @ University of Berkeley, Fin de Siecle: Socialism
and other essays, From Intellectual History to Cultural Criticism: Reflections on the Habermas-Gadamer Debate,
p. 33)
One final implication of Gadamer's hermeneutics that merits comment concerns the notion of a fusion of horizons.
Putting aside its problematic harmonistic implications, what this fusion suggests is, first, that historians themselves
must be aware of their own historicity and, second, that they are themselves irrevocably changed by their reflective
involvement with the past. Although it would be wrong to characterize this involvement simply as a form of
surrender,57 it is nonetheless more ambiguous in this regard than either the outmoded positivist objectification of
the past or the more recent structuralist version of the historian as a detached decoder of the synchronic relations of
the past preserved in the present.38 Gadamer's defense of prejudice may well have conservative implications, but it
reminds us that we delude ourselves if we think our present vantage point is somehow outside of history.
Participation as well as distanciation is necessary to our understanding of the past. It is impossible, as some of the
French post-structuralists seem to imply, to criticize the Western tradition from a position external to it.
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The alternative fails - - attempts to move beyond nihilism only brings back its return
Research in Phenomenology, 03, (Dennis Keenan, Nietzsche and the Eternal Return of Sacrifice, 33 167-85
2003, wilsonselectplus)
In the work of Nietzsche, sacrifice can only sacrifice itself over and over (in an eternal return of the same) because
what it seeks to overcome (the nihilistic revelation of truth that sublates sacrifice's negation) makes this sacrifice of
itself both necessary and useless. The truth is eternally postponed in a necessary sacrificial gesture that can only
sacrifice itself, thereby rendering itself useless. In the attempt to step beyond nihilism, that is, in the attempt to
negate (or sacrifice) nihilism, one repeats the negation characteristic of nihilism. One becomes inextricably
implicated in the move of nihilistic sacrifice. The sacrifice of the sacrifice characteristic of nihilism, that is, the
sacrifice of sacrifice, can only take place as (perform itself as) the impossibility (or eternally postponed possibility)
of its realization. One, therefore, produces or performs an interminable step/not beyond, an incessant step beyond
that eternally returns.
Sacrifice is to be overcome. What could be more obvious to a reader of the work of Nietzsche? And yet, is it that
obvious? A careful reading of the work of Nietzsche will reveal that in the attempt to step beyond sacrifice, one
becomes inextricably implicated in the move of nihilistic sacrifice. Sacrifice returns ... eternally.
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The call for distinguishing individuals as superior or inferior reinforces the dependence on
authoritative systems of power - - the alternative will never solve because it relies on higher
powers - - it is impossible to produce change until individuals are able to overcome the
desire for a superior/inferior dichotomy
Schutte, 84, (Ofelia, assistant professor of philosophy @ University of Florida, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without
Masks, Conclusion, p. 192-193)
The ideology of superior/inferior reinforces the dependence of individuals upon authoritative systems of value.
Because one can always be judged inferior to something superior to oneself, one is always subject to the power of
that which is deemed superior to one's performance and values. This creates in some the desire to conform to
external standards of conduct so as to prove one's value. However, the result of this type of alienation is the
mentality of the "herd" criticized by Nietzsche. On the other hand, in others the ideology of superior/inferior may
create a need to compete and either rival or overcome the previous authorities. And yet there seems to be only one
permissible way of being successful in this respect, and that is to become a "new" authority. The circle of alienation,
however, is not broken by the latter procedure. The person who attains the more valuable or "superior" status simply
moves to a different position in the circle of nihilism.
Moreover, because one cannot be "superior" in every respect, the organism remains fragmented and alienated.
Standards of values outside its own needs are held up as measures of its value in every conceivable area of the
individual's appearance and performance. Indeed, this panorama of existence yields the scene laid out by Nietzsche
where modern human beings are depicted as either completely manipulated by standards of value external to
themselves or else, in rebellion against this, rising as dictators over the masses. In a society or culture where
everyone has to account for one's value to a "higher" authority, the possibility of emptiness and fragmentation will
always stay with human beings. The need to prove one's value to a higher authority may keep one from developing
those talents and virtues that would be most meaningful to oneself. The origin of the depreciation of human life,
then, is in the need to make human life fit the expectations of a "superior" authority.
The divided consciousness resulting from this cannot transcend nihilism until and unless it can transcend the
dependence on authoritarianism. The nihilistic mind wants to control reality; it does not want reality simply to be.
Where it can no longer control, it only knows how to suspend its desire to grasp by submitting to a higher force.
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This reinforces its sense of helplessness and its inordinate need always to keep in control of things. Like "superior"
and "inferior," the opposites "good" and "evil" serve to reinforce the authoritarian mentality. It is not so much the
opposition of terms as the authoritative confinement into which the self is trapped when these terms are employed
that reveals their nihilistic nature. One must remember that Zarathustra, the superior teacher, is just as confined to
his mountain topdespite the appearance of freedomas the "inferior" people living in the valley. Once the
ideology of superior/inferior and good/evil sets in, one is confined, restricted, and immobilized in the quest for
personal integration and a healthy sense of values. One escapes individuality by placing one's identity within the
boundaries of one or both of these categories (superior/inferior, good/evil). Escaping individuality, one never
succeeds in learning what it means to be a healthy individual.
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Though we may readily accept and even welcome Heidegger's claim that works
of art reveal the truth or essence of beings ("The work [of art] ... is not the reproduction of some particular entity that happens to be pres ent at any given time,"
observes Heidegger; "it is, on the contrary, the reproduction of the thing's general essence"), we must question the attempt to transpose aestheticometaphysical criteria to the realm of political life proper. Is it in point of fact meaningful to speak of the "unveiling
of truth" as the raison d'etre of politics in the same way one can say this of a work of art or a philosophical work? Is
not politics rather a nonmetaphysical sphere of human interaction, in which the content of collective human
projects, institutions, and laws is articulated, discussed, and agreed upon? Is it not, moreover, in some sense dangerous to
expect "metaphysical results" from politics? For is not politics instead a sphere of hu man plurality, difference, and
multiplicity; hence, a realm in which the more exacting criteria of philosophical truth must play a sub ordinate role? And
thus, would it not in fact be to place a type of totalitarian constraint on politics to expect it to deliver over truth in
such pristine and unambiguous fashion? And even if Heidegger's own conception of truth (which we shall turn to shortly) is sufficiently tolerant and pluralistic to allay
such fears, shouldn't the main category of political life be justice instead of truth? Undoubtedly, Heidegger's long-standing
prejudices against "value-philosophy prevented him from seriously entertaining this proposition; and thus, as a
category of political judgment, justice would not stand in sufficiently close proximity to Being . In all of the aforementioned
instances, we see that Heideggers political philosophy is overburdened with ontological considerations that end up
stifling the inner logic of politics as an independent sphere of human action.
aesthetic judgments is an extremely tenuous proposition.
66
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Heidegger undermines morals and politics the alternative will only cause suffering and
the destroy all ethics
Thiele Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida 2003 [Leslie Paul, The Ethics and Politics
of Narrative, Foucalt and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, editors Rosenberg and Milchman]
<The complementarity of Heidegger's and Foucault's accounts of modern demons and saving graces should not be
too surprising. Foucault's indebtedness to and fascination with Heidegger is well documented. 1 My intent in this
chapter is neither to focus on the complementarity of these visions, nor to outline the striking philosophical and
political differences that remain in Heidegger's and Foucault's work. Rather, I attempt to make a claim for what at
first blush might appear a lost cause. Despite their originality and intellectual brilliance, Heidegger and Foucault are
often castigated as ethico-political dead-ends. They are criticized for their unwillingness or inability to supply the
grounds for sound moral and political judgment. Heidegger's embrace of Nazism, in particular, is frequently
identified as proof positive that he has little, if anything, to contribute to the ethico-political domain. The standard
charge is that his highly abstract form of philosophizing, empyrean ontological vantage point, and depreciation of
das Man undermines moral principle and political responsibility. From his philosophical heights, it is
suggested, Heidegger remained blind to human sufferings, ethical imperatives, and political practicalities. He
immunized himself against the moral sensitivity, compassion, and prudence that might have dissuaded him from
endorsing and identifying with a brutal regime. Those who embrace his philosophy, critics warn, court similar
dangers.
In like fashion, it is held that Foucault dug himself into an equally deep, though ideologically relocated, moral and
political hole. Genealogical studies left Foucault convinced of the ubiquity of the disciplinary matrix. There would
be no final liberation. The sticky, normalizing webs of power were inescapable and a hermeneutics of suspicion
quashed any hope of gaining the ethical and political high ground. 2 As such, critics charge, Foucault stripped from
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us all reason for resistance to unjust power and all hope of legitimating alternative ethico-political institutions. In a
Foucauldian world of panoptic power that shapes wants, needs, and selves, critics worry, one would have no
justification for fighting and nothing worth fighting for. 3
In sum, Heidegger's and Foucault's critics suggest that both thinkers undermine the foundations of the practical
wisdom needed to ethically and politically navigate late modernity. Despite the brilliance and originality of their
thought, arguably the greatest philosopher and the greatest social and political theorist of the twentieth century
remain ungrounded ethically and divorced from political responsibility. Critics argue that Heidegger's statements
and actions endorsing and defending Nazi authoritarianism and Foucault's radical anarchism, as displayed in his
discussions of popular justice with Maoists, demonstrate that neither thinker is capable of supplying us with the
resources for sound moral and political judgment.>
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<Apropos of this precise point, I myself run into my first trouble with Heidegger (since I began as a Heideggerian my first published hook was on Heidegger and language). When, in my youth, I was bombarded by the official
Communist philosophers' stories of Heidegger's Nazi engagement, they left me rather cold; I was definitely more on
the side of the Yugoslav Heideggarians. All of a sudden, however, I became aware of how these Yugoslav
Heideggarians were doing exactly the sauce thing with respect to the Yugoslav ideology of self-management as
Heidegger himself did with respect to Nazism: in ex-Yugoslavia, Heideggerians entertained the same ambiguously
assertive relationship towards Socialist self- management, the official ideology of the Communist regime - in their
eyes, the essence of sell-management was the very essence of modern man, which is why the philosophical notion of
self-managemrnt suits the ontological essence of our epoch, while the standard political ideology of the regime
misses this 'inner greatness' of self-management ... Heideggerians are thus eternally in search of a positive, ontic
political system that would come closest to the epochal ontological truth, a strategy which inevitably leads to error
(which, of course, is always acknowledged only retroactively, post factum, after the disastrous outcome of one's
engagement).
As Heidegger himself put it, those who carne closest to the Ontological Truth are condemned to err at the ontic level
... err about what? Precisely about the line of separation between ontic and ontological. The paradox not to be
underestimated is that the very philosopher who focused his interest on the enigma of ontological difference - who
warned again and again against the metaphysical mistake of conferring ontological dignity on some ontic content
(God as the highest Entity, for example) - fell into the trap of conferring on Nazism the ontological dignity of suiting
the essence of modern man. The standard defence of Heidegger against the reproach of his Nazi past consists of two
points: not only was his Nazi engagement a simple personal error (a stupidity [Dummheit]', as Heidegger himself
put it) in no way inherently related to his philosophical project; the main counter-argument is that it is Heidegger's
own philosophy that enables us to discern the true epochal roots of modern totalitarianism. However, what remains
unthought here is the hidden complicity between the ontological indifference towards concrete social systems
(capitalism, Fascism. Communism), in so far as they all belong to the same horizon of modern technology, and the
secret privileging of a concrete sociopolitical model (Nazism with Heidegger, Communism with some 'Heideggerian
Marxists') as closer to the ontological truth of our epoch.
Here one should avoid the trap that caught Heidegger's defenders, who dismissed Heideggers Nazi engagement as
simple an anomaly, a fall into the ontic level, in blatant contradiction to his thought, which teaches us not to confuse
ontological horizon with ontic choices (as we have already seen, Heidegger is at his strongest when he demonstrates
how, on a deeper structural level, ecological, conservative, and so on, oppositions to the modern universe of
technology are already embedded in the horizon of what they purport to reject: the ecological critique of the
technological exploitation of nature ultimately leads to a more 'environmentally sound' technology. etc.). Heidegger
did not engage in the Nazi political project 'in spite of' his ontological philosophical approach, but because of it; this
engagement was not 'beneath' his philosophical level - on the contrary if one is to understand Heidegger, the key
point is to grasp the complicity (in Hegelese: 'speculative identity') between the elevation above ontic concerns and
the passionate 'ontic' Nazi political engagement.
One can now see the ideological trap that caught Heidegger: when he criticizes Nazi racism on behalf of the true
'inner greatness' of the Nazi movement, he repeats the elementary ideological gesture of maintaining an inner
distance towards the ideological text - of claiming that there is something more beneath it, a non-ideological kernel:
ideology exerts its hold over us by means of this very insistence that the Cause we adhere to is not 'merely'
ideological. So where is the trap? When the disappointed Heidegger turns away from active engagement in the Nazi
movement, he does so because the Nazi movement did not maintain the level of its 'inner greatness', but legitimized
itself with inadequate (racial) ideology. In other words, what he expected from it was that it should legitimize itself
through direct awareness of its 'inner greatness'. And the problemlies in this very expectation that a political
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movement that will directly refer to its historico-ontological foundation is possible. This expectation, however, is in
itself profoundly metaphysical, in so far as it fails to recognize that the gap separating the direct ideological
legitimization of a movement from its 'inner greatness' (its historico-ontological essence) is constitutive, a positive
condition of its 'functioning'. To use the terms of the later Heidegger, ontological insight necessarily entails ontic
blindness and error, and vice versa - that is to say, in order to be 'effective' at the ontic level, one must disregard
the ontological horizon of one's activity. (In this sense, Heidegger emphasizes that 'science doesn't think' and that,
far from being its limitation, this inability is the very motor of scientific progress.) In other words, what Heidegger
seems unable to endorse is a concrete political engagement that would accept its necessary, constitutive blindness
- as if the moment we acknowledge the gap separating the awareness of the ontological horizon from ontic engage ment, any ontic engagement is depreciated, loses its authentic dignity.>
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"Insofar as Heidegger can be said to have had a project to shape human lifeways, it was as an endeavor to resist, or should I say, demur from, what he conceived to he an all-encroaching
technocratic mentality and civilization that rendered human beings 'inauthentic' in their relationship to a presumably self-generative reality, 'isness', or more esoterically, 'Being' (Sein). Not unlike
Heidegger viewed modernity' with its democratic spirit, rationalism, respect for the individual,
and technological advances as a 'falling' (Gefallen) from a primal and naive innocence in which humanity once
'dwelled, remnants of which he believed existed in the rustic world into which he was born a century ago.
'Authenticity', it can be said without any philosophical frills, lay in the pristine Teutonic world of the tribal Germans
who retained their ties with the Gods, and with later peoples who still tried to nourish their past amidst the blighted
traits of the modern world. Since some authors try to muddy Heidegger's prelapsarian message by focusing on his assumed belief in individual freedom and ignoring his hatred
many German reactionaries,
of the French Revolution and its egalitarian, 'herd'-like democracy of the 'They', it is worth emphasizing that such a view withers m the light of his denial of individuality. The individual by
As a member of
the Nazi party, which he remained up to the defeat of Germany twelve years later, his antihumanism reached
strident, often blatantly reactionary proportions. Newly appointed as the rector of the University of Freiburg upon
Hitler's ascent to power, he readily adopted the Fuehrer-principle of German fascism and preferred the title RektorFuhrer, hailing the spirit of National Socialism as an antidote to 'the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods,
the destruction of the earth [by technology], the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of
everything free and creative. His most unsavory remarks were directed in the lectures, from which these lines are taken, 'from a metaphysical point of view', against 'the
pincers' created by America and Russia that threaten to squeeze 'the farthermost corner of the globe ... by technology and ... economic exploitation.' Technology, as Heidegger
construes it, is 'no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm
for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing , i.e., of truth.30 After which
Heidegger rolls out technology's transformations, indeed mutations, which give rise to a mood of anxiety and finally
hubris, anthropocentricity, and the mechanical coercion of things into mere objects for human use and exploitation.
himself counts for nothing', he declared after becoming a member of the National Socialist party in 1933. 'The fate of our Volk m its state counts for everything.' 22
28
29
Heidegger's views on technology are part of a larger weltanschauung which is too multicolored to discuss here, and demands a degree of inter pretive effort we must forgo for the present in the
Suffice it to say that there is a good deal of primitivistic animism in Heidegger's treatment of
the 'revealing' that occurs when techne is a 'clearing' for the 'expression' of a crafted material - not unlike the Eskimo
sculptor who believes (quite wrongly, I may add) that he is 'bringing out' a hidden form that lies in the walrus ivory he is
carving. But this issue must be seen more as a matter of metaphysics than of a spir itually charged technique. Thus,
when Heidegger praises a windmill, in contrast to the 'challenge' to a tract of land from which the hauling out of
coal and ore' is subjected, he is not being 'ecological'. Heidegger is concerned with a windmill, not as an ecological
technology, but more metaphysically with the notion that 'its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to
the wind's blowing'. The windmill 'does not unlock energy from the air currents, in order to store it'. 31 Like man in
relation to Being, it is a medium for the 'realization' of wind, not an artifact for acquiring power. Basically, this
interpretation of a technological interrelationship reflects a regression - socially and psychologically as well as
metaphysically into quietism. Heidegger advances a message of passivity or passivity conceived as a human
activity, an endeavor to let things be and 'disclose' themselves. 'Letting things be' would be little more than a trite
Maoist and Buddhist precept were it not that Heidegger as a National Socialist became all too ideologically
engaged, rather than 'letting things be', when he was busily undoing 'intellectualism,' democracy, and techno logical
intervention into the 'world'. Considering the time, the place, and the abstract way in which Heidegger treated
humanity's 'Fall' into technological inauthenticity a Fall that he, like Ellul, regarded as inevitable, albeit a
metaphysical, nightmare - it is not hard to see why he could trivialize the Holocaust, when he deigned to notice it at
all, as part of a techno-industrial condition. 'Agriculture is now a motorized (motorsierte) food industry, in essence
the same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps,' he coldly observed, 'the
same as the blockade and starvation of the countryside, the same as the production of the hydrogen bombs. 32 In
placing the industrial means by which many Jews were killed before the ideological ends that guided their Nazi
exterminators, Heidegger essentially displaces the barbarism of a specific state apparatus, of which he was a part, by
the technical proficiency he can attribute to the world at large! These immensely revealing offhanded remarks,
drawn from a speech he gave in Bremen m 1949, are beneath contempt. But they point to a way of thinking that
context of a criticism of technophobia.
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gave an autonomy to technique that has fearful moral consequences which we are living with these days in the name
of the sacred, a phraseology that Heidegger would find very congenial were he alive today. Indeed, technophobia, followed
to its logical and crudely primitivistic conclusions, finally devolves into a dark reactionism and a paralyzing quietism. For if our
confrontation with civilization turns on passivity before a disclosing of Being, a mere dwelling on the earth, and
a letting things be, to use Heideggers verbiage much of which has slipped into deep ecologys vocabulary as
well the choice between supporting barbarism and enlightened humanism has no ethical foundations to sustain
it. Freed of values grounded in objectivity, we are lost in a quasi-religious antihumanism, a spirituality that can
with the same equanimity hear the cry of a bird and ignore the anguish of six million once-living people who were
put to death by the National Socialist state.
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intellectuals quickly became masters of judgments of absolute superiority and had no difficulty in defining a contest between good and evil. Cognitive dissonance is an astonishing phenomenon,
altered the entire human conception of freedom and dignity for formerly marginalized groups. The entire "socialist experiment," by contrast, ended in stasis, ethnic hatreds, the absence of even
under Churchill was "the West" in 1940, so was the United States from 1945 to 1989, drawing from its values to stand against what was simultaneously its mutant offspring and its antithesis. In
the twentieth century, the West met and survived its greatest trial. On the whole, however, Western intellectuals do not revel in these triumphs, to say the least. Where is the celebration? Just as
important, where is the accounting? On the Left, to have either would be to implicate one's own thought and will in the largest crime and folly in the history of mankind. We have seen myriad
documentaries on the collective and individual suffering of the victims of Nazism, but where is the Shoah, or the Night and Fog, let alone the Nuremberg trails of the postcommunist present? As
the countless victims who froze to death or were maimed in the Arctic death
camps would go unremembered; the officers and guards who broke their bodies and often their souls would live out
their lives on pensions, unmolested; and those who gave the orders would die peacefully and unpunished. Our documentary makers and moral intellectuals do not let us forget any
victim of the Holocaust. We hunt down ninety-year-old guards so that the bones of the dead might have justice, and properly so . The bones of Lenin's and Stalin's and
Brezhnev's camps cry out for justice, as do the bones of North Vietnam's exterminations, and those of Poi Pot's
millions, and Mao's tens of millions. In those cases, however, the same intellectuals cry out against--what is their phrase?--"witch-hunts," and ask us to let the past be the
Solzhenitsyn predicted repeatedly in The Gulag Archipelago,
past. We celebrated the millennium with jubilation; we have not yet celebrated the triumph of the West. Ask American high school or even college students to number Hitler's victims and
Columbus's victims, and they will answer, for both, in the tens of millions. Ask them to number Stalin's victims and, if my experience is typical, they will answer in the thousands. Such is their
in confirming or refuting various theories on the outcome of the Cold War (let alone, given their contemporary concerns, in analyzing ecological or gender politics under communist or Third
World regimes). Less obvious, but equally striking in some ways, has been the absence of celebration on so much of the intellectual Right, because it is not at all certain something worth calling
Western civilization did in fact survive the twentieth century.
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shifting frontier of encroaching violence and declaring "not one step further," though death may be the end of it-only this unwavering firmness offers any genuine defense of peace for the individual, of genuine peace for mankind
at large. n2
In past human crises, writers and thinkers strained language to the breaking point to keep alive the memory of the unimaginable, to keep the
human conscience from forgetting. In the current context, however, intellectuals seem more devoted to abstract assaults on values than to
thoughtful probing of the moral dimensions of human experience.
"Heirs of the ancient possessions of higher knowledge and literacy skills," n3 we seem to have lost our nerve, and not only because
of Holocaust history and its tragic aftermath. We feel insecure before the empirical absolutes of hard science. We are
intimidated by the "high modernist rage against mimesis and content," n4 monstrous progeny of the union between
Nietzsche and philosophical formalism, the grim proposal we have bought into that there is no truth, no objectivity,
and no disinterested knowledge. n5
Less certain about the power of language, that "oldest flame of the [*47] humanist soul," n6 to frame a credo to live
by or criteria to judge by, we are vulnerable even to the discredited Paul de Man's indecent hint that "wars and
revolutions are not empirical events . . . but 'texts' masquerading as facts." n7 Truth and reality seem more elusive
than they ever were in the past; values are pronounced to be mere fictions of ruling elites to retain power. We are
embarrassed by virtue.
Words collide and crack under these new skeptical strains, dissolving into banalities the colossal enormity of what must be expressed lest we
forget. Remembering for the future has become doubly dispiriting by our having to remember for the present, too, our having to register and
confront what is wrong here and now.
The reality to be fixed in memory shifts as we seek words for it; the memory we set down is flawed by our subjectivities. It is selective,
deceptive, partial, unreliable, and amoral. It plays tricks and can be invented. It stops up its ears to shut out what it does not dare to face. n8
Lodged in our brains, such axioms, certified by science and statistics, tempt us to concede the final irrelevance of words and memory. We have to
get on with our lives. Besides, memories reconstructed in words, even when they are documented by evidence, have not often changed the world
or fended off the powerful seductions to silence, forgetting, or denying.
Especially denying, which, in the case of the Holocaust, has become an obscene industry competing in the open market of ideas for control of our
sense of the past. It is said that the Holocaust never happened. Revisionist history with a vengeance is purveyed in words; something in words
must be set against it. Yet what? How do we nerve to the task when we are increasingly disposed to cast both words and memory in a condition of
cryogenic dubiety?
Not only before but also since 1945, the criminality of governments, paraded as politics and fattening on linguistic manipulation and deliberately
reimplanted memory of past real or imagined grievance, has spread calamity across the planet. "The cancer that has eaten at the entrails of
Yugoslavia since Tito's death [has] Kosovo for its locus," but not merely as a piece of land. The country's rogue adventurers use the word
"Kosovo" to reinvoke as sacred the land where Serbs were defeated by Turks in 1389! n9 Memory of bloody massacres in 1389, sloganized and
distorted in 1989, demands the bloody revenge of new massacres and returns civilization not to its past glory but to its gory tribal wars. As Matija
Beckovic, the bard of Serb nationalism, writes, "It is as if the Serbian people waged only one battle--by widening the Kosovo charnel-house, by
adding wailing upon wailing, by counting new martyrs to the martyrs of Kosovo. . . . Kosovo is the Serbianized [*48] history of the Flood--the
Serbian New Testament." n10
A cover of Suddeutsche Zeitung in 1994 was printed with blood donated by refugee women from Bosnia in an eerily perverse afterbirth of
violence revisited. n11
We stand benumbed before multiplying horrors. As Vaclav Havel warned more than a decade ago, regimes that
generate them "are the avant garde of a global crisis in civilization." The depersonalization of power in "system,
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ideology and apparat," pathological suspicions about human motives and meanings, the loosening of individual
responsibility, the swiftness by which disastrous events follow one upon another "have deprived us of our
conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual humanity." n12 Nothing less than
the transformation of human consciousness is likely to rescue us.>
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<Liberalism is thus insufficient for human dignity because the election that justifies man "comes from a god or
Godwho beholds him in the face of the other man, his neighbor, the original 'site' of the Revelation."34 Similarly,
humanism is insufficient, and "modern antihuman-ism ... is true over and beyond the reasons it gives itself." What
Levinas finds laudable in antihumanism is that it " abandoned the idea of per son, goal and origin of itself, in which
the ego is still a thing because it is still a being." As such, antihumanism does not eradicate the human, but "clears
the place for subjectivity positing itself in abnegation , in sacrifice, in a substitution which precedes the will." It
would therefore be a grave error to conclude in haste that Levinas's antihumanism is either inhuman or inhumane. To
the contrary. Levinas declares that "humanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human,"3''
because it is insufficiently attuned to alterity. If one understood "hu manism" to mean a "humanism of the Other,"
then there would be no greater humanist than Levinas.36>
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punches out docile bodies, whereas the formed seese Being as that neutered term and no-thing that call us
Foucault (like Spanos) never works out how genealogy is emancipatory, or how emancipation could be realized
collectives by actual agents in the world. The 'undefined work of freedom' the later Foucault speaks of in his work.
The genealogy of power is as much a hypostatization as is fundamental ontology: such hypostatizations tend to
institute the impossibility of practical resistance or freedom. In short, I dont think the Heideggerian 'dialogue' with
Foucault sufficiency tames or complements Heidegger, nor does it make his discourse (or Foucaults, for that matter)
any more emancipatory or oppositional. Indeed, Foucaults reified theory of power seems to undermine the very
notion of Opposition since there is no subject (but rather a 'docile' body) to do the resisting (or in his later work, a
privatized self to be within a regime of truth), nor an object to be resisted. As Said rightly points out in the The
World, The Text, and the Critic, Foucault more or less eliminates the central dialectic of opposed forces that still
underlies modern society (p. 221) Foucault's theory of power is shot through with false empirical analysis, yet
Spanos seems to accept them as valid diagnoses. Spanos fails to see, to paraphrase Saids criticism of Foucaults
theory of power, that power is neither a spider's web without the spider, nor a smoothly functioning diagram (p. 221)
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by wishing to.
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Baudrillard speaks from an egoistic position of privilege his criticism is just a narcissistic
game
Rojek 1993 (Chris, Deputy Director, Theory, Culture & Society Centre , Professor of Sociology and Culture at
Nottingham Trent University, Forget Buadrillard? Edited by Chris Rojek, pgs 109)
THE SEDUCTIONS OF THE SELF
Baudrillard's emphasis upon dispersal, aesthetics, irony and poetic sensibility is often taken as evidence that he is
enraptured with egoism. His sternest critics accuse him of treating social life as a sort of electronic fashion parade
and reducing social analysis to nothing but a narcissistic game (Kellner 1989). There is some justice in these
criticisms. As Bauman (1992: 154-5) has quipped, Baudrillard sometimes gives the impression of viewing the world
exclusively through the window of a speeding automobile or through the flicker of images on the TV screen. There
is an undoubted irony that this apostle of mobility and pathology also seems to be the most sedentary and
ecapsulated of commentators. Whether he is commentating on the Gulf War from the safety of his Paris apartment or
traversing the USA in the compartment of his AirAmerica plane, ever watchful, ever ready with the appropriate bon
mot, Baudrillard gives the impression of being the buddha of cool.
Baudrillards alternative fails, mostly because he doesnt have one
Best & Kellner, Department of Philosophy at University of Texas-El Paso, 1998 [Steven & Douglas,
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/illuminations/kell28.htm, Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future]
In the aftermath of the 1960s, novel and conflicting conceptions of postmodern politics emerged. Postmodern
politics thus take a variety of forms and would include the anti-politics of Baudrillard and his followers, who
exhibit a cynical, despairing rejection of the belief in emancipatory social transformation, as well as a variety of
efforts to create a new or reconstructed politics. On the extreme and apolitical position of a Baudrillard, we are
stranded at the end of history, paralyzed and frozen, as the masses collapse into inertia and indifference, and
simulacra and technology triumph over agency. Thus, from Baudrillard's perspective, all we can do is
"accommodate ourselves to the time left to us." [3]
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rationality. . . . Modernity is defined against pre-modernity, reason against irrationality and superstition, and this
divide is mapped on to a symbolic geography that counterposes the West and its Orient. Its Orient, because if 'the
West' did not exist, then the Orient could not exist either. . . . And the existence and identity it has bestowed is one of
constitutive inferiority and deficit.14
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