To call for a ballot is to breathe life into the system, a system content on devouring and

consuming all beings and potentialities for the sake of dead labor which is turned on its head
for more and more production - resistance is a sight for power to exert itself.

Bifo 11. Franco Bifo Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the
Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, After the Future , pg. 104-108

Time is in the mind. The essential limit to growth is the mental impossibility to
enhance time (Cybertime) beyond a certain level. I think that we are here touching
upon a crucial point. The process of re-composition, of conscious and collective
subjectivation, finds here a new paradoxical way. Modern radical thought has
always seen the process of subjectivation as an energetic process: mobilization,
social desire and political activism, expression, participation have been the modes
of conscious collective subjectivation in the age of the revolutions. But in our age
energy is running out, and desire which has given soul to modern social dynamics is
absorbed in the black hole of virtualization and financial games, as Jean Baudrillard
(1993a) argues in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death, first published in 1976. In
this book Baudrillard analyzes the hyper-realistic stage of capitalism, and the
instauration of the logic of simulation.
Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real,
preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From
medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is
also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its
own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation,
but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. [...]
The reality principle corresponds to a certain stage of the law of value. Today the
whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the
hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now,
rather that the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities
have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra. We must therefore reconstruct
the entire genealogy of the law of value and its simulacra in order to grasp the
hegemony and the enchantment of the current system. A structural revolution of
value. This genealogy must cover political economy, where it will appear as a
second-order simulacrum, just like all those that stake everything on the real: the
real of production, the real of signification, whether conscious or unconscious.
Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political
economy as its simulated model. The entire apparatus of the commodity law of
value is absorbed and recycled in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value,
this becoming part of the third order of simulacra. Political economy is thus assured
a second life, an eternity, within the confines of an apparatus in which it has lost all
its strict determinacy, but maintains an effective presence as a system of reference
for simulation. (Baudrillard 1993a: 2)
Simulation is the new plane of consistency of capitalist growth: financial
speculation, for instance, has displaced the process of exploitation from the sphere
of material production to the sphere of expectations, desire, and immaterial labor.
The simulation process (Cyberspace) is proliferating without limits, irradiating signs
that go everywhere in the attention market. The brain is the market, in
semiocapitalist hyper-reality. And the brain is not limitless, the brain cannot expand
and accelerate indefinitely.The process of collective subjectivation (i.e. social
recomposition) implies the development of a common language-affection which is
essentially happening in the temporal dimension. The semiocapitalist acceleration
of time has destroyed the social possibility of sensitive elaboration of the semio-
flow. The proliferation of simulacra in the info-sphere has saturated the space of
attention and imagination. Advertising and stimulated hyper-expression (just do
it), have submitted the energies of the social psyche to permanent mobilization.
Exhaustion follows, and exhaustion is the only way of escape:
Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this
trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on
itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death. For it is
summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system
must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and
suicide. So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which
every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out the hostage is
the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist, the hostages death for the terrorist.
Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial act.
(Baudrillard 1993a: 37)
In these impressive pages Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of
revolution against power, of the labor movement against capitalist domination, and
predicts the advent of a new form of action which will be marked by the sacrificial
gift of death (and self-annihilation). After the destruction of the World Trade Center
in the most important terrorist act ever, Baudrillard wrote a short text titled The
Spirit of Terrorism where he goes back to his own predictions and recognizes the
emergence of a catastrophic age. When the code becomes the enemy the only
strategy can be catastrophic:
all the counterphobic ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there,
everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated complicity,
the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy
the terrorists doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity.
(Baudrillard 2003: 6)
This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power by the
disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order. This
malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share this orders benefits. An
allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two
towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness
(literally twin-ness), this definitive order:
No need, then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for perverse,
unintended effects. Very logically inexorably the increase in the power heightens
the will to destroy it. And it was party to its own destruction. When the two towers
collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the
suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that Even God cannot
declare war on Himself. Well, He can. The West, in position of God (divine
omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and declared
war on itself. (Baudrillard 2003: 6-7)
In Baudrillards catastrophic vision I see a new way of thinking subjectivity: a
reversal of the energetic subjectivation that animates the revolutionary theories of
the 20th century, and the opening of an implosive theory of subversion, based on
depression and exhaustion.
In the activist view exhaustion is seen as the inability of the social body to escape
the vicious destiny that capitalism has prepared: deactivation of the social energies
that once upon a time animated democracy and political struggle. But exhaustion
could also become the beginning of a slow movement towards a wu wei
civilization, based on the withdrawal, and frugal expectations of life and
consumption. Radicalism could abandon the mode of activism, and adopt the mode
of passivity. A radical passivity would definitely threaten the ethos of relentless
productivity that neoliberal politics has imposed.
The mother of all the bubbles, the work bubble, would finally deflate. We have been
working too much during the last three or four centuries, and outrageously too
much during the last thirty years. The current depression could be the beginning of
a massive abandonment of competition, consumerist drive, and of dependence on
work. Actually, if we think of the geopolitical struggle of the first decade the
struggle between Western domination and jihadist Islam we recognize that the
most powerful weapon has been suicide. 9/11 is the most impressive act of this
suicidal war, but thousands of people have killed themselves in order to destroy
American military hegemony. And they won, forcing the western world into the
bunker of paranoid security, and defeating the hyper-technological armies of the
West both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan.
The suicidal implosion has not been confined to the Islamists. Suicide has became a
form of political action everywhere. Against neoliberal politics, Indian farmers have
killed themselves. Against exploitation hundreds of workers and employees have
killed themselves in the French factories of Peugeot, and in the offices of France
Telecom. In Italy, when the 2009 recession destroyed one million jobs, many
workers, haunted by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the
factories, threatening to kill themselves. Is it possible to divert this implosive trend
from the direction of death, murder, and suicide, towards a new kind of autonomy,
social creativity and of life?I think that it is possible only if we start from exhaustion,
if we emphasize the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange between life and
money could be deserted, and exhaustion could give way to a huge wave of
withdrawal from the sphere of economic exchange. A new refrain could emerge in
that moment, and wipe out the law of economic growth. The self-organization of the
general intellect could abandon the law of accumulation and growth, and start a
new concatenation, where collective intelligence is only subjected to the common
good.
Specifically, that turns the case they appeal to the same structures of domination that they
oppose

Campbell prof intl politics @ U Newcastle 1998 (David, Performing Politics and
the Limits of Language Theory and Event Volume 2 Issue 1, Muse)
These scenes (reported in the British press at the end of 1997) represent globalized
moments of an uneven phenomena that concerns Butler in Excitable Speech. In the
context of the "linguistification" of the political field (74), Butler wants to explore
through issues prominent in American jurisprudence the way in which words are
said to wound, symbols claimed to injure, and punitive responses consequently
warranted. With her own rhetorical virtuosity and acute philosophical acumen,
Butler sets out to interrogate the assumptions behind key arguments concerned
with hate speech and the strategies to counter it. In so doing, she begins from a
particular position sympathetic to those worried by hate speech in order to make a
specific point that diverges from their normal position:
That words wound seems incontestably true, and that hateful, racist, misogynist,
homophobic speech should be vehemently countered seems incontrovertibly right.
But does understanding from where speech derives its power to wound alter our
conception of what it might mean to counter that wounding power? Do we accept
the notion that injurious speech is attributable to a singular subject and act? If we
accept such a juridical constraint on thought - the grammatical requirements of
accountability - as a point of departure, what is lost from the political analysis of
injury? Indeed, when political discourse is collapsed into juridical discourse, the
meaning of political opposition runs the risk of being reduced to the act of
prosecution (50).
The collapse into juridical discourse, backed by the power of the state or specific
agents of the state, is obvious in the scenes above, and Butler's anxiety about the
minimalization of political opposition - particularly in the first case, where the
dubious nature of the 'offence' diverts attention from racism more generally -
appears fully justified. The question is, however, whether the nonjuridical and
nonstate forms of agency and resistance Butler places her faith in are up to the task
set for them.
Let's leave that concern to hang for a bit. Let us first ask how it is that the dominant
modes of dealing with hate speech appear universally juridical? In answering that
question, Butler demonstrates well the way in which critically interpretative thought
can combine a series of theoretical assumptions to demonstrate the limitations of
prevalent discourses and alternative possibilities. In so doing, Excitable Speech is a
powerful statement in response to those who would maintain that arguments
imbued with the idea of a "modernity without foundations" (161) evacuate ethico-
political concerns from our horizon.
Those who argue that hate speech demands juridical responses assert that not
only does the speech communicate, but that it constitutes an injurious act. This
presumes that not only does speech act, but that "it acts upon the addressee in an
injurious way" (16). This argumentation is, in Butler's eyes, based upon a "sovereign
conceit" whereby speech wields a sovereign power, acts as an imperative, and
embodies a causative understanding of representation. In this manner, hate speech
constitutes its subjects as injured victims unable to respond themselves and in need
of the law's intervention to restrict if not censor the offending words, and punish the
speaker:
This idealization of the speech act as a sovereign action (whether positive or
negative) appears linked with the idealization of sovereign state power or, rather,
with the imagined and forceful voice of that power. It is as if the proper power of the
state has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens, and the state then
rememerges as a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to protects as from
other citizens, who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign power (82).
Two elements of this are paradoxical. First, the sovereign conceit embedded in
conventional renderings of hate speech comes at a time when understanding power
in sovereign terms is becoming (if at all ever possible) even more difficult. Thus the
juridical response to hate speech helps deal with an onto-political problem: "The
constraints of legal language emerge to put an end to this particular historical
anxiety [the problematisation of sovereignty], for the law requires that we resituate
power in the language of injury, that we accord injury the status of an act and trace
that act to the specific conduct of a subject" (78).
The second, which stems from this, is that (to use Butler's own admittedly
hyperbolic formulation) "the state produces hate speech." By this she means not
that the state is the sovereign subject from which the various slurs emanate, but
that within the frame of the juridical account of hate speech "the category cannot
exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language
to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests
that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact,
the state actively produces the domain of publicly acceptable speech, demarcating
the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining
the power to make and sustain the line of consequential demarcation" (77). The
sovereign conceit of the juridical argument thus linguistically resurrects the
sovereign subject at the very moment it seems most vulnerable, and reaffirms the
sovereign state and its power in relation to that subject at the very moment its
phantasmatic condition is most apparent. The danger is that the resultant extension
of state power will be turned against the social movements that sought legal
redress in the first place (24).

Thus we choose to sacrifice the 1AC. We sacrifice the Good, safe sex, puppies, ice cream,
life, death, black, white, day night, wrong right, and the community. We sacrifice debate.

Mbembe 06. Achille Mbembe, senior researcher at the Institute of Social and
Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand, Faces of Freedom:
Jewish and Black Experiences, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial
Studies, 7:3, pg. 298

There is another version of liberation we encounter in black imagination. It is

predicated on an understanding of politics as a form of asceticism, or even as a
sacrificial act. Liberation as a sacrificial movement is a very consuming process.
Through sheer human will, the self is sacrificed to the future common good. This is
not far from martyrdom. One form of life is killed for another to be sustained. In fact,
to strive for freedom is to court death and, if need be, to accept the responsibility of
ones own death, as made clear by Nelson Mandela during the Rivonia Trial (Long
Walk to Freedom). Death, in this case, is the door to life that which lays open the
truth of life, the life that lives by sacrificing itself. It is a sacrifice that is
consummated for all, hence its redemptive character.
What black experiences of martyrdom (Cabral, Lumumba, Um Nyobe`, and many
others) seem to reflect is the fact that one cannot be free if one is caught in the
immediacy of being, in the empirical prison of life. In other words, if freedoms goal
is to preserve life, the idea that life must be preserved at all costs (the principle of
survival) is not necessarily conducive to freedom. Selflessness is necessary to
achieve freedom. To achieve freedom, one must be ready to transcend oneself in
death, or at least to come into close contact with ones master: death. From Martin
Luther King to Mandela, this absolute authority granted to death or the possibility of
death, this otherworldliness of freedom, is a fundamental aspect of modern black
narratives of redemption.
Then there is the relation between freedom and violence. Whether theorized or not,
the practice of violence in the name of the struggle for liberation or for that matter,
survival was a common feature of many political movements. Like the Jewish critic
Walter Benjamin, Fanon relies on an explicit notion of experience in this case the
colonial experience to lift the interdiction against killing as a legitimate means to
obtain freedom. Unlike Benjamin though, the lifting of the taboo of killing is not
justified theologically, but situationally. Unlike Benjamin, too, Fanon is not burdened
by a Hebrew Bible or a rabbinical or Mosaic law. The Fanonian practice of violence is
not aimed to enact any divine will or to instantiate any divine transcendence. Fanon
simply believes that colonialism, as violence in its natural state, will yield only when
confronted by a greater violence. Life, he adds, can only spring up again out of the
rotting corpse of the settler.

Be ready to destroy everything.

Burroughs 88. (William S. Burroughs, Western Lands 1988)
Scientists always said there is no such thing as a soul. Now they are in a position to
prove it. Total Death. Soul Death. Its what the Egyptians called the Second and Final
Death. This awesome power to destroy souls forever is now vested in farsighted and
responsible men in the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon. Governments
fall from sheer indifference. Authority figures, deprived of the vampiric energy they
suck off their constituents, are seen for what they are: dead empty masks
manipulated by computers. And what is behind the computers? Remote control. Of
course. Don't intend to be here when this shit house goes up. Nothing here now but
the recordings. Shut them off, they areas radioactive as an old joke. Look at the
prison you are in, we are all in. This is a penal colony that is now a Death Camp.
Place of the Second and Final Death. Desperationis the raw material of drastic
change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can
hope to escape.