A.

Interpretation – Presence means only troops

1. Substantially means including the main part
WORDS AND PHRASES, 1964, p. 818.

“Substantially” means in substance; in the main; essentially; by including the material or essential part.

2. Presence is Troops
Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, 2nd Ed., 1987, 1529.

Presence: The military or economic power of a country as reflected abroad by the stationing of its troops, sale
of its goods, etc.: the American military presence in Europe.

3. And this is true of Military Policy

Dictionary Of Military Terms, 3rd Ed. 2004, 187.

Presence: The fact of having people or units which represent a particular country or organization within a
particular area.

B. Violation – the aff is removing detention centers, don’t actually remove troops

C. Prefer our Interpretation –

2. Predictability – Government presence is reduced by removing troops – this ensures a literature

base that is predictable to what is going on in the Status Quo
World Tribune, Feb. 19, 2010. Retrieved Feb. 21, 2010 from http://www.worldtribune.com/.

In 2007, the U.S. military reached a peak of 175,000 troops as part of a sustained campaign against Al Qaida.
About a year later, amid the flight of Sunni and Shi'ite insurgents, Washington began reducing its military
presence in Iraq, with 77,000 soldiers leaving over the last 15 months. Officials said the U.S. military, which
transferred security responsibility to Baghdad in July 2009, has largely ended its counter-insurgency mission.
By July 2010, they said, the U.S. military would be limited to what was termed stability operations outside Iraqi
cities. "So I think this transition will be much smoother than people think on the ground," Odierno said. "It'll
be smooth just like coming out of the cities was."

extratopicality: they end counterterrorism missions as well as closing bases, this means they get extra
advantages not directly connected to the plan action
this is unfair because it creates an extraneous situation the neg can’t prepare for
destroys education and clash because of unpreparedness

D. Topicality is a voting issue for fairness and education

The time for torture is now, we are at a melting pot in the epoch of an era where the
epoch of time and epoch of different repetitive words is at an epoch where the maximum
has been reached – we much continue to invoke the epoch or suffer an epoch of death
and subordination.

John Hutnyk 2003 [Goldsmith College at University of London; Critique of Anthropology v. 23]

Bataille was clearly a militant against the war, there is no doubting his engagement in this regard: ... we can express the
hope of avoiding a war that already threatens. But in order to do so we must divert the surplus production, either into
rational extension of a difficult industrial growth, or into unproductive works that will dissipate an energy that cannot
be accumulated in any case. (Bataille, 1949/1988: 25) And even after the war he maintained a theoretical interest in ways to escape restrictions. In the second volume of The Accursed Share, Bataille
speculates on alcohol, war and holidays as the choices for expenditure. He is not so naive as to think that a larger participation in erotic games would help avoid war (nice thought), but he does rethink the ways of avoiding
war: ‘we will not be able to decrease the risk of war before we have reduced, or begun to reduce, the general disparity in standards of living’ (Bataille, 1991: 188). This ‘banality’ is what Bataille sees as the only chance for
an alternative to war, and it is possible even in the midst of the Cold War. The trouble was, faced with war itself, Bataille retreated to the library. Bataille’s contempt for and fascination with fascist ‘community’ must –
Nancy says – be behind his withdrawal (Nancy, 1991: 17). Unlike Marx in the Brumaire, Bataille’s analysis fills him with unease and inevitable failure in the face of ‘a paradox at which his thinking came to a halt’ (Nancy,
1991: 23). It is this interruption that left Bataille susceptible to the postmodern- ist revision which drained any sense of a political programme – the fight against fascism – from his work.9He was confined to the library,

Spiralling into
resigned, introspective, and in the end left passing books on to others with a whis- pered recommendation (the review Critiquewas the last publishing venture he started, and it continues today).

the conflagration of the sun, which gives energy without (obvious) return, he later wrote: The planet congested by
death and wealth a scream pierces the clouds Wealth and death close in. No-one hears this scream of a miserable waiting. And then: Knowing that there is no
response. (Bataille, 2001: 221) And, finally, from the ‘Notebook for Pure Happiness’ written towards the end of his life: The only escape is failure. (Bataille, 2001:

223) Everything that we know is true, but on condition of disappearing in us (we know better in ceasing to know). (Bataille, 2001: 247) Part IV
Have I not led my readers astray? (Bataille, 1991: 430) Bataille cannot be left to rot in the library. How useful an experiment would it be to try to ‘apply’ Bataille’s notion of expenditure to
politics today? Klaus-Peter Köpping asks questions about ‘modernity’ which arise explicitly from his reading of Bataille as a theorist of transgression, addressing political examples such as
A more extravagant general economy framework for such questions might
Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Indonesia (Köpping, 2002: 243).

take up the massive accumu- lation that is the excess of an arms trade promoting regional conflicts as integral to sales
figures on the one side, with the performative futility of massed anti-capitalism rallies and May Day marches that fall
on the nearest Sunday so as not to disrupt the city on the other. Expenditure and squan- dering today, in Bataille’s sense, might be seen in both the planned obso- lescence of
cars, computers and nearly all merchandise, as well as in the waste production and fast-food service industry cults and fashionista style wars, tamogochi and Beckham haircuts that currently sweep the planet. No doubt it
would be too mechanical to rest with such applications, too utili- tarian, but the relevance is clear. The use-value of Georges Bataille is somewhat eccentric and the deployment of pre-Second World War circum- stances as a
comparative register for today is of course merely speculative. No return to the 1930s (colourize films now). Yet, taking account of a long list of circumstantial differences – no Hitler, no Moscow, no Trotskyite opposition,
etc. – is also unnecessary since it is only in the interests of thinking through the current conjuncture so as to understand it, and change it, that any return should ever be contemplated. The importance of French anthropology
– Mauss – as well as psycho- analysis and phenomenology, cannot be underestimated and all are crucial in Bataille’s comprehension of the rise of fascism. Can these matters help us to make sense of political debates in the

midst of a new world war today? That the intellectual currents which shaped Bataille’s analysis were post- Marxist did not, then, replace the importance of Marx. Today the compre- hension of
Bush’s planetary terror machine still requires such an analysis, but one that can also be informed by the reading of Bataille’s thought as shaped by
the intellectual currents mentioned above. In a period of capi- talist slump, crisis of credit, overextended market, defaulted debt and threatening collapse, the strategy of war looms large. Even
before the events of 11 September 2001 in New York, Bush was clearly on the warpath with missile defence systems, withdrawal from various international treaties and covenants, and
massive appropriations for military and surveillance systems.
The imperial element is clear and sustained – the aggression against the
Palestinians, the adventure in Afghanistan and the war on Iraq (to defend papa Bush’s legacy) obviously have their
roots in the imperial- ist mercantile tradition – plunder and war in pursuit of resources, primarily oil, secondarily
armaments sales. If this is potlatch, it is of the destructive kind that Bataille feared. The possibility of a geo-political solution other than war should be
evaluated. But it is a matter of record that, under the Bush family regime, the US–Europe alliance has not been interested in pursuing any programme of reduction of disparity, a few
suspensions of Third World debt and UN summits notwithstanding. When Bataille searches for an alternative to war in some ‘vast economic
competition’ through which costly sacrifices, comparable to war, would yet give the competitor with initiative the
advantage Bataille, 1949/1988: 172), he holds out hope for a kind of gift without return. That he showed some enthusiasm for the Marshall Plan after the Second World War as a possible model for this might need
to be ascribed to the exhausted condition of post-war France, but he soon revised his assessment. The Marshall Plan was not as disinter- ested as Bataille implied; it facilitated circulation and recoupment of surplus value as
profit. The Cold War and nuclear proliferation turned out to be the preferred examples of reckless waste in actuality – as recog- nized in volume two of The Accursed Share (Bataille, 1991: 188).

( Today, redistribution is not considered an option, the threat of Asian capitalism – after the slaughter of millions – can be ignored, and the war on Islam
(known variously as the Gulf War, Zionism, and the War on Terror) appears as the primary strategy (combined with a war on South
America, mistakenly named as a war on drugs, and a war on immigration disguised as a security concern). The secondary strategy is a newly hollowed out version of liberal welfare. In 1933 Bataille had written of the
bourgeois tendency to declare ‘equality’ and make it their watchword, all the time showing they do not share the lot of the workers (Bataille, 1997: 177). In the 21st century, Prime Minister Blair of England has made some
gestures towards a similar pseudo- alternative. At a Labour Party congress in the millennium year he spoke of the need to address poverty and famine in Africa, and no doubt still congratulates himself on his pursuit of this
happy agenda; as I write a large entourage of delegates and diplomats are flying to Johannesburg for another conference junket – the Earth Summit. The party accompanying Blair and Deputy Prescott includes multinational
mining corporation Rio Tinto Executive Director Sir Richard Wilson (The Guardian, 12 August 2002). Rio Tinto is hardly well known for its desire to redistribute the global share of surplus expenditure for the welfare of
If there are no gifts, only competitions of expenditure, what then of the effort of Bataille to oppose fascism? It is not
all.

altruistic, and yet it is the most necessary and urgent aspect of his work that is given to us to read for today. Is fascism a charity-type trick? A deceit of double dealing which offers the illusion of more while giving
less? Something like this psycho-social structure of fascism appears to be enacted in the potlatch appeasements of the propaganda spinsters surrounding Blair. The New Labour and Third Way public offering is
ostentatiously to be about more healthcare, more police, more schools, but Blair spins and rules over a deception that demands allegiance to a privatization programme that cares only about reducing the costs (fixed capital
costs) of providing healthy, orderly, trained employees for industry, of short-term profit and arms sales to Israel, of racist scare-mongering and scapegoating of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants, of opportunist short-
term gain head-in-the-sand business-as-usual. Similarly, the gestures of multi-millionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates in establishing charity ‘foundations’ to ease their guilt is not just a matter of philanthropy, it is a
 The liberal rhetoric of charity
necessary gambit of containment (and these two in particular bringing their cyber-evangelism to the markets of Eastern Europe, South and South-East Asia).

and the militant drums of war are the two strategies of the same rampant restrictive economy. Carrot and stick.
Team A and team B of capi- talist hegemony – the critique of the gift is clear, a gift is not a gift but a debt of time – and this is not really generosity or hospitality. The same can
be said perhaps of war – it is not war but profit, just as the gift reassures the giver of their superior status, the war on terror unleashes a terror of its own; war does not produce victories but rather defeat for all. Bataille shows
us a world in ruins. September 11 has been made into the kind of event that transforms an unpopular (even unelected) figure into a leader under whom the nation coheres in a new unity – much as Bataille saw Nuremburg

achieve for the National Socialists. Of course I am not suggesting Bush is a Nazi – he hasn’t got the dress sense – but people were betrayed by the trick of a ‘democ- racy’
that offers pseudo-participation once every four years, and this time in a way that has consequences leading inexorably to a massive fight. The kowtowing to big business with a rhetoric of social security has been heard
before – it was called the New Deal (or welfare state) and was a deception almost from the start. Where there was perhaps some contractual obli- gation of aid in the earlier forms, today the trick of the buy-off bribery of

service provision is contingent and calculated according only to corporate strategic gain. While we lurch towards endless war, governments reassure us with the watchwords of security that
really mean death and despair to those on the wrong side of the wire. The largest prison population ever (under democracy or any other form of government), mass
confinement for minor offences (three strikes), colour overcoded death row (Mumia Abu-Jamal etc.), arrest and detention without trial or charge, celebratory executionism, etc. The incarcerated souls

in the concentration camps of Sangatte,10 Woomera,11 Kamunting12 or Guantanamo13 are wired in and offered up
as sacrificial gifts to the rule of new judicial-administrative fascism. A new toothy-smiling Christian cult of death and technology, spun carefully via press
conferences and TV sitcoms – television has given up any pretence of journalism in favour of infotainment. Does the US adminis- tration dream of a new post-war era where, once again like Marshall, they could come with
a plan to rebuild upon ruins? This would indicate the exhaustion of the current mode of production, which, with ‘information’ promised renewal but quickly stalled. Whatever the case, the enclosure of the US and Europe
behind fortress walls does not – experience now shows – ensure prophylactic protection, and ruin may be visited upon all. It was Bataille who said that perhaps only the ‘methods of the USSR would ... be equal to a ruined

Polite critiques and protest have no purchase – orderly rallies against the aggression in
immensity’ (Bataille, 1949/1988: 167–8).

Afghanistan, against asylum and immigration law, against the destruction of Palestine, etc., get no ‘airtime’ (instead, ‘political’ soap opera like The West
Wing, as the current equivalent in ideological terms to the Cold War’s Bomber Command). Every leader that accedes to the ‘War on Terror’ programme and its excesses (civilian deaths,
curtailment of civil liberty, global bombing) is an appeaser. This is like the dithering of Chamberlain, only this time the opposition activists are fighting in a ‘post-national’ arena and Stalin’s
slumber will not be broken, the Red Army cannot run inter- ference, there is no Churchill rumbling in the wings,
the fascist empire will prevail without
militant mobilization across the board. This is the appeaser’s gift – betrayal into the ‘ranks assigned to us by generals
and industrial magnates’ (Bataille, 1985: 164). The unravelling of the tricks of social welfare, of ‘asylum’ and ‘aid’
programmes, of ‘interest’ even (the narrowing of news broadcasts to domestic affairs) or respect, of the demon- ization
of others, of tolerance, the hypocrisy of prejudice – all this prepares us for a war manufactured elsewhere. After the
breakdown of the gift’s tricks, fascism is the strategy, the obverse side of capital’s coin. In this context, the geo-politics
that enables, or demands, appeasement of the imperious corporate/US power is the restricted destruction we should
fear, and we should fight in a struggle that goes beyond national defence, wage claims or solidarity. The discipline of the Soviets
and of Bataille could be our tools. Bataille reads on in his library. We are left speculating with him, rashly charging in with ideas that are less excessive, less exuberant, that modera- tion might withhold. But there is no
more important time to consider the efforts in the arts to fight militarism out of control, and, as Bush drags the world into permanent war, it is worth asking why Bataille’s surrealistic opposition to Hitler was inadequate. Is

it because there are no more thinkers in the Party? Is it that subversion is uninformed and its spirit quiet? Chained to the shelves, it is not enough to know that appeasement of the military-
industrial machine is the obverse side of liberal charity. Why are we still unable to acknowledge this is the path to war? What would be adequate to move

away from appeasement to containment and more? What kind of sovereign destruction would Bataille enact today? Against
the ‘immense hypocrisy of the world
of accumulation’ (Bataille, 1991: 424), the answer is clear: we should ‘condemn this mouldy society to revolutionary
destruction’ (Bataille, 1997: 175). The Bataille of La Critique Sociale might argue for a glorious expenditure as that
which connects people together in the social and recognizes their joint labour to produce themselves, and this must be
redeemed from the restricted economy that insists on expen- diture for the maintenance of hierarchy. If he were leaving
the library today, the Bataille of anti-war Surrealism might say it is time for a wake-up knock-down critique of the
barking dogs. The castrating lions of appease- ment must be hounded out of town. Back in your kennels, yelping
pups of doom. Fair call, Georges Bataille.

The aff presents torture as a deviation from the norm, ignoring the exuberant cruelty
inherent to modern war. Only the alt can address the dark motivations that make the
theatrics of torture inevitable. .
Adriana Cavarero, Prof Political Philosophy at Università degli studi di Verona, 2009
[Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence trans. McCuaig p. 76-77]

The official investigations and judicial proceedings following the scandal of the Abu Ghraib photographs have tried, as
everyone knows, to promote the thesis that the essence of the misdeed lay in the sadistic and deviant behavior of a few of
the soldiers involved, a handful of "bad apples:"22 Corroborating the classic connection between politics and lying, this has not only confirmed a deeply rooted tendency of the U.S. authorities
to engage in dissembling behavior but has obviously helped to supply new matter for modern reflection on torture, 2,3 compelling the critical literature on the matter to bring its own arguments
up to date. Special emphasis has thus been placed on "interrogational torture,"" that is, on the difference that supposedly separates harsh but legal interrogation techniques from the
degeneration of these techniques into torture. The task of extracting information from the victims, or, if one prefers, making them confess the truth, belongs for that matter to the traditional
paradigm of torture illustrated by Foucault. Obviously though, for analyzing the facts of Abu Ghraib today, things are more complicated: once you allow legal practices intended to make the
prisoner suffer in mind and body, perhaps even listing them in detail in dedicated manuals and thus recommending them, to distinguish between harsh interrogation and interrogational torture
often amounts to no more than abstruse and ghastly quibbling.25 Nor do things become any simpler when it comes to the second type of torture discussed in the literature on the subject,
terroristic torture, by which is meant a technology of pain intended to frighten and intimidate both the victims who actually undergo it and their accomplices and supporters. Cutting loose from
the pretended legality of the interrogational model, the discourse here passes over not only into the realm of intimidation but into that of
revenge and humiliation, which allude symptomatically to the supplice. And yet we are always, even in terms of frank
horrorism, within the domain of rational, or at any rate strategic, behavior, in the domain of violent acts that appear to
select their own ends or rather pretend to do so. 26 As though to torture rather than simply kill served some useful
purpose. As though a certain utilityinformation in the case of interrogational torture; intimidation, humiliation, or revenge
in the case of terroristic torturewere the upshot.

That utility played any fundamental part in the atrocious theater of Abu Ghraib is, however, doubtful. Most of them
bit players, 90 percent of the detainees in the Iraqi prison "were of no intelligence value"27 according to the assessment of
the American authorities themselves, in other words were of no utility when it came to supplying information. As for
intimidation, revenge, and humiliation, the torture certainly included them among its goals and drew nourishment from
them for its own cruelty, yet not in such a way as to assign these objectives a decisive role and make them the pivot of a
strategic economy. As the photographs demonstrate, what prevailed was the pleasure of farce, the entertainment of a
horror transformed into caricature, a license to dehumanize on the part of willing actors in an atrocious pantomime.
In this sense, in the contemporary era and in the global spotlight of history, the viewpoint of the regular fighterin
regulation uniform and endowed with regular horrorist "appetites"achieved its most expressive portrait at Abu
Ghraib. In an age in which the traditional figure of the enemy has been definitively replaced by the defenseless as casual
victim, the traditional figure of the warrior has also promptly adapted to the general festival of violence against the
defenseless by making way for an obscene caricature of itself. To compare the incomparable, you could even say that, after the images from Abu
Ghraib, what has emerged is a contrast between the actors of a violence against the helpless who show that they accompany their crime with a certain trivial enjoyment and the actors on the
other side who reveal a propensity for the grim and the lugubrious, even though they sometimes hymn the joys of paradise as the reward for slaughter. But in this respect, the phenomenology
of contemporary horrorism is so complex in the array of its modes, attitudes, and tones as to discourage any reductive contrast. The very disconcerting fact remains that Abu
Ghraib
presented horror in the imbecile and idiotic form of the leer. As though, having lost even the howl that freezes in her
throat, all that remained of Medusa today were a dull repugnance.

The rejection of violence is the rejection of our humanity, ensuring explosing excess
culminating in extinction

Kenneth Irzkowitz 1999

[Assoc Prof Philosophy at Marietta College, College Literature 26.1]

It would be pointless to deny that most illegal violence is abhorrent or immoral. At the same
time, however, given the violence of the life of our culture, we need to understand immoral
violence more deeply than any blanket condemnation of it will allow. Beyond our
condemnations, we need to recognize that the acts we most prohibit are paradoxically also the
very ones we most celebrate. A foremost proponent of this need is the French philosopher and
writer Georges Bataille. Relying on a notion of excess energy and the problem of its expenditure,
Bataille argues that the transgression of law is what he calls an accursed yet ineluctable part of
our lives. We make laws in the name of prohibiting acts of violence, yet the problem of the
expenditure of an excess of energy requires behaviors that violate the very same rules we cherish and
intend to uphold. The commentator Jean Piel took note of how Bataille managed "to view the world as if it were animated by a turmoil in accord with the
one that never ceased to dominate his personal life" (1995, 99). Here, the fact of an individualinturmoil reflects the surplus of energy disturbing life in
general, rather than a moral deficiency for which an individual can be held accountable. For Bataille, an individual's wasteful behaviors are ultimately
reflections of the problem of the surplus of solar energy. Piel put it this way: "The whole problem is to know how, at the heart of this general economy,
the surplus is used" (1995, 103). How should the surplus of solar energy be used? Bataile contends that this surplus is never extinguished and that its
expenditure always leads towards the commission of violence. The surplus of energy is accursed and finally cannot serve us productively. The accursed
excess confronts us with the problem of how to expend energy when this results in usages that cannot made be useful. Thus the production of violence
has a value for us as those condemned to the realm of nonproductive expenditures. We undoubtedly deny this value, as Bataille notes, when "Under
present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to giftgiving, to squandering without
reciprocations" (1988, 38). Nonetheless, as Bataille puts it, "the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander" (1988, 29). When this
impossibility of useful expenditure is ignored, then we fail to recognize ourselves on the deepest level, as who we most fundamentally are. Against this
failure and in the name of a kind of inverted Hegelian selfrecognition, Bataille calls for the transgression of our prohibitionist moral values. We need an
ethics of squandering goods, of squandering what is good, in recognition of an overabundance over and beyond all others, i.e. an overabundance that
can only, at best, be squandered. He writes, life suffocates within limits that are too close: it aspires in manifold ways to an impossible growth; it
releases a steady flow of excess resources, possibly involving large squandenngs of energy. The limit of growth being reached, life enters into ebullition:
Without exploding, its extreme exuberance pours out in a movement always bordering on explosion. Bataille 1988. 30) As living lives that must enter
into ebullition, we find ourselves fundamentally committed no more to moral righteousness than to immoral out pourings of energy, to sudden and
The protests of moralism are secondary and never responsive
violent outbursts exceeding all rational considerations.
to Bataille's questioning of morality: "Supposing there is no longer any growth possible, what is
to be done with the seething energy that remains?" (1988, 31). We are told by reason and
morality to do what is best, which is to prohibit behaviors that are nonproductive or harmful. Our
morality identifies the right with the useful and productive, with whatever makes us better.
Bataille, however, argues against this morality and for the requirement of useless,
nonproductive, violent outpourings of energya requirement for what he calls "a drainingaway, a
pure and simple loss, which occurs in any case" (1988, 31). These violent, nonproductive
outpourings, according to Bataille, are required of us all as living beings regardless of whether or
not we take the responsibility to manage and arrange their occurrence in our lives. At issue, for
Bataille, is energy in excess, energy as an excess. As an excess, such energy must be discharged
explosively in outpourings that, in the end, are inevitable. Does it make a difference how an excess of energy is
squandered if, in the end, the results will have to be violent, if we cannot avoid taking actions that must be acknowledged as wrong? Bataille proposes
that we face up to the value of the choices that remain, rather than continue to shrink from the available options, especially those moral prohibitionism
would regard as either dirty or simply unacceptable. All expenditures, even acts of squandering, cannot be equally unacceptable; our available options
lie with respect to the contrasting degrees of unacceptability of various acts and the various amounts of waste each entails. He states that "in no way
can [an] ... inevitable loss be accounted useful . . . but there remains] a matter of an acceptable loss, preferable to another that is regarded as
unacceptable (1988, 31). The key to the possibility of an ethics for Bataille is that beyond the naïve hopes of our prohibitionist morality, we can see
that some acts of violence are preferable to others. He contends in this vein that we need something counterintuitive, a kind of morality of evil, a
morality able to face up to what he refers to as "a question of acceptability, not utility" (1988, 31). This distinction between the acceptable and the
useful transforms the idea of a moral project to where it becomes right to enact those wrongs that would constitute the best (i.e., least damaging) uses
of energy given the requirements of expenditure in situations of limited growth. For Bataille, it is "right" to "constructively" suspend moral prohibitions in
prohibitionist morality is an inevitable failure in
order to substitute less damaging acts for the more violent alternatives. Our
even imagining how a surplus of energy may best be discharged. By default, this morality results
in more violent discharges of energy, in lives that are, as a consequence, made worse. Like Nietzsche, Bataille proposes a
revaluation of moral values, a transformation of what Nietzsche calls "herd" morality. For both Bataille and Nietzsche, ordinary morality is too constricted
with respect to the biggest picture, to conducting the totality of our lives. The value of the "herd" morality breaks down when taking human life as a
whole into account. To recognize ourselves for all that we are means having to change the outlooks that now constrain us. In recognizing ourselves we
alter our values and behaviors in the name of living the fullest lives possible. A system of moral values, under construction, may be regarded as
analogous to any system of valuation. For example, we may also construct a system of trading equities on the stock exchanges. This latter valuesystem
will select some equities as preferable to others, and makes trades accordingly. Good trades acquire better equities while bad trades acquire worse
ones. Moreover, the valuesystem as a whole is better to the extent it maximizes good trades. The best valuesystem makes the greatest number of good
trades, thereby maximizing profits, and minimizing what is lost. Analogous to this kind of valuesystem, a morality may be regarded as a system of
exchanges with the aim of maximizing excellence in living. As such, a morality values actions and intentions as better or worse in the name of right and
wrong. We ordinarily assume that an action is wrong simply if it violates the system of moral rules (the Ten Commandments, for example) and right if
the rules are upheld. Given this assumption, to do the right thing is analogous to using the stockpicking system correctly. On this level, when morality
tells us what to do, we are either right or wrong, depending simply on whether or not the rules are obeyed. But Bataille's Nietzschean morality demands
that we evaluate the value of the moral valuesystem itself, the success or failure of the system generating the rules. Those who trade equities know not
to stand by a set of rules that loses money. A valuesystem may sometimes have to be abandoned. For Bataille, the same is true for a dysfunctional set
of moral values. Yet our moral system that sets the standard of value for our behaviors has been subjected to no standards of evaluation. We need to
abandon the assumption that the rules of morality are absolute, productive in all contexts, and beyond dispute. We need to make it possible to employ
socalled 'immoral" values when these have life affirming effects, and to suspend or transgress 'moral" values when these serve a sufficient lifeaffirming
purpose. The key is to recognize ourselves as the extreme beings we are. Bataille sees human life as beyond the limits set by morality, as desiring
nothing less than the wild, destructive, celebratory excesses by means of which we are granted ecstatic gifts. We produce acts of violence in part
because they have a supreme value for us, even though the thought of such acts as having supreme value is always laughable and almost always
denied. A typical day betrays little in the way of a lust for outrageous excess. However, for Bataile, a typical day reveals only a part of our being.
According to Literature and Evil, just as certain insects, in given conditions, flock towards a ray of light, so we all flock to an area at the opposite end of
the scale from death. The mainspring of human activity is generally the desire to reach the point farthest from the funereal domain, which is rotten, dirty
and impure. We make every effort to efface the traces, signs and symbols of death. Then, if we can, we efface the traces and signs of these efforts.
(Bataille 1973, 48). In other words, there is a radical duality at work in our lives, although traces of this duality are ordinarily effaced. For Bataille, there
is first the fundamental value of the unacceptable and second the unacceptability of this first fundamental value, i.e., the overwhelming need to efface
the value of the unacceptable along with every trace of it as a value in our lives. He contends that both the left and right poles of this duality are
mainsprings of human selfrecognition. With the right pole of effacement, we suppress the awareness of the left pole, of the presence of our own
destructive desires. He acknowledges that the resulting selfconception does fit us to the extent that "the being which we are is primarily a finite being (a
mortal individual)... [with] limitations [that] are no doubt necessary" (1973, 50). Yet, at the same time, Bataille's own writings never fail to emphasize
the primacy of what is harmful to us, of what is neither useful nor good, of what is beyond our mere finitude. Throughout Literature and Evil, for
example, he repeatedly affirms the destructive behaviors and dark values that must come at the expense of survival needs. Mere survival is the
necessary but insufficient condition of striving to live a full life. To live fully actually means to live at the expense of future survival, to completely waste
ourselves, blind to all consequences. Along these lines, Literature and Evil argues that to live life really means nothing less than that we don't "flee
wisely from the elements of death [but instead] enter the regions that wisdom tells us to avoid" (Bataille 1973, 50). To live fully we must shun wisdom;
in living fully we laugh even at death itself, in the awareness that "When we enter the regions that wisdom tells us to avoid... we really live" (1973, 50).
When we achieve "a heightened consciousness of being," we burn, because only "by going beyond ... these limitations which are necessary for...
preservation... [are we able to] assert. the nature of... [our] being" (1973, 50). The first chapter of Literature and Evil similarly contends that "Death
aloneor, at least, the ruin of the isolated individual in search of happiness in timeintroduces that break without which nothing reaches the state of
ecstasy" (Bataille 1973, 13). This is because for every individual, "an irreducible, sovereign part of himself is free from the limitations and the necessity
which he acknowledges" (1973, 16). Indeed, in the same chapter, Bataille celebrates the desire for selfruin as a divine or sovereign inspiration, as one
taught to us by religion, Greek tragedy, and the great books. In his words, The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all
reli gions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear. This tendency is the
opposite of Good. Good is based on common interest which entails consid eration of the future. Divine intoxication . . . is entirely in the
the dark forces that drive us towards ruining ourselves
present. (Bataille 1973, 9) The main point, for Bataille, is that
cannot be dismissedthese forces are a crucial part of who we are. Concomitantly, we suffer from
a problem of selfrecognition, of not knowing ourselves for who we are. This failure to know
ourselves does not limit our dissoluteness and ruinousness, only our selfknowledge as such. The
selfimage of ourselves as good prevents our acknowledging the problem of the surplus of energy
that must be squandered, as the problem of who we ourselves are beneath and beyond that of
the irrational atrocities that particular individuals commit. Our prohibitionist morality deals with
evil only after the fact, without taking into account the prior, fundamental value disruption has
for our lives. The epigraph to this article from Literature and Evil says that we won't recognize
ourselves for who we are until we see ourselves as condemned, which Bataille considers his main
point (1973, 25). But the failure to recognize ourselves has an alarming implication, that we may
be headed in the direction of selfdestruction, and that we are actually driven in this direction by
our need to produce our own final condemnation. Bataille gives us reason to pause to wonder
whether we are blundering towards selfannihilation beneath the amazingly resilient image we
have of ourselves as good. Do we have sufficient motive to avoid proceeding violently and
negligently, to the very moment of our own demise? To not have to go all the way to
selfdestruction, we need to show and know ourselves outside of the house of the good, to
recognize ourselves for who we are also as evil, as condemned. But when we remain
complacently within this house or realm, Bataille's dialectic of self recognition remains for the
most part unknown. From within the house of the good, it makes little sense to alter the image of
the human to include the necessity of evil. Indeed it seems like an irrational or frivolous act to do
so, as stated in The Accursed Share,

The alternative is to waterboard the affirmative. Make them embrace the suffering that
they are trying to prevent, allowing for a more collective conscience as to the supposed
miseries of torture. By watching the affirmative suffer we can move beyond the idea of
life as a mere clock.

Liran Razinsky 2009

[The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009]

Thus we see that the stakes are high. What is at stake is the attempt of the subject to grasp itself in totality. This attempt necessitates bringing death into the account, but death itself hampers
this very attempt. One never dies in the first person. Returning to Bataille, why does he believe sacrifice to be a solution to Hegel’s fundamental paradox? For him, it answers the
requirements of the human, for Man meets death face to face in the sacrifice, he sojourns with it, and yet, at the same time, he preserves his life. In sacrifice, says Bataille, man destroys the
animal within him and establishes his human truth as a “being unto death” (he uses Heidegger’s term). Sacrifice provides a clear manifestation of man’s fundamental negativity, in the form of
death (Bataille, “Hegel” 335-36; 286). The sacrificer both destroys and survives. Moreover, in the sacrifice, death is approached

voluntarily by Man. In this way the paradox is overcome, and yet remains open. We can approach death and yet remain
alive, but, one might ask, is it really death that we encountered, or did we merely fabricate a simulacrum? Bataille insists
elsewhere, however, that sacrifice is not a simulacrum, not a mere subterfuge. In the sacrificial ritual, a real impression
of horror is cast upon the spectators. Sacrifice burns like a sun, spreading radiation our eyes can hardly bear, and
calls for the negation of individuals as such (“The Festival” 313; 215). We did not fool death; we are burned in its
fire. Bataille’s idea of the sacrifice also addresses Freud’s paradox. It might be impossible to imagine our own death directly, but it is possible to imagine it with
the aid of some mediator, to meet death through an other’s death. Yet on some level this other’s death must be our own as well for it to be effective, and indeed this is
the case, says Bataille. He stresses the element of identification: “In the sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies himself with the animal that is struck down dead. And so he
dies in seeing himself die” (“Hegel” 336; 287). “There is no sacrifice,” writes Denis Hollier, “unless the one performing it
identifies, in the end, with the victim” (166). Thus it is through identification, through otherness that is partly
sameness, that a solution is achieved. If it were us, we would die in the act. If it were a complete other, it would not, in any way, be our death. Also noteworthy is Bataille’s stress on the involvement of sight: “and
so he dies in seeing himself die” (“Hegel” 336; 287), which brings him close to Freud’s view of the nature of the problem, for Freud insists on the visual, recasting the problem as one of spectatorship, imagining,

,
perceiving. Bataille’s description recapitulates that of Freud, but renders it positive. Yes, we remain as a spectator, but it is essential that we do so. Without it, we cannot be said to have met death. Significantly

meeting death is a need, not uncalled-for. We must meet death, and we must remain as spectators. Thus it is through
identification and through visual participation in the dying that a solution is achieved, accompanied by the critical
revaluation of values, which renders the meeting with death crucial for “humanness.” Note that both possibilities of
meeting death—in the sacrificial-ritual we have just explored, and in theatre or art, to which we now turn—are social.
Thus Freud’s text, although it insists on the irrepresentability of death, actually offers, unintentionally perhaps, a possible way out of the paradox through turning to the other.
Death
perhaps cannot be looked at directly, but it can be grasped sideways, indirectly, vicariously through a mirror, to use
Perseus’s ancient trick against Medusa. The introduction of the other, both similar to and different from oneself, into
the equation of death helps break out of the Cartesian circle with both its incontestable truth and its solipsism and
affirmation of oneself. The safety that theater provides, of essentially knowing that we will remain alive, emerges as
a kind of requirement for our ability to really identify with the other. In that, it paradoxically enables us to really get a
taste of death. Bataille radicalizes that possibility. Although Freud deems the estrangement of death from psychic life a problem, as we have seen and shall see, theater is not a
solution for him. With Bataille however, theater emerges as a much more compelling alternative. Again, it is a matter of a delicate nuance, but a nuance that makes all the difference. The idea
common to both authors—that we can meet death through the other and yet remain alive—is ambiguous. One can lay stress on that encounter or on the fact of remaining alive. 11
Freud SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 75 Looking Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille tends to opt for the second possibility, but his text can also be read as supporting the first. The
benefit in bringing Freud and Bataille together is that it invites us to that second reading. An Encounter with Death Death in Freud is often the death of the other. Both the fear of death and
the death wish are often focused on the other as their object. But almost always it is as though through the discussion of the other Freud were trying to keep death at bay. But along with
Bataille, we can take this other more seriously. Imagining our own death might be impossible, yet we can still get a glimpse of death when it is an other that dies. In one passage in his text,
the death of the other seems more explicitly a crucial point for Freud as well—one passage where death does not seem so distant. Freud comments on the attitude of primeval Man to death, as
described above—namely that he wishes it in others but ignores it in himself. “But there was for him one case in which the two opposite attitudes towards death collided,” he continues. It
occurred when primeval man saw someone who belonged to him die—his wife, his child, his friend […]. Then, in his pain, he was forced to learn that one can die, too, oneself, and his whole
being revolted against the admission. (“Thoughts” 293) Freud goes on to explain that the loved one was at once part of himself, and a stranger whose death pleased primeval man. It is from
this point, Freud continues, that philosophy, psychology and religion sprang. 12 I have described elsewhere (Razinsky, “A Struggle”) how Freud’s reluctance to admit the importance of
death quickly undermines this juncture of the existential encounter with death by focusing on the emotional ambivalence of primeval man rather than on death itself. However, the description
is there and is very telling. Primeval man witnessed death, and “his whole being revolted against the admission.” ”Man could no longer keep death at a distance, for he had tasted it in his pain
about the dead” (Freud, “Thoughts” 294). Once again, it is through the death of the other that man comes to grasp death. Once again, we have that special admixture of the other being both
an other and oneself that facilitates the encounter with death. Something of myself must be in the other in order for me to see his death as relevant to myself. Yet his or her otherness, which
means my reassurance of my survival, is no less crucial, for if it were not present, there would be no acknowledgement of death, one’s own death always being, says Freud, one’s blind spot.
13 Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 76 I mentioned before Heidegger’s grappling with a problem similar to Bataille’s paradox. It is part of Heidegger’s claim,
which he shares with Freud, that one’s death is unimaginable. In a famous section Heidegger mentions the possibility of coming to grasp death through the death of the other but dismisses it,
essentially since the other in that case would retain its otherness: the other’s death is necessarily the other’s and not mine (47:221-24). Thus we return to the problem we started with—that of
the necessary subject-object duality in the process of the representation of death. Watching the dead object will no more satisfy me than imagining myself as an object, for the radical
difference of both from me as a subject will remain intact. But the possibility that seems to emerge from the discussion of Freud and Bataille is that in-between position of the person both
close and distant, both self and other, which renders true apprehension of death possible, through real identification. 14 As Bataille says, regarding the Irish Wake custom where the relatives
drink and dance before the body of the deceased: “It is the death of an other, but in such instances, the death of the other is always the image of one’s own death” (“Hegel” 341; 291).
Bataille speaks of the dissolution of the subject-object boundaries in sacrifice, of the “fusion of beings” in these moments of intensity (“The Festival” 307-11; 210-13; La Littérature 215; 70).
Possibly, that is what happens to primeval man when the loved one dies and why his “whole being” is affected. He himself is no longer sure of his identity. Before, it was clear—there is the
other, the object, whom one wants dead, and there is oneself, a subject. The show and the spectators. Possibly what man realized before the cadaver of his loved one was that he himself is
also an object, taking part in the world of objects, and not only a subject. When he understood this, it seems to me, he understood death. For in a sense a subject subjectively never dies.
Psychologically nothing limits him, 15 while an object implies limited existence: limited by other objects that interact with it, limited in space, limited in being the thought-content of
someone else. Moreover, primeval man understood that he is the same for other subjects as other subjects are for him—that is, they can wish him dead or, which is pretty much the same, be
indifferent to his existence. The encounter made primeval man step out of the psychological position of a center, transparent to itself, and understand that he is not only a spirit but also a
thing, an object, not only a spectator; this is what really shakes him. 16 The Highest Stake in the Game of Living Thus far we have mainly discussed our first two questions: the limitation in
imagining death and the possible solution through a form SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 77 Looking Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille of praxis, in either a channeled, ritualized or
a spontaneous encounter with the death of an other, overcoming the paradox of the impossibility of representation by involving oneself through deep identification. We shall now turn to our
third question, of the value of integrating death into our thoughts. We have seen that Bataille’s perspective continuously brings up the issue of the value of approaching death. The questions of
whether we can grasp death and, if we can, how, are not merely abstract or neutral ones. The encounter with death, that we now see is possible, seems more and more to emerge as possessing
a positive value, indeed as fundamental. What we shall now examine is Freud’s attempt to address that positive aspect directly, an attempt that betrays, however, a deep ambivalence. As
mentioned, Freud’s text is very confused, due to true hesitation between worldviews (see Razinsky, “A Struggle”). One manifestation of this confusion is Freud’s position regarding this
cultural-conventional attitude: on the one hand he condemns it, yet on the other hand he accepts it as natural and inevitable. For him, it results to some extent from death’s exclusion from
unconscious thought (“Thoughts” 289, 296-97). Death cannot be represented and is therefore destined to remain foreign to our life. 17 But then Freud suddenly recognizes an opposite
But this attitude [the cultural-conventional
necessity: not to reject death but to insert it into life. Not to distance ourselves from it, but to familiarize ourselves with it:

one] of ours towards death has a powerful effect on our lives. Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the
highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an
American flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a Continental
love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind. Our emotional ties, the
unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court danger for ourselves and for those who belong to us. We
dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are dangerous but in fact indispensable, such as attempts at
artificial flight, expeditions to distant countries or experiments with explosive substances. We are paralyzed by the
thought of who is to take the son’s place with his mother, the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his children, if a
disaster should occur. Thus the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other
renunciations and exclusions. Yet the motto of the Hanseatic League ran: ‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’
(“It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.”) (“Thoughts” 290-91) Readers unfamiliar with Freud’s paper are probably shaking their heads
in disbelief. Is it Freud who utters these words? Indeed, the oddity of this citation cannot be over-estimated. It seems not to belong to Freud’s Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38,
no. 2, 2009 78 thought. One can hardly find any other places where he speaks of such an intensification of life and fascination with death, and praises uncompromising risk-taking and the
neglect of realistic considerations. In addition to being unusual, the passage itself is somewhat unclear. 18 The examples—not experimenting with explosive substances—seem irrelevant and
unconvincing. The meaning seems to slide. It is not quite clear if the problem is that we do not bring death into our calculations, as the beginning seems to imply, or that, rather, we actually
bring it into our calculations too much, as is suggested at the end But what I wish to stress here is that the passage actually opposes what Freud says in the preceding passages, where he
describes the cultural-conventional attitude and speaks of our inability to make death part of our thoughts. In both the current passage and later passages he advocates including death in life,
but insists, elsewhere in the text, that embracing death is impossible. In a way, he is telling us that we cannot accept the situation where death is constantly evaded. Here again Bataille can be
useful in rendering Freud’s position more intelligible. He seems to articulate better than Freud the delicate balance, concerning the place of death in psychic life, between the need to walk on
the edge, and the flight into normalcy and safety. As I asserted above, where in Freud there are contradictory elements, in Bataille there is a dialectic. Bataille, as we have seen, presents the
following picture: It might be that, guided by our instincts, we tend to avoid death. But we also seem to have a need to intersperse this flight with occasional peeps into the domain of death.
When we invest all of our effort in surviving, something of the true nature of life evades us. It is only when the finite human being goes beyond the limitations “necessary for his
preservation,” that he “asserts the nature of his being” (La Littérature 214; 68). The approaches of both Bataille and Freud are descriptive as well as normative. Bataille describes a tendency
to distance ourselves from death and a tendency to get close to it. But he also describes Man’s need to approach death from a normative point of view, in order to establish his humanity: a life
that is only fleeing death has less value. Freud carefully describes our tendency to evade death and, in the paragraph under discussion, calls for the contrary approach. This is stressed at the
end of the article, where he encourages us to “give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due” (“Thoughts” 299). Paradoxically, it might be what will make life “more
tolerable for us once again” (299). But since Freud also insists not only on a tendency within us to evade death, but also on the impossibility of doing otherwise, and on how death simply
cannot be the content of our thought, his sayings in favor of bringing death close are confusing and confused. Freud does not give us a reason for the need to approach death. He says that life
loses in interest, but surely this cannot be the result of abstaining from carrying out “experiments with explosive substances.” In addition, his ideas on the shallowness of a life without death
Sacrifice, Bataille says, brings
do not seem to evolve from anything in his approach. It is along the lines offered by Bataille’s worldview that I wish to interpret them here.

together life in its fullness and the annihilation of life. We are not mere spectators in the sacrificial ritual. Our
participation is much more involved. Sacrificial ritual creates a temporary, exceptionally heightened state of living. “The
sacred horror,” he calls the emotion experienced in sacrifice: “the richest and most agonizing experience.” It “opens
itself, like a theater curtain, on to a realm beyond this world” and every limited meaning is transfigured in it
(“Hegel” 338; 288). Bataille lays stress on vitality. Death is not humanizing only on the philosophical level, as it is for
Hegel or Kojève. Bataille gives it an emotional twist. The presence of death, which he interprets in a more earthly
manner, is stimulating, vivifying, intense. Death and other related elements (violence) bring life closer to a state where
individuality melts, the mediation of the intellect between us and the world lessens, and life is felt at its fullest.
Bataille calls this state, or aspect of the world, immanence or intimacy: “immanence between man and the world,
between the subject and the object” (“The Festival” 307-311; 210-213). Moments of intensity are moments of excess
and of fusion of beings (La Littérature 215; 70). They are a demand of life itself, even though they sometimes seem to contradict it. Death is problematic for us, but it opens up
for us something in life. This line of thought seems to accord very well with the passage in Freud’s text with which we are dealing here, and to extend it. Life without death is life lacking in
intensity, an impoverished, shallow and empty life. Moreover, the repression of death is generalized and extended: “the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its
train many other renunciations and exclusions.” Freud simply does not seem to have the conceptual tools to discuss these ideas. The intuition is even stronger in the passage that follows,
where Freud discusses war (note that the paper is written in 1915): When war breaks out, he says, this cowardly, conservative, risk-rejecting attitude is broken at once. War eliminates this
conventional attitude to death. “Death could no longer be Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 80 denied. We are forced to believe in it. People really die. . . . Life has,
indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content” (“Thoughts” 291). Thus what is needed is more than the mere accounting of consequences, taking death into consideration
as a future possibility. What is needed is exposure to death, a sanguineous imprinting of death directly on our minds, through the “accumulation of deaths” of others. Life can only become
vivid, fresh, and interesting when death is witnessed directly. Both authors speak of a valorization of death, and in both there is a certain snobbery around it. While the masses follow the
natural human tendency to avoid death, like the American couple or those who are busy with the thought of “who is to take our place,” the individualists do not go with the herd, and by
allowing themselves to approach death, achieve a fuller sense of life, neither shallow nor empty. 19 Yet again, Freud’s claims hover in the air, lacking any theoretical background. Bataille
supplies us with such background. He contests, as we have seen, the sole focus on survival. Survival, he tells us, has a price. It limits our life. As if there were
an inherent tension between preserving life and living it. Freud poses the same tension here. Either we are totally absorbed by the wish to survive, to keep life intact, and therefore limit our
existence to the bare minimum, or else we are willing to risk it to some extent in order to make it more interesting, more vital and valuable. Our usual world, according to Bataille, is
characterized by the duration of things, by the “future” function, rather than by the present. Things are constituted as separate objects in view of future time. This is one reason for the

threat of death: it ruins value where value is only assured through duration. It also exposes the intimate order of life that is continuously
hidden from us in the order of things where life runs its normal course. Man “is afraid of death as soon as he enters the system of projects that is the order of things” (“The Festival” 312; 214).
Sacrifice is the opposite of production and accumulation. Death is not so much a negation of life, as it is an
affirmation of the intimate order of life, which is opposed to the normal order of things and is therefore rejected.
“The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life […]. Death reveals life in its plenitude” (309; 212). Bataille’s “neutral image
of life” is the equivalent of Freud’s “shallow and empty” life. What Freud denounces is a life trapped within the cowardly economical system of considerations. It is
precisely the economy of value and future-oriented calculations that stand in opposition to the insertion of death into
life. “Who is to take the son’s place with his mother, the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his children.” Of course there is an emotional side to the story, but it is this insistence on

replacement that leaves us on the side of survival and stops us sometimes from living the present. “The
need for duration,” in the words of Bataille,
“conceals life from us” (“The Festival” 309; 212). For both authors, when death is left out, life “as it is” is false and
superficial. Another Look at Speculation Both authors, then, maintain that if elements associated with death invade our
life anyway, we might as well succumb and give them an ordered place in our thoughts. The necessity to meet death is
not due to the fact that we do not have a choice. Rather, familiarization with death is necessary if life is to have its full
value, and is part of what makes us human. But the tension between the tendencies—to flee death or to embrace it—is not easily resolved, and
the evasive tendency always tries to assert itself. As seen above, Bataille maintains that in sacrifice, we are exposed through death to other dimensions of life. But the
exposure, he adds, is limited, for next comes another phase, performed post-hoc, after the event: the ensuing horror and the intensity are too high to maintain, and must
be countered. Bataille speaks of the justifications of the sacrifice given by cultures, which inscribe it in the general order of things.
Their moralistic outrage to torture is a vampire, sucking outrage from the state

Avital Ronell 2008

[Diacritics Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2008]

Not to remain stuck to a fatherland—not even if it suffers most and needs help most—it is less
difficult to sever one’s heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to remain stuck to some pity—not
even for higher men (höheren Menschen) into whose rare torture and helplessness some
accident allowed us to look. Not to remain stuck to a science—even if it should lure us with the most precious finds that seem to have
been saved up precisely for us. Not to remain stuck to one’s own detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the bird who [End Page
165] flies ever higher to see ever more below him—the danger of the flies. Not to remain stuck to our own virtues and become as a whole the victim of
some detail in us, such as our hospitality, which is the danger of dangers for superior and rich souls who spend themselves lavishly, almost indifferently,
and exaggerate the virtue of generosity into a vice. [52] The inventory prescribes extreme forms of detachment, even to the extent of urging the
detachment from detachment, so that independence and the ability to command are properly tested. The problem with testing one’s independence—the
test for Nietzsche is bound up with the possibility of independence—is that it copies the word that tries to describe the freeing perspective for us: in-
dependence, Un-abhängigkeit. In other words, independence depends on dependence, and can only come about by the negation of dependency. But
dependence comes first and always squats in any declaration of independence; so-called independence can never shake loose its origin in dependent
states. The un or in of what depends and hangs onto has to undo the core dependency and produce a nonaddictive prospect. This way of skating on the
rim of negativity is typical enough of the Nietzschean maneuver that, keeping up its stamina, endeavors not to trigger a dialectical takeover. The test
site circumscribed by this text occupies a zone between negation and projected reconciliation; it carves a hole in any possible synthesis. Independence
can never be stabilized or depended upon, which is why it has to submit punctually to the test of its own intention and possibility. The “nots” that
Nietzsche enters into the decathlon of testing are also a way of signing his own name by courting and swerving around the nihilistic threat:
Nicht/Nietzsche. This is the text, remember, in which Nietzsche says that every philosophical work installs a biographical register; he makes it clear that
he has strapped himself into this text and also that its articulation should not be limited to the disseminated indications of this or that biographeme.
Nonetheless the test run that he proposes bears the weight of his history, including his never-ending break-up with Richard Wagner. Thus the first self-
testing command says: “Not to remain stuck (hängenbleiben) to a person—not even the most loved—every person is a prison, also a nook” [52].
Beginning with the necessity of wrenching oneself loose from a beloved person, whether a prison
or shelter, the inventory goes on to name the urgency of breaking with one’s country, even in
times of war or need, even when the patriotic introject wants and calls you. A superpower nation-
state should be the easiest to sever with. If the inventory is set up in terms of serial “nots” this is
no doubt because Nietzsche needs to enact the complicity of the Versuch with its linguistic
appointees: the tester or attempter must desist from adhering to the temptation that calls. The
act, if such it is, of desistence is not as such a negative one, as Derrida has argued in his reading
of Lacoue-Labarthe: “Without being negative, or being subject to a dialectic, it both organizes
and disorganizes what it appears to determine” [“Desistance” 41]. Being tested, which brings
together attempter with the tempting, does not fall purely into the zone of action or its purported
other—passivity—but engages both at once. Already the locution “being tested,” always awkward and slightly wrenching,
invites the intervention of the passive where action or at least some activity is indicated. The test takes one through the magnetizing sites to which one
is spontaneously, nearly naturally, attracted. This could be a resting place, a shelter and solace overseen by the friendly protectors of the pleasure
pity,
principle. But Nietzsche, like the other guy, takes the test beyond the pleasure principle. Elsewhere Nietzsche states that pity toppled the gods;
the most dangerous affect, counts for the one to which we are most prone. We are tempted and
tested by pity, roped in by its grim allure, and even if we are not gods, pity can make us crumble
and christianize. (This does not mean that Nietzsche advocates the vulgarity of some forms of indifference. Only that action and intervention should not
Liberal pity policies would be nauseating to
eventuate from pity, as do “benevolent racism” [End Page 166] and the like.
Nietzsche; they are not radical, strong, or loving enough. Of course nowadays, I would even take liberal pity.) Science
belongs to the list of the desisted—“resistance” would come off as too strong a term, too repressive and dependent on what presents itself. The
inclusion of science in the subtle athletics of the “not” may reflect the way Nietzsche had to break away from his scientific niche of philology, but there is
more to it. It is not just a matter of releasing oneself from a scientific commitment in order to pass the Nietzschean test. As the other term in the
partnership, science itself stands to lose from too tight a grip and needs eventually to loosen the bond. A true temptress, science fascinates, perhaps
seduces and lulls. It captivates and often enough gives one a high, an intoxicating sense of one’s own capacity for mastery. Yet science itself is
implicated in the relation thus structured. For science not only curates the test from a place of superiority, but is itself subject to the rigors and renewals
of testing. So even if it invites the blindness of fascination and the sum of addictive returns, science needs to be released if only to go under, to dissolve
its substantial mask and be turned over to fresh scientific probes. The movement of dislocation and disappropriation continues even to the point of
disallowing sheer detachment. Increasing the dosage of desistance to the level of turning on itself, Nietzsche proposes that one should not remain
dependent on one’s experience of voluptuous detachment. He keeps the tested being in the vehicle of the dis-, and rigorously refuses to issue a permit
for sticking to any moment or structure of being that would seem welcoming or appropriate. (It is appropriate only to disappropriate, to trace one’s own
expropriation from a site that persistently beguiles with the proper.) Thus one must desist even from becoming attached to one’s own virtues, such as
Virtue can enlarge itself, take over;
hospitality. Virtue itself, no matter how generous or exemplary, can trip up the one being tested.
it is vulnerable to imperial acts of expansion. One can become enslaved to one’s virtue, attend to
it immoderately, and turn oneself into a hospital for the vampirizing other. In this ward, as in other
Nietzschean wings, strong and superior beings encounter the danger of infection, a weakening. They give too much and spend themselves as if they
were infinitely capable of the offerings for which they are solicited. The offerings turn into sacrifice; the superior soul gives itself away, finding that it is
spent, exhausted. Thus the virtue of generosity, coextensive with hospitality, is turned into a vice. Virtue tips into its other, and generosity soon
becomes a depleting burden.
Their “ethical stance” allows the aff to think of themselves as good, creating a distance
from their own violence that makes annihilaiton inevitable.

Kenneth Irzkowitz 1999

[Assoc Prof Philosophy at Marietta College, College Literature 26.1]

Bataille rejects the notion of a unified good. When he criticizes the moral good, this is because by assuming such unity, morality
has blinded us to the importance of disutility, to the praiseworthiness of nonproductive usages
serving no end beyond themselves. We generally assume that there are no such praiseworthy
usages, but Bataille insists that there are. Indeed, there is a whole realm of them, he contends,
as well as the need for an ethics corresponding to them, one able to take their violence into
account. The purpose of offering a series of such strong, disturbing characterizations is not to dismiss ordinary moral values but to supplement
them, to say that such values are not enough for us. At the same time that we outlaw and condemn all of these ruinous squanderings, our sovereign
brutality, murder, prostitution, swearing, sex, infamy, ruin,
aspirations demand them. The list includes
degradation, and finally treason. These are activities we must prohibit, activities we cannot allow
ourselves to participate in, but which at the same time identify who we are. Hypermorality
instructs that while we cannot take up such behaviors, we cannot not take them up either. We
cannot not squander ourselves in these and other ways, many of which are offensive of mention to ordinary morality. To help
emphasize just how offensive, there is a passage near the beginning of Death and Sensuality depicting the spectacle of primitive ritual human sacrifice,
the communal production of a wasteful expenditure witnessed in common. Bataille uses the word "sacred" to describe the experience of the witnesses,
underlining just how fundamental and revelatory to us he thinks such events were. Disturbing as it must be to us, he holds that the event of the
spectacle of ritual sacrifice has power of conveying a profound meaning, This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a
discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers
experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the
solemn and collective nature of religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice. (Bataille 1962, 16) It is a disturbing thought
that only a spectacular killing, that only events of this kind, can satisfy the human desire for the experience of sacred meaning. Along with a fear of our
own immoral excess comes the question of whether hypermorality invites unleashing this destructive excess. Would Bataille like to see us unleashed,
perhaps in the style of Charles Manson, to produce our own spectacles of ritual sacrifice? Certainly Bataille describes irrational violence as having an
undeniable meaning, one that is revelatory of the sacred continuity alluded to in the previous citation. Soon after that citation he similarly asserts that
we seek "the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity" (1962, 18). Where
do we find this power? We find it in transformative experiences akin to the sacrifice described above. In other words, to acquire the power to know the
unknowable, the production of transformative violence is the key. In the name of this power, the production of violence is not an accident but a goal.
This production is the key to the transformative experiences that give our lives a sense of intensity, depth, and meaning. Hence, we always have ample
motive to seek such experiences, to seek to bear witness to transformative violence. Given such ample motive, violence and spectacles of such
violence will be produced. Moreover, no morality will ever be able to put an end to these
productions. No morality has the power to stop the persistence of the sacred violence in our
lives, since this violcnce is the only key we have to the experience of the miraculous, of the
sacred. As for Charles Manson, Bataille would certainly try to understand Manson's and our own
violence in this context of the sacred, of our need for depth and meaning. The production of
transformative violence is fundamental to our being, whether we are conscious of it in this way
or not. He, then, would not regard Manson's production as an anomaly, as unlike what he himself would be driven to produce. Yet in our lives there
are also limits. It is unlikely that Bataile would applaud Manson for the same reason he ultimately rejects Sade. They are both indiscriminate; they both
go too far. "Continuity is what we are after,' Bataille confirms, but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can alone
establish is not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain. De
Sade's aberration exceeds that limit. (Bataille 1962, 13) In other words, our wasteful consumption must also have limits. To actually approve of our own
selfdestruction goes too far. Later on in Death and Sen suality, Bataille continues, Short of a paradoxical capacity to defend the indefensible, no one
would suggest that the cruelty of the heroes of Justine and Jullette should not be wholeheartedly abominated. It is a denial of the principles on which
humanity is founded. We are hound to reject something that would end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are
building we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. (Bataile 1962, 17980) This passage is crucial for understanding Bataille's
ethics. Usually Bataille writes on behalf of the violence that remains unaffected by absolute prohibitions. Prohibitions cannot obviate this transformative
violence. There is always ample motive to produce the experiences of sacred transformation, i.e., to transgress the prohibitions. Yet selfpreservation is
also a fundamental value for BatailIe there is also ample motive to resist the violence that denies the value of the well being of life itself. As he says in
the second of the above passages, we must condemn what threatens to destroy us; our sovereign aspirations can be taken too far. In another passage
he speaks of our need "to become aware of... [ourselves] and to know clearly what... [our] sovereign aspirations are in order to limit their possibly
disastrous consequences" (1962, 181). It is when we are ignorant of these aspirations that we are most vulnerable to them, enacting them anyway,
albeit inattentively. In the end, hypermorality asks us to encounter our aspirations to evil, to join in what Bataille calls "complicity in the knowledge of
Evil" in order to construct what he calls a "rigorous morality" (1973, unpaginated Preface). What does it mean to encounter such aspirations, to join in
such complicity? Bataille's hypermorality requires that, as a culture, we appreciate the value of becoming more active in our productions of
violence. From his earliest writings to his latest, Bataille always bemoaned the decline of the practice of sacrifice in the modem world, beginning in the
West, and he always believed that such a decline only obscures our productions of violence, rather than doing away with them or the needs from which
they stem. Two closely related discussions of this appear in his early essays "The Jesuve" and "Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van
Gogh," where Bataille suggests that the decline of the practice of sacrifice has been far less than a blessing for us. He argues that the production of
violence continues, the danger of this production continues, although in the most unrecognizable forms. The examples given in the essay "Sacrificial
Mutilation" emphasize both how easy it is to distance ourselves from this danger as well as how terrible such a danger could be. They include a man
twisting off his own finger and a woman tearing out her own eye, both terrible examples of our strange, cruel, and uncontrollable needs for expenditure.
Along similar lines, as a commentary on events of this kind, Bataile argues, The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due
to its universality, a human action more significant than any other. Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrifice,
with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the
conditions of presentday life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior. (Bataille 1985, 73) Here as throughout his writings,
Bataile emphasizes two key aspects of the decline of sacrifice that we ignore at our own peril. In the first place, he contends that the violent need that
ritual sacrifice was once able to address remains with us despite all optimism to the contrary. We don't put violence on display in the same ritualized
fashion, but the need remains constant. We've only become less aware of it in ourselves, and less aware of ourselves as those who have need of such
violence. Thus Bataille's first point is that the need for nonproductive usages does not diminish when it is denied. His second point is that this denial in
which the need persists represents a decline in selfawareness, one with obviously dangerous consequences. No longer do we congregate as a
community to witness the violence we desire to bring into this world and to affirm our lack of control over this violence, our lack of control over this
desire. We no longer congregate to produce the sacrificial spectacle, to produce thereby a community of mutual complicity in the knowledge of the
sacred continuity of being. We no longer allow ourselves to organize spectacles in the name of the sacred that enact that which exceeds the good. Such
spectacles would have to violate every stricture of human rights known to us today. Yet we have not changed, according to Bataile, except for
We are now more than ever the condemned on the way to
becoming less known to ourselves than ever.
becoming the destroyed by way of imagining ourselves as the good. Even an utter catastrophe
like the Holocaust does little to alter our naive selfimage. In his short piece on David Rousset's
book The Universe of the Concentration Camp, Bataille refuses to side with the moralists
because moralistic selfdelusion here is our problem, not our solution, There exists in a certain
form of moral condemnation an escapist denial. One says, basically, this abjection would not
have been, had there not been monsters .... And it is possible, insofar as this language appeals
to the masses, that this infantile negation may seem effective; but in the end it changes nothing.
It would be as vain to deny the incessant danger of cruelty as it would be to deny the danger of
physical pain. One hardly obviates its effects flatly attributing it to parties or to races which one
imagines to he inhuman. (Bataille 1991, 19) Based on what we have already seen in this paper,
Bataille can never accept the moralist's claim, distancing us from the purveyors of evil, no
matter how attractive it is to join hands at a particular moment of victory over an oppressive
enemy. It would be inconsistent for him to specify a particular set of disagreeable behaviors and
state that they aren't human, that they aren't ours. Even at this point, standing in the ruins, the
main point would be to obstruct our alltooready inclination to find ways of denying the cruelty at
the heart of us all; to interfere with our desire to attribute all cruelties to the monstrous one or
the aberrant few. For hypermorality, this cruelty is precisely what we need to take into account
of ourselves, rather than to deny it as the evil of others. . How is this to be done? Bataille faces a serious dilemma that
a contrast between his hypermorality and Aristotle's morality helps to show. The goal of morality is to take virtuous behaviors into account, to make
them part of our lives by learning through habituation to enjoy right behaviors with respect to our pleasures and pains. Aristotle says that it is the job of
"legislators [to] make the citizens good by forming habits in them .... and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one" (1941, 952, 1103b).
He continues saying that "the whole concern both of virtue and of political science is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be
good, he who uses them badly bad" (1941, 955, 1105a). As he puts it, "We assume ... that excellence tends to do what is best with regard to pleasures
and pains, and vice does the contrary" (1941, 955, lIlO4b). How do we become excellent? We begin with instruction by role models, who demonstrate
the praiseworthy behaviors and the rule to follow in practice until we follow it automatically, internalized as part of our second nature of moral character.
Such learning is by imitation of those who delight in shunning the wrong pleasures, who delight in withstanding the right pains. Such imitation is difficult
but noble and good, making us excellent. In contrast to these virtuous displays serving Aristotle's purposes of moral instruction, what about the kinds of
spectacles or displays Bataille proposes with his hypermorality? Whereas Aristotle's are displays of virtue, Bataile's would be closer to displays of vice.
Whereas the former invite imitation of the right relations to pleasure and pain, the latter would invite imitation of morally wrong relations. In the former
case we have a heroic role model. In the latter case,
the role model would be closer to the opposite, to the traitor,
the practitioner of vice; the role model would be closer to Sade
 A-SPEC 1NC

A)INTERPRETATION-THE AFF MUST SPECIFY AGENT

B)VIOLATION-USFG IS NOT AN ACTOR

Brovero in ‘94
(Adrienne, Immigration Policies Expert, http:www.wfu.edu/Student-organizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Brovero1994Immigration.htm)

The problem is that there is no agent specified. The

The problem is not that there is not a plan; this time there is on.

federal government does not enact policies, agents or agencies within the federal
government enact policies. The agent enacting a policy is a very important aspect of the policy. For some of the same reasons the
affirmative team should specify a plan of action, the affirmative team should specify an agent of action.

C)VOTERS

1. GROUND-DENY SPECIFIC LINKS TO DISADS, IMPLEMENTATION

TAKEOUTS, AND AGENTS CPS- 90 PERCENT OF POLICY IS
IMPLEMENTATION

2. NO SOLVENCY-BROVERO INDICATES USFG DOES NOT ENACT

POLICIES

3. NOT TOPICAL-THERE NOT FIRM ON AGENT WHICH VIOLATES

RESOLVED “TO TAKE A FIRM COURSE OF ACTION”- FROM RANDOM
HOUSE