DNG Answers

West debate 11-12
1 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches
War Machine 2AC Deleuze Bad General/Must-Read

( ) Deleuze himself wrote that the only relevant objection to a philosopher is that they do not pose the right questions unfortunately for them, Deleuzes questions are themselves not worth pursuing. Their affirmation of lines of flight and deterritorialization makes a communal ethic impossible. Their stark distinction between state and war machine replicates the dualisms they criticize and deters focus from the very real, material ways exploitation plays out across the world. Peter Hallward, Professor in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, 2006, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, p. 161-162
Now Deleuze understands perfectly well why most of the objections raised against the gre at philosophers are empty. Indignant readers say to them: things are not like that []. But, in fact, it is not a matter of knowing whether things are like that or not; it is a matter of knowing whether the question which presents things in such a light is good or not, rigorous or not (ES, 106). Rather than test its accuracy according to the criteria of representation, the genius of a philosophy must first be measured by the new distribution which it imposes on beings and concepts (LS, 6). In reality t hen, Deleuze concludes, only one kind of objection is worthwhile: the objection which shows that the question raised by a philosopher is not a good question, that it does not force the nature of things enough (ES, 107; cC WP, 82). Deleuze certainly forces the nature of things into conformity with his own question. Just as certainly however, his question inhibits any consequential engagement with the constraints of our actual world. For readers who remain concerned with these constraints and their consequences, Deleuzes question is not the best available question. Rather than try to refute Deleuze, this book has tried to sho w how his system works and to draw attention to what should now he the obvious (and perfectly explicit) limitations of this philosophy of unlimited affirmation. First of all, since it acknowledges only a unilateral relation between virtual and actual, there is no place in Deleuzes philosophy for any notion of change, time or history that is mediated by actuality In the end, Deleuze offers few resources for thinking the consequences of what happens within the actually existing world as such . Unlike Darwin or Marx, for instance, the adamantly virtual orientation of Deleuzes constructivism does not allow him to account for cumulative transformation or novelty in terms of actual materials and tendencies . No doubt few contemporary philosophers have had as an acute a sense of the internal dynamic of capitalism but equally, few have proposed so elusive a response as the virtual war mac hine that roams through the pages of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Like the nomads who invented it, this abstract machine operates at an absolute speed, by being synonymous with speed, as the incarnation of a pure and immeasurable multiplicity; an irruption of the ephemeral and of the power of metamorphosis (TP, 336, 352). Like any creating, a war machine consists and exists only in its own metamorphoses (T~ 360). By posing the question of politics in the starkly dualistic terms of war machine or state by posing it, in the end, in the apocalyptic terms of a new people and a new earth or else no people and no earth the political aspect of Deleuzes philosophy amounts to little more than utopian distraction . Although no small number of enthusiasts continue to devote much energy and ingenuity to the task, the truth is that Deleuzes work is essentially indifferent to the politics of this world. A philosophy based on deterritorialisation, dissipation and flight can offer only the most immaterial and evanescent grip on the mechanisms of exploitation and domination that continue to condition so much of what happens in our world . Deleuzes philosophical war remains absolute and abstract , precisely, rather than directed or waged [menee]. Once a social field is defined less by its conflicts and contradictions than by the lines of flight running through it, any distinctive space for political action can only be subsumed within the more general dynamics of creation or life. And since these dynamics are themselves anti-dialectical if not anti-relational, there can be little room in Deleuzes philosophy for relations of conflict or solidarity, i.e. relations that are genuinely between rather than external to individuals , classes, or principles.
West debate 11-12
War Machine 2AC Reject War Machines Comparative/Conclusive

( ) Our first political priority should be to REJECT the call of the negatives war machine and align ourselves with a more committed, principled, and modest political engagement. The 1ACis incompatible with Deleuzes nomadism, and this incompatibility is decidedly NOT a virtue of their politics. Those who desire to make the world a better place must look elsewhere than their rhizomatic war machine. Peter Hallward, Professor in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, 2006, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, p. 162-164
Deleuze writes a philosophy of (virtual) difference without (actual) others . He intuits a purely internal or self-differing difference, a difference that excludes any constitutive mediation between the differed. Such a philosophy precludes a distinctively relational conception of politics as a matter of course. The politics of the future are likely to depend less on virtual mobility than on more resilient forms of cohesion, on more principled forms of commitment, on more integrated forms of coordination, on more resistant forms of defence. Rather than align ourselves with the nomadic war machine, our first task should be to develop appropriate ways of responding to the newly aggressive techniques of invasion, penetration and occupation which serve to police the embattled margins of empire . In a perverse twist of fate, it may be that today in places like Palestine, Haiti and Iraq, the agents of imperialism have more to learn from Deleuzian rhizomatics than do their opponents. As we have repeatedly seen, the second corollary of Deleuzes
disqualification of actuality concerns the paralysis of the subject or actor. Sinc e what powers Deleuzes cosmology is the immediate differentiation of creation through the infinite proliferation of virtual creatings, the creatures that actualise these creatings are confined to a derivative if not limiting role. A creatures own interests, actions or decisions are of minimal or preliminary significance at best: the renewal of creation always requires the paralysis and dissolution of the creature per se. The notion of a constrained or
situated freedom, the notion that a subjects own dec isions might have genuine consequences -the whole notion, in short, of strategy - is thoroughly foreign to Deleuzes conception of thought . Deleuze obliges us, in other words, to make an absolute distinction between what a subject does or decides and what is done or decided through the subject. By rendering this distinction absolute he abandons the category of the subject altogether. He abandons the decisive subject in favour of our more immediate subjection to the imperatives of creative life or thought. Deprived of any strategic apparatus, Deleuzes philosophy thus combines the self-grounding sufficiency of pure force or infinite perfection with our symmetrical limitation to pure contemplation or in-action. On the one hand, Deleuze always maintains that there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the inten sification of life. Absolute life or creation tolerates no norm external to itself. The creative movement that orients us out of the world does not depend on a transcendent value beyond the world. After Spinoza, after Nietzsche, Deleuze rejects all forms of moral evaluation or strategic judgement. Every instance of decision, every confrontation with the question what should we do?, is to be resolved exclusively in terms of what w e can do. An individuals power or capacity is also its natural right, and the answer to the question of what an individual or body should do is again simplicity itself it should go and will always go as far as it can (WI~ 74; EP, 258). But
on the other band, we know that an individual can only do this because its power is not that of the individual itself. By doing what it can, an individual only provides a vessel for the power that works through it, and which alone acts or rather, which alone is. What impels us to persevere in our being has nothing to do with us as such. So when, in the conclusion of their last joint project, Del euze and Guattari observe that vitalism has always bad two possible interpretations, it is not surprising that they s hould opt for the resolutely inactive interpretation. Vitalism, they explain, can be conceived either in terms of an Idea that acts but is not, and that acts therefore only from the point of view of an external cerebral knowledge; or of a force that is but does not act, and which is therefore a pure internal Feeling [sentir]. Deleuze and Guattari embrace this second interpretation, they choose Leibnizian being over Kantian act, pr ecisely because it disables action in favour of contemplation. It suspends any relation between a living and the lived, between a knowing and the known, between a creating and the created. They embrace it because what feeling presents is always in a state of detachment in relation to action and even to movement, and appears as a pure contemplation without knowledge.8 As Deleuze understands it, living
contemplation proceeds at an immeasurable distance from what is merely lived, known or decided. Life lives and creation creates on a virtual plane that leads forever out of our actual world. Few philosophers have been as inspiring as Deleuze. But those of us who still seek to change our world and to empower its inhabitants will need to look for our inspiration elsewhere.
West debate 11-12
War Machine 2AC AT: Thats Not Our Deleuze

( ) They cant simply say thats not our Deleuze to get out of our offense Deleuzes thought is fundamentally driven by an overarching concern with creativity and the abolition of constraints. This desire to become rhizomatic and break down constraints relinquishes the task of shaping society and history to those that currently occupy power. Deleuzes alternative is literally a prescription to throw up our hands at the world and retreat into our own self-obsession. Peter Hallward, Professor in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, 2006, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, p. 7
To insist in this way on the logic of creation as the primary if not exclusive focus of Deleuzes work is undeniably to simplify aspects of his thought. My goal in this hook is not to engage in the detailed analysis of particular sequences or problems in Deleuzes texts, but to characterise the dominant movement of his philosophy as a whole. For the sake of clarity and economy this characterization will pay little attention to the complexities of context or the occasional inconsistencies that must accompany the development of so large and wide-ranging a body of work. Despite these shortcomings, I think its fair to say that this approach remains broadly in line with Deleuzes own way of reading other philosophers . Like Leibniz or Bergson, Deleuze assumes that every philosopher is animated by just one fundamental problem, and that to read a work of philosophy does not consist in concluding from the idea of a preceding condition the idea of the following condition, but in grasping the effort or tendency by which the following condition itself ensues from the preceding by means of a natural force)7 Every philosophys powe r is measured by the concepts it creates, concepts that impose a new set of divisions on things and actions. On the basis of the concepts they create, philosophers subordinate and submit things to a question in such a way that , in this forced and constrained submission, things reveal to us an essence, a nature. The main virtue of the question to which Deleuzes project will itself be submitted in the following pages may be to reveal in a somewhat unexpected way the degree to which his work, far from engaging in a description or transformation of the world, instead seeks to escape it . The Deleuze that has long fascinated and troubled me is neither a worldly nor even a relational thinker. If (after Marx and Darwin) materialism involves acceptance of the fact that actual or worldly processes inflect the course of both natural and human history then Deleuze may not be a materialist thinker either. As Deleuze presents it, the destiny of thought will not be fundamentally affected by the mediation of society, history or the world; although Delenze equates being with the activity of creation, he orients this activity towards a contemplative and immaterial abstraction. More than a hundred and fifty years after Marx urged us to change rather than contemplate the world, Deleuze, like so many of his philosophical contemporaries, effectively recommends instead that we settle for the alternative choice . The real preoccupation of this book concerns the value of this advice.
West debate 11-12
War Machine 2AC Authority Over Lines of Flight Bad

( ) Their constant answer to our indicts of lines of flight will be thats not our Deleuze or thats not our line of flight this is the fundamental problem with their politics. Their insistence that only they know the true nature of their line of flight sets them up as a hierarchical authority over the true knowledge of lines of flight. That replicates the worst aspects of what they criticize, and warrants the abandonment of their politics. Christopher R. Miller, Associate Professor of English at Yale University, 2003, Research in African Literatures,
Vol. 34, No. 3, p. 134-135 It is thus only as an act of authoritative assertion (and not reasoned argument) that one can maintain statements like those that Holland makes: "He [Miller] claims it is representational; they [Deleuze and Guattari] insist it is not"; "Deleuze and Guattari do not make 'anthropological statements of their own'" (H 163, 164); or again, "the last traces of humanism and anthropocentrism have disappeared " (H2 59). Who is empowered to decide what is representational and what is not? When A Thousand Plateaus refers us to
"studies on leopard-man societies, etc., in Black Africa," in a footnote that relies exclusively on a colonizer's account of the phenomenon (539 n11/297n), are we really supposed to take the leopard-men as purely virtual, philosophical concepts that sprang from the heads of Deleuze and Guattari without representation? To banish all thoughts about Belgian colonialism in the Congo (see M 193-96)? Only an act of willful blindness permits such a reading. Based on what criteria (other than obedience to the word of the masters) would one read the leopard-men and the thousands of other people discussed in A Thousand Plateaus as purely virtual? Holland is silent on this. When Deleuze and Guattari assert that their philosophy is not representational, Holland dutifully intones: "not representational!" (H 170 n10).
Because Deleuze and Guattari are "categorical" (H 163) in their insistence that their concepts are not scientific, Holland expects us to take that disclaimer at face value and abandon all critical inquiry into the possible traces of "science" in their "concepts." His method consists of applying the precepts of Deleuze and Guattari's thought to all readings of their works; that is for him the only true form of "understanding." I call that orthodoxy, not understanding. Only an "authority literally and explicitly beyond discussion, beyond appeal" 14 (a Deleuzian authority )and beyond the kind of critique I offered in "Beyond Identity"can make all this happen. This certainly runs counter to the famously antiauthoritarian, unorthodox, "open" reputation of Deleuze and Guattari's work. 15 I made clear at the beginning of "Beyond Identity" that my approach would be deliberately unorthodox, that I would read against the grain of nomad thought, hopefully in the interest of shedding some light. I acknowledged that my entire reading of A Thousand Plateaus would be illegitimate "if one takes nomadology as an orthodoxyprecisely what it is not supposed [End Page 134] to beand claims that it can be judged only by its own criteria and read only through the grid of its own self-defined vocabulary" (M 175). That definition of orthodoxy is an accurate description of Holland's approach; he might as well have stopped
reading at that point (and in a sense he did), because it is precisely at that point that we part company. For Holland, A Thousand Plateaus may not, must not be read by terms other than those approved by its authors. To me, it seems evident that we must, before anything else, seek to understand any thinker on his/her own termsthat is an obligation, but we are not, pace Holland, required to stop there. I believe that we are free to think outside and beyond the bounds that writers set for us (even when those bounds consist of a phony claim that there are no bounds). But authority is not nomadologically correct, so it has to be finessed . The wall of "philosophy" is Holland's device for this. As I wrote in my essay, the internal contradictions in A Thousand Plateausthe unresolved tension between the virtual and the realwould not be such a problem if they were more openly and honestly avowed; but the vehemence of Holland's reaction shows that, within the supposedly free and "open" world of nomadology, dogma is not to be called into question. "Meaning," Holland wrote in 1991, "is forever open to subjective interpretation," but apparently only in "postsignifying regimes" (HD 59), and only a Deleuzian can tell you if you have passed that mystical threshold. The (non-)concepts of A Thousand Plateaus, Holland explained in that same essay, "are strategically 'under-determined' so that their understanding and extension to other domains [like anthropology, Holland will assert later in the same essay] requires the invention of novel connections rather than the mere application of a pre-established rule" (HD 56; emphasis added). But in 2003, "rule" is re-established, and the meaning of A Thousand Plateaus is closely controlled. The rhizome has become a straitjacket. The reading of A Thousand Plateaus is "rule-bound" (HD 64 n4) (just what it is not supposed to be), and closed off to genuinely heterogeneous reading. By heterogeneous I mean an interpretation that might, if necessary, resist or test the assumptions of the text, of its author(s), and of its self-appointed guardians. If meaning is "forever open," is it open only to
interpretations that are certified to be in conformity with the author's views? The implications of such a stance are frightening. This is, in part, how nomadology has constructed for itself what Peter Hallward so accurately calls "a world without others."
West debate 11-12
Tyler Durden Disad (1/3)

Turn, Project Mayhem: a) A politics of lines of flight inevitably restratifies and turns into what it opposes their transcendence of boundaries cant happen without tons of violence. They start out as Fight Club but turn into Project Mayhem. Blent Diken, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Sciences, September 2001, online:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Diken-Laustsen-Enjoy-Your-Fight.pdf, accessed August 24, 2004 Fight Club is constructed along a line of flight in the Deleuzian sense. Its lines of flight are attempts to escape segmentarity, be it molar or molecular, to disorganize the social bond. It is only after you lose everything that youre free to do anything.... We have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves (Palahniuk 1997: 70, 52). Fight Club seeks to attain a Body without Organs, the zero-degree of symbolic difference, an undifferentiated body with no face, no privile ged zones and forms: a chaos so perfect, so pure, so complete that in it all differences, all articulations are effaced. Pure chaos, the undifferentiated reality (Callinicos 1982: 95). Complete destratification. With Bataille its principle is expenditure, with Deleuze and Guattari antiproduction, a universal tendency co -existing with exchange and production. Fight Club wants to go back to zero. The answer is not improvement but destruction, including self-destruction (Palahniuk 1997: 49). In his P rogramme from 1936 and his analysis of fascism, Bataille concludes that there is much the Left can learn from the organizational forms of fascism (Bataille 1997, 1997b; Srensen 2001). Assume the function of destruction and decomposition. Take part in th e destruction of the existing world Fight for the decomposition of all communities (Bataille 1997: 121). Fight Club, too, seeks a prematurely induced dark age. The complete and right -away destruction of civilization. (Palahniuk 1997: 125). Bataille had argued that it is necessary to affirm the value of violence and to take upon oneself perversion and crime (1997: 121); and Fight Club, again, violently lifts the curse: yes, youre going to have to kill someone. No excuses and no lies. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else (Palahniuk 1997: 125, 134). Fight Club wants the whole world to hit the bottom (Ibid. 123). Echoing the French nouveaux philosophes, especially the Situationist manifesto, it especially attacks the society of spectacle. Fight club isnt about words Fight club is not football on television. You arent watching a bunch of men you dont know halfway around the world beating on each other live by satellite with a two-minute delay (Ibid. 50, 51). Fight Club is about street fights, urban anarchism, and strategies of subversion. Realize the irony of the animal world, continues Batailles Programme (1997: 121). In his imagination, Jack walks up the entrance of a cave and out comes a penguin. Slide, it sa ys, smiling. Without any effort, we slid through tunnels and galleries (Palahniuk 1997: 20). It is no coincidence that the social space, in which Jack/penguin slides, is a smooth social space. Losing the social bond is freedom, and in this sense Fight Club is a Deleuzian war machine, a free assemblage oriented along a line of flight out of the repressive social machinery. It is that which cannot be contained in the striated, rigidly segmented social space; it consists of flows (speed), operates in a smooth space, and unties the social bond (codes) in multiplicity (mass-phenomena). In this respect war, or fight, is the surest mechanism against social organization: just as Hobbes saw clearly that the State was against war, so war is against the State, and makes it impossible (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 357). It is crucial in this context that Deleuze and Guattari recognize a war machine as an assemblage that has as its object not war war is only the supplement of the war machinebut the constitution of a creative line of flight, a smooth space. War is simply a social state that wards off the State (Ibid. 417). In this sense, violence is Fight Clubs supplement, not necessarily its object; Fight Club is above all a social state that wards off society. Fight Club proliferates in, or even better, constructs a nomadic social space without zones, centres, segments: a flattened space, in which one can slide through connections: and and and. Lines rather than points; connection rather than conjugation. Fight Club does not have a fixed spatiality, a permanent address; it grows like a rhizome, thorough discontinuous jumps. And temporally, it exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends (Palahniuk 1997: 48).
West debate 11-12

b) The impact to this arg is huge the desire to achieve a plane of pure immanence cannot be brought into being without a massively violent clearing away of all remnants of transcendence. William Rasch, Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Indiana, 2004, Sovereignty and Its
Discontents, p. 104-107 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer a similar invitation. Our task which is to say, philosophys task is, finally, once and for all, to overcome the time honored but world-distorting distinction between transcendence and immanence. It is the philosopher, the true philosopher, and only the philosopher, who can institute the infinite plane of immanence we are to inhabit. That plane, which is, of course, not physical and not explicable according to spatiotemporal coordinates (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p 37), can only be described by way of evocative similes and metaphors. If, for example, concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, then the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them. Or, if concepts are the archipelago or skeletal frame, then the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts. And again: Concepts are events, but the plane is the horizon of event s, the reservoir or reserve of purely conceptual events: not the relative horizon that functions as a limit, which changes with an observer and encloses observable states of affairs, but the absolute horizon, independent of any observer, which makes the event as concept independent of a visible state of affairs in which it is brought about (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p 36). This last, of course, defines ontology as such. The world is, independent of its observers. Thus the world, or, in this case, the plane of immanence, constitutes the absolute ground of philosophy, its earth or deterritorialization, the foundation on which it creates its concepts (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p 41). Nor is it unusual that the plane of immanence and what it grounds are described as absolute (Concepts are absolute surfaces or volumes, formless and fragmentary, whereas the plane is the formless, unlimited absolute, neither surface nor volume but always fractal [Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p 36]), unadulterated (the plane of immanence is always single, being itself pure variation IDeleuze and Guattari, 1994, p 39]), and infinite (That is why there are always many infinite movements caught within each other, each folded in the others, so that the return of one instantaneously relaunches another in such a way that the plane of immanence is ceaselessly being woven, like a gigantic shuttle. ... Diverse movements of the infinite are so mixed in with each other that, far from breaking up the One-All of the plane of immanence, they constitute its variable curvature, its concavities and convexities, its fractal nature as it were. ... The plane is, therefore, the object of an infinite specification so that it seems to be a One-All only in cases specified by the selection of movement [Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, pp 38,39]). All these images can be elucidated intelligently; or they can at least provoke further evocations that can make a powerful claim on our philosophical imagination. Yet, to repeat, none can demonstrate its own accuracy, and none can be demonstrated to be logically correct or empirically accurate . Nor should that be demanded of them. Of interest to us in the context of this study, however, is not the validity of these ontological claims, but the political world they imply or the political positions explicitly derived from them. The call for philosophy to constitute an infinite plane of immanence as a radically new ontology is made from within a particular narrative in the case of Deleuze and Guattari, from within a rather Manichean philosophy of
history. The characters in this world drama are Immanence, played by Philosophy (at its best), and Transcendence, portrayed, in all its evil disguises, by The Priestly Caste, which can include Philosophy (at its worst). The Greeks, Deleuze and Guattari write, were the first to conceive of a strict immanence of Order to a cosmic milieu that sections chaos in the form of a plane. ... In short, the first philosophers are those who institute a plane of immanence like a sieve stretched over the chaos. And it was Spinoza (with Nietzsches help) who showed us that the plane of immanence is surrounded by illusions, thoughts mirages, like the illusion of transcendence, the illusion of universals, the illusion of the eternal, and the illusion of discursiveness (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, pp 4950). But alas, such true philosophy has its enemies, and even within philosophy its false friends. From without, there is the priest, for instance, or the sociologist; there is the epistemologist, the linguist, the psychoanalyst, and the logician; and now, closest to home, there comes the most shameful moment, the moment of computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p 10). And from within, there is the desire to think transcendence within the immanent, to think the functional equivalent of transcendence in the transcendental. This philosophic fall from grace (punctuated only by the above mentioned protests of a Spinoza or a Nietzsche) follows a fairly consistent trajectory marked by Plato, Christianity, and the modern invention and development of the transcendental subject by Descartes, Kant and Husserl (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, pp 4448). Nevertheless, despite these philosophic Quislings, the world-historical battle is essentially conducted by Philosophy and Religion. The
West debate 11-12
CONTINUED

RASCH CONTINUED
religious sage conceives of the institution of an always transcendent order imposed from outside by a great despot or by one god higher than the others. ... Whenever there is transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the sky or on earth, there is religion; and there is Philosophy whenever there is immanence. ... Only friends can set out a plane
of immanence as a ground from which idols have been cleared (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p 43). The irony or is it tragedy? of this radical immanence lies, of course, in the clearing away of these idols, for this clearing is anything but friendly. If philosophy and only philosophy , if only true philosophy can institute immanence, then philosophy, perhaps in the personified guise of a Philosopher-King or, more romantically, a Philosopher-Revolutionary, must wage war against its enemies, those usurpers of its role coming from the realms of religion, the human sciences and social engineering. Radical immanence, it seems, can only be achieved by radically eliminating competing spheres of belief and knowledge, or, ironically, by instituting again a proper hierarchical relationship in which philosophy reigns supreme. Thus, the institution of a new, correct ontology and the new, infinite plane of immanence that that ontology allows cannot wait for the withering away of the state of transcendence, but must be put in place by revolutionary warfare, even if the revolution in question is bloodless. The post-revolutionary state is one in which the enemies of immanence have been defeated and in which all traces of the Gulag have been made to disappear. It is a state which friends and only friends can call home. That is, after all, what friends are for. If the enemy of pure immanence is transcendence, then within immanence the transcendental symbol of this impure, undesired and hierarchical political distinction is the feared and maligned notion of sovereignty . To maintain, as was done in the previous chapter,
that sovereignty is the consequence of unavoidable logical paradox would seemingly confirm the putative poverty of Western metaphysics and thus the need for a radically new ontology (and a completely new politics) in which such paradox could never arise, or, at any rate, would be forever rendered invisible and ineffective. While the old metaphysics posits the primacy of violence (original sin) and thus calls sovereignty into being as a kind of lightning rod, the new ontology would presuppose that sovereignty and the transcendental dominance it stands for causes the negative effects of social life. Thus the elimination of transcendental sovereignty will introduce a new social order that is precisely not an order, but a benevolent self-organization of all productive human endeavors. Though this attempt to delete sovereignty from political actuality has emerged with a vengeance in recent years, it is not new. Indeed, it was thought that the task had been successfully completed. Have not, after all, liberal individualism, pluralism, and most importantly the division of power supplanted the arbitrary willfulness of the absolute sovereign? Alas, we are told, though it now wears new clothes, the beast remains the same; only, the old dragon slayers have become the new dragons. Whereas the proto-liberal John Locke in the 17th century denounced monarchical absolutism in the name of parliamentary power, and whereas liberal theorists from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, theorists like Wilhelm von Humboldt, John Stuart Mill and Harold Lash, denounced state supremacy in the name of the individual and the pluralism that would allow this individual to flourish, the new critics of sovereignty, which, in addition to Agamben, include Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, do not excoriate it in the name of liberalism, but rather condemn liberalism itself as the new form of sovereignty; for as it turns out, what liberalism replaced was not sovereignty as such, but particular modes of state sovereignty that characterized modern Europe up through the 19th century. Accordingly, the question Hardt and Negri ask is whether and how the modem, transcendental logic of sovereignty can now, finally, be supplanted by a universally benign immanence in which transcendently imposed order is replaced by egalitarian self-organization. Their book, Empire, assumes from the outset a positive answer to the question of whether such self-organization is possible, even if it leaves us little with which to answer the question of how such a transformation is to come about. To challenge their initial supposition that pure immanence can exist without its constitutive other may indeed indicate to the prophets of a new ontology that one is still mired in the nihilistic swamp of metaphysics. Nevertheless, the chiliastic spirit of the overly hopeful has its chilling moments as well. Thus, the question I propose to address here asks whether the logic of sovereignty can be expelled from the realm of the political, or whether its expulsion must ultimately also assume the expulsion of the political altogether. Can one desire, in other words, the overcoming of sovereignty from within the political, or must that desire always express itself as a quasi-theological longing for a post-political state, a New Jerusalem? My tentative answer to that question is: Though the solution to the paradox of immanence that we call sovereignty precisely
because it is no solution may take varied forms and can be re-fashioned in an incalculable number of ways, some more desirable than others, the paradox of sovereignty itself cannot be sublated; or rather, the logical paradox that sovereignty contingently and imperfectly solves is the logical paradox that radical immanence itself imposes on the modern structure of the political. The question that the concept of sovereignty answers and that therefore we must confront reads: In a world, in which order is not divinely ordained, how is order nevertheless possible?
West debate 11-12
West debate 11-12
Tyler Durden Disad 2NC Lines of Death Impact

( ) This argument turns and outweighs their business war machines against the state turn lines of flight into lines of death. Blent Diken, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Sciences, September 2001, online:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Diken-Laustsen-Enjoy-Your-Fight.pdf, accessed August 24, 2004 Interestingly, whereas the movie clearly makes a self-reflexive mockery of Project Mayhem in the context of the first danger (macrofascism), the aspects of Fight Club that do not resonate in Project Mayhem (that is, its microfascist aspects) escape its ironic perspective. It seems as if the movie assumes that power predominantly pertains to molar lines. But lines of flight are not exempted from power relations, and there is a microfascism in Fight Club that cannot be confined to Project Mayhem. It is in this context remarkable that Fight Club operates as a deterritorialized line of flight , as a war machine that is violently opposed to the state; its members are not merely the Oedipalized paranoiacs of the capitalist state order. Its microfascism can be understood best as a transgressive delirium. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement, a proliferation of molecular interactions, skipping from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 214-5). If Project Mayhem is the ridiculous Nazi-type organization with unreflexive skinheads who just repeat Tylers orders, Fight Club is the molecular face of fascism. The third danger: a line of flight can lose its creative potentials and become a line of death. This is precisely what happens in Fight Club : the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion for abolition (1987: 229). In fact, fascism is the result of an intense line of flight that becomes a line of death, wanting self-destruction and death through the death of others (Ibid. 230). A line of flight that desires its own repression. The point at which escape becomes a line of death is the point at which war (destruction) becomes the main object of the war machine rather than its supplement. Fight Club , transforming into Project Mayhem, becomes an instrument of pure destruction and violence, of complete destratification, a war machine that has war as its object . In other words, the regression to the undifferentiated or complete disorganization is as dangereous as transcendence and organization. Tyler, the alluring and charismatic, the free-wheeling pervert of Fight Club, is as dangerous as society. If there are two dangers, the strata and complete destratification, suicide, Fight Club fights only the first. Therefore a relevant question, never asked by microfascists, is whether it is not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 270). The test of desire is not denouncing false desires but distinguishing between that which pertains to the strata, complete destratification, and that which pertains to line of flight, a test, which Fight Club does not pass (Ibid. 165). Lets qualify this point by investigating the way the logic of the cut works in the film.
West debate 11-12
Tyler Durden Disad 2NC Impact Calculus

( ) They will inevitably say thats not our line of flight or lines of flight are still good, however, you should assess the impact of our disad as bigger than whatever impact theyve got lines of flight turning into lines of death removes any of the benefit of the original line of flight. Blent Diken, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Sciences, September 2001, online:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Diken-Laustsen-Enjoy-Your-Fight.pdf, accessed August 24, 2004 The first danger is that a line of flight can become re-stratified: in the fear of complete destratification , rigid segmentation and segregation may seem attractive. Whenever a line of flight is stopped by an organization, institution, interpretation, a black hole, etc., a reterritorialization takes place. In spite of the fact that Fight Club makes a mockery of an illusion of safety in the beginning, its line of flight is followed by reterritorialization. It evolves into a project, Project Mayhem. Becoming a bureaucracy of anarchy (Palahniuk 1997: 119), Project Mayhem is the point at which Fight Club reterritorializes as the paranoid position of the mass subject, with all the identifications of the individual with the group, the group with the leader, and the leader with the group (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 34). In comparison with Fight Club, Project Mayhem is centralised around Jack/Tyler who gives the multiplicity of lines of escape a resonance. Methods change too: We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them (Ibid. 149). The new rules are: you dont ask questions; you have to trust Tyler, and so on (Ibid. 125). Fight Club was a gang, Project Mayhem is more like an army. Fight Club produces a microcosm of the affections of the rigid: it deterritorializes, massifies, but only in order to stop deterritorialization, to invent new territorializations .
West debate 11-12
Tyler Durden Disad 2NC Lines of Flight Bad

( ) Deleuzo-Guattarian nomadic politics are not liberatory and instead only lead to new, if less visible, forms of control. In a world of flows and lines of flight, the subject is free to consume and move wherever it wants, but this freedom is accompanied by nightly, passionate attachments to violent rituals. Blent Diken, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Sciences, September 2001, online:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Diken-Laustsen-Enjoy-Your-Fight.pdf, accessed August 24, 2004 The de-traditionalized, increasingly reflexive individuals no longer have ready-made symbolic authorities, and they complain, as does Tyler in Fight Club, we are a generation of men raised by women. He never knew his
father (Palahniuk 1997: 49). In the social space within which Fight Club emerges there is no father, only a ruse of signs, a n experience of a smooth space without symbolic hierarchies. A place no longer determined by the law and tradition or by the solidity of a habitus.
What follows is the burden of reflexivity as one has to choose ones place in the social, because identity is no longer a matter of occupying an already given subject position. Hence one desperately searches for a true
identity, tries to find an objective correlate to being. I loved my life. I loved my condo. I loved every stick of furniture . That was my whole life. Everythingthe lamps, the chairs, the rugswere me. The dishes were me. The plants were me. The television was me. This friction-free, smooth space is of course the space of contemporary capitalism, of flows. What is often overlooked is that in this social space fantasies are violated, not because they are forbidden but because they are not. Today fantasies are subsumed under capital, and a market for the extreme and the perverted is growing. In our post-Oedipal era, the paradigmatic mode of subjectivity is the polymorphously perverse subject that follows the command to enjoy; no longer the Oedipal subject integrated into the symbolic order through castration (iek 1999: 248). If, in the reflexive society, the symbolic f ather of the uncompromising No! is in retreat, the void is filled with either ersatz authorities (e.g. ethical committees) or authorities that make transgression or perversion of the Law a rule in the service of enjoyment. Thus, the standard situation of the disciplinary
subject is reversed: we no longer have the public Order of hier archy, repression and severe regulation, subverted by the secret acts of liberating transgression ... on the contrary, we have public social relations among free and equal individuals, where the passionate attachment to some extreme form of strictly regulated domination and submission becomes the secret transgressive source of libidinal satisfaction ,
the obscene supplement to the public sphere of freedom and equality (iek 1999: 345). The problem of authority today is not that of the symbolic authority that forbids enjoyment but that of the superego, of the obscene authority that enjoins one to enjoy. This is a scenario in which transgression does not result in freedom but in new, and even more rigid, authority structures. The distinction between societies of discipline and societies of control, in which power goes nomadic, is illuminating here. Deleuze claims that capitalism is no longer characterized by panoptic, place-bounded discipline forcing people to overtake given subject positions, but by a permanent movement, in which the subject is always in a state of becoming. Control, he says, is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite and discontinuous (Deleuze 1995: 181). If the geography of discipline worked in terms of fixed points or positions, control operates in terms of mobility, speed, flexibility, anonymity and contingent identities, in terms of the whatever (Hardt 1998: 32). The symptom of control society is the collapse of the institutional walls: not that discipline ends with the deterritorialization of institutions. Rather, discipline, now freer than ever from territorial constraints, has become more immanent to the social field (Hardt & Negri 2000). In control society subjectivity is produced simultaneously by numerous institutions in different combinations and doses; hence social space tends to lose its delimitation: one is factory worker outside the factory, stude nt outside the school, inmate outside prison, insane outside the asylumall at the same time. It belongs to no identity and all of themoutside the institutions but even more intensely ruled by their disciplinary logics (Hardt & Negri 2000: 331 -2). This unfinished, constantly
mutating status of everything does not bring with it freedom, but control, which corresponds to the immanent, axiomatic logic of capital. Capitalism does no longer function according to the discourse of the master (iek 1999: 373). Control is not given by castration, that is, by a restriction of the subjects ability to move and to act, by a limitation in being. It pertains to flows; the universe of capitalism is immanent, infinite, without
an end. As Fight Club says, living in it is like living in The IBM Stellar Sphere, The Philip Morris Galaxy, Planet Starbucks. The source of anxiety in this open, smooth space is not lack of being; rather, too much pseudo-freedom, e.g. freedom to consume. [T]he anxiety generated by the risk society is that of a superego: what characterizes the superego is precisely the absence of a proper measureone obeys its commands not enough / or too much; whatever one does, the result is wrong and one is guilty. The problem with the superego is that it can never be translated into a positive rule to be followed (iek 1999: 394). Thus, permitted enjoyment You may!turns into the prescriptive enjoymentYou must!(iek 2000: 133). In other words, the demise of the symbolic authority does in no way imply the demise of authority as such, and herein lies the paradox of the theory of reflexivity, its blindness to the (re)emerging non-symbolic forms of authority. The paradox of postmodern individuality: the injunction to be oneself, to
realize ones creative potential, results in the exact opposite , that is, the feeling of the inauthenticity of all acts. No act, no commodity is really it . My inner being is not expressed that way, either (Ibid. 22 -23). Extreme
individuality reverts to its opposite, causing the subject experience to be uncertain and faceless, changing from mask to mask, trying to fill the void behind the mask by shifting between idiosyncratic hobbies (iek 1999: 373).
West debate 11-12
West debate 11-12
Deleuze and Guattari Perm Solvency

( ) If you look at a small sample of tree-roots, they look like a rhizome, and if you zoom out on a picture of a rhizome, it begins to look like tree roots. Maps and tracings, tree structures and grass, etc, are not two opposed models. Rather, the so-called hierarchical models of knowledge they criticize contain within them their own lines of flight and liberation, while the tracing of their alternative contains its own despotism. There is no inconsistency in invoking one dualism only to challenge another. Gilles Delezue, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VII, and Felix Guattari, psychoanalyst at Le Borde Clinic, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 20-21
At the same time, we are on the wrong track with all these geographical distributions. An impasse. So much the better. If it is a question of showing that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierarchy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, and subterranean stems. The important point is that the roottree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history , still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again . No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing: in order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable. Not at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way an approximation; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way. We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models . Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic formula we all seek PLURALISM = MONISM via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging .
West debate 11-12
Perm Solves Immanence

( ) Their alternative seeks a plane of pure immanence away from the stratifications and territorializations endemic to Western thought, yet, the creation of such a space is a political task through-and-through. A politics of hospitality that gives space to alterity is the best way to open onto a future of immanence. Jeffrey Atteberry, Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of California-Irvine, 2003, Critical
Horizons, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 219-20 The reformulation of power found in Deleuze and Derrida may provide a lens then for perceiving the political force and agency of living labour in terms that would not reduce living labour to a form of subjectivity that bears within itself all the structural traces of the labour power which serves capital in its capture. Living labour cannot constitute itself as a subject. Instead, it is continually submitted to a process of subjectivisation through its reduction to labour power. It is powerless to seize itself in any immediate or autonomous fashion. At the limit, there is not even an itself properly understood there to be seized. In this sense, living labour is strictly speaking impossible. It would be but a figure of impossibility. This radical and constitutive powerlessness, however, would be the ultimate source of its excessive power. On account of this incapacity to seize itself, living labour eludes definitive capture by capital. As that force which overwhelms any effort at self-constitution, living labour would be but a name for lifes irreducible difference from itself, the difference which endows life with all of its force. Life is the pure immanence of this differential force that is made possible by its very impossibility. Consequently, this force expresses itself in the form of an event or, as Deleuze would say, in the form of a haecceity. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write, There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it.83 The individuation of a haecceity differs fro m that of a subject insofar as the former takes place as a singular event on the plane of immanence while the latter is the product of a command that structures the plane of transcendence. As a haecceity or event, the political agency of living labour does not operate on the level of the subject. Again, living labour will never appear as such, either to itself or to capital. Nevertheless, the trace of its force is continually recorded on the face of capital. The effects of living labour are unpredictable. Its actions cannot be programmed; it will always take capital by surprise, which gives its effects the appearance of contingency. This is its freedom. The political agency of living labour, therefore, cannot be actively willed. Nevertheless, there are actions that can be taken which would preserve the space of its emergence . In short, a political planomenon must be constructed that would respect its secrecy . In this sense, the construction of a plane of immanence remains as a political task. In more mundane terms, a community of hospitality remains to be formed that would safeguard the space of alterity . No demands, including those for adequate consciousness, should be made on living labour as condition for its action. Rather, the political community needs to find ways to respect, as if this were possible, the invisibility of living labour. In short, a civil society remains to be organised according to ethical principles that respect and acknowledge the limits of power, which is to say the powerlessness which is actually constitutive of any community.
West debate 11-12
AT: Prediction Bad

( ) Life requires prediction Nicholas Rescher, Professor or Philosophy at University of Pittsburgh, Predicting the Future, 1998, 199-200
In the sphere of social and political developments, forecasting has met with such outstanding failures as Karl Marxs vision of the inexorable victory of the proletariat and the earlier doomsayers who saw England taking a shooting Niagara plunge into political disaster with the passage of the nineteenth -century voting reform bills. Yet repeated failures, notwithstanding, the enterprise of social prediction is not totally without promise, seeing that there is good reason of general principle for thinking that a substantial proportion of human interaction must be predictable. We humans must attune our actions to those of other and must make our decisions with reference to the sorts of people we are dealing with in point of their actions and reactions (Are they trustworthy, rational, risk aversive, etc?) Only by assessing and classifying other people in point of predictable responses can we make plausible decisions about our own conduct. Since people in general live in circumstances where successful interaction with one another it is essential to our well beingindeed to our very survivalthe outcome of such interactions must be in general foreseeable. If it were not for the prediction-supportive impetus of human customs, routines, and habits, human societies would not exist and human existence itself would be in question. Life as we know it demands those stabilities and continuities that make possible a vast amount of prediction over the near term
( ) Despite its limits, we have to use prediction-its key to survival Nicholas Rescher, Professor or Philosophy at University of Pittsburgh, Predicting the Future, 1998, p. 156
It might seem that the obstacles to successful prediction are so numerous in variety and so extensive in scope that here, as with Dr. Johnsons dancing dog, it could be said that what is sur prising is not that it should be done well but that it should be done at all. As Rousseau wisely observed, The ability to foresee that some things cannot be foreseen is a very necessary capacity. Nevertheless, the evolutionary deliberations of chapter 1 also have to be kept in mind. Our predictive capacity may be severely limited, but it is notand in the circumstances cannot betoo radically impoverished. For if we were not as good at prediction as we actually areat any rate in the commonplace matters that affect our daily livesand if we did not inhabit a natural environment that made this extensively possible for us, then we just would not be here to tell the tale.
West debate 11-12
AT: But Lines of Flight Are Sweet

( ) Lines of flight are not good or bad in themselves that means you should default to our args because were the only ones reading evidence about how the plans particular lines of flight would go down. Preference our evidence over their uber-generic D and G junk Blent Diken, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Sciences, September 2001, online:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Diken-Laustsen-Enjoy-Your-Fight.pdf, accessed August 24, 2004 Lines of flight, emphasise Deleuze and Guattari, are neither good nor bad in themselves; they are open-ended processes. There is not a dichotomy between schizophrenia and paranoia, between the rhizome and the tree, between the strata and lines of flight. And then it is not enough to be against the strata, to oppose the strata (organization) and the lines of flight (becoming body without organs) to one another. Lines of flight have their own dangers, which are interesting in relation to Fight Club.
West debate 11-12
AT: But We Critique Stuff

( ) Your criticism changes nothing nomadic politics as a basis for criticism is already incorporated within the logic of territorialization and state-capitalism. Blent Diken, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Sciences, September 2001, online:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Diken-Laustsen-Enjoy-Your-Fight.pdf, accessed August 24, 2004 The development of the contemporary society confirms that critique is not a peripheral activity; rather, it contributes to capitalist innovations that assimilate critique , which is constantly confronted with the danger of becoming dysfunctional. Capitalism had received mainly two forms of critique until the 1970s: the social critique from the Marxist camp (exploitation) and the aesthetic critique from the new French philosophy (nomadism). Since the 1970s capitalism has found new forms of legitimation in the artist critique, which resulted in a transfer of competencies from leftist radicalism toward management (Boltanski & Chiapello; quoted in Guilhot 2000: 360). Consequently, the aesthetic critique has dissolved into a post-Fordist normative regime of justification, the notion of creativity is re-coded in terms of flexibility, and difference is commercialized. This is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the production process of the movie Fight Club itself as an aesthetic commodity: David [Fincher] said to me, You know, Chuck, were not just selling the movie Fight Club. Were selling the idea of fight clubs. (Palahniuk quoted in Sult 1999). Thus Fight Club is hardly an anti -institutional response to contemporary capitalism, just as creativity, perversion or transgression are not necessarily emancipatory today . Power has already evacuated the bastion Fight Club is attacking and it can effortlessly support Fight Clubs assault on sedentariness. Palahniuk says: We really have no freedom about creating our identities, bec ause we are trained to want what we want. What is it going to take to break out and establish some modicum of freedom, despite all the cultural training thats been our entire existence? Its about doing the things that are completely forbidden, that we are trained not to want to do (quoted in Jenkins 1999). What Palahniuk enjoys the luxury of overseeing here is precisely that such strategies are emancipatory only in so far as power poses hierarchy exclusively through essentialism and stable binary divisions. But many of the concepts romanticised by Palahniuks Fight Club find a correspondence in the network capitalism and its aesthetic Mecca, Hollywood, today. As Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly emphasized, smooth space and nomadism do not have an irresistable revolutionary calling but change meaning drastically depending on the context (see 1987: 387). Neither mobility nor immobility are liberatory in themselves. Subversion or liberation can only be related to taking control of the production of mobility and statis (Hardt & Negri 2000: 156). In this respect, Fight Clubs aesthetic critique sounds, if not cynical, nave. Asked by CNN if he is amused by the irony that Hollywood decided to make a violent movie about anti-consumerism by spending millions of dollars, Palahniuk answers that it seems like the ultimate absurd joke. In a way its funnier than the movie itself (CNN 1999). Yes, indeed, but as we tried to show there are reasons why it is so.
West debate 11-12
AT: D and G Args About Capitalism

( ) The idea that we can transcend capitalist production and get to a pure space of immanence away from capitalism IS the ideology of capitalism par excellance their attempt to get outside merely replicates the structures they criticize Blent Diken, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Sciences, September 2001, online:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Diken-Laustsen-Enjoy-Your-Fight.pdf, accessed August 24, 2004
The second strategy Fight Club adopts is, desperately searching for a non-consumerist domain outside capitalist exchange, heading toward a total anti-production, a potlach. The destruction of Jacks perfectly appointed condo, his moving into Tylers dilapidated mansion on the edge of a toxic-waste dump, terrorizing the food industry, blowing up the financial buildings to sabotage the credit-card society, and so on. The ultimate aim of all this is the destruction of capitalism. Capitalism survives by sublimating commodities, transforming them into
objects of desire, and Fight Club is obsessed by the desire to escape from the lure of the commodity form. Yet, is this desire for anti-production not the other side of the very capitalist fantasy? The reverse case of commodity fetishism is waste: the object devoid of its fetish-value; totally decommodified and de-sublimated object, which is indeed, according to Jacques-Alain Miller, the main production of contemporary capitalism. What makes Fight Club postmodern is precisely the realization that all consumption artefacts will become obsolete before being used and end as waste, transforming the earth into a gigantic waste land, which is a permanent feature of the capitalist drive (see iek 2000: 40-41). Waste is a sign of the growing significance of desublimation in contemporary capitalism. Herein lies also Fight Clubs mistake: the idea that use-value could be sustained without surplus-value production, that objects of desire would remain without their fetish value, that is, objet petit a (see iek 2000: 19, 21). Fight Clubs anti-consumerism is in this sense capitalisms inherent fantasy, concealing the fact that capitalism without surplus-value production (and without surplus-enjoyment based on sublimation) is impossible. When the object is delivered from the sublime objet petit a, it becomes waste. Waste produced by Fight Club
itself is thus the melancholy of capitalism in so far as melancholy defines the subjects relation to objects that are deprived of their aura. Therefore Fight Clubs sacrifice is not subversive but supportive of capitalist desire. The paradox of Fight Club is that i t makes an excess of sacrifice. It invests sacrifice itself with desire. And it is only t his desire, the very anti-desire, that is desire par excellence (iek 2001: 41). Fight Clubs secret is then the culmination of the fetish character of the commodity. The opaque character of the object a i n the imaginary fantasy determines it in its most pronounced forms as the pole of perverse desire (Lacan; quoted in iek 2001: 42). If avoidance of excess itself generates an excess, surplus enjoyment, what Lacan calls the temptation of sacrifice is to ascertain that there is some s ymbolic authority, some Other, even if it does not grant what I want (see iek 2001: 64 -5). Enter Fight Club: getting Gods attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all Gods hate is better than His indifference (Palahniuk 1997: 141). Again, Fight Clubs social critique is trapped in the framework of the symbolic order. Does the domain outside exchange, which Fight Club seeks to find, really exist in
the network society? No. There is no more outside (Hardt & Negri 2000: 187). With the real subsumption of society under capital, capital has become a world. Use value and all the other references to values and processes of valorization that were conceived to be outside the capitalist mode of production have progressively vanished (Ibid. 386). The dialectic between society and nature, the modern and the primitive, the mind and the
drives, the public and the private... has come to an end. What we have in the contemporary society is a non -place of politics, a spectacle, a virtual place, which is at once diffuse and unified (Ibid. 188-9). The smooth space, which is created by Fight Club, is in a sense also the space of the network society and its powers to be . Perhaps there is no topological contradiction between the outopia of the network society and the utopia of Fight Club. In this sense, Fight Club is the truth, or the symptom, of the reticular world. But Fight Club is in many respects typical of contemporary social movements. The masses in the contemporary society are driven by a desire for mobility: desertion, exodus and nomadism. Whereas resistance took the form of sabotage (direct/dialectical opposition) in the disciplinary era, in the contemporary era of control, resistance takes the form of desertion (flight, battles through subtraction, defection). Indeed, the mobility of the multitude, the migration of the masses, is the new spectre that haunts todays reticular world (Ibid. 213 -3). The new terrain of political struggle is mobility (Ibid. 214). Yet, as is the case with Fight Club, contemporary political struggles proliferate in an age of
communication but they are incommunicable. But what they tend to loose regarding extension, duration and communicability, they gain regarding intensity. They are forced to leap vertic ally and touch immediately on the global level (Ibid. 54-55). In so far as capital extends its networks, singular points of revolt tend to become more powerful: Empire presents a superficial world, the virtual center of which can be accessed immediately from any point across the surface; in the depthless, spectacle-ised society every point is potentially a center (Ibid. 58). Which means that, for immanent struggles au milieu, the desire to be against, or disobedience to authorities, is no longer an obvious notion. Palahniuk argues that Tyler plays the devils advocate against society. Tylers motivation is perhaps to be against something, anything (in CNN 1999). Yet, being against is not enough; as is the case with Fight Club, the problem of the network society is, rather, how to determine the enemy against which to rebel (Hardt & Negri 2000: 211).
West debate 11-12
AT: Transcendence/Immanence Links

this presumes were aff retag/change if were negside
( ) Their answers to the permutation will prove our arguments theyll say that the 1NC is immanent and that it cant just be permuted this ability to make distinctions between transcendence and immanence itself relies on an Archimedean, transcendent point of reference from which they can decide what is transcendent and what is immanent, which proves their alternative isnt immanent at all. William Rasch, Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Indiana, 2004, Sovereignty and Its
Discontents, p. 107-08 According to Nikias Luhmann, the monotheistic religions all seem to have a common underlying element, namely a salvation perspective. They thereby contemplate access to transcendence as a corrective for the suffering from distinctions. They propose that every distinction can be sublated in a realm beyond all distinctions. This is the form in which the distinction between immanence and transcendence is made manifest (Luhmann, 2000, p 150). The essence of religion, then, its originary moment, is one of paradox. Religion introduces a distinction between immanence and transcendence, between a realm of distinctions and a realm of pure indistinction, in order to express the desire to transcend all distinctions. Yet, this distinction between distinction and non-distinction can be made only from the mundane world of distinction itself. The desire for perfect indistinction can express itself only in the imperfect form of a discrete distinction. The desire for non-distinction, therefore, can do nothing but replicate what it wishes to transcend, namely, distinction. To live in space and time is to be forced to live in the profane, sinful world of distinctions, the world opened up, as the first book of the Bible tells us, by the knowledge of the difference between good and evil. It is only in time out of mind, in the beyond, the after-life or at the end of history, that the perfect state of indistinction can be achieved. A politics wishing to pattern itself on this religious desire would not be content with a-historical, transcendent solutions, but would attempt to actualize the realm of indistinction within history. It would attempt , as the saying goes, to establish a paradise on earth. Within history and on earth, however, transcendence of distinctions is, by definition, impossible. A theologically oriented politics, then, would seek to establish on earth the functional equivalent of paradise, a secular paradise that at least in its formal aspects would neutralize the malignancy of distinction. This, for example, is precisely how Fichte formulates it in his eighth lecture to the German nation. Because of unique historical circumstances, Fichte tells us, early Christianity was forced to institute a realm of absolute transcendence, outside of terrestrial time and space, in which eternal life could be found. This rigid separation of immanence and transcendence, however, is a false separation. In the regular order of things, Fichte writes, this earthly life itself is intended to be truly life. That is: The natural impulse of man ... is to find heaven on this earth, a nd to endow his daily work on earth with permanence and eternity; to plant and to cultivate the eternal in the temporal ... in a fashion visible to the mortal eye itself (Fichte, 1968, pp 112, 113). For Fichte, of course, the island of indistinction in th e sea of difference is called the Vaterland, and the spirit that imbues this island with eternal life is the love of the fatherland expressed by the self-constituting Volk. People and fatherland, in other words, are the support and guarantee of eternity on earth (Fichte, 1968, p 118). But just as the moral individual is infinitely perfectible and never complete, so too is the self-perfection of the people and the fatherland eternally under construction. The political project Fichte imagines, then, is both the constitution of a plane of radical immanence, to steal the Deleuzean phrase used so often by Hardt and Negri, and the projection of infinite perfectibility on that infinite plane. Thus the nation-state becomes both the desired goal and the site of an eternally unfinished project of self-improvement. The distinction between transcendence and immanence that the idea of the fatherland was said to overcome is thus reintroduced as the distinction between lesser and greater perfection; or worse, between an improper and a proper constitution of a Volk, an improper and proper expression of its spirit .
West debate 11-12
Deleuzes Alternative Gets Co-Opted

( ) Theres a danger in their alternative the rhetorical trappings of immanence and an approach to knowledge centered around tracing can easily be appropriated and used for malicious ends. Jeffrey Atteberry, Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of California-Irvine, 2003, Critical
Horizons, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 210-11 Given that philosophy is a process of metaphorisation, Derrida is deeply concerned with the rhetorical strategies and gestures that are at work within any thought. The rhetorical choices made by philosophers have a profound effect on how philosophical thought is received , on the way it will be interpreted, and the value it will assume in the process of exchange. As mentioned already, Derridas reservations are not with the content of Deleuzes own thought, but with how his rhetorical practices will determine its reception. In other words, and as Derrida mentions in Ill have to wander all alone, Derrida is not concerned with any particular theses. Rather, his reservations seem to address the question of rhetorical practices, gestures, and strategies. Given what Derrida refers to as their near total affinity on such fundamental concerns as the liberation within philosophical thought of a difference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference more profound than a contradiction, Derrida would most likely not be too quick to charge Deleuze with being entirely complicit with the metaphysics of presence, although Derrida would be the first to stress the degree to which all philosophical thinking remains caught within its closure. If anything, Derrida would surely recognise that Deleuze was among those philosophers, those of their generation, who most rigorously and trenchantly worked through such a closure. Derridas concern with rhetorical strategy, then, seems addressed to the process of reception and appropriation. As I hope to have shown, Deleuzes conception of immanence does not articulate itself within the closure of the metaphysics of presence. By the same token, however, the rhetorical equivocity of immanence would seem to expose him to a dangerous recuperation within a metaphysics of presence. As an example of why Derrida might have reason for his concerns, I would like to take a brief look at the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In their collaborative projects such as Empire, both men make extensive use of a markedly Deleuzean rhetoric. Despite the sophistication of their work and its importance for our times, their appropriation of Deleuzes rhetoric often seems to take place through a brutal literalisation of his terminology. Of course, Deleuze and Guattaris own rhetorical practice, along with their continual declarations that their thought is not metaphorical, would seem to legitimate such a practice.40 Deleuze and Guattari may well have their own strategic reasons for making such claims. Their rejection of metaphor functions as a disavowal of the controlled difference that the philosophical metaphor has always put to work in view of liberating a deterritorialising difference that would not be reducible to the sets of determined oppositions that govern the philosophical use of metaphor. Nevertheless, Hardt and Negris reception and use of Deleuzes rhetoric would seem to bear witness to an arrogant carelessness in face of the continued force of the most established philosophisms of the Western tradition . This force stems from the controlled difference at work within the philosophical metaphor and continues to dictate how Hardt and Negri appropriate Deleuzes terminology. They do not hide their own arrogance in this regard. In Empire, for instance, one finds the stunning declaration that their ontology does not risk repeating the old models of the metaphysical tradition, even the most powerful ones. In fact, every metaphysical tradition is now entirely worn out.41 Rather than making such rash declarations, they would do well, good Marxists that they are, to bear in mind Althussers famous dictum that those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology.42 Derrida, more than anyone, has continually reminded us of the continued ideological force of Western metaphysics, its white mythology. Derridas reservations concerning Deleuzes rhetoric speak to the danger and ease of its ideological misappropriation.
West debate 11-12
AT: Deleuze and Guattari Ethics (1/2)

( ) The concept of deterritorialization is much like the way the 1AC uses the concept of ethics and liberation from Guanatamo Deleuze and Guattari conceive of an absolute deterritorialization, i.e. pure flows, with nothing ever stratifying them, as something that never ACTUALLY exists but nevertheless informs the way we understand particular deterritorializations. Each deterritorialization for example, each escape from Guantanamo, is potentially accompanied by reterritorializations. This is like how the 1AC uses ethics we recognize that a transcendent and universal scheme of capital-E Ethics is impossible, but nevertheless we should strive to take small-scale, contingent lower-case-e ethical actions. The plan is an affirmation of a more open future, which should be combined with their affirmation of deterritorialization to new forms of justice, rights, and democracy. Paul Patton, Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, 2003, Critical Horizons, Vol. 4, No.
2, p. 169-171 The concepts created in Deleuze and Guattaris major work, A Thousand Plateaus, may be read as the expression of pure events of incorporeal transformation, deterritorialisation, becoming, capture and so on. However, in their application to particular historical phenomena, these concepts always describe contingent and conditioned versions of such events: this form of capture, this process of deterritorialisation, this particular expression of the order-word function of language. Consider the concept of becoming which they define as the action by which something or someone continues to become other (while continuing to be what it is).40 In its pure form, Deleuze and Guattaris becoming amounts to something very similar to what Derrida calls an iteration. In A Thousand Plateaus, they proceed to describe a series of more specific ways in which something or someone becomes other, for example by becominganimal, becoming-child, becoming-woman and becomingimperceptible. These different becomings are all related to their concept of minority or becoming-minor, which refers to the manner in which elements of a given majority deviate from the standard or norm. They may be ordered in various ways: for example, they argue that in relation to the masculine standard of European cultural and political normality, all becom ings begin with and pass through becoming-woman.41 In another series, one form of becoming stands apart as the pure form or immanent end of all becomings. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this as becoming imperceptible or becoming- world. This is a becoming in which an individual is reduced to an abstract line that can connect or conjugate with other lines thereby making a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency.42 This is a paradoxical form of becoming in which everything changes whil e appearing to remain the same, a becoming in which the movement is infinite and therefore imperceptible. It is, in effect, an absolute becoming. Finally, consider the concept of deterritorialisation that lies at the heart of the political ethic elaborated in Deleuze and Guattaris mature work. In the concluding statement of rules governing certain key concepts, deterritorialisation is defined as the complex movement or process by which something escapes or departs from a given territory.43 A territory can be a system of any kind conceptual, linguistic, social or affective and on their account such systems are always inhabited by vectors of deterritorialisation. In addition, deterritorialisation is always inseparable from correlative reterritorialisations. 44 Reterritorialisation does not mean returning to the original territory, but rather refers to the ways in which deterritorialised elements recombine and enter into new relations in the constitution of a new assemblage or the modification of the old. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between absolute and relative deterritorialisation such that relative deterritorialisation concerns only movements within the actual, as opposed to the virtual, order of things. Relative deterritorialisation is negative when the deterritorialised element is immediately subjected to forms of reterritorialisation, which enclose or obstruct its line of flight. It is positive when the line of flight prevails over secondary reterritorialisations, even though it may still fail to connect with other deterritorialised elements or enter into a new assemblage. By contrast, absolute deterritorialisation refers to a pure event, which takes place in the virtual, as opposed to the actual, order of things. As a pure event, it remains an unrealisable or impossible figure, manifest only in and through relative deterritorialisation. It is nevertheless the condition of all forms of actual or relative deterritorialisation: There is a perpetual immanence of absolute deterritorialisation within relative
West debate 11-12
deterritorialisation.45 At this point we can see how Deleuze and Guattaris practice of philosophy shares a common political orientation with that of Derrida. I suggested earlier that what motivates deconstruction
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AT: Deleuze and Guattari Ethics (2/2)

PATTON CONTINUED NO TEXT REMOVED
in its aporetic analysis of concepts is the relation which emerges in each case to something beyond. For Deleuze and Guattari, too, there is a sense in which their ethic of deterritorialisation is oriented towards the permanent possibility of something other, towards a perpetually open future or to -come. This is apparent in the role played by the concept of absolute deterritorialisation in the ontology of assemblages outlined in A Thousand Plateaus: absolute deterritorialisation is the underlying principle, which ensures that the future will be different from the past. At one point, Deleuze and Guattari describe it as the deeper movement . . . identical to the earth itself.46 It is like a reserve of freedom or movement in reality that is activated whenever relative deterritorialisation takes place . In other words, even though in itself it is an impossible or unliveable state, absolute deterritorialisation is the condition of poss ibility of real change or transformation within a given territory or system. For this reason, they insist that it is the combination of absolute with relative deterritorialisation that carries the movements of relative deterritorialisation to infinity, pushes them to the absolute, by transforming them.47 In their redescription of the nature and task of philosophy in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari transpose this commitment to an open future onto philosophy itself. Philosophy , they argue, is a vector of deterritorialisation to the extent that it creates concepts that break with established or self-evident forms of understanding and description. Herein lies the utopian vocation of philosophy , which they redefine even as they admit this is not a good concept, as the manner in which philosophy engages with the present. They call the process of inventing concepts which extract new events from existing states of affairs the counter-effectuation of those concepts: the event is actualised or effectuated whenever it is inserted, willy-nilly, into a state of affairs; but it is counter-effectuated whenever it is abstracted from states of affairs so as to isolate its concept.48 To think philosophically about the present is to diagnose the processes whose outcome is not yet determined. It is to countereffectuate the pure events that animate the everyday events and processes unfolding around us. In counter-effectuating the event, we attain and express the sense of what is happening, thereby dissociating the pure event from the particular determinate form in which it has been actualised and pointing to the possibility of other determinate actualisations. To describe current events in terms of such philosophical concepts is to relate them back to the pure event or problem of which they appear only as one particular determination or solution . For this reason, when Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come, what they mean is that the practice of creating concepts serves the overriding aim of opening up the possibility of transforming existing forms of thought and practice .49 Concepts such as becoming, capture and deterrritorialisation are not meant as substitutes for existing concepts of justice, rights, democracy or freedom, but they only serve the pragmatic goal of philosophy to the extent that they assist in bringing about another justice, new rights or novel forms of democracy and freedom.
West debate 11-12
Assess Transcendence/Immanence Distinctions Ethically

( ) You should evaluate all the arguments about transcendence or immanence in this debate from an ethico-political perspective thats the most important site for combining the transcendent and the immanent Daniel W. Smith, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, 2003, Between Deleuze and Derrida, p.
63 In short, the difference between the two philosophical trajectories of immanence and transcendence must be assessed and evaluated, not simply in the theoretical domain, but in the ethico-political domain. In part, this is because the speculative elimination of transcendence does not necessarily lead to its practical elimination, as one can see already in Kant. But more importantly, it is because it is at the ethical level that the difference between transcendence and immanence appears in its most acute and consequential form. On this score, it is perhaps the difference between Deleuze and Levinas that presents this contrast most starkly. For Levinas, ethics precedes ontology because it is derived from an element of transcendence (the Other) that is necessarily otherwise than Being (and hence privileges concepts like absolute responsibility and duty). For Deleuze, ethics is ontology because it is derived from the immanent relation of beings to Being at the level of their existence (and hence privileges concepts such as puissance (power or capacity) and affectivity). This is why Spinoza entitled his pure ontology an Ethics rather than an Ontology: his speculative propositions concerning the univocity of Being can only be judged practically at the level of the ethics they envelop or imply. Put summarily, for Levinas, ethics is derived from transcendence, while for Deleuze, transcendence is what prevents ethics. It seems to me that it is at this level at the practical and not merely speculative level that the relative merits of philosophies of immanence and transcendence need to be assessed and decided.24
West debate 11-12
AT: Politics Bad

( ) All philosophy is bound to the realm of the political whether it wants to be or not the argument that philosophy should retreat from the political is nothing more than a symptom of philosophy needing a new pair of glasses through which to view the world. Our politics founded on an ethic of responsibility to the Other reinvigorates philosophy Jeffrey Atteberry, Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of California-Irvine, 2003, Critical
Horizons, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 214-16 This brief detour through Hardt and Negri leads me to the political dimensions of Deleuze and Derridas philosophical work insofar as it entails a reconfiguration of the ontology of power. With my far too cursory discussion of Marx, I have merely wished to unfold Derridas statement that Deleuze would have said something that still remains secret to us with his insistence on the word immanence. In short, it seems to me that Derrida slyly introduces the word secret here precisely because it is under the sign of immanence and secret, respectively, that Deleuze and Derrida think thoughts essential relation to that which it cannot think. Moreover, it is precisely at this point where thought encounters its limit that philosophy enters into a zone or a territory that we could qualify as political. Lest we imagine, however, that this political zone would be a region separable from philosophy, we should recall Deleuzes statement that the unthought is not external to thought but lies at its very heart, as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the outside.55 In other words, thought encounters the unthought at every moment in which it can be said to truly think. In this sense, then, all philosophy is immanently political. In the barest structural terms, politics may be said to take place there where the invisible becomes visible. Everywhere that Derrida touches on phenomenology, he has already entered into the domain of politics. Politics, one could say, consists in the infinite series of negotiations that take place between the visible and the invisible, between that which is not seen and that which sees. In slightly more transparent and conventional terms, the political struggle is always the struggle for recognition. As we know, however, there is also nothing more politically neutralising and dangerous than political recognition itself. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze had already isolated the model of recognition as the dogmatic image of thought from which thought must be liberated if thought were to begin to think.56 As De leuze says, the form of recognition has never sanctioned anything but the recognizable and the recognized. 57 The politics of recognition never leaves room for anything other than that which is visible or capable of becoming visible. The politics of recognition, and the image of thought which sustains it, leaves no room for what Derrida calls the absolute secret that, in exceeding all possible play of visibility and invisibility, secretly opens the zone of politics itself.58 Nothing is more terrifying to the exercise of power than secrecy, and yet all power acts in secret. Living labour becomes visible to capital, it appears to capital, only in the guise of labour-power. In the Grundrisse, Marx tells us that capital abstracts living labour from its singularity and posits labour as its negation. Marx says that capital confronts the totality of all labours dunamei, and the particular one it confronts at a given time is an accidental matter.59 In brief, capital perceives living labour only through an Aristotelian lens of the dunamis, which is to say through the lens of power. And this powerful lens, as Derrida and Deleuze have taught us, forms an integral part of the apparatus of capture known as ontology. Through this lens, philosophy relates to that which it cannot think by reducing the difference between thought and its outside to that of a contradiction. Philosophy needs a new prescription. The philosopher needs a new pair of glasses. Both Derrida and Deleuze, perhaps more than any others, have felt the need for philosophy to approach that which it cannot think through another thought of difference . Having both started from what Derrida calls this shared thesis of a difference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference more profound than a contradiction, both Derrida and Deleuze have moved towards a reform of power, a rearticulation of the logic of dunamis. Derrida has most visibly undertaken this work under the sign of the impossible whereas a similar labour can be found in Deleuzes engagement with Spinoza. And here is the political force of their thinking which remains for us to unfold in the future. Only in rethinking its relationship to the other of thought will philosophy inaugurate , to quote Deleuze, the power of a new politics which would overturn the image of thought.60 Or, in other words switching back to Derridas discourse the democracy to come shall only be possible once thought has opened itself to an other possibility of the possibility .61 This power of a new politics entails a revolution in the philosophical thought of power.
West debate 11-12
Cede the Political

a) Even if a political strategy can form from the alt its immediate adoption destroys the chance for politics to occur Garo 8 (Isabelle, French philosopher, Molecular Revolutions: The Paradox of Politics in the Work of Gilles Deleuze, Deleuze
and Politics pg 71, dml)
The political dimension of Deleuzes work is, therefore, real. But that does not mean that political analysis or even a political perspective can be found in a strictly defined way in his work. And the paradoxical feeling that his thought does have a specifically political contemporary relevance perhaps stems from the fact that what was in the process of disappearing when he wrote his work is, precisely, in the process of re-emerging today: in both cases a figure becomes blurred and persists at the same time, the very idea of politics dissolves and is redefined, as that which never ceases to haunt philosophy and also to escape it. b) Extinction Boggs, 97 (Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late
twentieth-century America, December, Volume 26, Number 6, http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/m7254768m63h16r0/fulltext.pdf)
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges.
Many ideological currents scrutinized here localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post-modernism, Deep Ecology intersect with and reinforce each
other. While these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite their different outlooks and trajectories, they
all share one thing in common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to combat and overcome alienation. The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved perhaps even unrecognized only to fester more ominously in the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that
the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions. 74 In the meantime,
ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate
the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over peoples lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites an already familiar dynamic in many
unyielding truth is that, even
lesser-developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society. 75
West debate 11-12
Perm
Perm do both its key the alt radically throws away State-based politics which always fails and can only stifle the chance for change to actually occur Deleuze and Guattari 80 (Gilles and Felix, philosophers and rhizomes, A Thousand Plateaus pg 160-161, dml) You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had
emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either
one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified-- organized, signified, subjected-- is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata is demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them down on us heavier then ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorializations, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows
to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are
held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.
Castaneda describes a long process of experimentation (it makes little difference whether it is with peyote or other things): let us recall for the moment how the Indian forces him first to find a "place," already a difficult operation, then to find "allies," and then gradually to give up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment lines of experimentation, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity
(assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not "my" body without organs, instead the "me" (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds).
West debate 11-12
2AC: Authoritarianism Turn

Deleuze and Guattaris alternative fails and leads to authoritarian oppression. Barbrook 98 (Richard, coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster, 8/27,
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9808/msg00091.html) Techno-nomad TJs are attracted by the uncompromising theoretical radicalism expressed by Deleuze and Guattari. However, far from succumbing to an outside conspiracy, Frequence Libre imploded because of the particular New Left politics which inspired A Thousand Plateaus and the other sacred texts. Unwilling to connect abstract theory with its practical application, the techno-nomads cannot see how Deleuze and Guattari's celebration of direct democracy was simultaneously a
justification for intellectual elitism. This elitism was no accident. Because of their very different life experiences, many
young people in the sixties experienced a pronounced 'generation gap' between themselves and their parents. Feeling so isolated,
they believed that society could only be changed by a revolutionary vanguard composed of themselves and their comrades. This is why many young radicals simultaneously believed in two contradictory concepts. First, the revolution would create mass participation in running society. Second, the revolution could only be organised by a committed minority.<14> The New Left militants
were reliving an old problem in a new form. Back in the 1790s, Robespierre had argued that the democratic republic could only be created by a revolutionary dictatorship. During the 1917 Russian revolution, Lenin had advocated direct democracy
while simultaneously instituting the totalitarian rule of the Bolsheviks. As their 'free radio' experience showed, Deleuze and Guattari never escaped from this fundamental contradiction of revolutionary politics. The absence of the Leninist party did not prevent the continuation of vanguard politics .
As in other social movements, Fr=E9quence Libre was dominated by a few charismatic individuals: the holy prophets of the anarcho-communist revolution.<15> In Deleuze and Guattari's writings, this deep authoritarianism found
its theoretical expression in their methodology: semiotic structuralism. Despite rejecting its 'wooden language', the two philosophers never really abandoned Stalinism in theory. Above all, they retained its most fundamental premise: the minds of the majority of the population were controlled by bourgeois ideologies.<16> During the sixties, this elitist theory was updated through the addition of Lacanian structuralism by Louis
Althusser, the chief philosopher of the French Communist party.<17> For Deleuze and Guattari, Althusser had explained why only a revolutionary minority supported the New Left. Brainwashed by the semiotic 'machinic assemblages' of the family, media, language and psychoanalysis, most people supposedly desired fascism rather than anarcho-communism. This authoritarian methodology clearly contradicted the libertarian rhetoric within Deleuze and Guattari's writings. Yet, as the rappers who wanted to make a show for Frequence Libre discovered, Deleuzoguattarian anarcho-communism even included the censorship of music. By adopting an Althusserian analysis, Deleuze and Guattari were tacitly privileging their own role as intellectuals: the producers of semiotic systems.
Just like their Stalinist elders, the two philosophers believed that only the vanguard of intellectuals had the right to lead the masses - without any formal consent from them - in the fight
against capitalism.
Deleuze and Guattaris radical liberation plays out as a historical disasterPol Pot is an example of the alternative. Barbrook 98 (Richard, coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster, 8/27,
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9808/msg00091.html)
Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically joined this attack against the concept of historical progress. For them, the 'deterritorialisation' of urban society was the solution to the contradiction between participatory
democracy and revolutionary elitism haunting the New Left. If the centralised city could be broken down into 'molecular rhizomes', direct democracy and the gift economy would reappear as people formed themselves into small nomadic bands. According to
Deleuze and Guattari, anarcho-communism was not the 'end of history': the material result of a long epoch of social development. On the contrary, the liberation of desire from semiotic oppression was a perpetual promise: an ethical stance which could be equally lived by nomads in ancient times or social movements in the present. With enough intensity of effort, anyone could overcome their hierarchical brainwashing to become a fully-liberated individual: the holy fool.<21> Yet, as the experience of Frequence Libre proved, this rhetoric of unlimited freedom contained a deep desire for ideological control by the New Left vanguard. While the nomadic fantasies of A Thousand Plateaus were being composed, one revolutionary movement actually did carry out Deleuze and Guattari's dream of destroying the city. Led by a vanguard of Paris-educated intellectuals, the Khmer Rouge overthrew an oppressive regime installed by the Americans. Rejecting the 'grand narrative' of economic progress, Pol Pot and his organisation instead tried to construct a rural utopia. However, when the economy subsequently imploded, the regime embarked on ever more
West debate 11-12
ferocious purges until the country was rescued by an invasion by neighbouring Vietnam. Deleuze and Guattari had claimed that the destruction of the city would create direct democracy and libidinal ecstasy. Instead, the application of such anti-modernism in practice resulted in tyranny and genocide. The 'line of flight' from Stalin had led to Pol Pot. The alternative is elitist and bound to end in a totalitarian state Barbrook 98 (Richard, coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster, 8/27,
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9808/msg00091.html) This elitism is a hallowed tradition of the European avant-garde. For decades, radical
intellectuals have adopted dissident politics, aesthetics and morals to separate themselves from the majority of 'herd animals' whose minds were controlled by bourgeois ideologies. Despite their revolutionary rhetoric, avant-garde intellectuals fantasised about themselves as an artistic aristocracy ruling the philistine masses. Following this elitist custom, the Deleuzoguattarians champion nomadic minorities from the 'non-guaranteed' social movements against the stupified majority from the 'guaranteed'sector. Once again, the revolution is the ethical-aesthetic illumination of a minority rather than the social liberation of all people. Earlier in this century, this dream of an artistic aristocracy sometimes evolved into fascism. More often, the avant-garde supported totalitarian tendancies within the Left. Nowadays, cultural elitism can easily turn into implicit sympathy with neo-liberalism. The European avant-garde -
and its imitators - could never openly support the free market fundamentalism of the Californian ideology. Yet, as TJs cut 'n' mix, the distinctions between right and left libertarianism are blurring. On the one hand, the Californian ideologues claim that a heroic minority of cyber-entrepreneurs is emerging from the fierce competition of the electronic marketplace. On the other hand, the Deleuzoguattarians believe that this new elite consists of cool TJs and hip artists who release subversive 'assemblages of enunciation' into the Net. In both the Californian ideology and Deleuzoguattarian discourse, primitivism and futurism are combined to produce the apotheosis of individualism: the cyborg Nietzschean Superman.
West debate 11-12
2AC: Understanding Turn

Turn their type of revolution is committed precisely to stop the becoming-other of the disadvantaged they can never understand the situation of the people they try to liberate their author Deleuze 93 (Gilles, Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic and mother of three, Toward Freedom, The Deleuze Reader
pg 255-56, dml) All this constitutes what can be called a right to desire. It is not surprising that all ethnic, regional, about sex, or youthresurge not only as archaisms, but in
kinds of minority questionslinguistic, up-to-date revolutionary form which call once more into question in an entirely immanent manner both the global economy of the machine and the assemblages of national States. Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the world and the States? For, once again, the world and its States are no more masters of their plan than revolutionaries are condemned to the deformation of theirs. Everything is played in uncertain games, front to front, back to back, back to front. The question of the revolution is a bad question because, insofar as it is asked, there are so many people who do not become, and this is exactly why it is done, to impede the question of the revolutionary-becoming of people, at every level, in every place.
West debate 11-12
Alt Doesnt Assume Technology

Deleuze and Guattaris passion for anarcho-communism fails the technology they celebrate will be controlled by elites. Barbrook 98 (Richard, coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster, 8/27,
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9808/msg00091.html) The New Left anticipated the emergence of the hi-tech gift economy. People could collaborate with each other without needing either markets or states. However, the New Left had a purist vision of DIY culture. There could be no compromise between the authenticity of the potlatch and the alienation of the market. Fr=E9quence Libre preserved its principles to the point of bankruptcy. Bored
with the emotional emptiness of post-modernism, the techno-nomads are entranced by the uncompromising fervour of Deleuze and Guattari. However, as shown by Frequence Libre, the rhetoric of mass participation often hides the rule of the enlightened few. The ethical-aesthetic committment of anarcho-communism can only be lived by the artistic aristocracy. Yet, the antinomies
of the avant-garde can no longer be avoided. The ideological passion of anarcho-communism is dulled by the banality of giving gifts within cyberspace. The theory of the artistic aristocracy cannot be based on the everyday activities of
'herd animals'. Above all, anarcho-communism exists in a compromised form on the Net.
Contrary to the ethical-aesthetic vision of the New Left, the boundaries between the different methods of working are not morally precise. Within the mixed economy of the Net, the gift economy and the commercial sector can only expand through mutual collaboration within cyberspace. The free circulation of information between users relies upon the capitalist production of computers, software and telecommunications. The profits of commercial net companies depend upon increasing numbers of people participating within the hi-tech gift economy. Under threat from Microsoft, Netscape is now trying to realise the opportunities opened up by such interdependence. Lacking the resources to beat its monopolistic rival, the development of products for the shareware Linux operating system has become a top priority. Anarcho-communism is now sponsored by corporate capital. The purity of the digital DIY culture is also compromised by the political system. Because the dogmatic communism of Deleuze and Guattari has dated badly, their disciples instead emphasise their uncompromising anarchism. However, the state isn't just
the potential censor and regulator of the Net. Many people use the Net for political purposes, including lobbying their political representatives. State intervention will be needed to ensure everyone can access the Net. The cult of Deleuze and Guattari is threatened by the miscegenation of the hi-tech gift economy with the private and public sectors. Anarchocommunism symbolised moral integrity: the romance of artistic 'delirium' undermining the 'machinic assemblages' of bourgeois conformity. However, as Net access grows, more and more ordinary people
are circulating free information across the Net. Far from having any belief in the revolutionary ideals of May '68, the overwhelming majority of people participate within the hi-tech gift economy for entirely pragmatic reasons. In the late nineties, digital anarchocommunism is being built by hackers like Eric Raymond: "a self-described neo-pagan [right-wing] libertarian who enjoys shooting semi-automatic weapons..."
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Alt Fails
Deleuzes alt is epistemologically bankrupt and ensures the continuation of material oppression also scientists prove he is wrong Strathausen 10 (Carsten Strathausen is Associate Professor of German and English at the University of Missouri. His first
book was The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Carsten is the editor of A Leftist Ontology (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and the translator of Boris Groys' Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media (forthcoming 2011, Columbia University Press). He has also published numerous essays on culture, philosophy, and intellectual history and is currently completing a book project on The Aesthetics of New Media, Epistemological Reflections on Minor Points in Deleuze, Theory and Event Volume 13, Issue 4, dml) The same is true of epistemology. It, too, requires
establishes points along linesotherwise, things make no sense to us. This, of course, is why Deleuze calls upon human becoming (becoming animal, becoming minor, etc), so we may begin to think and express every thing in relation to everything else. But what is the epistemological price to pay for thinking along the infinite lines of Deleuze's
a third-person observer who draws distinctions and
smooth ontology instead of reflecting upon finite points whose function is to arrest this movement, if only temporarily? This is not just a rhetorical, but also a pragmatic question with actual consequences attached to it.
We may begin to sketch a preliminary answer by looking at some of theepistemological effects of Deleuze's thought. To do so, we must work our way back from the virtual being of paradox to the actual being of individuals, using a series of theses as steppingstones, so to speak, to secure our footing along the way. In Deleuze's philosophy, the event of sense becomes inexplicable and unforeseeablea mystery largely, if not entirely, beyond human control. Deleuze's sense of sense is unscientific, meaning that most
scientists today would undoubtedly reject his understanding of self-referential concepts as a non-sensical idea. Again, this
is the reason why DeLanda disregards sense in favor of isomorphism. Biologists and sociologists in particular would ask: who or what is it that generates concepts in the first placeif not a living organism with a highly developed nervous system and a big brain? They would also ask: what exactly is the concrete thing or scientific process that corresponds to "whiteness" or "the sensible" as such? One can hardly argue that "whiteness in itself" is a self-organizing, autopoietic process similar to what sustains living organisms or social structures. Scientifically speaking, "whiteness in itself" does not exist, because it is, by definition, un-observable. It only exists virtually in the sense of a self-referential concept that expresses (the sense of) its own object. Deleuze, of course,
was well aware of this epistemological tension between his vitalist philosophy and modern science., However, whenever he confronted questions about agency and third-person observation, he either rejected them as "common sense" or retreated into quasi-religious mysticism: "At the heart
of the logic of sense, one always returns to this problem, this immaculate conception, being the passage from sterility to genesis" (LS 97). Deleuze essentially treats epistemological questions like he treats everything else: he
ontologizes them. "We will not ask therefore what is the sense of the event: the event is sense itself" (LS 22). Deleuze literally lets epistemological questions "be"which, of course, means that he makes them function as yet another expression of the becoming of being.26 But he does not answer them.
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Nomad Alt Fails

Alternative failstreating the nomad as a complete outsider is narcissistic and impossible. Mann, 95 (Professor of English at Pomona, Paul, Stupid Undergrounds, PostModern Culture 5:3, Project MUSE) Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself from the order of fashion. Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very people who would take them most seriously. By now, any given work from the stupid underground's critical apparatus is liable to be tricked out with smooth
spaces, war-machines, n - 1s, planes of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations, strewn about like tattoos on the stupid body without organs. The nomad is already succumbing to the rousseauism and orientalism that were always invested in his figure; whatever Deleuze and Guattari intended for him, he is reduced
to being a romantic outlaw, to a position opposite the State, in the sort of dialectical operation Deleuze most despised. And the rhizome is becoming just another stupid subterranean figure. It is perhaps true that Deleuze and Guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this dialectical reconfiguration (one is reminded of Breton's indictment against Rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, Claudel's recuperation of him as a proper Catholic), but no vigilance would have sufficed in any case. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is evidence that, in real time, virtual models and maps close off the very exits they indicate. The problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth spaces, BwOs, etc., are at one and the same time theoretical-political devices of the highest critical order and merely fantasmatic, delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus perhaps an instance of the all-too-proper blurring of the distinction between criticism and fantasy. In Deleuze-speak, the stupid underground would be mapped not as a margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site
determined strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or less hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, n-dimensional intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a "space" (if one only had the proverbial nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid, colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g., "cyberspace"). What is at stake, however, is not only the topological verisimilitude of the model but the fantastic possibility of nonlinear passage, of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines occupying finite social space. In the strictest sense, stupid philosophy. Nomad thought is prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already mapped and dominated by nomad, rhizomatic capital (the political philosophy of the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its critiques, but one can always pretend otherwise). It is this very fantasy, this very narcissistic wish to see
oneself projected past the frontier into new spaces, that abandons one to this economy, that seals these spaces within an order of critical fantasy that has long since been overdeveloped, entirely reterritorialized in advance. To pursue nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost the game. Nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the dialectic and no project is more hopeless; the stupid-critical underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back on itself.
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A2 DG affs
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Deleuze and Guattari bury sexual difference in order to construct a metaphysical theory of changethe price they pay for being able to account for revolution in the abstract is the assumption of the sameness of speech between Man and Woman, the historically specific experiences of women, and the ability to posit an ontological difference between sexes. Braidotti 2003 [Rosi, Becoming Woman: Or Sexual Difference Revisited, Theory, Culture, Society 20.3]
In so far as the male/female dichotomy has become the prototype of Western individualism, the process of decolonizing the subject from this dualistic grip requires as its starting point the dissolution of all sexed identities based on the gendered opposition. In this framework, sexual polarizations and gender-dichotomy are rejected as the prototype of the dualistic reduction of difference to a sub-category of Being. Thus, the becoming-woman is necessarily the starting point in so far as the over-emphasis on masculine sexuality, the persistence of sexual dualism and the positioning of woman as the privileged figure of otherness, are constitutive of Western subject-positions. In other words, becoming-woman triggers off the deconstruction of Phallic identity through a set of deconstructive steps that retrace backwards different stages of the historical construction of this and other differences so as to undo them. Sexuality being the dominant discourse of power in the West, as Foucault taught us (Foucault, 1979, 1981, 1986, 1988),1 it requires special critical analysis. The
generalized becoming-woman is the necessary starting-point for the deconstruction of phallogocentric identities precisely because sexual dualism and its corollary the positioning of Woman as figure of Otherness are constitutive of Western thought. More significant still for feminist theory is Deleuzes next step: Deleuzes ultimate aim with respect to sexual difference is to move towards its final overcoming. The nomadic or intensive horizon is a subjectivity beyond gender in the sense of being dispersed, not binary; multiple, not dualistic; interconnected, not dialectical; and in a constant flux, not fixed. This idea is expressed in figurations like: polysexuality, the molecular woman and the bodies without organs, to whic h
Deleuzes de-Phallic style actively contributes. Ultimately, what Deleuze finds objectionable in feminist theory is that it perpetuates flat repetitions of dominant values or identities, which it claims to have repossessed dialectically. This amounts to perpetuating reactive, molar or majority-thinking: in Nietzsches scale of values, feminists have a slave-morality. As an artist put it recently: ironic mimesis is not a critique, it is the mentality of a slave (ICA Inventory, 1999). For Deleuze, women would be revolutionary if, in
their becoming, they contributed both socially and theoretically to constructing a non-Oedipal woman, by freeing the multiple possibilities of desire meant as positivity and affirmation. Women, in other words, can be revolutionary subjects only to the extent that they develop a consciousness that is not specifically feminine, dissolving woman into the forces which structure her. This new general
configuration of the feminine as the post-, or rather un-Oedipal subject of becoming, is explicitly opposed to what Deleuze constructs as the feminist configuration of a new universal based on extreme sexualization or, rather, an exacerbation of the sexual dichotomy. This position is for me problematic theoretically, because it suggests a symmetry between the sexes, which results in
attributing the same psychic, conceptual and deconstructive itineraries to both. Such an alleged symmetry between the sexes is challenged most radically by Irigaray, for whom sexual difference is a founding, structural difference, which cannot be dissolved easily without causing psychic and social damage. This perspective is determined by Irigarays acute sense of the historicity of womens struggles. A theory of difference which does not acknowledge sexual difference leaves me as a feminist critic in a state of sceptical perplexity. Or, to put it differently, Deleuzes critique of dualism acts as if sexual differentiation or gender dichotomies did not have as the most immediate and pernicious consequence the positioning of the two sexes in an asymmetrical power relationship to each other. Deleuze proceeds as if there were clear equivalence in the speaking positions of the two sexes: he misses and consequently fails to take into account the central point of the feminist assertion of sexual difference, namely the idea that there is no symmetry between the sexes. Such a dissymmetry functions as a re-vindication of radical difference at the psychic, conceptual but also at the political level. Clearly, this radical dissymmetry has been covered up by being coded as devalorized difference. It has been made to rest on a linear, teleological sense of time. History as we have come to know it is the master discourse of the white, masculine, hegemonic, property-owning subject, who posits his consciousness as synonymous with a universal knowing subject and markets a series of others as his ontological props. Developing this insight further, I have argued (Braidotti, 1991) that one cannot deconstruct a subjectivity one has never been fully granted control over; one cannot diffuse a sexuality which has historically been defined as dark and mysterious. In order to announce the death of the subject, one must first have gained the right to speak as one. I concluded that Deleuze becomes caught in the contradiction of postulating a general becoming woman which fails to take into account the historical and epistemological specificity of the female feminist standpoint. He gets stuck on a fundamental ambivalence about the position of sexual difference within his own project of becoming-woman, which is both one of many possible becomings,
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and the one through which all other becomings are possible: it is both foundational and accessory, originary and accidental. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that Deleuze does not have excellent reasons for doing so. Quite
to the contrary, as stated earlier, the critique of psychoanalytic discourse, which he shared with Guattari, is a systematic deconstruction of the institution of sexuality and sexed identities such as our culture has constructed them. It is, therefore, no wonder that in his theory of the becoming-minority, Deleuze argues for the dissolution of all identities based on the Phallus, even the feminine as the eternal other of this system. Nevertheless, in a feminist perspective based on sexual difference, the problems remain.
Moreover, Deleuze is not consistent in thinking through the problem of the becoming -woman; he proceeds rather in a contradictory manner about it. It is the position of yes, but . . ., I know what you mean, but . . .; this is the mode of denial, that is to say of wilful disavowal, which expresses a structural and systematic indecision. A similar navet about sexual difference is expressed in What is Philosophy?, when Deleuze contemplates the possibility of the crucial conceptual character in philosophy being a woman: What might happen if woman herself becomes a philosopher? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 71). May I be so bold as to venture that only a nonwoman would contemplate this possibility as a great novelty, an unprecedented event or a catastrophe internal to the philosophical order and capable of subverting it? Since the 1970s, and especially in Frenchlanguage cultures, women have been raising exactly this
question. They have enacted a collectively driven repossession of the subject-positions by and for politically motivated women. I would expect this rather large corpus of work and experience, which I see as a real symbolic capital of female feminist intelligence, to be taken into account whenever the otherwise politically naive question : What happens when women start thinking for themselves? actually gets asked.
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1NC Internal Link

Deleuze and Guattari retreat to the metaphysics of becoming because sexual difference, woman herself, is abject. The abject is the space between, and it marks the continual struggle of the subject to undergo a rite of passage from object-hood to agency. However, human being itself is the expelled and expeller: our nightmares and fantasies of bondage and freedom are inscribe on the maternal body itself. Our reaction to abjection is most generally a form of disgust and demands that we purge the mother from the subjective landscape of being. Bono 2005 [Paola, The Abjection of the Female Body: Hell as a Metaphor for Birth, at http://arts.
monash.edu.au/cclcs/research/papers/] A new-born baby, really just born, the umbilical cord not yet cut; naked and crying, its face screwed up in the effort. Still dirty with blood and mucus, marks of its passage through the physical, corporeal threshold it has crossed to come to life. Carnal threshold, vagina of the mother's body, whence it comes, in whose womb it has grown - living matter on its way to being; so that the traces of that body still show on its little body. Some of you might remember this image : one of Benetton's "scandalous" ads, which some years ago did in fact provoke scandalized reactions, at least in Italy. Because it was being used
for commercial ends, because it exploited childhood - nay, babyhood, for mercenary purposes. Or so the argument went. While childhood and exploitation would seem to have nothing to do with those babies who appear in numberless ads for diapers and babyfood; there has never been such an outcry in those cases. But then those babies are so pretty, so smiling and, most important, so clean! A further criticism (perhaps not spelled out exactly in these terms, but certainly this was its meaning) maintained that the ad violated again, for those reproachable commercial ends - a most important and sacred moment, the moment of birth. And here I think is a crucial point, a truth at the core of those scandalized reactions: in the concept of the sacred, and in the focus on birth. The reasons given
for it may strike one as hypocritical, but the spontaneous recoiling in disgust was sincere. What that image signified was birth in its "improper" physical reality, showing its traces on the baby's body dirty of the con/fusion with the mother's body. Mucus, blood, the wet stickiness of the carnal threshold, con/fusion: elements which, in Kristeva's term, we could recognize as belonging to the category of the abject. Because they are secretions, because they are inscribed in a borderline area: between the outside and the inside of the body, between the undefined self and other of the pre-natal dyad. It was an indecent image which exposed a secret everybody knows, the secret of an event everybody has experienced. It was unheimlich, uncanny in its familiarity and in its bringing to conscious attention what was and should have remained buried in the unconscious. Building upon Freud's notion of the uncanny as taboo, and referring to anthropological research, especially Mary Douglas' on purity and contamination, Kristeva in Powers of Horror identifies abjection - "one of those violent, dark revolts of being" (Kristeva 1982: 1) - as the horror of not knowing the borders of the self, a primary uncanny originated in the fertility and generative power of the mother's body. Like abjection, pregnancy and the pre-natal period are borderline phenomena, they are a space-time of
con/fusion, bodily co-existence (coincidence) of identities which it links in a vital and deadly relation, at the same time preparing their separation and distinction. Space-time which both confuses and produces one and another identity, questioning that subject/object demarcation on which the delusive stability of the self is founded. Forever threatened by the frailty of a boundary built
on the originary void of loss and on the impossible refusal of corporeality, the subject experiences in the feeling of abjection the uncertainty of its identity; the risk - fear and desire - of falling back into that space-time where it grew, which it left in order to be. Rejected, repressed, expelled, yet inevitably present and forever to be kept at bay, the abject physically inhabits those areas of the body which will become erotogenic zones, in that tension and coincidence between attraction and revulsion which also - especially - marks the female/maternal body. Borderline, marginal areas; and, Mary Douglas reminds us, "all margins are dangerous. [So that] we should expect the orifices of the body to symbolyse its especially vulnerable points". Eyes, mouth, nose, anus, genitals. And their secretions, which "by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body" (Douglas 1966: 121). Tears, saliva,
vomit, mucus, faeces, urina, sperm, menstrual blood. As though in "horrendous excremental drains" (Camporesi, 1991: 12), in counter-Reformation Catholic culture these bodily secretions characterize the post-Tridentine hell, obscene site of a promiscuous and chaotic carnality; a vision which lasts until the 19th century, as Pietro Camporesi shows in The Fear of Hell. Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe, where he explores and analyzes the figurations of hell in art and literature. Thus, in the "oafish underworld" of Belli's sonnets - he argues - this vision becomes "almost a Tartarean version of birth ex-putri" (Camporesi 1991: 12, 13), where the phantasma of the great collective body of humanity, the archaic belief in a fertile death, a pregnant death, the nursemaid of new life, the sense of continuity in death-life re-emerged. The hidden shadow of the one belonging to the many reappeared, as did the sense of a fatal, cyclical rotation, an uninterrupted pendulum between life and death, between decomposition and rebirth (Camporesi 1991: 13-14). Continuity is not a reason for hope, in the awareness of belonging to the cycle of being; on
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the contrary, it engenders horror for the corrupting, destructive confusion of the self, a condition of imperfect and improper not-being-anymore. Imperfect and improper like the not-yet-being of the prenatal period, spent in the closed, red, pulsating space of the mother's womb: suffocation and protection, dreaded hell and longed for Nirvana which in this longing is inhabited by the death drive. The womb is a liminal space, which must necessarily be crossed to come into the world; as in a rite of passage, this limen is ambiguously connoted, it is not-life and not-death. Analysing the liminal phase of rites
of passage, Victor Turner remarks that its symbolism draws upon both "the biology of death, decomposition, catabolism" and "processes of gestation and parturition" (Turner 1967: 96); thus the same symbols - huts and tunnels, for instance - signify both the maternal womb and the tomb. While stressing the positive value attributed by Turner to the transitional liminal phase as a field of open potentialities, Paola Cabibbo underlines this coincidence of opposing processes and notions [which] characterizes the peculiar unity of liminality; it is neither this nor that, and yet it is both this and that (Cabibbo 1993: 13). Or, to use Turner's own words again, the subjects of a rite of passage "are neither living nor
dead from one aspect, and both living and dead from another. Their condition is one of ambiguity and paradox, a confusion of all the customary categories" (Turner 1967: 97). Ambiguity, confusion: abjection. But in a socially and culturally created rite of passage there is no return to the limen between the before and after of initiation, once the subject has been re-defined and re-demarcated in a new social and subjective space. Abjection, on the contrary, is the recurring, threatening sensation of an incurable instability of the self, it is the radical and repeated questioning of the integrity of the subject. It finds expression in the body, in the secretions which crossing its boundaries exceed it, in its hollows, crevices, orifices. Sites of expulsion and - for example in the case of food - of incorporation; borderline sites of horror and pleasure, of abjection. Kristeva writes: We may call it a border: abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it - on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. But also, abjection itself is a compromise of judgment and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives. Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which the body becomes separated from another body in order to be - maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out (Kristeva 1982: 9-10). And she goes on to argue that the abject is the violence of mourning for an 'object' that has always already been lost . [...] It takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away - it assigns it a source in the non-ego, drive, and death (Kristeva 1982: 15). In the fear and desire of being overwhelmed by that lost body is a form of the feeling of abjection, which in many cultures is expressed and contained through rituals of purification. Rituals: because the abject borders upon - coincides with, says Kristeva - the sacred. With the interdictions against the danger of its contamination, the abject lays at the roots of the sacred. "As abjection - so the sacred" (Kristeva 1982: 19)
is the title of a passage where she briefly looks at the modes of purification in religion, from so called primitive religions to Jewish monotheism to Christianity: exclusion and taboo, transgression, sin - then to suggest that in our culture the abject finds expression and containment in writing. "Outside of the sacred, the abject is written" - she maintains, talking of the aesthetic task - a descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct - [which]
amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless 'primacy' constituted by primal repression (Kristeva 1982: 18). Literature can thus be seen as an exploration of the
abject; metaphorization of lack and fear so that the self can come to life again in signs (see Kristeva 1982: 38). In a century marked by the process of secularization, but also traversed by a renewed need of the sacred, writing becomes "a cache for suffering";
in the unbearable instability of the boundary between subject and object, "the narrative is what is challenged first"; its linearity is shattered up to the scream of a language which resembles violence and obscenity. The descents into hell of Cline's and Lispector's writing are the collapsing of narration into that crying-out theme which,
coinciding "with the incandescent states of a boundary-subjectivity [...] called abjection", is according to Kristeva "the crying-out theme of suffering-horror" (Kristeva 1982: 140-41). In the journey towards the origins, where life and death meet,
where the danger and pleasure of the loss of self are intertwined, in literature as well the feeling of abjection often becomes embodied in the female/maternal body. Already signified in religions and myths, revisited by psychoanalysis, the mother and the maternal are the privileged figure of the inextricable proximity of life and death at the centre of the symbolic construction.
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The abject becomes the site of violence; anything will be done to secure the sanctity of the Subject, and given the abjects ambiguous nature, it will suffer the slings and arrows of the Subjects quest for security. Brewster 2005 [Scott, Rites of defilement: abjection and the body politic in Northern Irish poetry, Irish
University Review: a journal of Irish Studies Autumn-Winter 2005] It might be argued that Northern Ireland--a territorial and signifying space whose meanings and boundaries have been so violently contested, a body politic sustained and racked by anomalous and permeable partition--has been in the condition of abjection since its foundation . Against this disorder, Northern Irish writing has often been posited as a purifying, redemptive force, able to 'hold a plea' with the rage of conflict and crisis. (1) Yet, for Julia Kristeva, it is literature that carries the full power of abjection into effect; all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter
what its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border ... where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so--double, fuzzy, heterogenous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject. (2) This essay traces how Northern poetry has given effect to the power of abjection over the last thirty years, in terms of its response to the physical and affective impact of violence, to a degraded polity, and to questions of origin and the maternal. A Thing of Nothing: The Violated Body Kristeva observes that the
artistic experience is 'rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies', and the work of catharsis exceeds religion in its ability to perform the 'rite of defilement and pollution' (Powers of Horror, p.17). In the very process of excluding filth and pollution, abjection is enshrined at the centre of culture: the taboo object provokes fear, disgust, and fascination. Kristeva characterizes the experience of abjection as 'a vortex of summons and repulsion' (Powers of Horror, p.1), and the corpse's abject status is exemplary of this ambivalence: These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death ... The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost
of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons us and ends up engulfing us (Powers of Horror, pp.3-4).
A thing of nothing, whose scattered materiality still demands our attachment even as it provokes loathing, the dead body sustains and flagrantly denies our corporeal integrity . Northern Irish poetry performs such a rite of defilement when it surveys the violated body. Tom Herron observes that much of the horror generated by the encounter between viewer/poet and brutalized dead bodies in Northern poetry is bound up 'in the abjected nature of dispersal'. (3) He identifies three predominant and interrelated modes of dealing with the violently fragmented body: displaying the body as spectacle or image, a site upon which we can read political violence; sanctifying the dead body through acts of ritual; conveying a sense of immediacy and intimacy through witness and elegy. For Herron, these approaches are complicit with the atrocity they represent. We can identify other tropes: Northern poetry, and literary criticism, have tended either to turn
the act of murder and its physical aftermath into narrative, to treat it as shock and incommunicability, or to view it as contamination. Peter McDonald has argued that Northern poetry cannot be innocent, and much of its language colludes with, or reinforces, 'encoded narratives' about identity politics and 'legitimate' violence. (4) To follow this argument,
violence is ascribed a telos, and the brute fact of sudden death and dispersed bodies is shaped into metanarrative. The shattering of corporeal integrity can be interpreted and accommodated within ideological critique, and yet such a narrative construction merely compounds or doubles that pain by aestheticizing sudden death--a 'poetry' of violence epitomized by the 'terrible beauty' of Yeats's 'Easter 1916'.
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1NC Alternative
Rather than think the space of the world in the abstract metaphysical terms of Deleuze and Guattari, we propose an account of the world in terms of sexual difference. Woman stages the ontological limit of the subject: the very gesture which opens up the space for the subjects symbolization is absolute negativity, and woman occupies this space because the Real can only be expressed in the form of the very void-experienced generated by the broken character of Symbolic existence. Woman is the Symbolic become itself. Feldner and Vighi 2007 [Helko and Fabio, Zizek Beyond Foucault, pp. 205-207]
On the strength of this argument, Z izek claims that each mascu -line denition of femininity is to be regarded as a patriarchal strata-gem aimed at establishing and underpinning the domain of the phallus. However, by converse, this also means that all feminist attempts to dene a feminine discourse beyond, outside or against the phallic function are doomed to fail, since they inexorably endup validating the masculine logic of the exception. Much more productive, he argues, would be to stick to the Lacanian insight that woman stages the ontological limit of the subject, rather than the epistemological one. That is to say: while the beyond of man is structured as a plausible and transgressive ction ( objet a ), the beyond of woman is a ction of the ction (Hegels appearance qua appearance), i.e. the pure formal essence of ctionality that can only be rendered as a connection with void. And this void is none other than the kernel of the symbolic order, the traumatic break in the causal link on account of which the big Other does not exist . What we should not forget is that the status of this Other
accessible to woman is, in its deepest connotation, that of the peculiar combination of the Symbolic and the Real. In a manner which proves to be consistent with his overall project, in his analysis of sexual difference Z izek emphasises the anti -humanistic equation subject-void as well the non-existence of the big Other qua ideological fantasy. 2 His resolve in bringing the question of femininity back into the equation is therefore functional to his political attempt to theorise a break with the crucial philosophical presupposition of the Enlightenment. Choosing as distinguished allies both Hegel and Lacan, Z izek maintains that the subject is no longer the
Light of Reason opposed to the non-transparent, impenetrable Stuff (of Nature, Tradition); his very kernel, the gesture which opens up the space for the Light of Logos, is absolute negativity qua night of the world (Z izek, 1994a, 145). Hence the prominence accorded to the Lacanian Real as the traumatic point of absolute freedom where the subject, in its negativity, meets the non-existence of the big Other. As previously discussed, in his latest works Z izek has moved more and more resolutely towards conceptualising the Real as a dimension which is fully consubstantial with the symbolic order: the Real is not external to the Symbolic: the Real is the Symbolic itself in the modality of not-all, lacking an external Limit/Dimension. In this precise sense, the line of separation between the Symbolic and the Real is not only a symbolic gesture par excellence, but the very founding gesture of the Symbolic and to step into the Real does not entail abandoning language, throwing oneself into the abyss of the chaotic Real, but, on the contrary, dropping the very allusion to some external point of reference which eludes the Symbolic (Z izek, 2003b, 6970). 3 Unquestionably, this is one of the most accurate denitions of the Real delivered by Z izek, one that substantiates his insight that the Real can only be expressed in the form of the very voidexperience generated by the radically fragmented character of our symbolic existence . This brings us back to the deadlock of the sexual relationship to Lacans thesis that every relationship between the sexes can take place only against the background of a fundamental impossibility (Z izek, 1994a, 155). Or, more pointedly: In so far as sexual difference is a Real that resists symbolization, the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical non-relationship in which the Other, our partner, prior to being a subject, is a Thing, an inhuman partner; as such, the sexual relations hip cannot be transposed into a symmetrical relation-ship between pure subjects (Z izek, 1994a, 1089).The point to re-emphasise is that the terms masculine and femi-nine do not designate two positive sets of properties (active vs. passive, reason vs. emotion, etc.), but instead two asymmetrical or uncoordinated ways in which the subject fails in his or her bid for identity. On this account, masculine and feminine should not be regarded as two opposite parts of a whole; quite
differently, they express two completely unrelated failures to attain this whole (see Z izek, 1994a, 15960).The analysis of the specic nature of sexual failure allows us to make further ground on the question of the rapport between the Symbolic and the Real. To recapitulate the argument so far: every symbolic order produces an excessive, supernumerary element that
eludes the logic of the signifying system and yet, precisely through its elusiveness, secretly supports its functioning. Meaning operates, literally, through an elusive/fantasmatic obstacle that allows for some kind of disavowed anchoring. We make sense by secretly relying on an excessive element that needs to be repressed if sense is to emerge; we hang on to meaning by excluding a disturbing sur-plus of
West debate 11-12
meaning. When, then, do we encounter the Real? From the privileged viewpoint of Lacans formulas of sexuation, precisely the moment we dissolve the masculine logic of the exception and, adopting the feminine position, force the Symbolic to fully become itself , i.e. to overlap with its traumatic structuring deadlock. Mean-ing dissolves into the Real the moment our symbolic existence in thought, language and communication extends over to the uncon-scious structuring kernel of our being. The feminine Real (the radical inconsistency of womans desire) is the Symbolic in the guise of not -all.
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2NC OV
Our argument is that Deleuze and Guattaris politics of the rhizome bury sexual difference. They demand that the revolutionary woman leave everything specifically feminine about her behindin other words, they make the body of woman abject and demand it be purged from the theoretical apparatus of revolutionary philosophy. We, on the other hand, affirm a politics of sexual difference which can recognize the situation of bodies in their historical embededdness. The impact is unending violenceabjection is inevitable because embodiment is inevitable. Their only reaction to abject is not to embrace it or cope with it but rather to purge it. This outweighs the aff because the purification of abjection is how we sanctify violence and give violence a telos. This turns the case because the family becomes just another site of abjection, bringing violence to those who genuinely desire the family structure as a way of making their way in the world meaningful.
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2NC Links
Our first link is METAPHYSICS. Our Braidotti evidence indicates that Deleuze and Guattari try to account for change and revolution in metaphysical terms, which strips the objects of their philosophy of their historical embeddedness and embodiment. Our second link is SEX. Deleuze and Guattari posit a multiplicity of sexes in order to overcome the dualistic tendencies of modernity. Our Braidotti evidence indicates that this strips women of everything specifically feminine about their bodies in order to make them into revolutionary subjects. Our third link is ABJECTION. They make the family, arboresence, sexual difference, and anything else that falls on the wrong side of their metaphysical dividing line into the dirty, filthy, putrid, fecund, and unclean. This reinscribes the very hierarchies that a rhizomatic politics would attempt to align itself against. Our fourth link is to the PLAN. Even if they dont ascribe any sort of meaning to the plan, our argument is that their claim that we need to do the plan, even experimentally, is problematic because we are already revolutionary subjects because we embody sexual difference. They radically divorce us from our real revolutionary potential because they demand that we become something that we are not in order to achieve something most of us dont genuinely desire. That is, they misread D+G because their account of the subject as libidinal forecloses the affirmatives understanding of free will and volition: there is no choice in the face of desire, and the real point of Deleuze and Guattaris writings is to change desire, not change politics.
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2NC Alternative
The alternative to their affirmation of the politics of the rhizome is rather to be the politics of the rhizome. That is, the affirmative declares itself as over and against the status quo, draws a metaphysical distinction between itself and the world it encounters in order to condemn the latter, whereas our Felder and Vighi evidence indicates that we are always already rhizomatic insofar that we are always already incomplete Subjects because we embody sexual difference. So, the alternative is to become what we are rather than to affirm something.
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Link Becoming-Woman = Metaphysics

Deleuze and Guattaris conception of becoming-woman dilutes their commitment to metaphysical difference into a multiple and undifferentiated becoming. Braidotti 2003 [Rosi, Becoming Woman: Or Sexual Difference Revisited, Theory, Culture, Society 20.3]
Juxtaposed to and compared with feminist discussions of sexual difference, Deleuzes work does not rest upon a dichotomous opposition of masculine and feminine subject positions, but rather on a multiplicity of sexed subject positions. The differences in degree between them mark different lines of becoming, in a web of rhizomatic connections. It is a vision of the subject as being endowed with multiple sexualities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 242). I have often argued that there is an unresolved knot in Deleuzes relation to the becoming-woman and the feminine. It has to do with a double pull that Deleuze never solved and which is closely tied to his interaction with Guattaris work on molecular subjectivity, transversality and schizoanalysis. It is a
tension between on the one hand, empowering a generalized becoming-woman as the prerequisite for all other becomings and, on the other, calling for its dismissal. On the one hand, the becomingminority/ Nomad/molecular/bodies-without-organs/woman is based on the feminine, on the other hand it is posited as the general figuration for the kind of subjectivity which Deleuze advocates. Deleuzian becomings emphasize the generative powers of complex and multiple states of transition between the metaphysical anchoring points that are the masculine and feminine. But they do not quite solve the issue of their interaction. Deleuzes work displays a great empathy with the feminist assumption that sexual difference is the primary axis of differentiation and therefore must be given priority. On the other hand, he also displays the tendency to dilute metaphysical difference into a multiple and undifferentiated becoming. In the next section I will explore this tension further.
West debate 11-12
Link Becoming-Woman = Dis-embedded

Deleuze and Guattaris rejection of molar politics means that women have to turn their backs on the advances of the civil rights movement, suffrage, equal protection, and so forth. According to them, nothing about the political can be specifically feminine if it is to be revolutionary. Braidotti 2003 [Rosi, Becoming Woman: Or Sexual Difference Revisited, Theory, Culture, Society 20.3]
Deleuze states that all the lines of deterritorialization necessarily go through the stage of becoming woman, which is not just any other form of becoming minority, but rather is the key: the pre-condition and the necessary startingpoint for the whole process. The reference to woman in the process of becoming -woman, however, does not refer to empirical females, but rather to socio-symbolic constructions, topological positions, degrees and levels of intensity, affective states. On the affirmative side, the becoming-woman is the marker for a general process of transformation: it affirms positive forces and levels of nomadic, rhizomatic consciousness. That woman occupies a troubled
area in the radical critique of phallocentrism is a well-known tenet of feminist philosophies: in so far as woman is positioned dualistically as the other of this system, she is also annexed to the Phallus, albeit by negation. Deleuze not
uncharacteristically ignorant of the basic feminist epistemological distinction between Woman as representation and women as concrete agents of experience ends up making analogous distinctions internal to the category of woman herself. From these assumptions, however, he draws damning conclusions for feminist philosophy. At this point his relationship to Irigaray becomes quite paradoxical because Deleuze clearly supports a feminist position: It is, of course, indispensable for women to conduct a molar politics, with a view to winning back their own organism, their own history, their own subjectivity [. . .]. But it is dangerous to confine oneself to such a subject, which does not function without drying up a spring or stopping a flow . (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 276) In spite of such evident
support for womens uphill struggle towards achieving full subjectivity, with human and citizenship rights, Deleuze, like Der rida and other post-structuralists, opposes to the majority/sedentary/ molar vision of woman as the structura l operator of the phallogocentric system the woman as becoming/minority/molecular/nomadic. Deleuze argues that all becomings are equal, but some were more eq ual than others. As against the molar or sedentary vision of woman as an operator of the phallogocentric system, Deleuze proposes the molecular or nomadic woman as process of becoming. In the next few sections I will explore this notion further and attempt an assessment.

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West debate 11-12

1 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

War Machine 2AC Deleuze Bad General/Must-Read

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2 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

War Machine 2AC Reject War Machines Comparative/Conclusive

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3 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

War Machine 2AC AT: Thats Not Our Deleuze

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4 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

War Machine 2AC Authority Over Lines of Flight Bad

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5 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

Tyler Durden Disad (1/3)

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6 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

Tyler Durden Disad (2/3)

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7 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

Tyler Durden Disad (3/3)

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8 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

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9 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

Tyler Durden Disad 2NC Lines of Death Impact

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10 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

Tyler Durden Disad 2NC Impact Calculus

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11 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

Tyler Durden Disad 2NC Lines of Flight Bad

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12 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

West debate 11-12

13 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

Deleuze and Guattari Perm Solvency

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14 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

Perm Solves Immanence

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15 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

AT: Prediction Bad

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16 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

AT: But Lines of Flight Are Sweet

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17 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

AT: But We Critique Stuff

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18 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

AT: D and G Args About Capitalism

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19 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

AT: Transcendence/Immanence Links

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20 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

Deleuzes Alternative Gets Co-Opted

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21 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

AT: Deleuze and Guattari Ethics (1/2)

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22 DG sucks balls Unabomber State bitches

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