Death K

1NC
The tautological fantasy of death is a scar on the politics of the 1ac. Their process of
endless mortification constructs the body as a diseased object that betrays the subject
and thus banishes it to a paradoxical purgatory between life and death defined by the
absence of pleasure.
Baudrillard 76 Jean, The Baud-Man. Symbolic Exchange and Death, pp. 177-180
Security is another form of social control, in the form of life blackmailed with the afterlife. It is universally present for us
today, and 'security forces' range from life assurance and social security to the car seatbelt by way of the state security police force. 'Belt up'
says an advertising slogan for seatbelts. Of course, security, like
ecology, is an industrial business extending its cover
up to the level of the species: a convertibility of accident, disease and pollution into capitalist surplus profit is operative everywhere.
But this is above all a question of the worst repression, which consists in dispossessing you of your own death, which everybody dreams of, as
the darkness beneath their instinct of conservation. It
is necessary to rob everyone of the last possibility of giving
themselves their own death as the last 'great escape' from a life laid down by the system. Again, in this symbolic short-circuit, the
gift-exchange is the challenge to oneself and one's own life, and is carried out through death. Not because it expresses the individual's asocial
rebellion (the defection of one or millions of individuals does not infringe the law of the system at all), but because it carries in it a principle of
sociality that is radically antagonistic to our own social repressive principle. To bury death beneath the contrary myth of
security, it is necessary to exhaust the gift-exchange. Is it so that men might live that the demand for death must be exhausted? No, but
in order that they die the only death the system authorises: the living are separated from their dead,
who no longer exchange anything but the form of their afterlife, under the sign of comprehensive insurance. Thus car safety
mummified in his helmet, his seatbelt, all the paraphernalia of security , wrapped up in the security myth, the driver is nothing but a
corpse, closed up in another, non-mythic, death , as neutral and objective a s technology, noiseless and expertly crafted. Riveted
to his machine, glued to the spot in it, he no longer runs the risk of dying, since he is already dead. This is the secret of
security, like a steak under cellophane : to surround you with a sarcophagus in order to prevent you
from dying Our whole technical culture creates an artificial milieu of death . It is not only armaments that remain the general archetype of
material production , but the simplest machine around us constitutes a horizon of death, a death that will never be resolved because it has
crystallised beyond reach . fixed capital of death, where the living labour of death has frozen over, as the labour force is frozen in fixed capital
and dead labour. In other words, all material production is merely a gigantic 'character armour' by means of which the species means to keep
death at a respectful distance . Of course, death itself overshadows the species and seals it into the armour the species thought
to protect itself with . Here again , commensurate with an entire civilisation , we find the image of the automobile-sarcophagus: the
protective armour is just death miniaturised and become a technical extension of your own body The biologisation of the
body and the technicisation of the environment go hand in hand in the same obsessional neurosis. The technical environment is our over-
production of pollutant, fragile and obsolescent objects. For production lives, its entire logic and strategy are articulated on fragility and
obsolescence . An economy of stable products and good objects is indispensable: the economy develops only by
exuding danger, pollution, usury, deception and haunting. Theeconomy lives only on the suspension of death that it
maintains throughout material production , and through renewing the available death stocks , even if it means conjuring it up by
a security build up: blackmail and repression . Death is definitively secularised in material production, where it is reproduced
on a large scale as capital. Even our bodies, which have become biological machinery, are modelled on this
inorganic body, and therefore become, at the same time , a bad object, condemned to disease ,
accident and death. Living by the production of death, capital has an easy time producing security' it's the same thing. Security is
the industrial prolongation of death, just as ecology is the industrial prolongation of pollution . A few more bandages on the
sarcophagus. This is also true of the great institutions that are the glory of our democracy' Social Security is the social prosthesis of a dead
society (,Social Security is death ! ' - May '68) , that is to say, a society already exterminated in all its symbolic wheels, in its deep system of
reciprocities and obligations, which means that neither the concept of security nor that of the 'social' ever had any meaning. The 'social'
begins by taking charge of death . It's the same story as regards cultures that have been destroyed then revived and protected as
folklore (d. M. de Certeau, ' La beaute du mort' [in La culture au pluriel, Paris: UGE, 1 974]) . The same goes for life assurance,
which is the domestic variant of a system which everywhere presupposes death as an axiom . The social translation of the death of the group -
each materialising for the other only as social capital indexed on death. Deathis dissuaded at the price of a continual
mortification : such is the paradoxical logic of security In a Christian context, ascesis played the same role. The accumulation of
suffering and penitence was able to play the same role as character armour, as a protective
sarcophagus against hell. And our obsessional compulsion for security can be interpreted as a gigantic collective ascesis, an
anticipation of death in life itself: from protection into protection, from defence to defence, crossing all jurisdictions, institutions and modern
material apparatuses, life is no longer anything but a doleful, defensive book-keeping, locking every risk into its sarcophagus. Keeping
the accounts on survival, instead of the radical compatibility of life and death. Our system lives off the production of death and pretends to
manufacture security. An about-face? Not at all, just a simple twist in the cycle whose two ends meet. That an automobile firm remodels itself
on the basis of security (like industry on anti-pollution measures) without altering its range, objectives or products shows that security is only a
question of exchanging terms. Security
is only an internal condition of the reproduction of the system when it
reaches a certain level of expansion, just as feedback is only an internal regulating procedure for systems that have reached a
certain point of complexity.

The viviocentric duality between life and death naturalizes ever exclusion. The
exclusion of the dead is constitutive of every social antagonism and only taking the
choice to orient ourselves positively towards death can produce any form of affective
life-value.
Robinson 12 (Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Social and
Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, "Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism and the Exclusion of Death" NKF

Symbolic exchange or rather, its suppression plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism.
Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related)
are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to
spectacle, immanence to transcendence. Baudrillards view of capitalism is derived from Marxs analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts
Marxs view that capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity.
In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that
different kinds of labour can be compared. Capitalism
is derived from the autonomisation or separation of
economics from the rest of life. It turns economics into the reality-principle. It is a kind of sorcery,
connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts the social world from an
exchange of death with the Other to an eternal return of the Same. Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a
regime based on value and the production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must contribute value. This creates an immense
regime of social exchange. However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of
value itself being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible
into social life, by means of accumulation. According to Baudrillard, capitalism
rests on an obsession with the abolition of
death. Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation. It tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death)
through value (associated with life). But this is bound to fail. General equivalence the basis of capitalism is itself the ever-presence
of death. The more the system runs from death, the more it places everyone in solitude, facing their own death. Life itself is fundamentally
ambivalent. The attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly. Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress,
and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific
knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis. For instance,
the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed to be preserved otherwise they will be
destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed,
market value, and sign-value all come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value. Capitalist exchange is always
based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation. And
capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing)
cannot be returned by the other. It is also this regime which produces scarcity Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins argument. Capitalism
produces the Freudian death drive, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and
Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the domains they study the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which
grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including
those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes into existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the
symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard
argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect
of the symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that
such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively
in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate
sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the
Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism
can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to
capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility.
Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The
remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and
threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is
experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the obscene, which is present in excess over the scene of what is imagined. This is
different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillards remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of
symbolic exchange. Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it.
The energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder.
Our culture is dead from
having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate
genocide on indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first destroying its own indigenous
logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported
or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability. Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system. This is
not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it counterposes a different principle of
sociality to that of the dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to
offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The affective charge of death remains present among
the oppressed, but not with the properly symbolic rhythm of immediate retaliation. The Church and State also exist based on the elimination
of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the
Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange. Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms
of the state and capitalism retained some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the
imaginary of the social contract was based on the idea of a sacrifice this time of liberty for the common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic
exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I havent seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that
this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art,
theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power. It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular
malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This
is initially how I read Baudrillards work. But on closer inspection, this seems to be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to
the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an
aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups. Death Death plays a central role in Baudrillards theory, and is closely related to
symbolic exchange. According to Baudrillard, what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in
exchanges with death. Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event
affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value which returns things to a state of
indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the
decomposition of existing relations, the death of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories.
For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction
carries shades of death because one generation replaces another. Baudrillards concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtins concept of the
grotesque. Death refers to metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective transformation, as
well as physical death. According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as social, not natural or biological. They see it as an effect of an
adversarial will, which they must absorb. And they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event
which does not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the wests
idea of abiological, material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the sociality of death.
Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary
oppositions. For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original, founding opposition on
which the others are founded. After this first split, a whole series of others have been created,
confining particular groups the mad, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so
on to particular segregated situations. The definition of the normal human has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly
everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant category. The original exclusion was of the dead it is defined as
abnormal to be dead. You livies hate us deadies. This first split and exclusion forms the basis, or
archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and
so on. This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard
suggests that death as we know it does not exist outside of this separation between living and dead. The
modern view of death is constructed on the model of the machine and the function. A machine either
functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or does not. For
Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death. The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise
of subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells. This requires an idea of
death as an end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of
religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal. Modern
systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know how to die or how to do anything but keep reproducing
themselves. The internalisation of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner
would say, between the category of man and the un-man, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also individualises people, by
destroying their actual connections to others. The symbolic haunts the code as the threat of its own death. The society of the code works
constantly to ward off the danger of irruptions of the symbolic. The mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced by the foreclosure
we still exchange with the dead
of death. The split never actually stops exchanges across the categories. In the case of death,
through our own deaths and our anxiety about death. We no longer have living, mortal relationships
with objects either. They are reduced to the instrumental. It is as if we have a transparent veil
between us. Symbolic exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and the state are
invented to take their place. It is the process of excluding, marking, or barring which allows concentrated or transcendental power to come into
existence. Through splits, people turn the other into their imaginary. For instance, westerners invest the Third World with racist fantasies
and revolutionary aspirations; the Third World invests the west with aspirational fantasies of development. In separation, the other exists
only as an imaginary object. Yet the resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard, any such marking or barring of the other brings the other to the
core of society. We all become dead, or mad, or prisoners, and so on, through their exclusion. The goal of survival is fundamental to
the birth of power. Social control emerges when the union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the dead become prohibited. The social
repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of life. People are compelled to survive so as to become useful. For Baudrillard,
capitalisms original relationship to death has historically been concealed by the system of production, and its ends. It only becomes fully visible
now this system is collapsing, and production is reduced to operation. In modern societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed outside
society. For example, elderly people are excluded from society. People no longer expect their own death. As a result, it becomes unintelligible.
It keeps returning as nature which will not abide by objective laws. It can no longer be absorbed through ritual. Western society is arranged so
death is never done by someone else, but always attributable to nature. This creates a bureaucratic, judicial regime of death, of which the
concentration camp is the ultimate symbol. The system
now commands that we must not die at least not in any old
way. We may only die if law and medicine allow it. Hence for instance the spread of health and safety regulations. On the
other hand, murder and violence are legalised, provided they can be re-converted into economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a regressive
redistribution of death. It is wrested from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies. For Baudrillard, there is not a social
People are effectively being killed, or left to die, by a process which never treats them
improvement here.
as having value. On the other hand, even when capitalism becomes permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it still creates an underlying
anxiety about being reduced to the status of an object or a marionette. This appears as a constant fear of being manipulated. The slave remains
within the masters dialectic for as long as his life or death serves the reproduction of domination.

The privileging of life over death is a false dichotomy. The cardinal sin of humanity is
the privileging of life instead, rush towards death and embrace a philosophical
encounter with that which has always been.
McGowan 13 (Todd, Assoc. Prof. of Film and Television Studies @ U. of Vermont, Enjoying What We
Dont Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, pp. 223-227)
On the level of common sense, this opposition is not symmetrical. What thinking person would not want to side with those who love life rather
than death.3 Everyone can readily understand how one might love life, but the love of death is a counterintuitive phenomenon. It seems as if it
must be code language for some other desire, which is how Western leftists often view it. Interpreting terrorist attacks as an ultimately life-
affirming response to imperialism and impoverishment, they implicitly reject the possibility of being in love with death. But this type of
interpretation can't explain why so many suicide bombers are middle-class, educated subjects and not the most downtrodden victims of
imperialist power.4 We must imagine that for subjects such as these there is an appeal in death itself. Those
who emphasize the importance of death at the expense of life do so because death is the source of value.5 The fact that life has an
end, that we do not have an infinite amount of time to experience every possibility, means that we must value some things above others. Death
creates hierarchies of value, and these hierarchies are not only vehicles for oppression but the pathways through which what we do matters at
all. Without the value that death provides, neither love nor ice cream nor friendship nor anything that
we enjoy would have any special worth whatsoever. Having an infinite amount of time, we would have no
incentive to opt for these experiences rather than other ones. We would be left unable to enjoy what seems to make life
most worth living. Even though enjoyment itself is an experience of the infinite, an experience of transcending the limits that regulate
everyday activity, it nonetheless depends on the limits of finitude. When one enjoys, one accesses the infinite as a finite subject,
and it is this contrast that renders enjoyment enjoyable. Without the limits of finitude, our experience of the infinite would become as tedious
as our everyday lives (and in fact would become our everyday experience). Finitude provides the punctuation through which the infinite
emerges as such. The struggle to assert the importance of death the act of being in love with death, as bin Laden claims that the Muslim
youths are is a mode of avowing ones allegiance to the infinite enjoyment that death doesn't extinguish but instead spawns.6 This is exactly
why Martin Heidegger attacks what he sees as our modern inauthentic relationship to death. In Being and Time Heidegger sees our individual
death as an absolute limit that has the effect of creating value for us. As he puts it, "With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost
potentiality-for-being. This is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein's Being-in-the-world.7 Without the anticipation of our
own death, we flit through the world and fail to take up fully an attitude of care, the attitude most appropriate for our mode of being,
according to Heidegger. Nothing really matters to those who have not recognized the approach of their own death. By
depriving us of
an authentic relationship to death, an ideology that proclaims life as the only value creates a valueless
world where nothing matters to us. But of course the partisans of life are not actually eliminating death itself. They
simply privilege life over death and see the world in terms of life rather than death, which would
seem to leave the value-creating power of death intact. But this is not what happens. By privileging life and
seeing death only in terms of life, we change the way we experience the world. Without the mediation that death
provides, the system of pure life becomes a system utterly bereft of value.8 We can see this in the two great systems of modernity
science and capitalism. Both modern science and capitalism are systems structured around pure life.9 Neither recognizes any ontological limit
but instead continually embarks on a project of constant change and expansion. The scientific quest for knowledge about the world moves
forward without regard for humanitarian or ethical concerns, which is why ethicists incessantly try to reconcile scientific discoveries with
morality after the fact. After scientists develop the ability to clone, for instance, we realize what cloning portends for our sense of identity and
attempt to police the practice. After Oppenheimer helps to develop the atomic bomb, he addresses the world with pronouncements of its evil.
But this rearguard action has nothing to do with science as such. Oppenheimer the humanist is not Oppenheimer the scientist.10 The same
dynamic is visible with capitalism. As an economic system, it promotes constant evolution and change just as life itself does. Nothing can
remain the same within the capitalist world because the production of value depends on the creation of the new commodity, and even the old
commodities must be constantly given new forms or renewed in some way.11 Capitalism produces crises not because it can't produce enough
crises of scarcity dominate the history of the noncapitalist world, not the capitalist one but because it produces too much. The crisis of
capitalism is always a crisis of overproduction. The capitalist economy suffocates from too much life, from excess,
not from scarcity or death. Both science and capitalism move forward without any acknowledged limit, which is why they are
synonymous with modernity.12 Modernity emerges with the bracketing of death's finitude and the belief that there is no barrier to human
possibility. The problem with the exclusive focus on life at the expense of death is that it never finds enough life and thus remains perpetually
dissatisfied. The limit of this project is, paradoxically, its own infinitude. It evokes what Hegel calls the bad infinite an infinite that is wrongly
conceived as having no relation at all to the finite. We succumb to the bad infinite when we pursue an unattainable
object and fail to see that the only possible satisfaction rests in the pursuit itself. The bad infinite -the infinite of modernity- depends on a
fundamental misrecognition. We continue on this path only as long as we believe that we might attain the final piece of the puzzle, and yet this
piece is constitutively denied us by the structure of the system itself. We
seek the commodity that would finally bring us complete
satisfaction, but dissatisfaction is built into the commodity structure, just as obsolescence is built into the very
fabric of our cars and computers. Like capitalism, scientific inquiry cannot find a final answer: beneath atomic theory we find string theory, and
beneath string theory we find something else. In both cases, the system prevents us from recognizing where our satisfaction lies; it diverts our
focus away from our activity and onto the goal that we pursue. In this way, modernity produces the dissatisfaction that keeps it going. But it
also produces another form of dissatisfaction that wants to arrest its forward movement. The further the project of modernity moves in the
direction of life, the more forcefully the specter of fundamentalism will make its presence felt. The exclusive focus on life has the effect of
producing eruptions of death. As the life-affirming logic of science and capitalism structures all societies to an increasing extent, the space for
the creation of value disappears. Modernity attempts to construct a symbolic space where there is no place for death and the limit that death
this infinite universe
represents. As opposed to the closed world of traditional society, modernity opens up an infinite universe.14 But
is established through the repression of finitude. Explosions of fundamentalist violence represent the
return of what modernity's symbolic structure cannot accommodate. As Lacan puts it in his seminar on psychosis,
"Whatever is refused in the symbolic order, in the sense of Verwerfung, reappears in the real.15 Fundamentalist violence is blowback not
simply in response to imperialist aggression, as the leftist common sense would have it. This violence marks the return of what modernity
necessarily forecloses.
Vote negative to lacerate the body and embrace a precarious dance with death. The
performative refusal of security that defines the negative is one that transcends the
carnivorous community of debate and enjoys the philosophical inevitability of
expenditure.
Irwin 2 Alexander, Professor of Religion at Amherst College and Senior Researcher at the Institute for
Social Justice, Exercises in Inutility in Saints of the Impossible, pg 139140/--hauteur de mort (height of
death)
This parti pris of responding to a brutal political and military situation with a mystico-literary self-stylization constitutes the force and originality, but also, for some,
the deeply unsatisfying ambiguity of Bataille's mystical subversion. Understanding Bataille's concerns in this way shows, in any event, why Bataille's

position with respect to the violence of the war could only be enacted/communicated performatively. What Bataille sought to
present was not a set of ethical propositions or rationally coordinated political theses, but rather a style of

life that, considered as a (lacerated but living) whole, offered an alternative to the values and forms of existence that had
found their culmination in totalitarian oppression and war. The life of mysticism and expenditure Bataille proposed could not, he claimed, be
adequately described in the language of philosophical, social scientific, or political discourse. This mode of life could only be grasped in its realization (performance)
in the existence of an exemplary being: the mystical writer, Bataille himself. Distancing himself from the "professorial" attitude of academic philosophers like
Heidegger, whose "method remains glued to results," Bataille affirmed: "what counts in my eyes is the moment of ungluing [decollement]. What I teach (if it is true
that . . . ) is an intoxication, not a philosophy. I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman" (BOC V, 218 note; ellipsis in original). Bataille was convinced
that the meditational method and more broadly the
mystical style of existence he made available through his writings opened the route to
a concrete experience of the heterogeneity and sovereignty of the self and thus laid the groundwork for genuine
freedom. The inner experience of freedom remains the precondition of any meaningful deployment of freedom in the
public, political world. And if freedom can be understood in Kantian terms as autolegislation, then mystical writing initiates autonomy by showing

people that they carry the supreme law within themselves, by teaching them to experience themselves as their own law (a law
constituted through endless contestation). "Man is his own law if he strips himself naked before himself. The mystic before God had the attitude of a subject.
inner experience, "knowing that he [the self]
Whoever places being before himself has the attitude of a sovereign" (BOC V, 278). The "naked" sovereign of

will die" (278), finds freedom tempered with the awareness of radical vulnerability and contingency, thus making freedom
inseparable from "compassion" (273), or as Bataille will later write, from a tragic "loyalty" (BOC XI, 541-45). Without the sacrificial knowledge of its own penetration
by death, the self's exercise of freedom would inevitably become an "exercise of power" over others (BOC V, 221). Instead, inner experience is a sacrificial
"conquest" of the self "for others" (76). Sovereignty is not static governance but tireless "revolt" (221). Through an unruly mixture of steamy confession, dense
philosophical analysis, histrionic bluster, parodic prayers, lachrymose lamentation, "mimicry," and irony, Bataille's textual mysticism
undermines or
overflows the conceptual structures on which the logic of domination relies. It attacks utility, rationality,

hierarchical order, and identity. By affirming a useless inner experience as in itself "sole authority , sole value" (BOC V, 18),

mysticism challenges the right of coercive political systems to claim ultimate value and unlimited
authority for themselves. By introducing through "auto-sacrificial" writing the toxin of the impossible into calculations of human meaning, Bataille sought
to reach the "underside" of language and human experience, to uncover the "nakedness" of irreducible anguish that philosophy and political theory had sought to
conceal, and to "annul the effects of totalizing discourse," both in the philosophical and in the political realms.56 For better or worse (for better and worse),
Bataille's writing not only reveals but is the heart of his politics. The impossible practice of this writing puts on display the forces that made Bataille momentarily
sensitive to fascism's seductions, but that also propelled him irresistibly away from the fascist orbit: his "monstrosities in the end rebellious toward all political
camps."57 It was this spiritual and political monstrosity irreducible heterogeneity, death-obsessed sacredness, ironic "sainthood"that Bataille hoped to make
by being it. The content of Bataille's message was himself: himself as mystic, as one who speaks of death
contagious. Not by analyzing it, but

from within death. In his mystical texts Bataille produces himself as one who lives and writes a hauteur de mort. He demonstrates the confrontation with
death in a context that is precisely not that of the battlefield, in order to show that death's impossible and necessary truth belongs not to the soldiers plunged in the
"vain noise of combat," but to the " 'men of religious death' or sacrifice" who raise up death's "bloody but wholly resplendent image" in the midst of a "sacred
silence" (BOC II, 238). This is the point Bataille considers it urgent to drive home: that in war or peace human life only begins to deploy its richness when death is
internalized and when life can be affirmed and loved in and through death. Bataille as the mystic o "la joie supplidante" embodies this affirmation. Bataille does not
merely articulate the claim, he is the claim that a life
lived in the mad intensity of the hauteur de mort is the only life
worth having. One can only "have" such a life when one sacrifices it. And one can only sacrifice it if one loses life
consciously: through what Bataille variously terms "dramatization," "comedy," "mimetism." By writing his own mystical dissolution, Bataille shows how it is possible
to "watch [one]self ceasing to be" (HDS, 19). He models the process through which, like the Tibetan monk in the burial ground, one can be penetrated by the secrets
of death, while "the body thus treated remains intact" (BOC VII, 2.59). What arises in the experience of Bataille's writing is not an irremediable mise-a-mort, but
instead a better way of encountering death's power reality and obviousness which are obscene. It is the truth we should laugh at. You can imagine a culture where
everyone laughs spontaneously when someone says: `This is true', `This is real'. All this defines the irresolvable relationship between thought and reality. A certain
form of thought is bound to the real. It starts out from the hypothesis that ideas have referents and that there is a possible ideation of reality. A comforting polarity,
which is that of tailor-made dialectical and philosophical solutions. The other form of thought is eccentric to the real, a stranger to dialectics,
a stranger even to critical thought. It is not even a disavowal of the concept of reality. It is illusion, power of illusion, or, in other words, a playing with reality,

as seduction is a playing with desire, as metaphor is a playing with truth. This radical thought does not stem from a philosophical doubt, a
utopian transference, or an ideal transcendence. It is the material illusion, immanent in this so-called `real' world. And thus it seems to come from elsewhere. It
seems to be the extrapolation of this world into another world. At all events, there is incompatibility between thought and the real. There is no sort of necessary or
natural transition from the one to the other. Neither
alternation, nor alternative: only otherness and distance keep
them charged up. This is what ensures the singularity of thought, the singularity by which constitutes an event, just like the singularity of the world, the
singularity by which it too constitutes an event.
2NC Top Shelf
 2NC Overview
The framing argument for this debate is that we are all always dying. The distinctive
binary between the living and the dead obfuscates the fact that we are all rushing
towards our own death all their arguments about preventable death and the ability
for the aff to solve should solidify the link debate. The very assumption that we are
somehow more dead after the bomb goes off ignores that the politics of security
deprives life of any real value long before the radiation hits several impacts

( ) Otherization: the exclusion of the dead is the foundational antagonism of

modernity. The dead were the original other that which is simultaneously inside and
outside the western paradigm and thus must be annihilated in order to preserve the
coherence of the hegemonic western subject.

( ) Lashout: the mortification of the body renders life an exercise in futility whereby
we avoid experiences and fear alterity in order to preserve the faade of our own
longevity. That makes everything different a threat and turns case causes things like
military interventions abroad.

( ) The privileging of life annihilates value: McGowan says that privileging life ignores
that value comes from the precarious nature of our existence, and that life is
something that can only maintain value amongst the awareness we have of death.

The desire to exclude the dead produces the conditions for every impact the
alternative is a prior question.
Mark Lacy 14, Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster
University, Security, Technology, and Global Politics, 8-10
For Virilio, attempts to contain the insecurity of geopolitics through improved global governance, 'free markets' and the liberal peace might
transform security and war around the world, creating a world of perpetual peace and prosperity. The global economy - coupled with the
acceleration of technology - might generate harmonious and creative societies where the unpleasant jobs have been replaced by machines and
where there is a growing consensus that we need to accelerate and intensify distributive justice around the planet. Technology will not only
improve our health and security - it will foster a Virilio isn't so sure about the optimistic liberal view of history. For Virilio, we
are
surrounded by the 'propaganda of an endless progress', the promise of a world where technology and
capitalism will overcome the problems and suffering that have blighted the human condition; the 'propaganda of progress' is
the vision of the future one often finds in corporate depictions of the future that illustrate how new products will transform life, creating an
existence where a multitude of technologies are effortlessly integrated into everyday life to create more rewarding and efficient work and
relationships.27 Virilio is less certain that technology and capitalism will improve the human condition, asking us to pay attention to what lies
underneath this propaganda of progress in the world around us - in the stress, suffering, paranoia, control, exhaustion and inequality that he
thinks might intensify in coming decades. Progress
(and the peace game), on this view, is a progress in the arts and
technologies of control designed to manage the growing numbers of the 'living dead' that are excluded from
the 'legitimate' economy, to control those that seek to exploit vulnerabilities in 'network' society. As we see later, for Virilio the peace game is
the war game turned inward, toward what he calls the endo-colonization of society, the attempt to control the constantly mutating terrains of
security in the post-Cold War world. The other side ofthe 'propaganda of an endless progress' is the 'administration of fear': Virilio suggests
that we need to pay attention to the way fear (usually fear of otherness and difference) is used to distort debate over
the problems we confront (so, for example, when fear of immigrants is presented as the cause of our economic woes and societal
implosion - and the route to further disorder). For Virilio, we need to negotiate our way through both the propaganda
of progress and the administration of fear, to pay attention to the way we can be captured by these
'easy' modes of responding to the world around us, to be constantly aware of these two very different traps. 9 Our world might be
heading toward the realization of the liberal dream of progress but Virilio looks around and sees a world of accelerating ecological, economic
and social degradation; politics becomes an increasingly narrow attempt to manage the insecurity and messiness in societies intent on realizing
security that promises to control the
the dream of a fast and efficient consumer lifestyle. On this view, the politics of
messiness has a tendency to get out of control, nourishing the 'war-machine' and the 'military
scientific complex', producing misguided security projects that generate chaos in the realization of
policies that are often driven by fear, technological optimism about what technology and war can
achieve, and a sense of cultural and racial superiority. 28 We might believe that we will learn from our mistakes (such as
the wars that have dominated the first decade of the twenty-first century after 9111) but that is to become caught up with the 'propaganda of
endless progress'.
There is an excess to security that results in 'unnecessary wars' that become
experimental zones for new technologies - and there is desire to control all aspects of life in increasingly intensive
and extensive ways that risks to undermine civil liberties, tipping the balance of liberty and security toward the endo-colonization of society; an
excessive focus on the problems of 'otherness' to the exclusion of the insecurity that comes from inside, from our financial systems or modes of
elites get caught up in the seductive possibilities offered by new technologies, the
consumption. Military and political
god-like ability to control the world. Virilio comments that: the nature of absolute speed is also to be absolute power, absolute
and instantaneous control, in other words an almost divine power. Today, we have achieved the three attributes of the divine: ubiquity,
instantaneity, immediacy; omnivoyance and omnipotence. 29 We can see an example of this excess of security and the desire to obtain these
attributes of the divine in the discovery in June 2013 that the National Security Agency obtained direct access to the digital infrastructures of
Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies, allowing the PRISM program to access the emails, file transfers, search histories and live chats
of all citizens, the metadata of the world. While this desire to become an omnipotent machine of surveillance might confront ethical and limits -
or might confront the limits of what is possible, the excess of information - the intention is clearly to know everything. 30 Or we can see this
desire to control the world from a distance in the development of drone technology: machines of vision and death that make possible control-
at-a distance. In his preface to The Administration of Fear, Betrand Richard notes that 'this son of an Italian communist and a catholic from
our
Brittany traces the rules of the game in which we are caught. And that we must escape' .31 We are trapped in a perverse situation where
societies are obsessed with security - but are governed with a security politics and economic policy
that appears to be making the societies we live in more fragile (and thus requiring more 'security' and
'protection sciences'). The question that Virilio leaves us with is - after we negotiate through the propaganda of progress and the administration
of fear - how do we escape the dangers of our accelerating reality, the darker possibilities made possible by the modem world? There is a sense
in Virilio's work that past attempts to re-design how we live were not up to the task, producing new 'traps', new types of control. 10 So the
optimistic 'liberal' student of international politics won't find much to agree with in Virilio's vision of politics and security. For the liberal
optimist, the modem age has made it possible for our 'rationality' to overcome the irrational and dangerous aspects of the human condition;
while there is much more to 'overcome' we are heading in the right direction and progress in this overcoming will be aided by new 'tools' and
technologies; human existence is more civilized and secure than at any point in our history.32 The liberal will reply that information
technologies are creating the foundation for a global public sphere that generates a 'transparent society' that makes it harder for states to hide
what they do; Virilio replies that information technologies create new types of control and incarceration. Freedom and progress in this
world order are illusions that mask the stress, control and inequality created by the system. The liberal will suggest
that the continued growth in a interconnected global economy - where crisis is simply a glitch on the way to a world of progress for everybody
around the planet - is a sign of the liberal capitalist world's resilience, its superiority to other ways of organizing human life.33 Virilio would
reply that we should be careful not to mistake this resilience as proof of the universal or 'timeless' vitality or appeal of a capitalist (and not
necessarily liberal) world order. The liberal sees global mobility as a symbol of the emerging cosmopolitan world order that overcomes the
limits of locality and nationalism. Virilio sees global mobility in terms of forced migration, of border camps, of
climate refugees, of habitats that can no longer support human life. Writing about Michel Foucault's studies of
prisons and asylums Virilio comments: 'I think that the real imprisonment is just ahead. '34 For Virilio, the problems on the
horizon will expose the fragility of the ways of organizing life that were enjoyed in the West through the second half of the
twentieth century: rapid technological, ecological and geopolitical transformation will force us to confront a reality where it becomes difficult to
hold on to the values and ideas that shaped political imaginations in the West during much of the previous century. cosmopolitan society built on the
information technologies that expand the possibilities for dialogue. The war game will become the peace game that aids the improvement of the human condition.
 2NC Alternative
You should vote negative to refuse the affirmatives call to live safely. We chose to
render debate a sacrificial community where, instead of maintain the fascist telos of
life-bringing and security, we have a philosophical interrogation with our mortality.
Everyone is going to die it is just a matter of what our relationship to that death is.

The Fiat Double Bind should frame your ballot either their impacts are true, and they
will happen before 2 highschoolers will make it to Congress, or they are doomsayers
and you vote negative on presumption. Any defense they make to this argument is
defense to the aff and a reason to prefer the alternative.

Irwin says the discursive performance of voting negative is uniquely important the
necropolitical dominion over life is maintained by a worst-case-scenario model that
demands action at even the smallest threat of extinction. Only refusing to be bullied
by the false choice between life and death and realizing that, as an academic, your
only decision is between living with or without meaning, can destroy the pedagogical
vice-grip of mortifying politics.
 2NC Link Wall
The assertion that one can draw a line in the sand between the living and the dead is a
link. Western rationalist science is a tautological construction founded on the faade
of absolute truth and fails to recognize the importance of spiritual relationships with
our own mortality in structuring our subjectivity. We are all dying all the time, and the
assertion that there is some brink that must be avoided based on the arbitrary
distinction of meiosis only serves to produce an epistemological vacuum that
privileges security and survivalism above everything else.

You should rush towards death McGowan says the system of values that privileges
life forces subjects to negatively orient themselves against the inevitable and casts a
dark shadow on our capacity to produce value in the world. That means voting
negative is vital because it destroys those delusions and hollows out the regimes of
value their mortifying politics sustain.
 AT Choice
This argument is still the stupidest one in debate your ballot does not decide
whether or not the whole planet goes extinct. This is a debate about our individual
orientations towards our own mortality. If we have proven the discursive strategy of
the 1ac is violent that should be reason enough to vote negative to reconsider what
it means for you as a decider to validate their mortifying scholarship.

The very idea of a choice is the link: it presumes that we are not all already dying and
will go extinct regardless. It is just a matter of how we theorize it and our relationship
to that death which is something their actomaniacal politics preclude.

Leveraging the lives of people whose fate has nothing to do with the debate is a form
of sentimental exploitation that transforms debate into a nest for neoconservative
vampires.
Baudrillard 94, Jean, wicked sick dude. The Illusion of the End 1994 p.92-3
All the media live off the presumption of catastrophe and of the succulent imminence of death. A photo in Liberation, for example, shows us a convoy of refugees
Anticipation of effects, morbid simulation, emotional
'which, some time after this shot was taken, was to be attacked by the Iraqi army'.

blackmail. It was the same on CNN with the arrival of the Scuds. Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the
virtual, that hysteria of the virtual - not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad faith, as
real to be consumed as unreal. In the past, to show something up as a fake, we said: 'It's just play-acting', 'It's all romance!', 'It's put on for the
cameras!'. This time, with Romania and the Gulf War, we were able to say, 'It's just TV!' Photographic or cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and
that of projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, are images without a negative, and hence without negativity and without
reference. They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to all reference to the real or to events. At a stroke, the contagion of
images, engendering themselves without reference to a real or an imaginary, itself becomes virtually without limits, and this limitless engendering produces
information as catastrophe. Is an image which refers only to itself still an image? However this may be, that image raises the problem of its indifference to the
television becomes the strategic space of the event, it sets itself
world, and thus of our indifference to it - which is a political problem. When

up as a deadly self-reference, it becomes a bachelor machine. The real object is wiped out by news not merely
alienated, but abolished. All that remains of it are traces on a monitoring screen.
 AT Preventable Death
We are all dying all the time and every death is a necessary part of the universe
there is no such thing as a preventable or avoidable death. Dying now or later doesnt
matter, especially in a world where security makes life a game of time instead of
pleasure.

This should calcify the link debate: it proves they believe death is an event instead of a
process, which is what allows for us to banish the dead from society and orient
ourselves away from our own mortality.
 AT Solves Extinction
We will turn that argument the fear of the inevitable creates violent investments in
political oligarchs and fear-mongers as we banish out own agency in the name of
personal security. That produces necropolitical structures founded on fear and turns
case things like the Argentinian genocide prove the inevitability of annihilation in a
politics defined by fear.

There is an external impact: Lacy says those regimes have been coopted by neoliberal
elites to systematically annihilate racial minorities and renders the environment
standing reserve in order to facilitate economic expansion and create a regime of
absolute domination over alterity. That makes extinction inevitable.

Independently the survival at all costs mentality causes endless violence

Santos 3 Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra (Boaventura de Sousa, Collective Suicide?,
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2003/63/santos.html, dml)

According to Franz Hinkelammert, the

West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save
humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the
possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of
indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many
other colonial wars. This is how it was under Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the Holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in
neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the
war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all
appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the Western illusion:
destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion
manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality, and that the problems and difficulties
confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to ultimate consequences . If there is unemployment, hunger and death
in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of market laws not having been fully
applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due,
rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential
terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of
alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to reproduce infinitely the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred
years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable
efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods
involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the
state and international institutions in their favor. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current
manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war
machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective
suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more
likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian
fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being
exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last,
catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260
thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars,
enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically,
sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms
of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It
is as though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation, legitimizing
the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In today's version, the period of primitive
accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a
machine of horror and destruction.
 AT Biological Death First
Your claim that life comes before joy relegates subjects to bare life and creates a self-
fulfilling prophecy where biopolitical agents genocidally murder certain groups under
the guise of political utopianism.
Copjec 2 (Joan Copjec, Imagine Theres No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, MIT Press, 2002,
p. 25-29)
Benjamin isolates this conception
To which conception do we refer and why is it problematic? At the end of his essay, Critique of Violence, Walter

when he mentions with disdain the

familiar proposition that higher even than the happiness and justice of
existence stands existence itself. Judging this belief in the sacredness of life itself, that is, in the
sacredness of bodily life vulnerable to injury by [our] fellow men, to be false and ignominious, he
speculates that it is probably of recent origin, the last mistaken attempt of the weakened Western tradition to seek the saint it has lost in cosmological
impenetrability.19 In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben follows up on Benjamins suggestion by tracking the emergence of this
dogma, wherein bare life, or life itself denuded of any political form or protective covering, is deemed
sacred. Whereas in classical Greece, bios (a form of life, or way of living, defined within the political sphere) could be, and systematically was, distinguished
from zoe (the simple fact of life, common to animals, men, and gods), in modern society, he argues, bios and zoe became conflated, making bare, biological life the
very matter of modern politics. Agamben thus adopts Foucaults thesis that in the middle of the nineteenth centuryor, at the threshold of
biological modernitynatural life became the primary concern of the State and, as a result, politics
was transformed into biopolitics. With the development of the life sciences, the old territorial State (in which power asserted itself through
the possession and control of geo- graphical territory) gave way to the State of population (in which power reigns less over land than over life

itself): the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a societys political strategies.20 It is against this backdrop

that Feuerbachs notion of the biologically based happiness drive must be understood; it is in this context that its political profile
assumes its ominous shape. If modern political power becomes coextensive or conflated with, as was said a moment ago, the life over which it
assumes sovereignty, it does so paradoxically by declaring bare life to be separable from forms of life, that is, from the political sphere wherein the living individual
is accorded certain rights and powers. That is to say, it
is only by declaring a (permanent) state of emergency, triggered by
the emergency bare life poses, that modern power is able to suspend its self-limiting laws and assume
absolute power over that same denuded (or, now, politically vulnerable) life. But if bare life in this way becomes barely distinguishable from the political
power that invents it as simultaneously excluded from its sphere and as the very territory over which it reigns, Homo Sacer remains more interested in exploring the
strategies of power than the notion of bare life they construct. The books references to Foucault are therefore limited to The History of Sexuality and Dits et crits,
where the focus is primarily on these strategies, rather than on the emergence of the biological definition of human life or, as Foucault puts it, the conceptual
bestialization of man. When Agamben faults Foucault, then, for failing to demonstrate how political techniques and technologies of the self (by which processes
of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power)21 converge to produce
that form of involuntary servitude which characterizes the modern subject, we recognize a need to know more about the biological definition of life if we are ever
going to be able to explain how modern power
is able to sink its roots so thoroughlyso inexhaustiblyinto bare
life. What is it about this definition of life that allows power to assume such an extensive, even
capillary hold over it? Though not a response to this question, The Birth of the Clinic, particularly the chapter Open Up a Few Corpses, in which
Foucault fittingly characterizes biological modernism as a mortalism, might begin to provide an answer. Placing the French physiologist Bichat in the conceptual
vanguard of this modernism, Foucault describes the formers innovation thus: [I]n trying to circumscribe the special character of the living phenomenon Bichat
linked to its specificity the risk of . . . deathof the death which life, by definition, resists. Bichat relativized the concept of death, bringing it down from the absolute
in which it appeared as an indivisible, decisive, irrecoverable event: he volatilized it, distributed it throughout life in the form of separate, partial, progressive
deaths, deaths that are so slow in occurring that they extend even beyond death itself.22 The
medical gaze of which Foucault speaks throughout The
Birth of the Clinic, the gaze, in Agambens terms, of
sovereign power, is an eye that sees death everywhere immanent in
life, sees everywhere this threat to life, and finds in this very ubiquity the excuse for its own insidious
and equally ubiquitous control. To the exact extent that life becomes defined by death, is permeated by death, it becomes permeated by
power. To return to Benjamins formulation, from the nineteenth century on, bodily life is defined essentially as that which is vulnerable to injury, by processes
of disease as well as by our fellow men. To measure the novelty of this notion, Benjamin asks his readers to reflect on the fact that this essential vulnerability, which
we now choose to label sacred, bore in antiquity the mark of guilt, that is, it was a sign of abjection.23 Human life has always been known to be vulnerable to
disease and death, of course, but only in the nineteenth century did this vulnerability become sacralized, by the discourses of power, as its essential aspect.
Agamben, however, departs from Foucault and Benjamin by seeing this notion of bare life not simply as a rupture with previous thought but as the culmination of a
gradual solidification, throughout history, of the link between nude or bare life and sovereign power. Thus, when he declares, for example, that Not simple natural
life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element, it is in the midst of a discussion of Roman law, which is in this sense not so
different from that of the modern legal-juridical order.24 Politicizing Death, the penultimate chapter of Homo Sacer, opens with a reference to a 1959 study of
what two French neurophysiologists termed coma depass (overcoma), a degree of coma, or of deaths incursion into life, involving a much greater loss of vital
functioning than that which had previously been allowed to pass for life. The argument of the chapter is that advances in life-support technology have led medical
science to redefine death by pushing its limits beyond those set by earlier standards. And as
the limits of death are extended, so too are
the reaches of sovereign power, which now begins to decide on the fate of a new class of citizens, the
neomorts, or faux vivants, that is, the new living dead, over which power assumes a unique sort of control. What
Agamben asks us to bear witness to is the fact that this recent extension of life beyond the cessation of its vital functions and the consequent increase of State
power were enabled by the emergence of the life sciences in the nineteenth century wherein death was conceived not as an absolute and unique event, but as a
multiple phenomenon, immanent in life, dispersed through time, and extending beyond death itself. Yet one of the most original aspects of Agambens argument,
as hinted, is the linkage of the historical account with a metaphysical one. It is, in the end, a certain metaphysical tradition that Agamben wishes to indict for the
high crimes of biopolitics (in his narrative, the Nazi concentration camp comes to replace the city as the paradigmatic
sociopolitical unit of this politics) because, he argues: by the way in which it isolates its proper elementbare lifebiopolitics reveals its fundamental
collusion with the metaphysical tradition. That is to say, he views the positing of bare life as strictly equivalent to the positing of pure Being insofar as both issue as
responses to the encounter with an unthinkable limit beyond which these elements are then supposed to dwell, indeterminate and impenetrable.25 According
to this analysis, a logic
of exception has been in place ab urbe condita, positing a limit and a beyond to the order of
political life; this logic eventually provided support for the notion and construction of the camps. Thus, while
divisions may have flickered momentarily in the classical City, Antigone may once have rebelled against Creon, these divisions and that rebellion were always placed
at risk by the logic of exception that nourished sovereign power. And now, we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoe and bios, between
private life and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and mans political existence in the city.26 Moreover, the current
models, by which the social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture . . . are trying to conceive and organize the public space of the worlds cities
without any clear awareness that at their very center lies the same bare life . . . that defined the biopolitics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century,
are in danger of simply perpetuating this politics of bare, bodilyor bestiallife.27 In fact, it is almost impossible to imaginenot only for the reader but, one
suspects, for Agamben himself, whose final pronouncements are irredeemably bleaka model that would not risk perpetuating this politics. Ironically, the
persuasiveness of Homo Sacers analysis adds another hurdle to the already difficult task of formulating an alternative. For, by focusing, however productively, on
historical continuities, Agamben is led to downplay the rupture the nineteenth- century life sciences represented, and it is precisely the notion of rupture, of a
thought or act that would be able to break from its immanent conditions, that is needed to restore power to life. The most insidious difficulty confronting us,
however, is the fact that we ourselves remain dupes of the dogma that death is imbedded in life; that is, we remain victims of the theme of bodily finitude, or of
bare life, that these sciences cultivate. Alain Badiou, in an interview in Artforum, makes this important point: The real romantic heritagewhich is still with us
todayis the theme of finitude. The idea that an apprehension of the human condition occurs primordially in the understanding of its finitude maintains infinity at a
distance thats both evanescent and sacred. . . . Thats why I think the only really contemporary requirement for philosophy since Nietzsche is the secularization of
infinity (my emphasis).28 Stated thus and affixed to Benjamin and Foucaults disparaging analyses of the modern sanctification of bestial life, this statement
strikes one as a long overdue correction of certain contemporary commonplaces. Yet its judgment will remain incomprehensible to cultural theorists who continue
to misrecognize bodily finitude as the sobering fact that confounds our Romantic pretensions. For these theoristsfor whom limits are almost always celebrated,
insofar as they are supposed to restrict the expansionism of political modernism and its notions of universalism and will (this is only slightly a caricature)the body
is the limit, par excellence, that which puts an end to any claim to transcendence. What Badiou is here proposing, however, is that our idea of bodily finitude
assumes a point of transcendence. Like Agamben, Badiou argues that death becomes immanentized in the body only on condition that we presuppose a beyond.
 AT Death is Evil
Saying death is evil deprives live of valuedeath is key to value construction and all
meaning. This is a new link
Callicott 89 (J. Baird, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, In
Defense of Land Ethics, 1989)

The "shift of values" which results from our "reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in
terms of things natural, wild, and free" is especially dramatic when we reflect upon the definitions
of good and evil espoused by Bentham and Mill and uncritically accepted by their contemporary followers. Pain and pleasure seem to
have nothing at all to do with good and evil if our appraisal is taken from the vantage point of
ecological biology. Pain in particular is primarily information. In animals, it informs the central nervous system of
stress, irritation, or trauma in outlying regions of the organism. A certain level of pain under optimal organic circumstances is indeed desirable as an indicator
of exertion--of the degree of exertion needed to maintain fitness, to stay in shape, and of a level of exertion beyond which it would be dangerous to go. An
arctic wolf in pursuit of a caribou may experience pain in her feet or chest because of the rigors of the chase. There is nothing bad or wrong in that. Or,
consider a case of injury. Suppose that a person in the course of a wilderness excursion sprains an ankle. Pain informs him or her of the injury and by its
intensity the amount-of further stress the ankle may endure in the course of getting to safety. Would it be better if pain were not experienced upon injury or,
taking advantage of recent technology, anaesthetized? Pleasure appears to be, for the most part (unfortunately it is not always so) a reward accompanying
those activities which contribute to organic maintenance, such as the pleasures associated with eating, drinking, grooming, and so on, or those which
contribute to social solidarity like the pleasures of dancing, conversation, teasing, and so forth, or those which contribute to the continuation of the species,
such as the pleasures of sexual activity and of being parents. The
doctrine that life is the happier the freer it is from pain
and that the happiest life conceivable is one in which there is continuous pleasure uninterrupted
by pain is biologically preposterous. A living mammal which experienced no pain would be one
which had a lethal dysfunction of the nervous system. The idea that pain is evil and ought to be
minimized or eliminated is as primitive a notion as that of a tyrant who puts to death messengers
bearing bad news on the supposition that thus his well-being and security is improved. More seriously still,
the value commitments of the humane movement seem at bottom to betray a world-denying or rather a life-loathing philosophy. The natural world as actually
constituted is one in which one being lives at the expense of others,as Each organism, in Darwin's metaphor, struggles to maintain it own organic integrity. The
more complex animals seem to experience (judging from our own case, and reasoning from analogy) appropriate and adaptive psychological accompaniments
to organic existence. There is a palpable passion for self-preservation. There are desire, pleasure in the satisfaction of desires, acute agony attending injury,
frustration, and chronic dread of death. But these experiences are the psychological substance of living. To
live is to be anxious about life,
to feel pain and pleasure in a fitting mixture, and sooner or later to die. That is the way the system
works. If nature as a whole is good, then pain and death are also good. Environmental ethics in general require
people to play fair in the natural system. The neo-Benthamites have in a sense taken the uncourageous approach. People have attempted to exempt
themselves from the life/de~ath reciprocities of natural processes and from ecological limitations in the name of a prophylactic ethic of maximizing rewards
(l~leasure) and minimizing unwelcome information (pain). To be fair, the humane moralists seem to suggest that we should attempt to project the same values
into the nonhuman animal world and to widen the charmed circle--no matter that it would be biologically unrealistic to do so or biologically ruinous if, per
impossible, such an environmental ethic were implemented.

Independently death is inevitable and your interpretation binds folks to suffering by

making their end inevitably an evil one. That creates a hatred of existence that
renders life unlivable. Thats McGowan.
 AT Fear is Biological
Your authors are hacks Fear is overstated and underutilized in decision making
Proulx 03 (Travis, University of British Colombia, ABSURDITY AS THE SOURCE OF EXISTENTIAL
ANXIETY A CRITIQUE OF TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY, p.5)

But he remains highly sceptical of The rather bold claim that terror management is the source of all
motives. As noted, their arguments on this score are interesting, sometimes ingenious, but open to dispute and therefore not very
convincing. (p50) In a similar critique, psychological theorist Roy Baumeister (1997) takes issue with TMT's claim that all
other motives derive from self-preservation, which they call the 'master motive'. We can readily agree that some
behaviour is oriented toward staying alive. But all? There is a large gap between the empirical findings
reported by Pyszczynski et al. and their theoretical claims. Their studies, of which we are both admirers, have
shown in many ways that reminding people of death can alter their behaviour. But these findings fall
far short of justifying the sweeping assertion that all motivation is derived from the fear of death, (p. 37)
In yet another TMT critique, social psychologist Melvin Lerner (1997) finds that The research that Pyszczynski, Solomon
and Greenberg have done, stimulated by their 'Terror Management Theory' (TMT), is unquestionably very impressive. However, the
scope of their integrating theoretical speculations is so encompassing as to be difficult for me, and possibly for others, to
accept, (p. 29) These sentiments are also echoed in social psychologist Brett Pelham's (1997) article "Human Motivation has Multiple Roots"
Pyszczynski, Solomon and Greenberg propose an integrative model of human motivation. Their thesis is that the primary human motives
explored in previous research are all rooted in the more fundamental motive to minimize the existential terror that is brought about by the
realization that one will someday die. Although I applaud both the empirical research on terror management, and the
author's
theoretical goal of providing an integrative theory for understanding human motivation, my
interpretation of the existing research on terror management is that a convincing case has not been
made for the author's position. It seems unlikely that the management of existential terror is the
quintessential human motive, (p. 44) There are two general strategies for attacking TMT's reductionist claims. The first is to point
out that until TMT can truly put its money where its mouth is, that is to say, actually examine the effect of 'mortality salience' on all human
behaviour with regard to all meaning systems and all facets of culture, their
reductionist claims shouldn't be made to
begin with. As Lerner suggests, A convincing demonstration that the management of terror is at the top of
the hierarchy of human motives would involve a demonstration that mortality salience manipulations
have a more dramatic effect on all kinds of defensive reactions than do any other meaningful kinds of
threat. This, of course, is a very tall order, (p.32)
 AT Permutation
If we win a thesis-level link argument about the nature of our relationship to death
the permutation is impossible because it presumes both epistemologies can coexist.
There either is a life-death binary or there isnt and you cant have it both ways.

Additionally the permutation is severance. That makes the 2ac a moving target and
skews the negative, which is a voter for fairness and education.

We have several disadvantages to the permutation:

( ) Ecologies of fear: the permutation only furthers the anxiety of the 1ac and
precludes an authentic confrontation with dying.
Mark Lacy 14, Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster
University, Security, Technology, and Global Politics, 43
What I think Virilio is pointing to here is this: global media technologies can 'hook' people into a democracy of emotion - that could involve sadness, love and hate -
that can be very difficult to resist and easy to manipulate. Just as people across the planet can consume the same products at the same time so people are
consumed by the same emotions or affects, emotions that 'capture' us. Nigel Thrift suggests that Virilio presents a rather narrow view of emotion and politics,
developing a view that plays down the ways in which emotions can playa 'vital part of political citizenship and communication', noting that emotion 'cannot be
caricatured as likely to diminish a full consideration of an intended action or as likely to provoke action without thought'.43 What I think Virilio is suggesting is that
while emotion can be used to expand our political and social imaginations there is a danger that
contemporary society is dominated by environments (or media ecologies) of fear and panic that reduce
politics to simplistic desires for protection and security (something that the Right have been
particularly effective at manipulating in the United States44). And the environment of panic and anxiety
'captures' us even where we can be aware that we are caught up in the 'administration of fear': the
ubiquity of the vectors means that it can be difficult to escape the synchronization of affects.

( ) Affective Communities: Irwin indicates the process of refusing the Faustian bargain
of exchanging our autonomy for a mastery over death is something done
performatively and discursively among communities of people in spaces like debate.
The perm doesnt access that.

( ) Deviancy: the any-means-necessary preservation of the 1ac renders the planet a

deadened object to be demolished by paranoid neoconservatives.
Marijn Hoijtink 14, PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of
Amsterdam, RISK, COMMERCE, AUTHORITY: TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF THE POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY,
www.krisis.eu/content/2014-2/krisis-2014-2-06-Hoijtink.pdf
The question of how to relocate the politics of these fully automated systems and technoscientific solutions becomes again relevant in chapter 6. Amoore is right
to mark the difficulties of interrupting the contemporary politics of possibility. She asks, confronted
by a technoscientific security
politics that acts on the very basis of future possibilities, indifferent to whether they come to pass,
how does one begin to map the conditions of possibility of such politics, or to show how things
might be otherwise? Is the possibility of critique effaced by a political program that precisely takes
possibility as its object? (155). We could add: where do we locate politics when the responsibility to secure is dispersed across software engineers,
risk- management consultants, or the algorithm itself? How can we question the collection of data if what counts is not the accuracy of the number, but the
associations that can be drawn across data? And how can we critique contemporary security practices when they rewrite the benchmarks of cost- effectiveness and
data protection? Indeed, such questions are particularly important in relation to a security politics that itself incorporates
and capitalizes
uncertainty and failure. As Linsey McGoey (2012: 8) points out, in todays security context, risk assessment can never
really go wrong: if a predicted threat fails to manifest itself, this only nurtures the idea that the next
crisis is near and that we need to become prepared. Similarly, when the expectations surrounding new
security technologies and systems prove uncertain this only generates further investment, for more hope
and hype are needed to remedy thwarted expectations.
 AT Util
Utilitarianism means happiness for the most people. McGowan indicates that the
aversion to death makes the production of value structurally impossible and precludes
any meaningful relationship with living. That ensures the alternative is a prior
question.

This is a debate about personal orientations we wont all become policy makers
deciding the outcome of nuclear conflicts but every one of us will die. You should
prioritize these philosophical questions because they determine every facet of how
we live our everyday lives and theirs are contingent on the scenario of our elevation
to the status of political elites.
2NC Tricks
 Linearity K
The will to order within the norms of rationality produces academic hegemony and
relegates bodies to bare life.
Leonard and Willis 8 (Timothy, Prof Emeritus at College of Education at Saint Xavier, and Peter, Senior Lecturer in Adult Learning and
Education at U of South Australia, Pedagogies of the Imagination, p 265, www.springerlink.com/content/t1603l22316633q8/)

The insight that the human mind is a function of imagination is the unifying thread of the mythopoetic project in curriculum
and pedagogy. It is clearly the underlying commitment of the authors in this collection, whose work is filled with an uncommon
hope in a time dominated by forces that would kill imagination in favor of linear, controllable
rationality. Of course imagination and the stories that it generates is never killed as such, but it can be repressed and heavily disguised.
Current western militarist culture has sought to control human imagination through the ''spin making"
of image industries under control of state and large corporations and the unfettered appropriation of the power of
the imagination in advertising. Curriculum in cultural studies that attempts to unmask the iron fist in the velvet glove of such advertising and
media ''spin" has been a valuable contribution to a socially aware curriculum. It does the learners a service in evoking critical attention and
skepticism towards the truth claims of consumerist culture but of course the critical approach tends to be focused on the important but not
exclusive arena of logical rationality. Logical
rationality, this book has argued, needs to be complemented and enriched
by the creative dimensions of human imagining with its links to the heart as well as the head and this
has become more and more necessary. A commonly held contemporary stance that curriculum must
be a process contained within mathematically measurable parameters is not neutral. It is hegemonic.
It is a corollary of the view that all persons are commodities, that all human interactions are markets,
and that all conflicts are wars. It has two major toxic elements. Through its passion for control, this linear/rational
orientation towards education has the potential to crush the imagination of its teachers and produce
a culture that is literally mindless. Fundamentalist upheavals in the world's religions are the most newsworthy reactions to this
imperialist rationalism and, having gathered momentum for almost a century, these movements have become a credible threat in their own
right to the future of imagination, mind, and reason itself. Paradoxically, then, an unbalanced and narrow rationality has spawned two dark
enemies of reason: firstly, its own insistence that all knowledge is derived from science and technology, and secondly, the fundamentalist
response that all knowledge is contained in the literal interpretation of divinely revealed texts.
 Predictions K
You should be wary of their impact claims the desire to produce and predict the
future creates an ontological security apparatus that makes their impacts inevitable
Aitken 11 [Rob Aitken, University of Alberta, Canada, Financializing security: Political prediction
markets and the commodification of uncertainty, Security Dialogue April 2011 vol. 42 no. 2 123-141]
It is perhaps most baldly articulated by Abramowicz, who, as we noted above, was not too bothered about the superiority of information markets' predictions, so
those who would seek to exercise freedom, either in their own name
long, it transpires, as they could still help discipline

or that of others, since the predictions of wellfunctioning information markets are objective (2003,
Executive Summary). The objective here has a curious relation to the real, a revealing problematic which perhaps indicates much of what is fundamentally at stake
here. For the objective is not so much the actually existing, rather it is that which can be ascertained without objection. Consider as particular exemplification of this
point the following. Abramowizc, in suggesting ever more arcane ways to ensure that only fundamental traders hold sway in the final analysis of a market's
arbitration, posits the possibility of a two stage information market. In the first players effectively bet on the outcome of a second, with the second open only
briefly, after the close of the first, with only the payouts of the second dependent upon the verification (or not) of some future event. For Abramowizc one virtue of
such a device is that there will no longer be risk associated with real world randomness(note 156)! It is thus not
reality itself and the randomness it entails that concerns those that seek solace in prediction
markets but rather certainty and reduction; a reality perhaps, but like the freedom we encountered above, only that reality which has
been suitably reformulated. Made single, indisputable, and dead; not manifold, contestable and lived. Such a singular representation of

reality can only be a simulation, in the most pejorative of senses, that which will always be by
passed, confounded and exceeded by practical experience (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 155). For there is always
irruption of that minimum of reversibility which exists in every irreversible process (Baudrillard, 1990, p.
161), requiring our endless human intervention to secure it, to keep its mask in place and to maintain
the illusion that it is outside of us and that we are not required for its maintenance. Indeed, one could go further. Our endless defence, our
securing of our simulated worlds, against the ceaseless encroachment of the entropy from which they are formed is, according to Baudrillard, that which gives them
ordered production and
their purchase upon us. They are only made interesting by this interminable maintenance requirement. The attractiveness of

prediction (see also, Cooper, 2005) is thus ironically provided by its potential to fall back into disorder, which
secretly ruins and dismantles it while simultaneously ensuring that a minimal continuity of pleasure traverses it, without which it would be nothing (Baudrillard,
1990, p. 161). And for Baudrillard this means that the seduction through which all our attempts to stabilize the real world are undone does n't belong to the order
of the real but rather surrounds it, providing the background against which our small victories over chaos are able to shine, just as derivatives markets surround
those in their underlying assets. [S]eduction envelops the whole real process of power, as well as the whole real order of production, with endless reversibility and
disaccumulation without which neither power nor production [nor indeed prediction] would exist (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 159, original emphases). This continual
disintegration of order and manufactured form is the very ground that production, prediction and power require for their perpetuation. It is what makes these
latter processes seductive. The lack of real prediction associated with PAM and similar systems is made abundantly clear by
Mason Richey (2005). Here PAM is indicted not for the reasons we have encountered above in the media furore surrounding its announcement but rather on more
philosophical terms, entirely consonant with the line of argument we have been developing. Richey follows the logic of PAM to its selfdefeating terminal
conclusion. Traders purchase a contract on PAM if they think its underlying event is more likely than its current price would suggest. En masse such trading will raise
the price of that contract. But PAM is an information and prediction market. Its raison d'tre is to provide a signal to those who are interested in the occurrence, or
rather the prevention, of the events that underlie traded contracts. Thus a
rise in prices is likely to instigate a response from
those for whom the market was created as signalling mechanism. In turn this thus reduces the
likelihood of the occurrence of the event. I bet, you see I bet, you act, I lose. Or as Richey (2005, p. 10) puts it: The idea that government
authorities employ the market to foresee events that they will prevent would, a priori, mute the signal. But this is not the most fundamental of the flaws. It merely
reflects one of a deeper level. And it is precisely why Hanson seems so misguided in his rendering of existing instruments as being in need of supplementation if
they are to deliver prediction of a precise enough nature. For in the act of specification of the possible future, the job that the signalling market of derivatives is
intended to achieve is already done. In the case of PAM, again in Richey's (2005, p. 10) words: [T]he derivatives of maximal predictive interest, the impetus for the
system's design, terrorism derivatives, must be explicitly articulated in order to be offered. But if the market designers can list a specific terrorist event, then they
have already defined, determined, and predicted the very event that the market is designed to identify. If the market designers know which terrorist derivatives to
offer, then they have already done the work of the market. For Richey (2005, p. 10) then: The system does both too little and too
much. This combination of inadequacy and excess is intimately tied to PAM's curious relation to a simulated future of an ordered, predicted, singular real. Our
reading of Dillon (2004, 2006, forthcoming) suggests that such fetishization of fixation is increasingly anathema to key

strands of, themselves increasingly dominant, thinking within the strategic centres of our Western
security apparatus. As he pithily puts it, the contingent has become a new order of the real[17]. This
contingent is the strategic thinking that both we, and any securing agency, actually need to engender
in a world in which human being is increasingly relativised in space and time through technologies of communication and
information (Cooper, 2005, p. 10); a world exemplified by PAM and its derivatives. What we, and they, certainly do not need to engage in is evergreater
emplacement. For in a world ever more clearly revealed by the congenitally failing securing action of such technologies as an inexhaustible informational
remainder which, strangely, appears only to disappear (Cooper, 2005, p. 22), such yearning for the objective, for a singular real in which to find and found
ourselves is futile in the extreme. Indeed, one could go further it
is in the desire for and the violent imposition of a singular
truth that most contemporary conflict is rooted. It is only a manifold real that has sufficient play of space and space of play to prevent
the horrors attendant upon crusades for the truth. So where do we end up? We began by invoking the range of different readings of PAM's demise and worked
through the differences and similarities between them. At the same time we considered the differences and similarities between PAM and other markets. What was
revealed by both of these comparisons was the tension between instrumental representation and the prior simulation upon which it depends, a tension embodied
perhaps most quintessentially by markets themselves. Markets are able to reconcile the reversible imminence of simulation through endless deferral both
between different markets and their derivatives and indeed between the present and the future, so long as the latter always remains deferred and can never
definitively be reached. In doing so they encompass both effectcause and causeeffect. As such they are able to sustain manifold reality so long as the world keeps
turning and money keeps making it go round. But what they cannot do, except in nave and impoverished accounts, such as those of many of the protagonists we
considered, is be simply resolved to one, singular reality that would arbitrate the truth, particularly the truth of a prediction. PAM's attempt to capture effect in
order to enable intervention at the level of cause is forever undone by the ways in which such effect is both overly prefigured and by the ways in which such
prefiguring, when coupled with the informative role the market is intended to perform for interventionists, acts to ensure that its signals are suppressed. Despite
their myriad other disagreements, the extraction of a singular reality from the manifold is what most of our commentators seem desperate to achieve. However the
divergence in their views does not thus reveal some underlying neutral core of truth from which each raps out a different line. Rather, we witness the opposite. A
manifold, polyphonous world that endlessly resists and undoes any singular articulation of its nature or trajectory. Such a world allows each to tell a different story
of its benefits and costs. We thus happily join in celebrating the cessation of PAM's singular call. But we would equally revel in the silencing, or rather the drowning
out via cacophony, of those other monologues that brought about its end.

This alone is a reason to vote negative if we win their scholarship and methodology
is bad, your should vote negative to pass the plan without those research practices.
 Queerness K
Their doomsday rhetoric is a product of their anxiety of a queer world this is rooted
in a heteronormative fear of death that tries to maintain citizenship and immortality
Feit 2005. Extinction Anxieties: Same-Sex Marriage and Modes of CitizenshipFeit, Mario.Theory & Event, Volume 8, Issue 3, 2005. Asst.
Prof.. George Mason University

Why this doomsday rhetoric, which outpaces and exceeds the likely consequences of same-sex marriage? Because same-
sex marriage calls into question the perpetuation of community in the face of mortality. In one case, reproduction of community quite literally is

understood as sexual reproduction of community; homosexuality in this instance is presented as lethal because it is non-reproductive.
Queer opposition to marriage, on the other hand, presents marriage as a lethal force to a community that does not raise its succeeding generations. In this case,
the fear is that an instrument of heteronormativity overwhelms precarious queer processes of
socialization and regeneration. In short, both arguments are concerned with the perpetuation of
community in light of the absence of gay sexual reproduction.4 Why are these anxieties about the preservation of existing modes of
citizenship across time anxieties about mortality? Because citizenship -- world-making of any kind -- is always also about

coping with human finitude, as Zygmunt Bauman points out: Such a life -- life forgetful of death, life lived as
meaningful and worth living, life alive with purposes instead of being crushed and incapacitated by purposelessness -- is a formidable
human achievement. The totality of social organization, the whole of human culture (not certain functionally
5
specialized institutions, nor certain functionally specialized cultural precepts) cooperate to make this achievement possible. Bauman
emphasizes that concern with death and efforts to give meaning to life by transcending death are not to be understood as religious matters, i.e. as falling within the
provenance of certain ethical dispositions or cultural institutions. Many aspects of culture, which apparently bear no relation to existential consolation, are very
6
much concerned with it. Indeed, they become highly effective inasmuch the aspiration to transcend death remains unarticulated. Anything that

appears to challenge the perpetuation of community evokes the fear of death. This is why both straight and gay
opponents react so intensely to same-sex marriage -- they fear the extinction of the form of community that provides

them with existential consolation. For straight opponents, George Weinberg's explanation is salient: "The notion that there are homosexuals
distresses some people because the thought of persons without children reawakens their fear of
death. Today in the larger population, vicarious immortality through having children and grandchildren assuages the spirit of millions and blunts the edge of
mortality for them. Our great glorification of reproduction, with all the customs and modes that advance it,

serves in part as a ceremony to circumvent death as if by magic."7 My argument elaborates how Weinberg's point applies to
the debate on same-sex marriage, and expands it to include queer critiques of marriage. In the latter case, queer cultural practices and politics -- chiefly, finding
8
alternatives to marriage -- function as the "children" who provide existential consolation, that is, allow for the conclusion: "He died, but his work lives on." My
argument, though based on a comparison, does not attribute equal ethical weight to the two sides. To the contrary, I am indebted to queer theory's critique of
heteronormativity, and consider my argument as a contribution to queer theory. This contribution is two-fold: first, I
hope to flesh out one account of
heteronormativity that is largely neglected, namely heteronormativity's reliance on the fear of death. The association of
homosexuality with death is not exhausted by homophobic discourses on HIV/ AIDS. It precedes the emergence of AIDS. As Paul Morrison notes, "the epidemic has
resolved, rather than occasioned, a crisis in signification: the crisis that has always been gay sexuality itself...The cultural function of AIDS has been to stabilize,
9
through a specifically narrative or novelistic logic, the truth of gay identity as death or death wish." Gay men are considered "a population doomed to extinction,
10
This logic of lethal homosexuality relies on the childlessness of homosexuality, and thus concerns both lesbians and gay men. It is this
anyway."

underlying association of sexual reproduction with immortality and citizenship, which I emphasize in the discussion
that follows. We cant escape death its inevitable only voting negative can escape the sexualized anxiety of a world ruled and determined by a fear that makes
like not worth living.

That causes Omincide

Sedgwick 8 (Eve, Professor of English at Duke University, Epistemology of the Closet, second revised
edition, California at Berkeley Press, p. 127-130)

From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, scenarios

of same-sex desire would seem to have had a
privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both genocide
and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the law of half of the United States and to the
Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the name of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double
history.In the first place there is a history of the mortal suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and
gay people, through burning, hounding, physical and chemical castration, concentration camps,
bashingthe array of sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton records under the name of gay genocide, and whose supposed eugenic
motive becomes only the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized minority identity in the nineteenth century. In the
second place, though, there is the inveterate topos of associating gay acts or persons with fatalities
vastly broader than their own extent: if it is ambiguous whether every denizen of the obliterated Sodom was a sodomite, clearly
not every Roman of the late Empire can have been so, despite Gibbon's connecting the eclipse of the whole people to the habits of a few.
Following both Gibbon and the Bible, moreover, with an impetus borrowed from Darwin, one of the few areas of agreement among modern
Marxist, Nazi, and liberal capitalist ideologies is that there is a peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, affinity between same-sex desire
and some historical condition of moribundity, called "decadence," to which not individuals or minorities but whole civilizations are subject.
Bloodletting on a scale more massive by orders of magnitude than any gay minority presence in the culture is the "cure," if cure there be, to the
mortal illness of decadence. If a fantasy trajectory, utopian in its own terms, toward gay genocide has been endemic
in Western culture from its origins, then, it may also have been true that the trajectory toward gay
genocide was never clearly distinguishable from a broader, apocalyptic trajectory toward something
approaching omnicide. The deadlock of the past century between minoritizing and universalizing understandings of
homo/heterosexual definition can only have deepened this fatal bond in the heterosexist imaginaire.
In our culture as in Billy Budd, the phobic narrative trajectory toward imagining a time after the homosexual is
finally inseparable from that toward imagining a time after the human; in the wake of the homosexual, the wake
incessantly produced since first there were homosexuals, every human relation is pulled into its shining
representational furrow. Fragments of visions of a time after the homosexual are, of course, currently in dizzying circulation in our
culture. One of the many dangerous ways that AIDS discourse seems to ratify and amplify preinscribed homophobic mythologies is in its
pseudo-evolutionary presentation of male homosexuality as a stage doomed to extinction (read, a phase the species is going through) on the
enormous scale of whole populations. 26 The lineaments of openly genocidal malice behind this fantasy appear only occasionally in the
respectable media, though they can be glimpsed even there behind the poker-face mask of our national experiment in laissez-faire medicine. A
better, if still deodorized, whiff of that malice comes from the famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson: "AIDS is God's way of weeding his
garden." The saccharine luster this dictum gives to its vision of devastation, and the ruthless prurience with which it misattributes its own
agency, cover a more fundamental contradiction: that, to rationalize complacent glee at a spectacle of what is imagined as genocide, a proto-
Darwinian process of natural selection is being invokedin the context of a Christian fundamentalism that is not only antievolutionist but
recklessly oriented toward universal apocalypse. A similar phenomenon, also too terrible to be noted as a mere irony, is how evenly our
culture's phobia about HIV-positive blood is kept pace with by its rage for keeping that dangerous blood in broad, continuous circulation. This is
evidenced in projects for universal testing, and in the needle-sharing implicit in William Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing HIV-
positive persons. But most immediately and pervasively it is evidenced in the literal bloodbaths that seem to make the point of the AIDS-
related resurgence in violent bashings of gays--which, unlike the gun violence otherwise ubiquitous in this culture, are characteristically done
with two-by-fours, baseball bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded conceivable form of body-fluid contact. It might be
worth
making explicit that the use of evolutionary thinking in the current wave of utopian/genocidal fantasy
is, whatever else it may be, crazy. Unless one believes, first of all, that same-sex object-choice across history and across cultures is
one thing with one cause, and, second, that its one cause is direct transmission through a nonrecessive genetic path--which would be, to put it
gently, counter-intuitive--there is no warrant for imagining that gay populations, even of men, in post-AIDS generations will be in the slightest
degree diminished. Exactly to the degree that AIDS is a gay disease, it's a tragedy confined to our generation; the long-term demographic
depredations of the disease will fall, to the contrary, on groups, many themselves direly endangered, that are reproduced by direct
heterosexual transmission. Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or other
groups, then, gay genocide, the once-and-for-all eradication of gay populations, however potent and sustained
as a project or fantasy of modern Western culture, is not possible short of the eradication of the whole human
species. The impulse of the species toward its own eradication must not either, however, be
underestimated. Neither must the profundity with which that omnicidal impulse is entangled with
the modern problematic of the homosexual: the double bind of definition between the homosexual, say, as a distinct risk
group, and the homosexual as a potential of representation within the universal. 27 As gay community and the solidarity and visibility of gays as
a minority population are being consolidated and tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and suffering, how can it fail to be
all the more necessary that the avenues of recognition, desire, and thought between minority
potentials and universalizing ones be opened and opened and opened?
Epistemology Indicts
 Junk Science
Red flag all their authors claims they are deluded and studies have proven this.
Benatar 2008, David (01/2008). "The Optimism Delusion". Think : philosophy for everyone (1477-
1756), 16, p. 19.

The deeply deluded will deny that life is even nearly as bad as I have suggested. Such protestations
are unreliable. There are well-established features of human psychology that lead most people to
underestimate how bad the quality of their lives is. Chief among these psychological features is
'pollyannaism', an inclination most people have towards optimism. Research has shown, for example,
that people selectively recall the good more often than the bad, overestimate how well things will go,
and tend to think that the quality of their life is above average.
 Atrocity Inevitable
Treat all their arguments with skepticism only we provide an objective view of
reality their epistemology is flawed
Philosophy Talk 07 (Schopenhauer and Prozac, 5/14,
http://theblog.philosophytalk.org/2005/04/schopenauer_and.html)

Why is it so difficult to accept Schopenhauer's 'pessimistic view' of the world as being an objective
one? Is it not true that life is ultimately meaningless, and all around we see people who are evil and
selfish and egotistical? Do we not look on the news channel and hear about atrocities taking place
every single day? If we reflect on the history of mankind has it not been nothing more than 'war of all
against all' until recent decades? Perhaps you find his view 'pessimistic' because you happen to be
among the minority of the human species living in the 1st world in the 21st Century? What about the
rest of the world still living in abject poverty? Surely you accept he fact that one day, all your work will
come to nothing, your health will fail and you will probably die after much suffering? Schopenhauer
was simply giving an objective account of what life actually is about, and in his own words his
philosophy provided him with much comfort. If anything, he was simply a melancholy man with a
genuinely wicked sense of humour - hardly depressed!
 Rationalize Pain
its cause u white
Ligotti 2012 (Thomas, pessimist, THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, LB)

Due to our consciousness of being alive and destined for death, some of us not only invent schemes
for blocking out this knowledge but also burn to discredit, or murder, anyone who would controvert
our patented certitudes. (We think, therefore we should make everyone think what we think.) The consequence of having a crush of
competing creeds is that every person and group must brook the intolerance, whether maniac or controlled, of those who do not share their
customized fanaticism. Such intolerance is often a petty affair of taste. Someone unyieldingly swears that everything
which gives him pleasure, bringing momentary relief from the pain of consciousness, is superior to
what is pleasurable to someone else. My music is better than your music. My music is an outpouring of genius,
while your music is lackluster and couldnt possibly give pleasure (relief) to anyone who knows anything about good music. My music. My
movies. My distractions. (The ante may be upped to My nationality. My race. My self.) A further example of this situation: horror
writers have been recurrently asked, Why would anyone want to supplement the horrors of this world by writing horror stories? Too witless
to deserve an answer apposite to horror stories, the question rightly spotlights that the world is indeed well-stocked with horror, which means
only one thing: death and everything that culminates in death. Perhaps the world should keep this kind of thing to a minimum. But this is not
the way it is with us. Instead, we augment every horror that crosses our path. Human
beings seem all too ready to cover up a
lesser horror by contriving a greater one. (It is a straight shot from the spear to the atomic bomb.) For sure, we cannot
see all the ramifications of the things we do, but even if we could we would do them anyway. Any
advancement seems like a good idea at the time and will be put to use. And if it should become a tool for
unremitting horror, we just mutter Oh well and move on to our next boner. That is what we call being human. Animals have lived by the
same instincts for millions of years; we extemporize, instinctually superposing new horrors over the old, positioning them tier upon tier, as if we
were building a pyramid never to be capped with a peak. Then we ask ourselves and our gods how everything got to be such a mess. People
who live with horror every day are going to want answers pertaining to how they sunk into this
quagmire. This is one of the drawbacks of being creatures with consciousness. Our brains are a breeding ground for questions as a swamp is
for insects. They also incubate answers regarding our lot on this rotating compost heap we call home, with a preference for those answers that
bloviate about spirituality. Although this is practically a universal impulse, it seems that not all have been ensnared by it. As Yi-Fu Tuan
documents in his Landscapes of Fear (1979), certain primitive social groups, more prevalent during the ascent of humanity than in its latter
days, have had no use for the spiritual. Interestingly, these peoples lives have also been more comfortable than most hunter-gatherer tribes
with ready access food and drink, no enemies, good weather, and not much in the way of curiosity or ambition. But this idyllic lifestyle, perhaps
too frequently romanticized in comparison with those of succeeding ages, is not how things have been for our species generally speaking.
Overall, people have not been safe and comfortable. They have been fearful and pained and badly
accommodated by the world around them . . . and they wanted answers to why they have been so
abused, why they should be subject to an epic hose job. They wanted the meanness of their lives to
mean something. They always have, which is why at any stage in world history we will be harried by far-fetched theologies hatched in
antiquity. At least they would seem far-fetched if we were normal by an absolute paradigm rather than normal by consensus. (Does belief in a
god really make a believers life more meaningful, by any definition, than that of an unbeliever? That would seem to depend on the individual
rather than the god.) Not taking part in those ancient cultswhatever modern mask they wearnot sharing in their madness, makes it a real
chore to have a good-faith tolerance of them. The difficulty in tolerating religions is not that they are groundwork of so many cruel laws, so
many cruel and unusual mores, and so much of the cruel but entirely usual violence that magnifies the natural suffering of our lives. Human
beings are most proficient at cooking up reasons for their cruelty without the persuasions of religion. If
all religious faith were bled out of us, nothing would change, cruelty-wise. What makes an unbelievers skin crawl is the voodoo-like horror that
religions inject into our lives. Bad enough to be in a tight existential spot such as a foxhole during a battle, but what an addition of insult to
injury (or death) to have long-abandoned prayers well up inside us at these times of crisis. How much more preferable it is to cry for ones
mother as a conditioned response to being in terror for ones life. For the fear that religion has sown in the human race, there can be no
forgiveness and no tolerance. That horror aside, it is also embarrassing to be in the company of the religious when they are most earnestly
devout. One would like to apologize to the universe for them and scuttle off, red-faced, into some hole in the ground. The conundrum for
unbelievers is that virtually all of them have loved ones who follow some religious faith. So what are the faithless to dodump infinite derision
on their blood relations and others they favor with fondness and respect? No philosophic principle has ever deserved such fidelity.
 Optimism Bad
The optimistic outlook their authors promote is inaccurate and rooted in a
fundamental misperception of the suffering in our world
Sanderson 07 (Matthew Walter, PhD dissertation Southern Illinois University, RELIGIOUS SUBLIMITY
AND THE TRAGIC VIEW OF LIFE IN KANT, SCHOPENHAUER AND NIETZSCHE, August, ProQuest)
However, this life-affirmative religious attitude is indicative, for Schopenhauer, of the very worst form of optimism. Such optimism insists that it
desirable to view the immense suffering in the world as beautiful and justified
is possible and, indeed, most
(even if, in reality, it is not). The general problem with optimism, according to Schopenhauer, is that it
is based on a superficial perspective on the world, one that surveys it from a distance instead of
sympathizing with its inner being. And, as Schopenhauer points out, this superficial perspective is often the result of mistaking the
redemptive dimension of aesthetic experience with redemption itself. He writes: To this world the attempt has been made to adapt the
system of optimism, and to demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring. However, an
optimist tells me to open my eyes and look at the world and see how beautiful it is in the sunshine, with its
mountains, valleys, rivers, plants, animals, and so on. But is the world, then, a peep-show? These things are certainly beautiful to
behold, but to be them is something quite different (WWR II, 581). Think, for instance, to elaborate upon Schopenhauers
own example, of the beauty of a lake at sunset. The beauty, however, is perceived from a distance. If one were to
actually trade places with the scene one would feel all the suffering, for instance, of the animals, some
of whom are perhaps dying of starvation or falling victim as prey to others. The optimism, then, that arises
from aesthetic pleasure and the perception of beauty is really based on a perspective that does not truly identify with
the depth of existence, as Nietzsche himself recognizes when he argues that to see the will as beautiful we must perceive it through
the lens of aesthetic transfiguration.
 Human Life Bad
Objectively, our physical lives are intolerably awful their evidence is rooted in a
delusional epistemology.
Singer 10 (Peter, a chair in bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, 6/6, The New
York Times, Should This Be The Last Generation?,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-
generation/?scp=2&sq=singer&st=cse)

Benatar also argues that human lives are, in general, much less good than we think they are. We spend
most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can
achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states. If we think that this is a
tolerable state of affairs it is because we are, in Benatars view, victims of the illusion of pollyannaism.
This illusion may have evolved because it helped our ancestors survive, but it is an illusion
nonetheless. If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we
should inflict on anyone.
Death Real
 Land
All of existence is predicated on an infinite labyrinthine ontology that proliferates in
every direction constantly dying and being born in an endless flux of existence.
Unfortunately, your politics of death and fear are the foundation of all fascism, and
only destroying everything you believe in can shatter the sword of ressentiment.
Land 92 (Lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick, "The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent
Nihilism Page 171-174 NKF)
A provisional differentiation is obviously possible between elementary sponges (such as Batailles groping example of the siphonophore) and scaled sponges for which being is composed [VII
265] irreducibly (such as Mengers). An elementary sponge might also be a scaled sponge, but of an extremely disequilibriated kind. It has a privileged stratum of fission, which is a threshold at
which death vertiginously transforms its sense. A siphonophore can be dissolved to the level of its cells and still recompose itself, but dissolution below this level annihilates it. In the same
way, a hive of bees or a colony of termites can be disaggregated without irreparable damage, which does not hold for the dismemberment of the individual insects composing them. Yet even
in these cases the matter is more complex; sex cells, viruses, nutrient compounds, and other components circulate upon differentiated strata, irreducible to specifiable economies of life and

death. The death of a highly organized animal triggers a crisis across a large spectrum of its biochemical composition, but it does not precipitate a return to
some zero-degree of chemical organization. Under natural circumstances the compositional stock of such a creature is rapidly
plundered; its proteins and fats redistributed into new hierarchies by scavangers of all kinds. Cultural organisms are able to treat texts and other detritus
of life in an analagous fashion. Sades thought begins to stray into the labyrinth when he writes: Now then, what value can Nature set upon individuals

whose making costs her neither the least trouble nor the slightest concern? The worker values his labour according to the labour it entails and
the time spent creating it. Does man cost Nature anything? And, under the supposition that he does, does he cost her more than an ape or an elephant? I go further: what are the regenerative

materials used by nature? Of what are composed the beings that come into life? Do not the three elements of which they are formed result from the prior destruction of other bodies? If
all individuals were possessed of eternal life, would it not become impossible for Nature to create any new
ones? If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws. Now, once we observe that destruction is so useful to her that she absolutely cannot dispense
with it, and that she cannot achieve her creations without drawing from the store of destruction which death prepares for her, from this moment onward the idea of

annihilation which we attach to death ceases to be real; there is no more veritable annihilation; what
we call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finis, but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter, what every
modern philosopher acknowledges as one of Natures fundamental laws [S III 514]. What is crucial to the labyrinth, maze, or composition of beings [II 293] is that the word individual is not
ableto serve as a designation for a degree of the scale of forms [II 2934]. Each element is corrupted by an irreducible organizational fabric that opens across the difference of scale. I am
ledto propose to speak of aggregate [amas] if it is a matter of associations which do not modify the parts forming it, of composed beings when it is a matter of atoms, cells, or elements of
the same order [II 295]. Simple animals such as sponges and starfish are characterized by a relatively loose assemblage of cells, whilst linear animalssuch as insects or vertebratesexhibit a
more complex mode of composition [II 294] in which the organic elements succumb more profoundly to their integration. In his early sacred sociology writings Bataille employs the

A society is an assemblage or composition which

distinction between colonies and societies to mark this difference between aggregated and scaled multiplicities.

does not consist of individuals possessing a greater ontological density than its own, and this absence
of privileged scale meshes it inextricably with death (the unrealizable zero of community). The elements of a society are thus
vampirically drained towards the nuclear whole, just as they are agitated in their integrity by the ineliminable flows at a lower degree on the scale of composition [II 305],
lending the labyrinth a double aspect [II 292, 293]. Such particlesmore spongiform than sponges themselvesare irreparably violated by their

constellation into the dissipative mass of the labyrinth. General economy is a traffic system; marking routes within the complex immanence or quasi-
horizontality that infests the axis of transcendence. Every vertical difference is collapsible onto a tangled horizontal flow. It is not

that base materialism denies the necessity of vertical articulation; there is no tendency to delete the vocabulary of summits and troughs, differences

in intensity, compositional strata. The elimination of such an axis from materialist thought would leave nothing but a theologically constituted reality abandoned by God (a colony of
particles). Scaling is the positive superfluity of God inherent to matter, but its gradations of relative transcendence must be commensurated with an impersonal nature exhausting the real:
genealogically rather than metaphysically explored. The labyrinth is the unconscious of God, or the repressed of monotheism. The illusion of ego in general requires that it remain unthought.
What God really was is something incompatible with anything being at all. Real composition is not extrinsically created nature, but if this is a Spinozism, it is one in which substance itself is
sacrificed to the scales. So that atheism is in the end (an end without end) an immense sponge, a mega-sponge, the dissolution of boundaries in all of its positive complexity. It is an
inexhaustible porosity, saturated with negation, pregnant with swarming lethalities, and drunk upon the sea. Sponge-matterencroached without limit by silenceis the same thing as fate. In
any traffic system real transition precedes articulation (which means that there are no boundaries, but only digressions). Sponge-vectors do not connect pre-existing points, but spawn
decomposable patches from out of the subtilization of speeds and the intricate criss-crossing of routes. Absolute points are transcendent mirages, hyperbolically projected out of dismantled

The reality of space is only the possibility of flow. Were you to stop a short moment: the complex, the gentle, the
vector nets.

violent movements of worlds will make of your death a splashing foam [V 112], writes Bataille. The word death has
the same mix of referential richness and conceptual poverty as the sign lifting a speed restriction. It would
designate a concept only if this semiotic transition were treated as the representation of absolute
velocity, rather than an incitement to free-flow. Dying is the departure from a traffic system, but this
emigration is not transcendentally governed by a pure destination. The slipping-away of an animal into death is no less intricately
positive than the arterial pulse pumping the blood from its heart. We are all fictional suicides, some impatient,
some less so, but all demonstrating by our meticulousness the taciturnity of death. In effect, death is nothing in immanence, but due to the fact

that it is nothing, no being is ever truly separated from it [VII 308].

 Lanza
Linearity is a myth time and space are constructions of perception. Death doesnt
really exist because the physical world is an illusionimmortal life is consciousness
and it exists outside of time.
Lanza 2009 (Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief
Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of
Medicine. "Does Death Exist? New Theory Says 'No'", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-
lanza/does-death-exist-new-theo_b_384515.html)

Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could
retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam
splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer

decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is
you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes

transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply
holo-projecting either this or that result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it's still the same
battery or agent responsible for the projection. According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects we think. Wave

your hand through the air - if you take everything away, what's left? Nothing. The same thing applies for time. You

can't see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of

information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything
together. Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, "Now Besso" (an
old friend) "has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us...know that the distinction between

past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Immortality doesn't mean a
perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.

Our argument is also an Epistemology D/Athe Aff's hypotheses can't accommodate

for recent experimental findings, means they can't be correct. Our hypothesis is a
better fit for the evidence so voting Aff is bad sciencebad science is debilitating to
the coherence of our knowledge systems
Lanza and Berman 2009 Robert Lanza. MD, is considered one of the leading cell scientists in the
world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake
Forest University School of Medicine, and Berman 2k9 Bob Berman is an author and the most widely
read astronomer in the world, he is director of the Storm King Observatory in Cornwall, New York, and
of the Overlook Observatory in Woodstock, New York, he is an adjunct professor of astronomy at
Marymount Manhattan College. Biocentrism. 2009. p.1-2 [m leap]

Our understanding of the universe as a whole has reached a dead end. The meaning of quantum physics has been
debated since it was first discovered in the 1930s, but we are no closer understanding it n]ow than we were then. The theory of
everything that was promised tor decades to be just around the corner has been stuck for decades in
the abstract mathematics of string theory, with its unproven and unprovable assertions. But it's worse than
that. Until recently, we thought we knew what the universe was made of, but it now turns out that 96
percent of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy, and we have virtually no idea
what they are. We've accepted the Big Bang, despite the increasingly greater need to jury-rig it to fit
our observations (as in the 1979 acceptance of a period of exponential growth, known as inflation, for
which the physics is basically unknown). It even turns out that the Big Bang has no answer for one of the greatest mysteries m
the universe: why is the universe exquisitely fine-tuned to support life? Our understanding of the fundamentals of the
universe is actually retreating before our eyes. The more data we gather, the more we've had to
juggle our theories or ignore findings that simply make no sense. This book proposes a new perspective: that our
current theories of the physical world don't work, and can never be made to work. Until they account
for life and consciousness. This book proposes that, rather than a belated and minor outcome after billions of years of lifeless
physical processes, life and consciousness are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the universe. We call this new perspective
biocentrism. In this view,life is not an accidental by-product of the laws of physics. Nor is the nature or history of the
universe the dreary play of billiard balls that we've been taught since grade school . Through the eyes of a biologist and an astronomer, we
will unlock the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. The twenty-first
century is predicted to be the century of biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to
begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science, not with
imaginary strings that occupy equally imaginary unseen dimensions, but with a much simpler idea that
is rife with so many shocking new perspectives that we are unlikely ever to see reality the same way again.
Biocentrism may seem like a radical departure from our current understanding, and it is, but the hints have
appeared all around us for decades. Some of the conclusions of biocentrism may resonate with aspects of Eastern religions or certain New Age
philosophies. This is intriguing, but
rest assured there is nothing New Age about this book. The conclusions of
biocentrism are based on mainstream science, and it is a logical extension of the work of some of our
greatest scientific minds.

Immortality existsPhysicists and Scientists agree

Zammit 3 (Victor, ba, ma, phd former solicitor of the sc of new south wales and the court of australia,
January 22, http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=50)

From the late nineteenth century until to-day there have been groups of prominent, well-respected
scientists - many of them the best-known names in science - who have worked to prove that
immortality is a natural physical phenomenon and its study is a branch of physics. Many of these
scientists were highly practical people whose discoveries in other areas fundamentally changed the way
people work and live. Many considered themselves to be Rationalists and Humanists and have had to
face intense opposition from both traditional Christian clergy and from materialist scientists who joined
together to try to suppress their findings. One of the pioneers in this tradition was Emmanuel
Swedenborg; who was born in Sweden in 1688. One of the leading scientists of his day, he wrote 150 works in seventeen sciences. At the
University of Uppsala he studied Greek, Latin, several European and Oriental languages, geology, metallurgy, astronomy, mathematics,
economics. He was an intensely practical man who invented the glider, the submarine and an ear trumpet for the deaf. He was held in high
esteem by all, was a Member of parliament and held important Government posts in mining. He always showed he had enormously high
intelligence and maintained a keen practical mind until his death. Swedenborg was also a very highly gifted clairvoyant who spent more than
twenty years investigating other dimensions. As he himself said: I have been allowed to talk with practically everyone I have ever known
during this physical life- with some for hours, with some for weeks or months, with some for years - all for the overriding purpose that I might
put forward a view of the
be assured of this fact, (that life continues after death) and might bear witness to it. Interestingly he
universe which is remarkably similar to twentieth century quantum physics . At a time when Newton was arguing
that matter was composed of impenetrable atoms which were given motion by outside forces, Swendenborg taught that it was made up of a
series of particles in ascending order of size, each of which was composed of a closed vortex of energy which spiralled at infinite speeds to give
the appearance of solidity. In England one of the founders of the Society for Psychic Research (SPR) was Sir William Crookes,
a Fellow of
the Royal Society and later its President. The discoverer of six chemical elements including Thallium, he
was considered to be the greatest scientist of his time. He worked extensively investigating levitation
phenomena which was associated with the medium D.D. Home. Conclusive photographs were a part of
this record and the authenticity of the appearances, as well as the total absence of fraud and trickery
were verified by a number of other leading scientists of the day including Cromwell F. Varley, an early
researcher into ionisation and supervisor of the initial laying of the Atlantic Cable. He was finally
convinced of the reality of the afterlife by a series of remarkable full materialisations of his wife. Also in
his group were scientists Lord Balfour, Sir William Barrett, Sir Oliver Lodge and Lord Raleigh J Thompson
who discovered the electron and Alfred Russell Wallace who propounded the theory of evolution at the
same time as and independently of Charles Darwin. Thomas Alva Edison, the American inventor of the
phonograph and the first electric light bulb was a spiritualist who experimented with mechanical means
of contacting the 'dead' (Scientific American, 30/10/1920). John Logie Baird, television pioneer and inventor of the infra-red camera,
contacted the 'deceased' Thomas A. Edison through a medium and later stated: I have witnessed some very startling phenomena under
circumstances which make trickery out of the question ( Logie Baird 1988: 68-69). Another twentieth century investigator was Dr Glen
Hamilton, a physician and member of the Canadian Parliament. In his laboratory under strictly
controlled conditions he had a battery of fourteen electronically controlled flash cameras which
photographed apparitions simultaneously from all angles. Observers present at his experiments
included four other medical doctors, two lawyers, and both an electrical and civil engineer. Each of the
witnesses stated strongly and unequivocally that time after time, I saw dead persons materialise.
(Hamilton 1977). Yet another brilliant scientist and inventor who after investigating became totally
convinced of the existence of the afterlife was George Meek. At the age of 60 George Meek retired from his
career as an inventor, designer and manufacturer of devices for air conditioning and treatment of waste water. He held scores of industrial
patents which enabled him to live comfortably and devote the next twenty five years of his life to self-funded full-time research into life after
death. Meek undertook an extensive library and literature research program and travelled the world to locate and establish research projects
with the top medical doctors, psychiatrists, physicists, biochemists, psychics, healers, parapsychologists, hypnotherapists, ministers, priests and
established the Metascience Foundation in Franklin North Carolina which sponsored the famous
rabbis. He
Spiricom research which succeeded in establishing extended two-way instrumental contact between
people alive and people living in the afterlife. His most recent book: After We Die What Then(1987)outlines the conclusions
of his years of full-time research- that we do all survive and that in the last twenty-five years mankind has learned more about what happens
when we die than was learned in all earlier periods of recorded history (Meek 1987:4).

The burden of proof is on themscience indicates there life after death.

Zammit 3 (Victor, ba, ma, phd former solicitor of the sc of new south wales and the court of australia,
January 22, http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=50)
In England today a group of scientists, mathematicians and university professors are working to make known the results of experiments on sub-
atomic particles and mathematical calculations which provide a scientific explanation for so-called psychic phenomena. Professor Abdus Salam,
a Nobel Laureate and director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, has given financial backing and grants to this group. Central to
Pearson, a former university lecturer in Intelligence Behind the Universe (1990) mathematically
its claims is the work of Ron
confirms the experiments of Crookes, Hamilton and other researchers. Sam Nichols, an astrophysicist from
Leeds University, supports Pearson's calculations and claims that so-called 'deceased' entities although
composed of slightly different atomic components, exist in and share the same space with the
material world. This is possible because most of what we consider to be solid matter is in fact empty
space. Modern physics now teaches that atoms are 99.99999% empty space- the distance between an
electron and its nucleus being as great proportionally as the distance from the earth to the sun. And
even electrons, protons and neutrons, the particles which make up atoms, are now thought to be
energy rather than matter. Astrophysicist Michael Scott of Edinburgh University argues that: the
advancement of quantum physics has produced a description of reality which allows the existence of
parallel universes. Composed of real substances they could would not interact with matter from our
own universe. Professor Fred Alan Wolf seems to concur with these findings in his book Mind and the
New Physician which he states: as fantastic as it sounds, the new physics called quantum mechanics
posits that there exists, side by side with this world, another world, a parallel universe, a duplicate
copy that is somehow slightly different yet the same. And not just two parallel worlds, but three, four
or even more! In each of these universes, you, I and all the others who live, have lived, will live, and will ever have lived, are alive!
Michael Roll has taken these findings and published them in a booklet, The Physicists and Rationalists' case for Survival After the Death of
our Physical Bodies in which he argues that dying is as natural as being born and that we all pass on to the next world
where there are no special places reserved for any special religious group (Roll 1996). The evidence
from many scientists that the afterlife exists is overwhelming. But as stated above, there is NOT one
scientist who has proved that the afterlife does not exist.
 Multiverse
Put away your Lanza indicts the multiverse is real and happening now its filled
with PURE LOVE and ACCEPTANCE which solves EVERY IMPACT
Bancarz 2014 (Steven. "Harvard Neurosurgeon Confirms The Afterlife Exists."Spirit Science and
Metaphysics. N.p., 12 June 2014. Web. 11 Mar. 2015. <
http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/harvard-neurosurgeon-confirms-the-afterlife-exists/>,
LB)

Before his experience, he did not believe existence of a non-physical spirit. Trained in western medical
school and surrounded by medical colleagues who are deeply invested in the materialism view of the universe, he thought that the idea of a
soul was outlandish. Like most skeptics, he believed stories of the afterlife to be hallucinations or products of the human imagination. Dr.
Alexander changed his mind after he was in a coma for seven days caused by severe bacterial
meningitis. During his coma he experienced a vivid journey into what he knew to be the afterlife, visiting
both heavenly and not so heavenly realms. After returning to his body and experiencing a miraculous healing against all odds, and went
on to write the NY Times #1 best selling book Proof of Heaven. What Dr. Alexander confirms is that our life here is just a test help our souls evolve and grow, and
that the way we succeed in doing so is to proceed with love and compassion. Here are just a few other notable points he made: The experience of the afterlife was
so real and expansive that the experience of living as a human on Earth seemed like an artificial dream by comparison. The
fabric of the afterlife
was pure LOVE. Love dominated the afterlife to such a huge degree that the overall presence of evil
was infinitesimally small. If you wish to know the Universe, know Love. In the afterlife, all communication
was telepathic. There was no need for spoken words, nor even any separation between the self and everything else
happening around you. All the questions you asked in your mind were immediately answered to you
telepathically as well. When asked what he wants everyone to know about the spiritual realm, he always answers saying that you are precious and
infinitely loved more than you can possibly imagine. You are always safe. You are never alone. The unconditional and

perfect Love of God neglects not one soul. Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything. Not
some abstract, hard-to-fathom kind of love but the day-to-day kind that everyone knows-the kind of
love we feel when we look at our spouse and our children, or even our animals. In its purest and most
powerful form, this love is not jealous or selfish, but unconditional. This is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly
glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or will ever exist,
and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who
does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions. Now lets talk credibility for a minute. What makes this
experience so much more significant than another NDE account? Ebens neocortex was completely
nonfunctional during the time of his coma do to his severe bacterial meningitis, so there is no
scientific account for why he experienced this. In fact, he gives refutations to 9 different possible
scientific explanations for his experience in his book.
 2NC Land XT
You concede the binary between life and death is a psychological construct. Death is
not real4 warrants
A) Preference towards life is a product of the ego perpetuating itselfit has now moral
superiority over death
B) Energy is immanentlife begins with death. Individual deaths just allow for more life. No
warrant for why saving lives is good
C) Death is lifethe flows of experience make death and life indistinct from one another
because they both compose what it means to beyou dont have an impact
D) No time-frame questionsthe idea of a longer life over a shorter one is a market construct.
Linearity is a myth constructed by the psyche, there is no reason to prefer a long life over a
short one. The myth that a long life is better is a smoke screen to force workers into longer
lives of production.
 2NC Lanza XT
Science proves that the death of the body doesn't destroy life because consciousness
is infinite and generates reality itselfthat's Lanza and Bermanthey are professors
at Wake Forest that draw from quantum mechanics to scientifically prove that death
doesnt exist two warrants

Rejection of mind-body dualism 2002 experiments at the University of Chicago show

that photons actions are manipulated by other photons as well as the observer this
shows that the universe is interconnected on a fundamental level, and that distinction
between mind and matter are pseudo-scientific

Rejection of organic materialism the universe is biocentric, in that life shapes and
gives meaning to the universe consciousness gives other phenomena existence,
including life and death

A second experiment was repeated 8 years later and yielded the exact same results.
NONE OF THEIR EVIDENCE IS IN THE CONTEXT OF THIS SECOND EXPERIMENT. Our
evidence post dates theirs.

Framing issue there are infinite universes - life and death exist outside of time, and
there are an infinite number of potential universes that life

All of their death bad arguments are non-responsive death may be bad, but it
doesnt exist death transcends linear ways of thinking and opens up the possibility
for infinite bliss in an infinite number of universes
 2NC Multiverse XT
Extend the Bancarz evidence if we win this argument it proves that death is
desirable to physical existence since the afterlife is AH-Mazing

He cites the experience of a Harvard doctor who was brain dead in a coma when he
came back, he indicated that the afterlife was a world filled with infinite love devoid
of suffering. Everyone is happy and everyone is accepted. You should prioritize the
recency and scientific basis for his experience its peer reviewed and individually
checks back all scientific fallacies associated with it.

Our science is v tru. Get rekt

Bancarz 2014 (Steven. "Harvard Neurosurgeon Confirms The Afterlife Exists."Spirit Science and
Metaphysics. N.p., 12 June 2014. Web. 11 Mar. 2015. <
http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/harvard-neurosurgeon-confirms-the-afterlife-exists/>,
LB)
Lets take a look at 5 potential explanations he outlines in Appendix B of Proof of Heaven. Some are of his explanations would make no sense
to us as laymen untrained in neuroscientific terminology, so here are the most common explanations he refutes, all of which are taken
verbatim from his book: 1. A primitive brainstem program to ease terminal pain and suffering (evolutionary
argument possibly as a remnant of feigned-death strategies from lower mammals?). This did not explain the robust, richly
interactive nature of the recollections. 2. The distorted recall of memories from deeper parts of the
limbic system (for example, the lateral amygdala) that have enough overlying brain to be relatively protected from the meningitic
inflammation, which occurs mainly at the brains surface. This did not explain the robust, richly interactive nature of
the recollections. 3. DMT dump. DMT, a naturally occurring serotonin agonist causes vivid hallucinations and a dream-like state. I
am personally familiar with drug experiences related to serotonin agonist/antagonists (LSD) from my teen years in the early 70s. I have had no
personal experience with DMT but have seen patients under its influence. The
rich ultra-reality would still require fairly
intact auditory and visual neocortex as target regions in which to generate such a rich audiovisual
experience as I had in a coma. Prolonged coma due to bacterial meningitis had badly damaged my neocortex, which is where all of
the serotonin from the raphe nuclei in my brainstem (or DMT, a serotonin agonist) would have had effects on visual/auditory experiences. But
my cortex was off, and the DMT would have no place in the brain to act. 4. A reboot phenomenon a random dump of
bizarre dis-jointed memories due to old memories in the damaged neocortex, which might occur on restarting the cortex into
consciousness after a prolonged system-wide failure, as in my diffuse meningitis. Especially given the intricacies of my
elaborate recollections, this seems most unlikely. 5. Unusual memory generation through an archaic visual
pathway through the midbrain, prominently used in birds but only rarely identifiable in humans. It can be demonstrated in humans who are
cortically blind, due to occipital cortex. It
provided no clue as to the ultra-reality I witnessed and failed to explain
the auditory-visual interleaving. His NDE account stands as the most credible account of all time, and
coming from his materialistic scientific background, we have good reason to believe that he really did
have a vivid encounter with something beyond this world.
Framework
 Top Shelf
Vote negative in the affs framework: your securtization against death produces a
fascistic allegiance to necropolitical elites and makes destruction of the climate,
resource wars, and global genocide inevitable. Thats Lacy.

Counter Interp: debate should determine competing epistemological claims about our
orientation towards death. Education is the only portable skill, and how we relate to
dying should be a-priori.

The nexus of all modern thought is the subjects relationship with death. Transforming
out inevitable loss into an affective process of affirmation is a pre-requisite to any
political engagement.
Evans and Reid 14. Brad Evans, professor of international relations at the University of Lapland,
Finland and Julian Reid, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol, Resilient
Life, 2014, pg. 12
There is also much to be gleaned here from another genre no less informative to the history of our present Greek Tragedy. Sophocles Oedipus
Rex22 has classically dominated our understanding of politics, especially the structured, patriarchical and masculine forms of domina- tion his
embodiment allows us to think about as it extends into the forms of oppression manifest in the modern nation state. And yet, we have
suggested, if there is an Oedipal Leviathan to speak of in contemporary times, it openly declares itself to be a false prophet, for the sovereign
can no longer provide the security upon which its foundational truths came to rest. Without, then, a lead performer, what once appeared to be
the undisputed figure for political embodiment has been displaced by the Terror of Antigone who embodies the vulnerability of our times. Such
is the self-inflicted nature of the violence we are fated to endure as a result of the novel lethality our freedoms now depend upon. And such is
the condition of the resilient subject, for in its attempt to deal with the question of finitude, it appeals to personal vulnerability as a matter of
ontological fact and the collective as a form of unavoidable endangerment. Humanity as a whole therefore exhibits what we term a lethal
conditioning a state of investiture that makes it incumbent upon the subject to embrace resilience or be subjected to a fate which, left
underexposed, will prove more devastating still. The question of finitude is personally and intellectually daunting. How may we begin to come
to terms with our own passing into the absolute unknown? None of this is incidental. In fact, it
brings us back to the original
problematic of philosophy as we confront what it means to die? How is it possible to learn to live with
death? Cornel West offers a compelling explanation.23 You know, West responds, Plato says philosophys a meditation on and a
preparation for death. By death what he means is not an event, but a death in life because theres no rebirth, theres no change, theres no
transformation without death, and therefore the question becomes: How do you learn how to die? To philosophize is the
practice of learning to die whilst living. As West further explains, You cant talk about truth without talking about learning how
to die because its precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live
is only by learning how to die, by willing the messianic
more intensely and critically and abundantly. That is to say, it
moment (to borrow from Walter Benjamin) in which death is read more as a condition of affirmation, that it
becomes possible to change the present condition and create a new self by turning your world upside
down. Resilience cheats us of this affirmative task of learning how to die. It exposes life to lethal
principles so that it may live a non-death. Our wounds now exist before us. There is an important caveat to be addressed here.
Some may counter that our societies are actually bombarded with various spectacles of violence that actually speak directly to the problem of
finitude. While this is partly true, such finite moments only headline in extremity. That is to say, we learn to mourn those deaths which reaffirm
the dangerous threshold of existence. Think here of 9/11, tsunamis, catastrophic accidents, incurable virulent diseases and so on. Then
compare to the daily plight of suffering that is largely ignored or not considered newsworthy enough to draw our attentions. Indeed, as
Zygmunt Bauman explains, while liberal societies have become fascinated with the spectacle of violence (especially as enter- tainment), for the
most part, death as an experience for philosophical reflection has become a private affair hidden from the public gaze.24 For instance, while
headstones of the recently deceased seldom write of a person simply having died a natural death (there is always something responsible), to
think about the question of death as an ontological condition for subsequent re-birth is relegated to the world of religious
superstition/pathology or some dangerous attempts to counter liberal reason with the vio- lence of self-immolation. Any
rigorous
critique of resilience must therefore deal with the conflict between the lethality of freedom and the
philosophical question of death, for it is here we may expose deeply embedded onto- logical and
metaphysical claims about what it means to live a meaningful life beyond the biophysical.

We have several DAs to your interpretation:

( ) Simulations: imaging a futuristic model of politics produces a feeling of personal

ineptitude that eradicates alterity.
Antonio 95 (Robert, July 1995, Nietzsches antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History,
American Journal of Sociology, Volume 101, No. 1) //AMM

This tendency obscures the social bases of language,

Treating words as mirrors of reality provides a comforting illusion of "certainty."
reifies social conventions, and weakens capacities to imagine and create alternative conditions. Linguistic "abbreviations" cement
obligatory social ties where "mutual agreement" about "feelings" is absent and the tendency to "let go" must be stemmed. Nietzsche held that
language serves social selection of the herd, keeping experiences, desires, impulses, and actions of weak persons within
boundaries, inscribing strong individuals as collective enemies, and redirecting ressentiment into regimentation. Accordingly, cultural
rationalization makes this process of liquidating particularity more effective and universal (Nietzsche 1966, pp. 100102, 21617;
19686, pp. 357-58, 380). Since Nietzsche was himself a master writer, his polemics about words per se are hyperbolic.11 The real target is
Socratic culture's exceptionally abstract languages, rampant conceptual reifications, and impoverished aesthetic sensibilities. Nietzsche
that the obsession with rational representation makes the body an inert target of disciplinary
believed
control. Adoration of concepts, theory, and reason makes the abstract signifier the ultimate object of knowledge. Purely formal
concepts are treated as the "highest," "real," and "true" things, while sense experience is relegated to
the degraded status of "appearance." Platonic ideas, Chris- tian soul, Kantian things-in-themselves, and Newtonian atoms and
time are all foundational reifications that "dehistoricize" the corporeal world and erect illusions of firm "grounds" for those who cannot face life
without God and tradition or bear the weight of its connective choices and its "great dice game" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 287-90; 19686, p. 549;
19686, pp. 35-37). Destroying Socratic culture's "objective" foundations (i.e., God and Truth), the latest phase of cultural rationalization greatly
amplifies feel- ings of uncertainty. The consequent desperate searching and clinging produces frenetic reification;
fanatical new prejudices, religions, and politics appear alongside the most sterile intellectual formalisms. Mass culture's hastily formulated
languages blur all difference and ambiguity (e.g., parties "transform their principles into great at fresco stupidities"). The proliferation of
abstract signifiers, arising from diverse locations and detached from any sense of stable referents, contribute to increasingly mechanical,
diffuse, and mindless regimentation. In this fashion, Nietzsche severed the links that modern theorists saw between rationalization and
enhanced communication, social integration, and legitimate authority (Nietzsche 1983, p. 215; 1986, pp. 161-62; 1966, pp. 216-17; 19686, pp.
357-58, 380-81). According to Nietzsche, the "subject" is Socratic culture's most central, durable foundation. This prototypic
expression of ressentiment, master reification, and ultimate justification for slave morality and mass
discipline "separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum . . . free to express strength or not to do
so. But there is no such substratum; there is no 'being' behind the doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added
to the deed" (Nietzsche 1969b, pp. 45-46). Leveling of Socratic culture's "objective" foundations makes its
"subjective" features all the more important. For example, the subject is a central focus of the new human sciences,
appearing prominently in its emphases on neutral standpoints, motives as causes, and selves as entities, objects of inquiry, problems, and
targets of care(Nietzsche 1966, pp. 19-21; 1968a, pp. 47-54). Arguing that subjectified culture weakens the personality, Nietzsche spoke of a
"remarkable antithesis between an interior which fails to correspond to any exterior and an exterior which fails to
correspond to any interior" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 78-79, 83). The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest
time."'12 He considered "roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close personal
identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw differentiated roles and
professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male professionals) in specialized
occupations over identify with their positions and engage in gross fabrications to obtain advancement .
They look hesitantly to the opinion of others, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They
are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have trouble being anything
but actors-"The role has actually become the character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers devastating
inauthenticity. The powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integrity,
decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure
are undone by paralyzing over concern about possible causes, meanings, and consequences of
acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40;
1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate "masks" reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or
simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you
genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that which is represented? . . . [Or] no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so
pervasive thatit is hard to tell the copy from the genuine article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche
1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory
scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor cannot plan for the long term or
participate in enduring networks of interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the societal
"edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid subjectivized landscape. Nietzsche (1974, p. 259) stated,
"One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if
one always 'might miss out on something. ''Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . .
Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in
continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others." Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of
ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The most
mediocre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery of
genuine ascetic priests, like Socrates, and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to render the "sick" harmless. But he
deeply feared the new simulated versions. Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these impostors amplify the worst
inclinations of the herd; they are "violent, envious, exploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to circumstances.
" Social selves are fodder for the "great man of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the less one knows how to
command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely- a god,
prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. The deadly combination of
desperate conforming and overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new type
of tyrant.

( ) Mastery: They render the masses the play things of political elites and render them
mere pawns in a fascistic game of life and death
Chan 2k [Stephen, Professor IR Dean Ethics at Notingham Trent University, Millennium Vol. 29, No. 3,
pp. 565-589] WE DO NOT DEFEND GENDERED LANGUAGE

a man believes he can change the world as a

There are also more Lucifer-like dangers, ho wever. When you understand that
result of meditation and specific rituals, and when you try to find out wh y he is so certain that, after performing that
ritual, he really will become master of the world or at least of his villagewell, there again is the temp tation of absolute
liberty; in other words, the suppression of the human condition. Man is a limited, conditioned being. But the freedo m o f a god, or a mythic
ancestor, or a spirit no longer trammelled by a mortal body! Those are temptatio ns.25. First, however, there are so me questions to ask about
IR. For what is the
paradigm now of the person of IR? He or she goes to the Internatio nal Studies Association conferences
and performs his or her knowledge to other performers. He or she reads (translations and summaries of) the texts of the
moment, and seeks a reflexivity within those texts; locates a critical practice within the conference hall and classroo m; believes that
discourse, and his or her participation in discourse, constructs the world. This
is a professionalism pure and proper, and it
is hermetically sealed fro m the world, rather than in hermeneutic dialogue with it. It is a conceit to justify comfort. And I guess
it is a certain coming of age: having finally spoken and written a constructivism that says it is our purpose to speak and write, that the world
that suffers is merely the victim of discourse, and that therefore, the purpose of the person of IR is to engage with discourse rather
than engage with suffering. It is ingenious and disingenuous, and causes regret that Buddhism has no sense of actual purgatory. We have
come to resemble those higher men and sublime men who so ught to distract Zarathustra from his eternal joy, and caused him to give in to
what Eliade called the temp tation of the eternal return. Within
IR, of course, we have the temptations of eternal return:
ever a new paradigm, new debate, or merely new fashion, anything, to prevent us from confronting
the fact that, since IRs inventio n, suffering, and IRs inaccessibility to it, have been constant.

( ) Actomania: the question of what is to be done creates the faade of absolute

authority only recognizing our impotency can prevent the collusion between power
and death that allows for the necropolitical order to annihilate otherness.
Snoek 12 (Anke, PhD in Philosophy Dept @ Macquarie U, Agambens Joyful Kafka, GENDER MODIFIED
Given the preceding sketch Agamben gives of power and possibilities (the law's being in force without significance, the subtle reverse found in
Kafka's work of this situation, Againben's praise of creatures without work), the questions arise: what ought we to do now? What form
of resistance is possible for us? How should we act? What can we do? This is actually one of the major criti- cisms on Agamben's work,
that in it, at least when read superficially, Agamben nowhere seems to formulate any explicit answer to the question of resistance. The Italian
political philosopher Antonio Negri, also one of Agamben's close friends, points out that Agamben was never directly involved in political
struggles and he sees this as a great lack in his philosophy.' Agamben's work is often described as a radical passivity.1 This passivity can be seen
both as a strength and a weakness of his work. Agamben's passivity is not a regular powerlessness, but seems to come close to (Mahayana)
Buddhism, an exercise in doing nothing.4 This passivity also shows evidence of a radical paradigm shift in thinking about power and resistance,
a movement that is often attributed to Foucault and whose traces can be found in Kafka avant la leltre. As is evident from the above, Agamben
is fundamentally opposed to the tendency of metaphysical politics to attribute an identity to the human being, to allocate to him [or her] a
work of his [or her] own. If the human being has no identity of his [or her] own and no activity of his [or her] own, then this also has
consequences for our traditional view of actions as being fundamentally embedded within end-means relationships, as goal oriented in
essence. Our views of activities and activism must therefore be thoroughly revised in line with our revision of the possibility of a transcendent
work of man. Kafka's opera singing executioners or questioners Deleuze once defined power as the act in which the human being is cut off from
its potentiality. But, Agamben states, 'There is, nevertheless, another and more insidious operation of power that does not immediately affect
what humans can do - their potentiality - but rather their "impotentiality", that is, what they cannot do, or better, can nor do' (N, 13). Given
that flexibility is the primary quality the market requires from us, the
contemporary human, yielding to every demand by
society, is cut off from his [or her] impotentiality, from his ability to do nothing. Just as we saw previously,
politics is a politics of the act, of the human individual being at work. The irresponsible motto of the contemporary individual, 'No
problem, I can do it', comes precisely at the moment 'when he [or she] should instead realize that he [or she] has been consigned
in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he [or she] has lost all control' (N, 44). This flexibility also
leads to a confusion of professions and callings, of professional identities and social roles, because people are no longer in touch with their
inability. Agamben sees an example of this in Kafka's Vie Trial. In the last chapter, just before his death, two men enter through Joseph K.'s
door. They are his questioners/executioners, but Joseph K. does not recognize them as such and thinks that they are *[o)ld second-rate actors
or opera singers?'5 Agamben argues that, in Katka's world, evil is presented as an inadequate reaction to impotentiality (CC, 31). Instead of
making use of our possibility of 'not being', we fail it, we flee from our lack of power, 'our fearful retreat from it in order to exercise ... some
power of being' (CC, 32). But this power we try to exercise turns into a malevolent power that oppresses the persons who show us their
weakness. In Kafka's world, evil does not have the form of the demonic but that of being separated from our lack of power. Nothing makes us
more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality. Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however,
Those who are separated from their own impotentiality lose, on the other
still resist; they can still not do.
hand, first of all the capacity to resist. (X, 15) And it is evident, according to Agamben, from the example of Hichmann how right
Kafka was in this (CC, 32). Eichmann was not so much separated from his power as from his lack of power,
tempted to evil precisely by the powers of right and law (CC, 32). What should one do? A clash with activists At the end of 2009, Agamben gave
a lecture in honour of the presentation of a collection of texts written by the T'iqqun collective. This French collective has written several
political manifestoes and in 200S their compound was raided by the anti terrorist brigades. The charges were quite vague: belonging to an ultra
left and the anarcho-autonomous milieu; using a radical discourse; having links with foreign groups; participating regularly in political
demonstrations. The evidence that was found was not weapons, but documents, for example a train schedule. Although Agamben calls these
charges a tragicomedy and accuses French politics of barbarism6, in his lecture he emphasizes another important political value of the T'iqqun
collective. This collective embodies Foucaults idea of the non subject. One of the latter's greatest merits is that he thought of power no longer
as an attribute that a certain group had over another, but as a relation that was constantly shifting. A second merit of Foucaults thinking was
the idea of non authorship. The subject itself, its identity, is always formed within a power relation, a process that Foucault termed
'subjectivization techniques' In Foucault, the state attempts to form the subject via disciplinary techniques and the
subject responds via subjectivization techniques: it internalizes the expectations of the state in the formation of its
own identity. That is why Foucault rejects the idea of a subject and the idea of actorship, of attributing an act to a subject. Hence, as long
as we continue to think in terms of a subject resisting oppressive power via deliberate action, we cannot liberate ourselves from power
relations. The gesture Tiqqun instead is making is, according to Agamben, not one of looking for a subject that can assume the role of saviour or
revolutionary. Rather, they begin with investigating the force fields that are operative in our society (instead of focusing on the subject). In
describing these fields of force and the moment they become diffuse, new possibilities can arise that are not dependent on a subject. The
discussion that followed this lecture provides a very clear picture of Agamben's position. Many activists present at the lecture asked what his
theory entailed concretely with respect to the direction in which they should go. Agamben's constant reply was that anyone who poses this
question has not understood the problem at all. I always find it out of place to go and ask someone what to do, what is there to be done? ... If
someone asks me what action, it shows they missed the point because they still want me to say: go out in the streets
and do this? It has nothing to do with that. (OT) Inactivity as active resistance to the state was hardly conceivable for
many of the left wing activists present at Agamben's lecture at Tiqqun. Although the state acknowledges the anti-law tendencies in the writings
of the Tiqqun collective, the activists present at Agamben's lecture failed to recognize this specific form of resistance. What Agamben
attempted to show was that the
power of the T'iqqun collective lay precisely in the fact that they did not
prescribe any concrete actions but sought unexpected possibilities in 'being thus'. In that same sense, Agamben's analysis of
Kafka's work should not be seen as a manual for activist freedom but as a description of small opportunities, of examples in which the power
relation is diffuse and that we must attempt to recognize, create and use. Agamben shows us different possibilities and means for resistance,
but these are not regular acts with a goal; rather, they are means without end. As Kishik pointed out, Agamben's work is an attempt to "*make
means meet" (not with their ends, but with each other)'.7 One way to achieve this is through gestures. The gestures of the people in the
Oklahoma theatre and elsewhere in Kafka's work, the shame of Joseph K. and the 'as not' in Kafka's 'On Parables' show us that there are other
strategies, aside from active resistance, to reverse political situations.
 AT Bryant
They do not meet Bryants test for a worthwhile strategy the 1ac is nothing but: step
1 vote aff, step two question mark, step 3 solves extinction.

We solve anti-fiat modes of debate allow for activist stances that have material
ways of resolving real world issues

The division between theory and praxis only serves to solidify neocolonial violence
basing politics in the ontological incoherence of the western political project is vital to
any long term peace.
Spanos 8 (William V Spanos, distinguished professor of English at Binghamton University, PhD from the
University of Wisconsin, 2008, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of
Vietnam, pp 26-31, modified)
I will return later in this book to Saids provocative retrieval of empires spectral Othershis bringing of this marginalized figure out of the shadows of imperialisms
periphery to center stage, as it were. It will suffice here to suggest that by thus assuming the exilic perspective of the Abgeschiedene in addressing the question of
global colonialism, it should now be clear that my intervention has not been intended to mimic the by now commonplace critical imperative of a certain
postcolonial discourse, usually identified with Salmon Rushdie and Malek Alloula, in which the Empire writes back to the imperial center.32 This critical
initiative, perhaps needless to say, has contributed significantly, especially by way of identifying the colonial project with cultural, specifically literary, production, to
the inauguration of an anticolonial discourse that would be commensurate to the complex and multisituated operations of American (neo)colonialism in the
postimperial age of globalization, above all, in that phase that has been represented by its intellectual deputies as the end of history and is now bearing witness
to Americas unilateral imposition of capitalist democracy on rogue states that threaten the American Peace. But, as I have suggested, it remains inadequate to
this most difficult of tasks, not impossible. This inadequacy is not simply the result of this criticisms vestigial adherence to the kind of imperial thinking it would
interrogate (i.e., its not being postcolonial exilic or, rather, a-partenough).33 It is also, and primarily, the result of a paradoxically limited historical sense.
praxis-oriented postcolonial criticism, like the genealogical
Despite its insistent appeal to history against theory, this

criticism of Foucault and even Said, from which it ultimately derives, is not historical enough. In
keeping with its indifference to, if not its antitheoretical bias against theory, it has, in fact, reduced
the critical potential of this resonant motif of resistance by restricting the genealogy of imperialism by
and large to the modern erafrom the age of exploration in the fifteenth century to the age of
imperialism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In overlooking its own origins in the exilic theory that emerged in
response to the decisive self-destruction of the imperial (onto)logic of the discourse of the Occident in the middle of the twentieth century, this

postcolonial discourse, in other words, has also lost sight of an earlier, deeper, and polyvalent
structural origin of the colonial project. I mean the very epochal moment of the founding of the idea of the Occidental polis in late Greek
and especially (imperial) Roman antiquity. This was the moment that bore witness to the Wests self-conscious inscription of metaphysicsof thinking the transitory
and singular (contingent or always incomplete) event from the exclusionary or accommodational providential/ panoptic vantage point of its (preconceived)
completionas the truth of being and history at large.34 As a consequence of this forgetting of the provenance of imperialism in the Roman transformation
of the errant thinking of the Greeks into a correct (and, in Fukuyamas term, directional) thinking, the discourse of postcolonialism has delimited its

genealogy of Western imperialism to the Enlightenment and after and thus the ideological parameters of imperialism to the practice of empire,
that is, to the site of cultural geopolitics. Despite its suggestive spontaneous probings beyond it (mostly in the form of its inadequately thought reiteration of the
relay of white metaphorscenter/periphery; light/darkness; plantation/wilderness; settler/nomad, development (improvement)/underdevelopment that
systematically informs the truth discourse of metaphysics), they therefore remain vestigially and disablingly [stultifyingly] disciplinary. In other words, this
privileged version ofpostcolonialist discourse is determined by a problematic that restricts itself to an idea of the imperial that remains indifferent to
or, more accurately, overlooks the inaugural ontological ground on which the developing structure of the

West as the West restsa ground that, as I have shown, visibly reasserts itself in the neo-Hegelianism of the post-Cold War end-of-history discourse.
As such, it is a critical discourse that addresses an imperialism that has been rendered anachronistic, if not exactly obsolete, by the triumphant cultures
representation of the end of the Cold War as the end of history and the annunciation of this good news as the advent of the New World Order. I mean, to retrieve
and reconstellate into the present historical occasion the forgotten and decisively important ideological function of the ruse of the Pax Romana, the peace of what I
have been calling the Pax Americana. On the other hand, I do not want to suggest that the theoretical perspective of Heideggers Abgeschiedene as such (or, for
that matter, its poststructuralist allotropes) is entirely adequate to this task of resistance either, since the consequences of his (and, in a different way, of those he
influenced) failure to adequately think the political imperatives of his interrogation of Western ontology are now painfully clear. We
must, rather,
think the Abgeschiedenethe ghostly ontological exile evolving a way of errant thinking that
would be able to resist the global imperialism of Occidental/technological logicwith, say, Saids political Deleuzian
nomad: the displaced political emigr evolving, by way of his or her refusal to be answerable to the Truth of the Occident, a politics capable of

resisting the polyvalent global neo-imperialism of Occidental political power. The Abgeschiedene, the displaced thinker, and the
migrant, the displaced political person, are not incommensurable entities; they are two indissolubly related, however uneven, manifestations of the same world-
historical event. The political Left of the 1980s, which inaugurated the momentum against theory, was entirely justified in accusing the theoretical discourse
of the 1970s of an ontological and/or textual focus that, in its obsessive systematics, rendered it, in Saids word, unworldlyindifferent to the imperial politics
of historically specific Western history. But it can be seen now, in the wake of the representation of the global triumph of liberal democratic capitalism in the
1990s as the end of history, or, at any rate, of Americas arrogant will to impose capitalist-style democracy on different, destabilizing cultures, that this Lefts focus
on historically specific politics betrays a disabling [stultifying] indifference to the polyvalent imperial politics of ontological representation. It thus repeats in reverse
praxis-oriented discourse, that is, tendseven as it
the essential failure of the theoretically oriented discourse it has displaced. This alleged

unconsciously employs in its critique the ontologically produced white metaphorics and rhetoric informing the practices it opposesto separate praxis

from and to privilege it over theory, the political over the ontological. Which is to say, it continues, in
tendency, to understand being in the arbitraryand disabling [stultifying] disciplinary terms endemic to
and demanded by the very panoptic classificatory logic of modern technological thinking, the
advanced metaphysical logic that perfected, if it did not exactly enable, the colonial project proper.35 In so
doing, this praxis-oriented discourse fails to perceive that being, however it is represented, constitutes a continuum, which, though unevenly developed at any
historically specific moment, nevertheless traverses its indissolubly related sites from being as such and the epistemological subject through the ecos, culture
(including family, class, gender, and race), to sociopolitics (including the nation and the international or global sphere). As a necessary result, it fails to perceive the
emancipatory political potential inhering in the relay of differences released (decolonized) by an interrogation of the dominant Western cultures disciplinary
representation of being. By this relay of positively potential differences I do not simply mean the nothing (das Nichts) or the ontological difference (Heidegger),
existence (Sartre), the absolutely other (Levinas), the differance or trace (Derrida), the differend (Lyotard), the invisible or absent cause (Althusser)
that belong contradictorily to and haunt white/totalitarian metaphysical thinking.36 I also mean the pariah (Arendt), the nomad (Deleuze and Guattari), the
hybrid or the minus in the origin (Bhabha), the nonbeings (Dussel), the subaltern (Guha), the emigr (Said), the denizen (Hammar), the refugee
(Agamben), the queer (Sedgwick, Butler, Warner), the multitude (Negri and Hardt),37 and, to point to the otherwise unlikely affiliation of these international
postcolonial thinkers with a certain strain of postmodern black American literature, the darkness (Morrison) that belong contradictorily to and haunt
white/imperial culture politics: The images of impenetrable whiteness need contextualizing to explain their extraordinary power, pattern, and consistency.
Because they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control, these
images of blinding [totalizing] whiteness seem to function as both antidote for meditation on the shadow that is the companion to this whitenessa dark and
abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing. This haunting, a darkness from which our early literature seemed
unable to extricate itself, suggests the complex and contradictory situation in which American writers found themselves during the formative years of the nations
literature.38 In this chapter, I have overdetermined the ontological perspective of the Abgeschiedene, the errant thinker in the interregnum who would think the
spectral nothing that a triumphant empirical science wishes to know nothing about,39 not simply, however, for the sake of rethinking the question of being as
such, but also to instigate a rethinking of the uneven relay of practical historical imperatives precipitated by the post-Cold War occasion. My purpose, in other
words, has been to make visible and operational the substantial and increasingly complex practical role that
ontological representation has played and continues to play in the Wests perennial global imperial
project, a historical role rendered disablingly [stultifyingly] invisible as a consequence of the oversight inherent in the vestigially disciplinary problematics of the
privileged oppositional praxis-oriented discourses, including that of all too many New Americanists. In accordance with this need to reintegrate theory

and practicethe ontological and the sociopolitical, thinking and doingand to accommodate the present uneven balance of this relationship to the actual
conditions established by the total colonization of thinking in the age of the world picture, I would suggest, in a prologemenal way, the inordinate urgency of
resuming the
virtually abandoned destructive genealogy of the truth discourse of the post-Enlightenment
Occident, now, however, reconstellated into the post-Cold War conjuncture. I mean specifically, the conjuncture that, according to Fukuyama (and the
strategically less explicit Straussian neoconservatives that have risen to power in America after 9/11), has borne apocalyptic witness to the global triumph of liberal
capitalist democracy and the end of history. Such a reconstellated genealogy, as I have suggested, will
show that this triumphant post-
Cold War American polity constitutes the fulfillment (end) of the last (anthropological) phase of a continuous, historically
produced, three part ontological/cultural/sociopolitical Western history: what Heidegger, to demarcate its historical itinerary (Greco-Roman, Medieval/Protestant
Christian, and Enlightenment liberal humanist), has called the ontotheological tradition. It will also show that this long and various history, which the
neoconservatives would obliterate, has been from its origins imperial in essence. I am referring to the repeatedly reconstructed history inaugurated by the late or
post- Socratic Greeks or, far more decisively, by the Romans, when they reduced the pre-Socratic truth as a-letheia (unconcealment) to veritas (the adequation of
mind and thing), when, that is, they reified (essentialized) the tentative disclosures of a still originative Platonic and Aristotelian thinking and harnessed them as
finalized, derivative conceptional categories to the ideological project of legitimizing, extending, and efficiently administering the Roman Empire in the name of the
Pax Romana. To be more specific, this reconstellated destructive genealogy will show that the reality of the triumphant American democratic/capitalist polity
rests on a fabricated ontological base that privileges the hierarchically structured binarist principle of principlesthat identity is the condition for the possibility of
difference and not the other way aroundand that, therefore, this polity is imperial in essence as well as in its multisituated political practices. It will show, in other
words, that, in representing being meta ta physica (from after or above beings temporal disseminations), this ontological base generates a truth discourse
that, far from being transparently objective, open to the empirical event, is actually re-presentational, pan-optic, and retro-spective
and, as such, utterly metaphorical and ideological. To retrieve the now virtually forgotten, but extraordinarily resonant phrase Derrida coined to identify this truth
discourse with European origins and interests, it will show that the alleged disinterested truth discourse of the West is, in fact, a binarist white
mythology.40 It will show that its truth structuralizes or, more telling in the proximity of its sublimated metaphorics of temporal closure to the operations
of colonization, spatializes or territorializes the differential dynamics of temporality around a polyvalent (Eurocentric) Logos. I mean by this Logos a Transcendental
Signified or Principle of Presence invariably represented in Western history since the Romans codification of the domiciled colonus (farmer/settler) as the
binary opposite of the nomadic sylvestris (savage, literally, of the woods) in the form of a combination of indissolubly related, hierarchically structured binary
tropes of resolution or accommodationmost notably and enablingly, the centered circle, the panoptic eye (and its light), and, not least, the maturation process
(the clearing of the wilderness and the planting and cultivation of the original seed). It is, for example, this relay of imperial tropes emanating from and circulating
around the presiding Logos that informs Hegels imperial Philosophy of History, epitomized by the incantatory repetition of World History) in the following famous
passage on Enlightenment: The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning. The History of the
World has an East kat exochen (the term East in itself is entirely relative), for although the Earth forms a sphere, History performs no circle round it, but has on the
contrary a determinate East, viz., Asia. Here rises the outward physical Sun, and in the West it sinks down: here consentaneously rises the Sun of self-consciousness,
which diffuses a nobler brilliance. The History of the World is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a Universal principle and
conferring subjective freedom.41 And, I will show in chapter 6, it is this relay of imperial tropes, subsumed to the Hegelian paradigm by Fukuyama, that has
pervaded the unexceptionalist discourse of American exceptionalism from the Puritan jeremiad in behalf of the errand in the wilderness, through the discourse of
the frontier in behalf of the fulfillment of Americas Manifest Destiny, to that of the post-9/11 effort to recuperate the American national identity in the wake of the
Vietnam War. More immediately, the reconstellation of destructive genealogy into the post-Cold War occasion will show that the relay of binarist white
metaphors informing the truth discourse of the triumphant post- Enlightenment democratic/capitalist society constitutes a naturalized diagram of a mechanism
power is
of power reduced to its ideal form.42 Contrary to the representation of the reigning disciplinary interpretation of being, this hegemonic diagram of

operative simultaneously, however unevenly at any particular historical specific occasion, throughout the
continuum of being, from the representation of being and the subject as such, through gender and race, to culture, economics, and the national and international
polity. It is, in short, polyvalent in its imperial applications.
 AT Cede the Political
Actomania creates a bad form of engagement the decisions the plan mandate, aka
those made under duress, cause serial policy failure and destroy the pedagogical
process of the 1ac by centering death as a motivator for all decision making.

Status quo engagement only reproduces the normalized political subject. The drive to
bring everyone under the umbrella of the ideal citizen naturalizes violence against
otherness that is seen as a threat to their utopian project.

Its try or die for the alternative only an affective engagement towards political
subjectivity can reclaim the political.
Gilbert 9 (Jeremy, "Deleuzian Politics? A survey and Some Suggestions)

Taking this further, I would argue that if any mode of self-government emerges as implicitly desirable from the perspective
developed by Deleuze and Guattari, then it would clearly be one which was both democratic and pluralistic without being subject to
the existing limitations of representative liberal democracy. Deleuzes earlier work may occasionally be characterised
by a Nietzschean aristocratic tone. However, where he expresses anti-democratic sentiments in his work with Guattari, these only ever seem
imbricated with
to spring from a commitment to that Marxian tradition which understands liberal democratic forms to be deeply
processes of capitalist exploitation. When weighing up the legacy of this tradition today, it is worth reflecting that the
degradation of actually existing democracy under neoliberal conditions in recent decades, especially in the years
since the fall of the Berlin wall, has lent much weight to the hypothesis that a democratic politics which has no anti-capitalist dimension can
only ultimately fail, as the individualisation of the social sphere and the corporate
control of politics progressively
undermine the effectiveness of public institutions. 83 82 From such a perspective, the problems with existing forms of
representative democracy are several. Firstly, in ceding legislative sovereignty to elected bodies for several years at a
time, they rely on the artificial stabilisation of majorities of opinion along party lines which do not
actually express the complexity of popular desires in any meaningful way. While it is clearly true that democracy as such
necessarily demands the temporary organisation of molarities for the purpose of taking collective decisions, the existing set of relationships
between individuals and parties does not enable these molarities to emerge with sufficient intensity to effect major change: for example,
despite the vehemence of anti-war opinion in the UK in 2003, the government was effectively at liberty to pursue the invasion of Iraq, safe in
the knowledge that this intensity would disperse before the next general election. At the same time, these relationships do not
enable the emergence of sites of engagement and deliberation which would enable new ideas and practices to emerge,
simply delegating political engagement to a class of professional politicians, journalists, and policy-specialists whose job is not to
innovate, invent and transform existing relations of power, but to maintain them, and the arrangements which express them. Most crucially,
they do not enable the new forms of collective becoming which a more participatory, decentralised, molecular
democracy would facilitate, preventing any meaningful institutional expression of those new forms of dynamic, mobile,
cosmopolitan collectivity which globalisation makes possible. Instead they seek to actualise that potential only in the politically ineffectual
forms of a universalised liberalism or banal forms of multiculturalism, two complementary grids which are imposed upon global flows within
the parameters of either the nation state or legalistic supra-national institutions. The drive to find new forms of participative
democracy which characterises the leading-edge of contemporary socialist practice, 85 84 and which has informed not only the politics of the
social forum movement 86 but more broadly the entire history of radical democratic demands (including, for example, the
Chartists demand for annual parliaments, or the Bolshevik cry for all power to the soviets), surely expresses just this desire for
democratic forms not stymied by the apparatuses of majority and individualisation.
 AT Condo
Counter Interpretation negative gets 2 conditional advocacies solves your offense.

Best policy option-many ideas must be compared to the aff in order to find the best
policy option, which is the point of the round

Reciprocity- The fact that the aff can perm and advocate multiple perms means that
the neg can run multiple conditional counterplans

Neg flex The aff has intrinsic advantages in terms of framing the debate, giving both
the first and last speeches, and win/loss percentages prove. The neg needs a variety of
approaches to answer the aff.

Harder debate is better for debate-forces us to work harder, learn more and make
debate a more productive activity. It doesnt matter if it is infinitely regressive or not.

We arent a moving target because we will have to pick one and because the status
quo is always an option. All arguments are conditional. The aff will kick advantages
and we can concede disads. We can kick a CP

Skew Inevitable without a K or a CP wed just read 4 more DAs and 3 T violations.
The 2AC is hard no matter what.

Reject the Arg not the team make them prove abuse in round.
 AT Empirics
Objectivity is a myth cognitive bias intervenes in academic decisions.
Zizek 12 (Slajov, Legendary political theorist and the Batman, U of Llubljana, Interviewed
by Bradley G. Bolman and Tara Raghuveer, A Conversation with Slavoj Zizek, The
Harvard Crimson, 2/10/12, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/10/theres-this-
slovenian-saying/?page=single#)We dont defend gendered language or Zizeks rhetoric
in general
FM: It seems that a similar deadlock appears in
the context of both the economic crisis and global warmingexperts
cant seem to predict them, nor will politicians or society act to stop them. SZ: I especially hate, from my own
experience, when people say, Oh, who could have predicted this [economic crisis]? No. I know a couple of leftists and empiricists who exactly
predicted this. These are not the kinds of cheap catastrophists who all of the time give bad predictions and then something happens so that
they go awry. No, no. They were very precise and predicted this crisis. Paul Krugman said something deeply true. A guy asked him, But now
that we know, wouldnt things be radically different if we were to know 10 years back what we know now? He said, No, no, it wouldnt. The
you may know that there may be a
system pushes you to act in a certain way. The illusion is much stronger. Like,
catastrophe, but nonetheless, we would have done exactly the same thing. I mean, its no longer a
question of knowledge. Today many, even sociologists, have this wonderful idea of how, although we live in a society of
knowledgeeven scientific knowledge[it] is becoming more and more contingent, non-binding. I think it
was the German theorist Ulrich Beck who drew attention to the simple fact: today we speak about expert opinions. Are we aware how
paradoxical this term is? The idea is that we ordinary people have opinions. They tell you the truth. Now experts all of a sudden are telling us
different opinions and we have to decide how, who knows, if even they dont know. This is the tragedy of our predicament of freedom
of choice. The problem is...we are often forced to choose without having serious cognitive coordinates of how or what to choose.... The price is
science is no longer a homogenous science but its turning into kind of a pluralistic field of
that
opinions. For example, I once had a debate with a quantum physicist. And he accused me, You stupid guys with your French theory, total
bullshit. He made fun precisely of this: You can just say whatever you want. And I told him, Fuck you! Look at quantum physics: literally
anything goes. You can claim that there is a Big Bang, that there is no Big Bang, there were multiple Big Bangs Its incredible how, when
science approaches a certain limit, how open it becomes. Its as if anything you can imagine, you find scientists who advocate. Im not saying
science is just laughable. It is real. Im just saying how difficult it is to decide today without a proper cognitive
base. We are more and more compelled to this. Andre Depui said that the problem when people say, Oh but we dont know if its really
global warming. The problem is that if you want to wait until we really know, it will be, by definition, too late. Because we will really know
when the catastrophe is here. This is maybe one of the great things that has to be decided as a specific problemin Germany there were
working with certain proponents of risk societyhow to decide some basic rules of decision-making in situations that are cognitively non-
transparent. You have to decide because not doing anything is also a decision. You have to decide, but you dont know. The situation is not
transparent.

Debate is uniquely destructive the Frankenstein you produce is not objectivity.

HSI 13 (Hsimpact.com, Website about high school debate, Epistemology- Defending
Your House, 10/16/13, http://hsimpact.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/epistemology-
defending-your-house/)
When negatives introduce a K of epistemology the responses of most affirmatives are incoherent. Epistemology arguments call
into question how you know the things you presented in your 1AC are accurate/true. At its most basic level a bias
argument is a k of epistemology- your authors let their ideology get in the way of their reporting and therefore your evidence is suspect. At a
more complicated level epistemology ks indict schools of thought or branches of the academy and the way they produce knowledge. Those
air quotes are important: most affirmatives who dont understand K arguments think something like this our 1AC is a series of facts about the
world, my partner and I serve as intermediaries relating these facts to the judge. A crucial postmodern insight is that observation is not
a passive exercise but an active attempt to impose order on the world. Your 1AC didnt come into
being naturally- you picked evidence and put it together to make a certain set of arguments. Your
authors underwent a similar process. Even if there are factual claims in your 1AC (in a sense of as close as we
can get to facts) the conclusions and arguments made based on those facts are not truth in any meaningful sense
of the world. Lets look at a simple example from the recent space topic. Many affirmatives argued in favor of space militarization based on the
idea that the PRC was in the process of militarizing space in order to counter US capabilities. Now affirmative authors and negative authors
stipulate to a certain set of facts: that the PRC tested an ASAT capable weapon in 2007, that the Chinese and American militaries have had a
less than rosy relationship in the last decade, that Chinas growth puts it in a position of power similar to that of the US etc (not all authors
agree on all obvi). What the China threat K is saying is not china did not test a weapon but instead that the way the affirmative deduces
motive and based on that motive a foreign policy objective and ascribes it to the PRC is problematic. It assumes a benevolent US space
presence that is under threat from China instead of assuming that China is defending its own legitimate space interests from US attack for
example. So what the epistemology K is saying here is not no truth , but instead that the affirmatives version of the truth is not NEUTRAL
and OBJECTIVE. These words neutral and objective generally mean that some kind of information is not influenced by ideology or politics-
which the affirmatives China advantage almost certainly is. Now, when faced with such an argument the affirmative
usually responds with some or all of the following 1. Well we should get to weigh our aff- this is total
nonsense and not an argument. If you find yourself saying this in a debate slap yourself in the face three times. This is not a framework, this
is not a form of impact calculus, it is the argumentative equivalent of a null set. Imagine this: Aff: AQ threatening terrorist attacks with aliens on
American Flag stores- fox news 13 Neg: well fox news is not a credible source Aff: Well we should get to weigh our aff Neg: Yesyou do get
to weigh your aff, unfortunately your aff is a steaming pile of crap so .00001 percent of the dip cap DA
outweighs it Aff: But its our aff and we would like to weight it Judge: I vote neg on the Dip Cap DA for the first time ever Weighing
your aff presupposes that your aff has some value, and epistemology Ks call that weight into question. This is the K
concept of logically prior- before you can weigh something you have to decide how much it weighs/how to assign it weight. Instead of arguing
you GET to weigh things you need to be arguing that they have weight.
 AT Fairness
This is a new link fairness claims are grounded in envy and gain coherence through
violent lashout
McGowan 13 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Dont Have, Project Muse)
This is whyequality doesnt solve the problem of the social antagonism. Rather than eliminating the envy of the others
enjoyment, a sense of justice exacerbates it. The demand for equality and justice has its origins in envy of the others enjoyment.
According to Joan Copjec, Envy is not simply an impediment, but the very condition of our notion of justice.35 Because
the idea of equality and justice is rooted in envy, each member of society has constant suspicions about the others and their commitment to
forgoing pleasure for the sake of the social order as a whole. Suspicions
continually emerge, revealing that the social
antagonism remains in force in such a way that makes eruptions of violence inevitable.
 AT Legal Education
The regime of legal education serves to normalize the necropolitical order through a
paradox of specificity and universalization.
Fernando 10 (Jeremy, Sick Philosopher person who responds to emails in funny ways, The Suicide
Bomber and her gift of death, Page 76-80, NKF)
The unknowability of the Law becomes even more curious if we take into account the fact that, "no one else could gain admittance here,
because this entrance was meant solely for you." 13 This suggests that it is a personalized Law and this opens up the paradox that every
law, that the Law itself, faces: in order for something to be Law, it has to have a certain universality, in that it can be
applied to everyone without distinction or discrimination; however each application of the Law is singular,
unique and situation al. lt is this very paradox between universality and singularity that Paul de Man reminds us of
with reference to the tension that lies between grammar and figurative language: The system of relationships that generate the
text and that functions independently of its referential meaning is its grammar. To the extent that a text is grari1matical, it is a logical code or a
machine. And there can be nongrammatical text, as the most nongrammatical of poets, Mallarm, was the first to acknowledge. Any
nongrammatical text will always be read as a deviation from an assumed grammatical norm. But just as no text is
conceivable without grammar, no grammar is conceivable without the suspension of referential meaning.
Just as no law can ever be written unless one suspends any consideration of applicability to a particular entity including, of course, oneself,
grammatical logic can function only if its referential consequences are disregarded. On the other hand, no
law is a law unless it also
applies to particular individuals. lt cannot be left hanging in the air, in the abstraction of its generality. Only by thus
referring back to particular praxis can the justice of the law be tested, exactly as the jusstesse of any statement can only be tested by its
referential verifiability, or by deviation from its verification . ... There can be no text without grammar: the Iogic of grammar generates
texts only in the absence of referential meaning, but every text generates a referent that subverts the grammatical
principle to which it owed its constitution.14 In other words, we can call text any entity that can be considered from
such a double perspective: as a generative, open minded, non-referential grammatical system and as a figural
system closed off by a transcendental signification that subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence
. .The" definition" of the text also states the impossibility of its existence and prefigures the allegorical narratives of this impossibility. A text is
defined by the necessity of considering a statement, at the same time, as performative and constative, and the logical tension between figure
and grammar is repeated in the impossibility of distinguishing two linguistic functions which are not necessarily compatible. It seems that as
soon as a text knows what it states, it can only act deceptively ... and if a text does not act, it cannot state what it
knows. Hence, at best the Law can only be known -if that term can even be used in the first place -at the very moment in
which it is applied; to the man, to K, to you : the Law can only be glimpsed by the effects it has on one, but can never be known as such.
This is precisely why the priest tells K, "you don't have to consider everything as true, you just have to consider it as necessary": it is not so
much that one cannot tell between what is true or not (which is the misunderstanding that K has in thinking that lies are
made into a universal system"16) but more radically that each truth -and by extension each lie-is only provisional,
situationally singular. lt is the situationality of the Law, of each positing of the Law, that allows the "commentators
[to] tell us: the correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive."
In fact, one can only guess at best whether it is a correct understanding, which suggests that every misunderstanding is not only potentially a
correct understanding, but that it is impossible to distinguish between them in the first place: one might even posit that within every
understanding lies a misunderstanding. It is for this reason that" even the executer of the Law remains blind to it: all the
doorkeeper is doing is carrying . out the Law in that particular situation, the situation of the Law being "solely for you"; in other words, the
only knowledge that the executer of the Law has is of its effects the only time that the executer knows of the La w is
at the very moment (s)he is executing it.

The regime of legal thought naturalizes normative violence and produces destructive mediocrity.
Schlag 9 [Pierre, Byron R. White Professor of Law and Former Associate Dean for Research, University of
Colorado Law School, ESSAY AND RESPONSE: Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law, and the Rank Anxiety of
Nothing Happening (A Report on the State of the Art), March, 2009, Georgetown Law Journal, 97 Geo.
L.J. 803]
In terms of social organization then, there may be something to be said for creating a professional corps (lawyers) whose modes of
communication are widely shared and relatively standardized. Notice that if this is the objective, then the only place where that sort of
standardized communication can be widely shared is somewhere close to the middle of the bell curve. Both intellectual sloth and intellectual
excellence are, by definition, aberrant and thus detract from our efforts at standardization. Thus, training for mediocrity does serve a
social function (within limits, of course). Mediocrity is not the only aim here. One would like this mediocrity to be the best it can be. We
would like legal professionals to share a language and a mode of thought and, at the same time, for that language and mode of thought to be as
perspicuous and intelligent as possible. Given the omnipresence of the bell curve, these desiderata are obviously in tension. The economists
would likely talk about achieving "the optimal degree" of intelligence and mediocrity at the margin, but my sense is this will only get us so far.
For law professors, the tension is bound to be somewhat frustrating. What many law professors would like--because many of them are
intellectually inclined--is to bring intelligence to bear within legal discourse. This is bound to be a somewhat frustrating venture. Legal
discourse is not designed to produce intelligence and, frankly, the materials and the discourse can only bear so much.
Good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness--any of these virtues is often enough to snuff out real
thinking. Indeed, whatever appeal good judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness may have for a judge or a lawyer (and I am prepared
to say the appeal is considerable), such virtues are not particularly helpful to intellectual achievement. On the contrary, intellectual
achievement requires the abandonment of received understandings. In fact, I would go so far as to say that intellectual vitality (at least
in the context of a discipline like law) [*829] requires some degree of defamiliarization, some reach for the exotic. The thing is,
those sorts of efforts are not going to get very far if they constantly have to answer to good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness, and the
like. And at this point, I would like to flip the argument made earlier in the paper. Here, I would like us to think of appeals to good judgment,
groundedness, and reasonableness in legal thought as appeals to mediocrity. Making people see things involves things far
different from good judgment, groundedness, or reasonableness. It involves a kind of artistry--a
reorientation of the gaze, a disruption of complacency, a sabotage of habitual forms of thought, a
derailing of cognitive defaults. This is part of what a really good education is about. Constant
obeisance to good judgment or groundedness or reasonableness, by contrast, will systematically
frustrate such efforts. n57 This is all rather vexing. Legal academics--with aspirations to intellectual excellence--are thus destined to
play out the myth of Sisyphus. The main difference, of course, is that Sisyphus had a real rock to push up a real hill. The law professors' rock and
hill, by contrast are symbolic--imaginative constructions of their own making. Arguably, pushing a symbolic rock up a symbolic hill is
substantially easier than doing it for real. At the very least, it is easier to fake it and to claim success. At the same time, though, the symbolic
nature of the exercise perhaps makes it more transparently pointless. As between these two points, there is a certain dissonance. On the one
hand, we are dealing with pushing rocks up hills--and that is surely hard work. On the other hand, the rocks and hills are of our own
imagination--so it should be easy. This is very confusing. n58 My best guess (and I offer this only as a preliminary hypothesis) is that the
dissonance here might yield a certain degree of neurosis. n59 Still the question pops up again: "So what?" So what--so you have maybe seven
thousand-something law professors in the nation and you know, maybe ninety-six percent are engaged in a kind of vaguely neurotic
scholarship. So what? Maybe it's borderline tragic. Maybe, these people could have done so much better. None of this, by the way, is clearly
established. But let's just assume, it's true. Who cares? Seven thousand people--that's not a lot of people. Plus, it's hard to feel for them. I know
that nearly all of them would be us (but still). It's an extraordinarily privileged life. So why care about this? Here's why. The thing about legal
scholarship is that it plays--through the mediation of the professorial mind--an important role in shaping the ways, the [*830] forms, in which
law students think with and about law. n60 If they are taught to think in essentially mediocre ways,
they will reproduce those ways of thinking as they practice law and politics. If they are incurious, if
they are lacking in political and legal imagination, if they are simply repeating the standard moves (even
if with impressive virtuosity) they will, as a group, be wielding power in essentially mediocre ways . And the thing is:
when mediocrity is endowed with power, it yields violence. And when mediocrity is endowed with great power, it yields
massive violence. n61 All of which is to say that in making the negotiation between the imprinting of standard forms of legal thought and the
imparting of an imaginative intelligence, we err too much on the side of the former. (Purely my subjective call here--but so is everybody else's.)
Another way to put it is that while there is something to be said for the standardization point made earlier, generally, standardization is
overdone. n62
 AT Moots the Aff
The 1ac is an 8 minute defense of its epistemology the aff is obviously offense
against the kritik.
 AT Policy Education
Education isnt real and you have no substantive validation for its existence. The
alternatives affect is the only way to affect personalized change.
Baudrillard in 81 [Jean, Simulacra and Simulation p. 80-81]
The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media
messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere
information is thought to produce an
accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of
capital. Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there
be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social-just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions
and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without
which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where
we think
that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs. Information devours its own content. It devours
communication and the social. And for two reasons. I. Rather than creating communication , it exhausts itself in the act of staging

communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The
nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, black- mail through speech: "You are concerned, you are the event, etc." More and
more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through
which one stages the desire of the audience, the anti theater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the
traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that-
would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in
the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the
model that calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a circular process-that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The
hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished. Thus not only communication but the social functions in a
closed circuit, as a lure-to which the force of myth is attached. Belief ,
faith in information attach themselves to this tautological
proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality. But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that
which was attached to myths in ancient societies. One both believes and doesn't. One does not ask oneself, "I know very well, but still." A sort of inverse simulation
in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of communication in which this system encloses us. To this tautology of
the system the masses respond with ambivalence, to deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief.
Myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be

exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses.

 AT Reps Bad
Reps firstthe 1AC was a performative artifact. If the only tangible impact at the end
of the round is our education, that representations come first because they
fundamentally shape how we relate to the epistemology of the 1AC.
 AT Pragmatism Good
Their changing the world attitude through the political sphere is bullshit and leads
to a hatred of the self and lashout
Baudrillard 5 [Jean. French postmodern dude: philosopher, sociologist, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. The
Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. Page 146-150]

'Bis Gottes Fehle hilft,' says H6lderlin. 'Until God's absence comes to our aid.' The death of God is, in fact, the deliverance from all re- sponsibility to another world.
But our responsibility for this world then becomes total, and there is no longer any possible redemption. Or, rather, redemption changes meaning: it is no longer the
redemption of man and his sin, but the redemption of the death of God. That death has to be redeemed by a com- pulsive effort to
transform the world. One has to ensure one's salvation at all costs by realizing the world for better or for
worse. A performance that tops off the one described by Max Weber in The Spirit ofCapitalism: that of

transforming the world into wealth for the greater glory of God. But it is no longer a question now of his glory; it is a
question of his death and of exorcizing it. The point is to make the world transparent and operational by
extirpating from it any illusion and any evil force. And so, under the hegemony of good, everything is
getting better and, at the same time, going from bad to worse: no hell any more, and no damnation. Everything
becomes susceptible of redemption. From this point on, good and evil, which were still opposing
powers, but linked to each other in transcendence, are to be dissociated for the purposes of a
definitive realization of the world under the banner of happiness. In fact, this idea of happiness bears merely a distant
relation to good. For if good is moral in essence, happiness, the performance of happiness - is in essence perfectly immoral. It is to such an

evangelization that we can ascribe all the manifest signs of well-being and accomplishment Offered to
us by a paradisiac civilization subject to the eleventh commandment, the commandment that sweeps
away ~1l others: 'Be happy and show all the signs of happiness!' . We can see this demand for universal redemption in the
way all current violence and injustice is being put on "trial, and also, retrospectively, all the crimes and violent events of the past: the French Revolution, slavery,
original sin and battered wives, the ozone layer and sexual harassment. In short, the investigative process for the Last Judgement is already well under way and we
are doomed first to condemn, then to absolve and whitewash the whole of our history; to exterminate evil from even the tiniest interstices, so as to offer the image
of a radiant universe ready to pass over into the next world. An inhuman, superhuman, all-too-human undertaking? And why fuel this eternal repentance, this chain
reaction of bad conscience? Because everything must be saved. This is where we have got to today. Everything will be re- deemed, the whole past will be
rehabilitated, buffed up to the point of transparency. As for the
future, it is better and worse yet: everything will be
genetically modified to" attain the biological and democratic perfection of the species'; The salvation that was
defined by the equivalence of merit and grace will be defined, once the fixation with evil and Hell has been overcome, by the equivalence of genes and
performance. To tell the truth, once happiness becomes the general equi- valent of salvation, pure and simple, then heaven itself is no longer needed. From

the point when everyone is potentially saved, no one is. Salvation no longer has any meaning. This is
the destiny that beckons for our democratic enterprise: it is stifled at birth for having forgotten the necessary
discrimination, for the omission of evil. We need, then, an irrevocable presence of evil, an evil from which there is no possible
redemption, an irrevocable dis- crimination, a perpetual duality of Heaven and Hell, and even, in a sense, a predestination of evil, for there can be no destiny
without some predestination. There is nothing immoral in this. According to the rules of the game, there is nothing immoral in

some losing and others winning, or even in everyone losing. What would be immoral would be for everyone to win. This
is the contemporary ideal of our democracy: that all should be saved. But that is possible only at the cost of a perpetual inflation and upping of the stakes. And this
is reassuring, since the imperative of salvation, of the individual state of grace, will always be thwarted by some challenge
or passion from elsewhere, and any form of personal beatitude may be sacrificed to something more vital, which
may be of the order of the will in Schopenhauer's terms or of the will to power in Nietzsche's, but which, in any event, retains the fateful quality

of that which, in opposition to any happy finality, is predestined to come to pass. Behind its euphoric
exaltation, this imperative of maximum performance bears within it evil and misfortune in the form of
a deep disavowal and a secret disillusionment. Perhaps performance is merely a collective form of
human sacrifice, but disembodied and distilled into our entire technological machinery. In this strange world, where everything is potentially available -
the body, sex, space, money, pleasure - to be taken or rejected en bloc, everything is there; nothing has disappeared physically, but everything has disappeared
metaphysically. 'As if by magic,' one might say, except that it has disappeared not so much by enchantment as by disenchantment. Individuals, such as they
are, become exactly what they are. Without transcendence and without image, they carry
on their lives like a useless function in the
eyes of another world, irrelevant even in their own eyes. And they do what they do all the better for
the fact that there is no other possibility. No authority to appeal to. They have sacrificed their lives to
their functional existences. They are one with the exact numerical calculation of their lives and their
performance. Summoned to get the greatest efficiency and pleasure out of themselves, human beings are
suddenly at odds; and their existences dislocated. An existence realized, then, but at the same time denied,

thwarted, disowned. Wherever humans are condemned to total freedom or to an ideal fulfilment, this automatic abreaction to ;their own good and
their own happiness seeps in. This imperative of maximum performance also comes into contradiction with the moral law, which dictates that everyone shall be put
on an equal basis and everything set to zero in the name of democracy and an equal division of opportunity and advantage. From the perspective of universal
redemption no one must stand out. For justice to be done, all privilege must disappear; everyone is called on to shed any specific qualities and to become once
again an elementary particle - collective happiness being that of the lowest common denominator. This is like potlatch in reverse, each outbidding the other in
insignificance, while zealously cultivating their tiniest difference and cobbling together their multiple identities. Recrimination means going back over the crime to
correct its trajectory and its effects. This is what we are doing in going back over the whole of our history, over the criminal history of the human species, so that we
may do penance right now as we await the Last Judgement.
 AT Sever Reps
There are no unlimited reps and proximate risk of a link should be sufficient the link
debate proves the strategy is reasonable and you ought to be ready for it. The
alternative is worse, because it precludes and reps-based debating and turns debate
into an echo-chamber for policy gargle.
Links
 Capitalism
Capital has evolved into a vampiric system of death that now tethers the desires of its
slaves to the production of the socius. This system distorts desire into a mechanism of
production that traps the body within a matrix of consumption and suffering.
Land 93, Nick. British philosopher, author, and lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Making it with Death. Page
3-5 NKF

There is a familiar humanist response to this becoming zombie at the limit possibility of the modern
worker, which is associated above all with the word alienation. The processes of de-skilling, or ever
accelerated re-skilling, the substitution of craft by abstract labour, and the increasing interexchangability of human activity with
technological processes, all accompanied by the dissolution of identity, loss of attachment, and
narcotization of affective life, are condemned from the basis of a moral critique. A reawakening of the political is
envisaged, aimed at the restoration of a lost human integrity. Modern existence is understood as profoundly deadened by the real

submission of humane values to an impersonal productivity, which is itself comprehended as the

expression of dead or petrified labour exerting a vampiric power over the living. The bloodless zombie
proletarian is to be resuscitated by the political therapist, ideologically cured of the unholy love for
the undead, and bonded to a new eternal life of social reproduction. The death core of capital is
thought as the object of critique. Deleuze is differentiated utterly from a socialist humanism of this kind since in the schizoanalytic programme death is the
impersonal subject of critique, and not an accursed value in the service of a condemnation. An intricate passage towards the end of AntiOedipus runs: The body without

organs is the model of death. As the authors of horror stories have understood so well. it is not death that serves as the model for catatonia. it is catatonic
schizophrenia that gives its model to death, zero intensity. The death model appears when the body
without organs repels the organs and lays them aside: no mouth, no tongue, no teeth to the point of
self-mutilation. to the point of suicide. Yet there is no real opposition between the body without organs
and the organs as partial objects: the only real opposition is to the molar organism that is the
common enemy. In the desiring-machine, one sees the same catatonic inspired by the immobile motor that forces him to put aside his organs, to different parts of the machine,
different and co-existing, different in their very coexistence. Hence it is absurd to speak of a death desire that would presumably

be in qualitative opposition to the life desires. Death is not desired, there is only death that desires,
by virtue of the body without organs or the immobile motor, and there is also life that desires, by
virtue of the working organs. [AOe 329]It is not therefore that the worker is transformed by a process of privation into a zombie. it is rather that primary
production migrates from personality towards zero, populating a desert at the end of our world. It is important at this stage to note that Spinoza
changes the sense of desert religion, no longer a religion sprung from the desert. it becomes a desert at the heart of religion. Spinoza's substance is a desert God. God as

impersonal zero, as a death that remains the unconscious subject of production. Within Spinozism God is dead, but
only in the sense of a baseline of zombie becomings, as that which Deleuze calls ''the plane of
consistency'', described in A Thousand Plateaus by the words ''fusionability as infinite zero'' (TP 158). One cannot differentiate on the plane of consistency between bodies without
organs and the body without organs, between machines and the machine. Between machines there is always a coupling that conditions their real difference, and all couplings are immanent to

. The machines produce their totality alongside themselves as the undifferentiated or

a macromachine

communicated element, a becoming a catatonic God, erupting like a tumour out of presubstantialized
matter, by which nature spawns death adjacent to itself. Almost inevitably. when it is a matter of the body without organs it is a matter of
Spinoza. In AntiOedipus we are told that: The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity, and the partial objects are these degrees, these intensive

parts that produce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = 0. The body without organs is the immanent substance, in the most
Spinozist sense of the word; and the partial objects are like its ultimate attributes, which belong to it precisely insofar as they ate really distinct and cannot on this account exclude or oppose
one another. (AOe 327)
 Disease
The affirmatives discourse of disease securitizes the alien body of the infected
justifies ethnic cleansing in pursuit of the perfect human
Gomel 2000 (Elana Gomel, English department head at Tel Aviv University, Winter 2000,
published in Twentieth Century Literature Volume 46,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_4_46/ai_75141042)
In the secular apocalyptic visions that have proliferated wildly in the last 200 years, the world has been destroyed by nuclear wars, alien
invasions, climatic changes, social upheavals, meteor strikes, and technological shutdowns. These baroque scenarios are shaped by the
eroticism of disaster. The apocalyptic desire that finds satisfaction in elaborating fictions of the End is double-edged. On the one hand, its
ultimate object is some version of the crystalline New Jerusalem, an image of purity so absolute that it denies the organic messiness of life. [1]
On the other hand, apocalyptic fictions typically linger on pain and suffering. The end result of apocalyptic
purification often seems of less importance than the narrative pleasure derived from the bizarre and opulent tribulations of the bodies being
burnt by fire and brimstone, tormented by scorpion stings, trodden like grapes in the winepress. In this interplay between the incorporeal
purity of the ends and the violent corporeality of the means the
apocalyptic body is born. It is a body whose mortal
sickness is a precondition of ultimate health, whose grotesque and excessive sexuality issues in angelic sexlessness, and
whose torture underpins a painless--and lifeless--millennium.The apocalyptic body is perverse, points out Tina Pippin, unstable and mutating
from maleness to femaleness and back again, purified by the sadomasochistic "bloodletting on the cross," trembling in abject terror while
awaiting an unearthly consummation (122). But most of all it is a suffering body, a text written in the script of stigmata, scars, wounds, and
sores. Any apocalypse strikes the body politic like a disease, progressing from the first symptoms of a large-scale disaster through the crisis of
the tribulation to the recovery of the millennium. But of all the Four Horsemen, the one whose ride begins most intimately, in the private
travails of individual flesh, and ends in the devastation of the entire community, is the last one, Pestilence. The contagious body is the most
characteristic modality of apocalyptic corporeality. At the same time, I will argue, it contains a counterapocalyptic potential, resisting the
dangerous lure of Endism, the ideologically potent combination of "apocalyptic terror", a nd "millennial perfection" (Quinby 2). This essay, a
brief sketch of the poetics and politics of the contagious body, does not attempt a comprehensive overview of the historical development of
the trope of pestilence. Nor does it limit itself to a particular disease, along the lines of Susan Sontag's classic delineation of the poetics of TB
the
and many subsequent attempts to develop a poetics of AIDS. Rather, my focus is on the general narrativity of contagion and on the way
plague-stricken body is manipulated within the overall plot of apocalyptic millennialism, which is a
powerful ideological current in twentieth-century political history, embracing such diverse
manifestations as religious fundamentalism, Nazism, and other forms of "radical desperation" (Quinby 4--
5). Thus, I consider both real and imaginary diseases, focusing on the narrative construction of the contagious body rather than on the precise
epidemiology of the contagion. All apocalyptic and millenarian ideologies ultimately converge on the utopian transformation of the body (and
the body politic) through suffering. But pestilence offers a uniquely ambivalent modality of corporeal apocalypse. On the one hand, it may be
appropriated to the standard plot of apocalyptic purification as a singularly atrocious technique of separating the damned from the saved. Thus,
the plague becomes a metaphor for genocide, functioning as such both in Mein Kampf and in Camus's The
Plague.[2] On the other hand, the experience of a pandemic undermines the giddy hopefulness of Endism. Since everybody is a potential victim,
the line between the pure and the impure can never be drawn with any precision. Instead of delivering the
climactic moment of the Last Judgment, pestilence lingers on, generating a limbo of common suffering in which a tenuous and moribund but
all-embracing body politic springs into being. The end is indefinitely postponed and the disease becomes a metaphor for the process of livi ng.
The finality of mortality clashes with the duration of morbidity. Pestilence is poised on the cusp between divine punishment and manmade
disaster. On the one hand, unlike nuclear war or ecological catastrophe, pandemic has a venerable historical pedigree that leads back from
current bestsellers such as Pierre Quellette's The Third Pandemic (1996) to the medieval horrors of the Black Death and indeed to the Book of
Revelation itself. On the other hand, disease is one of the central tropes of biopolitics, shaping much of the twentieth-century discourse of
power, domination, and the body. Contemporary plague narratives, including the burgeoning discourse of AIDS, are caught between two
contrary textual impulses: acquiescence in a (super) natural judgment and political activism. Their impossible combination produces a clash of
two distinct plot modalities. In his contemporary incarnations the Fourth Horseman vacillates between the voluptuous entropy of
indiscriminate killing and the genocidal energy directed at specific categories of victims. As Richard Dellamora points out in his gloss on Derrida,
apocalypse in general may be used "in order to validate violence done to others" while it may also function as a
modality of total resistance to the existing order (3). But my concern here is not so much with the difference between "good" and "bad"
apocalypses (is total extinction "better" than selective genocide?) as with the interplay of eschatology and politics in the construction of the
apocalyptic body.
Their disease securitization reduces the body to an inert object and deprives life of
fundamental value by reducing the self to an object in need of constant fortification.
This creates an ethic of life over living that deprives existence of value and ensures
new viruses and diseased more potent than anything every seen before ravage the
planet completely outside our control.
Baudrillard 93, Jean. The Baud-Man. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomenon Page 60-63 NKF edited for gendered
language**

Consider the 'Boy in the Bubble', surrounded, in his NASA-donated tent, by an atmospheric distillate of medical knowledge, protected from any
conceivable infection by an artificial immune system, 'cuddled' by his mother through the glass, laughing and growing up in an extraterrestrial

ambiance under the vigilant eye of science. Here we have the experimental version of the wolf-child, the 'wild child' raised by wolves. The parenting in this case,

however is done by computers. The Boy in the Bubble is a prefigurement of the future - of that total asepsis, that total extirpation of germs, which is the biological form of transparency . He

epitomizes the kind of vacuum-sealed existence hitherto reserved for bacteria and particles in laboratories but now destined for us as, more and more,
we are vacuum-pressed like records, vacuum-packed like deep-frozen foods and vacuum-enclosed for death as victims of fanatical therapeutic measures. That we think and reflect in a vacuum

the extermination of people* begins with the

is demonstrated by the ubiquitousness of artificial intelligence. It is not absurd to suppose that

extermination of people's* germs. One has only to consider the human being themselves*, complete with their* emotions, their* passions, their* laughter, their* sex and
his secretions, to conclude that people* is nothing but a dirty little germ - an irrational virus marring a universe of transparency. Once they* has been

purged, once everything has been cleaned up and all infection - whether of a social or a bacillary kind - has been driven out, then only the virus

of sadness will remain in a mortally clean and mortally sophisticated world. Thought, itself a sort of network of antibodies and natural immune defences, is also highly
vulnerable. It is in acute danger of being conveniently replaced by an electronic cerebrospinal bubble from which any animal or metaphysical reflex has been expunged. Even without all the

technological advantages of the Boy in the Bubble,we are already living in the bubble ourselves - already, like those characters in Bosch paintings, enclosed in a
crystal sphere: a transparent envelope in which we have taken refuge and where we remain, bereft of everything yet overprotected, doomed to artificial

immunity, continual transfusions and, at the slightest contact with the world outside, instant death. This is why we are all losing
our defences - why we are all potentially immunodeficient. All integrated and hyperintegrated systems - the technological system, the social system, even
thought itself in artificial intelligence and its derivatives tend towards the extreme constituted by immunodeficiency. Seeking to eliminate all external aggression, they secrete their own
internal virulence, their own malignant reversibility. When a certain saturation point is reached, such systems effect this reversal and undergo this alteration willy-nilly - and thus tend to self-

destruct. Their very transparency becomes a threat to them, and the crystal has its revenge. In a hyperprotected space the body loses all its
defences. So sterile are operating rooms that no germ or bacterium can survive there. Yet this is the very place
where mysterious, anomalous viral diseases make their appearance. The fact is that viruses proliferate as soon as
they find a free space. A world purged of the old forms of infection, a world 'ideal' from the clinical point of view, offers a
perfect field of operations for the impalpable and implacable pathology which arises from the sterilization
itself. This is a third-level pathology. Just as our societies are confronting a new kind of violence, born of the paradoxical fact that they are simultaneously both permissive and pacified, so
too we face new illnesses, those illnesses which beset bodies overprotected by their artificial , medical or computer-generated

shield. This pathology is produced not by accident, nor by anomie, but rather by anomaly. The very same thing happens with the social body, where the same causes bring about the same
perverse effects, the same unforeseeable dysfunctions - a situation comparable to the genetic disorder that occurs at the cellular level, again occasioned by overprotection, overcoding,
overmanagement. The social system, just like the biological body, loses its natural defences in precise proportion to the growing sophistication of its prostheses. Moreover, this unprecedented
pathology is unlikely to be effectively conjured away by medicine, because medicine is itself part of the system of overprotection, and contributes to the fanatical protective and preventive
measures lavished upon the body. Just as there seems to be no political solution to the problem of terrorism, so there seems to be no biological solution at present to the problems of AIDS and
cancer. Indeed, the causes are identical : anomalous symptoms generated at the most fundamental level by the system itself represent a reactive virulence designed to counter, in the first
case, a political over management of the social body, and in the second case, a biological over management of the body tout court. At an early stage the evil genie of otherness takes the forms
of accident, breakdown, failure. Only later does the viral, epidemic form make its appearance: a virulence that ravages the entire system, and against which the system is defenceless precisely
because its very integrity paradoxically engenders this alteration.
 Policy
Your normative discourse is only a cloak to hide the sword of ressentiment that
necessitates the worst atrocities in human history. Instead, we should shatter your
projectionist conceptions of catastrophe and let them fall by the wayside.
Baudrillard 2005 (Jean, "The Intelligence of Evil,")
However that may be, duality and evil are not the same as violence. The dual form, the agon, is a symbolic form and, as such, it might be said to be much

nearer to seduction and challenge than to violence. Closer to metamorphosis and becoming than to force and violence. If there were a force of evil, a reality of evil, a

source and an origin of evil, one could confront it strategically with all the forces of good. But if evil is a form, and most of the time a form that is deeply

buried, one can only bring out that form and come to an understanding with it [etre en intelligence avec elle]. This is how it is, for example, with the Theatre
of Cruelty: in that gestural and scenic externalization of all the 'perverse' possibilities of the human spirit, within the framework of an exploration of the roots of
evil, there is never any question of tragic catharsis. The point, rather, is to play out fully these perverse possibilities and make

drama out of them, but without sublimating or resolving them. 'To speak evil' is to speak this fateful, paradoxical situation that is the reversible
concatenation of good and evil. That is to say that the irresistible pursuit of good, the movement ofIntegral Reality - for this is what good is: it is the

movement towards integrality, towards an integral order of the world - is immoral. The eschatological perspective of a
better world is in itself immoral. For the reason that our technical mastery of the world, our technical approach to
good, having become an automatic and irresistible mechanism, none of this is any longer of the order of morality
or of any kind of finality. Nor is to speak and read evil the same thing as vulgar nihil- ism, the nihilism of a denunciation of all values, that of the prophets of doom. To denounce the reality
contract or the reality 'conspiracy' is not at all nihilistic. It is not in any sense to deny an obvious fact, in the style of 'All is sign, nothing is real - nothing is true, everything is simulacrum' - an
It is one thing to note the vanishing of the real into the Virtual, another to deny it so
absurd proposition since it is also a realist one!

as to pass beyond the real and the Virtual. It is one thing to reject morality in the name of a vulgar immoralism, another to do so, like Nietzsche so as to pass beyond good and
evil. To be 'nihilistic' is to deny things at their greatest degree of intensity, not in their lowest versions. Now, existence and self- evidence

have always been the lowest forms. If there is nihilism, then, it is not a nihilism of value, but a nihilism ofform. It is to speak the world in its radicality , in its

dual, reversible form, and this has never meant banking on catastrophe, any more than on violence. No finality, either positive or negative,

is ever the last word in the story. And the Apocalypse itself is a facile solution.
 Proliferation

Fear of proliferation invokes orientalist tropes that legitimize mass violence---vote

negative to problematize their simplistic accounts of nuclear history
Shampa Biswas 8, prof of IR @ Whitman, Nuclear Apartheid As Political Position: Race As A
Postcolonial Resource?, http://asrudiancenter.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/nuclear-apartheid-as-
political-position-race-as-a-postcolonial-resource/
Nuclear Apartheid: Race in the Global Order The nuclear-apartheid argument has been invoked fairly regularly in the public speeches of Indian political leaders and policymakers. As is

the division between nuclear haves and nuclear have-nots within a

pointed out by external-affairs minister Jaswant Singh,

discriminatory and flawed nonproliferation regime that sets differentiated standards of national security creates a a sort of
international nuclear apartheid. (36) To use the word apartheid is clearly to use a racial signifier, and one that carries with it a certain contemporary political
resonance, given the very recent shameful history of the complicity of many First World states with the racist regime in South Africa. Under very different circumstances no doubt, the nuclear-
apartheid argument is in one sense an attempt then to point to the continuing exclusions and marginalizations faced by people of color in Third World countries in a global order dominated
and controlled by privileged whites in First World countries. Now it is clear that this black/white distinction is problematic. Not only can China, as one of the nuclear five, clearly not be
categorized in the latter category, but it is also problematic, for reasons that will become clearer later, to conflate state boundaries with racial boundaries, despite the racial implications of all
boundary-making exercises. However, the articulation of whiteness with power is deep and compelling for many and draws on a particular postcolonial logic. Let us, for instance, hear the
words of a scholar on Indian security writing just before the Indian tests: There continues to exist three White nuclear weapons states as part of the Western alliance to which in all
likelihood a fourth one, Russia, may be added when its Partnership for Peace merges into NATO. It may be recalled that following the Indian atomic test of 1974, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
of Pakistan had reportedly said that there was a Christian bomb (US, Britain and France), a Marxist bomb (Soviet Union and China), a Jewish bomb (Israels bombs-in-the-basement) and now a
Hindu bomb (India), but no Muslim bomb. Likewise, India could possibly complain now that there were four White bombs, one Yellow or Beige bomb, but no Brown or Black bombs, an unfair
and unacceptable situation. While China may continue to show some defiance against the policies of the West on occasion, the nuclear distribution indicated the continuing domination of the
traditional White imperialists in an overwhelmingly non-White world. (37) Similarly, J. Mohan Malik, in reference to the nuclear-apartheid position says that an unstated reason behind
Indias nuclear ambivalence had been the belief that the possession of nuclear weapons by white nations implied their racial and technological superiority that could not go unchallenged.
(38) It is this sense of racial discrimination in a postcolonial world that is invoked by a BJP spokesman when he says, We dont want to be blackmailed and treated as oriental blackies. (39)

Nuclear apartheid, as deployed by Indian leaders, quite simply points

Let us examine more closely what discrimination the nuclear apartheid position precisely points to.

to not just the existence of an unequal global distribution of nuclear resources, but the legitimization and institutionalization of that inequality
through the terms of contemporary international treaties such as the NPT and the CTBT. Let us hear Jaswant Singh on this issue: If the
permanent fives possession of nuclear weapons increases security, why would Indias possession of nuclear weapons be dangerous? If the permanent five continue to employ nuclear
weapons as an international currency of force and power, why should India voluntarily devalue its own state power and national security? Why admonish India after the fact for not falling in
line behind a new international agenda of discriminatory nonproliferation pursued largely due to the internal agendas or political debates of the nuclear club? If deterrence works in the West
as it so obviously appears to, since Western nations insist on continuing to possess nuclear weaponsby what reasoning will it not work in India? (40) On the face of it, such an argument is

the unequal burdens

hard to dispute. Clearly, both treaties recognize a clear distinction between those able to possess nuclear weapons and those that are not. Further,

placed on those two groups to contribute to a nuclear-free world makes one wonder about the criteria that makes any particular group of

countries more worthy of or more capable of or more responsible in possessing weapons that seem dangerous
when they proliferate to others. Within a national-security problematic, the pressures that impinge on France to acquire nuclear weapons to ward off the dangers
of an anarchic world are surely not in any demonstrably clear fashion any greater than those that impinge on India. (41) In the words of the Indian minister for external affairs, It cannot be
argued that the security of a few countries depends on their having nuclear weapons, and that of the rest depends on their not. (42) If security is indeed high politics, then the question of
the affordability of nuclear weapons by an underdeveloped country like India should also be moot. If being secure is always the foremost priority, then a poor Indias expensive nuclear
program should make senseunless the life of poor people is cheap. Moreover, if deterrence is the product of state rationality, then the horrific calculus of mutual destruction should

operate as smoothly to prevent nuclear war in the Indian subcontinent (where contiguous territory only magnifies the horror) as it does in the European theater. (43) The creeping
suspicion that the accentuated fear of nuclear disaster in South Asia, expressed in different versions of the
South Asian Tinderbox argument, are reflections of more deep-seated prejudices about the
irrationality of barbaric peoples in the Third World is hard to avoid. Hence, Pratap Bhanu Mehta attributes the popularity of the
tests for Indians to the politics of cultural representationa general perception of the unstated assumption in global nuclear discourse that

the subcontinent is full of unstable people with deep historical resentments, incapable of acting
rationally or managing a technologically sophisticated arsenal. (44) However, this is not to discount the significance of issues such as the historical
relations between India and Pakistan or the underdevelopment of a command, control, communications, and intelligence system in either countrywhich add new and

important dimensions to the possibility of a South Asian nuclear conflictbut to problematize the manner in which they function

within a particular discourse to create certain kinds of possibilities and foreclose others. For instance, I believe that
the historical relationship between India and Pakistan is certainly pivotal to understanding the nuclear dynamic between these two states, but it is also important to point out that the

dominant historical narrative of the US role in World War II has imparted a certain aura of responsibility to the US decision
to use an atomic bomb, so that the United States unique position as the only country ever to have used a nuclear weapon
is rendered beyond ethical reproach, while Indias mere possession of it becomes questionable. Why,
after all, does the possession of around one hundred or so nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan cause the kind of stir

that the more than ten thousand nuclear warheads, many on active alert, in the United States hardly ever invoke? If such
a sense of (un)safety is not simply a product of the proliferation of nuclear weapons but also has to do with whom these weapons proliferate to (hence, the much greater focus on
horizontal, rather than vertical, proliferation in these treaties), then what prejudiced criteria make the P-5 unthreatening to, and indeed in some renditions the guarantors of, safety in a way
not deemed possible for other countries? (45) Why, if it is not about a certain kind of racism, do treaties like the NPT and CTBT that do legitimize both structural inequities and the
presuppositions that make those possible, not appear preposterous to scholars, commentators, and activists who find progress in the institutionalization of international norms? Is it not

the strategic objectives of treaties like the NPT and CTBT have less to do with peace and more
possible to argue that

with maintaining a monopoly of nuclear violence, a monopoly that is not just fundamental to the
undemocratic nature of the world order but can be used to sustain and maintain the hegemony of a few
states? (46) In this sense, then, the nuclear-apartheid argument does need to be taken seriously. Not only does it point to the hypocrisy
inherent in the disarmament position taken by powerful countries but it also points to orientalist assumptions
that underlie both such positions and the responses generated by the proliferation of nuclear weapons to Third
World countries. The argument also indicates the existence of an international hierarchy that, even when it is recognized, is accepted somewhat unproblematically by those
within NWSs quick to condemn India and Pakistan without simultaneously condemning the P-5. (47) Even if one accepts that there is a middle ground between what is seen as the
impossibility of complete global disarmament and the horror of unrestricted proliferation, and that this middle ground of some kind of realistic arms-control arrangement is certainly

the nuclear-apartheid argument does call on us to interrogate how indeed what becomes
more attractive than its absence,

realistic within this terrain of the middle ground is produced through the workings of power in the
international realm. This is one sense in which the nuclear-apartheid argument does make it possible to unsettle some of the
taken-for-granted in accounts of international relations. While its political-strategic use by Indian leaders is largely directed at a domestic constituency that can
find a compelling postcolonial logic in this symbol of discrimination and racial condescension, (48) it behooves IR scholars to take seriously and pay close attention to the claims made in and
through this symbol. Is it precisely the silence on race within IR that both enables its use as a postcolonial resource by Indian political leaders and constrains scholars from interrogating
critically (without dismissing it or accepting it at its face value) the claims of that position?
 Risk Calculus
Risk calculus is not a neutral tool---its a political maneuver which instills a permanent
state of catastrophe and drains life of value
Brad Evans 13, Senior Lecturer in International Studies at the University of Bristol, Liberal Terror, 34-41

Terror emerges from within our aficted communities. It is integral to the modalities which sustain our
advanced living systems. As Stephen Graham points out, this creates a fear of dislocation which is now endemic in the popula- tion of all great cities.75
This paranoiac systemic awaken- ing, he argues, is having huge implications for the very conceptual distinctions used in the analysis and de nition of organized
political violence.76 Disrupting the sense of civic normality, terrors appear like a sudden break or rupture that, maturing for some considerable time, terries
precisely because it has gone unnoticed within our daily routines. It is therefore no coincidence to nd that contem- porary accounts of terror demand
environmental frames of reference.77 What we fear is what we actually produce. Since what endangers arises from within our living systems, what threatens is part
of that very existence.78 Not only does this imply that terror is necessarily indiscriminate; as Massumi noted, it is indiscriminable and indistinguishable from the
general environment.79 It precludes any prior elimination of the fact on the basis that its sheer possibility inaugurates its simulated occurrence. No longer, then, a
conventionally singular problem, i.e. nuclear attack, con- temporary fears register in the multiple. Anything can become the material source of our physical undoing.
With sequential notions of catastrophe therefore rmly dis- placed by an unending continuum of endemic crises, selective immunity is replaced by the demands for
an auto-responsive logic that strategically connects all things live-able. The political as such is
effectively over-written by a catastrophic aversion complex as the normalization of threat takes aim at those dangers which are
not quite locat- able but remain forever lurking. A recent contribution to the RAND Corporations tenth anniversary re ections on 9/11 retains this emphasis: [p.
34] Nation-states are geographic; they have addresses. As important, they come with lengthy stories attached, and intelligence is ultimately about helping people
adjust the stories in their heads to guide their actions. . . . We know what states are like, even states as different from the United States as North Korea. They are
hierarchical and bureau- cratic. They are a bounded threat. Many of the items of interest about states are big and concrete: tanks, missiles, massed armies.
Terrorists are different in every respect. They are small targets, like bin Laden, yet a single suicide bomber can do major mayhem. They are amorphous, uid, and
hidden, presenting intelligence with major challenges simply in describing their structures and boundaries. Not only do terrorists not have addresses, they arent
only over there. They are here as well, an unpleasant fact that impels nations to collect more information on their citizens and residents and to try to do so with
minimal damage to civil liberties. Terrorists come with little story attached.80 Being witness to the events during the build-up to the tenth anniversary of the 9/11
attacks provides some telling insight into this state of terror normality. Some three days before the of cial commemoration, new media channels reported the
possibility of another devastating attack. The event itself already heightened the stakes. The Department of Homeland Security warned of speci c, credible but
uncon rmed threat information. The United States, it seemed, was preparing itself for an attack of epidemic proportions. To be expected, many specialists
provided expert opinion on the likely nature of the attack. While the intelligence seemed to point to car bombs (thereby placing severe restrictions on the
movement of traf c to strategically important areas of New York City), nothing was to be ruled out. Once again, the airwaves were full of professional doomsayers
speculating about an attack on the transport system or within a prominent public space. Others also discussed the relative merits of some airborne biological agent
or contamination of water systems. The threat was seemingly ubiquitous. It could not be divorced [p. 35] from the lived environment. What was therefore ordinarily
taken for granted once again became the source of anxiety as the threat appeared everywhere yet remained elusive. Meanwhile, for defensive agencies, the
frontier between warfare, public life, transportation, and the life-world systems that sustained the ordinary functioning of this dynamic environment once again
became strategically indifferent. The Daily Herald poster which adorned news- paper stands throughout New York on the morning of 9 September encapsulated the
tragic irony to this anxious predicament: 9/11 Terror Threat. Catastrophic Topographies While all modern political communities have been consti- tuted by a
security imperative, the catastrophic imaginaries of liberal regimes of security governance advance a new topography for political action that is planetary in vision.
Geo-politics is therefore seconded by a catastrophic risk landscape of which the modern nation-state is merely a part of a global network of interconnected
endangerment. It is most revealing to nd that economic agencies are at the forefront of this security policy. During the 1990s, organizations such as the World
Bank increasingly became interested in security concerns as the focus of their work (along with economics more generally) went from the managed recoveries of
national crises to the active promo- tion of better lives.81 Transforming their remit from economic management to security governance, such organ- izations
became moral agents in their own right advocat- ing economic solutions to the ravages of civil wars, criminality, shadow economies, poverty, endemic cultural
violence, and political corruption. This was matched by a particular revival in the ideas of liberal political econo- mists such as Friedrich von Hayek who long since
equated the free market with political orientations. While we will deal with Hayeks legacy later, it is important to stress that [p. 36] he wrote speci cally about the
concept of emergence in order to dismiss the conscious creation of rational agents invested in some grand universalizing metaphysical struc- ture.82 For Hayek,
since the most important structures (including laws) are emergent, so the Nomos assumes alto- gether contingent qualities. In doing so, Hayek more than paved the
way for liberal political economies to assume a moral status as they were tasked with alleviating worldly injustices and unnecessary suffering. Providing the intel-
lectual foundations and self-appointed moral justi cations for intervention, he set in place the logic that poor eco- nomic management is central to understanding
local prob- lems which potentially have global consequences. More recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has taken up this challenge in a comprehensive way,
allowing us to truly visualize the catastrophic topographies of twenty- rst-century liberal rule. In 2005, the WEF pub- lished its rst annual Global Risk Report,
in Iraq, Terrorism, Emerging Fiscal Crises, Disruption in Oil Supplies,
whose top ten risks included: Instability

Radical Islam, Sudden Decline in Chinas Growth, Pandemics Infec- tious Diseases, Climate
Change, WMDs and Unre- strained Migration and Related Tensions. Every year since, the reports have
become more rigorous in their analysis, more expansive in the numbers of potential threats (the current
gure now includes the main fty with geo-politics merely a nodal element), and accompanied by sophisticated digitalized mappings which highlight the
interconnectedness of this global security terrain. With each report providing fully interactive Global Risks Inter- connection Maps, analysts can be alert to the
latest infor- mation on continually evolving radically connected situations which have the potential to become truly cata- strophic. According to the 2012 report: As
the world grows increasingly complex and interdepend- ent, the capacity to manage the systems that underpin our prosperity and safety is diminishing. The
constellation of [p. 37 risks arising from emerging technologies, nancial interde- pendence, resource depletion and climate change exposes the weak and brittle
nature of existing safeguards the policies, norms, regulations or institutions which serve as a protective system. Our safeguards may no longer be t to manage
vital resources and ensure orderly markets and public safety. The interdependence and complexity inher- ent in globalization require engaging a wider group of
stakeholders to establish more adaptable safeguards which could improve effective and timely responses to emerging risks.83 Global risks are presented here as a
complex and contin- gent narrative for contemporary society. Working on the objective basis of scientic evaluation, they
enable us to work out through sophisticated algorithms the best and worst case scenarios. Presupposing the
accidental (hence collapsing the future into the present), they offer consid- ered value and attribute assayable costs to that

which is otherwise incalculable. There is, however, a distinct politics at work here. The catastrophic
imaginary is not premised on value-neutral science. As Dean has acutely observed, risk is a set of different ways
for ordering reality, of rendering it into a calculable form. It is a way of representing events in a certain form so they might be made
governable in particular ways, with particular techniques and for particular goals.84 So while the WEF presents risks like some uncontroversial truth, Dean
encourages us to focus on the intelligibility of certain representations that render reality in such a form as to make it amenable to types of action and
intervention.85 Deans critique here is notably indebted to the work of Franois Ewald, who once explained: Nothing is a risk in itself; there is no risk in reality. But
on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all depends on how one analyses the danger, considers the event.86 Proposing new methods for acting upon subjects
behaviour, risk-based analysis displaces any ideologically principled notion of equitable social insurance with highly [p. 38] technocratic rule by experts. As Peter
Miller and Nikolas Rose have observed, The ethics of lifestyle maximization, coupled with a logic in which someone must be held to blame for any event that
threatens an individuals quality of life, generates a relentless imperative of risk manage- ment.87 Risk thus becomes axiomatic since any
effort at risk awareness cannot help but establish a new horizon of risks. As Furedi notes, [T]erms like risk or at risk
are used in association with just about any routine event re ecting our unprecedented preoccupation with risk.88 That is to say, the more we are able

to control/reduce known risks, the more risks proliferate and appear to warrant further attention. For
this reason, Dillon argues, [r]isk is one of the single most important devices for security strategies currently pursued.89 On the one hand, it proposes a

remedial solution to the problem of nitude, for it may appear that, in taming chance, you may tame
time. Moreover, tame time and you may tame the future. Tame the future and you may, nally,
secure a being human being whose very existence is temporal.90 On the other hand, it cannot provide a solution since
contingency is itself constitutive of what it means to be a living thing.91 Risk as such is not something
to be simply averted at all costs. Securing life through the embrace of risk-based tech- nologies becomes the preferred method for regulating the
conduct of lives: Whatever else might be said of the ontology of a contingent universe . . . , risk does not exist out there, independent,

as it were, of the computational and discursive practices that constitute specic risks as the risks that they

are. Risk is a carefully crafted artefact. Risks are thus created, circulated, proliferated and capitalized upon in a
whole variety of burgeoning ways. Underwriting secures self- governance through contingency by
employing technologies of risk. This, then, is not exactly the risk society explored by Ulrich Beck, whose account of risk is almost wholly
preoccupied with cataloguing the growth of man- made dangers. This is the truth-telling of a governmental [p. 39] technology

that enacts a world of self-regulating subjects bound in continuous calculation and commodication
of their variable exposure to contingency.92 Catastrophic topographies are overwhelmingly future- orientated. Raising awareness of the
interconnections between all potential dangers, security agencies begin to govern through the constellation of catastrophic emergen- cies liberal societies face.
While interconnected mapping doesnt offer any hierarchy of endangerment in terms of some universal political aspiration, what does appear central to all
deliberations is the Event.93 Crucial here are issues of preparedness and resilience in the face of the catastrophic occurrences. Resilience is now the lingua franca
of contemporary security discourse. It provides us with a technical term for all manner of threats to exist- ence.94 It is no coincidence, however, to discover that its
contemporary meaning can be traced back to the ideas of Crawford Stanley Holling, who de ned the resilience of an ecosystem as the measure of its ability to
absorb changes (particularly sudden catastrophic events) and still exist.95 Resilience is something more than survivability. It encourages actors to learn from
catastrophes so that soci- eties can become more responsive to further catastrophes on the horizon. It promotes adaptability so that life may go on living despite
the fact that elements of our living systems may be destroyed. And it creates shared knowl- edge and information that will continually reshape the forms of
communities and af rm their core values, thereby determining what is absolutely vital to our ways of living. Resilience is premised upon the ability of the endan-
Life becomes a series of events. Its bio-graphical
gered subject to continually re-emerge from the condi- tions of its ongoing emergency.

make-up therefore has no intrinsic value other than a non-linear set of (post-)vital problems which at
the point of their arising continue to defy the dream of perfect calculation long since abandoned by [p. 40] technologies
of systemic rule. So as the resilient subject continually navigates throughout the complex landscape which de nes the topos of

contemporary politics the catastrophic topography of the times what becomes a condition of possibility is

the contingency or eventfulness of life itself. Unlike Continental approaches to the event, however,
which propose a concept of freedom on account of lifes facticity which precedes any compulsion to
make secure, the resilient subject while not secure in any xed sense embodies the subject which is
no longer tasked with imagining a different concept of the political. It is, from the perspective of difference, a post-
political subjectivity which, accepting the eventual fatefulness of existence, proposes an emergent ontology that is
exclusively bound to mastering the control of life-shaping events by pre-emptively governing those
catastrophes (actual or potential) which shape the normality of the times. Resilient life as such offers no
political concern with a future that may be politically different. What concerns the resiliently minded is whether or not the
future is at all liveable. Late liberalism has reached its point of political ni- tude where existence is being increasingly governed by an immanent ordering of life
that witnesses the triumph of economy over the political, and the catastrophic imaginary is most revealing of its particular onto-theological expressions. This brings
into sharp relief the differences between the apocalyptic imaginaries of monotheistic regimes of religious power and the catastrophic imaginar- ies of liberal
regimes of security governance. While both xate on the event-to-come, the apocalyptic is founded upon the eventual revelation of the One (true God, true
religion, Supreme Being). The catastrophic, in contrast, proposes a future-orientated discourse that is fuelled by the innitely possible. Whereas apocalyptic
narratives therefore put forward a Sovereign eschatology that impresses upon the subjects imaginary the plagues of judgement such that onto-theological rule can
shape 41 actions of believers in the present, catastrophic narratives construct the basis for their onto-theologically driven rule by promoting life as an emergent,
adaptable, pre- epistemic eschatological complex. So whereas apocalyptic imaginaries propose an altogether teleological religiosity whose eventual revelation is a
prophesied truth, the cata- strophic imaginary offers a non-linear eschatology of the living that moralizes the government of life on a planetary scale in lieu of the
fact that nothing can be known with absolute certainty.
 Thanatopolitics

The Hall evidence is amazing on how the nature of biopolitics has evolved into
thanatopolitics, a system where biopolitical institutions are constantly exposing their subjects
to death through war and genocidal violence. This system is so perverse that violence and
death become fundamentally interwoven with everyday life that death no longer exists as an
event and instead as an inherent component of everyday life. This system of institutionalized
death reduces genocide to a casual event and makes it so death is no longer an impact
because of its sheer regularity. That makes your complicity in those structures an
independent reason to vote Negit also means your impacts are inevitable and have to
magnitude. That means suffering frames your ballot.

Western sovereignty is dominated by a politics of death. This thanatopolitical

domination constantly exposes subjects to death and causes existential suffering of
the worst kind. This biopolitics makes liberal sovereigns and totalitarian regimes
indistinguishable and means there is no impact to death.
Hall 2007 Lindsay. MA Political Science. Death, Power, and the Body: A Bio-political Analysis of Death and Dying. Thesis. Virginia
Polytechnic Institute, 2007. edited for grammar clarity

Agamben, on the other hand, addresses the intertwinement of medicine, death, and power through his analysis of the modern individuals exposure to death. According to Agamben,

Western culture has become thanatopolitical,. which means that it is dominated by a politics of death that leaves
us more and more exposed to both death and operations of power. For Agamben, death has become
indistinct. It is both meaningful and meaningless, both individual and anonymous, both visible and invisible. Moreover,
because modern society increasingly exposes individuals to death, liberal democracy becomes
increasingly indistinguishable from totalitarian regimes, an issue I will explore in more detail in Chapter Three. While the issues that I am
addressing life sustaining technologies are merely one symptom of the greater problem that Agamben is himself concerned with, I hope that shedding more light on this particular space of
power can allow us to think about and eventually challenge the greater politics of death operating in modern society.In this study I will focus specifically on reconsidering the relations of

terminating life is nearly

power surrounding the decision to stop preserving life in the particular space of the hospital room. According to Foucault.s view,

unthinkable in a biopolitical society. Thus, as Benjamin Noys elaborates, we try so hard to preserve life, even at the cost
of terrible suffering, because death is the limit to [bio-political] power. (2005, 54). For Foucault, death has become
shameful. It is paramount to giving up, to letting go, or to admitting defeat (all things given a negative connotation in Western society) (2003c, 247). In this
study I would like to reconsider these claims through Giorgio Agamben.s argument that death has become more political as the boundary

between life and death has become blurred. Such a state of being, he claims, exposes the body to death, and
yet.as I am primarily concerned with..saturates. the body with power (Agamben 1995, 164). As suggested by this synopsis, I am
using Foucault as the starting point for my study. Though I ultimately bring in Agamben who question aspects of his analysis of power, I begin my first chapter with an in depth account of the
ways in which Foucault believed power to be exercised upon the body. In this chapter I begin to hammer out the theoretical framework that I will then both use and challenge in order to
analyze the space of the hospital room as a space of power. In The Birth of the Clinic. Foucault.s only sustained analysis of the medical discipline.he claimed that the body was suddenly made
.exhaustively legible. with the birth of modern medicine. More precisely, he claims that it was .from the integration of death into medicine.that Western man could [at last] constitute himself
in his own eyes as an object of science,. grasping himself within his own language, and giving himself his own discursive existence (Foucault 1973, 197). In his later writings on power, however,
Foucault gives this constitutive capacity of individuals to sexuality, not death, and as I have previously suggested, Foucault begins to look at death as a limit[s] to power itself. Throughout this
study I have attempted to reconcile this seeming contradiction in Foucault.s work through the work of Giorgio Agamben. My second chapter is an examination of what Agamben terms the

.zone of indistinction. between life and death. For Agamben, the line between life and death has become increasingly blurred by a
this decision is increasingly taken
whole series of .waverings. around both the time of death and the question of who decides on this time. As Agamben claims,

up by the medical profession, thus in the conclusion of this chapter I return to Foucault.s only sustained engagement with medical power, The Birth of the Clinic. In
this section I argue that Agamben.s analysis of the intertwinement between the medical discipline and power might benefit from some of the historical insights provided in Foucault.s analysis.

While Agamben centers his analysis on post-World War II society,Foucaults work demonstrates that the entanglement of medicine
and sovereign power have a far longer history than perhaps Agamben realizes or is willing to engage
with. In the third and final chapter of this study I examine how death is politicized. As Agamben argues, death is not a natural or biological
moment but a political decision. In order to tackle the nature of this decision I look at the work of Peter Singer who compares two seemingly contradictory ethics,
the ethics of the sanctity of life and the quality of life ethic. An Agambenean analysis of these ethics however, suggest some problems that Singer may have not been able to articulate because
he fails to take into account the political nature of death. One of the criticisms that has been lodged against Singer is that his ethics closely parallels Nazi eugenics programs in which the
medical establishment made decisions on whose life was worth living. This criticism bridges the gap between Singer.s work and the point I have been making through this piece.

Biopower is intimately enmeshed with sovereignty. Foucault saw this combination at work primarily
in totalitarian regimes. However, as Agamben argues, the distinctions between totalitarian regimes
and democracies are crumbling. I argue in my Conclusion that modern power is increasingly an amalgamation
between the bio-political and the thanatopolitical. For power can both manage life and expose us to
death. What is crucial to take from this analysis is that we must formulate some sort of individual resistance to this power, even though techniques of modern bio-power
(bureaucratic planning, statistical analysis, population control) may expose us to death as a population rather than as individuals. This
resistance must be something greater than simply a call for physician assisted suicide or an appeal for individual ownership of our bodies, it must first center on an engagement with what
about life is really worth preserving.
 Terrorism
Apocalyptic terrorism scenarios are grounded in vested political interests ---the impact
is a racist extermination of alterity
Bryan 12 Desiree, Manager, Operations, Asia Department at U.S. Chamber of Commerce, MScECON
Candidate @ time: Security Studies at Aberystwyth University, The Popularity of the New Terrorism
Discourse, http://www.e-ir.info/2012/06/22/the-popularity-of-the-new-terrorism-discourse/

New Terrorism vs. Old Terrorism The opening sentence of a textbook on terrorism states, Terrorism has been a dark feature of
human behavior since the dawn of recorded history (Martin, 2010, 3). If this is the case, what makes the new terrorism
different from the old? According to the mainstream orthodoxy on terrorism, the old terrorism was generally
characterized by: left wing ideology; the use of small scale, conventional weapons; clearly identifiable
organizations or movements with equally clear political and social messages; specific selection of targets and explicit grievances
championing specific classes or ethnonational groups (Martin, 2010, 28). Also according to the orthodoxy, the shift to the new terrorism, on
the other hand, is thought to have emerged in the early 1990s (Jackson, 2011) and took root in mass consciousness with the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. (Martin, 2010, 3). The new terrorism is characterized by: loose, cell-based networks with
minimal lines of command and control, desired acquisition of high-intensity weapons and weapons of mass destruction (Martin,
2010, 27), motivated by religious fanaticism rather than political ideology and it is aimed at causing mass causality and maximum destruction
(Jackson, 2007, 179-180). However, these dichotomous definitions of the old and new types of terrorism are not without problems. The
first major problem is that terrorism has been characterized by the same fundamental qualities throughout
history. Some of the superficial characteristics, the means of implementation (e.g. the invention of the Internet or dynamite) or the
discourse (communism vs. Islam) may have evolved, but the central components remain the same. The second major problem is that
the characterization of new terrorism is, at best, rooted in a particular political ideology, biased and
inaccurate. At worst, it is racist, promotes war mongering and has contributed to millions of deaths . As David
Rapoport states: Many contemporary studies begin by stating that although terrorism has always been a feature of social existence, it
became significant when it increased in frequency and took on novel dimensions as an international or transnational activity, creating in
the process a new mode of conflict (1984, 658). Isabelle Duyvesteyn points out that this would indicate evidence for the emergence of a new
type of terrorism, if it were not for the fact that the article was written in 1984 and described a situation from the 1960s (Duyvesteyn, 2004,
439). It seems that there have been many new phases of terrorism over the years. So many so that the definition of new has been stretched
significantly and applied relatively across decades. Nevertheless, the idea that this terrorism, that which the War on Terror (WoT) is directed
against, is the most significant and unique form of terrorism that has taken hold in the popular and political discourse. Therefore, it is useful to
address each of the so-called new characteristics in turn. The first characteristic is the idea that new terrorism is based on loosely organized
cell-based networks as opposed to the traditional terrorist groups, which were highly localized and hierarchical in nature. An oft-cited example
of a traditional terrorist group is the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who operated under a military structure and in a relatively (in contrast to the
perceived transnational operations of al-Qaeda) localized capacity. However, some of the first modern terrorists were not highly organized
groups but small fragmented groups of anarchists. These groups were heeding the call of revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and other
contemporary anarchists to achieve anarchism, collectivism and atheism via violent means (Morgan, 2001, 33). Despite the initial, self-
described amorphous nature of these groups, they were a key force in the Russian Revolution (Maximoff, G.). Furthermore, leading anarchist
philosophers of the Russian Revolution argued that terrorists should organize themselves into small groups, or cells (Martin, 2010, 217).
These small groups cropped up all around Russia and Europe in subsequent years and formed an early form of a loosely organized cell-based
network not unlike modern day al Qaeda. Duyvesteyn further notes that both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded
in 1964, and Hezbollah, founded 1982, operate on a network structure with very little central control over groups (2004, 444). The second
problematic idea of new terrorism is that contemporary terrorist groups aim to acquire and use weapons of mass
destruction (WMDs). This belief is simply not supported by empirical evidence. One of the key problems with this theory is
that WMDs are significantly more difficult to obtain and utilize than most people understand. Even if a
terrorist group were to obtain a biological WMD, Biologist Matthew Meselson calculates that it would take a ton of
nerve gas or five tons of mustard gas to produce heavy causalities among unprotected people in an open area of one square
kilometer (Mueller, 2005, 488). And thats only an example of the problem with the implementation of WMDs, assuming they are
acquired, transported and desirable by a terrorist group in the first place. Additional problems, such as the fact that
WMDs are extremely difficult to deploy and control (Mueller, 2005, 488) and that making a bomb is an
extraordinarily difficult task (Mueller, 2005, 489), further diminish the risk. It is interesting to note that, while the potential
dangers of WMDs are much lauded, the attacks of September 11th were low tech and had been
technologically possible for more than 100 years. Mueller also states, although nuclear weapons have been
around for well over half a century, no state has ever given another state (much less a terrorist group) a
nuclear weapon that the recipient could use independently (2005, 490). All of this talk about the difficultly of acquiring and deploying
WMDs (by non-state agents), is not to diminish the question of what terrorists have to gain by utilizing these weapons. It is important to
question whether it would even further the aims of terrorists to use WMDs. The evidence suggests
otherwise. In the Politics of Fear Jackson states, Mass casualties are most often counterproductive to terrorist
aims they alienate their supporters and can provoke harsh reprisals from the authorities [] in addition, []
they would undermine community support, distort the terrorists political message, and invite over-
whelming retaliation (2007, 196-197). Despite popular rhetoric to the contrary, terrorists are rational
political actors and are acutely aware of these dangers (Jackson, 2007, 197). Government appointed studies on this
issue have supported these views. This leads us to the third problem with new terrorism, which is the idea that we are facing a
new era of terrorism motivated by religious fanaticism rather than political ideology. As stated previously, earlier, so-called traditional forms of
terrorism are associated with left wing, political ideology, whereas contemporary terrorists are described as having anti-modern goals of
returning society to an idealized version of the past and are therefore necessarily anti-democratic, anti-progressive and, by implication,
irrational (Gunning and Jackson, 3). Rapoport argues the idea that religious terrorists are irrational, saying, what seems to be distinctive about
modern [religious] terrorists, their belief that terror can be organized rationally, represents or distorts a major theme peculiar to our own
culture [] (1984, 660). Conveniently for the interests of the political elites, as we shall see later, the idea of irrational fanaticism makes the
notion of negotiation and listening to the demands of the other impossible. In light of this, it is interesting to note that the U.S. has, for
decades, given billions of dollars in aid to the State of Israel, which could be argued to be a fundamentalist, religious organization that engages
in the terrorization of a group of people. Further, it is difficult to speak of The Troubles in Northern Ireland without speaking of the religious
conflict, yet it was never assumed that the IRA was absolutist, inflexible, unrealistic, lacking in political pragmatism, and not amenable to
negotiation (Gunning and Jackson, 4). Rapaport further reinforces the idea that religious terrorism goes back centuries by saying, Before the
nineteenth century, religion provided the only acceptable justifications for terror (1984, 659). As we have seen here, problems with the
discourse of new terrorism include the fact that these
elements of terrorism are neither new nor are the popular
beliefs of the discourse supported by empirical evidence . The question remains, then, why is the idea of new terrorism so
popular? This question will be addressed next. Political Investment in New Terrorism There are two main categories that explain the
popularity of new terrorism. The first category is government and political investment in the propagation of the idea that
a distinct, historically unknown type of terrorism exists. The mainstream discourse [1] reinforces, through
statements by political elites, media, entertainment and every other way imaginable, the culture of violence, militarism and
feelings of fear. Through mass media, cultural norms and the integration of neoliberal ideology into society, people are becoming
increasingly desensitized to human rights issues, war, social justice and social welfare, not to mention
apathetic to the political process in general.
 War
Baudrillard says that images of destruction, catastrophe and disaster are exaggerated by the
media and used to give pleasure to those in the first world at the expense of everyone else.
As a society, we export death and import back its image, drawing satisfaction from the
exploitation of other people and cultures and our efforts to solve the problems that we
actually enjoy so much. The affirmative is a perfect example of this process their harms
detail disaster in the status quo which they provide a simulated solution to through fiat, all in
an effort to make themselves feel powerful in this exchange of suffering.
Their supposed solution is a part of this process they will never actually fix all the problems
they claim, because then they would be left without a source of enjoyment. Even if their
solution does work, it will have the side effect of creating more suffering to continue the
cycle. A perfect example of this is Iraq we get all worked up over what a terrible person
Saddam is and the damage he could cause, so we go remove him to improve the situation,
but now theres been an explosion of porn, drugs and violence in Iraq after the invasion so we
can continue to consume the images of disorder and trouble and justify even more
interventions, which makes their harms are inevitable.
Also, this quest for more sources of suffering is a constantly expanding process. Once we run
fix some problems, we have to generate more to keep the images flowing, encouraging
artificial tragedies to replace natural ones. This mindset ends in human extinction as the
ultimate spectacle.

The images of catastrophe and destruction they present are like a drug, used by the
first world nations to feed off the suffering of the rest of the world. Their efforts to
solve these problems are coproductive with the disasters themselves, and this
constant search for new spectacle will lead to the destruction of the human species as
the ultimate reality TV show.
Baudrillard in 94 [Jean, The Illusion of the End p. 66-71]
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' [['autre
monde]. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity

cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and
gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the
extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy
source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say,

that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the
contrary to the Marxist analysis,

misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media
nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West
is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials,
the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans

Other people's destitution becomes

frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order.

our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality
merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle

of our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the
catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the
moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the
distress of the rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the
Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as
the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and
natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other
drugs. We provide them, through our media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this
catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for

. But when the catastrophe market itself

perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain

reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation, when we run out of
disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the
West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle
and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite
for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us
Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black
Africa and Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines
and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The
misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and,
moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable
epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side:
in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly
decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is
not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely. In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-
developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass
through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an
end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples. Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the
objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a
majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own
utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years
after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who -
fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely
reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good
bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating
itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race. No solution has been found to the dramatic situation of the under-developed, and none will be found since their drama has now been
overtaken by that of the overdeveloped, of the rich nations. The psychodrama of congestion, saturation, super abundance, neurosis and the breaking of blood vessels which haunts us - the drama of the excess of means over ends

. Artificial
calls more urgently for attention than that of penury, lack and poverty. That is where the most imminent danger of catastrophe resides, in the societies which have run out of emptiness

catastrophes, like the beneficial aspects of civilization, progress much more quickly than natural ones. The underdeveloped are still at the primary stage of
the natural, unforeseeable catastrophe. We are already at the second stage, that of the manufactured catastrophe - imminent and foreseeable - and we shall soon be at that of the pre-

programmed catastrophe, the catastrophe of the third kind, deliberate and experimental. And, paradoxically, it is our pursuit
of the means for averting natural catastrophe - the unpredictable form of destiny - which will take us there. Because it is unable to escape it,
humanity will pretend to be the author of its destiny. Because it cannot accept being confronted with an end which is uncertain or

governed by fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species.

 Warming
Welcome to the Anthropocenethe point of no return! The ecological catastrophes of
modernity have reached a point of no return. The humanist ethics of modern policy
constantly flee from death and existence in favor of a securitized life, unfortunately that
security backfires. The ethic of survival is just a ruse to fool us into thinking we can keep
consuming forever, which only ensures policy failure and global destruction. In order to ever
heal the environment and live in the Anthropocene, we must die as a civilization. Our culture
and components must face absolute extinction, thats manifest in a rejection of their
securitization of the environment.

Fear of catastrophic warming is rooted in the same prophetic mode of discourse as

Christian myths of the end of days---the will to freeze the earth in at a static
equilibrium results in extermination of difference---vote neg to open yourself up to
catastrophe
Brad Evans and Reid 14, *Senior Lecturer in International Studies at the University of Bristol, ** and
Julian Reid, Professor of International Relations, Faculty of Social Science, University of Lapland, The Art
of Living Dangerously, 161-5
[p. 161] Fundamental to the writing of apocalypse was this consciousness, this confidence, this absolute certitude of possession of the power to be able to confront the disaster. Today, in the
context of the widespread and deep-seated belief in the inescapably catastrophic nature of the world, both economically and ecologically understood, such a consciousness and confidence in
the abilities to confront it is liable to be diagnosed as a form of, what we moderns call, madness. But perhaps that is the point. The apparent extremity of not just belief, but confidence and
even certainty in the possibility of apocalyptic division between [p. 162] worlds and between times, of present and future, is a sign of how detached we have become from this particular mode
of truth-telling. We cannot agree with Benjamin Noys, for this reason, when he argues that the main problem facing the Left today is the excess of its apocalyptic tone.30 In effect the

the question is not about some messianic totalitarianism; it is how to save and
opposite is the case. For

reconstitute the power of a more confident vision in the context of our widespread political
submission to the ecologization of the political on which neoliberalism thrives and the discourse of
catastrophe has grown.31 The world we live in is a world of radical contingency, in which the future is
uncertain and impossible to calculate. Nevertheless, as human beings we are capable of investing our futures with profound beliefs and
senses of certainty as to what may and can happen. Indeed what does climate science express other than a longing for a sense of

certainty; claims to truth which can be said to be beyond doubt? The scientific imaginary out of which the belief in the
incontestable nature of climate change emerged, the necessity and reality of its occurrence, the impossibility of
arguing with or over its reality, is an expression of that longing. Such a longing is for a realm of certainty
beyond the radical contingency of the world; a radical contingency that many branches of science
itself now understand as the real. Climate science is constituted by a subject who is dependent for its
reproduction on the belief in the existence of, as well as our abilities to see and speak of, such a world
beyond the real. In other words, it is structured by the very same ontology of time that structures Christian
Science and literature. And when we look at debates within climate science, and claims to knowledge as to the coming of
the Sixth Extinction, we are looking at a world populated by prophets that operate within regimes of truth deeply similar to those
occupied by the prophets of Christianity. Climate science is a religion. [p. 163] Our intention here is not to contest the

truth claims of climate science and the ideologues of climate change on the basis of their non-approximation to
reality. It is to point at the conditions of possibility for such claims; conditions of possibility that are
structurally similar to those that underpin prophesy in its Christian form. Further, our intent is to point out that a
political discourse which posits the possibility of welcoming the coming of another world and another life
beyond that which is diagnosed as at risk of extinction in climate science, the world and life of
catastrophe as we experience it today, may have no less truth to it. Climate scientists say that there
is no way of escape from the dreadful and fearful realities of climate change; while economists say that there is no
alternative to the further extension of the market in mitigation of the catastrophic effects of climate change. The Left meanwhile castigates

humanity for not having recognized and respected the parametric conditions on which our existence
depends. All such claims reproduce a prophetic mode of truth-telling tied into a parrhesiastic mode of
truthtelling which predicts a future which is awful and diagnoses the faults and crimes of human
beings on account of which they must change their ways of living. What is precisely missing here is a
different vocabulary through which to articulate the necessity and reality of climate change, while
being able to welcome this inevitable event as the process of passage to a new world and new life
beyond that which we have known up until now. It is to welcome the departure of that which has conditioned our experience as a form of species
life to date. Who ultimately knows what the future for life is beyond the Holocene? Not one of us. The Anthropocene is only just beginning. What

we can know is that life will take different forms. There will be, as there is always assumed to be in
irreducible thought, a division between present and future, and within that a division between life
forms. Not between the saved and the damned, but between the life forms that will die off with the
end of the Holocene and [p. 164] those that will emerge with whatever comes into existence after that
time. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of the Grolar bear; the cross between a Polar and Grizzly bear born of the
sexual encounter consequent upon the catastrophe effects of climate change, specifically the breaking up of the Arctic sea
ice. What is it about a civilization or a culture that manages to turn the wondrous phenomenon of the

emergence of new forms of life, consequent upon these dramatic changes in a milieu, into a
problematic of insecurity and threat? A team of ecologists led by Brendan Kelly of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, in Alaska, argues that with this
phenomenon of the cross-breed, so endangered, native species such as the Polar Bear, from which the Grolar Bear is emerging, will soon disappear. Furthermore the speeding up of
evolutionary pressures, the forcing of animals into rapid adaptive modes, may not produce biologically favorable outcomes. Quoting Kelly, from an interview with Live Science: This change is

This cult of mourning for the coming death of existing species

happening so rapidly that it doesnt bode well for adaptive responses.32

life, consequent upon the movement of the earth, and fear for the nature of the new forms of life to
come, expresses perfectly the ways in which the ancient fear for the coming catastrophe is now
coupled with a modern biopoliticized fear of the transformative effects of lifes movement upon
existing species. Pure and native forms thus become threatened by the emergence of impure,
foreign, maladapted ones. Rather than simply accept the injunction to fear processes of imminent
global ecological catastrophe, as well as accept claims as to the moral culpability of humanity for this
catastrophe, there is a need to recognize the ways in which our understanding of this phenomenon
are shaped for us by prophetic and parrhesiastic modes of veridiction. From this more or less ancient combination of modes of
veridiction follows the injunction that the human must change itself in order to save itself and its world. In these senses,

the truths we tell ourselves concerning the [p. 165] problematic of finitude remain embedded within
modes of veridiction as old and moralizing as Christianity itself. Submitting to the blackmail of global
ecological catastrophe is to submit to a combination of the very same modes of veridiction that
functioned in the Middle Ages to subject human beings to absurd ideas such as the Kingdom of the Last Day and
the Final Judgment. The modernity of prophesy and parrhesia concerned with global ecological
catastrophe owes to the different ways in which they pose the problem of finitude. While in the
Middle Ages the legitimacy of theocratic rule depended on an offer of security to humans from the costs of
their finitude through the promise of eternal life, peace and security in Heaven, today the offer is one of successful

adaptation to the costs of our having failed to understand the full nature of the problem of finitude, in
mitigation of the reality that as humans we have only just come to understand that we have no preordained right to the earth, no providential history, or guarantee
of security and development. The
promise held out to us should we be willing to submit to this new
problematization of the truth of finitude, and accept the need to adapt, is not one of eternal life, nor
even necessarily better life, but simply a little more life for our species and those that we exist
interdependently with. STOP IF SHORT ON TIME This is why, rather than submitting to the
blackmail of the coming catastrophe, we argue for the need to develop an alternative and more poetic
vocabulary by which to articulate a politics of the welcome in order for us to confront the reality of
what Paul Virilio names rightly the finitude of (human) progress.33 Why is it we fear that which is fundamental to

the course of the world as well as of ourselves? And what is to fear of an end? Fighting the
debasements of human potentiality, and moving beyond the impasses which political Lefts and Rights
have reached today, requires the development of a new regime of truth (discursively, sensually,
aesthetically and atmospherically) through which to articulate the possibility of the coming
catastrophe while being able to welcome this event as the [p. 166] process of passage to a new world
and life beyond that which we have known up until now. A regime of truth that does not demand of
us that we learn to fear more the course of the world and its transformative effects, with a view to
being able to sustain ourselves for longer in the forms and ways that we have come to know and
depend on, but which instils in us the confidence and courage to encounter and desire of it the very
transformations it renders possible of ourselves.

Welcome to the Anthropocene. Our fear of death and constant need for control has
doomed us and the biosphere along with us. Its time for us to learn how to die.
Scranton 13, Roy. Doctoral candidate in English at Princeton. Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene. NKF
Driving into Iraq just after the 2003 invasion felt like driving into the future. We convoyed all day, all night, past Army checkpoints and burned-out tanks, till in the blue dawn Baghdad rose

Flames licked the bruised sky from the tops of refinery towers, cyclopean monuments bulged and
from the desert like a vision of hell:

broken overpasses swooped and fell over ruined suburbs, bombed factories, and narrow ancient streets.With shock
leaned against the horizon,

and awe, our military had unleashed the end of the world on a city of six million a city about the same size as Houston or Washington. The

infrastructure was totaled: water, power, traffic, markets and security fell to anarchy and local rule.
The citys secular middle class was disappearing, squeezed out between gangsters, profiteers,
fundamentalists and soldiers. The government was going down, walls were going up, tribal lines were being drawn,
and brutal hierarchies savagely established. I was a private in the United States Army. This strange, precarious world was my new home. If I survived. Two and a half years later, safe and lazy

I thought I had made it out. Then I watched on television as Hurricane Katrina hit New
back in Fort Sill, Okla.,

Orleans. This time it was the weather that brought shock and awe, but I saw the same chaos and urban collapse
Id seen in Baghdad, the same failure of planning and the same tide of anarchy. The 82nd Airborne hit the ground, took
over strategic points and patrolled streets now under de facto martial law. My unit was put on alert to prepare for riot control operations. The grim future Id seen in Baghdad

was coming home: not terrorism, not even W.M.D.s, but a civilization in collapse, with a crippled infrastructure, unable to recuperate from shocks to its
system. And today, with recovery still going on more than a year after Sandy and many critics arguing that the Eastern seaboard is no more prepared for a huge weather event than we were
last November, its clear that futures not going away. This March, Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, the commander of the United States Pacific Command, told security and foreign policy

global climate change was the greatest threat the United States faced more dangerous than
specialists in Cambridge, Mass., that

terrorism, Chinese hackers and North Korean nuclear missiles. Upheaval from increased temperatures, rising seas and radical destabilization is probably the most
likely thing that is going to happen he said, that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about. Locklears not alone. Tom
Donilon, the national security adviser, said much the same thing in April, speaking to an audience at Columbias new Center on Global Energy Policy. James Clapper, director of national

Extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves) will increasingly disrupt food and
intelligence, told the Senate in March that

energy markets, exacerbating state weakness, forcing human migrations, and triggering riots, civil
disobedience, and vandalism. On the civilian side, the World Banks recent report, Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for
Resilience, offers a dire prognosis for the effects of global warming, which climatologists now predict will raise global temperatures by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit within a generation and 7.2
degrees Fahrenheit within 90 years. Projections from researchers at the University of Hawaii find us dealing with historically unprecedented climates as soon as 2047. The climate scientist

James Hansen, formerly with NASA, has argued that we face an apocalyptic future. This grim view is seconded by researchers worldwide, including Anders
Levermann, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Lonnie Thompson and many, many, many others. This chorus of Jeremiahs predicts a radically transformed global climate

forcing widespread upheaval not possibly, not potentially, but inevitably. We have passed the point of no return. From
the point of view of policy experts, climate scientists and national security officials, the question is no longer whether global warming exists or

how we might stop it, but how we are going to deal with it. II. Theres a word for this new era we live in: the
Anthropocene. This term, taken up by geologists, pondered by intellectuals and discussed in the pages of publications such as The Economist and the The New York
Times, represents the idea that we have entered a new epoch in Earths geological history, one

characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force. The biologist Eugene F. Stoermer and the Nobel-Prize-
winning chemist Paul Crutzen advanced the term in 2000, and it has steadily gained acceptance as evidence has increasingly mounted that the changes wrought by global warming will affect
not just the worlds climate and biological diversity, but its very geology and not just for a few centuries, but for millenniums. The geophysicist David Archers 2009 book, The Long Thaw:

huge concentrations of carbon dioxide

How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earths Climate, lays out a clear and concise argument for how

in the atmosphere and melting ice will radically transform the planet, beyond freak storms and
warmer summers, beyond any foreseeable future. The Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London the scientists responsible for
pinning the golden spikes that demarcate geological epochs such as the Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene have adopted the Anthropocene as a term deserving further consideration,
significant on the scale of Earth history. Working groups are discussing what level of geological time-scale it might be (an epoch like the Holocene, or merely an age like the Calabrian),
and at what date we might say it began. The beginning of the Great Acceleration, in the middle of the 20th century? The beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around 1800? The advent of

The challenge the Anthropocene poses is a challenge not just to national security, to food and energy
agriculture?

or to our way of life though these challenges are all real, profound, and inescapable. The greatest challenge the
markets,

Anthropocene poses may be to our sense of what it means to be human. Within 100 years within three to five generations
we will face average temperatures 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today, rising seas at least three to 10 feet higher, and worldwide shifts in crop belts, growing seasons and population

centers. Within a thousand years, unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases wholesale right now, humans
will be living in a climate the Earth hasnt seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago, when oceans were
75 feet higher than they are today. We face the imminent collapse of the agricultural, shipping and energy
networks upon which the global economy depends, a large-scale die-off in the biosphere thats
already well on its way, and our own possible extinction. If homo sapiens (or some genetically modified variant) survives the next millenniums,
it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have inhabited. Geological time scales, civilizational
collapse and species extinction give rise to profound problems that humanities scholars and academic philosophers, with their
taste for fine-grained analysis, esoteric debates and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill suited to address. After all,
how will thinking about Kant help us trap carbon dioxide? Can arguments between object-oriented ontology and historical

materialism protect honeybees from colony collapse disorder? Are ancient Greek philosophers, medieval theologians, and contemporary
metaphysicians going to keep Bangladesh from being inundated by rising oceans? Of course not. But the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have

always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: What does it mean to be human? and What does it mean to live? In the epoch

of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality What does my life mean in the face of
death? is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does
one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end? These questions have no logical or
empirical answers. They are philosophical problems par excellence. Many thinkers, including Cicero, Montaigne, Karl Jaspers, and The Stones own Simon Critchley, have argued that studying

philosophy is learning how to die. If thats true, then we have entered humanitys most philosophical age for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The rub is that now we
have to learn how to die not as individuals, but as a civilization. Learning how to die isnt easy. In Iraq, at the beginning, I was terrified
by the idea. Baghdad seemed incredibly dangerous, even though statistically I was pretty safe. We got shot at and mortared, and I.E.D.s laced every highway, but I had good armor, we had a
great medic, and we were part of the most powerful military the world had ever seen. The odds were good I would come home. Maybe wounded, but probably alive. Every day I went out on

mission, though, I looked down the barrel of the future and saw a dark, empty hole. For the soldier death is the future, the future his
profession assigns him, wrote Simone Weil in her remarkable meditation on war, The Iliad or the Poem of Force. Yet the idea of mans having death for a future is
abhorrent to nature. Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without
meeting deaths face. That was the face I saw in the mirror, and its gaze nearly paralyzed me. I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomos

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Instead of fearing my

Hagakure, which commanded:

end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, Id imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a
sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, Id tell myself that I didnt

The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone
need to worry, because I was already dead.

else came back alive. If by setting ones heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, wrote Tsunetomo, he gains
freedom in the Way. I got through my tour in Iraq one day at a time, meditating each morning on my inevitable end. When I left Iraq and came back stateside, I thought Id left that future

behind. Then I saw it come home in the chaos that was unleashed after Katrina hit New Orleans. And then I saw it again
when Sandy battered New York and New Jersey: Government agencies failed to move quickly enough, and volunteer groups

like Team Rubicon had to step in to manage disaster relief. Now, when I look into our future into the
Anthropocene I see water rising up to wash out lower Manhattan. I see food riots, hurricanes, and
climate refugees. I see 82nd Airborne soldiers shooting looters. I see grid failure, wrecked harbors, Fukushima waste, and plagues. I see Baghdad. I
see the Rockaways. I see a strange, precarious world. Our new home. The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end.
Likewise , civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are
wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of
things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever,

burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the
ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet
the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth,
permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence. The biggest problem climate change
poses isnt how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It wont be

The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one:

addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning.

understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the
sooner we realize theres nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the
hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality. The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will
be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we cant sustain. Or we
can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever
problems the present offers without attachment or fear. If we want to learn to live in the
Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.
Impacts
 Brainwashing
Their hyped up extinction scenarios are government tactics to consolidate authority in
the hands of the elite---neuroscience demonstrates that they are literally
brainwashing us into Fascism
Livingston 12 (Alexander, Assistant Prof of Govt @ Cornell. postdoctoral fellow in the department of
Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, and a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Ethics at the
University of Toronto, Avoiding Deliberative Democracy? Micropolitics, Manipulation, and the Public
Sphere, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2012), pp. 269-294, Project MUSE

Deliberative democracy is a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. A politics of pure deliberation is the dream of hare-
brained philosophy professors who, fetishizing consensus, would reduce all political conflict to moral disagreement, purge passion from politics,
and substitute the disinterested and boring experience of jury duty for the vital and indispensable experience of action, and all this just for the
sake of theoretical parsimony. At its best deliberative democracys moralization
and rationalization of politics stinks of a
bad nostalgia for a classical participatory democracy that never existed. At its worst, it is a license for an
exclusionary politics of elite decision making that silences the voices of the needy and degenerates into a variant of
technocratic management from above. [End Page 269] Or so much of the rhetoric of its critics goes.1 That this caricature of deliberative
democracy is familiar ought to be the occasion for some worry. A general skepticism concerning the claims of public reason has seeped into
much of the landscape of contemporary political theory, making this kind of easy rejection of deliberation both comprehensible and all too
plausible. Yet this kind of rejection is too fast and depends on a straw man account of what deliberative democracy means. The aim of this
article is to make the case that this caricature is wrong and that such skepticism about public reason is unwarranted. Deliberative democracy is
a robust theory of the political that, at its best, lays the groundwork for an egalitarian and even radical democratic politics. To this end, I
propose to read the recent work of William E. Connolly as an expression of political theorys skeptical critique of public reason. Connolly is
exemplary of this wider skepticism in that while he offers a powerful critique of deliberative democracy, his critical alternative is only plausible
when rearticulated as a variant of deliberative democracy itself. Connolly argues that contemporary findings in neuroscience
and cognitive science, mixed with a healthy dose of Gilles Deleuzes cosmological pluralism, reveal a deep, visceral register
of human thinking that theories of deliberative democracy overlook at their own peril. Deliberative
democracys rationalism turns a blind eye to this political unconscious and relegates the theory to an ineffectual
intellectualism, but, according to Connolly, the left today needs to make this unconscious lower register its
fighting grounds if it hopes to hold its ground against an insurgent neoconservative micropolitics of
media manipulation. This is a suggestive line of argument, but ought it lead to a rejection of deliberative democracy or instead to a
more robust and complex account of communicative agency in our media-saturated world? Connolly travels the first route, but I argue that his
alternative to deliberation that he dubs micropolitics, a politics of the ordinary that politicizes habits, dispositions, feelings, the body,
emotions, and thinking as potential sites of domination and resistance below the register of formal principles and procedures, can only be
defended by following the second route. Given the way that Connolly presents the problem of the visceral register there does not seem to be
much role for deliberation in his vision of democratic politics. While he often stresses that intellectualism is constitutively insufficient to
ethics, he strains to remind us that saying this is not the same as saying that deliberation has no role to play (2002, 111). Issuing a series of
caveats, Connolly notes that nothing in the [End Page 270] above carries the implication of eliminating argument, rationality, language, or
conscious thought from public discourse and that he only means to flag the insufficiency of argument to ethical life without denying its
pertinence (1999, 36; 2002, 108). The goal of his turn to micropolitics is not to replace deliberation but rather to augment intellectualist
models of thinking and culture (2002, 13). Given the role of affective modes of appraisal in politics, I agree with Connolly that theories of
public reason ought to be amended and augmented in many ways. Yet, for all his caveats, Connollys vision of micropolitical engagement
seems to give short shrift to practices of public deliberation. Indeed, his theory only announces their compatibility but does not follow through
in enacting it. In what follows, I try to close this circle, so to speak, by demonstrating the deliberative potential of Connollys agonistic
pluralism.2 I agree that a politics of the visceral reveals the shortcomings of theories of deliberative democracy that prioritize small community
meetings and experimental mini-publics as the sine qua non of democratic citizenship today, but Connolly overlooks the resources provided
by an alternative account of deliberative democracy; namely, a critical and sociologically complex theory of deliberative democracy that aims at
revising our self-understandings and provoking self-transformation. Intellectualism and the Visceral Register The first step in exploring the
potential of William Connollys reluctant theory of deliberative democracy is to come to terms with the reasons why he thinks extant accounts
of communicative politics are insufficient. Intellectualism, Connolly argues, is the grand failing of deliberative democracy. In accusing
deliberative democracy of intellectualism, he is not issuing a by-now familiar criticism of deliberative rationalism. To say that deliberative
democracy is guilty of intellectualism is not to say that it is blind to questions of power, or identity, or differenceor at least its not only to say
thisbut rather that deliberative models of democracy are working with a faulty conception of thinking. They have been captured by what
Gilles Deleuze calls the image of thoughtthe idea that thinking is an autonomous, linguistically mediated process of mind that is oriented
toward coherence and truth (1994, 12967). Deliberative thinking takes place at one relatively transparent register where our reasons for
action can be compared, reasoned about, and revised through the force of the better argument. This image of thought is intellectualist because
it fails to see how thought is a layered process of neural, perceptual, and embodied activity not reducible to conceptual ratiocination alone.
Attempts to give priority to the highest and conceptually most sophisticated brain nodules in thinking and judgment, Connolly argues, may
encourage those invested in these theories to underestimate the importance of body image, unconscious motor memory, and thought-imbued
affect (2002, 10). Against the intellectualist image of thought, Connolly argues that thinking is distributed across multiple registers that make
possible visceral modes of appraisal (1999, 27). It is these deep, intensive, and reactive visceral modes of thinking and judgment that the
deliberative image of thinking overlooks. Disgust, for example, is a visceral response that makes your stomach turn. It seems to well up inside
you without your willing it. The values and beliefs of others can sometimes stimulate this kind of feeling, say, if they present you with a defense
of cloning, or euthanasia, or gay marriage, as the case may be. You cant always put your finger on what it is that strikes you as so disgusting
and morally contaminating about such proposals, but sometimes you just feel that they are plain wrong. Were unable to provide defensible
reasons for our responses. Sometimes things just rub us the wrong way. Connollys point is that visceral
and embodied responses
like disgust, shame, and hatred come to play a role in political decision makingas they evidently do in
political deliberations about matters such as cloning, euthanasia, and gay marriageand that a deliberative approach is poorly
equipped to deal with them. Deliberative democrats either require that these sorts of affective feelings are
purged from the public sphere as unfortunate distortions of real communication, or they suggest that
they can be subject to deliberation and argument just as any other sort of belief, interest, or prejudice
can be. Connolly thinks that both of these approaches are bound to fail. Visceral reactions are not conceptually
sophisticated thoughts and as such are not amenable to deliberation, argumentation, or verbal persuasion. The
exchange of validity claims alone is not enough to stop your stomach from churning when you think about the right to die. Deliberative
democrats need to learn how much more there is to thinking than argument and to begin experimenting with alternative forms of political
engagement (1999, 149). Because political judgment is so often carried out at the level of this visceral or virtual register, deliberation cannot
provide a privileged or efficacious form of participation, justification, or transformation. To corroborate these claims about the multiple
registers of thinking, Connolly turns to recent findings in neuroscience that suggest a more intimate
relationship between reason, the emotions, and the body than [End Page 272] the intellectualist account
assumes. Like some other political theorists, Connolly hopes that a closer engagement with neurology and cognitive
science will provide grounds for a more adequate account of subjectivity, reason, and ethics.3 The kind of
thinking that intellectualists privilegesophisticated, conceptual, reflective, deliberative, and linguistically mediated
thoughtpertains to the activity of the largest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex. It is through the rich and
complex layers of neural activity in the cortex that we can perform intricate activities like planning, speaking, reasoning, and arguing. What
recent findings in neuroscience suggest, however, is that cortical activity is not autonomous and is in fact
in some ways subservient to the parts of the brain that control emotions, memory, and affect.4 In
particular, the cortex responds to information from the limbic system, the small curved part of the brain below the cortex that controls emotion
and fine motor movement. Made up of the basal ganglia, the hippo-campus, and the amygdala, the limbic system enables the fast, intensive,
and reactive action of affects. The jolt of fear that makes ones hair stand on end or the disgust that we feel in the pit of our stomachs is the
work of the part of the limbic system called the amygdala. The sort of reactions governed by this system are an evolutionary necessity for a
species that needs to appraise and respond to dangerous situations quickly and effectively without much cognitive expenditure. The decision to
jump out of the way of a speeding car needs to happen in a split second. It is not the sort of situation that allows you to deliberate about the
relative merits of your different options before acting. But this is not to say that the limbic system is entirely thoughtless. It is not concerned
with sophisticated, conceptual, and deliberative thinking, but its actions certainly are symbolically mediated or thought imbued in some sense
(the expression is Connollys). These intense affective responses are not entirely biologically determined but instead take a fair deal of cultural
learning. The limbic system in a sense learns or records cultural standards of what is dangerous and what is disgusting and then habituates
them as automated response.5 Between the cortex and limbic system there is a feedback loop of mutual influence through which these fast,
affective, proto-thoughts of the limbic system shape the slow, reflective thinking of the cortex (2002). The existence of these intensive,
instinctive elements moving below the register of reflective judgment means that human reason is not pure and autonomous but rather is
shaped in a complex way at the neural level by the influence of the emotions and affects.6 David Hume, it would seem, [End Page 273] was
right to say that reason is in fact the slave of the passions. And what this means for politics is that the emotions and affects that shape and
guide thinking are themselves deeply influenced by values and opinions that we may or may not actually want to endorse. Racist,
sexist,
homophobic, and other ideological sentiments may lodge themselves deeply into this body-brain-
culture network (2002). Where this is the case, valid and sound argumentation is at a loss to dislodge
them and the force of the better argument may be powerless to persuade us to respect, tolerate, or
trust each other in the ways that democratic cooperation require. Connolly explains: Culturally preorganized charges
shape perception and judgment in ways that exceed the picture of the world supported by the models of calculative reason, intersubjective
culture, and deliberative democracy. They show us how linguistically complex brain regions respond not only to events in the world but also,
proprioceptively, to cultural habits, skills, memory traces, and affects mixed into our muscles, skin, gut, and cruder brain regions. (2002, 36) This
all culminates in a critique of deliberative models of democracy: the inability of practical reason to influence these potentially dangerous or
hateful culturally preorganized charges points to its undoing. Visceral Politics Before analyzing the merits of Connollys critique of deliberative
democracy I want to first situate his charge of intellectualism within its political context. At its heart, Connollys objection to the deliberative
turn in democratic theory boil down to his belief that too
much focus on the terms of justification and legitimation
ignores the everyday sensibilities expressed and reproduced in the actions of citizens. These sensibilities are
not identical to doctrinal beliefs or articulate reasons; or, as he prefers to put it in his most recent book, spirituality is not identical with
doctrinal creed (2008). Rather, the sensibility that determines how it is that we hold our beliefs or creed is unreflectively informs this visceral
register of judgment and thinking. Where these sensibilities have been cultivated to promote respect, responsiveness, and generosity a
pluralistic liberalism can thrive. The political problem, however, is that in
contemporary America this noble ethos is largely
absent. Instead Connolly argues that this visceral register has become a vehicle for a stingy sensibility
animated by resentment, fear, and a desire for revenge (1999, 7). The deep roots of existential resentment in an increasingly
disempowered American working class today provide the spiritual common ground for the an emerging coalition of competing neoconservative
and neoliberal elites who share a punitive and vengeful ethic while disagreeing on matters of doctrine. The resulting theological-corporate-
media apparatus Connolly calls the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine wreaks havoc on American democracy today as it proceeds to
undermine the terms of liberal pluralism and roll back the hard-won achievements of the liberal democratic struggles of the last hundred years
(2008, 3968). Democratic theorys idea of deliberation seems poorly equipped to confront this threat. Connollys contention is that the failing
of the left in America today is due in no small part to its resistance to accepting the role of the visceral register in politics. Instead, it is still
caught up in a potentially antiquated search for some better argument that would bring reason and truth together to serve the ends of justice.
thinking and has crafted an array of
The American right, however, has been a much better student of the visceral elements of
strategies that seek to manipulate it to punitive ends. Among working-class Americans who have
suffered unemployment with the collapse of the industrial economy, cultural alienation from a powerfully secular
and liberal cultural elite, and social fragmentation from the increasing speed, ethnic pluralism, and diversity of a globalizing world, there exists a
reserve of resentment to be tapped. Neoliberals
and neoconservatives on the American right have overcome
their traditional antagonism to draw on this resentment and channel it into a shared spirituality of
revenge that vilifies foreigners, immigrants, nonwhites, women, queers, liberals, and secularists.7
Crucial to the success of this resonance machine has been its most powerful echo chamber: the media. Savvy
exploitation of new media technologies enable conditions of mass persuasion through which the
sentiments of resentment are validated, entering the thought-imbued feelings of viewers before
being subjected to critical scrutiny (2008, 55), and channeled to political ends. Twenty-four-hour news
shows, aggressive and partisan pundits, and the constant fluctuation of terror alerts all combine to
excite, code, and steer visceral fear and anxiety. The result is the proliferation of ugly dispositions
that the powerful media machinery of the right can foment and amplify, installing them in habitual
patterns of perception, identity, interest, and judgments of entitlement (2008, 53). Micropolitics as the manipulation
of embodied, intensive affects along the visceral register of thinking is a familiar tactic in the
repertoire of [End Page 275] commercial capitalism and the state. Marketers and advertisers have long
drawn on findings in psychology, neurobiology, and related fields to manufacture the desires their
commodities satisfy. Branding is only the most recent affective technique of assuring consumer loyalty in a long history of unconscious and
unwilled consumption. Marketers now talk about low-involvement advertising that bypasses the higher-level cognitive functions of viewers
to appeal to nonconscious mental processing. Similarly, the manipulation of intensive reactions and affect has been
crucial in sustaining consent for Americas open-ended war on terror. The color-coded terror alert
system in place to warn Americans of the likelihood of terrorist attacks functions as a perceptual
marker by which public fear and anxiety are calibrated. The aggressive rhetorical tactics, facial
gestures, and vocal timbre of conservative media pundits like Bill OReilly and Rush Limbaugh as well
as the explosive graphics, and fast cutting techniques of twenty-four-hour news channels all have the effect of expressing
the spinelessness of the liberals they browbeat.8 And the list goes on. Techniques of affective persuasion that function
through sub-discursive modes of communication are ubiquitous and powerful in the modern world (2008, 66). The
challenge of confronting them today, Connolly wagers, means learning to play their game. The left is done arguing. Its time to learn how fight
fire with fire (2006, 74). What Kind of Politics Are Micropolitics? A more fundamental source of Connollys skepticism about deliberative
democracy than the findings of neurological science is Gilles Deleuzes cosmological pluralism. In Connollys texts, these scientific and
metaphysical sources dovetail elegantly, but one is always left with the impression that the scientific arguments are deployed only to the extent
that they readily accord with these more basic philosophical commitments to a deep and radical pluralism in the world.9 Deleuzes concepts of
multiplicity, rhizomes, micropolitics, deterritorialization, and war machines infuse Connollys writing and offer an alternative discourse to the
allegedly problematic language of public reason. In fact, Deleuze himself, in his magisterial collaboration with Flix Guattari, could be said to
prefigure a certain denigration of deliberative politics.10 It would of course be anachronistic to describe Deleuze and Guattari as critics of
deliberative democracy, or even worse, as denizens of the American culture wars. But that said, there are passing remarks concerning
deliberation in their texts that seem to connect with [End Page 276] Connollys claims. More important than decision making and deliberation
are the molecular and unconscious forces that open us up to new ways of thinking and experiencing the world. When Deleuze and Guattari do
mention political deliberation it is invariably to dismiss it as an example of what they call arboreal, state thinking: Politics operates by
macrodecisions and binary choices, binary interests; but the realm of the decidable remains very slim. Political decision making necessarily
descends into a world of microdeterminations, attractions, and desires, which it must sound out or evaluate in a different fashion. Beneath
linear conceptions and segmentary decisions, an evaluation of flows and their quanta. (1987, 221) A politics that addresses these
microdeterminations, what Deleuze and Guattari call micropolitics, is more basic than deliberation because it concerns the boundaries of the
rigid boundaries. Strategic appeals to
realm of the decidable. The appeal of reason can only function within existing narrow and
affect, however, can help close or expand this realm and open up new issues to deliberation and participation.
In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari consider micropolitics as essentially underlying deliberation. Creative becoming, not practical reason, is at
the heart of their vision of politics. How does a democratic micropolitics, then, attempt to reshuffle the rigid segments of a stingy American
public culture? Connolly argues that the only way we can achieve a public ethos of pluralism is by cultivating the civic virtues of agonistic
respect and critical responsiveness (2005, 65). If the work of politics aspires to more than a further round in a vicious circle of existential
revenge, citizens must first nurture an ethics of micropolitical receptivity to the interdependence of their conflicting identities claims in a
complex, ever faster late-modern world (1999, 149). To this end, Connolly draws on Deleuze and Guattaris thinking to devise tactics and
techniques of nudging or exerting modest influence on the visceral register of the self and of public culture more widely (2002, 77; 1999,
29). In some passages, Connolly describes this as the search for more expansive modes of persuasion, while in others he appeals to the force
of a sort of mystical experience (1999, 8; 2002, 120). Yet this dependence on Deleuze and Guattaris micropolitics draws Connolly away
from his own best insights and leads him to marginalize the democratic core of a leftist response to an insurgent neoconservative micropolitics.
[End Page 277] Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy provides a powerful tool for theorizing the symbolic meanings and dispositions carried at
visceral register of experience. While they do not frame their project in terms of embodied registers or the differential processing structures of
brain, they provide an analogous conception of experience, drawing on Henri Bergsons concept of the virtual (Bergson 1990; Deleuze 1988).
Emotions, memory traces, infrasensible experiences, habitual gestures, and the unconscious exist virtually, such that we cannot always
articulate them at the level of language, yet they play a role in shaping our higher-register experiences of the world. The virtual represents a
lower register of experience than the conscious and reflective register of ideas, doctrines, and interests. To the extent that A Thousand Plateaus
can be regarded as a text of political philosophy, it can be said to be a treatise concerned with political potential of this virtual register as both a
site of subjectification and resistance. Micropolitics is Deleuze and Guatarris name for this politics of the virtual. In A Thousand Plateaus,
the received image of the
Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of micropolitics in their analysis of political regimes. Against
state as a centralized, stable, and sovereign territorial entity, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the state is better
described as a macropolitical assemblage that depends on more ubiquitous, fluid, and supple
micropolitical assemblages. The molar organization of the state depends on a micro- or molecular
organization of forces such as affects, moods, memories, and habits that sustain and propagate the
states ends. In short, they write, everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a
macropolitics and a micropolitics (1987, 213). Despite appearances to the contrary, even the most monolithic
and centralized assemblages of power, such as the state, are in fact fluid and lively micro-assemblages resonating together in an
only relatively stable manner. Taking the stark example of the fascist state, Deleuze and Guattari make the case that it too is in fact only a
decentered plurality that depends on the micropolitics that sustain it: The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical
level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of
molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural
fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veterans fascism, fascism on [End Page 278] the Left and fascism on the
Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates
with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole.
 Death Cult
Body Counts. Death debating reduces peoples lives to mere numbers for debaters to
consume in their game.
Jean Baudrillard, 93 (Symbolic Exchange and Death trans Iain Grant, 162-3, 173-5, manpower is left
deliberately in)
2. More importantly, that everyone should have a right to their life (habeas corpus habeas vitam) extends social jurisdiction over
death. Death is socialized like everything else, and can no longer be anything but natural, since every other death is a social scandal: we have
not done what is necessary. Is this social progress? No, it is rather the progress of the social, which even annexes death to
itself. Everyone is dispossessed of their death, and will no longer be able to die as it is now understood. One will no longer be free to live
as long as possible. Amongst other things, this signifies the ban on consuming ones life without taking limits into account. In short, the principle of natural
death is equivalent to the neutralization of life. 28 The same goes for the question of equality in death: life must be reduced
to quantity (and death therefore to nothing) in order to adjust it to democracy and the law of equivalences. The same objective that is
inscribed in the monopoly of institutional violence is accomplished as easily by forced survival as it is by death: a forced life for lifes sake (kidney machines,
malformed children on life-support machines, agony prolonged at all costs, organ transplants, etc.). All these procedures are equivalent to disposing of death and
imposing life, but according to what ends? Those of science and medicine? Surely this is just scientific paranoia, unrelated to any human objective. Is profit the aim?
No: society swallows huge amounts of profit This 'therapeutic heroism is characterised by soaring costs and 'decreasing benefits': they manufacture unproductive
survivors_ Even if social security can still be analysed as 'compensation for the labour force in the interests of capital, this argument has no purchase here_
Nevertheless: the system is facing the same contradiction here as with the death penalty. it overspends on the prolongation of life because this system of values is
essential to the strategic equilibrium of the whole; economically: however, this overspending unbalances the whole_ What is to be done? An economic choice
becomes necessary, where we can see the outline of euthanasia as a semi-official doctrine or practice_ We choose to keep 30 per cent of the uraemics in France
alive (36 per cent in the USA!). Euthanasia is already everywhere, and the ambiguity of making a humanist demand for it (as with the 'freedom' to abortion) is
striking: it is inscribed in the middle to long term logic of the system. All this tends in the direction of an increase in social control. For there is a clear objective
behind all these apparent contradictions: to ensure control over the entire range of life and death. From birth control to death control, whether we execute people
the essential thing is that the
or compel their survival (the prohibition of dying is the caricature, but also the logical form of progressive tolerance),
decision is withdrawn from them: that their life and their death are never freely theirs, but that they
live or die according to a social visa. It is even intolerable that their life and death remain open to biological chance, since this is still a type of
freedom. Just as morality commanded you shall not kill', today it commands: 'You shall not die', not in any old way. anyhow, and only if the law and
medicine permit. And if your death is conceded you, it will still be by order. In short: death proper has been abolished to make room
for death control and euthanasia strictly speaking, it is no longer even death, but something completely neutralised that
comes to be inscribed in the rules and calculations of equivalence: rewriting-planning-programming-
system. It must be possible to operate death as a social service, integrate it like health and disease under the
sign of the Plan and Social Security. This is the store of 'motel-suicides' in the USA, where, for a comfortable sum, one can purchase one's death under the
most agreeable conditions (like any other consumer good); perfect service, everything has been foreseen, even trainers who give you back your appetite for life,
after which they kindly and conscientiously send the gas into your room, without torment and without meeting any apposition. A service operates these motel-
suicides, quite rightly paid (eventually reimbursed?). Why did death not become a social service when: like everything else: it is functionalised
as individual and computable consumption in social input and output?
Trivialization. Death debating causes an aesthetic fascination with the spectacle of
death. This turns debate into a death cult and denies the choice to avoid death
impacts.
Jean Baudrillard, 93 (Symbolic Exchange and Death trans Iain Grant, p. 185-7)

Pursued and censured everywhere, death springs up everywhere again. No longer as apocalyptic folklore, such as might have haunted the living imagination in
passes into the most banal reality, and for us takes on the
certain epochs; but voided precisely of any imaginary substance, it
mask of the very principle of rationality that dominates our lives. Death is when everything functions and serves something
else, it is the absolute, signing, cybernetic functionality of the urban environment as in Jacques Tatis film Play-Time. Man is absolutely indexed on his function, as in
Kafka: the age of the civil servant is the age of a culture of death. This is the phantasm of total programming, increased predictability and accuracy, finality not only
in material things, but in fulfilling desires. In a word, death is confused with the law of value and strangely with the structural law of value by which everything is
arrested as a coded difference in a universal nexus of relations. This is the true face of ultra-modern death, made up of the faultless, objective, ultra-rapid
connection of all the terms in a system. Our true necropolises are no longer the cemeteries, hospitals, wars, hecatombs; death is no longer where we think it is, it is
no longer biological, psychological, metaphysical, it is no longer even murder: our societies true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank spaces
from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where the worlds sterilized memories are frozen. Only the dead remember everything in something
like an immediate eternity of knowledge, a quintessence of the world that today we dream of burying in the form of microfilm and archives, making the entire world
into an archive in order that it be discovered by some future civilization. The cryogenic freezing of all knowledge so that it can be resurrected; knowledge passes into
immortality as sign-value. Against our dream of losing and forgetting everything, we set up an opposing great wall of relations, connections and information, a dense
and inextricable artificial memory, and we bury ourselves alive in the fossilized hope of one day being rediscovered. Computers are the transistorized death to which
we submit in the hope of survival. Museums are already there to survive all civilizations, in order to bear testimony. But to what? It is of little importance. The mere
fact that they exist testifies that we are in a culture which no longer possesses any meaning for itself and which can now only dream of having meaning for someone
else from a later time. Thus everything becomes an environment of death as soon as it is no longer a sign that can be transistorized in a gigantic whole, just as
money reaches the point of no return when it is nothing more than a system of writing. Basically, political economy is only constructed (at the cost of untold
sacrifices) or designed so as to be recognized as immortal by a future civilization, or as an instance of truth. As for religion, this is unimaginable other than in the Last
Judgment, where God recognizes his own. But the Last Judgment is there already, realized: it is the definitive spectacle of our crystallized death. The spectacle is, it
must be said, grandiose. From the hieroglyphic schemes of the Defense Department or the World Trade Center to the great informational
schemes of the media, from siderurgical complexes to grand political apparatuses, from the megapolises with their senseless control of the slightest and most
everyday acts: humanity, as Benjamin says, has everywhere become an object of contemplation to itself. Its
self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure of the first order. (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations [tr. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, London: Jonathan
Cape: 1970], p. 244) For Benjamin, this was the very form of fascism , that is to say, a certain exacerbated form of ideology, an
aesthetic perversion of politics, pushing the acceptance of a culture of death to the point of jubilation.
And it is true that today the whole system of political economy has become the finality without end and the aesthetic vertigo of productivity to us, and this is only
the contrasting vertigo of death. This is exactly why art is dead: at the point of saturation and sophistication, all this jubilation has passed into the spectacle of
complexity itself, and all aesthetic fascination has been monopolized by the system as it grows into its own double (what else would it do with its gigantic towers, its
satellites, its giant computers, if not double itself as signs?). We are all victims of production become spectacle, of the aesthetic enjoyment [jouisseance], of delirious
production and reproduction, and we are not about to turn our backs on it, for in every spectacle there is the immanence of t he catastrophe. Today, we have made
the vertigo of politics that Benjamin denounces in fascism, its perverse aesthetic enjoyment, into the experience of production at the level of the general system.
We produce the experience of a de-politicised, de-ideologised vertigo of the rational administration of things, of endlessly
exploding finalities.
 Death Drive

All bodies fundamentally share a drive for a return to limitlessness. The denial of that
desire creates reactive modes of being and forces us into cycles of violence as bodies
capacity to will their own fate is conditioned away from them.
Braidotti 09. Rosi Braidotti, distinguished professor in the humanities at Utrecht University (Netherlands),In: Braidotti, R. and Colebrook, C.
and Hanafin, Patrick (eds.) Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Publishers Limited, pg. 109

It is a paradox that while at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper level of
our unconscious structures, all we long for is to lie silently and let time wash over us in the stillness of
non-life. Self-styling ones death is an act of affirmation. It means cultivating an approach, a style of
life that progressively and continuously fixes the modalities and the stage for the final act, leaving
nothing unattended. Pursuing a sort of seduction into immortality, the ethical life is life as virtual
suicide. Life as virtual suicide is life as constant creation. Life lived so as to break the cycles of inert
repetitions that usher in banality. Lest we delude ourselves with narcissistic pretences, we need to
cultivate endurance, immortality within time, that is to say death in life. The generative capacity of
this Life cannot be bound or confined to the single, human individual. It rather transversally
trespasses all boundaries in the pursuit of its aim, which is the expression of its potency. It connects us
trans-individually, trans-generationally and eco-philosophically. Just as the life in me is not mine or even
individual, so the death in me is not mine, except in a very circumscribed sense of the term. In both
cases all I can hope for is to craft both my life and my death in a mode, at a speed and fashion which
can sustain all the intensity I is capable of. I can self-style this gesture auto-poietically, thus
expressing its essence as the constitutive desire to endure. I call it potentia. What we humans truly
yearn for is to disappear by merging into this eternal flow of becomings, the precondition for which is
the loss, disappearance and disruption of the atomised, individual self. The ideal would be to take only
memories and to leave behind only footsteps. What we most truly desire is to surrender the self,
preferably in the agony of ecstasy, thus choosing our own way of disappearing, our way of dying to
and as our self. This can be described also as the moment of ascetic dissolution of the subject, the
moment of its merging with the web of non-human forces that frame him/her the cosmos as a
whole. Call it death, it has rather to do with radical immanence, with the totality of the moment in
which, we finally coincide completely with our body in becoming at last what we will have been all
along: a virtual corpse. This is neither Christian affirmation of Life nor transcendental delegation of the
meaning and value system to categories higher than the embodied self. On the contrary, it is the
intelligence of radically immanent flesh that states with every single breath that the life in you is not
marked by any master signifier and it most certainly does not bear your name. The awareness of the
absolute difference between intensive or incorporeal affects and the specific affected bodies that one
happens to be is crucial to the ethics of choosing for death. Death is the unsustainable, but it is also
virtual in that it has the generative capacity to engender the actual. Consequently, death is but an
obvious manifestation of principles that are active in every aspect of life, namely, the pre-individual or
impersonal power of potentia; the affirmation of multiplicity and not of one-sidedness and the
interconnection with an outside which is of cosmic dimension and infinite. It is a temporal brand of
vitalism that could not be further removed from the idea of death as the inanimate and indifferent state
of matter, the entropic state to which the body is supposed to return. It is desire as plenitude and
over-flowing, not as lack, following the entropic model built into psychoanalytic theory. Death, on the
contrary, is the becoming-imperceptible of the nomadic subject and as such it is part of the cycles of
becomings, yet another form of inter-connectedness, a vital relationship that links one with other,
multiple forces. The impersonal is life and death as bios/zoe in us the ultimate outside as the
frontier of the incorporeal.
 Fascism
This subordination of desire to fear in the face of threats from the outside world has
transformed the State into a war machine. Liberalism asks us to surrender and be safe
war is permeating everywhere. In this way, war is an imminent thing, dispersed
everywhere and nowhere. Dont live life in a bomb shelter death isnt the worst that
can happen.
Bell 7 (Daniel M., Associate Professor of Theological Ethics, Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, JCRT 8.2 SPRING
2007 55,d http://www.jcrt.org/archives/08.2/)

life is constituted by motion; specifically by the active power that is desire.

Like Hobbes and Foucault, Deleuze holds that
Moreover, this desire in a state of nature if you will, is not reactive; it is not fearful. Rather, it is anarchic, creative,
harmonic. This active, playful power that is desire only becomes reactive, fearful, or in Deleuzes terms, paranoid, as it is acted upon, as it is
captured or seduced by reactive and fearful forces, which is precisely what the state-form attempts to do. The state-form assembles
desire, forms and shapes it so that it is paranoid and fearful, and in so doing, the state promotes the promise of
its own existence: Surrender and be safe. Deleuzes focus, however, broadens beyond the state-form to consider the
contemporary political horizon as it is constituted by global capitalism. He positions his account of desire and the state -
form within a universal history of capitalism. According to this genealogy, the history of capitalisms advent is the story of
the state-forms slow subsumption by or becoming immanent to economy. Hobbes absolutist state of sovereignty was able to channel all
desire through the bottle-neck of the state and its mercantile economy. Yet, as Foucault noted, eventually desire exceeded the ability of the
sovereign to control and contain it, and as a result the state-form mutated into liberal state. What is novel about the liberal state is that its art
of government neither requires all desire be funneled through the state (civil society is fine, as per Foucaults governmentality) nor demands
that desire be subordinated to the ends of sovereignty. In this sense, liberal government is distinctly economic government; it is government
that strives to further not its own ends, what an earlier political tradition called reason of state, but the ends of capitalist economy. The liberal
state is immanent to the larger economic field, and its task is primarily that of minimizing intervention and interference in the workings of that
field. Yet, we might ask, have we not crossed a new threshold in recent decades as capitalism has increasingly undermined the governing
authority of even the liberal, economic, state? Does not global capitalism mark a crisis of the liberal state? After all, it would appear that
capitals ability to eclipse national sovereignty is approaching the point of rendering the liberal state unnecessary, a point where passports can
be replaced by credit cards and citizenship replaced by membership in trade alliances and associations. According to Deleuze, we
have
entered a new era, but the state-form has not been rendered obsolete. Rather, it is undergoing another mutation, a
shift toward a much more active or aggressive advocacy of capital. No longer is the state satisfied with merely
minimizing intervention in economy; now it actively pursues the extension of economy into every fiber and cell of
human life. The state has become a model of realization for capital. More specifically, and more immediately relevant to the
matter of the culture and politics of fear, the state has become a war machine. Whereas it was once the case that
states appropriated war machines; today states constitute a war machine. Specifically, they are capitalisms war machine. The capitalist state is
the small state, strong state that we see evolving all around us in response to the dictates of the global capitalist order states long on
disciplinary power and short on welfare capacity. Furthermore, the object of this machine is no longer, as it once was,
war in the traditional sense of the term. Here we might recall the ways the war of terrorism was described at its initiation. It is a
ghost war, occurring not at the frontiers of society but, like a fog and in a manner synonymous with
governmentality, permeating or blanketing society. And it is waged against a spectral enemy be it terrorists with dirty bombs,
microbes, or superpredator youths16 by means equally spectral stealth forces, renditions, disappearances, electronic eavesdropping,
invisible break-ins, snooping librarians, truck driver informants and so forth. This war machine, moreover, does not simply fight in society, but
rather it has society, peace, politics, the world order as its object. As Deleuze observes, with this latest permutation of the state-form,
Clausewitzs famous formula has been inverted: War is no longer the continuation of politics; politics is now the continuation of war. 17 We
are already living in the midst of the Third World War, Deleuze wrote almost thirty years ago. Politics, culture, peace, civil
society are the object of this war. Thus we are submerged in a state of permanent war; permanent emergency, a permanent state
of exception where the laws and civic political associations that once offered some degree of liberty are suspended indefinitely and
foreclosed. 18 Moreover, in waging this war against peace and politics, the
state-form, in a move reminiscent of Orwells 1984, promotes
and installs a very special kind of peace: a terrifying peace, the peace of absolute terror, a culture and politics of fear.
Security is now conceived as war, as organized insecurity, as distributed and programmed universal catastrophe. War is peace and freedom is
preserved only by sacrificing it and we all have a stake in this as we desire the goods that this fear makes possible. And what goods are those?
According to Deleuze, this
state of permanent war, this culture of fear has as its goal the deterritorialization
of desire, the separation of the productive force of desire from anything that would stand between it
and the capitalist market and the concomitant rendering available of this desire to this market. Thus, the culture of fear is not in
service to the state per se, but the market. The threat of terror paves the way for capital and the goods it promises to provide. So, after 9/11
the president instructs us, not to seek out our neighbors and embrace them, but to shop, to seek out commodities and purchase them. Shortly
thereafter, the US trade representative to Latin America wielded the threat of terrorism to cajole reluctant nations to fall in line with trade
pacts. Likewise, homeland security and terrorism have been invoked to crush domestic labor actions, as well as popular movements against
the expansion of the capitalist market. The invasion of Iraq, while falling far short of its lofty rhetoric with regard to the welfare of the Iraqi
people, has gone a long way toward privatizing oil resources, abolishing unions, lowering wages, etc in short, furthering capitals extension in
the region. Likewise, Katrina was used to repeal a host of labor and environmental laws that stood in way of the market and talk persists of
rebuilding the New Orleans in a manner that is decidedly market friendly. The list of examples of how fear and terror are used to promote the
capitalist order could go on and on. With Deleuze, we reach the end of our survey of liberalism and fear. The politics and culture of fear that
envelop us is not the intrusion of an extra-political force kept a bay by the liberal political order. To the contrary, liberalism needs
fear and so it produces it, and it does so not simply by the imposition of the heavy, disciplinary hand of the state and its
apparatuses, but by the velvet touch (one that we even desire!) of the vast array of technologies of the self that constitute the complex space
of civil society. Moreover,
by means of this liberal governmentality, we come to desire our own
domination and participate in a kind of political cannibalism whereby we want the very things
that undercut the liberties liberalism purports to secure. Thus, as we examine the culture of fear, we are looking as if into a mirror
and glimpsing the truth of our liberal soul. Liberalism is founded on fear. As Judith Shklar has said so well, liberalism does not offer a summum
bonum toward which all should strive; nor does it rest upon a theory of moral pluralism as many are wont to proclaim. Rather, its foundation is
much more barren. Liberalism is erected on the sheer negative, the fear of a summum malum. As she says, to be alive is
to be afraid.19 But in this way the contradiction at the empty heart of liberalism is exposed: The promise of liberalism recall
Montesquieu et. al. was freedom from terror and fear; yet this it cannot and it dare not deliver. For without fear, liberalisms raison
detre, even the very barren surface into which it sinks its sickly roots, erodes as if into nothing. Therefore, under liberalism, there can
be no end to fear. Even death is not its terminus, but only its culmination and even its return, for death does not relieve our
fears. Rather, as Hobbess insightfully discerned, face to face with death we are reminded that whatever meager goods we seek out in the
midst of this vale of tears career, family, friends, etc. are contingent upon actually surviving to pursue them. For an end to fear, for a
politics that finally is not cannibalistic of either liberty or life and so holds forth the hope of nurturing human
communion/community (the root meaning of politics), for a more generous politics beyond the (anti)politics of color-coded
insecurity and perpetual war with our neighbors, both foreign and domestic, we will have to look elsewhere. To this alternative we
now turn.
 Slave Dichotomies
The unconditional affirmation of human life is a violent form of oppression which
denies the possibility of value to death and reifies a master-slave dichotomy that is a
precondition for oppression
Baudrillard 02 (Jean, The Spirit of Terrorism: Hypotheses on Terrorism,)
All the same, weshould try to get beyond the moral imperative of unconditional respect for human life,
and conceive that one might respect, both in the other and in oneself, something other than, and
more than, life (existence isnt everything, it is even the least of things): a destiny, a cause, a form of
pride or of sacrifice. There are symbolic stakes which far exceed existence and freedom - which we
find it unbearable to lose, because we have made them the fetishistic values of a universal humanist
order. So we cannot imagine a terrorist act committed with entire autonomy and freedom of conscience. Now, choice in terms of
symbolic obligations is sometimes profoundly mysterious - as in the case of Romand, the man with the double life, who
murdered his whole family, not for fear of being unmasked, but for fear of inflicting on them the profound disappointment of discovering his
deception. Committing suicide would not have expunged the crime from the record; he would merely
have passed the shame off on to the others. Where is the courage, where the cowardice? The
question of freedom, ones own or that of others, no longer poses itself in terms of moral
consciousness, and a higher freedom must allow us to dispose of it to the point of abusing or
sacrificing it. Omar Khayyam: Rather one freeman bind with chains of love than set a thousand prisoned captives free. Seen in that light,
this is almost an overturning of the dialectic of domination, a paradoxical inversion of the master-slave relationship. In the past, the
master was the one who was exposed to death, and could gamble with it. The slave was the one
deprived of death and destiny, the one doomed to survival and labour. How do things stand today?
We, the powerful, sheltered now from death and overprotected on all sides, occupy exactly the
position of the slave; whereas those whose deaths are at their own disposal, and who do not have
survival as their exclusive aim, are the ones who today symbolically occupy the position of master.
 2NC Brainwashing XT
Framing affect is the locus for micropolitical discussions. This is not a
representations argument, but instead the implications of those reps on an
interpersonal level. Flooding academic spaces with images of violence and impending
threats actually changes the neural wiring in the brain and causes individual
adjustments in how we relate to the world around us. ( ) Impacts

( ) Paranoia the constant inundation of impending doom creates a nihilistic hatred

of existence where the body is understood as an object to be preserved. That fear of
the spectre of extinction destroys lifes value and corrodes meaningful experience
through fear.

( ) Xenophobia the drive to securitize the self creates a fear of otherness manifest in
racialized and gendered violence. Those who exist outside the normative political
subject e.g. white cis men, become disposable threats in the social order.

( ) Sheep the affective process of fearmongering produces people so terrified they

forfeit individual agency in exchange for protectionism. That turns all your framework
arguments and allows for the extreme right to further their vice-grip on politics and
solidify neocolonial violence.

History proves that framing collapses into the worst atrocities in human history.
Deleuze and Guattari 80 (ATP 214-215)
It is not sufficient to define bureaucracy by a rigid segmentarity with compartmentalization of contiguous offices, an office manager in each
segment, and the corresponding centralization at the end of the hall or on top of the tower. For at the same time there is a whole bureaucratic
segmentation, a suppleness of and communication between offices, a bureaucratic perversion, a permanent inventiveness or creativity
practiced even against administrative regulations. If Kafka is the greatest theorist of bureaucracy, it is because he shows how, at a certain level
(but which one? it is not localizable), the barriers between offices cease to be "a definite dividing line" and are immersed in a molecular
medium (milieu) that dissolves them and simultaneously makes the office manager proliferate into microfigures impossible to recognize or
identify, discernible only when they are centralizable: another regime, coexistent with the separation and totalization of the rigid segments.I0
We would even say that fascism
implies a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their centralization.
Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of
its own devising: there are totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship type, that are not fascist. The concept of the totalitarian
State applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is
inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to
resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism,
fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every
fascism is defined by a micro-
black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole.1'
There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established,
microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to act upon the "masses." Daniel Guerin is correct to say that if
Hitler took
power, rather then taking over the German State administration, it was because from the beginning
he had at his disposal microorganizations giving him "an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to penetrate
every cell of society," in other words, a molecular and supple segmentarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. Conversely, if
capitalism came to consider the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it preferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point
of view was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the segmentarity and centralization of the latter was more classical and less
fluid. What
makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass
movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. American film has often depicted these molecular focal points; band,
gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does
desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to
power; nor do they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never
separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping
postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself
results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and
potentially gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It's too easy to be antifascist
on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both
personal and collective.
Alternatives
 Dance with Death
Vote negative to lacerate the body and embrace a precarious dance with death. The
performative refusal of security that defines the negative is one that transcends the
carnivorous community of debate and enjoys the philosophical inevitability of
expenditure.
Irwin 2 Alexander, Professor of Religion at Amherst College and Senior Researcher at the Institute for
Social Justice, Exercises in Inutility in Saints of the Impossible, pg 139140/--hauteur de mort (height of
death)
This parti pris of responding to a brutal political and military situation with a mystico-literary self-stylization constitutes the force and originality, but also, for some,
the deeply unsatisfying ambiguity of Bataille's mystical subversion. Understanding Bataille's concerns in this way shows, in any event, why Bataille's

position with respect to the violence of the war could only be enacted/communicated performatively. What Bataille sought to
present was not a set of ethical propositions or rationally coordinated political theses, but rather a style of

life that, considered as a (lacerated but living) whole, offered an alternative to the values and forms of existence that had
found their culmination in totalitarian oppression and war. The life of mysticism and expenditure Bataille proposed could not, he claimed, be
adequately described in the language of philosophical, social scientific, or political discourse. This mode of life could only be grasped in its realization (performance)
in the existence of an exemplary being: the mystical writer, Bataille himself. Distancing himself from the "professorial" attitude of academic philosophers like
Heidegger, whose "method remains glued to results," Bataille affirmed: "what counts in my eyes is the moment of ungluing [decollement]. What I teach (if it is true
that . . . ) is an intoxication, not a philosophy. I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman" (BOC V, 218 note; ellipsis in original). Bataille was convinced
that the meditational method and more broadly the
mystical style of existence he made available through his writings opened the route to
a concrete experience of the heterogeneity and sovereignty of the self and thus laid the groundwork for genuine
freedom. The inner experience of freedom remains the precondition of any meaningful deployment of freedom in the
public, political world. And if freedom can be understood in Kantian terms as autolegislation, then mystical writing initiates autonomy by showing

people that they carry the supreme law within themselves, by teaching them to experience themselves as their own law (a law
constituted through endless contestation). "Man is his own law if he strips himself naked before himself. The mystic before God had the attitude of a subject.
inner experience, "knowing that he [the self]
Whoever places being before himself has the attitude of a sovereign" (BOC V, 278). The "naked" sovereign of

will die" (278), finds freedom tempered with the awareness of radical vulnerability and contingency, thus making freedom
inseparable from "compassion" (273), or as Bataille will later write, from a tragic "loyalty" (BOC XI, 541-45). Without the sacrificial knowledge of its own penetration
by death, the self's exercise of freedom would inevitably become an "exercise of power" over others (BOC V, 221). Instead, inner experience is a sacrificial
"conquest" of the self "for others" (76). Sovereignty is not static governance but tireless "revolt" (221). Through an unruly mixture of steamy confession, dense
philosophical analysis, histrionic bluster, parodic prayers, lachrymose lamentation, "mimicry," and irony, Bataille's textual mysticism
undermines or
overflows the conceptual structures on which the logic of domination relies. It attacks utility, rationality,

hierarchical order, and identity. By affirming a useless inner experience as in itself "sole authority, sole value" (BOC V, 18),

mysticism challenges the right of coercive political systems to claim ultimate value and unlimited
authority for themselves. By introducing through "auto-sacrificial" writing the toxin of the impossible into calculations of human meaning, Bataille sought
to reach the "underside" of language and human experience, to uncover the "nakedness" of irreducible anguish that philosophy and political theory had sought to
conceal, and to "annul the effects of totalizing discourse," both in the philosophical and in the political realms.56 For better or worse (for better and worse),
Bataille's writing not only reveals but is the heart of his politics. The impossible practice of this writing puts on display the forces that made Bataille momentarily
sensitive to fascism's seductions, but that also propelled him irresistibly away from the fascist orbit: his "monstrosities in the end rebellious toward all political
camps."57 It was this spiritual and political monstrosity irreducible heterogeneity, death-obsessed sacredness, ironic "sainthood"that Bataille hoped to make
contagious. Not by analyzing it, but by being it. The content of Bataille's message was himself: himself as mystic, as one who speaks of death
from within death. In his mystical texts Bataille produces himself as one who lives and writes a hauteur de mort. He demonstrates the confrontation with
death in a context that is precisely not that of the battlefield, in order to show that death's impossible and necessary truth belongs not to the soldiers plunged in the
"vain noise of combat," but to the " 'men of religious death' or sacrifice" who raise up death's "bloody but wholly resplendent image" in the midst of a "sacred
silence" (BOC II, 238). This is the point Bataille considers it urgent to drive home: that in war or peace human life only begins to deploy its richness when death is
internalized and when life can be affirmed and loved in and through death. Bataille as the mystic o "la joie supplidante" embodies this affirmation. Bataille does not
merely articulate the claim, he is the claim that a life
lived in the mad intensity of the hauteur de mort is the only life
worth having. One can only "have" such a life when one sacrifices it. And one can only sacrifice it if one loses life
consciously: through what Bataille variously terms "dramatization," "comedy," "mimetism." By writing his own mystical dissolution, Bataille shows how it is possible
to "watch [one]self ceasing to be" (HDS, 19). He models the process through which, like the Tibetan monk in the burial ground, one can be penetrated by the secrets
of death, while "the body thus treated remains intact" (BOC VII, 2.59). What arises in the experience of Bataille's writing is not an irremediable mise-a-mort, but
instead a better way of encountering death's power reality and obviousness which are obscene. It is the truth we should laugh at. You can imagine a culture where
everyone laughs spontaneously when someone says: `This is true', `This is real'. All this defines the irresolvable relationship between thought and reality. A certain
form of thought is bound to the real. It starts out from the hypothesis that ideas have referents and that there is a possible ideation of reality. A comforting polarity,
which is that of tailor-made dialectical and philosophical solutions. The other form of thought is eccentric to the real, a stranger to dialectics,
a stranger even to critical thought. It is not even a disavowal of the concept of reality. It is illusion, power of illusion, or, in other words, a playing with reality,

as seduction is a playing with desire, as metaphor is a playing with truth. This radical thought does not stem from a philosophical doubt, a
utopian transference, or an ideal transcendence. It is the material illusion, immanent in this so-called `real' world. And thus it seems to come from elsewhere. It
seems to be the extrapolation of this world into another world. At all events, there is incompatibility between thought and the real. There is no sort of necessary or
natural transition from the one to the other. Neither alternation, nor alternative: only otherness and distance keep
them charged up. This is what ensures the singularity of thought, the singularity by which constitutes an event, just like the singularity of the world, the
singularity by which it too constitutes an event.
 Death Orgy
Vote negative to have an orgy while the bombs fall.
Land 92 lecturer in Continental Philosophy at Warwick University (Nick, The Thirst for Annihilation pg. xi-xii)[rkezios]

Life appears as a pause on the energy path; as a precarious stabilization and complication of solar decay. It is most
basically comprehensible as the general solution to the problem of consumption. Such a solar- or general-
economic perspective exhibits production as an illusion; the hypostatization of a digression in
consumption. To produce is to partially manage the release of energy into its loss, and nothing more.
Death, wastage, or expenditure is the only end, the only definitive terminus. Utility cannot in reality
be anything but the characterization of a function, having no sense short of an expenditure which escapes it utterly. This is
relative utility. The order of Western history has as its most pertinent symptom the drift of utility away
from this relative sense, towards a paradoxical absolute value. A creeping slave morality colonizes
value, subordinating it to the definition that which serves. The good becomes synonymous with
utility; with means, mediation, instrumentality, and implicit dependence. The real trajectory of loss is immanence,
continuity, base matter, or flow. If the strictly regional resistance of everything that delays, impedes, or momentarily arrests the
movement of dissolution is abstracted from the solar flow it is interpretable as transcendence. Such abstract resistance to loss is characterized
by autonomy, homogeneity, and ideality, and is what Bataille summarizes as (absolute) utility. The (inevitable) return of constricted energy to
immanence is religion, whose core is sacrifice, generative of the sacred. Sacrifice is
the movement of violent liberation
from servility, the collapse of transcendence. Inhibiting the sacrificial relapse of isolated being is the
broad utilitarianism inherent to humanity, correlated with a profane delimitation from ferocious
nature that finds its formula in theology. In its profane aspect, religion is martialled under a conception of God; the final
guarantor of persistent being, the submission of (ruinous) time to reason, and thus the ultimate principle of utility. Cowering in the shadow of
its gods, humanity is the project of a definitive abrogation of expenditure, and is thus an impossibility. The humanizing project has the form of
an unsustainable law. Despite
the fortifications of prohibition, the impossible corrodes humanity in
eroticism;the eruption of irreducible excess, which is the base unity of sexuality and death. Eroticism
gnaws us as the inevitable triumph of evil (utter loss). It is this passionate submission to fate (= death) that guides
Batailles own readings, in Literature and Evil for instance, the greatest work of atheological poetics. Literature and Evil is a series of responses
to writing that exhibit the complicity between literary art and transgression. Batailles insistent suggestion is that the nonutilitarian writer is not
interested in serving mankind or furthering the accumulation of goods, however refined, delicate, or spiritual these may be. Instead, such
writersEmily Bront, Baudelaire, Michelet, Blake, Sade, Proust, Kafka, and Genet are Batailles examples in this textare concerned with
communication, which means the violation of individuality, autonomy, and isolation, the infliction of a wound through which beings open out
into the community of senseless waste. Literature is a transgression against transcendence, the dark and unholy rending of a sacrificial wound,
allowing a communication more basic than the pseudo-communication of instrumental discourse. The heart of literature is the death of God,
the violent absence of the good, and thus of everything that protects, consolidates, or guarantees the interests of the individual personality.
The death of God is the ultimate transgression, the release of humanity from itself, back into the
blind infernal extravagance of the sun.
 Radical Passivity
The alternative is personalized passivityin the face of meta-level threats far beyond
our control we should thus recline to indifference in the face of death.
Zizek 2003 (Slavoj, The puppet and the dwarf, 2003,)

Insofar as death and life designate for Saint Paul two existential (subjective) positions, not objective
facts,we are fully justified in raising the old Pauline question: who is really alive today?1What if we are really alive
only if and when we engage ourselves with an excessive intensity which puts us beyond mere life?
What if, when we focus on mere survival, even if it is qualified as having a good time, what we
ultimately lose is life itself? What if the Palestinian suicide bomber on the point of blowing himself
(and others) up is, in an emphatic sense, more alive than the American soldier engaged in a war in
front of a computer screen hundreds of miles away from the enemy, or a New York yuppie jogging
along the Hudson river in order to keep his body in shape? Or, in terms of the psychoanalytic clinic, what if a hysteric is
truly alive in her permanent, excessive, provoking questioning of her existence, while an obsessional is the very model of choosing a life in
death? That is to say, is not the
ultimate aim of his compulsive rituals to prevent the thing from
happeningthis thing being the excess of life itself? Is not the catastrophe he fears the fact that,
finally, something will really happen to him? Or, in terms of the revolutionary process, what if the difference that separates
Lenins era from Stalinism is, again, the difference between life and death? There is an apparently marginal feature which clearly illustrates this
point: the basic attitude of a Stalinist Communist is that of following the correct Party line against Rightist or Leftist deviation in short, to
steer a safe middle course; for authentic Leninism, in clear contrast, there is ultimately only one deviation, the Centrist onethat of playing it
safe, of opportunistically avoiding the risk of clearly and excessively taking sides.There was no deeper historical necessity, for example, in
the sudden shift of Soviet policy from War Communism to the New Economic Policy in 1921 it was just a desperate strategic zigzag
between the Leftist and the Rightist line, or, as Lenin himself put it in 1922, the Bolsheviks made chapter 4 all the possible mistakes.This
excessive taking sides, this permanent imbalance of zigzag, is ultimately (the revolutionary political) life itselffor a Leninist, the ultimate
name of the counterrevolutionary Right is Center itself, the fear of introducing a radical imbalance into the social edifice. It
is a properly
Nietzschean paradox that the greatest loser in this apparent assertion of Life against all transcendent
Causes is actual life itself. What makes life worth living is the very excess of life: the awareness that
there is something for which we are ready to risk our life (we may call this excess freedom, honor, dignity,
autonomy, etc.). Only when we are ready to take this risk are we really alive. So when Hlderlin wrote: To live is to
defend a form, this form is not simply a Lebensform, but the form of the excess-of-life, the way this excess violently inscribes itself into the
life-texture. Chesterton makes this point apropos of the paradox of courage: A
soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut
his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He
must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely
wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of
furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

In response to violent necropolitics refuse death and choose action against power
under the umbrella of catastrophe.
Zizek 8 (In Defense of Lost Causes 167-171)
The reason that he is so serene, that he is not afraid of this fate, is not that Danton w a s a traitor, w h i l e he, Robespierre, is pure, a direct
embodiment of the people's Will; it is that he, Robespierre,
is not afraid to die his eventual death will be a mere
accident which counts for nothing: What does danger matter to me? My life belongs to the
Fatherland; my heart is free from fear; and if I were to die, I would do so without reproach and without ignominy.''
Consequently, insofar as the shift from "we" to "I" can effectively be determined as the moment when the democratic mask falls off and when
Robespierre openly asserts himself as a Master (up to this point, we follow Lefort's analysis), the very term"Master" has to be given here its full
Hegelian weight: the M a s t er i s t h e figure of sovereignty, the one who is not afraid to die, who is ready to risk everything. In other words,
the ultimate meaning of Robespierre's first-person singular ("I") is: I am not afraid to die. What authorizes him is simply this, not any kind of
direct access to the big Other, that is, he does not claim that he has direct access to the people's Will which speaks through him. It is against
this background that one
should recall Mao Zedong's message to the hundreds of millions of downtrodden,
a simple and touching message of courage do not be afraid of the Big Powers: "Bigness is nothing to be afraid of. The
big will be overthrown by the small. The small will become big." The same message of courage sustains also Mao's (in)famous stance towards
the prospect of a new atomic world war: We stand firmly for peace and against war . But if the imperialists insist on unleashing another war, we
should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first, we are against it; second, we
are not afraid of it. The First World War was followed by the birth of the Soviet Union with a population of 200 million. The Second World War
was followed by the emergence of the socialist camp with a combined population of 900 million. If the imperialists insist on launching a third
world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the
imperialists []" It is all too easy to dismiss these lines as the empty posturing of a leader ready to sacrifice millions for his political g oals (the
extension of Mao's ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death in the late 1950s)the flipside of this dismissive attitude is the basic
message: "we should not be afraid." Is this not the only correct attitude apropos war: "first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it"?
(The logic of Mao's argument is very precise here: his "although we are against war, we are not afraid of it " inverts the "imperialists' " true
attitude, which is "although we are for war, we are afraid of it" imperialists
are Nietzschean slaves, they need wars,
but are afraid to lose their possessions to which they are attached, while the proletarians are the true
aristocratic Masters who do not want war (they do not need it), but are not afraid of it, because they
have nothing to lose . . . ) Mao's argument goes on to its terrifying conclusion: The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation
with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U S atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, t h e y would make a hole right
through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the
solar 26 system. There is obviously an "inhuman madness" in this argument: is the fact that the destruction of planet Earth "would hardly mean
anything to the universe as a whole" not rather poor solace for the extinction of humanity? The argument only works if, in a Kantian way, one
presupposes a pure transcendental subject unaffected b y this catastrophe a subject which, although non-existent in reality, L) operative as a
virtual point of reference. Recall Husserl's dark dream, from his Cartesian Meditations, of how the transcendental cogito would remain
unaffected by a p l a g u e that would annihilate all humanity: it is easy, apropos this example, to score cheap points about the self-destructive
background of transcendental subjectivity, a n d about how Husserl misses the paradox of what Foucault, in his Le Mots et choes, called the
"transcendentalempirical doublet," of the link that forever attaches the transcendental ego to the empirical ego, so that the annihilation of the
latter by definition leads to the disappearance of the first. However, what if, fully recognizing this dependence as a fact (and nothing more than
this a bald fact of being), one nonetheless insists on the truth of its negation, the truth of the assertion of the independence of the subject
with regard to the empirical individuals qua living beings? Che Guevara approached the same line of thought when, in the midst of the
unbearable tension of the Cuban missile crisis, he advocated a fearless approach of risking the new world war which would involve (at the very
least) the total annihilation of the Cuban people he praised the heroic readiness of the Cuban people to risk its own disappearance. Again,
there is definitely something terrifying about this attitude however, this terror is nothing less than
the condition of freedom. This is how Yamamoto Jocho , a Zen priest, described the proper attitude of
a warrior: " everyday without fail he should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders
that goes, ' Step from under the eaves and you're a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is
waiting.' This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand." This is why,
according to Hillls Loiy, many Japanese soldiers in World War II performed their own funerals before leaving for the battlefield: Many of the
soldiers in the present war are so determined to die on the battlefield that they conduct their own public funerals before leaving for the front.
This holds no element of the ridiculous to the Japanese. Rather, it i s admired as the spirit of the true samurai who enters the battle with no
thought of return. This
preemptive self-exclusion from the domain of the living, of course, turns the soldier
into a properly sublime figure. Instead of dismissing this feature as part of fascistic militarism, one
should assert it as also constitutive of a radical revolutionary position, which, as Seneca put it long ago in his
Oedlpus, demands of the subject to "search for a way to wander without mixing with the dead, and yet removed from the living." When, in the
flashback scene from Bryan Singer's The Usual Supects, the mysterious Keyser Soeze returns home and finds his wife and small daughter held at
gunpoint by the members of a rival mob, he shoots his wife and daughter dead, and then declares that he will pursue the members of the rival
gang mercilessly, tracking down their parents, families, and friends, in order to kill them all . . . In a situation of a forced choice, the Soeze-
subject makes the crazy, impossible choice of, in away, striking at himself, at what is most precious to him, and this act, far from amounting to a
case of impotent aggression turned towards oneself, rather changes t h e coordinates of the situation in which the subject found himself: by
way of cutting himself loose from the precious object through whose possession the enemy kept him in check, the subject gains the space for a
free act. The price of this freedom is, of course, terrible: the only way for t he subject to neutralize the guilt of sacrificing his
most precious object(s) is to turn himself into a king of the "living dead," to renounce all personal idiosyncrasies and pleasures a n d to dedicate
h is entire life to destroying all those who forced him to perform the sacrificial act. Such an "inhuman" position of absolute freedom
(in my loneliness, I am free to do whatever I want, nobody has any hold over me) coinciding with absolute subjection to a Task (the only
purpose of my life is to enact vengeance) is what, perhaps, characterizes the revolutionary subject at its
innermost.
 Sacrifice
The alternative is to sacrifice the 1AC in glorious expenditure and have and intimate
encounter with death that allows us to reassert our own value to life outside their
politics of fear and control.
Irwin 2 Alexander 2002, Asst Prof Religion Amherst College, [Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred p. 161-
163]

Because sacrifice resists rational or moral purpose, Bataille provides it with a radically different charge. During most of the, rg3os,
Bataille views sacrifice as a form of collective violence, but one that no longer operates within the
domain of people's beliefs, serving to structure and bound them in politically meaningful ways. Instead, Bataille conceptualizes the
effects of sacrificial violence ontologically because he identifies reification, not moral decadence, as the
fundamental modern problem. In his view, capitalism, utilitarianism, and parliamentarianism have reduced
human beings to servile things. The spirit of Bataille's diagnosis of the human condition is not, prima facie, dissimilar from that of either Maistre
or Sorel. They, too, argue that the morally regenerative properties of sacrificial violence will serve to heal

human beings of their reification. But because Bataille includes morality itself among those phenomena
that contribute to the decadence of the modern age, he rejects his predecessors' concern with a
return to moral and spiritual wholeness. Bataille criticizes the goal of human wholeness as a religious and philosophical
fantasy that serves only to enslave human beings to the ideal dictates of reason and morality. Furthermore,

even if wholeness were desirable, sacrificial violence, as Bataille conceives of it, no longer possesses a
regenerative capacity. Rather, sacrifice is a violent operation that exposes human beings to death, loss,
rupture, and fragmentation elements of accursedness that Bataille treats as essential components of
humanity. Rather than allowing human beings to flee from their base humanity into realms of idealism and purity, such as religion,
philosophy, or politics, Baraille suggests that sacrifice offers them a visceral reminder that their humanity is thoroughly

intertwined with what humans reject as radically other, namely, death or not-being. Thus, the antidote to
reification in the modern age consists not in regenerative morality or reconstructed wholeness, but rather in a confrontation
with what Bataille calls the accursed share (ha part inaudite).14 For Bataille, unity and wholeness are antithetical to being
human, which avoids reification only when it confronts its own absence, an experience achieved through sacrifice. Although Bataille radically
rejects many of the previous definitions of sacrificial violence in the French discourse, he retains its most important
feature: communality. Even in Bataille's hands, sacrificial violence illustrates the paradox of a community built
around violent destruction. Maistre characterized sacrificial loss conservatively: death reinvigorated preexisting, divinely sanctioned, social and
political norms. The French revolutionaries and Sorel viewed sacrifice more creatively as the collective taking of a life for the sake of a new sociopolitical order.
Because Bataille defines sacrifice as violent, unrecoverable loss, it contributes to a concept of community
fundamentally opposed to those envisioned by Maistre, Sorel, and the revolutionaries. Republicanism, monarchism, and anarcho-syndicahsm all
presuppose the possibility of authority, even if they posit radically different embodiments of it. Bataille's concept of sacrifice gives
rise to a community in which the act of foundation never coheres. What binds the community
together is the shared experience of unrecoverable violent loss. Sacrifice cultivates community by fostering a nondiscursive
communication between human beings whose sundered individuality permits the formation of an ecstatic bond. This bond gives rise to a metapolitica.l community
in which sovereignty has neither basis nor dominion. In Bataille's view, sacrificecannot participate in the construction of
republicanism, monarchism, or anarcho-syndicalism because, like the obelisk, those ideas of community betray their sacrificial
origin by positing the possibility of a renewed erection of authority. Bataille's concept of sacrifice invites
reflection on what community would be if it were never to recover what was violently destroyed to create it. This is a
fundamentally antipolitical notion of community insofar, as it subverts all the concepts that have historically made politics

possible. Although Maistre, Sorel, and the French revolutionaries agree on little politically, all posit a theory of sacrificial violence that
requires replacement or recovery of that which sacrifice destroys.
 2NC Dance with Death XT
You should vote negative to refuse the affirmatives call to live safely. We chose to
render debate a sacrificial community where, instead of maintain the fascist telos of
life-bringing and security, we have a philosophical interrogation with our mortality.
Everyone is going to die it is just a matter of what our relationship to that death is.

The Fiat Double Bind should frame your ballot either their impacts are true, and they
will happen before 2 highschoolers will make it to Congress, or they are doomsayers
and you vote negative on presumption. Any defense they make to this argument is
defense to the aff and a reason to prefer the alternative.

Irwin says the discursive performance of voting negative is uniquely important the
necropolitical dominion over life is maintained by a worst-case-scenario model that
demands action at even the smallest threat of extinction. Only refusing to be bullied
by the false choice between life and death and realizing that, as an academic, your
only decision is between living with or without meaning, can destroy the pedagogical
vice-grip of mortifying politics.
AT Specific Authors
 AT Beres
Beres concludes fear of death is bad
Louis Rene Beres, Prof Intl Law Purdue, 94 (Arizona Journal of Intl and Comparative Law, Spring)

Fear of death, to summarize, not only cripples [destroys] life, it also creates entire fields of premature
corpses. But how can we be reminded of our mortality in a productive way, a way that would point to a
new and dignified polity of private selves and, significantly, to fewer untimely deaths? One answer lies in
the ethics of Epicurus, an enlightened creed whose prescriptions for disciplined will are essential for
international stability. The creed of Epicurus is not the caricatural hedonism so falsely associated with
the philosopher, but an independence of desire and a freedom from fear -- of death especially. When,
therefore, in the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus maintains that pleasure is "the end," he says explicitly:
[W]e do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in sensuality, as is supposed by
some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the
body and from trouble in the mind. For it is not continuous drinkings and revellings, nor the satisfaction
of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life,
but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere
opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit. 67 Sober reasoning, above all, turns
our confidence towards death and our caution towards the fear of death. Aware that Socrates called
such fears "bogies," Epictetus says, in Book II, Chapter I of the Discourses: What is death? A bogy. Turn it
round and see what it is: you see it does not bite. The stuff of the body was bound to be parted from the
airy element, either now or hereafter, as it existed apart from it before. Why then are you vexed if they
are parted now? For if not parted now, they will be hereafter. Why so? That the revolution of the
universe may be accomplished, for it has need of things present, things future, and things past and done
with. 68 We are each "a little soul, carrying a corpse," as Marcus Aurelius says, citing Epictetus, but what
sort of soul bears such a heavy burden? Is it the soul of the [*23] Platonic tradition described by
Descartes as "in its nature entirely independent of the body, and in consequence that it is not liable to
die with it"? 69 Such questions of metaphysics lie far beyond the purview of a political scientist -- even
one who has been freed from the tyrannies of vacant empiricism -- but they must be raised before we
can ask the next question: How can we best liberate citizens from the "bogy" of death in order to rescue
an endangered planet from nefarious definitions of self-determination? To answer such questions we
need not contrast Descartes with the Epicureans, or with Spinoza, Locke or Hume. All we need to
recognize is, as Santayana notes in Volume Three of The Life of Reason, that "everything moves in the
midst of death." 70 Raised by this understanding "above mortality," the triumphant soul of constantly
perishing bodies acknowledges that everything, everywhere, is in flux, and that even the most enduring
satisfactions are not at odds with personal transience. But let us take leave of the metaphysical, and
return to the vastly more concrete realm of international affairs. What, exactly, must be done to bring
individuals to the liberation offered by Santayana? Very little, if anything! "Immortal reason," Santayana
notwithstanding, will not wean our minds from mortal concerns. Perhaps, over time, humankind will
envisage the eternal and detach its affections from the world of flux, but that time seems to be far in the
future. For now, we must rely on something else, something far less awesome and far more mundane.
We must rely on an expanding awareness that States are not the Hegelian "march of God in the world,"
but the vicars of annihilation and that the triumph of the herd in world politics only hastens the
prospect of individual death. V. DEATH, REALPOLITIK AND PLANETIZATION: CREATING AUTHENTIC SELF-
DETERMINATION This, then, is an altogether different kind of understanding. Rather than rescue
humankind by freeing individuals from fear of death, this perspective recommends educating people to
the truth of an incontestable relationship between death and geopolitics. By surrendering ourselves to
States and to traditional views of self-determination, we encourage not immortality but premature and
predictable extinction. It is a relationship that can, and must, be more widely understood.

And state control death is bad

Louis Rene Beres, Prof Intl Law Purdue, 94 (Arizona Journal of Intl and Comparative Law, Spring)
What is more, because death is the one fact of life which is not relative but absolute, Israel's blithe unawareness of its national mortality deprives its still living days of essential absoluteness

and growth. For states, just as for individuals, confronting death can give the most positive reality to life itself. In this respect, a
cultivated awareness of nonbeing is central to each state's pattern of potentialities as well as to its very existence. When a state chooses to block off such

an awareness, a choice currently made by the State of Israel, it loses, possibly forever, the altogether
critical benefits of "anxiety."
 AT Dickinson
Dickinson is wrong liberalism is incapable of checking the worst excesses of
biopolitics
Dean 1
(Mitchell, Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, 2001, Demonic Societies: Liberalism, biopolitics, and sovereignty. Ethnographic
Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Hanson and Stepputat, p. 50-1)

although liberalism may try to make safe the biopolitical imperative of the optimization of life, it has
Finally,

shown itself permanently incapable of arrestingfrom eugenics to contemporary genetics---the emergence of

rationalities that make the optimization of the life of some dependent on the disallowing of
the life of others. I can only suggest some general reasons for this. Liberalism is fundamentally concerned to govern
through what it conceives as processes that are external to the sphere of government limited
by the respect for rights and liberties of individual subjects. Liberal rule thus fosters forms of
knowledge of vital processes and seeks to govern through their application. Moreover, to the
extent that liberalism depends on the formation of responsible and autonomous subjects
through biopolitics and discipline, it fosters the type of governmental practices that are the
ground of such rationalities. Further, and perhaps more simply, we might consider the possibility that sovereignty and biopolitics
are so heterogeneous to one another that the derivation of political norms from the
democratization of the former cannot act as a prophylactic for the possible outcomes of the
latter. We might also consider the alternative to this thesis, that biopolitics captures and expands the division between
political life and mere existence, already found within sovereignty. In either case, the framework of
right and law can act as a resource for forces engaged in contestation of the effects of biopower; it
cannot provide a guarantee as the efficacy of such struggle and may even be the means of the
consolidation of those effects.
 AT Gibson Graham
Not our argumentwe arent trying to solve capitalism, you can win this and it wont
matter.

Capitalism is produced socially. Hundreds of years of necropolitics and political

destruction have created a socius defined by death. The death drive has created a
society literally defined by fear and constantly pushing towards death because
suffering has become the dominant mode of being.

Gibson Graham suckthey are hacks writing to convince people to move markets into
the Philippines. Who cares what they say?

Social metanarratives check solvency take outseven if material capitalism has to be

addressed scenario by scenario, the social implications of its ethics have been
universalized by pedagogical models like debate. That makes the alt key.
 AT Kacou
We have several DAs to Kacous interpretation of being:

( ) Survivalism their unconditional affirmation of human life will always overlook the
struggles of people who no longer value it. Their attempt to sustain a global order that
is bent on the domination of the world only short circuits itself

( ) Fear the 1ac was a profound fear of death theyre so focused on life that they
never see the forest for the trees. Life is not the opposite of death and death is not the
opposite of life. Their attempt to run from death reinscribes fear mongering politics
that create the conditions for totalitarian control thats Lacy

Kacous teleological understanding of life as pleasure resigns our freedom to drives of

both slavery and narcissism
Kirby 11 /Joseph Morrill, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Christian Study at the Toronto School
of Theology, The Quest for Pleasure and the Death of Life, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural
and Social Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 2, 2011, Online/

Kacou argues that the pleasure that would otherwise accompany both work and satisfaction is distorted by false understandings of
reality. For him, conscious existence only appears to be painful to those who have misunderstood reality . As
we saw in the very inception of his argument, Kacous project is to find what he calls the a priori value of
conscious life, the value prior to all particular situations and selfunderstandings in which consciousness might find itself a
hedonistic version of Kants transcendental unity of apperception. As I will now show, however, this project is
self-defeating. There is no such thing as consciousness outside of some selfunderstanding, which
means that the attempt to ascertain the value of conscious life as it exists prior to all belief systems
will inevitably lose the very thing it is trying to capture. Kacou has ended up arguing that organic life is
inherently pleasurable, and then arguing that conscious human life must also be inherently
pleasurable because animal life is temporally prior to conscious life. This, however, amounts to arguing
that conscious life would be inherently pleasurable only if it did not exist, which is absurd. This point
becomes more obvious if we consider Kant and Hegels interpretations of the story of the fall from Eden. Both explicitly reject the idea
that this fall occurs because a true understanding is corrupted by a false one; instead, they argue that the pain of conscious
existence comes from the necessity of having understandings in the first place, which derives from the
freedom, necessary to consciousness, of arbitrarily choosing one course over another. In his essay
Conjectural Beginning of Human History,24 Kant describes the fall from Eden in terms of the emergence of freedom from the chains of
instinct. By choosing to eat a fruit that it had never eaten before, humanity created the first artificial desire. This first free choice opened up an
internal gulf between a humans actual life and its primal instincts. Humans
were faced with an abyss of freedom now,
instead of following the single track that instinct determines for all other animals, they had to choose
how they would live. The necessity of infinite possibility thus replaced the necessity of instinct that
bound all other creatures. Kant sees this abyss of possibility as constituting the eternal fate of the
human species. Kacou is arguing for the exact opposite. By claiming that all human action is necessarily
aimed at pleasure, he is basically arguing that freedom is a delusion. More precisely, since all action is
necessarily aimed at pleasure, all supposedly free choices are nothing more than deviations from the
razors edge of perfect pleasure, which would be known to a purely rational being through a kind of
mathematical calculation. Kacous ideal is to replace the stupidity of free choice with a rational
calculus that would show us what action will lead to the greatest pleasure in all possible situations. His ideal
is a consciousness that would know what it had to do in order to maximize pleasure over the course of
its entire life, and would thus never have to make a choice. Much as Aristotle argues that Kacous position is
base, Hegel sees Kacous attitude as the very origin of evil.25 For Hegel, the necessity of choice gives rise to
the possibility of evil, but consciousness only becomes evil if it uses its freedom to try to return to
unity with instinct, if it tries to renounce its freedom and change back into an innocent animal. In other
words, to long for a return to the unity of instinct is to betray the destiny of freedom. It is to will ones
subjective separation from the rest of reality, to measure everything in terms of ones own selfish
desires. By arguing that the only thing human beings can do is decide how they are going to satisfy
their pleasures, Kacou is essentially attempting to annul the pain that comes from having to choose.
We are now ready to make an obvious point: for our experience that life is painful to be the result of a false
understanding of life, the world would have to be a paradise in reality. Our fall from Eden would thus be a fall only
in our perception of reality, rather than a fall in reality itself. However, if the world were not actually a paradise, then
Kacous argument could not be true. But according to Kant and Hegel, the world is not a paradise precisely
because we are free beings who are forced to choose our path in life. Furthermore, our ability to choose
necessarily gives rise to an understanding, which comes to replace instinct as the medium through
which we interact with the world. Because of this, when Kacou tries to divorce his justification for
conscious life from all a posteriori explanations, theories, or speculations, on the grounds that such
explanations inevitably distort our pursuit of pleasure, he has made a correct observation, but his
conclusion is utterly wrong. Such explanations do distort our pursuit of pleasure, but they are not
something that we can get beyond. Kacou is logically correct to say that we must move beyond all a
posteriori explanations of life in order to truly experience life as pleasurable, but he has failed to
realize that this would entail ridding ourselves of conscious existence itself. We should remember here that it is
conscious existence towards which Kacou directs his arguments, trying to convince it that there is
value to its life. But by trying to begin his argument from this supposedly more fundamental level,
Kacou actually loses touch with the very thing he is trying to grasp. Worse, a consciousness that actually
took Kacous advice, that came to see pleasure as its highest ideal, would come to experience its
actual existence as meaningless pain. As long as it continued to exist, it would never be able to free
itself from the a posteriori explanations that were supposedly the source of all its grief and as such,
this inherent grief would only be exacerbated.
 AT Kalnow
This evidence is logically backwardsit says we should not force people to suffer, but
allowing them to be born into a condition where they will inevitably die and suffer
many humiliations along the way is like a capital crime in reversethey sentence
people to life which negates choice in a much more gruesome manner. Voting neg is
the only decision that accounts for the choice the aff has made to condemn an infinite
number of future people
 AT Lenman
Concludes neg we should probably kill everyone now
Lenman 02 (James, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Sheffield University, On Becoming
Extinct, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly)

It is not only individuals who die. Species

also die or die out. Today there are no longer any sabre-tooth tigers or
Irish elk and, one day, certainly, there will be no human beings. Perhaps that is a bad thing but, if so, it is a bad thing
we had better learn to live with. The Second Law of Thermodynamics will get us in the end in the fantastically unlikely event that nothing else
does first. We might perhaps argue about whether and how much this inevitability should distress us but that it not my present purpose. Rather I want to ask
whether, given that any given species will at some time disappear, it is better that it disappear later rather than sooner. More particularly, given
that it is
inevitable that our own species will only endure for a finite time, does it matter how soon that end
comes? We are naturally disposed to think it would be a bad thing were our extinction imminent. In
popular movies like Armageddon, everyone is very unhappy with this prospect for an obvious and extremely understandable reason they are all going to die very
soon. The
trouble is that if we take a timeless and impersonal perspective, this might seem to be no big
deal. For, on such a perspective, future people matter no less than do present people. And this fate is
waiting for some generation or other.
 AT May
May doesnt say anything what is an ontology of freedom? How do we do that? Why
is that the aff? This card is flowery language and says next to nothing.

May flows negative and explicitly takes out your arguments about giving others a
choice
May 05 (Todd May. "To Change the World, to Celebrate Life: Merleau-Ponty and Foucault on
the Body." Philosophy and Social Criticism 31:5-6. September 2005)
And what happens from there? From the meetings, from the rallies, from the petitions and the teach-ins? What happens next? There
is,
after all, always a next. If you win this time - end aid to the contras, divest from apartheid South Africa, force debt-
forgiveness by technologically advanced countries -there is always more to do. There is the de-unionization of workers, there are
gay rights, there is Burma, there are the Palestinians, the Tibetans. There will always be Tibetans, even if they
aren't in Tibet, even if they aren't Asian. But is that the only question: Next? Or is that just the question we focus on?
What's the next move in this campaign, what's the next campaign? Isn't there more going on than that? After all, engaging in political
organizing is a practice, or a group of practices. It contributes to making you who you are. It's where the power is, and where your life is, and
where the intersection of your life and those of others (many of whom you will never meet, even if it's for their sake that you're involved) and
the buildings and streets of your town is. This moment when you are seeking to change the world, whether by making a suggestion in a meeting
or singing at a rally or marching in silence or asking for a signature on a petition, is not a moment in which you don't exist. It's not a moment of
yours that you sacrifice for others so that it no longer belongs to you. It remains a moment of your life, sedimenting in you to make you what
you will become, emerging out of a past that is yours as well. What will you make of it, this moment? How will you be with others, those others
around you who also do not cease to exist when they begin to organize or to protest or to resist? The illusion is to think that this has nothing to
do with you. You've made a decision to participate in world-changing. Will that be all there is to it? Will
it seem to you a simple
sacrifice, for this small period of time, of who you are for the sake of others? Are you, for this moment, a
political ascetic? Asceticism like that is dangerous.
 AT Morgan
Their Morgan evidence speaks from a position of privilege and a first world
perspective. Morgan himself concedes in the ununderlined portion of their text that
we live in a planet of finite resources and that it is specifically the industrial civilization
that is beautiful. He ignores unindustrialized societies who dont have any resources.
Furthermore theres no warrant in this piece of evidence as to why life is a good thing
in the first place.
 AT Myers (Lanza)
We only defend the particle experimentthe Myers evidence doesnt indict that
Myers doesnt disprove the particle experiment thats the only part of Lanzas theory
were defending. They say that Lanza is unqualified because hes a stem cell biologist
but a cardiologist can still speak on matters concerning the blood. Furthermore hes
just reporting the results conducted from UChicago studies, not actually conducting
the studies himself. They say the reason for his theory is because he lost his sister in
an accident however that isnt a reason to reject his theory altogether. He also has
science on his side.
 AT Peterson
Saying death is evil deprives live of valuedeath is key to value construction and all
meaning. This is a new link
Callicott 89 (J. Baird, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, In
Defense of Land Ethics, 1989)

The "shift of values" which results from our "reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in
terms of things natural, wild, and free" is especially dramatic when we reflect upon the definitions
of good and evil espoused by Bentham and Mill and uncritically accepted by their contemporary followers. Pain and pleasure seem to
have nothing at all to do with good and evil if our appraisal is taken from the vantage point of
ecological biology. Pain in particular is primarily information. In animals, it informs the central nervous system of
stress, irritation, or trauma in outlying regions of the organism. A certain level of pain under optimal organic circumstances is indeed desirable as an indicator
of exertion--of the degree of exertion needed to maintain fitness, to stay in shape, and of a level of exertion beyond which it would be dangerous to go. An
arctic wolf in pursuit of a caribou may experience pain in her feet or chest because of the rigors of the chase. There is nothing bad or wrong in that. Or,
consider a case of injury. Suppose that a person in the course of a wilderness excursion sprains an ankle. Pain informs him or her of the injury and by its
intensity the amount-of further stress the ankle may endure in the course of getting to safety. Would it be better if pain were not experienced upon injury or,
taking advantage of recent technology, anaesthetized? Pleasure appears to be, for the most part (unfortunately it is not always so) a reward accompanying
those activities which contribute to organic maintenance, such as the pleasures associated with eating, drinking, grooming, and so on, or those which
contribute to social solidarity like the pleasures of dancing, conversation, teasing, and so forth, or those which contribute to the continuation of the species,
such as the pleasures of sexual activity and of being parents. The
doctrine that life is the happier the freer it is from pain
and that the happiest life conceivable is one in which there is continuous pleasure uninterrupted
by pain is biologically preposterous. A living mammal which experienced no pain would be one
which had a lethal dysfunction of the nervous system. The idea that pain is evil and ought to be
minimized or eliminated is as primitive a notion as that of a tyrant who puts to death messengers
bearing bad news on the supposition that thus his well-being and security is improved. More seriously still,
the value commitments of the humane movement seem at bottom to betray a world-denying or rather a life-loathing philosophy. The natural world as actually
constituted is one in which one being lives at the expense of others,as Each organism, in Darwin's metaphor, struggles to maintain it own organic integrity. The
more complex animals seem to experience (judging from our own case, and reasoning from analogy) appropriate and adaptive psychological accompaniments
to organic existence. There is a palpable passion for self-preservation. There are desire, pleasure in the satisfaction of desires, acute agony attending injury,
frustration, and chronic dread of death. But these experiences are the psychological substance of living. To
live is to be anxious about life,
to feel pain and pleasure in a fitting mixture, and sooner or later to die. That is the way the system
works. If nature as a whole is good, then pain and death are also good. Environmental ethics in general require
people to play fair in the natural system. The neo-Benthamites have in a sense taken the uncourageous approach. People have attempted to exempt
themselves from the life/de~ath reciprocities of natural processes and from ecological limitations in the name of a prophylactic ethic of maximizing rewards
(l~leasure) and minimizing unwelcome information (pain). To be fair, the humane moralists seem to suggest that we should attempt to project the same values
into the nonhuman animal world and to widen the charmed circle--no matter that it would be biologically unrealistic to do so or biologically ruinous if, per
impossible, such an environmental ethic were implemented.

Independently death is inevitable and your interpretation binds folks to suffering by

making their end inevitably an evil one. That creates a hatred of existence that
renders life unlivable. Thats McGowan.
 AT Pyzczynski
The terror management theory their Pyszczynski references is flawed---terror doesnt
dictate all human action and isnt necessary to maintain value to life
Proulx 03 (Travis, University of British Colombia, ABSURDITY AS THE SOURCE OF EXISTENTIAL
ANXIETY A CRITIQUE OF TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY, p.5)

But he remains highly sceptical of The rather bold claim that terror management is the source of all
motives. As noted, their arguments on this score are interesting, sometimes ingenious, but open to dispute and therefore not very
convincing. (p50) In a similar critique, psychological theorist Roy Baumeister (1997) takes issue with TMT's claim that all
other motives derive from self-preservation, which they call the 'master motive'. We can readily agree that some
behaviour is oriented toward staying alive. But all? There is a large gap between the empirical findings
reported by Pyszczynski et al. and their theoretical claims. Their studies, of which we are both admirers, have
shown in many ways that reminding people of death can alter their behaviour. But these findings fall
far short of justifying the sweeping assertion that all motivation is derived from the fear of death, (p. 37)
In yet another TMT critique, social psychologist Melvin Lerner (1997) finds that The research that Pyszczynski, Solomon
and Greenberg have done, stimulated by their 'Terror Management Theory' (TMT), is unquestionably very impressive. However, the
scope of their integrating theoretical speculations is so encompassing as to be difficult for me, and possibly for others, to
accept, (p. 29) These sentiments are also echoed in social psychologist Brett Pelham's (1997) article "Human Motivation has Multiple Roots"
Pyszczynski, Solomon and Greenberg propose an integrative model of human motivation. Their thesis is that the primary human motives
explored in previous research are all rooted in the more fundamental motive to minimize the existential terror that is brought about by the
realization that one will someday die. Although I applaud both the empirical research on terror management, and the
author's
theoretical goal of providing an integrative theory for understanding human motivation, my
interpretation of the existing research on terror management is that a convincing case has not been
made for the author's position. It seems unlikely that the management of existential terror is the
quintessential human motive, (p. 44) There are two general strategies for attacking TMT's reductionist claims. The first is to point
out that until TMT can truly put its money where its mouth is, that is to say, actually examine the effect of 'mortality salience' on all human
behaviour with regard to all meaning systems and all facets of culture, their
reductionist claims shouldn't be made to
begin with. As Lerner suggests, A convincing demonstration that the management of terror is at the top of
the hierarchy of human motives would involve a demonstration that mortality salience manipulations
have a more dramatic effect on all kinds of defensive reactions than do any other meaningful kinds of
threat. This, of course, is a very tall order, (p.32)
 AT Rawls

He votes negative we should stop reproducing entirely

Hyry 04 (Matti, Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy of Law @ the University of Manchester +
Adjunct Professor of Practical Philosophy @ the University of Helsinki, June, Human Fertility, If you
must make babies, then at least make the best babies you can?,
http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/english/staff/Hayry/2004%20HF%20If%20You%20Must%20Make%20B
abies.pdf)

The idea of generosity, or the gift of life, also runs into difficulties in the modern world. For one
thing, a vast proportion of the earths population live in very poor conditions. Can someone really
stand up and demand the gratitude of, say, children dying of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
(AIDS) in Africa? And in more affluent parts of the world, some individuals with disabilities have
contested the worth of their own existence. They claim that their parents have been criminally
negligent to bring about their wrongful lives. These are clearly cases in which the gift of life is not too well received
(Feinberg, 1992; Benatar, 2000). These observations do not refute the basis of the generosity argument in an ideal worldit might be good to
produce more good lives. But they do cast doubt over its application in the real world. As
long as human reproduction can
produce unnecessary suffering, the idea of the gift of life is more difficult to accept. A specific case against
making babies It seems, then, that human reproduction is sometimes, but not always, a good thing. The question is, what should be deduced
from this modest intermediary result? One possibility is to take a step further and argue that people should not have children at
all. The notions of safety, avoidance of risk, and prevention of unnecessary suffering could be used to defend this solution. The logic would be
the following: If people decide not to have children, they will not harm anyone. No one is born, and no
one is harmed. The result, in terms of good and bad, is zero. If, on the contrary, people decide to have
children, the lives of their children can be good or bad. If they are good, the parents are lucky. But if
they are bad, the parents bring about unnecessary suffering. So if people who think about having
children want to avoid risks, which is a perfectly sound form of rationality (Luce and Raiffa, 1957;
Rawls, 1972), they should settle for the zero result, and not have children at all (Hayry, in press).
 AT Rogers (Lanza)

They say that Lanzas unqualified but hes a professor at wake forest University whos
a pretty smart dude. Rogers sites examples like Zenos Paradox, however not even
Zenos paradox is able to be disproven because calculus ignores the structure and
constraints of the actual problem. They say Lanza does marijuana. Thanks for the FYI
now read an impact to smoking weed. Well out card them on the death debate.

"Robert Lanza was taken under the wing of scientific giants such as psychologist B.F.
Skinner, immunologist Jonas Salk, and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. His
mentors described him as a genius, a renegade thinker, even likening him to
Einstein himself." - US News & World Report, cover story.

Impact Turn - Marijuana enhances mental capabilities. This is an independent reason

to prefer our author.
Perkel No Date (Marc Perkel, Owner of Computer Tyme Marijuana Telling Teenagers the
Truth about Smoking Pot Project of the Peoples Legal Front,
http://www.perkel.com/politics/issues/pot.htm, DA:
Marijuana is the safest of all drugs. It is far safer to smoke a joint than to have a beer. Pot is the drug
of choice for people who want to get high, but be responsible in getting high. There are people who do no drugs at all, and that's fine.
But for those of you who want to get high and be responsible, Pot is a very good choice. Marijuana make most people
more relaxed. It relieves the clutter and tension after a hard days work or school. It mellows you out and
makes you more relaxed. It heightens the imagination and improves creativity. If you have a problem with anger, Pot is usually a
good drug to reduce it. Marijuana has other medical benefits. It helps reduce problems with glaucoma.
If you have cancer, it reduces nausea from chemotherapy. I had a close friend who died of cancer. His doctor
prescribed Pot even though it wasn't legal. I gave him some and it allowed him to eat food again. This was three weeks before he
died. I think the Pot gave him another week of quality life. Marijuana is also safer, more effective, and has less side effects than many
prescription antidepressants. Shortly after my divorce when I learned that I got a judgement for more that 100% of everything I
owned, my doctor put me on Pamalor, a common antidepressant. Pamalor turned me into a zombie and made me practically
impotent. I merely existed and felt nothing, had no motivation, couldn't accomplish anything, and became basically useless. After
two weeks of that I got off it. Getting stoned and laid a couple time a week had a much better result. I was alert, motivated, effective,
sharp, got better sleep, happy, and alive. Not all antidepressants have this same effect. However, these drugs are overperscribed and
in many cases I think that an occasional joint is a better alternative to antidepressant drugs. Marijuana is especially good for those
with high stress lifestyles. The brain has a tendency to lock on to a problem and your mind gets into a mental loop where you can't
stop thinking about work or some other problem. Pot can help you break the cycle and see the problem from a
different perspective, or allow your mind to move on and rest allowing you to enjoy life so that
you can recover and have a fresh perspective for the next day. Marijuana can make you Smarter.
Marijuana enhances certain mental abilities. Although it cuts into short term memory, it
reallocates mental resources allowing you to become more imaginative and to come up with new
solutions to problems that you wouldn't normally think of when you're not stoned. Much of my
creative writing starts from things I though of while smoking Pot. For example, my web page on Teen Cigarette Smoking is a very
effective web page that has resulted in thousands of kids decided to not smoke cigarettes. I wrote most of it while I was stoned. And I
came up with the concepts as to why it would work as a result of smoking Pot. My smoking Pot has resulted in a decrease in teem
smoking.
 AT Wadhawan and Kamal (Lanza)
They say we arent falsifiable but Lanza draws his analysis from two experiments
conducted by quantum physicists at the University of Chicago using a photon
generator to prove that consciousness can collapse organic reality. If this isnt
falsifiable then their evidence sure isnt.
 AT Wuthnow
Their Wuthnow evidence is badit asserts an intrinsic value to hope and dignity. First,
it relies on an empirical methodology but cites only anecdotal evidence and assertions
about natural selectionthat doesnt constitute data, its just a conclusion. Our ev is
better under any epistemological argument because it constitutes a theory based on
logical connection of concepts, which is precisely how scientific conclusions are also
made.

Second, heres a real statistic for you straight from the study Fight Club: over a long
enough timeline, human survivability drops to zero. Everyone dies, without exception,
and along the way, they suffer. One hundred percent of experienced suffering is a
result of existence.

Third, we also account for evolutionhumans are over-evolved because we have

consciousness and this makes us capable of internalizing the horror and
meaninglessness of the world, which is the better explanation of suicide and also
establishes that the value to life is arbitrary and ruined by fear from the consciousness
of our inevitable demise. Theyve got it backwardsthe key question is not why we
kill ourselves, but why we dont.
Bottom Shelf
 AT Dooms Humanity
Thats the point dude. Irwin says we need to depart from the authoritarian politics
that dominate our society. Only refusing the ethics of utility and transforming our
orientation towards being can
 AT Anti-Politics
Your evidence is about Baudrillard, but the alt is Bataille so whatever.

You have no warrantsyour authors misread the evidence and allow for multiple
competing interpretations of its meaning to invalidate is legitimacy.

Personal relations are a pre-requisite. Understanding how fear and defines agency in
micropolitical spheres is key to creating affective change.
 AT Baudrillard Indicts
The author is deadmeaning and value has exploded beyond the seals of history and
the limitations of understanding in a great and transcendental gestalt.
Bryant 12, Levi. Author of a number of articles on Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, Lacan, and political theory. Machinic Art: The Matter of
Contradiction. NKF

art, or that it is not simply about

My talk will be focused on three interrelated points. First, Im interested in emphasizing the materiality or real autonomy of

something, but is something. For me, works of art are objects or machines in their own right, that circulate throughout
the world independent of their makers. A work of art is no less a thing or machine than a person, rock, or tardigrade. They take on a life of
their own and have their own singular powers and properties. In my view, theres a tendency to ignore the powers
of art per se, to always reterritorialize it on artists intentions and audience receptions, rather than exploring the being of the work of art as a real
entity in the world as such. While I agree with everything you say about the production of the work of art that the production of art involves an immersion of the artist in the medium with
which he works such that both artist and medium become something different in the activity of production and such that there isnt a pre-existent model of the work of art in the artists mind

thats then simply placed in material embodiment I want to argue that art works enjoy a sort of autonomy from both their makers and
audiences. We know little about the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh or the creators of the French cave paintings, yet these things are still nonetheless able to resonate and act in the
world. Theres thus a way in which, I think, works of art are in excess of all contexts (authors intention, historical setting, audience reception, etc); and it is

because they are in excess of context that they are able to endure throughout the ages. Works of art are

perpetually escaping all historical and hermeneutic horizons, all regimes of attraction, and falling into new
regimes of attraction modifying them in all sorts of ways. They are examples of the Lucretian clinamen or swerve and are inexhaustible in their
ability to produce swerves. This is what the historicists and hermeneuticians miss in their approach to art: the excess of art over any and all historical context or horizon, the constitutive being

of art as clinamen. This excess over every horizon is possible because art is a material being. To my knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari do the best job of emphasizing the
being of art as object or machine. In chapter 7 of What is Philosophy?, they claim that art preserves and is the only thing that preserves.

Paraphrasing them, they point out that Mona Lisas smile is preserved in oil for all eternity, or at least until the paint and

canvas decay. While I dont share the view that art is the only thing that preserves, their point is nonetheless well taken. They begin from the observation that art is a
material being, an object, not a meaning. In this vein they speak of art works creating blocks of affect and sensation. Reference to blocks should be taken literally.
The art work does not represent a percept, affect, or sensation, it creates a percept, affect, or
sensation that has now become an autonomous material being in its own right, liberated from dependence on the sense
organs. These blocks of affect are literally things out there in the world, not just experiences in the sense

organs of a person.
 AT Contemplate Death
You cant access thisthe 1ACs violent necropolitics deprives subjects of a coherent
understanding of death. Your fearmongering corrupts your epistemic framework and
makes understanding death impossible.

Your understanding of death is wrong and rooted in false modern colonial

epistemologiesthats Baudrillard. Your contemplation is wrong.

Alternative is keyonly facing death head on can give people an authentic experience
with death. Only that personal interaction can give people the tools they need to
create meaning from death.
 AT Death Debates Good
Body Counts. Death debating reduces peoples lives to mere numbers for debaters to
consume in their game.
Jean Baudrillard, 93 (Symbolic Exchange and Death trans Iain Grant, 162-3, 173-5, manpower is left
deliberately in)
2. More importantly, that everyone should have a right to their life (habeas corpus habeas vitam) extends social jurisdiction over
death. Death is socialized like everything else, and can no longer be anything but natural, since every other death is a social scandal: we have
not done what is necessary. Is this social progress? No, it is rather the progress of the social, which even annexes death to
itself. Everyone is dispossessed of their death, and will no longer be able to die as it is now understood. One will no longer be free to live
as long as possible. Amongst other things, this signifies the ban on consuming ones life without taking limits into account. In short, the principle of natural
death is equivalent to the neutralization of life. 28 The same goes for the question of equality in death: life must be reduced
to quantity (and death therefore to nothing) in order to adjust it to democracy and the law of equivalences. The same objective that is
inscribed in the monopoly of institutional violence is accomplished as easily by forced survival as it is by death: a forced life for lifes sake (kidney machines,
malformed children on life-support machines, agony prolonged at all costs, organ transplants, etc.). All these procedures are equivalent to disposing of death and
imposing life, but according to what ends? Those of science and medicine? Surely this is just scientific paranoia, unrelated to any human objective. Is profit the aim?
No: society swallows huge amounts of profit This 'therapeutic heroism is characterised by soaring costs and 'decreasing benefits': they manufacture unproductive
survivors_ Even if social security can still be analysed as 'compensation for the labour force in the interests of capital, this argument has no purchase here_
Nevertheless: the system is facing the same contradiction here as with the death penalty. it overspends on the prolongation of life because this system of values is
essential to the strategic equilibrium of the whole; economically: however, this overspending unbalances the whole_ What is to be done? An economic choice
becomes necessary, where we can see the outline of euthanasia as a semi-official doctrine or practice_ We choose to keep 30 per cent of the uraemics in France
alive (36 per cent in the USA!). Euthanasia is already everywhere, and the ambiguity of making a humanist demand for it (as with the 'freedom' to abortion) is
striking: it is inscribed in the middle to long term logic of the system. All this tends in the direction of an increase in social control. For ther e is a clear objective
behind all these apparent contradictions: to ensure control over the entire range of life and death. From birth control to death control, whether we execute people
the essential thing is that the
or compel their survival (the prohibition of dying is the caricature, but also the logical form of progressive tolerance),
decision is withdrawn from them: that their life and their death are never freely theirs, but that they
live or die according to a social visa. It is even intolerable that their life and death remain open to biological chance, since this is still a type of
freedom. Just as morality commanded you shall not kill', today it commands: 'You shall not die', not in any old way. anyhow, and only if the law and
medicine permit. And if your death is conceded you, it will still be by order. In short: death proper has been abolished to make room
for death control and euthanasia strictly speaking, it is no longer even death, but something completely neutralised that
comes to be inscribed in the rules and calculations of equivalence: rewriting-planning-programming-
system. It must be possible to operate death as a social service, integrate it like health and disease under the
sign of the Plan and Social Security. This is the store of 'motel-suicides' in the USA, where, for a comfortable sum, one can purchase one's death under the
most agreeable conditions (like any other consumer good); perfect service, everything has been foreseen, even trainers who give you back your appetite for life,
after which they kindly and conscientiously send the gas into your room, without torment and without meeting any apposition. A service operates these motel-
suicides, quite rightly paid (eventually reimbursed?). Why did death not become a social service when: like everything else: it is functionalised
as individual and computable consumption in social input and output?
Trivialization. Death debating causes an aesthetic fascination with the spectacle of
death. This turns debate into a death cult and denies the choice to avoid death
impacts.
Jean Baudrillard, 93 (Symbolic Exchange and Death trans Iain Grant, p. 185-7)

Pursued and censured everywhere, death springs up everywhere again. No longer as apocalyptic folklore, such as might have haunted the living imagination in
passes into the most banal reality, and for us takes on the
certain epochs; but voided precisely of any imaginary substance, it
mask of the very principle of rationality that dominates our lives. Death is when everything functions and serves something
else, it is the absolute, signing, cybernetic functionality of the urban environment as in Jacques Tatis film Play-Time. Man is absolutely indexed on his function, as in
Kafka: the age of the civil servant is the age of a culture of death. This is the phantasm of total programming, increased predictability and accuracy, finality not only
in material things, but in fulfilling desires. In a word, death is confused with the law of value and strangely with the structural law of value by which everything is
arrested as a coded difference in a universal nexus of relations. This is the true face of ultra-modern death, made up of the faultless, objective, ultra-rapid
connection of all the terms in a system. Our true necropolises are no longer the cemeteries, hospitals, wars, hecatombs; death is no longer where we think it is, it is
no longer biological, psychological, metaphysical, it is no longer even murder: our societies true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank spaces
from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where the worlds sterilized memories are frozen. Only the dead remember everything in something
like an immediate eternity of knowledge, a quintessence of the world that today we dream of burying in the form of microfilm and archives, making the entire world
into an archive in order that it be discovered by some future civilization. The cryogenic freezing of all knowledge so that it can be resurrected; knowledge passes into
immortality as sign-value. Against our dream of losing and forgetting everything, we set up an opposing great wall of relations, connections and information, a dense
and inextricable artificial memory, and we bury ourselves alive in the fossilized hope of one day being rediscovered. Computers are the transistorized death to which
we submit in the hope of survival. Museums are already there to survive all civilizations, in order to bear testimony. But to what? It is of little importance. The mere
fact that they exist testifies that we are in a culture which no longer possesses any meaning for itself and which can now only dream of having meaning for someone
else from a later time. Thus everything becomes an environment of death as soon as it is no longer a sign that can be transistorized in a gigantic whole, just as
money reaches the point of no return when it is nothing more than a system of writing. Basically, political economy is only constructed (at the cost of untold
sacrifices) or designed so as to be recognized as immortal by a future civilization, or as an instance of truth. As for religion, this is unimaginable other than in the Last
Judgment, where God recognizes his own. But the Last Judgment is there already, realized: it is the definitive spectacle of our crystallized death. The spectacle is, it
must be said, grandiose. From the hieroglyphic schemes of the Defense Department or the World Trade Center to the great informational
schemes of the media, from siderurgical complexes to grand political apparatuses, from the megapolises with their senseless control of the slightest and most
everyday acts: humanity, as Benjamin says, has everywhere become an object of contemplation to itself. Its
self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure of the first order. (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations [tr. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, London: Jonathan
Cape: 1970], p. 244) For Benjamin, this was the very form of fascism , that is to say, a certain exacerbated form of ideology, an
aesthetic perversion of politics, pushing the acceptance of a culture of death to the point of jubilation.
And it is true that today the whole system of political economy has become the finality without end and the aesthetic vertigo of productivity to us, and this is only
the contrasting vertigo of death. This is exactly why art is dead: at the point of saturation and sophistication, all this jubilation has passed into the spectacle of
complexity itself, and all aesthetic fascination has been monopolized by the system as it grows into its own double (what else would it do with its gigantic towers, its
satellites, its giant computers, if not double itself as signs?). We are all victims of production become spectacle, of the aesthetic enjoyment [jouisseance], of delirious
production and reproduction, and we are not about to turn our backs on it, for in every spectacle there is the immanence of the catastrophe. Today, we have made
the vertigo of politics that Benjamin denounces in fascism, its perverse aesthetic enjoyment, into the experience of production at the level of the general system.
We produce the experience of a de-politicised, de-ideologised vertigo of the rational administration of things, of endlessly
exploding finalities.
 AT Degrees of Suffering
This argument is stupidthere is literally no bright line for how this evidence
functions. What is normal suffering and what is terrible suffering is literally
indistinguishable, and all your arguments about personal choice are a reason this
argument has literal to know basis because subjectivity always filters experience.

Thats a pretty brutal concession for the affirmative because it means that some
degree of suffering is fundamentally unique to the human experience. The fact that
we are the only ones with a root cause claim, aka the endless fear of death and desire
for constant conservation, means only the alternative is making inroads to solving that
suffering across the board.

Wielding the highest degree of suffering against us creates political vampires.

Baudrillard 94, Jean, wicked sick dude. The Illusion of the End 1994 p.92-3
All the media live off the presumption of catastrophe and of the succulent imminence of death. A photo in Liberation, for example, shows us a convoy of refugees
Anticipation of effects, morbid simulation, emotional
'which, some time after this shot was taken, was to be attacked by the Iraqi army'.

blackmail. It was the same on CNN with the arrival of the Scuds. Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the
virtual, that hysteria of the virtual - not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad faith, as
real to be consumed as unreal. In the past, to show something up as a fake, we said: 'It's just play-acting', 'It's all romance!', 'It's put on for the
cameras!'. This time, with Romania and the Gulf War, we were able to say, 'It's just TV!' Photographic or cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and
that of projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, are images without a negative, and hence without negativity and without
reference. They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to all reference to the real or to events. At a stroke, the contagion of
images, engendering themselves without reference to a real or an imaginary, itself becomes virtually without limits, and this limitless engendering produces
information as catastrophe. Is an image which refers only to itself still an image? However this may be, that image raises the problem of its indifference to the
television becomes the strategic space of the event, it sets itself
world, and thus of our indifference to it - which is a political problem. When

up as a deadly self-reference, it becomes a bachelor machine. The real object is wiped out by news not merely
alienated, but abolished. All that remains of it are traces on a monitoring screen.
 AT Disaster Reps Good
Nothey engender fear politics. That turns case. Disaster reps also destroy our
capacity to affectively engage the political, because they create politically petrified
subjects incapable of creating material change. That fear creates docile politically
incapable lemmings and lets the neoliberals who dominated death politics takeover
the political. That makes catastrophe and causes error replication.
 AT Joy
The meaninglessness of life is manifest is empty palliatives like religion, politics,
metaphysics, and capitalism. All this crap is just a shield to protect us from the truth,
our lives are meaningless, and to search for meaning is to suffer and die as a sheep
bound by terminal suffering.
Ligotti 12, Thomas. Novelist, philosopher, dark horror cult figure. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Page 18-19 NKF

The Norwegians two central propositions as adumbrated above are as follows. The first is that consciousness, that glory of awareness and self-awareness

unique to our species, makes our lives miserable, and thus we thwart it in four principle ways: (1) by isolation of the dire facts of
existence from our minds, denying both to ourselves and to others (in a conspiracy of silence) that our condition is
inherently disconcerting and problematic; (2) by anchoring our lives in metaphysical and institutional
veritiesGod, Country, Family, Lawsbased on charters issued by an enforcing authority (in the same way as a hunting license ),
imbuing us with a sense of being official, authentic, and guarded while shunting aside the feeling that
these documents are not worth the paper they are written on (in the same way as a passport establishes ones identity even
though it may be forged); (3) by distraction, a widespread conspiracy in which everyone keeps their eyes on the

ballor a television screen or fireworks displayand their heads placidly unreflective; (4) by sublimation, the process by which
thinkers and artistic types recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in
which the worst fortunes of humanity are represented in a stylized and removed manner for the
purposes of edification and entertainment, forming the conspiracy of creating and consuming products that
provide an escape from our suffering in the guise of a false confrontation with ita tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance.
(Zapffe uses himself as an example that ones awareness of writing about actual horror does not raise the resulting opus above the status of copy, just as a movie
whose centerpiece is the romance of two young people, one of whom dies of leukemia, cannot rend its audience with the throes of the real thing, albeit it may
produce an award-winning tearjerker, as in the case of the 1971 film adaptation of Erich Segals 1970 bestselling novel Love Story.) These
tactics keep
our imaginations from scrutinizing too closely the smorgasbord of pains and death-agonies laid out for
us. Alongside these corporeal unpleasantries is the abstract abashment some persons suffer because,
at the end of the day, they feel their lives are destitute of any meaning or purpose.5 While every other creature in

the world is insensate when it comes to meaning and purpose, those of us on the high ground of
evolution are full of this enigmatic hankering, a preoccupation that any comprehensive encyclopedia of philosophy treats under the
heading LIFE, THE MEANING OF. This is why Zapffe inferred that beings with consciousness are a mistake in the world of

nature. We have a need that is not natural, one that can never be satisfied no matter how many big lies we swallow. Our
unparalleled craving may be appeasedlike the yen of a dope fiendbut we are deceived if we think it is ever
gone for good. Years may pass during which we are unmolested by LIFE, THE MEANING OF. Gratification of this want in our lives can come from anywhere
or from nowhere. Some days we wake up and say, Its good to be alive. If everyone were in such high spirits all the time, the topic of LIFE, THE MEANING OF would
never rise up in our heads or our conversations. No one is nagged by the meaning of a life that is affluent with ease. But this
ungrounded jubilation
soon runs out of steam. Our consciousness, having snoozed awhile in the garden of incuriosity, is pricked by some thorn
or other, perhaps DEATH, THE MEANING OF. Then the hunger returns for LIFE, THE MEANING OF, the emptiness must
be filled again, the pursuit is resumed. And we will persist in chasing the impossible until we are no
more. This is the tragedy that we do our best to cover up in order to brave an existence that holds
terrors for us at every turn, with little but blind faith and habit to keep us on the move.
 AT Extinction is Different

Extinction Framing generates violence The drive for survival necessitates the
creation of the other and the body as enemies to be eliminated. The AFFs universal
endorsement of survival conceals its inextricable violent underbelly: genocide and
war.
Bauman 92 (Zygmunt, Prof. Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, Cambridge: Polity Press, Pg. 33-39)

Inescapably, as Elias Canetti wrote, 24 man is a survivor: `the most elementary and obvious form of success is to remain alive'. We are not just alive; at every
moment we are still alive. Success is always an `until further notice' success; it is never final. It must be repeated over and over again. The effort can never grind to a
halt. Survival is a lifelong task. Its energizing, creative potential in never exhausted. Whatever is left of it will be just locked up, in one felt swoop, at the moment of
death. Canetti insists that survival
is not identical with the old and trivial notion of self-preservation'. The idea of self-
preservation, sometimes conceived of as an instinct, sometimes as a rational choice, hides or
beautifies the gruesome truth of survival. Survival is targeted on others, not on the self. Though we never live through our own death, we
do live through the deaths of the others, and their death gives meaning to our success: we have not died, we are still alive. Thus `the desire for a long life which
plays such a large part in most cultures really means that most people want to survive their contemporaries. They know that many die early and they want a
different fate for themselves.' I would not conceive of my own performance as a success if it were not for the fact that performances of others proved unsuccessful;
I can only measure my own performance against those other performances. I want to know what I should do to escape or to postpone the others' lot -- to outlive
others. Others die of smoking; perhaps if I don't smoke, I'd survive them? At
the radical extreme of survival, says Canetti, looms murder:
`He wants to kill so that he can survive others; he wants to stay alive so as not to have others surviving

him.' This wish can be silenced, even denied, indignantly, by consciousness -- but it cannot be really effaced: `Only survival at a
distance in time is wholly innocent.' 25 The cynicism with which the wish of survival is inevitably , though self-ashamedly,

infused, comes blatantly into the open during war -- that socially sanctioned, legitimate murder: the declared purpose is then `to limit our
casualties', and anyone knows, even if refrains from spelling it out, that the price of that limiting is multiplying the dead on the other side of the battleline. Kill, so
that you and your beloved shalt not be killed. Declaration of war means suspension of the guilt and shame that the wish of survival spawns at `normal' times. That
normally carefully concealed wish now emerges from hiding, dressed as the noble mission of fighting evil empires or disarming the enemies of mankind, be they
carriers of disease that saps the civilized life or spoilers of harmonious world order. It shapes itself up as liberation, restoration of
order, or crusade; it ends up as genocide. The survivor's `most fantastic triumphs have taken place in our own time, among people who set
great store by the idea of humanity ... The survivor is mankind's worst evil, its curse and perhaps its doom.' 26 War is, admittedly, an extreme case -- but, Canetti
insists, it shows in a spectacular way what is always there, though hidden; survival is never wholly innocent when re-forged into action. This is a dramatic, tragic
vision of the inner tendency of survival. One wonders to what extent this tendency is truly inner (or innate); one is entitled to suspect that the destructive edge of
survival is sharpened (and even more probably directed) by the socially organized setting in which the activity of survival takes place. It is this setting that may (or
may not) arrange thesurvival as a zero-sum game, and then split the habitat into a part that is threatening and has
to be subdued or better still annihilated, and another part whose well-being enhances the chance of my own survival; this is what most societies
have been doing all along, and continue to do. Like other in-built qualities of the human predicament, the impulse of survival is the stuff of which societies are
patched together. Even though this impulse is not the society's creation, it is keenly, skilfully and on the whole effectively manipulated by society; it is, as a rule,
socially managed -- in a way that for one reason or another is deemed useful. It is
deployed to build and preserve boundaries of
states, nations, races, classes. It is invoked, explicitly or tacitly, whenever hostility is to be directed, but also
whenever loyalty to the cause and group solidarity are called for. It is not just, and not necessarily destructive in its
application. But if it can be put effectively to non-destructive uses, it is because of its destructive potential. One of such uses can be traced back to what Norman O.
Brown dubbed the Oedipal project: 27 `The project of becoming God -- in Spinoza's terms, causa sui.' The Oedipal project is a flight from infantile dependency, a
wish to become `the father of himself'. This stage in development always arrives, and once it arrives it is invariably directed against the parents, the true
embodiment of dependency -- and this whatever the parents do and however they behave. The Oedipal project is a drive to emancipation that cannot be achieved
unless the bond of dependency is broken. However, the deepest, the ultimate dependency is that on one's own mortal body -- that ultimate limit of autonomy; for
this reason the battle cannot be won. Oedipal project is just a first `trial skirmish' in a long series of battles doomed to defeat (though the hubbub of successive
skirmishes silences for a while, perhaps a long while, the thought of the final debacle). The causa sui project stays unfulfilled, and as long as it is unfulfilled it

generates the energy needed to wage ever new battles. It also needs ever new battlefields and war strategies, so that the struggle
may continue while each successive engagement is lost. The tragic paradox is that the undeclared purpose of the struggle is gaining exclusive mastery over one's
own body (and thus, by proxy, surviving its unsurvivable mortality). The
dream of survival constitutes the body as the most
important of targets, as own body is the mortal side of the self, and -- with its procreative function -- is also the
instrument through which individual immortality has been expropriated by the species. The body is the `natural
enemy' of survival, and the only uncontrived enemy. A paradox indeed -- and the seat of perhaps the deepest and most hopeless of ambivalences: in the struggle
aimed at the survival of the body, the would-be survivors meet the selfsame body as the arch-enemy. But let us note that even in the `struggle of liberation'
targeted against one's own body it is always the socially set framework of dependence that injects meaning into the experience of the lack of mastery. These
battlefronts are, like all others, socially drawn. And it is the selfsame society which has articulated the aims of the struggle and drawn the battlelines, that also
supplies the weapons and the strategies with which the battles can be fought. It is therefore on this interface that the survival impulse of the developing individual
meets and merges with the self-perpetuating processes of sociality. Society, in other respects the hostile field of competitors against which one's own survival can
be measured and hopefully asserted, appears simultaneously as the armoury of survival's weapons, trusty ally, source of succour, encouragement, and hope.
Society fares no better than the body: it also emerges from the existential predicament as a monster of ambivalence: half-friend, half-enemy the object and the
means of the struggle. The impulse of survival renders both the body and society ambivalent. Yet all ambivalence it spawns seem to pale into insignificance when
compared to its own. Survival is torn apart by a contradiction no amount of lies may assuage; an inner split resulting in a constant outpouring of guilt which can be
no more placated than its source can be drained. Philippe Aris 28 suggested that the spectres of `la mort de Moi' (self-death) and `la mort de Toi' (Thou-death)
were crystallization points of two successive (respectively, eighteenth-century, Enlightenment, and nineteenth-century Romanticism), and to an extent mutually
exclusive, attitudes towards death. We may surmise instead that the two
terrors are just twin aspects of the hopelessly
ambivalent sentiment gestated and sustained by the impulse of survival at all ages of human existence. My own survival,
as we have seen before, cannot be savoured otherwise than as a macabre privilege over the others, less fortunate. Yet these others may be, and more often than
not are, the very meaning of my existence -- the uppermost value which makes my life worth living; the very sense of being alive: life is communicating with others,
being with others, acting for others and being addressed, wanted, lifted into importance by the need of others and by the bid they make for my attention and
sympathy. The death of others may be a benchmark for my own survival success, but it is the life of others which made that success desirable in the first place, as
well as is making it now worthy of effort. After all, I want to survive mostly because the thought of all that communication, intercourse, loving, being loved -- all that
grinding suddenly to a halt is so unbearable. My desire to survive is all the stronger the richer and more satisfying is that experience of being with others. The world
without my seeing it or fantasizing it is unimaginable; but the image of a world emptied of others, a world that testifies to my ultimate triumph as a survivor, is
unbearable. (The `sole survivor's' plight is no less a nightmare than death; after all, it shows what death is about, it is a mirror-image of death; moreover, only if
reflected in that imaginary mirror can death be visualized in all its brutal truth.) More immediately, the
exit of every person that inhabits
my life and stands between sense and senselessness, fullness and void, impoverishes that life of mine which feeds and in turn feeds on
the drive to survival. Is not survival, therefore, a self-destructive and self-defeating impulse? Is not it the case that it
can fulfil itself only in its defeat? The core of all callousness, cruelty and brutality, the survival impulse
seems also to be the fount of sociability. It is neither selfish nor selfless; or perhaps it is both, and cannot but be both at the same time. In a tormented, self-
immolating and painful way it implements the order of nature: it seals the bond between individual self-preservation effort and the survival of the species. By
mobilizing the emotional and rational faculties of individuals, its practice fulfils and reinforces the logical and pragmatic interdependence between perpetuity of the
species and the temporal existence of its members. Its innate ambivalence has itself a survival value. It is an ambivalence all the same, and an acute one with that.
One would expect therefore a drive to separate the inseparable -- a favourite point of entry for all societal managerial skills and ambitions; a stuff from which all
man-made, `cultured', contrived social order is made. Making distinctions, discriminating, setting apart, classifying, is culture's foremost mark, craft and tour de
force. In its intentions (though hardly ever in its practical accomplishments) culture is a war of attrition declared on ambivalence. Its promise is to separate the grain
from the chaff in all their incarnations -- be they called truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, friends and enemies, or good and evil. Its job is to see that the
world is well mapped and well marked, so that confusion will have little chance to arise. Its ambition is to make the world hospitable by eliminating the torments of
choice where no fully satisfying choice seems available. Its struggle -- futile yet unstoppable -- is to cut the ambivalent human predicament into a multitude of
logically and pragmatically unequivocal situations. Obviously, the poignantly ambivalent survival impulse is the prime candidate for such treatment. Individual
survival makes no sense and offers no allurement without survival of others; but then such others as are needed for survival to remain attractive and to make sense
may be -- should be -- separated from the rest of the others who are not. This is exactly what society, through its `culturing' effort, achieves -- or at least tries hard
to achieve. `The others' are divided into those who support, and those who threaten survival. The uncompromising, overwhelming self-assertion of the species is
split into more palatable and easier-to-manage tribal interests. The `inside' and the `outside' are thereby created and carefully demarcated. Inside -- unity,
cooperation and mutual love. Outside -- wilderness, vigilance and fight. My tribe is to be spared all casualties at all costs. Among the costs (or are they costs at all?
Are they not, to be frank, gains?), the most indispensable of all is `collateral damage' inflicted on the enemy tribe once it has been appointed `the target' and, as
targets are meant to be, is `hit' and `neutralized'. My tribe's survival has been offered what it demands: a measure of callous self-love and a measure of loving co-
operation with others. Only such others as are earmarked for love, and the others selected for callous treatment, are no more the same others. In Reinhold
Niebuhr's words, tribal patriotism `transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism'. 29 Murders which the survival impulse clamours for are no more
clouded with the sorrow with which la mort de Toi tends to inject the survivor. The killed is not Tu, and so the murder is not a murder. The haunting contradiction of
human survival has been resolved. The resolution is greatly helped by the ingenious game of universality and particularity: by the uncanny talent of particularity to
dress up as universality. Most instances of collectivized survival succeeded in what Rgis Debray described as `melting the meanness of chauvinism with the
generosity of messianism'. 30 Universality, the code-name for unbound inclusion, is deployed as a tool of exclusion. Once the cause in the service of which the
survival impulse is mobilized (the cause that ennobles survival exertions, legitimizes them, cleans them of the gnawing suspicion of selfishness, immorality, a
sociality) has been proclaimed universal, nothing is left outside; or, rather, whatever has been left outside is now non-entity: it does not count, it has no value left,
its destruction is not counted among the costs of survival. At best, the leftovers are waste to be disposed of for the sake of the health and sanity of that which has
been marked for survival. If the leftovers had feelings and gumption, they would, surely, rejoice in their destruction, which has been sealed as a necessary and
universally beneficent event the moment the boundaries of universality closed outside their abode. They would sing merrily on the way to the sewage gutters.

The universe wont miss us

Seed 88 (John; Australian environmentalist and director of the Rainforest Information Centre; THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN - TOWARDS A COUNCIL OF ALL BEINGS;
http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Anthropo.htm)

"But the time is not a strong prison either. A little scraping of the walls of dishonest contractor's concrete Through a shower of chips and sand makes freedom. Shake the dust from your hair.

This mountain sea-coast is real For it reaches out far into the past and future; It is part of the great and timeless excellence of things." (1) "Anthropocentrism" or
"homocentrism" means human chauvinism. Similar to sexism, but substitute "human race" for "man" and "all other species" for "woman".
Human chauvinism, the idea that humans are the crown of creation, the source of all value, the
measure of all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness. "And the fear of you and the dread of
you shall be upon every beast of the earth , and upon every fowl of the air, and upon all that moveth on the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hands they are delivered".(2)

When humans investigate and see through their layers of anthropocentric self-cherishing, a most
profound change in consciousness begins to take place. Alienation subsides. The human is no
longer an outsider, apart. Your humanness is then recognised as being merely the most recent stage of your existence, and as you stop identifying exclusively with this
chapter, you start to get in touch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as a species only recently emerged from the rainforest. As the fog of amnesia disperses, there is a transformation in
your relationship to other species, and in your commitment to them. What is described here should not be seen as merely intellectual. The intellect is one entry point to the process outlined,

For some people however, this change of perspective follows from actions
and the easiest one to communicate.

on behalf of Mother Earth. "I am protecting the rainforest" develops to "I am part of the
rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking."
What a relief then! The thousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to
recall our true nature. That is, the change is a spiritual one, thinking like a mountain (3),
sometimes referred to as "deep ecology". As your memory improves, as the implications of
evolution and ecology are internalised and replace the outmoded anthropocentric structures in
your mind, there is an identification with all life, Then follows the realisation that the distinction
between "life" and "lifeless" is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic
life emerged 4000 million years ago.
 AT Fear Good
Fear leads to preemption not passivity
Massumi 07 (Brian, Communication Department of the Universit de Montral , Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption)
Fear is always a good reason to go politically conditional. Fear is the palpable action in the present of a threatening future cause. It
acts just as palpably whether the threat is determinate or not. It weakens your resolve, creates stress, lowers consumer confidence, and may ultimately lead to individual and/or economic

paralysis. To avoid the [inaction] paralysis, which would make yourself even more of a target and carry the fear to even higher level, you must simply
act. In Bush administration parlance, you "go kinetic."6 You leap into action on a level with the potential that frightens you. You do that, once again, by inciting the potential to take an
actual shape you can respond to. You trigger a production of what you fear. You turn the objectively indeterminate cause into an actual effect

so you can actually deal with it in some way. Any time you feel the need to act, then all you have to do is actuate a fear. The production of the effect follows as smoothly as
a reflex. This affective dynamic is still very much in place, independent of Rumsfeld's individual fate. It will remain in place as long as fear and remains politically actuatable. The logic

of preemption operates on this affective plane, in this proliferative or ontogenetic way: in a way that contributes to the reflex production of the specific being
of the threat. You're afraid Iraq is a breeding ground for terrorists? It could have been. If it could have been, it would have been.

So go ahead, make it one. "Bring 'em on," the President said, following Hollywood-trained reflex. He knew it in his "guts." He couldn't have gone wrong. His reflex was right.
Because "now we can all agree" that Iraq is in actual fact a breeding ground for "terrrorists". That just goes to prove that
the potential was always there. Before, there was doubt in some quarters that Saddam had to be removed from power. Some agreed he had to go, some didn't.
Now we can all agree. It was right to remove him because doing so made Iraq become what it always could have been. And that's the truth. Truth, in this new world order, is by nature
retroactive. Fact grows conditionally in the affective soil of an indeterminately present futurity. It becomes objective as that present reflexively plays out, as a effect of the preemptive action
taken. The reality-based community wastes time studying empirical reality, the Bushites said: "we create it." And because of that, "we" the preemptors will always be right. We always will
have been right to preempt, because we have objectively produced a recursive truth-effect for your judicious study. And while you are looking back studying the truth of it, we will have acted
with reflex speed again, effecting a new reality. 7 We will always have had no choice but to prosecute the "war on terror," ever more vigilantly and ever more intensely on every potential
front. We, preemptors, are the producers of your world. Get used to it. The War in Iraq is a success to the extent that it made the productivity of the preemptive "war on terror" a self-
perpetuating movement. Even if the US were to withdraw from Iraq tomorrow, the war would have to continue on other fronts no matter who controls Congress or who is in the White House.
It would have to continue in Afghanistan, for example, where the assymetrical tactics perfected in Iraq are now being applied to renew the conflict there. Or in Iran, which also always could
have/would have been a terrorist breeding ground. Or it could morph and move to the Mexican-US border, itself morphed into a distributed frontline proliferating throughout the territory in

On the indefinite Homeland Security front of a protieform war, who knows what threats may
the moving form of "illegal immigration".

be spinelessly incubating where, abetted by those who lack the "backbone" to go kinetic. Preemption is like deterrence in that it combines a
proprietary epistemology with a unique ontology in such a way as to make present a future cause that sets a
self-perpetuating movement into operation. Its differences from deterrence hinge on its taking objectively indeterminate or potential threat as its self-
constitutive cause rather than fully formed and specified threat. It situates itself on the ground of ontogenetic potential. There, rather than deterring the feared effect, it actualizes the
potential in a shape to which it hopes it can respond. It assumes a proliferation of potential threats, and mirrors that capacity in its own operation. It becomes proliferative. It assumes the
objective imbalance of a far-from-equilibrium state as a permanent condition. Rather than trying to right the imbalance, it seizes it as an opportunity for itself. Preemption also sets a race in
motion. But this is a race run on the edge of chaos. It is a race of movement-flushing, detection, perception, and affective actuation, run in irreparably chaotic or quasi-chaotic conditions. The
race of preemption has any number of laps, each ending in the actual effecting of a threat. Each actualization of a threat triggers the next lap, as a continuation of the first in the same
direction, or in another way in a different field. Deterrence revolved around an objective cause. Preemption revolves around a proliferative effect. Both are operative logics. The operative logic

Preemption is an effective operative logic rather than a causal operative logic. Since its ground is
of deterrence, however, remained causal even as it displaced its cause's effect.

potential, there is no actual cause for it to organize itself around. It compensates for the absence of an actual cause by producing an

actual effect in its place. This it makes the motor of its movement: it converts an absent or virtual cause really, directly into a taking-actual-effect. It does this affectively. It
uses affect to effectively trigger a virtual causality.8 Preemption is when the futurity of unspecified threat is affectively held in the present in a perpetual state of potential emergence(y) so
that a movement of actualization may be triggered that is not only self-propelling but also effectively, indefinitely, ontologically productive, because it works from a virtual cause whose
potential no single actualization exhausts. Preemption's operational parameters mean that is never univocal. It operates in the element of vagueness and objective uncertainty. Due to its
proliferative nature, it cannot be monolithic. Its logic cannot close in around its self-causing as the logic deterrence does. It includes an essential openness in its productive logic.9 It incites its
adversary to take emergent form. It then strives to become as proteiform as its ever-emergent adversary can be. It is as shape-shifting as it is self-driving. It infiltrates across boundaries,
sweeping up existing formations in its own transversal movement. Faced with gravity-bound formations too inertial for it to sweep up and carry off with its own operative logic, it contents
itself with opening windows of opportunity to pass through. This is the case with the domestic legal and juridical structure in the US. It can't sweep that away. But it can build into that
structure escape holes for itself. These take the form of formal provisions vastly expanding the power of the executive, in the person of the president in his role as commander-in-chief, to

Preemption stands for conflict

declare states of exception which suspend the normal legal course in order to enable a continued flow of preemptive action.10

unlimited: the potential for peace amended to become a perpetual state of undeclared war. This is the
"permanent state of emergency" so presciently described by Walter Benjamin. In current Bush administration parlance, it has come to be called "Long War" replacing the Cold War: a
preemptive war with an in-built tendency to be never-ending. Deterrence produced asymmetrical conflict as a by-product. The MADly balanced East-West bipolarity spun off a North-South
sub-polarity. This was less a polarity than an axis of imbalance. The "South" was neither a second Western First nor another Eastern Second. It was an anomalous Third. In this chaotic " Third
World ," local conflicts prefiguring the present "imbalance of terror" proliferated. The phrase "the war on terror" was in fact first popularized by Richard Nixon in 1972 in response to the attack
at the Munich Olympics when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spectacularly overspilled northward. Asymmetrical conflicts, however, were perceivable by the reigning logic of deterrence only as
a reflection of itself. The dynamic of deterrence were overlaid upon them. Their heterogeneity was overcoded by the familiar US-Soviet duality. Globally such conflicts figured only as
opportunities to reproduce the worldwide balance of terror on a reduced scale. The strategy of "containment" adopted toward them was for the two sides in the dominant dyad to operate in
each local theater through proxies in such a way that their influence, on the whole, balanced out. "I decided," Nixon said after Munich , "that we must maintain a balance."11 He did not, as
Bush did after 9-11, decide to skew things by going unilaterally "kinetic." The rhetoric of the "war on terror" fell into abeyance during the remainder of the 1970s, as Southern asymmetries
tended to be overcoded as global rebalancings, and going kinetic was "contained" to the status of local anomaly.
 AT Gives Meaning
There is a literature distinction youre losing. Your 1AC isnt a discussion of death,
because it begins its political engagement with a dogmatic conception of death as
something that is bad and should be avoided. That means you cant access discussion
claims.

Alt is keyonly experiencing death up close can create the personal understanding of
personal meaning that an understanding of mortality provides. Only the alternative
accesses this evidence.
 AT Help People
You dont have compassionyou reduce people to commodities and objects to be
calculated in big impact debatesthats Robinson.

Your compassion is misguidedsaving people from death is antithetical to

compassion. Life is plagued by suffering. Compassion is liberating people through
death, not trying to keep them in the status quo to suffer forever.

Alt checks compassion. The Irwin evidence says that authentic relationships with
other people and connections to our own humanity are all intrinsically linked to our
capacity to relate to and appreciate death. That means only the alternative can
resolve these compassion claims.

Short: Your vampiric obsession with the suffering of the other dooms your plan and
creates a destructive model of sentimental exploitation.
Baudrillard 94, Jean, wicked sick dude. The Illusion of the End 1994 p.92-3
All the media live off the presumption of catastrophe and of the succulent imminence of death. A photo in Liberation, for example, shows us a convoy of refugees
Anticipation of effects, morbid simulation, emotional
'which, some time after this shot was taken, was to be attacked by the Iraqi army'.

blackmail. It was the same on CNN with the arrival of the Scuds. Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the
virtual, that hysteria of the virtual - not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad faith, as
real to be consumed as unreal. In the past, to show something up as a fake, we said: 'It's just play-acting', 'It's all romance!', 'It's put on for the
cameras!'. This time, with Romania and the Gulf War, we were able to say, 'It's just TV!' Photographic or cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and
that of projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, are images without a negative, and hence without negativity and without
reference. They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to all reference to the real or to events. At a stroke, the contagion of
images, engendering themselves without reference to a real or an imaginary, itself becomes virtually without limits, and this limitless engendering produces
information as catastrophe. Is an image which refers only to itself still an image? However this may be, that image raises the problem of its indifference to the
television becomes the strategic space of the event, it sets itself
world, and thus of our indifference to it - which is a political problem. When

up as a deadly self-reference, it becomes a bachelor machine. The real object is wiped out by news not merely
alienated, but abolished. All that remains of it are traces on a monitoring screen.

Long: Their sentimental exploitation of the less privileged is the worst form of
cannibalism and dooms their political strategy. You should vote on this card.
Baudrillard 94, Jean, wicked sick dude. The Illusion of the End 1994 p.92-3
The end of history, being itself a catastrophe, can only be fueled by catastrophe. Managing the end therefore becomes synonymous with the management of
catastrophe. And, quite specifically, of that catastrophe which is the slow extermination of the rest of the world. We
have long denounced the
capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the other half of the world. We must boldly denounce
the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive
violence. The extraction and humanitarian repercussion of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and coal mines. The extortion of
poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this
not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products
of history - the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist
oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis,
that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich
countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this
time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and
seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its
part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference,
the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest
Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism:

form of the New World Order. Other people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the
humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality
merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We
are the consumers of the
ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely
function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable:
we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it
might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the
distress of the rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the
Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be
surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as the economic crisis of the West will
the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it
not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so

is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds,
Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor

countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our
media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust
their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic
cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and
ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a
hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress
becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation, when we run out of disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like
coffee or other commodities, the West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite
for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out
the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we
are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly.
The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic
nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding
the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic
debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado
or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas
our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we
deplore each day in pictures.
 AT I have VTL
Humanity is psychologically conditioned to lie to itself. The intuitive belief in lifes
value is worthless.
Benatar 06 (David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Cape Town, Better Never to Have Been, pg 99-101)

Those cases in which the offspring turn out to regret their existence are exceedingly tragic , but where
parents cannot reasonably foresee this, we cannot say, the argument would suggest, that they do wrong to follow their important interests in having children. Things would be quite different, according to this argument, if the majority or even a sizeable minority of people regretted
coming into existence. Under such circumstances the above justification for having children certainly would be doomed. However, given that most people do not regret their having come into existence, does the argument work? In fact, the argument is problematic (and not only for the
reasons that Seana Shiffrin raises and which I mentioned in Chapter 2). Its form has been widely criticized in other contexts, because of its inability to rule out those harmful interferences in people's lives (such as indoctrination) that effect a subsequent endorsement of the interference.

Coming to endorse the views one is indoctrinated to hold is one form of adaptive preference -
where an interference comes to be endorsed . However, there are other kinds of adaptive preference of which we are also suspicious. Desired goods that prove unattainable can cease to be

It is not uncommon for people to find themselves in unfortunate

desired ('sour grapes'). The reverse is also true.

circumstances and adapt their preferences to suit their predicament

(Being forced to feed on lemons) If coming ('sweet lemons').

into existence is as great a harm as I suggested, and if that is a heavy psychological burden to
bear, then it is quite possible that we could be engaged in a mass self-deception about how
wonderful things are for us. then it might not matter that most
If that is so, , contrary to what is claimed by the procreative argument just sketched,

people do not regret their having come into existence. Armed with a strong argument for the
harmfulness of slavery, we would not take the slaves' endorsement of their enslavement as a
justification for their enslavement, particularly if we could point to some rationally
questionable psychological phenomenon that explained the slaves' contentment. If that is so, and if coming into
existence is as great a harm as I have argued it is, then we should not take the widespread contentment with having come into existence as a justification for having children.
 AT Intrinsic VTL
Impassioned stories of the delight theyve found in life or pleas to common sense
and intrinsic value arent arguments theyre excuses for debate. Make the aff
logically justify their stance that existence is good.
Benatar 06 (David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Cape Town, Better Never to Have Been, pg 202 206)

The view that coming into existence is always a harm runs counter to most peoples intuitions. They
think that this view simply cannot be right. Its implications, discussed in Chapters 4 to 6, do not fare any better in the court of common intuitions. The idea that
people should not have babies, that there is a presumption in favour of abortion (at least in the earlier stages of gestation), and that it would be best if there
were no more conscious life on the planet is likely to be dismissed as ridiculous. Indeed, some
people are likely to find these views
deeply offensive. A number of philosophers have rejected other views because they imply that it would be better not to bring new people into
existence. We already saw, in the previous chapter, that a number of thinkers reject the maximin principle because it implies that there should be no more
people. There are other examples, however. Peter Singer rejects a moral ledger view of utilitarianism, whereby the creation of an unsatisfied preference is a
kind of debit that is cancelled only when that preference is satisfied. He says that his view must be rejected because it entails that it would be wrong to bring
into existence a child who will on the whole be very happy, and will be able to satisfy nearly all her preferences, but will still have some preferences
unsatisfied. Nils Holtug rejects frustrationismthe view that while the frustration of preferences has negative value, the satisfaction of preferences simply
avoids negative value and contributes nothing positive. Frustrationism implies that we harm people by bringing them into existence if they will have frustrated
desires (which everybody has). Thus he dismisses frustrationism as implausible, indeed deeply counter-intuitive. Of the implication that it is wrong to have a
child whose life is much better than the life of anyone we know, he says: Surely, this cannot be right. I now turn to the question whether it matters that my
conclusions are so counter-intuitive. Are my arguments instances of reason gone mad? Should my conclusions be dismissed on account of being so eccentric?
a views
Although I understand what motivates these questions, my answer to each of them is an emphatic no. At the outset, it is noteworthy that
counter-intuitiveness cannot by itself constitute a decisive consideration against it. This is because
intuitions are often profoundly unreliablea product of mere prejudice. Views that are taken to be deeply counter-intuitive in one
place and time are often taken to be obviously true in another. The view that slavery is wrong, or the view that there is nothing wrong with
miscegenation, were once thought to be highly implausible and counter-intuitive. They are now taken, at least in many parts of the
world, to be self-evident. It is not enough, therefore, to find a view or its implications counter-intuitive, or even offensive. One has to examine the arguments
for the disliked conclusion. Most of those who have rejected the view that it is wrong to create more people have done so without assessing the argument for
that conclusion. They have simply assumed that this view must be false. One reason against making this assumption is that
the conclusion follows from views that are not only accepted by most people but are also quite reasonable. As I explained in Chapter 2, the
asymmetry of pleasure and pain constitutes the best explanation of a number of important moral
judgements about creating new people. All my argument does is uncover that asymmetry and to
show where it leads. It might be suggested, however, that my argument should be understood as a reductio ad absurdum of the commitment to
asymmetry. In other words, it might be said that accepting my conclusion is more counter-intuitive than rejecting asymmetry. Thus, if one is faced with the
choice between accepting my conclusion and rejecting asymmetry, the latter is preferable. There are a number of problems with this line of argument. First,
we should remember just what it is to which we are committed if we reject asymmetry. Of course, there are various ways of rejecting asymmetry, but the least
implausible way would be by denying that absent pleasures are not bad and claiming instead that they are bad. This would commit us to saying that we do
have a (strong?) moral reason and thus a presumptive duty, based on the interests of future possible happy people, to create those people. It would also
commit us to saying that we can create a child for that childs sake and that we should regret, for the sake of those happy people whom we could have created
but did not create, that we did not create them. Finally, it would commit us not only to regretting that parts of the earth and all the rest of the universe are
uninhabited, but also to regretting this out of concern for those who could otherwise have come into existence in these places. Matters become still worse if
we attempt to abandon asymmetry in another wayby claiming that absent pains in Scenario B are merely not bad. That would commit us to saying that we
have no moral reason, grounded in the interests of a possible future suffering person, to avoid creating that person. We could no longer regret, based on the
interests of a suffering child, that we created that child. Nor could we regret, for the sake of miserable people suffering in some part of the world, that they
were ever created. Those who treat my argument as a reductio of asymmetry may find it easier to say that they are prepared to abandon asymmetry than
actually to embrace the implications of doing so. It certainly will not suffice to say that it is better to give up asymmetry and then to proceed, in their ethical
theorizing and in their practice, as though asymmetry still held. At the very least, then, my argument should force them to wrestle with the full implications of
rejecting asymmetry, which extend well beyond those that I have outlined. I doubt very much that many of those who say that they would rather give up
asymmetry really would abandon it. A second problem with treating my argument as a reductio of asymmetry is that although my conclusions may be
counterintuitive, the dominant intuitions in this matter seem thoroughly untrustworthy. This is so for two reasons. First, why should we think that it is
acceptable to cause great harm to somebodywhich the arguments in Chapter 3 show we do whenever we create a childwhen we could avoid doing so
without depriving that person of anything? In other words, how reliable can an intuition be if, even absent the interests of others, it allows the infliction of
great harm that could have been avoided without any cost to the person who is harmed? Such an intuition would not be worthy of respect in any other
pro-natal
context. Why should it be thought to have such force only in procreative contexts? Secondly, we have excellent reason for thinking that
intuitions are the product of (at least non-rational, but possibly irrational) psychological forces. As I showed in Chapter 3, there
are pervasive and powerful features of human psychology that lead people to think that their lives
are better than they really are. Thus their judgements are unreliable. Moreover, there is a good evolutionary
explanation for the deep-seated belief that people do not harm their children seriously by bringing them into existence. Those who do not have this belief are
less likely to reproduce. Those with reproduction-enhancing beliefs are more likely to breed and pass on whatever attributes incline one to such beliefs. What
is important to both of these reasons is that it is not merely my extreme claimthat coming into existence is a harm even when a life contains only an iota of
sufferingthat is counterintuitive. My more moderate claimthat there is sufficient bad in all actual lives to make coming into existence a harm, even if lives
with only an iota of bad would not be harmfulis also counterintuitive. If only the extreme claim ran counter to common intuitions, then these intuitions
would be (somewhat) less suspect. However, then it would have to be said that my extreme claim would be more palatable if all actual lives were largely
devoid of bad. This is because the claim would be primarily of theoretical interest and would have little application for procreation, given that the interests of
existent people could more plausibly be thought to outweigh the harm to new people. But it is not merely my extreme claim that runs counter to most
peoples intuitions. Most people think it is implausible that it is harmful and wrong to start lives filled with as much bad as all actual lives contain. Worse still,
those who would treat my argument as a reductio of asymmetry should note that their argument could also be used by a species doomed to lives much worse
than our own. Although we might see their lives as great harms, if they were subject to the kinds of optimistic psychological forces characteristic of humans
they too would argue that it is counter-intuitive to claim that they were harmed by being brought into existence. That which would not be counter-intuitive
from our perspective would be counterintuitive from theirs. Yet we can see, with the benefit of some distance from their lives, that little store
should be placed on their intuitions about this matter. Something similar can be said about the common human intuition that creating
(most) humans is not a harm.
 AT Infinite VTL
No infinite VTLvalue is defined by our capacity to engage with and appreciate the
fleeting nature of existence. Thats McGowan. That means only understanding the
erosion of life can create value. Sans the alternative value is 0, no infinite.

False VTL mitigates this argument. Capitalism has conditioned people to enjoy their
own repression and preserve their own lives only to be further exploited. This is
inherently joy negating and creates ontological violence.
 AT Longer Life
The will to order within the norms of rationality produces academic hegemony and
relegates bodies to bare life.
Leonard and Willis 8 (Timothy, Prof Emeritus at College of Education at Saint Xavier, and Peter, Senior Lecturer in Adult Learning and
Education at U of South Australia, Pedagogies of the Imagination, p 265, www.springerlink.com/content/t1603l22316633q8/)

The insight that the human mind is a function of imagination is the unifying thread of the mythopoetic project in curriculum
and pedagogy. It is clearly the underlying commitment of the authors in this collection, whose work is filled with an uncommon
hope in a time dominated by forces that would kill imagination in favor of linear, controllable
rationality. Of course imagination and the stories that it generates is never killed as such, but it can be repressed and heavily disguised.
Current western militarist culture has sought to control human imagination through the ''spin making"
of image industries under control of state and large corporations and the unfettered appropriation of the power of
the imagination in advertising. Curriculum in cultural studies that attempts to unmask the iron fist in the velvet glove of such advertising and
media ''spin" has been a valuable contribution to a socially aware curriculum. It does the learners a service in evoking critical attention and
skepticism towards the truth claims of consumerist culture but of course the critical approach tends to be focused on the important but not
exclusive arena of logical rationality. Logical
rationality, this book has argued, needs to be complemented and enriched
by the creative dimensions of human imagining with its links to the heart as well as the head and this
has become more and more necessary. A commonly held contemporary stance that curriculum must
be a process contained within mathematically measurable parameters is not neutral. It is hegemonic.
It is a corollary of the view that all persons are commodities, that all human interactions are markets,
and that all conflicts are wars. It has two major toxic elements. Through its passion for control, this linear/rational
orientation towards education has the potential to crush the imagination of its teachers and produce
a culture that is literally mindless. Fundamentalist upheavals in the world's religions are the most newsworthy reactions to this
imperialist rationalism and, having gathered momentum for almost a century, these movements have become a credible threat in their own
right to the future of imagination, mind, and reason itself. Paradoxically, then, an unbalanced and narrow rationality has spawned two dark
enemies of reason: firstly, its own insistence that all knowledge is derived from science and technology, and secondly, the fundamentalist
response that all knowledge is contained in the literal interpretation of divinely revealed texts.
 AT Mysteries of Life
You cant access thisthe 1ACs violent necropolitics deprives subjects of a coherent
understanding of death. Your fearmongering corrupts your epistemic framework and
makes understanding death impossible.

Your understanding of death is wrong and rooted in false modern colonial

epistemologiesthats Baudrillard. Your contemplation is wrong.

Alternative is keyonly facing death head on can give people an authentic experience
with death. Only that personal interaction can give people the tools they need to
create meaning.
Baudrillard 94, Jean, wicked sick dude. The Illusion of the End 1994 p.92-3
All the media live off the presumption of catastrophe and of the succulent imminence of death. A photo in Liberation, for example, shows us a convoy of refugees
Anticipation of effects, morbid simulation, emotional
'which, some time after this shot was taken, was to be attacked by the Iraqi army'.

blackmail. It was the same on CNN with the arrival of the Scuds. Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the
virtual, that hysteria of the virtual - not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad faith, as
real to be consumed as unreal. In the past, to show something up as a fake, we said: 'It's just play-acting', 'It's all romance!', 'It's put on for the
cameras!'. This time, with Romania and the Gulf War, we were able to say, 'It's just TV!' Photographic or cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and
that of projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, are images without a negative, and hence without negativity and without
reference. They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to all reference to the real or to events. At a stroke, the contagion of
images, engendering themselves without reference to a real or an imaginary, itself becomes virtually without limits, and this limitless engendering produces
information as catastrophe. Is an image which refers only to itself still an image? However this may be, that image raises the problem of its indifference to the
television becomes the strategic space of the event, it sets itself
world, and thus of our indifference to it - which is a political problem. When

up as a deadly self-reference, it becomes a bachelor machine. The real object is wiped out by news not merely
alienated, but abolished. All that remains of it are traces on a monitoring screen.
 AT Nihilism

Nihilism is the only force left because it constitutes itself within the system there is
no such thing as theories or events that impact the system. Nihilism against theories
and against events allows us to exist within the hyper-real instead of disappearing
from it
Baudrillard 94 (1994, Jean, On Nihilism, Simulacra and Simulations, 159)
Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spanglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer
comes from a weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical radicality born of the death of God and of all the
consequences that must be taken from this death. Todays nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in
some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this
transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still
pretends to analyze it. When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so the great nihilist before
the Eternal and the cadaver of the Eternal. But before the simulated transparency of all things, before
the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has
become hyperreal), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own. The universe, and all

of us, have entered live in to simulation, in to the malefic, not even malefic, indifferent, sphere of difference: in a
bizarre fashion, nihilism has been entirely realized no longer through destruction, but through simulation

and deterrence. From the active, violent phantasm, from the phantasm of the myth and the stage that it also was, historically, it has passed into the
transparent, falsely transparent, operation of things. What then remains of a possible nihilism in theory? What new scene can unfold, where nothing and death
could be replayed as a challenge, as a stake?
 AT No Death Drive
Yes death driveour evidence is better than yours. The death drive has created a
society literally defined by fear and constantly pushing towards death because
suffering has become the dominant mode of being. Empirics flow neg. Hundreds of
years of genocide has reduced life to a necropolitical hydra defined by its endless
obsession with destruction.
 AT No Transencdence
Non-UQ this argument is arbitrary, because there is no proof there isnt life after
death.

You cant win this argument if we win that Death isnt realthats Lanza

Yes it iswe are 20 watts of energy, that doesnt just disappear.

 AT Nuclear VTL
Non UQBodies are already calculated in the status quothats Robinson.

You making case outweighs arguments turns this argument, leveraging extinction
impacts commodifies lifethats Baudrillard.

The more we talk about nuclear war the less we fear it the turn is linear and is a new
link.
Carol Cohn, Senior Fellow, CGO and Wellesley College, 87

(Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, June, 43, Slick Ems, Glick Ems, Christmas Trees, and Cookie Cutters)

MY CLOSE ENCOUNTER with nuclear strategic analysis started in the summer of 1984. I
was one of 48 college teachers attending a summer
workshop on nuclear weapons, strategic doctrine, and arms control that was held at a university containing one of the nation's
foremost centers of nuclear strategic studies, and that was cosponsored by another institution. It was taught by some of the
most distinguished experts in the field, who have spent decades moving back and forth between academia and governmental positions in
Washington. When at the end of the program I was afforded the chance to be a visiting scholar at one of the universities' defense

studies center, I jumped at the opportunity. I spent the next year immersed in the world of defense intellectuals--men (and indeed, they are virtually all
men) who, in Thomas Powers's words, "use the concept of deterrence to explain why it is safe to have weapons of a kind and number it is not safe to use." Moving
in and out of government, working sometimes in universities and think tanks, they create the theory that underlies U. S. nuclear strategic practice. [Continues]

In other words, what I learned at the program is that talking about nuclear weapons is fun. The words are quick, clean, light, they trip off the
tongue. You can reel off dozens of them in seconds, forgetting about how one might interfere with the next, not to mention with the lives beneath them. Nearly

everyone I observed--lecturers, students, hawks, doves, men, and women--took pleasure in using the
words; some of us spoke with a self-consciously ironic edge, but the pleasure was there nonetheless. Part of
the appeal was the thrill of being able to manipulate an arcane language, the power of entering the secret kingdom. But perhaps more important, learning

the language gives a sense of control, a feeling of mastery over technology that is finally not controllable but powerful beyond human
comprehension. The longer I stayed, the more conversations I participated in, the less I was frightened of nuclear

war. How can learning to speak a language have such a powerful effect? One answer, discussed earlier, is that the language is abstract and sanitized, never giving
access to the images of war. But there is more to it than that. The learning process itself removed me from the reality of

nuclear war. My energy was focused on the challenge of decoding acronyms, learning new terms, developing competence in the language--not on the
weapons and the wars behind the words. By the time I was through, I had learned far more than an alternate, if abstract, set of words. The content of what I could
talk about was monumentally different.
 AT Life before Ontology
Nopethat goes backwards. Irwin says understanding the endless complications of
humanity, the good and the bad, is key to conceptualizing our humanity. Only
addressing the accursed share, aka the pain and exuberance of death that
fundamentally tethers all beings together in the ever flowing imminence of nature, is
key to creating an ontology that gives life meaning and allows for the production of
joy
 AT Reductionism
Nowe all experience things differently, the death drive and the absence of joy is
literally on the only common psychological component of experience.

You kill metanarratives and make social analysis impossible. This also applies to you
way harder, because your impact scenarios are predicated on narratives and causal
link chains predicated on social and political analysis that draws heavily from
psychoanalysis. That means this is defense for the neg if you win it.
 AT Saving Affirms Life
Nopeyour representation of savior status turns case. The Robinson evidence indicts
your methodology of trying to rescue people from the inevitable. That creates a false
dichotomy between the living and the dead and denies the ever-flowing imminence
that is existence. Those distinctions allow for racial and sexual antagonisms that turn
case.
 AT Suffering
Only a risk the alt solvesa life plagued by a fear of death makes suffering
inevitablethats McGowan.

Prioritize Psychological sufferingpain from their impacts is shrouded in false

conceptions of materiality. Frame the impact debate around our capacity for
empathetic engagement, any risk that your politics destroy our capacity to create
meaning means you prioritize the emotional trauma of a no-joy existence that makes
pain liberation.

This is also not offenseyou cant affect change. Either everyone is going to die, or
your aff doesnt solve because someone is going to do shit anyway. That means the alt
is probably good, because we ought to enjoy something before we are all obliterated.

Bereft of values, our society demands images of suffering from others to replenish our
moral sentiment. We exchange our pity for their pain, in a process that guarantees
the suffering must continue.
Baudrillard in 94 [Jean, September 28, "No Reprieve For Sarejevo"]
The problem lies indeed in the nature of our reality. We have got only one, and it must be preserved. Even if it is by the use of the most heinous of all paroles:
"One must do something. One cannot remain idle." Yet, to do something for the sole reason that one cannot do
nothing never has been a valid principle for action, nor for liberty. At the most it is an excuse for one's own powerlessness and a
token of self-pity. The people of Sarajevo are not bothered by such questions. Being where they are, they are in the absolute need to do what they do, to do the
right thing. They harbour no illusion about the outcome and do not indulge in self-pity. This is what it means to be really existing, to exist within reality. And this
reality has nothing to do with the so-called objective reality of their plight, which should not exist, and which we do so much deplore. This reality exits as such - it is
the stark reality of action and destiny. This is why they are alive, while we are dead. This is why we feel the need to salvage the reality of war in our own eyes and to
impose this reality (to be pitiable) upon those who suffer from it, but do not really believe in it, despite the fact they are in the midst of war and utter distress. Susan
Sontag herself confesses in her diaries that the Bosnians do not really believe in the suffering which surrounds them. They end up finding the whole situation unreal,
senseless, and unexplainable. It is hell, but hell of what may be termed a hyperreal kind, made even more hyperreal by the harassment of the media and the
humanitarian agencies, because it renders the attitude of the world towards them even less unfathomable. Thus, they live in a kind of ghost-like war - which is
fortunate, because otherwise, they would never have been able to stand up to it. These are not my words, by the way: they say it so. But then Susan Sontag, hailing
herself from New York, must know better than them what reality is, since she has chosen them to incarnate it. Or maybe it is simply because reality is what she, and
with her all the Western world, is lacking the most. To
reconstitute reality, one needs to head to where blood flows. All
these "corridors", opened by us to funnel our foodstuffs and our "culture" are in fact our lifelines along which we suck their
moral strength and the energy of their distress. Yet another unequal exchange. And to those who have found in a radical delusion of
reality (and this includes the belief in political rationality, which supposedly rules us, and which very much constitutes the principle of European reality) a kind of
alternative courage, that is to survive a senseless situation, to these people Susan Sontag comes to convince them of the "reality" of their suffering, by making
something cultural and something theatrical out of it, so that it can be useful as a referent within the theatre of western values, including "solidarity". But Susan
intellectuals swap their
Sontag herself is not the issue. She is merely a societal instance of what has become the general situation whereby toothless

distress with the misery of the poor, both of them sustaining each other, both of them locked in a perverse
agreement. This parallels the way the political class and civil society are swapping their respective misery: one throwing up corruption and scandals, the
other its purposeless convulsions and its inertia. Thus, not so long ago, one could witness Bourdieu and Abbe Pierre offering themselves as televisual slaughtering
lambs trading with each other pathetic language and sociological garble about poverty. Our whole society is thus on its way towards "commiseration" in the most
literal sense of the word (under the cloak of ecumenical bathos). It looks like as if we
are in the midst of an immense feeling of guilt, shared by
intellectuals and politicians alike, and which
is linked to the end of history and the downfall of values. Then, it has
become necessary to replenish the pond of values, the pond of references, and to do so by using that smallest
common denominator which is the suffering of the world, and in doing so, replenishing our game reserves with artificial fowls.
"At the moment, it has become impossible to show anything else than suffering in the news broadcasts on television", reports David Schneidermann. Ours is a
victim-society. I gather that society is merely expressing its own disappointment and longing for an impossible violence against itself. Everywhere, a New Intellectual
Order is following on the heels of the New World Order. Everywhere, we see distress, misery and suffering becoming the basic stuff of the primitive scene. The
status of victimhood, paired with human rights is the sole funeral ideology. Those who do not directly exploit it do it by proxy - there is no dearth of mediators who
take some surplus value of financial or symbolic nature along the way.
Loss and suffering, just like the global debt, are negotiable and for sale
on the speculative market, that is, the intellectual-political market - which is in no way undermining the military-industrial
complex of old & sinister days.
 AT Devalues Life
This evidence is trash and you dont understand symbolic exchange. Baudrillard just
says that life and death exist in tandem with one another and that all the experiences
that encompass both experiences have value. He doesnt say life is bad or that
suffering is good, he just says that everything affects who we are and how we engage
it.

The return to symbolic exchange dissolves the social antagonism by disrupting the
binaristic constructions of capitalist Enframing.
Robinson 12, Andrew. Political theorist who writes about the Baud-Man, Deleuze, and other people I care about less. An A to Z of Theory
| Jean Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange NKF

Baudrillard argues that the modern unconscious is arranged around the ideas of killing, devouring and possessing. The indigenous
unconscious is instead arranged around the ideas of giving, returning and exchanging, which organise collective processes of exchange. These ideas assume a
reversible, cyclical logic. Indigenous systems are also based on kinship and direct needs. The transition to consumer society occurs through the invention of artificial
needs, akin to Barthess second-order significations. Despite its group-defining function, symbolic
exchange is also defined in terms of the
overcoming of separations, segmentations and boundaries. Symbolic exchange is a regulated play of signs and appearances, including
ceremonies of metamorphosis. It doesnt accumulate profits or meanings. It doesnt alienate people from each other or the world. For Baudrillard, the symbolic also
puts an end to all the other bars and splits. It puts an end to the effect of the real, the experience of real disjunctions based on categories. Symbolic

exchange also refuses any separation of life and death. Life given over to death, or death given meaning for the living, are forms of
symbolic exchange. It also does not know the nature-culture split, since the territory is different from the modern idea of nature . The

relationship to the dead exists instead of alienation. In the west, people are alienated by internalising an
abstract agency. The relation to the dead and with shadows or doubles instead occurs through a concrete
connection, a non-alienated duel-relation. Death, seen in this way, is a kind of social openness, an undoing which breaks
down social separations perhaps even a form of reproduction prior to sexuality. This is similar to Bakhtins theory of the grotesque.