Lacan K

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Africa Reps K Index

1NC..............................................................................................................................................................................2-9
Africa Link....................................................................................................................................................................10
Gag Rule Link...............................................................................................................................................................11
AIDS Link.....................................................................................................................................................................12
General Link.................................................................................................................................................................13
Social Constructions Link.............................................................................................................................................14
Affs Reps Fail...............................................................................................................................................................15
Link..........................................................................................................................................................................16-19
Link Civil Society......................................................................................................................................................20
Impact...........................................................................................................................................................................21
Alt Traverse The Fantasy...........................................................................................................................................22

Alt Achmats Pledge..................................................................................................................................................23
Alt Achmats Pledge..................................................................................................................................................25
Alt Solvency**........................................................................................................................................................26-33
A2: Pomo/Postructuralist.........................................................................................................................................33-34
Framework....................................................................................................................................................................35
A2: Perm.......................................................................................................................................................................36
A2: Critics of Mbembe.................................................................................................................................................37
A2: Butler................................................................................................................................................................38-39
A2: Harms.....................................................................................................................................................................40
A2: Alt Symbolic Order...........................................................................................................................................41
A2: Science...................................................................................................................................................................42
A2: Bellamy..................................................................................................................................................................43
A2: Essentialism...........................................................................................................................................................44
Aff Answers
General Aff Answers...............................................................................................................................................45-49
Perm Solvency..............................................................................................................................................................50
A2: Alt Rewrite Text..................................................................................................................................................51
Aff No Link................................................................................................................................................................52
www.miamidebate.blogspot.com
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Africa is the empty other of the Western political imaginary The 1ACs depictions of
Africa as chaotic, disease stricken, and primitive are a tool for the West to narrate its own
subjectivity and authorize its political reading of Africa
Mbembe 01 (Achille, Research prof in history & politics @ U of Witwatersrand, On the Postcolony, p 1-2, dbm)
First, the African human experience constantly appears in the discourse of our times as an experience that can
only be understood through a negative interpretation. Africa is never seen as possessing things and attributes
properly part of human nature. Or, when it is, its things and attributes are generally of lesser value, little
importance, and poor quality. It is this elementariness and primitiveness that makes Africa the world par
excellence of all that is incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks of
nature in its quest for humankind. At another level, discourse on Africa is almost always deployed in the framework (or on the
fringes) of a meta-text about the animalto be exact, about the beast: its experience, its world, and its spectacle. In this meta-text, the
life of Africans unfolds under two signs. First is the sign of the strange and the monstrousof what, even as it opens an appealing depth
before us, is constantly eluding and escaping us. Attempts are made to discover its status, and to do so the first
requirement is, apparently, to abandon our world of meaning; is not Africa to be understood for what it is, an entity with
its peculiar feature that of shared roots with absolute brutality, sexual license, and death? The other sign, in the discourse of our times,
under which African life is interpreted is that of intimacy. It is assumed that, although the African possesses a self-referring structure that
makes him or her close to being human, he or she belongs, up to a point, to a world we cannot penetrate. At bottom, he/she is familiar
to us. We can give an account of him/ her in the same way we can understand the psychic life of the beast. We can even, through a
process of domestication and training, bring the African to where he or she can enjoy a fully human life. In this perspective, Africa is
essentially, for us, an object of experimentation. There is no single explanation for such a state of affairs. We should first remind
ourselves that, as a general rule, the experience of the Other, or the problem of the I of others and of human beings we
perceive as foreign to us, has almost always posed virtually insurmountable difficulties to the Western
philosophical and political tradition. Whether dealing with Africa or with other non-European worlds, this
tradition long denied the existence of any self but its own. Each time it came to peoples different in race, language, and
culture, the idea that we have, concretely and typically, the same flesh, or that, in Husserl's words, My flesh already has the meaning of
being a flesh typical in general for us all, became problematic. 4 The theoretical and practical recognition of the body and flesh of the
stranger as flesh and body just like mine, the idea of a common human nature, a humanity shared with others, long posed, and still
poses, a problem for Western consciousness. 5 But it is in relation to Africa that the notion of absolute otherness has
been taken farthest. It is now widely acknowledged that Africa as an idea, a concept, has historically served,
and continues to serve, as a polemical argument for the West's desperate desire to assert its difference from
the rest of the world.6 In several respects, Africa still constitutes one of the metaphors through which the
West represents the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image, and integrates this image into the set of
signifiers asserting what it supposes to be its identity. 7 And Africa, because it was and remains that fissure
between what the West is, what it thinks it represents, and what it thinks it signifies, is not simply part of its
imaginary significations, it is one of those significations. By imaginary significations, we mean that something invented
that, paradoxically, becomes necessary because that something plays a key role, both in the world the West constitutes for itself and in
the West's apologetic concerns and exclusionary and brutal practices towards others. 8 Whether in everyday discourse or in ostensibly
scholarly narratives, the continent is the very figure of the strange. It is similar to that inaccessible Other with
a capital O evoked by Jacques Lacan. In this extremity of the Earth, reason is supposedly permanently at
bay, and the unknown has supposedly attained its highest point. Africa, a headless figure threatened with
madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy, or stability, is portrayed as a vast dark cave
where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and
unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete, strange signs,
convulsive movements in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and
primordial chaos. But since, in principle, nothing Africa says is untranslatable into a human language, this
alleged inaccessibility must flow not from the intrinsic difficulty of the undertaking, not from what therein is
to be seen and heard, not from what is dissimulated. It flows from there being hardly ever any discourse
about Africa for itself. In the very principle of its constitution, in its language, and in its finalities, narrative
about Africa is always pretext for a comment about something else, some other place, some other people.
More precisely, Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give
a public account of its subjectivity. 9 Thus, there is no need to look for the status of this discourse;
essentially, it has to do at best with self-deception, and at worst with perversion. The harshness of such a diagnosis
may surprise. But it must not be forgotten that, almost universally, the simplistic and narrow prejudice persists that African social
formations belong to a specific category, that of simple societies or of traditional societies. 10 That such a prejudice has been emptied of
all substance by recent criticism seems to make absolutely no difference; the corpse obstinately persists in getting up again every time it
<contd>
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<mbembe contd no text omitted>
is buried and, year in year out, everyday language and much ostensibly scholarly writing remain largely in thrall to this presupposition. 11
Three major features are seen as characterizing traditional societies. First are what might be called facticity and arbitrariness. By facticity is
meant that, in Hegel's words, the thing is; and it is merely because it is and this simple immediacy constitutes its truth. 12 In such case,
there is nothing to justify; since things and institutions have always been there, there is no need to seek any other ground for them than the
fact of their being there. By arbitrariness is meant that, in contrast to reason in the West, myth and fable are seen as what, in such societies,
denote order and time. Since myth and fable are seen as expressing the very power of the originaire, nothing in these societies requires, as
noted above, justification, and there is little place for open argument; it is enough to invoke the time of origins. Caught in a relation of pure
immediacy to the world and to themselves, such societies are incapable of uttering the universal. Second, in addition to being moved by the
blind force of custom, these societies are seen as living under the burden of charms, spells, and prodigies, and
resistant to change. Timeit was always there, since time immemorial, we came to meet itis
supposedly stationary: thus the importance of repetition and cycles, and the alleged central place of witchcraft
and divination procedures. The idea of progress is said to disintegrate in such societies; should change occur
rare indeedit would, as of necessity, follow a disordered trajectory and fortuitous path ending only in
undifferentiated chaos. Finally, in these societies the person is seen as predominant over the individual, considered (it is added) a
strictly Western creation. Instead of the individual, there are entities, captives of magical signs, amid an enchanted and mysterious universe
in which the power of invocation and evocation replaces the power of production, and in which fantasy and caprice coexist not only with the
possibility of disaster but with its reality. More than any other region, Africa thus stands out as the supreme receptacle of
the West's obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of absence, lack, and non-being, of
identity and difference, of negativenessin short, of nothingness. 13 And, contrary to M. de Certeau's view, the
problem is not that Western thought posits the self (self-identity) as other than the other. 14 Nor does everything
come down to a simple opposition between truth and error, or to a confrontation between reason and that form of
unreason called fable or even madness. 15 In fact, here is a principle of language and classificatory systems in
which to differ from something or somebody is not simply not to be like (in the sense of being non-identical or
being-other); it is also not to be at all (nonbeing). More, it is being nothing (nothingness). Flying in the face of
likelihood or plausibility, these systems of reading the world attempt to exercise an authority of a particular
type, assigning Africa to a special unreality such that the continent becomes the very figure of what is null,
abolished, and, in its essence, in opposition to what is: the very expression of that nothing whose special feature
is to be nothing at all.
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The Affs attempt at unmasking the so-called reality of Africa is futile - The Aff
representations of the Harm erase the possibility of understanding Africa outside of a
dogmatic circularity the Aff cannot sustain its own dogma of being able to reveal Africa
as it is.
Returning to the literature of political science and development economics, it becomes clear these disciplines
have undermined the very possibility of understanding African economic and political facts. In spite of
the countless critiques made of theories of social evolutionism and ideologies of development and
modernization, the academic output in these disciplines continues, almost entirely, in total thrall to these two
teleologies. 22 This thralldom has had implications for understanding the purposes of these disciplines in
Africa, for the conception of their object, and for the choice of their methods. Mired in the demands of what
is immediately useful, enclosed in the narrow horizon of good governance and the neo-liberal catechism
about the market economy, torn by the current fads for civil society, conflict resolution, and alleged
transitions to democracy, the discussion, as habitually engaged, is primarily concerned, not with
comprehending the political in Africa or with producing knowledge in general, but with social engineering.
As a general rule, what is stated is dogmatically programmatic; interpretations are almost always cavalier,
and what passes for argument is almost always reductionist. The criteria that African agents accept as valid,
the reasons they exchange within their own instituted rationalities, are, to many, of no value. What African
agents accept as reasons for acting, what their claim to act in the light of reason implies (as a general claim to
be right, avoir raison), what makes their action intelligible to themselves: all this is of virtually no account in
the eyes of analysts. Since the models are seen as self-sufficient, history does not exist. Nor does
anthropology. It is enough to postulate, somehow, in a form totally timeless, the necessity of freeing the
economy from the shackles of the state, and of a reform of institutions from above, for this economy, these
institutions, to function on the basis of norms decreed universal and desirable. 23 It should be noted, as far as
fieldwork is concerned, that there is less and less. Knowledge of local languages, vital to any theoretical and
philosophical understanding, is deemed unnecessary. To judge from recent academic output, sub-Saharan
Africa, wrapped in a cloak of impenetrability, has become the black hole of reason, the pit where its
powerlessness rests unveiled. Instead of patient, careful, in-depth research, there are off- the-cuff
representations possessed and accumulated without anyone's knowing how, notions that everyone uses but of
origin quite unknown in Kant's well-known formulation, groundless assertions, against which others
equally specious can always be set. 24 One consequence of this blindness is that African politics and
economics have been condemned to appear in social theory only as the sign of a lack, while the discourse of
political science and development economics has become that of a quest for the causes of that lack. On the
basis of a grotesque dramatization, what political imagination is in Africa is held incomprehensible,
pathological, and abnormal. War is seen as all-pervasive. The continent, a great, soft, fantastic body, is seen
as powerless, engaged in rampant selfdestruction. Human action there is seen as stupid and mad, always
proceeding from anything but rational calculation.
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The affirmatives representations lock in domination and subjection these representations
take on a life of their own and assist the development of the very nightmare that the Aff
attempts to resolve.
Mbembe 07 (Achille, Research prof in history & politics @ U of Witwatersrand, Africa in Motion: An
interview with the post-colonialism theoretician Achille Mbembe, 3/17,
http://www.metamute.org/en/node/10333/print, dbm)
Achille Mbembe: To say that colonialism or apartheid is over does not mean to negate history or to erase memory. It simply means to be
attentive to those signs of the times which signal the entry into other configurations of human experience, hope and possibilities, or if
you wish, other temporalities. As we can clearly infer from everyday life examples, those temporalities almost always carry
with them bits and pieces, traces and fragments of the past. These fragments are recycled and imbued with
new meanings. Whether in the cultural, political or symbolic realms, the African present is formed by an
assemblage of signs and symbols and artefacts that mean different things in various languages and contexts.
These signs, symbols and artefacts are then organised around multiple central tropes that come to function as
both images and mirages, parables and allegories. As a result, because it succeeds in weaving onomatopoeic
relations between the thing and its double, African cultural history is the perfect archive of resemblance. This
is valid for the past and for the present. Christian Hller: What is particularly striking and original about your approach is the way you
theorize power or commandement in the postcolony. Concerned with the banality of power, you put the Bakhtinian model of the
grotesque and the obscene (as possible models of resistance against the oppressor) to a quite distinctive use, in so far as these categories
are exactly the modes in which power is exercised (mostly by autocrats) in African postcolonies. What kind of power constellation did,
or does, this process exactly engender - for example, you talk of a mutual zombification resulting from this? Achille Mbembe: The
book is not a reflection on power in general, but on that specific formation of will, desire and fantasy the postcolonial potentate is. This
formation of will, fantasy and passions operates predominantly through the mediation of the body and the
senses. It is a formation in which power is ubiquitous both in presence and in the realm of the tactile. Its
language is that of jouissance. It appeals not to reason as a category of public life, but to sensations (the eye,
the ear, the mouth, the phallus, taste, smell, a range of pleasures and pains of varying intensities). Such a
power formation indeed has a historicity and a materiality as I show in chapters 1 and 2. But more
importantly, it is a bundle of energies and brutal fantasies which always end up taking on lives of their
own. Because of sheer coercive repetition, these fantasies end up becoming a habitus or at least part of the
stylistics of everyday life, a prosaics. More radically, the starkness and the brutality of these fantasies may,
on occasion, assume a nightmarish appearance, as reality and fable reflect each other, thereby transforming
the very identity of the original and its referents. This is why an analysis a la Foucault or a reading from
within the usual categories of political economy are unable to highlight its complexities. In this kind of
power formation, reality is each time erased, recreated, and duplicated. It is this power of proliferation (and
its ability to obliterate the distinctions between truth and falsehood, the visible and the occult) that turns
domination and subjection into a magical song, at that point where the originary arbitariness produces
terror and hilarity.
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The affirmatives discourse of healing legitimizes the dominant mode of African
governmentality as War massacre and war becomes a therapeutic liturgy that works
hand in hand with the Affs representations of health and wholeness
Mbembe 06 (Achilles, Research prof in history & politics @ U of Witwatersrand, Law and Disorder in the
Postcolony, On Politics as a Form of Expenditure, 324-328, dbm)
The regulation of the population thus takes place in very large part through war, which itself increasingly
involves a process of selecting and appropriating resources necessary for the reproduction of life. The forces
that shape lifethat order and manage itare essentially forces that are armed or that act through the
mediation of arms, whether in combat situations or in the banal circumstances of everyday life. Under these
conditions, power is infinitely more brutal than it was during the authoritarian period. Its intent is no longer
to discipline as such. If it still maintains its tight grid of bodies (or their agglomeration within camps or so-
called security zones), this is not so much to inscribe them in disciplinary apparatuses as to better inscribe
them, when the time comes, within the order of that maximal economy that has become the "massacre"a
more or less updated form of age-old human sacrifices (Law 1985). The widespread experience of insecurity
has, in turn, sharpened the social distinction between those who carry weapons (both creators of insecurity
and purveyors of protection) and those who, because they lack them, perpetually run the risk of seeing their
lives and property forfeited. When contemporary wars have led to the military victory of one of the parties in conflict, they have
not necessarily been followed by liberalization of the regimes thus put in place by force. To the contrary, what have emerged are
social formations and political entities that combine traits of military principalities, predisposed to combative relations; tyrannies,
formed by an armed nucleus and cliques that exercise quasi-absolute control over long-distance trade and natural resources; and, in
certain cases, authoritarian regimes attired in "developmentalist" guise. In cases where armed dissidents have not
vanquished state power in its entirety, they have provoked territorial divisions and succeeded in controlling entire regions that they
administer on the model of colonial concessioner societies (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1972), especially where mining deposits are found (e.g.,
diamonds in Sierra Leone and Angola). In some cases, no military or state administration exists as such. The administration of public
affairs is carried out by means of family clans, while the amassing of wealth is left in the hands of private operators (Prunier
2000).Territorial fragmentation thus takes various forms: emerging regional fiefdoms controlled by independent forces, each receiving
marketable resources from and backed by neighboring states (as with Congo-Kinshasa, Sierra Leone, and Somalia); war zones on the
borders of neighboring states (Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Rwanda); breakaway provinces or regions within national
boundaries (Angola, Uganda, and Casamance); security belts around capitals and adjacent regions (Congo-Brazzaville); internment
camps of civilian populations deemed close to the rebels (Burundi and Rwanda); economic predation with the support of mercenaries
from distant places (like Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, and South Africa); and general practices of dehumanization in war zones (Liberia,
Congo-Kinshasa, Angola, Sierra Leone, and Sudan). War as a new form of governmentality draws on the debris of
bodies of knowledge or, at the very least, fragments of discourse meant to legitimate it. These bodies of knowledge
and discourse no longer rest on a single "archive," such as the "anticolonial archive" and its various vulgates (national liberation, anti-imperialism,
revolution, and so forth). They rarely refer, as in former times, to a collective emancipation project or to revolutionary social transformation. To be sure, the
rhetoric on eradication of corruption, protection of the environment, or minority rightsintegral parts of the international lexiconstill supplies
connotations of a fundamental moral conflict to some of these disagreements. But these miscellaneous relics of knowledge and fragments of discourse are
these discursive fragments are founded on the violent manipulation of
drawn from quite diverse sources. Some of
utopias. They blend together the desire for sacrifice, the will to eliminate existing tyrannies, and ideologies
aiming at dissolving differences linked to race or the survival of ethnic groups who perceive themselves as
threatened. Others draw their central categories from indigenous interpretations of the social world in terms
of illness, misfortune, and healing (Janzen 1982). War, under these conditions, appears as an immense
therapeutic liturgy. Still others rely on kernels of meaning extracted from monotheistic religions or messianic eschatologies of a
religious sort, when they are not borrowing their normative models from autochthonous imaginaries of the occult. Others claim to
inscribe themselves on the horizon of a modernity whose materialist, utilitarianist, and hedonistic dimensions they seek to
commandeer.19 But whatever their discursive underpinnings, their political manifestations are achieved through
grueling wars, in the course of which thousandsindeed, hundreds of thousandsare massacred, and
hundreds of thousands are either displaced or confined in camps (Hyndman 1999). As a result, the dominant
political culture distinguishes itself from all others by the high degree of articulation between the production
of political utopias and death en masse. The "styles of killing" themselves hold little variation; neither do the aftermaths of death. In the
case of massacres, especially, bodies divested of being are quickly returned to the state of skeletons. The morphology of these skeletons is now inscribed in
the register of an undifferentiated generality: simple remains of an unburied pain, emptied and meaningless corporealities, strange repositories submerged in
a cruel stupor. In the case of the Rwandan genocide, where a large number of skeletons were, if not exhumed, at least conserved in a visible state, a tension
remains between the petrification of bones, with their strange coldness, and their obstinate desire to signify something meaningful. There does not seem to
be, in these fragments marked with impassivity, any ataraxia: nothing but the illusory defiance of a death already come to pass . 20 In other cases, where
physical amputation replaces immediate death, the removal of limbs opens the way to the deployment of incision techniques, of removals and excisions,
which here, too, have the osseous phenomenon as their object. The vestiges of this demiurgic surgery remain long after the event, in the form of human
figures undoubtedly alive but in whom the corporeal totality has been replaced by pieces, fragments, folds, indeed massive wounds difficult to close again;
wounds that serve constantly to place under the gaze of the victim the morbid spectacle of his or her transition from the realm of flesh.
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These differences culminate into a fantasy of a stable identity, necessitating closure. The
impossibility of our own utopian fantasy leads to the extermination of entire populations to
secure our own self
Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Visiting Fellow in Psychoanalysis and Political Science @ University of Essex, Lacan
and the Political, pgs. 100-101)
What I will try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian
politics. Simply put, my argument will be that every utopian fantasy construction needs a scapegoat in order
to constitute itselfthe Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the Jew is a good example, especially as
pointed out in ieks analysis. 4 Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for its elimination. Put
another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a horrific side, a paranoid
need for a stigmatised scapegoat. The naivetyand also the dangerof utopian structures is revealed when
the realisation of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought close to the frightening kernel of the
real: stigmatisation is followed by extermination. This is not an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of
utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions,
violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and repression of violence (this is
its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it is sustained and fed by violence
(this is its horrific side). This repressed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name
utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy.
To use a phrase enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is driven out through the door comes back
through the window (is not this a precursor of Lacans dictum that what is foreclosed in the symbolic
reappears in the real?VII:131). 5 The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this
manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world, from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and
Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian
operationhere the approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analysing our political
experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan identified the utopian dream
of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic area (seminar of 18 June 1958).
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The Alternative analyses the Affs representations of Africa as created by a Lack in the
Symbolic Order that is contemporary thinking about geopolitics this act of sublimation is
essential to opening up material public spaces to challenge the politics of the Status Quo
Stavrakakis, 1999 (Yannis, BA, MD, Phd, Fellow at the University of Essex, Lacan and the Political: Thinking
the political, Pg 131-133)
In that sense, although sublimation does not involve a change in the drives object it involves a new
relation between the drive and something in addition to the object, something separate but also related
to it; it involves the dimension of the Thing (Lee, 1990:163). Sublimation raises an object to the dignity of
the Thing, it is thus directly related to the real. This is because here the Thing is the lost/impossible real
whose place is reoccupied by imaginary or symbolic objectsthe ethical ideal being just one of them
without, however, any of them being able to compensate us or cover over this loss which is a product of this
same symbolisation. What I want to suggest is that sublimation moves beyond traditional ethical
identification by taking into account the dimension of the impossible real. But what is most important
in sublimation and relates to our discussion on democracy is that sublimation creates a public space.
Although it can only be individual it nevertheless creates a public spacea certain unifying field. This
paradox is very well exemplified in the valuation and overvaluation of art within civilisation, art being
sublimation par excellence. The work of art is, on the one hand, strictly individual, tied to the libido of a
particular body, that of the artist. But the artists work is also addressed to the public; it entails the creation of
a public space without ever abolishing its singularity: the public of sublimation is not, in this sense, a
public of common denominator, of communality. Sublimation is rather the public space in which our
singular perverse bodies may make contact with one another through the creation of beautiful objects
that stand for them (Rajchman, 1991:73). This is not then a public space created by identification with
a common purpose or good as in traditional ethics: Sublimation involves another sort of bond
among us (Rajchman, 1991:73). One that mediates between the individual and the common, the particular
and the universal. Sublimation does not provide a total representation of the lost Thing, the impossible
real; it only recreates the vide left by this loss, which is structurally unrepresentable for us
(Rajchman, 1991:74). Sublimation recognises lack and the centrality of the real instead of attempting its
impossible elimination as identification with an ideal does. Lack is the organising principle of the
public, common space created by sublimation. Needless to say, sublimation is not mere intellectual
gymnastics either. Sublimation involves the possibility of constructing a material edifice around the
recognition of the real, the recognition of the lack that cross-cuts the subject and the social field. This is
illustrated in Lacans argument about the vase in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis already mentioned in Chapter
2: Now if you consider the vase from the point of view I first proposed, as an object made to represent
the existence of the emptiness at the centre of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as
represented in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing. And that is why the potter, just like
you to whom I am speaking, creates the vase with his hand around the emptiness. (VII:121) Isnt that what
democracy attempts to do, that is to say, to create a unity founded on emptiness, on lack and division? On
the one hand, then, sublimation is closely related to an attempt to encircle the real, to create a space for
the unrepresentable within representation. Artsublime art that isis thus revealed as articulating, as
showing an impossibility. In this regard democracy can be sublime, revealing politics as an art of the
impossible, a perpetual attempt to institutionalise within political reality, within the field of political
institution, the moment of the impossible, the political modality of the real. Artistic creation is not
limited within fantasy and political invention is not limited within utopian politics. On the other hand, one
should not neglect Lacans comments on the ultimately imaginary nature of sublimation. For all his intelligent negotiation of
sublimation, Lacans position remains ambiguous. Sublimation never stops providing an ultimately fantasmatic answer to the subject of
the Thing; fantasy seems to contaminate the field of sublimation: At the level of sublimation the object is inseparable from imaginary
and especially cultural elaborations. It is not just that the collectivity recognizes in them useful objects; it finds rather a space of
relaxation where it may in a way delude itself on the subject of das Ding, colonize the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes. That is
how collective, socially accepted sublimations operate. Society takes some comfort from the mirages that moralists, artists, artisans,
designers of dresses and hats, and the creators of imaginary forms in general supply it with. But it is not simply in the approval that
society gladly accords it that we must seek the power of sublimation. It is rather in an imaginary function, and, in
particular, that for which we will use the symbolization of the fantasm ($ ), which is the form on
which depends the subjects desire.
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The Affs modes of phatasmic politics is fundamentally incompatable with the Altrnative -
we must keep a distance from phantasmic politics in order to avoid re-identification and
deliver an effective public politics
As Ernesto Laclau has put it, by reoccupation we mean a process by which certain notions, linked to the advent of a new vision and
new problems, have the function of replacing ancient notions that had been formed on the ground of a different set of issues, with the
result that the latter end up imposing their demands on the new notions and inevitably deforming them (Laclau, 1990:74). What I want
to suggest is that in Homers schema psychoanalytic politics reoccupies the ground of traditional fantasmatic politics. The result is
that this fantasmatic conception of politics ends up imposing its demands on the psychoanalytic part of the
argumentation. Thus, this latter part is necessarily deformed: if it is not recognised in its radical constitutivity,
the impossibility of society, the irreducibility of the real within the social, loses all its power. In that sense,
the ultimate consequence of Homers argumentation is the following: the absorption of Lacanian political
theory by radical quasi-utopianism will offer left-wing radicalism the hegemonic appeal entailed in the
articulation of one more signifier (psychoanalysis) in its signifying chain, but psychoanalytic political
theory has nothing to gain beyond its own deformation. Well, it doesnt sound like a very good deal. In fact,
articulating Lacanian theory with fantasmatic politics is equivalent to affirming the irrelevance of
Lacanian theory for radical politics since this articulation presupposes the repression of all the political
insights implicit in Lacans reading and highlighted in this book. The alleged irrelevance of Lacan for radical politics is also the
argument put forward by Collier in a recent article in Radical Philosophy. Colliers argument is that since it is capitalism that shatters our
wholeness and disempowers us (as if without capitalism we would be on the road to utopia; obviously, capitalism occupies the structural
position of the antichrist in this sort of leftist preaching), then Lacans theory is, in fact, normalising capitalist damage, precisely because
alienation is so deep for Lacan that nothing can be done to eliminate it (Lacan is deeply pessimistic, rejecting cure or happiness as
possible goals, my emphasis). 19 Thus Lacan has nothing to offer radical politics. Something not entirely surprising since, according to
Collier, psychological theory in general has no political implications whatsoever. The conclusion is predictable: Let us go to Freud and
Klein for our psychotherapy [Lacan is of course excluded] and to Marx and the environmental sciences for our politics, and not get our
lines crossed (Collier, 1998:41-3). Surprisingly enough this is almost identical with Homers conclusion: Lacanian theory is OK as an
analytical tool but let us go back to Marx for our ideological seminar and our utopian catechism! It is clear that from a Lacanian
point of view it is necessary to resist all such reoccupations of traditional fantasmatic politics. At least
this is the strategy that Lacan follows on similar occasions. Faced with the alienating dimension of every
identification, Lacan locates the end of analysis beyond identification. Since utopian or quasi-utopian
constructions function through identification it is legitimate, I think, to draw the analogies with the social
field. If analysis resists the reoccupation of the traditional strategy of identificationalthough it recognises
its crucial, but alienating, role in the formation of subjectivitywhy should psychoanalytic politics, after
unmasking the crucial but alienating character of traditional, fantasmatic, identificatory politics, reoccupy
their ground? This rationale underlying the Lacanian position is not far away from what Beardsworth articulates as a political reading
of Derrida. For Beardsworth, deconstruction also refuses to implicate itself in traditional politics, in the local sense of politics in
Beardsworths terminology: In its affirmative refusal to advocate a politics, deconstruction forms, firstly, an account of why all political
projects fail. Since the projection of any decision has ethical implications, deconstruction in fact generalizes what is meant by the
political well beyond the local sense of politics. In this sense it becomes a radical critique of institutions. (Beardsworth, 1996:19)
Similarly, the radicality and political importance of the Lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its
distance from fantasmatic politics, from politics in the traditional sense; which is not the same as saying
that psychoanalysis is apolitical: in fact, it becomes political precisely by being critical of traditional politics,
exactly because, as argued in the previous chapter, the political is located beyond the utopian or quasi-
utopian sedimentations of political reality.
Miami (Ohio) 2007 10
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Africa Link
Public discourse and academia views Africa as an identity caught in a web of difference
and absolute otherness, configuring it as a figure of lack
Mbembe, 2006 (Achille, On the Postcolony: a brief response to critics, African Identities, Volume 4, Issue 2
October 2006 , pages 143 178, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?
content=a759315776&fulltext=713240928)
That this essential negativity persists is not due to the absence of a rich archive. Nor is it that the archive
cannot be rearranged in new ways. It is not as if many were not familiar with the material or that the latter
could not be cast in a different light. On the Postcolony argues that there are at least two main reasons
key realities are still blocked from view. The first is that Africa as a name, as an idea and as an object
of academic and public discourse has been, and remains, fraught. It is fraught in ways that go beyond
even the paradigm of orientalism introduced by Edward Said to speak to the staging of the difference of
the non-West from the West. Africa is not only perpetually caught and imagined within a web of
difference and absolute otherness. So often, Africa epitomizes the intractable, the mute, the abject
(Mbembe and Nuttall 2004, pp. 348-349). Any discourse on Africa has to take into account the existence
of an arche-writing, a first nomination which, insofar as it operates as a primordial or constitutive
violence the role of which is to inscribe Africa into a system of differentiation and classification, is in-
and-of-itself already an expropriation. This is a form of writing that endows Africa with an identity it
never possessed in the first place while never being able to open up a space for the continent to
manifest its self-presence. The second reason is presentism. Presentism should be defined as a discourse
on the gap and the lack. It rests on a method of reading the social that consists in simply turning to
statistical indices to measure the gap between what the continent is and what we are told it should be.
Partly because of its prescriptive nature, this method has ended up constructing an image of Africa as
a figure of lack. It is a form of misrecognition which tells us what Africa is not and hardly says
anything about what it actually is. It operates essentially by segmentation of time, excision of the past
and deferral of the future. This is the kind of reading the social, the political, the economic that underpins
structural adjustment programmes, ideologies of good governance and various projects of social engineering,
including those spearheaded by international NGOs (cf. Ferguson 2005).
Even discourses of Afro-nationalism fall into the same discourse of Africa as the ego and
the West of the Father.
A student of the black radical tradition, Cedric J. Robinson admits that some aspect of black life and
experience is 'unaccounted for' in the Marxist explication of the historical processes of 'calculated social
destruction', routine brutality and systematic exploitation. The brutal degradation of black life under
slavery and colonialism should be assigned to 'something of a more profound nature than the obsession
with property' alone, he adds (Robinson 2000, p. 308). In other words, to come to terms with the slave/native predicament, the
materiality of capitalism has to be acknowledged and dealt with. But capitalism, in its association with race, must also be read as a
symptom. Indeed, in contexts in which capitalism and race form a single stream, property almost always signifies itself as something
else. Black life or survival, in such a context, is constantly inscribed in a transformational network of crossings and reversals, of twists
and turns, some material, others not. In the process, it enters into a specular realm (speculum) - a regime of superfluity
characterized by the dissolution and volatilization of its value in the very act in which such value is
supposedly instituted (Mbembe 2004). Finally, as shown by many critics, this is a mode of thinking that
lives the great Other's rejection as an emasculation (see Carr 2002, esp. ch. 5). It is a thought born from an
original wound: an encounter between Africa and the West that is lived as a rape. Even when the
discourse of Afro-radicalism or Afro-nationalism pretends to consider African-life-for-itself, its obscure
object is always, first and foremost, the great Other, the West. The ego (Africa) never appears in these
discursive formations except under the figure of an anal object given up to the violence and cruelty of
the Father (the West) (Mudimbe 1977). It is difficult to have faith in the redemptive potential of a
discourse that is the manifestation of a subject dispossessed of its subjectivity, of its voice, and of its
desire by a demonic power of which this subject is the prey (for a critique, see Mbembe 2002 and the
controversy in Public Culture 2002, pp. 585-628; see also Wickramasinghe 2001, pp. 37-42).
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Gag Rule Link

The aff works to undermine the phalluscentric mode the symbolic order views Africa
A proper response would require a genealogical analysis of the symbolic systems which in Africa have
historically tied the social worlds of sexuality and of power to the phantasmal configurations of
pleasure (jouissance) on the one hand, and to structures of subjection on the other hand. There is no
doubt that historically, sex and gender norms were central to the fabric of power and economic life.
But so were cultural and symbolic categories in the definition of what stood for womanhood and for
manhood. But our knowledge of how power operated through the medium of actual bodies is, at the very
least, lacunal (see Mernissi 1975, 2001; and, for a more general treatment, Benslama and Tazi 2004). I will
therefore limit myself here to underlining some paradoxes and putting forward a few hypotheses. In
particular, I will try to highlight the kinds of imaginaries of body, sex, and gender relationships that
contribute, in a decisive way, to the constitution as well as the psychic life of that figure of brutality I have
called the postcolony.
In the postcolony, power dons the face of virility. The polis is above all equivalent to a community of men
(socit des hommes). Its effigy is the erect penis. It can be argued that the whole of its psychic life is
organized around a particular event: the swelling of the virile organ, the experience of turgescence.
Power experiences processes of turgescence as defining moments in the course of which it redoubles its
size and casts itself beyond its limits. During this growth towards its limits, it multiplies itself and
produces a phantasmal double whose function it is to efface the distinction between the real and the
fictional. The effigy (the phallus) plays, from this moment of growth, a spectral function. But in seeking
to exceed its own boundaries, the body of power (the phallus) exposes its limits, and in exposing them,
exposes itself and renders itself vulnerable. Such is the sexual imagination of the postcolony.
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AIDS Link
Aids Link- the cure for aids and the disavowal recognition of a traumatic reality that splits
the ego
Sitze, 2004, (Adam, Denialism, fellow in the English Department at Syracuse University, he will be assistant
professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/v103/103.4sitze.html)
A perplexing contiguity links the general economy of denialism to its specific manifestation in the Mbeki administration. Approached in
this frame, Mbeki's denialism is still, in Mamphela Ramphele's words, "irresponsibility bordering on criminality."95 Even before the
South African government's and the TAC's resounding April 2001 court victory over the pharmaceutical cartel, the Ministry of Health
indicated that it would not declare the situation a "national emergency" or "extreme urgency" that, under Article 31 of TRIPs would be
the surest way to open an exception to patent enforcement [End Page 782] and enable the parallel imports the court victory had made
possible.96 Instead, Mbeki began posing, more insistently and publicly than ever, questions he had asked since at least 1999 regarding
the relationship between HIV and AIDS, the validity of HIV/AIDS tests, the racist presuppositions of epidemiological studies of HIV,
and the ostensibly intolerable toxicity of ARVs.97 Why? When the TAC calls the Mbeki administration's logic "denialism," or when
Pieter-Dirk Uys parodies Mbeki by playing "MacBeki," they imply that Mbeki's position is informed by a certain madness.98
"Disavowal" (Verleugnung) is certainly, for Freud, constituted by a simultaneous denial and
recognition of a traumatic reality that is so consistent it eventually splits the ego into the two
autonomous egos of the psychotic. But the textual operation at work when "Castro Hlongwane" rejects the
relation between HIV and AIDS through a semantic analysis of the signifier AIDS itself,99 to the point where
it argues that to call the illnesses sweeping through South Africa "AIDS" would itself be genocide,100
suggests that, if there were an operation of psychosis in "Castro Hlongwane," it would not be intelligible in
Freudian terms. Because the text seems to encounter AIDS as an inassimilable signifier, and because its
miracle cure for AIDS consists in nothing more than a refusal of its signified, the madness of the text
would seem to consist less in disavowal than in what Lacan, drawing on a juridical term, calls
"foreclosure."101 For Lacan, foreclosure takes place when the subject's refusal, rejection, or
repudiation of le nom du pre reaches a point where the paternal signifier is cast outside of the
symbolic altogether. The paradox of foreclosure is that the signifier which confers order, identity, and
law upon the symbolic is forced outside of the same symbolic order it grounds.102 It is for this reason
that foreclosure manifests itself in a certain kind of "miraculous" symbolic creativity.103 The
hallucinations of the psychotic, Lacan suggests, are specifically neological in character, marked by
autonyms, new compound words, purely homophonic equivalences, and a struggle against the
omnipotent words of God.104 On this read, if there were in "Castro Hlongwane" a certain operation
of psychosis, it would manifest itself at the point where the text renames the acronym AIDS and
introduces its mode of truth production as a "miracle" akin to a sovereign performative ("let there be
light").105 Like President Schreber's autobiography, the validity of the text's statements would derive from its attempt to occupy the gap
in the symbolic left open by the foreclosed-upon nom du pre. But, keeping in mind that for Achille Mbembe, as for Carl Schmitt, the
category of the [End Page 783] miracle is linked to the paradox of the sovereign exception, where the sovereign is legally exempted
from the same rule of law he grounds, perhaps we ought to consider a less psychobiographical approach to the interpretation of "Castro
Hlongwane."106 From the angle of a certain concept of political sovereignty, the text's theories, which by its own account do battle with
the signifiers of an omnipotent apparatus, would be what Mbembe would call a "fantasm of power." Issued from the organ of sovereign
power, they would be written with the tip of God's phallus.107 In this event, it would be impossible to read "Castro Hlongwane" without
situating its theories in the nondiscursive supports that endow them with the capacity to remain in force while also signifying
nothing.108
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General Link
The affirmatives world of fantasy desire further sustains the symbolic real as it is doomed
to failure because we are constantly trying to identify ourselves through the Other
This representation involves flocculation, the crystallisation into signifying units. The Thing can only be
sought in the paths of the signifier, it can only be represented in the field of the Other, and only as
represented by something else, as veiled (ibid.). Thus we are revealed as divided between our representations
of ourselves and our real jouissance. In our representations we are continuously searching for this lost-
impossible real but this quest is doomed to failure since it is our attempts to symbolise the real that force us
to lose it for ever. 13 And the reason we still symbolise, we still represent, we still identify, is that every
symbolisation, every representation of reality is articulated around a fantasy frame, a promise of
encountering our lost jouissance. Fantasy creates this illusion by offering us the objet petit a as embodying, in
its absence, this fullness. Fantasy, however, cannot fulfil desiresince it cannot capture the unknown pre-
symbolic real; it can only sustain it, revealing human experience as a dialectics of impossibility. The promise
of fullness that sustains desire is generated in a performative way by symbolic lack. The objective level is
thus revealed as the level of a structural lack but also as the level in which fantasmatic, futile attempts to
neutralise this lack are taking place. If, however, symbolisation and fantasy are crucial in every such attempt
to produce the impossible object society doesnt that mean that Lacanian theory is but another version of
social constructionism, of the idea that reality as a coherent whole is socially constructed?
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Social Constructions Link

Social Constructions and institutions arent the root cause of the affirmatives harms but
instead the identity created by the play of symbolic and imaginary means at its disposal
creating by its linguistic discourse.
the political, Pg 54)
At first it is indeed possible to confuse the anti-objectivist dimension of Lacanian theory with the standard
social constructionist argumentation recently in vogue. Lacan suggests that social reality is not a stable
referent, a depository of identity, but a semblance created by the play of symbolisation and fantasmatic
coherence. Reality is lacking and, at the same time, attempting to hide this lack through the symbolic and
imaginary means at its disposal. Social constructionism is also articulated on the basis of the critique of
objectivist and essentialist conceptions of reality. If, in the past, it was thought possible to acquire an
objective representation or symbolisation of reality, even of the deep essence of things, constructionism
argues that the failure of all these attempts, the historical and social relativity of human representations of
reality, show that this reality is always the result of a process of social construction. What we accept as
(objective) reality is nothing but a social construction with limited duration. Reality is always constructed at
the level of meaning and discourse. 14
The affirmatives harms are not socially constructed but created by signifiers of linguistic
discourse
The importance of constructionism is very clearly shown in our representation of nature since nature is something we usually perceive as objectively real.
Nature, in everyday discourse, refers to the idea of an objective externality which can be absolutely intelligible through the mediation of sensation and
without the intervention of social meaning. This is a belief still widely shared by natural scientists, Green activists and lay people. But how natural is nature?
In order to answer this question social constructionists focus their attention on the coexistence, in the same social terrain, of different, if not contradictory,
representations of nature. It is obvious that in our societies a Green activist and an industrialist do not share the same conception of nature. Social
constructionism is based on the recognition of this social relativity of knowledge. As Berger and Luckmann have pointed out, what is real for a Tibetan
monk may not be real for an American businessman (Berger and Luckmann, 1967:15). The same applies to the level of diachrony. Our perception of reality
is not only socially relative but also historically relative. As Collingwood and Kelsen have shown, the ancient Greek conception of nature differs from the
Renaissance and the modern conception, while the primitive attitude towards nature is markedly different from modern scientific conceptions of nature
What social constructionism concludes from the social and historical
(Collingwood, 1945; Kelsen, 1946).
relativity of human knowledge is that reality is socially constructed; that it is impossible, for example,
to pin down once and for all the essence of nature. For humans, reality comes to existence as a
meaningful whole only within a network of meaning, within the level of discourse in which the elusive
objective reality is articulated with the meaning with which it becomes visible for us. This shift from a
naturalist to a culturalist paradigm signifies a change of perspective: it is not social meaning that is reduced to nature but nature that is
revealed as socially constructed at the level of meaning. Within the naturalist framework, real nature (as represented in the objective
discourse of the naturalist) is accepted as the signified of all social meaning. Social constructionism introduces an
important reversal: nature is only a signifier and its signified is society, which sets the rules according
to which we understand the world (Eder, 1996:31). Not only nature is a signifier and not an object or a
signified, but its own signified, the signified of nature, is not reality (as a hard extra-discursive entity),
but the level of construction, of the production of social meaning. The signified is itself a signifier; in a
very Lacanian manner signification refers only to another signification, and so on and so forth. Today that social constructionism is hegemonising the terrain
of the social sciences, it is standard textbook knowledge (normal science in Kuhns vocabulary) that nature is increasingly being seen as a social
construction. Social science can no longer suppose the objectivity of nature as an unchanging essence (Delanty, 1997:5). This stress on the loss of an
objective, natural anchor of meaning, the reversal of constructionism, seems, as we have already hinted, very close to the Lacanian conceptualisation of
The signified, the real object implied in signification, is ultimately absent in both cases and a
signification.
replacement constructed through a signifying process. In Lacan, it is also the case that reality is always precarious
(III:30). The reality with which psychoanalysis is concerned is upheld, woven through, constituted, by a tress of signifiers; reality, in
other words, implies the subjects integration into a particular play of signifiers (III:249). It is the signifier that produces
reality: This stress on the loss of an objective, natural anchor of meaning, the reversal of constructionism, seems, as we have already hinted, very close
The signified, the real object implied in signification, is ultimately
to the Lacanian conceptualisation of signification.
absent in both cases and a replacement constructed through a signifying process. In Lacan, it is also the
case that reality is always precarious (III:30). The reality with which psychoanalysis is concerned is
upheld, woven through, constituted, by a tress of signifiers; reality, in other words, implies the
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subjects integration into a particular play of signifiers (III:249). It is the signifier that produces
reality:
Affs Reps Fail
The affirmatives fixed identity of Africa is impossible and ends in failure.
What are the implications of the constitutive alienation in the imaginary and the symbolic for a theory of subjective identity? The
fullness of identity that the subject is seeking is impossible both in the imaginary and in the symbolic level. The subject is
doomed to symbolise in order to constitute her- or himself as such, but this symbolisation cannot
capture the totality and singularity of the real body, the close-circuit of the drives. Symbolisation, that
is to say the pursuit of identity itself, introduces lack and makes identity ultimately impossible. For
even the idea of identity to become possible its ultimate impossibility has to be instituted. Identity is
possible only as a failed identity; it remains desirable exactly because it is essentially impossible. It is
this constitutive impossibility that, by making full identity impossible, makes identification possible, if
not necessary. Thus, it is rather misleading to speak of identities within a Lacanian framework. What we
have is only attempts to construct a stable identity, either on the imaginary or the symbolic level,
through the image or the signifier. The subject of lack emerges due to the failure of all these attempts.
What we have then, if we want to be precise and accurate, is not identities but identifications, a series of
failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure, a deeply political play.
The affirmatives doom to fail we cant access the real or the Other through symbolic
representations only the alternatives dislocation of construction can come face to face with
the irreducible real
However, Butlers point entails one more misunderstanding. It seems to imply that Lacanian discourse elevates the real to the status of a
Taboo. Here ieks following formulation propos of historical analysis is very important: Lacan is as far as it is possible to
be from any tabooing of the real, from elevating it into an untouchable entity exempted from
historical analysishis point, rather, is that the only true ethical stance is to assume fully the
impossible task of symbolising the real, inclusive of its necessary failure. (iek, 1994a:199-200) In the
face of the irreducibility of the real we have no other option but to symbolise; but such a symbolisation can
take at least two forms: first, a fantasmatic one which will attempt to repress the real and to eliminate
once and for all its structural causality. Psychoanalysis favours the second and more complex one: the articulation of
symbolic constructs that will include a recognition of the real limits of the symbolic and will attempt to symbolically institutionalise
real lack. Let me illustrate this point by returning to one of the examples I used earlier, that of nature. The crucial question
regarding our access to the natural world becomes now: how can we then, if in fact we can, approach
nature before it becomes Nature, the real before it becomes reality, before its symbolisation ? This is the
question posed by Evernden: how can we return to things before they were captured and explained, in which transaction they ceased to
be themselves and became instead functionaries in the world of social discourse [?] (Evernden, 1992:110). How can we
encounter the pre-symbolic Other in its radical otherness, an otherness escaping all our
representations, if he is always beyond? (ibid.: 118). Well, in fact we cant; what we can do, however,
is acknowledge this failure, this constitutive impossibility, within our symbolisations. Trapped as we
are within the world of social meaning, all our representations of reality are doomed to fail due to their
symbolic character. Every attempt to construct what is impossible to be constructed fails due to our
entrapment within the world of construction. The only moment in which we come face to face with the
irreducible real beyond representation is when our constructions are dislocated. It is only when
Nature, our construction of external reality, meets a stumbling block, something which cannot be
symbolically integrated, that we come close to the real of nature. Nature, constructed Nature, is nothing but a mode of
concealment, a cloak of abstractions which obscures that discomforting wildness that defies our paranoid urge to delineate the boundaries of Being
(Evernden, 1992:132). Only when these boundaries collapse, in that minute intermission before we draw new ones, can we sense the unheimlich of real
nature. It is in that sense thatas argued in Chapter 2Lacanian theory opens the road to a realist constructionism or a constructionist realism; it does so by
accepting the priority of a real which is, however, unrepresentable, but, nevertheless, can be encountered in the failure of every construction. One final point
before concluding this section: when applied to our own discourse isnt this recognition introducing a certain ethical principle? Recognising at the same time
the impossibility of mastering the real and our obligation to recognise this impossibility through the failure of our attempts to symbolise it, indeed seems to
introduce a certain principle which cannot be by-passed. Of necessity this is a principle affecting the structure of knowledge and science in late modern
societies.
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Link
The affirmative plays the signifier in the symbolic order to identify itself through its harms
of instability in Africa. Their attempt to aid them presupposes the signification of political
reality and the lack of a common language and the failure to linguistically communicate
with them that shapes our reality
It is evident that what is at stake in the function of the point de capiton is the fixation of a given discursive
construct, the inclusion of a number of especially decontested signifiers in its signifying chain. Such an
inclusion presupposes a certain exclusion, that is to say a signification of the limits of political reality.
Social groups, for example, tend to define themselves through exclusion, by comparing themselves to
strangers. But how are these strangers defined? One crucial element is the lack of communication.
What adds the uncanny flavour to the encounter with the stranger is the lack of a common language,
the failure of communication. This is because it is impossible to represent linguistically, to
communicate, what is beyond language. A number of names are employed to encircle this unrepresentable
terrain: Terms like gogim, barbaroi, and nemtsi all imply such perception of the human
incompleteness of persons who could not communicate with the in-group, which constituted the only real
men (Armstrong, 1982:5-6). It is because reality is constructed in discursive terms that the encounter
with a non-member of a given linguistic community poses the problem of the limits of language and
reality; it is the encounter with a real beyond our construction of reality. Only the exclusion of this real can
guarantee the stability of our reality. Our reality can be real only if the real outside reality is negated,
attributed to the Other who somehow stole it from us. 4 Benveniste has shown that anthropological
historians were correct in perceiving this close relation between linguistic exclusion and the construction
of an ethnic or other identity. It is possible to locate particular signifiers that function as traffic lights
warning a group member when he is approaching a barrier separating his group from another [his
reality from a real beyond his control] (Armstrong, 1982:5-6). Both the point de capiton (for example the
signifier communism, to return to our previous example) and the signifier marking the limit of political
reality, the signifier representing, within our fantasmatic scenario, the excluded real (capitalism could
be one from the point of view of a communist discourse) are empty signifiers. The point de capiton, on
the one hand, can function as a point of reference only if posited as an incarnation of the universality of a
certain group or collectivity, as a representative of the pure being or the systematicity of the system. In the
point de capiton a particular signifier is called to incarnate a function beyond its concreteness, it is emptied
from its particular signification in order to represent fullness in general and be able to articulate a large
number of heterogeneous signifiers. The nation is clearly such an empty signifier that serves as a point
de capiton uniting a whole community (Demertzis, 1996). The signifier of exclusion, on the other hand,
is also an empty signifier, but one that represents the opposite of the point de capiton: pure negativity;
what has to be negated and excluded in order for reality to signify its limits. Reagans characterisation of
the USSR as the evil empire is a good case in point. Here again a particular signifier is emptied from its
concrete content in order to represent a negative universal, to stigmatise the always escaping real. We
should not forget, however, that the symbolic construct articulated around the point de capiton and
founded on the signification of the exclusion of the real can function properly only within a certain
fantasmatic frame; the empty signifier can only function as an objet petit a. It has been argued that our
linguistically constructed reality (an ethnic or nationalist ideology for example) depends on the incorporation
of all individual symbols, verbal and non-verbal, in a mythic structure (Armstrong, 1982:6). It is necessary
then to move from the consideration of the symbolic structure of political reality to its fantasmatic support.
This movement is inscribed in the structure of the empty signifier itself insofar as the empty signifier is
emptied of particular contents; the illusion is that it can become completely empty so that it can contain
everything; within a certain transferential illusion, it is supposed that anything can be inscribed into it. The
other side of semiotic emptiness is fantasmatic fullness. 5
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Link
The affirmatives utopian hope for Africa fails. We need to accept the impossibility of
stability in Africa to create a democratic ethos to truly be able to solve
What should not be neglected however in Ricoeurs standpoint is the centrality of the element of hope. No doubt, a society without hope
is a dead society. Yet, in reality, to eliminate the element of hope from human life is not only undesirable but also impossible. As Jacques
Derrida has put it: There is no language without the performative dimension of the promise, the minute I open my mouth I am in the
promise. Even if I say I dont believe in truth or whatever, the minute I open my mouth there is a believe me at work. Even when I lie,
and perhaps especially when I lie, there is a believe me in play. And this I promise you that I am speaking the truth is a messianic a
priori, a promise which, even if it is not kept, even if one knows it cannot be kept, takes place and qua promise is messianic. (Derrida,
1996:82-3) In addition, for Derrida, this element of hope is not necessarily utopian: I would not call this attitude utopian. The messianic
experience of which I spoke takes place here and now; that is the fact of promising and speaking is an event that takes place here and
now and is not utopian (ibid.). Is it then possible to retain this element of hope without incorporating it into a
utopian vision? Can we have passion in politics without holocausts? Furthermore, is it possible to have
a politics of hope, a politics of change without utopia? The experience of the democratic revolution
permits a certain optimism. Democratisation is certainly a political project of hope. But democratic
discourse is not (or should not be) based on the vision of a utopian harmonious society. It is based on
the recognition of the impossibility and the catastrophic consequences of such a dream. What
differentiates democracy from other political forms of society is the legitimisation of conflict and the
refusal to eliminate it through the establishment of an authoritarian harmonious order. Within this
framework the antagonistic diversity between different conceptions of the good is not seen as
something negative that should be eliminated, but as something to be valued and celebrated. This
requires the presence of institutions that establish a specific dynamic between consensus and dissent
this is why democratic politics cannot aim towards harmony and reconciliation. To believe that a final
resolution of conflict is eventually possible, even when it is envisaged as asymptotic approaching to the
regulative idea of a free unconstrained communication, as in Habermas, is to put the pluralist
democratic project at risk. (Mouffe, 1996b:8) 14 Democratic politicsand politics in generalcan never
eliminate conflict and dislocation, antagonism and division. The aim is rather to establish unity within an
environment of conflict and diversity; to create a thoroughly doubtful society, beset by productive self-
doubt, a society that traverses its utopian mirror image by identifying with its supposed enemy (Beck,
1997:169). In that sense, understanding and accepting the nature of democratic politics requires
accepting the anti-utopian dimension of antagonism and dislocation, the constitutivity of the political
qua encounter with the real. Today, the hegemonic appeal of this democratic anti-utopian hope
depends on the creation of a democratic ethos: the real issue is not to find arguments to justify the
rationality and universality of liberal democracywhat is needed is the creation of a democratic
ethos. 15 The emergence and maintenance of democratic forms of identity is a matter of identification
with this democratic ethos, an ethos associated with the mobilisation of passions and sentiments, the
multiplication of practices, institutions and language games providing the conditions of possibility for
the radicalisation of democracy (Mouffe, 1996b:5-8). 16 But this is not an identification with a utopian
image, it is an identification entailing the acceptance of the impossibility of attaining such a goal, it is
an identification with the symptom in the Lacanian sense of the word. Isnt it something worth fighting
for? Yet, before answering this question, before developing our argument for this psychoanalytic grounding
of modern democracy, we have to deal with the argumentation put forward against this kind of confluence
between Lacan and the political (democracy being an order based on the recognition and institutionalisation
of the political par excellence).
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Link
This form of ego-politics is unstable- a gap forms between ourselves and our perceived
reality, mandating identification with the other. Yet this relationship is mediated by our
own fundamental lack, creating elements of difference that force violent otherization
What is most important here is that in the mirror stage, the first jubilant moment is anticipating its own
failure. Any imaginary unity based on the mirror stage is founded on an irreducible gap: the human
being has a special relation with his own imagea relation of gap, of alienating tension (II:323). Unity
in the imaginary is a result of captivation, of a power relation between the infant and its image. But
this captivation, the anticipation of synthesis, can never eliminate the real uncoordination of the body
of the infant, it can never erase the external and alienating character of its own foundation. This
ambiguity is never resolved. One important consequence of this is that narcissism starts appearing in a
different light, as constituting the basis of aggressive tension: the imaginary is clearly the prime source
of aggressivity in human affairs. 7 What characterises every narcissistic relation is its deep ambiguity
(III:92-3). The ambiguity of the imaginary is primarily due to the need to identify with something
external, other, different, in order to acquire the basis of a self-unified identity. The implication is that
the reflecting specular image in imaginary relations, always contains within itself an element of
difference: what is supposed to be ours is itself a source of alienation. In that sense, every purely
imaginary equilibrium or balance with the other is always marked by a fundamental instability (Lacan
in Wilden, 1968:481). This alienating dimension of the ego, the constitutive dependence of every
imaginary identity on the alienating exteriority of a never fully internalised mirror image, subverts the
whole idea of a stable reconciled subjectivity based on the conception of the autonomous ego. It is not
surprising then that when Lacan discusses the idea of the autonomous ego in the Freudian Thing it is
enough for him to say It is autonomous! Thats a good one! (E: 132).
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Link
The affirmatives symbolization to solve disorder in Africa creates total and universal
representation producing its own remainder the evil agent which we must eliminate
leading to genocides and violence
In order to realise the problematic character of the utopian operation it is necessary to articulate a genealogy
of this way of representing and making sense of the world. The work of Norman Cohn seems especially
designed to serve this purpose. What is most important is that in Cohns schema we can encounter the
three basic characteristics of utopian fantasies that we have already singled out: first, their link to
instances of disorder, to the element of negativity. Since human experience is a continuous battle with
the unexpected there is always a need to represent and master this unexpected, to transform disorder
to order. Second, this representation is usually articulated as a total and universal representation, a
promise of absolute mastery of the totality of the real, a vision of the end of history. A future utopian
state is envisaged in which disorder will be totally eliminated. Third, this symbolisation produces its
own remainder; there is always a certain particularity remaining outside the universal schema. It is to
the existence of this evil agent, which can be easily localised, that all persisting disorder is attributed.
The elimination of disorder depends then on the elimination of this group. The result is always
horrible: persecution, massacres, holocausts. Needless to say, no utopian fantasy is ever realised as a
result of all these crimesas mentioned in Chapter 2, the purpose of fantasy is not to satisfy an
(impossible) desire but to constitute it as such. What is of great interest for our approach is the way in which
Cohn himself articulates a genealogy of the pair utopia/demonisation in his books The Pursuit of the
Millennium and Europes Inner Demons (Cohn, 1993b, 1993c). The same applies to his book Warrant for
Genocide (Cohn, 1996) which will also be implicated at a certain stage in our analysis. These books are
concerned with the same social phenomenon, the idea of purifying humanity through the
extermination of some category of human beings which are conceived as agents of corruption, disorder
and evil. The contexts are, of course, different, but the urge remains the same (Cohn, 1993b:xi). All these
works then, at least according to my reading, are concerned with the production of an archenemy which goes
together with the utopian mentality.
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Link Civil Society

The idea of a civil society doesnt make sense outside the Western view of the world its
application to Africa fails
Mbembe 01 (Achille, Research prof history & politics @ U of Witwatersrand, On the Postcolony, p 37-38, dbm)
Later, the ideas of refinement, sociability, courtesy, and urbanity became stronger and penetrated society, as a result of the rivalry that
impelled the bourgeois elites to imitate the manners of court nobility. To restore some discriminatory value to its behavior, or even
monopolize its symbolic rewards, the aristocracy stepped up the requirements of civility, issued more and more prohibitions, and raised
the threshold of disapproval, thereby dramatizing the competition over appropriation of marks of distinction. Consequently, the
transformation of behavior, respect for binding agreements, and control of conductin short, the promotion
of less brutal relations among individualscannot be separated from the notion of civil society. This latter
idea refers also to a pacified and policed society where, with affects and passions controlled, self-control and
the exchange of good manners gradually replace raw physical violence; subsequently, there would no longer
be pressing need for vulgar brute force (the distinctive feature of, for example, the colonial regime) in the
arrangements for maintaining domination and the means used to ensure subordination. It follows that the
notion of civil society refers, in the West, to particular forms of constructing, legitimating, and resolving
disputes in the public domain. But civil society is unthinkable without the existence of autonomous
institutions, sites, and social coalitions capable of playing an intermediary role between state and society.
Historically, civil society was a response to the general problem of the legitimacy of a domination otherwise
regarded as arbitrarythat is, having no justification but itself and, to that end, dispensing with normative
acceptance by those dominated. 34 Because the domination at issueconcentration of violence, exercise of
compulsion, forced delivery of commodities and means of livelihood, allocation of utilities, judgment of
disputes, grooming of peopleis the one exercised by that particular form of institutional arrangement
known as the state, it follows that its legitimation (its normative acceptance by the dominated) implicitly
raises the problem of how to set limits to state power. It immediately becomes apparent that there can be no
civil society without places and spaces where ideas of autonomy, representation, and pluralism can publicly
crystallize, and where juridical subjects enjoying rights and capable of freeing themselves from the
arbitrariness of both state and primary group (kin, tribe etc.) can come into being. As thus problematized,
civil society is not to be confused either with the mere existence of autonomous associations evolving outside
state control or simply with society (an error that many hasty observers of Africa commit). For, simply that
associations emerge does not automatically imply that a civil society exists. 35 This autonomy does not mean
merely the coming into being of a separate sphere, outside or apart from the state; 36 it lies rather in the way
that production and distribution of power are effected through a multiplicity of independent sources, and in
the capacity of those sources to articulate, autonomously and publicly, an idea of the general interest. 37 The
process through which what is acknowledged as the common or general interest comes to be defined
implies the existence of a public sphere that cannot be assimilated purely and simply to the official sphere.
.Further, the notion of civil society refers to a theory of social stratification and the procedures by which a
minimum of acceptance of that stratification is established. 38 As J. Leca explains, what is critical is the
tension, never resolved, between the reality of inequality and the fact that, to be legitimate, power must be
based on inclusion and equality (be it only formal) among citizens. The notion of civil society cannot,
therefore, be applied with any relevance to postcolonial African situations without a reinterpretation of the
historical and philosophical connotations that it suggests: the indigenous categories used for thinking
politically about conflictual and violent relations, the special vocabularies in which the political imaginary is
expressed and the institutional forms into which that thought is translated, the anthropology that underlies
both issues of representation and issues of unequal allocation of utilities, the negotiation of heterogeneity, and
the refinement of passions.
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Impact
This identification leads to genocide in the pursuit of a perfect utopian society anyone can
be a substitute for the Jew.
Simply put, the elimination of the Jew is posited as the only thing that can transform the Nazi dream to
reality, the only thing that can realise utopia. 9 As it is pointed out by an American Nazi propagandist,
our problem is very simple. Get rid of the Jews and wed be on the way to Utopia tomorrow. The Jews
are the root of all our trouble (True in Cohn, 1996:264, my emphasis). The same is, of course, true of
Stalinism. Zygmunt Bauman brings the two cases together: Hitlers and Stalins victims were not killed in
order to capture and colonise the territory they occupied. They were killed because they did not fit,
for one reason or another, the scheme of a perfect society. Their killing was not the work of destruction
but creation. They were eliminated, so that an objectively better human worldmore efficient, more
moral, more beautifulcould be established. A Communist world. Or a racially pure, Aryan world. In
both cases, a harmonious world, conflict free, docile in the hands of their rulers, orderly, controlled.
(Bauman, 1989:93) In any case, one should not forget that the fact that the anti-figure in Nazi ideology
came to be the Jew is not an essential but a contingent development. In principle, it could have been
anyone. Any of us can be a substitute for the Jew. And this is not a mere theoretical possibility. In their
classical study of the authoritarian personality Theodor Adorno and his colleagues point out that subjects
in our sample find numerous other substitutes for the Jew, such as the Mexicans and the Greeks
(Adorno, 1993:303). Although the need for the structural position of the anti-figure remains constant the
identity of the subject occupying that position is never given a priori. This does not mean that within
a certain historical configuration with a particular social sedimentation and hegemonic structure all
the possibilities are open to the same extent; it means though that in principle nobody is excluded from
being stigmatised. Of course, the decision on who will eventually be stigmatised depends largely on the
availability within a particular social configuration of groups that can perform this role in social
fantasy, and this availability is socially constructed out of the existing materials. As Lacan points out in
Anxiety, although a lack or a void can be filled in several ways (in principle), experienceand, in fact,
analytic experienceshows that it is never actually filled in 99 different ways (seminar of 21 November
1962).
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Alt Traverse The Fantasy

The alternative is to traverse the fantasy: instead of proposing a course of action, an act
which reaches out for the real and attempts to represent it, we encircle the real, allowing us
to recognize the role that these constructions of Africa play in our aggressive tendencies
and the Political, pgs. 83-85, dbm)
It was Foucault who posed this crucial question back in the early 1960s, in The Order of Things, by
formulating the following phrase: How can one think what he does not think [and the real in Lacan is
something beyond whatever we can think about it], inhabit as though by a mute occupation something that
eludes him, animate with a kind of frozen movement that figure of himself that takes the form of a
stubborn exteriority? (Foucault, 1989:323). And although his position was altered later in his work, his
answer at that time was that psychoanalysis, instead of turning its back to this dark continent of the
unthought, points directly to it, to the limits of representation, unmaking the positivity of man created
by the human sciences (Foucault, 1989:374-9). Psychoanalysis belongs to a form of reflection which involves for the first time,
mans being in that dimension where thought addresses the unthought and articulates itself upon it (Foucault, 1989:325). This attitude is
inscribed in the Freudian notion of the unconscious. The unconscious is a psychical agency whose existence we are
obliged to assume, to infer it from its effects, but of which we know nothing (Freud in Roazen,
1969:49). Freud affirms that the unconscious and this is the real dimension of the unconsciousis
unknowable as such and thus unsymbolisable in itself. Psychoanalysis aims at formulating a logic of
relations and connections that attempt to encircle this unknowability, to represent the limit of the
symbolic (of language and knowledge) and traverse the closure of fantasy, a move which becomes possible exactly
because this limit is surfacing within the symbolic order of language and knowledge; this limit is an internal limit, an internal exteriority
(Samuels, 1993:144). In this light, if the question is How do we know that the real resists symbolisation in the first place? the answer
must be Exactly because this resistance, this limit of symbolisation, is shown within the level of representation. Psychoanalysis is
based on the idea that the real is shown in certain effects persisting in discourse 9 although it lacks
representation per seand that it is possible to enact the symbolic gestures which can encircle these
moments of showing; something true can still be said [and we have to show how this can be done] about
what cannot be demonstrated (XX: 119). The question which remains open is what is the nature of these
symbolic gestures. It is not so much a question of if but a question of how: How can we know the
real, if everything that can be categorised and explained within the framework of a scientific theory
belongs to reality? How can any discourse reflect an authentic knowledge of the real? (Lee, 1990:137). Thurston is asking a
similar question: How can an instance of language escape the semiotic conditions of representation? (Thurston, 1998:158); a question
posed in the following terms by Badiou: How can a truth come to knowledge, whose own being, or relationship to being, is not able to
be known? (Badiou, 1996:24). First of all it is impossible to do it by articulating some kind of pure meta-
language; for Lacan, there is no metalanguage except for a failed one, precisely because every meta-
linguistic function has to be articulated in language (XX:122). Whatever we can show about that which
escapes language has to be shown in and through language, especially through the points where meaning is
disrupted. The meta-linguistic aspiration to articulate an impossible knowledge of the real has to work
between the words, between the lines. We have to expose the kind of real to which it grants us access .
We have to show where the shaping (mise en forme) of that metalanguagewhich is not, and which I make ex-sistis going. (XX:119) One then has to
locate the exact points within linguistic or discursive representation in which the real is surfacing. What is at stake here is our ability to inscribe, without
neutralising it, to recognise using a symbolic strategy, the ultimate impossibility of the real as it is revealed in our traumatic encounters with it (traumatic in
what is at stake is our memory of the political beyond the
the sense that they disrupt the ordinary forms of symbolisation);
forgetting orchestrated by political reality. It is clear that Lacan believes that it is possible to escape from the illusion of closure and
approach the real by means of a study of paradox and bizarre representational structures such as topology (the Borromean knot, for example, is capable of
showing a certain real; it represents the realXX: 133). In his 1972-3 seminar Encore, he makes it clear that the real can only be inscribed on the basis of
an impasse of formalisation (XX:93). It is through the failures of symbolisationthe play of paradox, the areas of inconsistency and incompletenessthat it
becomes possible to grasp the limits, the points of impasse, of dead-end, which show the real yielding to the symbolic (Lacan in Lee, 1990:171). It is no
coincidence that these moments are usually accompanied by anxiety. Encircling the real can be also achieved through art. It does not need to be abstract
art. In fact, artistic expression which uses the most naive realismthe representation of a pipe by Magritte pointing to the absolute mastery of the real by
reality (Magrittes pipe purports to be not a representation of a pipe but the pipe itself)is most successful in subverting it from withinthe inscription
this is not a pipe subverts this fantasy by revealing in the most unexpected place the failure of representation to capture the real, showing the real by
revealing the distance between representation and the real. This failure is all the more evident because Magritte uses the most literal way of artistic
expression; he uses literalism to undermine itself (Harkness, 1983:9). He allows the old field of representation to rule, but only temporarily, only on the
surface; beneath there is nothing: the most literal representation is transformed to a gravestone of realist representation itself (Foucault, 1983:41). What
remains as a trace of the real is an absence inscribed within the field of representation (Foucault,
1983:54). 10 But it is not only art; it is also philosophy and even politics. As we shall try to show in our
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discussion of Lacanian ethics in Chapter 5, it might be possible to inscribe a recognition of the real, to
institute the moment of the political within the space of politics. 11
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Alt Achmats Pledge

Achmats pledge allows us to refuse the sovereigns representation between life and death
In an odd way, this implication is entirely consistent with the arguments of the refused texts themselves. In
his 1994 "Off the Control Track: Power, Resistance, and Representation in South African Documentaries,"
Achmat offers "a theorization and critique of ideas which invoke suffering, sacrifice, and death as necessary for liberation." 148
He focuses, in particular, on the matrices of power and knowledge that, prior to any pure source of popular memory, make
possible the documentary filmic narration of the antiapartheid struggle as an "unarmed people prepared to confront the
mightiest military force on the African continent with the power of their own death ."149 His critique of this matrix is that, by
configuring death as sacrifice, it recuperates from death a surplus value, in the form of the signifier of the martyr, that
documentary film essentially enjoys and exploits. The immanent power of these signifiers, Achmat suggests, is their capacity to
hauntto "possess" the subject that witnesses them.150 At the close of Achmat's essaywhich, like his 1995 "My
Childhood as an Adult Molester," ends with an explicit emphasis on beginning151his text takes a
metacritical turn. As if the essay had been directed, all along, against the Greco-Roman-Christian metaphysic
that translates martyrdom into witnessing, substitutes testimony for witnessing, and derives protest from testimony, Achmat's
critique of the content of anti-apartheid documentaries enters into a retheorization of the way that martyrdom is inscribed in the
testamentary form of protest documentary itself. Acknowledging that the "mimetic approximation to truth" that
defines the documentary form is "derived from the experience of suffering, repression, and death," Achmat suggests that
this mimeticism is itself generative of the sacrificial cycle of violence it claims merely to represent. The documentary emphasis on
martyrdom, he argues, "may in fact be the constant reinvention of the originary trauma of colonial wars and conquest, racial
domination, gender and class inequalities, projected onto martyred bodies."152 Quite unlike Ren [End Page 791]
Girard, from whose analytic of mimeticism Achmat maintains a studied distance, Achmat argues that insofar
as documentary film derives its power of truth from what he calls "the power of one's own death," the correlation of
attestation and conscience that defines its mode of truth production will necessarily require death, in the form of the
reproduction of the martyrs on whose behalf it then claims to bear witness. Achmat suggests that this derivation of truth and
politics from death becomes especially intolerable, under conditions where imperialist fantasies of African nihilism find their
rhyme in the African state's exercise of a certain denialism. Living in Africa on a continent which signifies death and destruction
in the imperialist imaginary, it is imperative to uncouple sacrifice from resistance. Faced with the denial of state responsibility
for the basic conditions of life in villages, towns, and cities across the continent we cannot indulge the genocidal fantasies of
sacrifice. Hence, it is disturbing to read filmmakers who insist upon valorising sacrifice and torture as a necessity for the
pastoral reinvention of Africa.153 To oppose the pleasure principle inscribed in documentary attestation, Achmat
turns to Foucault's argument, in the final chapter of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, that " death is
power's limit." His reading of Foucault is precise and subtle, and I would like to read over Achmat's shoulder in order to draw out what
I feel are its implications. In the chapter to which Achmat turns, Foucault begins by discussing "patria potestas."154 Without going any
further, it is already worth noting that, in the political philosophies of Kant and Hegel, the notion of "testament" receives its intelligibility
from the same Roman laws of patriarchal inheritance that give rise to the modern concept of state sovereignty.155 The codes of patria
potestas that give the father the right to decide on the life or death of the son also stipulate the conditions under which the will of
the father can survive his death. Testaments are designed to guarantee primogeniture (the institution so opposed
by the early Marx): the testis in testament presupposes the testes of the patria potestas. The stakes of Achmat's
critique of documentary attestation become clearer once read alongside Foucault's inquiry into the limits of patria potestas. His
critique becomes intelligible as a challenge to documentary film to think beyond its capitulation to the nihilism inscribed in the
patriarchal concept of testament. To frame images of death as signifiers of martyrdom is not only to locate the truth, test, or
touchstone of political struggle in [End Page 792] death. It is also to come into possession of the images of the dead as if they
were nothing more than properties invested with a certain political valueas if the dead have merely left behind their images in
a last will and testament the validity of which it then falls to documentary film to execute as a kind of "estate." But by placing
this kind of value on death, Achmat seems to argue, documentary film also unwittingly turns death itself into a value . It
exorcises the power immanent to the images of the dead (the power to possess the living) even as it teaches the
unhaunted living to value life as nothing more than a potential political death. Documentary film would thus remain under the sway
of patria potestas to the extent that its ethics of attestation derives its understanding of death from a property-based notion of inheritance.
Resistance to patria potestas would, in turn, require a departure from documentary film's capitulation to and recapitulation of the
testamentary poetics grounded in this understanding. Why else might Achmat be reading The History of Sexuality in 1994a moment
of political transition that also marked a juncture where confession and testimony were becoming the dominant regimes of
intelligibility for the narration of apartheid. Whether in the managed spectacles of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or in the
spate of biographies and autobiographies that emerged in the 1990s, discourses on the transition from apartheid became governed by the
regime of truth Foucault has called exomologesis. Though exomologesis can be roughly translated as "recognition of fact," Foucault
treats it as a "technology of the self" designed to purify the soul from sin through a self-revelation (publicatio sui) that is simultaneously
a self-renunciation (the extreme form of which is martyrdom). Like any technology of the self, exomologesis is a distinctly collective
act; whether in its medical or juridical form, it unfolds as a dramatic ritual of penitence that reconcites the penitent with the community
and the community to itself. Foucault's inquiry into exomologesis, which advances his discussion of confession in the first volume of
The History of Sexuality, approaches it as a specifically pastoral power, a mode of subjectivation that binds the subject to itself through
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various practices of self-knowledge: publicly disclosing one's wounds in order to be cured; bearing witness against and refusing
oneself in order to make a break with one's past; and reaffirming the fact of one's fidelity to the principle of salvation through
truth.156 Returning to Foucault's comments on exomologesis helps us reread the opening of Achmat's 1995 "My Childhood as an
Adult Molester," which renders testimony decidedly indistinct from the most uncensored fantasy.157 [End Page 793] This preference not
to deliver straight testimony marks a departure from the disciplines of self-revelation that otherwise dominated the production of
discourse about apartheid in the mid-1990s. Achmat instead locates the truth of politics, and the politics of truth, in a joyful militancy
that affirms even death itselfthough in a very cautious way. Reading Foucault's remarks on the nature of contemporary sovereign
power, Achmat suggests that while "death is the limit of power, sacrifice brings a different power relation to
bear on the symbolism of death. The private moments of death become timeless public images of
sacrifice." Against exomologesis's relentless imperative to confess and testify publicly, Achmat concludes
his essay by calling for forms of documentary film that "ensure that death once again becomes the limit
point of power and an eternal moment of privacy." This may seem like an odd point with which to conclude an ending
that is supposed to double as a beginning. But read alongside Foucault's argument in The History of Sexuality, the affirmative kernel
encrypted in it becomes clearer. If we keep in mind that, for Foucault, death is the limit not to power per se, but the
limit to political sovereignty vested with a power "to make live or to cast out into death," we can follow
the way in which Achmat's affirmation of a private death is a line of flight from the sovereign power to
decide life and death. This becomes vitally important when we consider the 1999 utterance that, in its
various iterations over the last four years, has become globally known as Achmat's "pledge." "I will not take
expensive treatment until all ordinary South Africans can get it on the public-health system. That probably means that I will die
a horrible death, even though medical science has made it unnecessary."158 As we know, the force of Achmat's performative
culminated felicitously in his ingestion of ARVs in early August 2003, days after the Mbeki administration caved to the TAC and
announced that the government would soon roll out a universal AIDS plan. But in making and keeping his pledge even though
especially whilehis life hung in the balance, didn't Achmat contradict everything he wrote in 1994? As his own life and possible death
became the object of numerous documentaries, didn't he surrender to the very metaphysic of martyrdom, protest, and testimony against
which he earlier wrote so passionately? Didn't Achmat's refusal to take ARVs require him to subject himself to the very sovereign power
against which he protested, namely, the power to let die? The hagiographies imply exactly this. But to read Achmat's 1994 and 1995
texts is to gain a new angle from which to understand his pledge. The latter, [End Page 794] like the former, consists of a departure from
the entire catalog of transcendental and essentially nihilistic powers collected under the rubric of patria potestas. Up to and including
martyrdom. Though Achmat made a pledge referring to the possibility of his own death, it would be a mistake to presume this pledge
expresses a desire to protest or bear witness through or to the "power of one's own death." Recalling that Achmat is a dedicated reader of
Bataille, and a writer for whom life, sex, and politics are inextricable, let me conclude by dwelling on the singular politics of his pledge.
To do so is to wonder whether, prior to its utterance, perhaps even as its condition of possibility and as the source of its power, it was
subtended by a secret, cautious pact with the virus itself. A pact of what kind? In 1993, Alexander Garca Dttmann argued that the
anxiety of living with HIV/AIDS is, in part, that the virus undermines the ontological distinction between life and death. "One no longer
lives and has not yet died, because one has died already and nevertheless lives on, because life and death merge beyond recognition."159
Under political conditions where death marks power's limit, wouldn't this indistinction amount to an
edge? Wouldn't it yield a power to protest sovereign power from just beyond, or just before, the limit
that defines its jurisdiction? Supposing it were even possible for a virus to sign a pact, that is to say, to keep its promise,
wouldn't one of the effects of that pact be a chance to take part in a combat against sovereign power without also having anything to do
with the limits it inscribes in life? Signing a secret pact with the virus would not here be a matter of using the "power of one's own
death" as an instrument of political leverage. It would be a matter of cautiously opening a relation to death that nevertheless did not
derive its political power from death. Part of the power of such a pact would derive from giving oneself over to the virus, surrendering to
its replication, but on one critical condition: that one gain from that replication a new power. This power would be neither a
power of one's own death nor a power to represent death. It would instead be a paradoxical power that
derives its specific modality from the ontological indeterminacy of the virus itself: from a virus that is
neither dead nor alive, the power to live without dying on the terms of sovereign power. Pledging to remain
without ARVs until the poorest have access to them would then be a way of introducing a promise, and therefore the political itself, into the relations
between people living with HIV but without ARVs. Letting his body embody a wrong that itself calls for justice would be a way of affirming the same HIV-
positive political community his pledge posits. [End Page 795] Putting his life on the line would be neither stoicism nor satyagraha,160 but a way of
drawing on the virus to redefine the line between life and death itself: to re-create the diagnosis "positive" in and as a name for the affirmation of life with
HIV. The pledge would not, then, be a pact of the sort that binds one to oneself in solipsistic moral consistency (promise-keeping).161 It would be a process
of individuation defined by a protest of the condition of the dead and the living dead.162 To iterate the virus's own potency in and as the power of that
pledge would be to transcribe the very power of the virus into a power of truth the most powerful effect of whichtreatmentwould amount to the virus's
recession. It would be to enter into a cautious ensemble with the virus that was at the same time a combat against it. It would be to turn the virus back on
itself, to make it work on itself, to turn the virus's own power into a potential for the virus to be maintained in privationto live, with it. Who knows
grasped hagiographically, the truth-
whether this pact, in fact, exists. Perhaps I have just imagined it. But what is clear enough is that,
force of Achmat's pledge cannot but be misrecognized as the martyrdom from which Achmat, in 1994,
urged flight. On these terms, it would remain intelligible merely as a particularly bold and forcefully
instrumentalist form of dissent, objection, or complaint. But other visions of protest are possible. From
Zackie Achmat one can learn that protest also signifies promise and affirmation, and that to protest
and to live are undeniably the same.
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Alt Achmats Pledge

Achmets Pledge can be places as a resistance to denialism
Posing the problem in this manner simultaneously opens a way to think about the forms of resistance
to denialism. In 2003, the leading institutions of global mass media focused considerable attention on TAC
chairperson Zackie Achmat's pledge not to take ARVs before they became available in the South African
public health care system.146 Precisely because of the hagiographic quality of this attention, which obscures
the character of the TAC as a broad grass-roots movement, it is has become necessary to rethink Achmat's
interventions on the basis of his own writing. By the latter, I mean to the texts Achmat has published on sex,
politics, and representation [End Page 790] around the same time he founded the National Coalition for Gay
and Lesbian Equality. Even as the very best of the recent hagiographies take pains to include mentions of
Achmat's six months as a male prostitute, they for some reason treat as unspeakable his time as a critical
theorist.147 The implication of this foreclosure is that one cannot both be a martyr (as the
hagiographies assume Achmat is) and offer a critical theory of martyrdom (as Achmat has done in his
writing), as if the aura and authenticity of political sacrifice would be somehow conjured away by
explicit account of the mechanisms by which such effects are produced.
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Alt Solvency**
Once we recognize that the fantasy of wholeness is just a screen to cover up the lack, we can
recognize the true politics of the act - psychoanalysis is a pre-requisite to effective politics
McGowan 04,(Todd, teaches critical theory and film in the English Department at the U Vermont Lacan and
Contemporary Film, Ed. McGowan and Kunkle, pg 155-69, dbm)
For all its ability to control both past and present, the power of ideology is not absolute. We have political
possibilities because ideology does not function smoothly. The hitches in its functioning mark the points at which
subjects can mount resistance, and psychoanalytic interpretation allows us to recognize such points. As we have
already seen, Dark City begins with a moment at which ideological control fails. It fails because, as Detective Eddie
Walenski (Colin Friels) later tells Murdoch, "Once in a while one of us wakes up while they're changing things. It's
not supposed to happen, but it does. It happened to me." It also happens to Murdoch at the beginning of the film.
During the process of tuning and the imprinting of memories, Murdoch wakes up before Schreber has successfully
imprinted his new identity. As a result; Murdoch doesn't know who he is; he has only fragments of memories. To
"wake up" means that one has become aware of the process of ideological interpellation and has grasped that
ideology, produces identity. And in contrast, to sleep is to acquiesce to ideological control. This is why, during
another tuning later in the film Murdoch frantically exhorts those around him to wake up so that they too can
become aware of the control being exerted over the. In order to resist ideological control, the first step is to become
aware of its functioning, which Murdoch does. Ideology is susceptible to this kind of awareness--and failure-because
the symbolic authority is itself incomplete It suffers from lack just like the subjects under its control. That is to say,
symbolic authority does not simply exert its power over subjects; it also wants something from them. In Dark City
the figures of symbolic authority (the Strangers) seek the human soul the source of human individuality. Schreber
points out that they believe human individuality will save them-a collective species-from death. He explains to
Murdoch, "it is our capacity for individuality, our souls, that makes us different from them. They think they can
find the human soul if they understand how our memories work All they have are collective memories. They share
one group mind. They're dying, you see. Their entire race is on the brink of extinction. They think we can save
them."10 ' The strangers represent resent the symbolic authority in the film, and yet they themselves desire. They
want to discover the hidden secret of humanity -the objet petit a, the kernel of jouissance, within the human subject.
They take a special interest in Murdoch precisely because the process of ideological control fails with him, and thus
he seem, to possess this kernel of jouissance that cannot be reduced to ideology. What they seek in humans is not
successful ideological control, but the ability to resist it. Through this depiction of the Strangers, Dark City reveals not only that
symbolic authority desires (i.e., that it is lacking and therefore not absolute), but also that it desires the very jouissance that it forbids. Symbolic
authority demands obedience, but it desires resistance-the kernel of jouissance in the subject that cannot be assimilated through ideology. Its
desire cannot be reduced to a demand: authority articulates its demand-"Obey the Law! "but its desire appears between the lines of the demand.
As Lacan (1966-1967) points out in his Seminar XIV entitled La logiaue du fantasme, "it is from the demand-and thoroughly from the demand-
that desire arises" (1966-1967, session of June 21, 1967). It is, Lacan adds, "only a by-product of the demand" (1966-1967, session of June 21,
1967). Because desire emerges from demand, it remains-in direct contrast to demand-fundamentally enigmatic and irreducible to any positive
realization in signifiers. According to Lacan (1989), desire "cannot be indicated anywhere in a signifier of any demand whatsoever, since it is not
articulatable there even though it is articulated in it" (p. 62). Unlike demand, desire is elusive: whenever it is made completely
articulate, it slips away. So while the Strangers demand that the city's human subjects suc cumb to their manipulation,
what they really want-what they desire-is to discover someone who will successfully resist. Re sistance indicates the
presence of the "soul" or objet petit a, that extimate part of the subject-what is in the subject more than the subject-
that remains the same despite constant changes in symbolic identity. All mastery is constrained and haunted by the
desire for this little piece of the Real that has the ability to completely topple its authority. It seems odd, of course, to
say that mastery wants subversion rather than obedience. But this results from the fact that the position of mastery is
itself split and therefore inconsistent. This desire of the master is evident in the paternal figure who favors the
rebellious son over the dutiful one, as in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Big Daddy, the father of the
family depicted in the play, clearly prefers his son Brick over his other son Gooper, despite the rebellion of the
former and the obedience of the latter. Gooper is a successful lawyer, and he takes care of the family estate. In
addition, he has a stable marriage and has fathered grandchildren for Big Daddy. Gooper has done all of these things
in order to please Big Daddy, to conform to his demand. Brick drinks, disdains his inheritance, has a rapidly
dissolving marriage, and, perhaps most significantly, has sexual desire for men rather than women. However, even
the revelation of Brick's attraction to men does not alter Big Daddy's preference for him; in fact, it seems to increase
it.'' The more Brick acts against Big Daddy's demand, the more Big Daddy desires him. Brick's resistance to Big
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Daddy's authority attracts Big Daddy's desire because it indicates the presence of the objet petit a-something that
absolutely resists assimilation to the demands of authority. Big Daddy, like the Strangers, seeks out this object that seems to hold the secret of
jouissance that always remains just outside the reach of those in power. Symbolic authority's lack constitutes a political opening for the subject, which is why the subject
must constantly remain aware of it. In addition to revealing the desire of symbolic authority Dark City also illustrates the inability of symbolic authority to experience
jouissance. Perhaps the Strangers experience some jouissance in their mastery, but sexual jouissance completely escapes them. This failing becomes apparent in an exchange
between Schreber and one of the Strangers. While Schreber works in his lab preparing a new identity for a human subject, a Stranger approaches Schreber as the latter
begins to reflect on one of the memories he puts into this identity: "What is it? The recollections of a great lover? A catalogue of conquests? We will soon find out. You
wouldn't appreciate that, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is. Not the sort of conquests you would ever understand." Schreber's comment here underlines the distinction
between mastery and jouissance. Because they occupy the position of mastery, the Strangers continually seek the jouissance that their very position denies to them.
This is the fundamental impasse of all mastery: not only does it need those it controls and subjects to sustain its own position of mastery, but it cannot escape being
obsessed with the secret jouissance of these subjects. Hence, in addition to leaving open the space for resistance, symbolic authority actually encourages its own
Through its depiction of the desire of symbolic authority, Dark City reveals one of the ways that
subversion.
psychoanalytic critique and psychoanalytically informed inquiry serve political action. Often, the strongest barrier
to overcome in the political act is the belief that symbolic authority is without fissure, that there is no opening in
which the act can occur. By showing the Strangers' desperate search for the jouissance of the subject, the film
shatters this belief. Rather than embodying an invariable mastery that thwarts all challenges to it, the Strangers
betray the inconsistency of mastery, it's lack. And because even symbolic authority lacks, we need not succumb to
its demands.12 Symbolic authority's lack creates the space at which we can oppose it, and taking up this opposition
is what it means to act politically. But the primary barrier to such an act is our investment in the fantasy that fills in
symbolic authority's lack. Because symbolic authority is lacking or split, ideological control is not absolute. This
means that it needs a fantasmatic support in order to entice subjects to buy into it. If ideology simply demands
submission, subjects will be reluctant to buy into it. But fantasy fills in this lacuna, offering a reward (an image of
the ultimate jouissance) that ideology offers in exchange for submission. Hence, far from subverting ideological
control, fantasy perpetuates it and follows from it. The Strangers provide the inhabitants of the city with fantasies-
images of an experience beyond ideological control-and these fantasies assist in rendering the people docile . In the
case of Murdoch, we see clearly how ideological control depends on a fundamental fantasy. For Murdoch, this
fantasy is that of Shell Beach, a place of warmth and light in contrast to the dark, dreary city. Shell Beach occupies
this important place in Murdoch's psychic economy because it represents his point of origin-home. He believes that
if he can return to this point, he will find the answers to all of his questions about his identity and gain a sense of
completion. The contrast between the social reality of Dark City and Murdoch's fantasy reveals the crucial role that
fantasy plays in keeping subjects satisfied with the social reality as it is . Murdoch and everyone else in the city live in perpetual
darkness-a hopeless world of unending night. Proyas emphasizes this absence of light in the different aspects of the film's mise-en-scene. Every setting within the
city is very dimly lit; the characters wear dark colors and often appear in shadow; and no scene takes place during the day. This world would seem to be conducive
to widespread dissatisfaction, but fantasy intervenes to foster contentment through an imaginary satisfaction. Fantasy allows subjects to take solace in the image of
past (and future) satisfaction. Whereas the social reality is dark and hopeless, fantasy presents a world brimming with light. In Murdoch's fantasmatic image of
Shell Beach, a bright sun shines on a beautiful shoreline. This fantasy seems to offer an opening to a point beyond ideological control-hope for a different future--
but ideology actually relies on this image of an opening in order to keep subjects satisfied with their existence within ideology .
In order for fantasy to
supplement ideology in this way, it must remain amorphous and unarticulated. On several occasions during the
film, Murdoch asks about the way to Shell Beach. But each time his interlocutors stumble in mid-sentence, despite
expressing certainty about their knowledge of the directions. An exemplary instance of this occurs when Murdoch
questions a cab driver: Murdoch: Hey, do you happen to know the way to Shell Beach? Cab Driver: You're
kidding. Me and the Mrs. spent our honey-moon there.... All you gotta do is take Main Street west to .. or is the
Cross-. . . that's funny, I can't seem to remember if it's Main Street west or the Crosstown. This initial feeling of
knowledge and the subsequent uncertainty clue us in to the fantasmatic status of Shell Beach. Because it functions
as the locale of fantasy, subjects feel as if they know it intimately. But because it is fantasmatic, they cannot put
this "knowledge" into words. In Seminar VII, Lacan points out that "fantasms cannot bear the revelation of speech"
(1992, p. 80). To articulate the fantasy-to give directions to Shell Beach-would destroy . it insofar as this would
expose the imaginary status of the fantasy scenario. By stressing the inability of other subjects to tell Murdoch the way to Shell Beach, the
film again insists on the link between the individual's relationship to his or her private fantasies and the political situation of the entire society. Even though
Murdoch's fantasy is individual and private-Shell Beach is not the fantasy of everyone in the city-other inhabitants assist him in sustaining the fantasmatic status of
Shell Beach through their failure to direct him to it. In other words, their silence allows Murdoch to sustain distance from his fantasy. The fantasy of Shell Beach
continues to hold sway over Murdoch in part because everyone shows such respect for this private fantasy.
The subjects of Dark City unconsciously
recognize the danger for everyone-the public danger-if even one subject traverses her or his private fantasy. If the
fantasy of one subject breaks down and ceases to obscure the void at the heart of the symbolic structure, then
everyone's fantasy becomes questionable. Leaving his fantasy unarticulated and unrealized, Murdoch's fellow citizens protect him from facing the
void that it obscures. Just as the subject's traversal of the fantasy has political consequences for the whole society, the whole society's (political) commitment to
keeping fantasy hidden acts as a barrier to the subject's traversal of the fantasy. Perhaps the most insightful moment in Dark City occurs when Murdoch tries to take
the subway to Shell Beach. This scene offers an exact depiction of the impossible status of the fantasy within the symbolic order. When Murdoch takes a local train to
Shell Beach, the train stops before arriving, and an announcement tells the passengers that they must exit the train. After disembarking, he is told that only the express
train goes all the way to Shell Beach. But it turns out that there is no station at which one can board the express train, and so all one can do is to watch it go by. Here
we have the dilemma of fantasy in a nutshell: the local train that we can take never arrives at the destination, and only the express train that we can't board actually
makes it there. We miss the object one way or the other.' 3 These failures are not simply empirical obstacles to the realization of the fantasy but work to constitute and
sustain the fantasy. The fantasy only continues to function insofar as we find ourselves in the situation of Murdoch-unable to track it down. Fantasy relies on
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the subject's distance from it in order to be effective. Shell Beach must remain inaccessible and always on the
horizon. When the subject gets too close to the fantasy, the fan tasy breaks down, as Dark City illustrates. Dissatisfied
with his inability to find Shell Beach, Murdoch finally corners Schreber and demands that Schreber take him there. The course is circuitous: they travel by
boat down an isolated river and then walk through a series of narrow passages. When Murdoch opens the final door leading to "Shell Beach" the
camera is positioned behind him, so that we see Murdoch looking at what appears to be a bright blue vista. By first introducing us to "Shell Beach"
obscured by a doorway and through a long shot. Proyas plays with our expectations, forcing us as spectators to become aware of our own investment in fantasy. It
initially looks as if Murdoch has actually realized his fantasy, that he has finally arrived at Shell Beach. A quick cut to a closeup of Murdoch looking at the scene
seems to confirm this his expression connotes amazement. However, when we finally see Shell Beach through a subjective shot from Murdochs perspective, it
becomes apparent that the reason for this amazement is not the realization of the fantasy. It turns out that Shell Beach, once one actually arrives at it, is nothing but a
What seemed from the initial long shot to be the bright colors of an actual beach
poster of Shell Beach plastered on a brick wall.
turn out to be the faded colors of a mere poster. This is why the fantasy resists complete articulation: if one collapses
the distance separating oneself from the fantasy, the imaginary nature of the fantasy becomes readily apparent. In
addition to revealing what happens to fantasy when a subject comes face-to-face with it, Dark City also makes
evident what fantasy obscures. The most important role of fantasy within the psychic economy is its ability to cover
over the traumatic Real on which all ideology rests. As Zizek puts it, "The fantasy which underlies the public
ideological text as its non-acknowledged obscene support simultaneously serves as a screen against the direct
intrusion of the Real" (1998, pp. 64-65). Fantasy allows us to avoid an encounter with the Real that always threatens
to swallow the subject. Dark City depicts this dynamic almost literally. Confronted with the poster of Shell Beach
and the brick wall underneath, Murdoch (assisted by Inspector Bumstead) takes a hammer to the wall, breaking
down the fantasy in order to reveal what lies beyond. After they break through the wall, what they see horrifies
them: the image of Shell Beach covered the void of infinite space. Murdoch and Bumstead now recognize that the
city is not located on a planet (such as earth, where the film seemed to be set), but is free-floating through the
vastness of space. This immediately renders meaningless the entire ideological edifice upon which their world
rested. Murdoch and Bumstead see that there is, in the last instance, no ground under their feet, that void is at the
bottom of everything. At this point, Murdoch recognizes that he will never attain his fantasy and that the object of
his desire is the product of his own positing. As Schreber tells hi, There is no ocean, John. There is nothing
beyond the city. The only place home exists is in your head. Breaking down the wall forces Murdoch into this
recognition, and it is akin to what Lacan calls the traversal of the fantasy-the end of psychoanalysis. When a subject
traverses the fantasy, he or she moves from desire (continually seeking the object) to drive (circling around an
objectless void). One resists this transition because it entails the loss of any hope for escape. Desire promises a transcendent
future, a future beyond present constraints. But the drive makes no promises; it involves only a perpetual circling. Murdoch is not the only character in the film to pass
from desire to drive. Detective Eddie Walenski also made this transition prior to the beginning of the time depicted in the film, but he was unable to face the horror of
the drive's monotony and became mad (thus leaving him unable to assist Murdoch in his political action). On the walls of his office and home, Walenski draws spirals
that close in on themselves in order to represent the inescapabilitv of the drive. He tells Bumstead, "I've been spending time in the subway, riding in circles, thinking in
circles." Whereas desire proceeds in a linear fashion, metonymically moving from object to object. the drive is circular and thus is completely self-encloscd. It is a
circular motion constantly turning in on itself. Walenski eventually kills, himself in order to escape the monotony of the drive, which indicates that the fantasy of an
other place (such as Shell Beach) retained a hold over him. In its hope for relief from present conditions, literal suicide is necessarily accompanied by a fantasmatic
supplement an image of a better place somewhere else (even if this is only oblivion). In opting for suicide, Walenski reveals that he is unable to reconcile himself to
the object's nonexistence. Murdoch, on the other hand, is able to break from fantasy's hold, and this frees him from the power of ideological control, preparing him for
a final battle with the Strangers. The ideological control of the Strangers depends not so much on the symbolic identity that it produces in the subjects of the city as in
This is why Zizek claims that "the crucial precondition for breaking the chains of servitude is
its fantasmatic hold over them.
thus to `traverse the fantasy' which structures our jouissance in a way which keeps us attached to the Master-makes
us accept the frame-work of the social relationship of domination" (1998, p. 48). Traversing the fantasy frees the
subject from the power of symbolic authority by subverting the subject's libidinal investment in that authority.
Murdoch cannot become a fully radicalized subject until he abandons the hope that Shell Beach might bring him
complete satisfaction. This hope represents an investment in the authority of the Strangers because it is this authority
that has created Shell Beach. Hence, challenging the authority of the Strangers, prior to traversing the fantasy, would
threaten to undermine the fantasy. It is for this reason that fantasy plays such a crucial role in keeping subjects in
line. However, when he traverses the fantasy of Shell Beach (his fundamental fantasy), nothing stands in the way of
Murdoch mounting a political challenge to the hegemony of the Strangers. I ` The point at which Murdoch shatters the Shell Beach
fantasy and lays bare the void that it covers marks the radical moment of Dark City. But the film is unable to sustain this radicality, this confrontation with the void
that underlies the symbolic structure. After Murdoch and Bumstead break through the Shell Beach poster and expose the void, the Strangers appear, and during the
ensuing struggle, Bumstead and one of the Strangers fall through the hole in the wall and are thrust into the vacuum of space. This seemingly horrific event is actually
a wholly ideological development, as the subsequent shot indicates. After Bumstead's body leaves the world of the city and enters into space, the next shot depicts the
city subjectively-from the impossible perspective of Bumstead as he floats lifelessly through space. We gradually see that what seemed like a planet is actually a vast,
self-contained spaceship, unattached to any solar system. The problem with this shot is that it is purely fantasmatic: it posits a "real world" (a la Shell Beach, though
perhaps not as attractive) beyond the confines of our present world. At this point, the film implies that there is a vast universe of space (and possibly, somewhere,
Earth, a "real" home) beyond the ideological world of the city. It presents space itself as the "real world," as the place at which we arrive after traversing the fantasy.
But this is the fantasmatic gesture par excellence. Traversing
the fantasy doesn't allow us to escape the limits of our present
situation; instead, it allows us to see that there is nothing beyond those limits, that the image of the beyond is the
product of the limits themselves. That is to say, fantasy doesn't conceal the "real world" (however bleak), but instead
works to convince us that such a place exists, just beyond our reach. Traversing the fantasy involves the recognition
that there is no beyond-or, rather, that the beyond exists within the present world.15 In this sense, Dark City, though
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it depicts Murdoch traversing the fantasy, almost immediately restores the dimension of fantasy for the spectator.
But despite this lapse into fantasy, the film soon reveals the political possibilities unleashed through fantasy's
traversal. After he breaks from the fantasmatic control of the Strangers, Murdoch finds himself under their physical
control: he becomes their prisoner, and they plan to imprint their collective identity into his mind. They believe that because
Murdoch has successfully resisted them, he can become the vehicle for their deliverance. But instead of imprinting the identity of the Strangers into Murdoch,
Schreber imprints Murdoch with a series of memories. These memories include a tutorial designed to teach Murdoch how to develop his power of tuning in order to
Murdoch is not seduced by the memories
thwart the Strangers. Because he no longer has any (fantasmatic) investment in their authority,
themselves and uses them solely as a tool for battling the Strangers. He knows that he has nothing to lose in
destroying the symbolic edifice that the Strangers have authored. Thus assisted by Schreber, Murdoch defeats the
Strangers and frees humanity from their control. His private victory over the Strangers' authority is at once a
collective victory as well. It is at this point that we see most clearly the link between psychoanalysis and political
action. Psychoanalysis assists the analysand in traversing the fantasy and thereby breaking from her or his
investment in symbolic authority. As we have seen, in the film Murdoch undergoes a process similar to
psychoanalysis, concluding with his traversal of the Shell Beach fantasy. This is the process that makes possible
Murdoch's subsequent political act of overthrowing the Strangers. There is no authentic political act without a prior
traversing of the fantasy. Thus, psychoanalysis--and the psychoanalytic critique of ideology-leads us to political
action. As long as Murdoch remained invested in the authority of the Strangers at the level of fantasy, he could not
even see the opening for a political act. But by traversing the fantasy, he broke down this barrier, thereby revealing
the essential role that psychoanalysis plays in politics. While Murdoch does not, of course, undergo actual
psychoanalysis, his trajectory in the film-culminating in the traversal of the fantasy-follows that of analysis. Thus,
Dark City indicates not the political necessity of submitting everyone to analysis (which is clearly an unworkable
proposition) but the political importance of adopting the psychoanalytic path and its attitude toward fantasy.
Psychoanalysis is integral to the authentic political act because of the nature of symbolic authority. Symbolic
authority has mastery not as a result of superior force: though there are far fewer Strangers than humans, the
Strangers nonetheless have control. Instead, it relies on the fact that those who are under its control are themselves
invested in that control. That is, the humans submit to the authority of the Strangers because it provides them with
symbolic identity and a fantasmatic support for that identity. This investment in symbolic authority acts as a barrier
to political action, giving the humans a reason to sustain the status quo. It is only through the act of traversing the
fantasy-an act that psychoanalysis promotes-that subjects can escape this investment and act against symbolic
authority. Thus, the apparent short-circuit between psychoanalytic analysis and political action that critics have
noted within contemporary Lacanian thought must be seen in a new light. Far from working against concrete
political activity, psychoanalytic critique is in fact the basis for it. Without psychoanalysis, politics remains
micropolitics, caught within the very symbolic structure that it is trying to contest. With psychoanalysis we can
attain the authentic political act, one that eschews symbolic authority and authors a radical break.
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Alt Solvency
Resistance through acceptance of death is able to base on the relationship between slave and
colonialism
Mbembe, 2003 (Achille, Necropolitics, Public Culture 15.1 (2003) 11-40,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v015/15.1mbembe.html)
In this instance, my death goes hand in hand with the death of the Other. Homicide and suicide are
accomplished in the same act. And to a large extent, resistance and self-destruction are synonymous. To
deal out death is therefore to reduce the other and oneself to the status of pieces of inert flesh, scattered
everywhere, [End Page 36] and assembled with difficulty before the burial. In this case, war is the war of body on body (guerre au corps--corps). To
kill, one has to come as close as possible to the body of the enemy. To detonate the bomb necessitates resolving the question of distance, through the work
of proximity and concealment. How are we to interpret this manner of spilling blood in which death is not simply that which is my own, but always goes
hand in hand with the death of the other? 75 How does it differ from death inflicted by a tank or a missile, in a context in which the cost of my survival is
calculated in terms of my capacity and readiness to kill someone else? In the logic of "martyrdom," the will to die is fused with the willingness to take the
enemy with you, that is, with closing the door on the possibility of life for everyone. This logic seems contrary to another one, which consists in wishing to
impose death on others while preserving one's own life. Canetti describes this moment of survival as a moment of power. In such a case, triumph develops
precisely from the possibility of being there when the others (in this case the enemy) are no longer there. Such is the logic of heroism as classically
understood: to execute others while holding one's own
death at a distance. In the logic of martyrdom, a new semiosis of
killing emerges. It is not necessarily based on a relationship between form and matter. As I have
already indicated, the body here becomes the very uniform of the martyr. But the body as such is not
only an object to protect against danger and death. The body in itself has neither power nor value. The
power and value of the body result from a process of abstraction based on the desire for eternity. In
that sense, the martyr, having established a moment of supremacy in which the subject overcomes his
own mortality, can be seen as laboring under the sign of the future. In other words, in death the future
is collapsed into the present. In its desire for eternity, the besieged body passes through two stages. First, it is transformed into a mere thing, malleable matter.
Second, the manner in which it is put to deathsuicideaffords it its ultimate signification. The matter of the body, or again the matter which is the body, is invested with properties
that cannot be deduced from its character as a thing, but from a transcendental nomos outside it. The besieged body becomes a piece of metal whose function is, through sacrifice, to
bring eternal life into being. The body duplicates itself and, in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation. Let me explore, in conclusion, the relation
between terror, freedom, and sacrifice. Martin Heidegger argues that the human's "being toward death" is the decisive [End Page 37] condition of all true human freedom. 76 In other
words, one is free to live one's own life only because one is free to die one's own death. Whereas Heidegger grants an existential status to being-toward-death and considers it an event
of freedom, Bataille suggests that "sacrifice in reality reveals nothing." It is not simply the absolute manifestation of negativity. It is also a comedy. For Bataille, death reveals the
human subject's animal side, which he refers to moreover as the subject's "natural being." "For man to reveal himself in the end, he has to die, but he will have to do so while alive
by looking at himself ceasing to exist," he adds. In other words, the human subject has to be fully alive at the very moment of dying, to be aware of his or her death, to live with the
impression of actually dying. Death itself must become awareness of the self at the very time that it does away with the conscious being. "In a sense, this is what happens (what at
least is on the point of taking place, or what takes place in an elusive, fugitive manner), by means of a subterfuge in the sacrifice. In the sacrifice, the sacrificed identifies himself with
the animal on the point of death. Thus he dies seeing himself die, and even, in some sense, through his own will, at one with the weapon of sacrifice. But this is play!" And for
Bataille, play is more or less the means by which the human subject "voluntarily tricks himself." 77 How does the notion of play and trickery relate to the "suicide bomber"? There is
no doubt that in the case of the suicide bomber the sacrifice consists of the spectacular putting to death of the self, of becoming his or her own victim (self-sacrifice). The self-
sacrificed proceeds to take power over his or her death and to approach it head-on. This power may be derived from the belief that the destruction of one's own body does not affect
the continuity of the being. The idea is that the being exists outside us. The self-sacrifice consists, here, in the removal of a twofold prohibition: that of self-immolation (suicide) and
that of murder. Unlike primitive sacrifices, however, there is no animal to serve as a substitute victim. Death here achieves the character of a transgression. But unlike crucifixion, it
has no expiatory dimension. It is not related to the Hegelian paradigms of prestige or recognition. Indeed, a dead person cannot recognize his or her killer, who is also dead. Does this
imply that death occurs here as pure annihilation and nothingness, excess and scandal? Whether read from the perspective of slavery or of colonial occupation, death and freedom are
irrevocably interwoven. As we have seen, terror is a defining feature of both slave and late-modern colonial regimes. Both regimes are also [End Page 38] specific instances and
experiences of unfreedom. To live under late modern occupation is to experience a permanent condition of "being in pain": fortified structures, military posts, and roadblocks
everywhere; buildings that bring back painful memories of humiliation, interrogations, and beatings; curfews that imprison hundreds of thousands in their cramped homes every night
from dusk to daybreak; soldiers patrolling the unlit streets, frightened by their own shadows; children blinded by rubber bullets; parents shamed and beaten in front of their families;
soldiers urinating on fences, shooting at the rooftop water tanks just for fun, chanting loud offensive slogans, pounding on fragile tin doors to frighten the children, confiscating
papers, or dumping garbage in the middle of a residential neighborhood; border guards kicking over a vegetable stand or closing borders at whim; bones broken; shootings and
fatalitiesa certain kind of madness. 78 In such circumstances, the discipline of life and the necessities of hardship (trial by death) are marked by excess. What connects terror,
death, and freedom is an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics. The future, here, can be authentically anticipated, but not in the present. The present itself is but a moment of
visionvision of the freedom not yet come. Death in the present is the mediator of redemption. Far from being an encounter with a limit, boundary, or barrier, it is experienced as "a
release from terror and bondage." 79 As Gilroy notes, this preference for death over continued servitude is a commentary on the nature of freedom itself (or the lack thereof). If this
lack is the very nature of what it means for the slave or the colonized to exist, the same lack is also precisely the way in which he or she takes account of his or her mortality.
Referring to the practice of individual or mass suicide by slaves cornered by the slave catchers, Gilroy suggests that death, in this case, can be represented as agency. For death is
In this essay I have argued that
precisely that from and over which I have power. But it is also that space where freedom and negation operate. Conclusion
contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure
the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror. I have demonstrated that the notion of biopower is
insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power [End Page 39] of
death. Moreover I have put forward the notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the
various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum
destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in
which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living
dead. The essay has also outlined some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the
colony in particular) and has suggested that under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and
suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred.
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Alt Solvency
By identifying with the excluded other, we can elevate their position to the universal,
eliminating the barriers force instability and self-identification. Vote negative to force
recognition of our fundamental instability traversing the social fantasy of identification
By saying We are all Jews!, We all live in Chernobyl! or We are all boat people!all paradigms
used by iek in Looking Awry (iek, 1991b: 140)we elevate the symptom, the excluded truth of the
social field (which has been stigmatised as an alien particularity) to the place of the universal to the point
of our common identification which was, up to now, sustained by its exclusion or elimination. The same
happens when we say We are all gypsies!the central slogan in a recent anti-racist protest in Athens
or when it is argued that we will be in a stronger position to fight anti-Semitism only when the
Holocaust is recognised as a true part of all and not only of Jewish history, this localisation silencing its
significance; only when on finding out what happened, everyone, and not just the Jews, thinks: it
could have been methe victim that is (Monchi, 1997:80). What is promoted here is an attitude
consistent with identifying with the symptom of the social and traversing social fantasy. It is only by
accepting such an impossible representation, by making this declaration of impossibility, that it is
possible to represent the impossible or rather to identify with the impossibility of its representation.
Identification with the symptom is thus related to the traversing of fantasy. Going through fantasy
entails the realisation of the lack or inconsistency in the Other which is masked by fantasy, the
separation between objet petit a and the Other, a separation which is not only ethically sound but also
liberating for our political imagination: it is precisely this lack in the Other which enables the subject
to achieve a kind of de-alienation called by Lacan sparation[in the sense that it is realised] that the
Other itself hasnt got it, hasnt got the final answer. This lack in the Other gives the subjectso to speak
a breathing space, it enables him to avoid the total alienation in the signifier not by filling out his lack
but by allowing him to identify himself, his own lack, with the lack in the Other. (iek, 1989:122)
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Alt Solvency
We must embrace the impossibility of the fantasy to dislocate the real
In the course of history the search for the proper ideal, for the real good, has led to numerous distinctions
between true and false goods. This enterprise of ethical thought aims at the fantasmatic reduction of all
impossibility, at the elimination of the intervention of in human life. A certain idea of the good is
instituted at the place of the constitutive aporia of the human life. But this is a dead end; the successive
failures of all these attempts not only put into question the particular ideas of the good that have been
dislocated but this whole strategy: the question of the Sovereign Good is one that man has asked himself since time
immemorial, but the analyst knows that that is a question that is closed. Not only doesnt he have that Sovereign Good that is asked of
him, but he also knows there isnt any. (VII:300) In Lacans view, the sphere of the good erects a strong wall across the path of our
desirethe first barrier that we have to deal with (VII:230). Lacans central question is: what lies beyond this barrier, beyond the
historical frontier of the good? This is the central question that guides the argumentation in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. What lies
beyond the successive conceptions of the good, beyond the ways of traditional ethical thinking, is their ultimate failure, their inability to
master the central impossibility, the constitutive lack around which human experience is organised. In fact, this
impossibility exercises a structural causality over the history of ethical thought. Its intolerable
character causes the attempts of ethical thought to eliminate it. But this elimination entails the danger
of turning good to evil, utopia to dystopia: the world of the good is historically revealed to be the
world of evilas epitomized not only by the famous reversibility of Kant with Sade but also by the unending murders under the
reign of the politics of happiness (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1997:58). On the other hand, the irreducible character of this impossibility shows
the limits of all these attempts. The name of this impossibility in Lacan is, of course, the real. The real stands at the heart of the
Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis: As odd as it may seem to that superficial opinion which assures any inquiry into ethics must concern
the field of the ideal, if not of the unreal, I, on the contrary, will proceed instead from the other direction by going deeply into the notion
of the real. The question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real. (VII:11) As
we have repeatedly mentioned in this book, the real here is the impossible, that is to say, impossible to represent in any imaginary way or
inscribe in any symbolic system. It is the impossible jouissancean enjoyment beyond any limit, any barrier
the link between death and the libido. It is this same Thing that escapes from the mediation of
discourse; it escapes its representation and symbolisation and returns always to its place to show their
limits. It is the constitutivity of the real that reveals the subject as a subject of lack. It is the
constitutivity of the real that creates the lack in the Other; it is the constitutivity and irreducibility of
the impossible real that splits the social field. The erection of the good or the ideal of traditional ethics aimed at mastering
this structural impossibility of the real. Its failure opens the road to a different strategy, that of recognising its centrality and
irreducibility. The ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics without an ideal (Miller, 1987:9). The possibility of such a discourse is based on
the psychoanalytic idea that there can be an ethically satisfactory (though not necessarily satisfying) position to be achieved in
encircling the real, the lack, the bance as such (Lee, 1990:98). Although the real in itself cannot be touched there are two strategies in
confronting its structural causality. The first one is to defensively by-pass itas traditional ethical discourse doeswhile the second is
to encircle it (Lipowatz, 1995b:139). This later strategy entails a symbolic recognition of the irreducibility of
the real and an attempt to institutionalise social lack. 4 This attitude is what iek has called the ethics of
the real. The ethics of the real calls us to remember the past dislocation, the past trauma: All we have
to do is to mark repeatedly the trauma as such, in its very impossibility, in its non-integrated horror,
by means of some empty symbolic gesture (iek, 1991b:272). Of course we cannot touch the real but we can encircle
it again and again, we can touch the tombstone which just marks the site of the dead. iek calls us not to give way: We must preserve
the traces of all historical traumas, dreams and catastrophes which the ruling ideologywould prefer to obliterate. We ourselves must
become the marks of these traumas. Such an attitudeis the only possibility for attaining a distance on the [ideological] present, a
distance which will enable us to discern signs of the New (iek, 1991b:
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A2: Pomo/Postructuralist
( ) Postmodern and poststructuralist approaches fail - too polarizing either ignore the
dynamics of structures or fail to take into account the materiality of structures
There, in all its closed glory, is the prior discourse against which any comment by an African about Africa is deployed. There is the
language that every comment by an African about Africa must endlessly eradicate, validate, or ignore, often to his/her cost, the ordeal
whose erratic fulfillment many Africans have spent their lives trying to prevent. In their objects, language, and results, the fragments of
studies brought together in this book endeavor to tease out the far-reaching consequences of the theoretical and practical effects of this
violence and this extremism. Starting with the theme of contemporaneousness, they seek to give as intelligible an account as
possible of some aspects of political imagination and political, social, and cultural reality in Africa today,
both for their intrinsic worth and in the perspective of a comparative study of societies. The problem is to do
so in a manner that does justice to what J. F. Bayart describes as the true historicity of African societies 16
that is, the foundations of what might be called their true lawfulness, true raisons d'tre and relation
to nothing other than themselves. Such an undertaking poses numerous problems of methodology and of
definition. The first has to do with the extraordinary poverty of the political science and economics literature
on Africa, and with the crisis of its languages, procedures, and reasonings. 17 The issue is not that nothing
has been achieved, or that there have not been remarkable advances. 18 And it is not that other disciplines
have had fewer shortcomings and weaknesses. 19 Concerned with explaining either single and unrepeatable
occurrences or symbolic representations, recent historiography, anthropology, and feminist criticism inspired by
Foucauldian, neo-Gramscian paradigms or post-structuralism problematize everything in terms of how identities
are invented, hybrid, fluid, and negotiated. On the pretext of avoiding single-factor explanations of
domination, these disciplines have reduced the complex phenomena of the state and power to discourses
and representations, forgetting that discourses and representations have materiality. The rediscovery of the
subaltern subject and the stress on his/her inventiveness have taken the form of an endless invocation of the
notions of hegemony, moral economy, agency, and resistance. In keeping with an outdated
Marxist tradition, most scholars have continued to operate as if the economic and material conditions of
existence find an automatic reflection and expression in a subject's consciousness; to account for the tension
between structural determinants and individual action, they lapse into the grossest Parsonian
functionalism. Thus, on the basis of dichotomies that hardly exist, everything is considered said once it has
been shown that the subjects of action, subjected to power and lawcolonized people, women, peasants,
workers (in short, the dominated)have a rich and complex consciousness; that they are capable of
challenging their oppression; and that power, far from being total, is endlessly contested, deflated, and
reappropriated by its targets. 20 Helped by the collapse of Marxism as an analytical tool and allembracing
project, and by the demise of theories of dependency, economic explanations of contemporary social and
political phenomena have, with consideration of the draconian character of external constraints, all but
disappeared, all struggles have become struggles of representation. Levies, exploitation, corve, taxes,
tribute, and coercion no longer exist. Breaking away from the influence of Weber, everything has become
network, and no one asks any more about the market and capitalism as institutions both contingent and
violent. 21 Only rarely is there recourse to the effects of the longue dure to explain the paths taken by
different societies and to account for contradictory contemporary phenomena. Finally, there persists the false
dichotomy between the objectivity of structures and the subjectivity of representationsa distinction
allowing all that is cultural and symbolic to be put on one side, all that is economic and material to be put on
the other. Rejection of philosophical perspective is such that any basic thinking about African societies and
their history is deprived of all legitimacy. An instrumentalist paradigm now rules, too reductionist to throw
intelligible light on fundamental problems touching on the nature of social reality in Africa.
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A2: Pomo/Poststructuralist
Their criticism starts from the same set of assumptions that portray Africa as the empty
other that being the West contains distinctive features which distinguish it from the rest
of the world
Mbembe 01 (Achille, Research prof history & politics @ U of Witwatersrand, On the Postcolony, p 9-11, dbm)
The central assumption that guides what follows is that the peculiar historicity of African societies, their
own raisons d'tre and their relation to solely themselves, are rooted in a multiplicity of times, trajectories,
and rationalities that, although particular and sometimes local, cannot be conceptualized outside a world that
is, so to speak, globalized. 25 From a narrow methodological standpoint, this means that, from the fifteenth
century, there is no longer a distinctive historicity of these societies, one not embedded in times and
rhythms heavily conditioned by European domination. Therefore, dealing with African societies' historicity
requires more than simply giving an account of what occurs on the continent itself at the interface between
the working of internal forces and the working of international actors. 26 It also presupposes a critical
delving into Western history and the theories that claim to interpret it. An extraordinary difficulty at once
begins to loom. Social theory has always sought to legitimize itself by stressing its capacity to construct
universal grammars. On the basis of this claim, it has produced forms of knowledge that privilege a number
of categories dividing up the real world, defining the objects of enquiry, establishing relations of similarity
and equivalences, and making classifications. It has equipped itself with tools to ask questions, organize
descriptions, and formulate hypotheses. 27 But this same social theory has defined itself, above all, as an
accurate perception of so-called modern Europe. 28 When examined, it turns out to rest on a body created,
for the most part, at the time of the first industrialization and the birth of modern urban societies; modernity
itself as a phenomenon has been primarily understood in the perspective of Western rationalism. 29 In other
words, from Max Weber to the deconstructionists, the link between modernity, rationalism, and Westernism
was seen as more than merely contingent; it was seen as constitutive of all three, so that it is precisely this
interlinking that is the distinctive feature of the West, distinguishes it from the rest of the world, means
that its developments have not happened anywhere else. 30 This uniqueness would cover, for example, the
secularization of culture, the release from the thrall of nature, the end of miracles, the elimination of finalism
from religions, and the shattering of primary bonds and loyal ties and ancient customs and beliefsan
assertion of which the validity might, if one so wanted, be profoundly questioned. Continuing the habitual
argument, modernity is also seen as characterized by the liberation of the sentient subject and his/her
sovereignty from the unifying power of religion and the authority of faith and tradition. The triumph of the
principle of free will (in the sense of the right to criticize and the right to accept as valid only what appears
justified), as well as the individual's acquired capacity to self-refer, to block any attempt at absolutism, and to
achieve self-realization through art, are seen as key attributes of modern consciousness. So is differentiation
among the various sectors of social lifefor example, between state or bureaucracy and the market, or
between public and private life. On key matters, the Hegelian. post-Hegelian, and Weberian traditions,
philosophies of action and philosophies of deconstruction derived from Nietzsche or Heidegger, share the
representation of the distinction between the West and other historical human forms as, largely, the way the
individual in the West has gradually freed her/himself from the sway of traditions and attained an
autonomous capacity to conceive, in the here and now, the definition of norms and their free formulation by
individual, rational wills. 31 These traditions also share, to varying degrees, the assumption that, compared
to the West, other societies are primitive, simple, or traditional in that, in them, the weight of the past
predetermines individual behavior and limits the areas of choiceas it were, a priori. The formulation of
norms in these latter societies has nothing to do with reasoned public deliberation, since the setting of norms
by a process of argument is a specific invention of modern Europe. In this context, when articulated, the critique of
modernity is always directed against the positivism seen as emanating from the alienated life and self-
dispossession resulting from a form of work that deprives the producer of the enjoyment of what he or she
has produced (Marx); against the total assimilation of reason and power, with claims to validity seen as simply masking mundane
claims to domination (Nietzsche); against the corruption of all rational criteria and the confusion of reason, technicism, and absolute
domination by obscene totalitarian forces (Horkheimer and Adorno); against the absolutization of reifying,
instrumental, and calculating reason (Heidegger); or in the name of the supposed death of every form of
unifying teleological interpretation of the world (Derrida, Foucault, etc.). 32 The dispute thus bears not on
FTH Africa Reps K
the Westernness of modernity but on what the Enlightenment bequeathed us and on the possibilities of
accomplishing in reality the promises of universality contained in the ideals of the Aufklrung.33
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Framework
( ) The 1ACs speech act engages in the construction of the African subject and imbues it
with meaning thereby creating reality
Mbembe 01 (Achille, Research prof in history & politics @ U of Witwatersrand, On the Postcolony, p 6, dbm)
The concepts developed in this volume start from two observations. The first postulates that what passes for
social reality in sub-Saharan Africa is made up of a number of socially produced and objectified practices.
These practices are not simply matters of discourse and language, although of course the existential
experience of the world is, here as elsewhere, symbolically structured by language; the constitution of the
African self as a reflexive subject also involves doing, seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, and touching. In the
eyes of all involved in the production of that self and subject, these practices constitute what might be called
meaningful human expressions. Thus, the African subject is like any other human being: he or she engages in
meaningful acts. (It is selfevident that these meaningful human expressions do not necessarily make sense for
everyone in the same way.) The second observation is that the African subject does not exist apart from the
acts that produce social reality, or apart from the process by which those practices are, so to speak, imbued
with meaning.
( ) The discursive orderings that we impose on Africa have a substantial impact on public
life
Mbembe 01 (Achille, prof history & politics @ U of Witwatersrand, On the Postcolony, p 240-242, dbm)
Having set out to discover what remains, at this turn of the century, of the African quest for self-
determination, we find ourselves thrown back on the figures of the shadow, into those spaces where one
perceives something, but where this thing is impossible to make outas in a phantasm, at the exact point of
the split between the visible and graspable, the perceived and the tangible. In many respects, this conclusion
is frightening. It suggests that Africa exists only as an absent object, an absence that those who try to
decipher it only accentuate. In this logic, our power to state the thing is reduced to our capacity to create
shadow effects literally, to lieso great is the contradiction between the discourse we produce, and
experience as one fabricates it from day to day. Thus, we must speak of Africa only as a chimera on which
we all work blindly, a nightmare we produce and from which we make a livingand which we sometimes
enjoy, but which somewhere deeply repels us, to the point that we may evince toward it the kind of disgust
we feel on seeing a cadaver. All this is one reason why, whether produced by outsiders or by indigenous
people, end-of-the-century discourses on the continent are not necessarily applicable to their object. Their
nature, their stakes, and their functions are situated elsewhere. They are deployed only by replacing this
object, creating it, erasing it, decomposing and multiplying it. Thus there is no description of Africa that does
not involve destructive and mendacious functions. But this oscillation between the real and the imaginary, the
imaginary realized and the real imagined, does not take place solely in writing. This interweaving also takes
place in life. When we have understood that the reality with which we have been concerned all along exists
only as a set of sequences and connections that extend themselves only to dissolve; of superstitions,
narratives, and fictions that claim to be true in the very act through which they produce the false, while at the
same time giving rise to both terror and verisimilitude; of truths that flicker out like fireflies and are
destroyed in the roughness of everyday life at the moment everyone still believes in them. In other words,
what we designate by the term Africa exists only as a series of disconnections, superimpositions, colors,
costumes, gestures and appearances, sounds and rhythms, ellipses, hyperboles, parables, misconnections, and
imagined, remembered, and forgotten things, bits of spaces, syncopes, intervals, moments of enthusiasm and
impetuous vorticesin short, perceptions and phantasms in mutual perpetual pursuit, yet coextensive with
each other, each retaining on its margins the possibility of, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, transforming itself into
the other.
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A2: Perm
The permutation is self-defeating- it fills the space opened by the kritik with utopian
policymaking the co-opts any chance of solvency for the alternative
Since, however, Lacanian political theory aims at bringing to the fore, again and again, the lack in the Other,
the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself
in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. Is it really possible and consistent to point to the lack in the
Other and, at the same time, to attempt to fill it in a quasi-utopian move? Such a question can also be posed
in ethical or even strategic terms. It could be argued of course that Homers vision of a psychoanalytic
politics does not foreclose the recognition of the impossibility of the social but that in his schema this
recognition, and the promise to eliminate it (as part of a quasi-utopian regulative principle) go side by side;
that in fact this political promise is legitimised by the conclusions of psychoanalytic political theory. But this
coexistence is nothing new. This recognition of the impossibility of society, of an antagonism that cross-
cuts the social field, constitutes the starting point for almost every political ideology. Only if presented
against the background of this disorder the final harmonious order promised by a utopian fantasy acquires
hegemonic force. The problem is that all this schema is based on the elimination of the first moment, of the
recognition of impossibility. The centrality of political dislocation is always repressed in favour of the second
moment, the utopian promise. Utopian fantasy can sound appealing only if presented as the final solution to
the problem that constitutes its starting point. In that sense, the moment of impossibility is only
acknowledged in order to be eliminated. In Marx, for instance, the constitutivity of class struggle is
recognised only to be eliminated in the future communist society. Thus, when Homer says that he wants to
repeat Marxs error today he is simply acknowledging that his psychoanalytic politics is nothing but
traditional fantasmatic politics articulated with the use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary.
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A2: Critics of Mbembe

The affirmatives counterdiscourses are all based on on a conceptual structure of the West,
this ideology of responsibility the West must have acknowledging Africa as an object
In the process of writing On the Postcolony, it appeared to me that the combination of an uncritical
Marxist moral-political-economic evangelism and nationalist (nativist) rhetoric was of little use in the
attempt to transcend the limits of our epistemological imagination. In fact, when examined closely, both
counter-discourses have actively contributed to a spectacular contraction of the terms of philosophical
inquiry concerning this region of the world (Mbembe 2002). First, it has been amply demonstrated that
even when they start as a counter-reaction to European vilification, most of these counter-discourses
are always deeply embedded in the conceptual structures of the West (the arche-writing). To a large
extent, the West is their roots. They always draw, in their wake, key elements of imperial discourse. They
are not only always shaped by racialized and gendered elements of empire, colony and nation (Stephens
2005, p. 15). They belong to an epistemic system that begins and ends in white fixations on blacks and black
obsessions with whites - all in a framework in which politics is fundamentally understood as a race
struggle against racialized enemies. Second, that the anger and compensatory nature of these counter-
discourses have hardly been noticed is surprising. All along, the function of this anger in the verbal
enactment of the revolution has been to erase the traces of the originary violence described above. But
anger - the violence of the subaltern - is also a violence that refuses to face up to its own dependence on,
and enmeshment in, the primordial structure of the arche-writing - its entanglement with that
originary violence whose energy and form it not only iterates, but repeats since its very protocols are
deeply implicated in the exact terms it aims to repudiate. Third, the ties that bind these counter-
discourses and Eurocentric narratives of Africa expand to the question of responsibility. In Afro-radical
and nationalist (nativist) discursive formations, the address to the West seldom goes hand in hand with
the capacity to answer for oneself, that is, 'to be held accountable not simply by another but, already in
advance, by and for oneself - to answer to oneself in the place of the other' (Keenan 1997, p. 59). In their
attempt to provincialize Eurocentric narratives of Africa and to imagine a politics of black sovereignty, these
discursive formations end up describing Africa as an object apart from the world. They fail to go
beyond a simple reiteration of the paradigm of 'African difference', Fourth, because of the refusal to
acknowledge that some of the moral quandaries thrown up by our past and present may not admit of
any a priori solutions, too many intellectual corners are cut far too hastily (for a similar observation in
the Indian context, see Chakrabarty 2002, p. xxiv). For instance, the manifold experiences of the self are too
easily conflated with ubuntu - the ideology of racial communalism. Africa's own historicity is too easily
reduced to a matter of context: having-been-enslaved; having-been-colonized; being-economically-
marginalized. By easily fetishizing resistance and by relying heavily on an unqualified embrace of the
politics of disruption (if not destruction) in the name of 'agency', these counter-discourses have not
been able to produce the philosophical resources that would help to even begin to consider deeply the
political and ethical ramifications of what it is to have been, and to still be, a slave or to have been once
named a native.
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A2: Butler
The alternative takes these sex and gender categories to expose them and to make the
vulnerable. We solve all of your gender Butler arguments
The vagina, by virtue of the manner with which it was supposed to be hollowed out by the penile
erection, came to be construed at times as a container, at times as an envelope or a sheath whose
function it was not only to enfold, but also to discipline the excess and immoderation of the penis. As in the Islamic contexts
described by Hachem Foda, the function of the vagina was to 'border, contain, mold, and delimit that which owed its existence to its
erectile status' (Foda 2004, pp. 163-164). Other qualities were attributed to the vagina: a voracious and insatiable appetite (the abyss); a
guarantee of life (through its reproductive functions); the quintessential threat (the hole in the other, the original wound notably
symbolized by menstrual blood). These symbolic significations were almost always contradictory. In the
masculine imaginaries, the vagina oscillated between attraction and repulsion (Rey-Flaud 2002, p. 119),
the obscure fear of engulfment (the ostensible castrating power of woman), and the seat of life (the
maternal function) (see the articles in Arnfred 2004). According to Preston Blier, the term designating the
vagina could be used as an insult. But ancillary terms describing the woman's genitals could also refer
to inertia, tomb, and glutton. Like its counterpart the penis, the word employed in reference to the vagina,
minona, was the name of a powerful deity of both witchcraft and motherhood (Preson Blier 1995, ch. 4).
These examples point to the fact that body and sexuality were fraught with uncertainty and danger.
That this was the case testified to the very precariousness of everyday life. The forces mobilized for the
performance of sex and body were not transparent. Vulnerability was a mode through which power
and sex were mutually constituted and circulated. In its combination of power, vulnerability and
obscurity, to engage in sex was to place oneself, man and woman, in a precarious position. Through its
ethos of a flesh devoted to penance, colonial Christianity added to the circle of anxiety that already surrounded sex. In reinforcing the
dramaturgy already attached to precolonial understandings of sex and the body, it fostered the internalization of sexual repression and
firmly inscribed sex within the realm of sin and death (see, for example, Vandermeersch 2002). Islam, by contrast, glorified a celestial
sexuality whose earthly counterpart constituted a kind of foretaste (Al-Azmeh 1995).
FTH Africa Reps K
A2: Butler
No link: the phallus is the privileged organ of power or that is how it is viewed through
signifiers only the alternative would be able to break down the gender symbolism
Although no amount of guilt seemed to be attached to the carnal act as such, an array of interdictions
surrounded copulation. A complex of ideas and taboos clearly delimited the extent to which male power
could be deployed. But even though male power was not a boundless field, ancestral and colonial
traditions all shared the idea according to which the phallus was the veritable horn of plenty. The
phallus was at the same time the privileged organ of power and, in a word, the signifier of signifiers.
Monotheistic religions (Christianity and Islam) both regarded masculine sovereignty as endowed, at once,
with theological and juridical properties. Indigenous imaginations espoused, without contention, the idea
according to which the difference between virility and femininity rested on the material difference between
two specific organs. The entanglement of these imaginaries was a decisive aspect of the process by
which gendered reality has been made up at least since the nineteenth century. Such representations
helped to legitimize gestures, rules and ritualized enactments of sexual subjection and autonomy. But
gender symbolism and the male/female antinomy were always contested categories (see in particular
Griaule 1938, 1965; Zahan 1969). To be sure, social actors did incorporate a masculinist habitus that
exaggerated the formal and symbolic opposition between male and female domains, objects and moral
qualities. But if anything, the tension between the production of gender boundaries and processes that
constantly undermined them was a common occurrence. As cultural anthropologist Mariane C. Ferme argues
in a detailed study of gendered practices in Sierra Leone, zones of ambiguity and transgression abounded,
and in fact, boundaries were almost always if not overcome, at least unmade in what she calls 'the
context of practice'. Ferme pays particular attention to the performance of gendered differences and what
she terms the logic of exaggerated display of gender exclusiveness. The latter, she shows, could easily mask
both hierarchical distinctions among women and instances of appropriation by women of ordinarily male
domains. She suggests that any account of the sexual politics of the postcolony should take into
consideration the co-existence of multiple public spheres, some 'open spaces' and others 'concealed
sites.' It would appear as if the tension between the 'overt' and the 'concealed,' or between visible and
esoteric orders of power is the source of: (1) the production of a vast array of significations around the
understanding of a gendered social world; (2) the nature of female power and the constitution of sites
identified entirely or partially as female domains; (3) and finally the strategic uses of polysemy and
covert associations that can be appropriated by either men or women, depending on the context (Ferme
2001, pp. 61-74). A dramatic figure of this strategic use of polysemy (and the logic of display and
concealment/dissimulation that underpins it) is the figure of the mabole. The mabole epitomizes the absence
of transparent gender distinctions. A 'middle-sex' character, the mabole is supposed to combine elements of
both sexes in an ongoing and unresolved dialectical tension. According to Ferme, she is 'both man and
woman'. As a 'ritually male-identified woman', she participates in the social roles typically associated with
both genders. But because she has to manage 'a regime of ambiguity without resolving it dialectically into a
stable order of meaning', she is 'always on the brink of exclusion' (2001, pp. 78-79). All the above does not
invalidate the centrality of the male organ in the social imagination. Such a centrality consecrated, in
fact, the law of the Father and of the elderly (ans). And, as Lacan argues, 'it is with this penis that one
will make a signifier of the loss that appears at the level of jouissance by virtue of the function of the
law' Lvesque 2002, p. 105). It is this that explains the proliferation of practices and rituals of phallus
worship in different pre-colonial and contemporary African traditions. Indeed, in many traditions, the
sexual act is assimilated to a totemic feast governed by the dialectic of ingestion - that is, an ingestion of
the other and ingestion by the other.
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A2: Harms
The aff fundamentally misunderstands the fact that concepts such as Africa are dynamic
and ever changing concepts we must radically question what Africa has come to mean in
our world
Not that there is no distress. Terrible movements, laws that underpin and organize tragedy and genocide, gods that present
themselves in the guise of death and destitution, monsters lying in wait, corpses coming and going on the tide, infernal powers, threats
of all sorts, abandonments, events without response, monstrous couplings, blind waves, impossible paths, terrible forces that
every day tear human beings, animals, plants, and things from their sphere of life and condemn them to death: all these are present.
But what is missing, far from the dead ends, random observations, and false dilemmas (Afrocentrism vs.
Africanism), is any sign of radical questioning. For what Africa as a concept calls fundamentally into
question is the manner in which social theory has hitherto reflected on the problem (observable also
elsewhere) of the collapse of worlds, their fluctuations and tremblings, their about-turns and disguises, their
silences and murmurings. Social theory has failed also to account for time as lived, not synchronically or
diachronically, but in its multiplicity and simultaneities, its presence and absences, beyond the lazy categories
of permanence and change beloved of so many historians. What a certain rationality, claiming to be universal
but in reality mired in the contingent and the particular, has never understood is that all human societies
participate in a complex order, rich in unexpected turns, meanders, and changes of course, without this
implying their necessary abolition in an absence of center. The torment of nonfulfillment and
incompleteness, the labyrinthine entanglement, are in no way specifically African features. Fluctuations and
indeterminacy do not necessarily amount to lack of order. Every representation of an unstable world cannot
automatically be subsumed under the heading chaos. But, reduced to impatience and ignorance, carried
away by verbal delirium, slogans, and linguistic inadequacywith some analysts, only reading French,
others only English, and few speaking local languagesthe literature lapses into repetition and plagiarism;
dogmatic assertions, cavalier interpretations, and shallow rehashes become the order of the day.
Ethnographic description, distinguishing between causes and effects, asking the subjective meaning of
actions, determining the genesis of practices and their interconnections: all this is abandoned for instant
judgment, often factually wrong, always encumbered with off-the-cuff representations. The standard
prescriptive discourse of economism is becoming combined with the exhortation and social prophetism of a
certain sort of political activism. The upshot is that while we now feel we know nearly everything that
African states, societies, and economies are not, we still know absolutely nothing about what they actually
are.
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A2: Alt Symbolic Order

Identifying with the real doesnt symbolize it but creates the limits it poses that is revealed
through its relation of the symbolization.
What Butler is in fact reiterating here is the well-known paradox of Epimenides who, as a Cretan himself,
claimed that All Cretans are liars. If this statement is true then he is also a liar but if he is a liar then his
statement cannot be true. In both cases the paradox is irresolvable. Yet, what these paradoxes point to is
exactly the real lack in our symbolic media, the real limits of any process of symbolic signification and
resolution. And although we can never symbolise the real in itself, it is possible to encircle (even in a
metaphorical way) the limits it poses to signification and representation. Although it is impossible to touch
the real, it is possible to encircle its impossibility, exactly because this impossibility is always emerging
within a symbolisation. Hence Lacans position: I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because
theres no way to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet its through this very
impossibility that the truth holds onto the real (1987:7). Beyond the imaginary ideal of absolute knowledge,
Truth is nothing other than that which knowledge can apprehend as knowledge only by setting its ignorance
to work (E: 296). 6 In that sense, Butlers claim is misleading because the statement the real resists
symbolisation is not a symbolisation of the real per se 7 but a symbolic expression of the limits it poses,
a recognition of its structural causality as it is revealed in its relation to the world of symbolisation. 8 In
the second case we have a symbolic gesture which has no positive-representational content. Underlying
this view is the idea that psychoanalytic practice ultimately subvertsbut cannot eliminatethe
philosophical distinctions between the discursive and the extra-discursive, the linguistic and the extra-
linguistic, the real and knowledge. What is shown sometimes in clinical experience (an analyst or an
analysand may know something about that) is that analytic discourse is capable of effecting changes in the
real jouissance of the subject, without reducing it (or its impossibility) to a positive representation (as
in the case of a fantasmatic scenario).
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A2: Science
Science is only viable when we disrupt the fantasmatic symbolic representations of reality.
Our kritik is a science of the impossible we dont reject science.
I take my lead, in this regard, from Lacans text Science and Truth (it is the opening lecture of his 1965-6
seminar on The Object of Psychoanalysis). In this particular text, Jacques Lacan stages a critique of
modern science as it has been articulated up to now, that is as a discourse constantly identifying the
knowledge it produces with the truth of the real. If the constitutive, non-reducible character of the real
introduces a lack into human reality, to our scientific constructions of reality for example, science usually
attempts to suture and eliminate this gap. Lacan, for his part, stresses the importance of that which puts in
danger this self-fulfilling nature of scientific axioms: the importance of the real, of the element which is
not developing according to what we think about it. In that sense, science la Lacan entails the
recognition of the structural causality of the real as the element which interrupts the smooth flow of
our fantasmatic and symbolic representations of reality. Within such a context, this real, the obstacle
encountered by standard science, is not bypassed discretely but introduced within the theory it can
destabilise. The point here is that truth as the encounter with the real is encountered face to face (Fink,
1995a:140-1). It is in this sense that psychoanalysis can be described as a science of the impossible, a
science that does not repress the impossible real. For Lacan, what is involved in the structuration of the discourse of
science is a certain Verwerfung of the Thing which is presupposed by the ideal of absolute knowledge, an ideal which as everybody
knowswas historically proved in the end to be a failure (VII: 131). In other words, we cannot be certain that definite
knowledge is attainable. In fact, for Lacan, certainty is not something we should attribute to our
knowledge of things. Certainty is a defining characteristic of psychosis. In Lacans view, it constitutes its
elementary phenomenon, the basis of delusional belief (III:75). Opening up our symbolic resources to
uncertainty is, on the other hand, the only prudent move we have left. What we can know has to be expressed
within the structure of language but this structure has to incorporate a recognition of its own limits. This is not a development which
should cause unease; as Nancy has put it What will become of our world is something we cannot know, and we can no longer believe in
being able to predict or command it. But we can act in such a way that this world is a world able to open itself up to its own uncertainty
as such. Invention is always without a model and without warranty. But indeed that implies facing up to turmoil, anxiety, even
disarray. Where certainties come apart, there too gathers the strength that no certainty can match. (Nancy in Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy, 1997:157-8)
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A2: Bellamy
( ) Bellamy misunderstands Lacans argument the individual psyche doesnt exist
We can now dispel the confusion which accompanies many discussions on the relation between psychoanalytic theory and socio-
political analysis, a confusion which is open to accusations of a certain psychoanalytic reductionism. We may approach
this issue through the question: What serves to unite these two approaches? The most common but totally misleading answer is the
following: But surely, the role of the individual actor in politics. Such a view has been articulated by Bellamy as a criticism of the use
of Lacanian theory in Laclaus and Mouffes work: In order to render more meaningful their invoking of psychoanalytic terms Laclau
and Mouffe would need to be more specific about the precise nature of the intersection between the socialand the psychic which
however fragmented, alienated and deconstructed is surely a major factor in the implementing of political actions. Their use of
psychoanalytic terms to further elucidate certain ideological and political phenomena is too broadly deployed to allow for a
consideration of the individual psyche as a factor in the operations of ideology. (Bellamy, 1993:34-5, my emphasis) Here I would
like to question the conception of individual psyche that Bellamy has in mind. For her formulation seems to betray a certain
resistance to giving up an ultimately essentialist perspective. What must be emphasised once more here is that, for Lacan, this
psyche is nothing other than the pure substanceless subject as lack. The object of Lacanian psychoanalysis is
not the individual, it is not man. It is what he is lacking (1978:26). In that sense, all attempts to present the
Lacanian notion of the subject as related to what used to be called individuality, every attempt to reduce it
to the one who suffers or to a biological channel of discourse, simultaneously reducing analysis to its
therapeutic action (Alcorn, 1994:28) 26 or to a science of the individual (Feher-Gurewich, 1996:164) are not only incapable
of providing a link between Lacan and the political or a new alliance between psychoanalysis and social
theory (ibid.: 151) but are completely misplaced; Lacan is extremely clear in this respect: in the term subjectI am not
designating the living substratum needed by this phenomenon of the subject, nor any sort of substance, nor any being possessing
knowledge in his pathos, his suffering, whether primal or secondary, nor even some incarnated logos. (XI:126)
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A2: Essentialism
( ) No link Lacans location of a constitutive lack avoids essentializing
It is the Lacanian subject of the signifier, the lacking subject, that provides the first link between
psychoanalysis, society and politics, and this precisely because it highlights its dependence on the socio-
symbolic order: Psycho-analysis is neither a Weltanschauung, nor a philosophy that claims to provide the
key to the universe. It is governed by a particular aim, which is historically defined by the elaboration of the
notion of the subject. It poses this notion in a new way, by leading the subject back to his signifying
dependence. (XI:77) By locating, at the place previously assigned to an essence of the individual psyche,
a constitutive lack, Lacanian theory avoids the essentialist reductionism of the social to the individual level
and opens the way to the confluence of psychoanalysis and socio-political analysis, since this lack can only
be filled by socio-political objects of identification. The point here is that analytic theory is not only
concerned with lack but also with what attempts to fill this lack: Psychoanalysis is otherwise directed at the
effect of discourse within the subject (III:135). In that sense, Lacanbelieved in the priority of social
discourses, of language, over the subject (Copjec, 1994:53). This is the meaning of the constitutivity of the
symbolic in the emergence of the subject that we have been describing up to now. Michelman is correct then
when asserting that Durkheim and Lacan are thus allied in their critiques of various forms of psychological
and biological reductionism that deny the existence and efficacy of facts of this order [the symbolic/social
order] (Michelman, 1996:127). Thus Lacan not only seems aware of the dangers pointed by Durkheim and
reiterated by Jamesonwith which we started this bookbut avoids them in the most radical way: there is
no subject according to Lacan which is not always already a social subject (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy,
1992:30). 27
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Mbembes project of a critical analysis of Africa fails due to its ambiguity, it fails to speak
to the silenced in oppression Africa.
Weate, 2003 (Jeremy, Goldsmiths College, University of London, Postcolonial theory on the brink: a critique of
Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony, published in African Identities)
I will suggest first of all that precisely because of this ambiguity, Mbembe fails in his stated intentions of
thinking through the lived experience of post-colonial Africa to outline the conditions for a new form
of African writing. His project is ultimately theoretically confused and devoid of productive
existential engagement. Whilst Mbembe speaks, Africa in all its contingent, pre-textual complexity,
remains silent, and silenced. Secondly, I will argue that On the Postcolony erases all precursors.
Mbembe deliberately undervalues the volumes of important critical work that have been written on Africa
that avoid the objections he claims to apply tout court. This denial of a critical tradition is in part a
consequence of the poststructuralist theoretical framework Mbembe by and large adopts. The semiotic
paradigm attempts to frame all objects in its own image; it therefore cannot account for how and why
it has written less assimilable modes of thought out of history. In this sense, as Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri (2001) have said of post-colonial theory in general, Mbembes work resembles a symptom
or effect of a cause which it cannot itself articulate. Mbembes reliance on textual formalism therefore
blinds his thinking to other modes of African critical expression. For example, there is little space in his
theory for the organic intellectual who uses other means to produce a critically effective discourse on
Africa.
Mbembes criticism reduces the Other to the same

Given this combination of European theoretical frameworks, Mbembe appears to be simply extending
post-colonial theorys appropriation of post-structuralist and psychoanalytic resources to include
existential phenomenology. This sentiment is certainly backed up at times by Mbembe, for example when
he writes, To ask whether Africa is separated from the West by an unbridgeable gulf seems pointless (ibid:
14). In which case, African existential complexity appears to be amenable to a post-colonial lexicon that
incorporates an earlier wave of European theory. Here, Mbembes rejection of both contemporary
Western and African theory makes an exception for its post-colonial offshoot. However, this
interpretation of his theoretical position soon encounters barriers. Apart from the fact that Mbembe does
not explicitly acknowledge and situate himself in such precise and unambiguous terms, two other issues
arise. The first problem with this characterisation is that elsewhere in the introduction, he appears to reject
Western theory completely: We should first remind ourselves that, as a general rule, the experience of the
Other, or the problem of the I of others and of human beings we perceive as foreign to us, has almost
always posed virtually insurmountable difficulties to the Western philosophical and political tradition []
Whether dealing with Africa or with other non-European worlds, this tradition long denied the
existence of any self but its own. (2001: 2) Mbembes comments here parallel deconstruction in
ascribing to Western philosophy as a whole a tendency to reduce the Other to the Same (what Derrida
refers to as logocentrism or the metaphysics of presence). In which case, whilst one might initially
agree with his characterisation, this agreement can only be fully granted if we also agree to bracket out
key existentialist and post-structuralist texts that explicitly set out to interrogate the question of
alterity, from Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Blanchot through to Derrida. Unfortunately, On The Postcolony
does not engage with any such treatments of alterity, so it is difficult to tell whether Mbembe would
find sustenance from this body of work or not.
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Membe reintrenches the paradigm of the victim turning the kritik
Mbembes stated aim of thinking African lived experience from a more engaged perspective. Mbembes
goals of non-linearity and historically generative forms of empowerment evaporate in the face of the
work of describing and theorising domination. There is, in fact, little in the way of African living in the
concrete world or validating and accomplishing of the age that Mbembe had promised at the
outset. In terms of an underlying theory of power, this amounts to a heavy privileging of African power
over (power as limitation and imposition), and scant attempts to theorise power to (power as capacity and
agency). The negative interpretation that for Mbembe characterises previous discourses on Africa
therefore gets replicated in his own work. In the words of one commentator, Mbembes text repeats
and entrenches the paradigm of the victim (Segall 2002).
Mbembe concedes there are no sites of resistance only trivial public dances might
Again, Mbembes argument appears at the same time to be both an implicit questioning of standard European
critical concepts at the same time as an echo of the deconstructive project of transcending binaristic
structures of thought. This prompts yet again the tangled question about the modes of theoretical
appropriation at work in his thought. Moreover, he shares with deconstruction the problem as to what
should happen after the suspension of the binary of domination and oppression. What should take
their place as a third concept? We are given a clue at the start of the chapter, when Mbembe states that he
wants to generalise Bakhtins notions of the obscene and grotesque at work in non-official cultures across the
field of domination itself. One of the key concepts motivating this move is his analysis of what he calls
conviviality. Mbembe cites as an example public dance performances for the despotic leader or after
an execution. For Mbembe, in an African context, there are simply no spaces of resistance available
outside of domination (unofficial or otherwise).
Mbembe refuses to engage any notion of resistance because it just further entrenches us to
the codification of the state
This, arguably, is the central moment of Mbembes thinking: that African lived experience is a messy
collusion between ruler and ruled, oppressed and oppressor, executed and executioner; a non-linear
controlled chaos that resists Western manichean modes of analysis, requiring a new form of writing to
capture the imaginary at work. And as with Foucault, the order of things is reconfigured through
internal disruption and the work of the negative, rather than any productive agency. It is in this sense
that we can understand Mbembes refusal to countenance any notion of resistance, as a form of futile
positivism. Mbembe describes this power complex as an economy of death (2001: 115). Power that
works against the state is essentially masochistic; the only way to avoid the destructive codification of
the state upon the body is to will ones pain and to accept it as a form of enjoyment a perverse form of
Nietzsches amor fati.
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According to Mbembe resistance modifies power leading to worse forms of domination
For example, in the passage just quoted, how can incontestable power maintain its unchallengeable
status, if it can at the same time be modified via affirmation? Logic dictates that either power is
incontestable, and therefore unmodifiable, or it is not. In which case, resistance is the name we must
give to the force that modifies power. And an acknowledgement of the possibility of resistance requires
also that power itself cannot be absolutely incontestable. It is Mbembes staunch refusal to accept a
more complex account of power that embraces resistance as a possibility latent within all modes of
domination and complicity that many of his critics have found especially unpalatable. As Adeleke Adeeko
writes: As much as I admire Mbembes breathtaking coverage of African political history, it is hard for me to accept that
the potentate and the dominated share some general conviviality under the circus tent of power. It is equally hard for me
to agree that something like death in and for itself is possible in the administration of capital punishment. I am not able to
believe that one could say, without an explicitly argued refutation of Fanons work, that the native who later becomes
the postcolonial subject lacks the will to resist. (2002: 6)
The alternative lacks agency which is key to solvency

In this sense, what is fundamentally absent in Mbembes account of baroque practice is an underlying
theory of agency. Mbembe forgoes any opportunity to uncover agency in previous theorisations, both in
Western and African intellectual history. He could, for instance, have referred to Hegels account of the
master-slave dialectic. Hegel, surprisingly for newcomers to The Phenomenology of Spirit, ultimately
placed the balance of power and agency in the slave, firstly because the slave was closer to material
production through work and secondly, because the masters dependence on the slave did not require
reciprocation (Hegel 1979). It is this proximity to the factors of production and freedom from dependency
that Marx seized upon in his reappraisal of Hegels metaphysics, culminating in his theory of the heightened
class-consciousness of the proletariat. Whether traced through Hegel and Marx, or through Fanons theory of
revolutionary violence (Fanon 1967), the onus should have been on Mbembe to acknowledge and critique
these lineages, rather than simply deny the legitimacy of agency without argument. Indeed, there is
considerable research that points in exactly the opposite direction to Mbembes key claim that
totalitarian regimes deny all modes of agency in their subjects (Scarry 1985). The suggestion is that in
limit situations where life is nasty and often brutishly short, there are often individual and collective forms
of response that work around and underneath the explicit codes of violence by creating modes of contestation
by other means. Indeed, the claim is that it is precisely through the lived experience of attempted
annihilation, totalistic expropriation and servitude that the human spirit attains unmatched powers of agency
and expression (Bakare-Yusuf 2001). How else, apart from through crude biologism, to begin to account
for the extraordinary expressive output of black diasporic cultures?
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Mbembe refusal for grassroot resistance has focused on political spheres of intellectuals
and leaders ignoring Africas culture and history that he ignores
In addition to underplaying the role of agency and resistance within existential contexts of suffering
and domination, another aspect supporting Mbembes refusal to examine baroque practice in more
detail is his over-reliance on a specific understanding of the intellectual, and what constitutes
conceptual contestation within the political sphere. Mbembes interest seems to be in locating theoretical
and political engagement in the writerly sphere of academic, juridical and overtly political texts, not on the
street, the bidonville or within the practices of everyday life. In unison with his underdeveloped theory of
bodily resistance, his thought does not engage with demotic modes of resistance and the micropolitics of
daily practice. As Benetta Jules-Rosette writes, While in the 1960s and 1970s African intellectuals played
crucial roles across the continent in shaping independence struggles and new nation-states and in
introducing such philosophies as Pan-Africanism, negritude, and African Humanism all critiqued by
Mbembe the contemporary plight of bourgeois intellectuals as political and economic refugees has left a
void in many African nation-states. In part, this void has been filled by grassroots intellectuals, religious
leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs. This development is not a product of proletarian nostalgia, as
Mbembe suggests, but merely a fact of daily life. These organic leaders occupy an empty space of
creativity where new ideologies and cultural strategies are shaped and deployed. It is in this milieu that
the responses to the devastation of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid analysed by Mbembe must be
traced. (2002: 604) Mbembe refuses to theorise the space of everyday life, nor does he engage with
grassroots resistance. This is an enormous problem for his project. As Jules-Rosette points out, it is precisely
within the sphere of everyday culture in Africa that seemingly absolute modes of power are contested
and modified. Moreover, it is only by sidestepping the demotic sphere that Mbembe can lend his
dismissal of all previous forms of thought any semblance of credibility. As we have seen, even a passing
attention to existing work in African theory and writing would quickly put paid to his tabula rasa
approach. Beyond the writerly sphere however, non-linear Africa has already been writing itself into
history, whether Mbembes text acknowledges it or not. Whether it is Set Setal graffiti art in Senegal, Mami
Watta across West Africa, the sapeurs in Congo, Afrobeat or Fuji musical culture in Nigeria or an almost
limitless supply of other cases, African cultural forms have continually sought to engage with and
document the times (Friedman 1994, Hechte and Simone 1994). That many of these forms are not part of
official culture or are not readily amenable to scholarly analysis is beside the point. What is key is that
Mbembes claim that the complexities of African lived experience have yet to be fully theorized and
articulated can only make sense if one assumes that the only form of theory acceptable is that of the
institutionalised intellectual surveying juridical/textual discourse.
The alternative further falls into modes of power and tyranny. By ignoring the western bias
they simply further reintrench us into this victim paradigm they try to solve for
Without a methodological acknowledgement of this, Mbembes project of writing Africa from a fresh
post-colonial perspective is surely doomed to failure, remaining empty and unsubstantiated. Without
charting and coming to terms with creative strategies to overcome despotic tyranny, his text is bound
to fall back on explicit modes of power and negation, resulting in the very thanatography he had hoped
to avoid. Worse still, without acknowledging the ways in which the Western bias towards juridical
analyses of power in various post-colonial contexts seek to re-enforce the victim paradigm, Mbembes
text itself falls prey to its own form of complicit conviviality. As Kimberly Segall writes, To ignore the
cultural invasion of legal forms and local adaptions to them as exemplified in the operations of the
postcolonial performative of victimization thus courts the charge of a cultural blindness, an academic
imperialism. (2002: 617 618)
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The alternative ignore the concept of will to power that people act for their own reasons
further withdrawing to the negative and the objectivist social ontology
Ultimately, the most fundamental cause of Mbembes entanglement with the negative is his reductive
understanding of power. Although indirectly influenced by Nietzsche (through his reading of Foucault and
Deleuze), Mbembe crucially fails to acknowledge and internalise Nietzsches most important concept
that of the will to power. He does not understand that people act for their own reasons, whether these
are reflexively available or not. That complicity, corruption and conviviality is at work in innumerable
African contexts is undoubtedly true; that these are performed solely for the benefit of the regime is
however deeply questionable. Mbembes mistake is to not recognise, beyond Sartrean masochism, the
pragmatic complex of reasons that motivate complicity, and the unstable flux of possibility this complex
gives rise to. His notion of baroque practice alludes to what the textualist terms of his theoretical
position do not allow him to unpack that resistance as a possibility is inherent within every instance
of complicity. This impoverished account of power as domination entails that the metaphysical
structure of Mbembes thought is trapped within an objectivist social ontology. Mbembes refusal to
acknowledge resistance is the corollary of a refusal to accept that in each case, complicity is enigmatic
and could go either way towards progressive or even revolutionary resistance, or towards retrenchment of
the regime. For Mbembe, power in the African context is simply the various forms that domination takes.
Mbembe follows the by now familiar metaphor of locating the violence of the state at the level of inscription.
As with Foucault, it is hard to resist the idea that there is a degree of projection at work here. From the
evidence of On the Postcolony, Mbembes thought suffers from the very ressentiment he claims to
uncover in the objects of his analysis. How else to explain his pendulous ambivalence concerning Bakhtin?
On the one hand, a creative, existential thread draws Mbembe to a pre-textual ludic play that undermines the
codes of the regime, on the other, his thought withdraws into the longue dure of the negative.
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Perm Solvency
The alternative erases Africas past while also not providing any development for it, by
refusing to see methods of resistance the negative becomes complicit in the victimology they
tried to avoid. Only the permutation that tries to counteract the modes of resistance.
Mbembes project of opening up a new epoch of African writing beyond the colonial is, as it stands,
doomed to failure. It commits the double error of attempting to erase the past completely, as well as
not providing any substantive ground for further development. On The Postcolony literally lacks body.
Mbembe condemns himself to the very narrative of loss he had sought to avoid. His failure to see beyond
de jure limitations, and his refusal to engage with everyday praxis and modes of creative resistance
entail that his account is complicit with the very Western victimology that he had sought to avoid. All
this being the case, thanks to the oblique influences of existential phenomenology and Deleuze, Mbembes
work does nonetheless indicate the way forward, for African thinking, and for post-colonial thought as a
whole. As we have seen, his attempt to think how oppressive power can be resisted took the form of a
practice that undermines explicit modes of textuality the written rules of State power. What remains
potently unfulfilled in Mbembes work is the project of thinking through the power of creative, embodied
and material resistance at the level of everyday praxis. This project would counteract the paradigm of
the victim with a conceptual apparatus that acknowledges de facto modes of resistance. The project
ahead for post-colonial thought is therefore to think through existential acts of bodily resistance, and to
understand in more detail how complex power dynamics can be modified through the pragmatics of
everyday performance. This project would therefore suspend the automatic centrality currently granted to
the textual paradigm, thinking beyond a cartesian understanding of the text, towards
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Perm Solvency- Policymaking that rewrites new texts woven behind precedents of African
culture can undermine power relations
Mbembes very own baroque practice. In this case, the new form of writing ahead recontextualises text
as a quasi-material substance, as a hinge between the world of concepts and the world of bodily
experience. Text therefore becomes woven, a texture stitched into the fabric of the world. Text is put
back into relation to its existential ground and becomes a palimpsest, the opaque surface upon which
all forms of writing must be inscribed, rather than perpetually caught up in the self-referential
delusional economy of the sign. Each new instance of writing, whether literary or otherwise, writes into
a page that is already densely layered with precedents. The written codes of de jure power are finally
put in relation to the de facto modes of resistance that undermine them. Via phenomenological,
deleuzian, feminist or other methods of analysis, we could finally be led to the very space that Mbembe
sought all along to uncover - a more complex account of power as it operates within the sinews of lived
experience. From an African perspective (whether on the continent or not), this project would, above
all, enable us at last to engage African existence in all its informal, non-linear complexity. Whether at
the level of cultural analysis, social research or policy making, this work would start to encounter
Africa on its own terms, not through a confused attempt at constructing a new form, but through a
detailed engagement with modes of survival beyond the bounds of juridical recognition, as they take
expression in the moment.
Mbembes Alternative of different writing destroys any African culture even though it is
not all based on nativist neoliberal ideology
Weate, 2003 (Jeremy, Achille Mbembe and the Postcolony: Going beyond the Text, The Indiana University
Press, Research in African Literatures 34.4 (2003) 27-41, muse)
The problem with this statement of method is that it simply does not amount to a clearly defined
theoretical position, backed up by any [End Page 30] semblance of conceptual systematicity. If, on the
other hand, systematic thinking were deemed not applicable to the existential and metaphysical
plurality that is Africa, then Mbembe would need to theorize the plural to a much more sustained level
than he does. We would need to know at what level plurality operates and how; whether, for instance,
plurality arises out of absolute ontological difference, or perhaps involves more of a fluid exchange across
porous socioexistential boundaries.2 From the evidence of the passage above, Mbembe's simple hope is to
collect his concepts from "social theory" and, where necessary, invent a "different writing." What he
fails to recognize is that this strategy itself is already theoretically, metaphysically and perhaps
ideologically motivated and cannot be considered as a sort of neutral bricolage. For instance, we can ask why
should it be that in order to theorize Africa adequately beyond the limitations of Western theory, the supplement should take the form of
writing? 3 And why choose "some general questions suggested by concepts drawn from social theory" over others? Further, how does
one bridge the gap between European social theory and the new project of "different writing"? Surely, what is required is an
underlying theoretical and methodological framework that attempts to accommodate both social
theory and the new African theory Mbembe's project attempts to announce? Perhaps more fundamentally still,
the question remains as to why Mbembe thinks that a different writing is in order. Conscious or not, the monumentalist and
revolutionary ambition of announcing a completely new form echoes the manifestos of various avant-garde art movements in twentieth-
century Europe, such as futurism, dadaism, and situationism. As with these projects, there is the proclaimed necessity
of beginning again, and as a corollary, the necessity to dismiss and then erase the past. This tabula rasa
approach is deeply problematic, not least from an African perspective. The implicit assumption is that
there is no pre-existing form of African theory that deserves to survive the criticisms Mbembe has
mounted. The problem with this assumption is that it only works if we consider that all African theory
neatly slots into Mbembe's principle target zones of nativism, neoliberal discourse, or finally what he
refers to Afro-radicalism (that is, various strands of African nationalism and Marxism). As several
commentators have pointed out, such a view can only be generated thanks to a severely constricted
and, dare one say it, reducedaccount of African theory. 4 It is not difficult to challenge Mbembe's
critical taxonomy of African theory with some counter examples.
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Aff No Link
Not all instances of African theory are based on pastcolonial literature. And even if it is,
there is no way that Mbembe falls outside of that category
Weate, 2003 (Jeremy, Achille Mbembe and the Postcolony: Going beyond the Text, The Indiana University
Press, Research in African Literatures 34.4 (2003) 27-41,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v034/34.4weate.html)
As several commentators have pointed out, such a view can only be generated thanks to a severely
constricted and, dare one say it, reducedaccount of African theory. 4 It is not difficult to challenge
Mbembe's critical taxonomy of African theory with some counter examples. Let us for brevity's sake
attempt to categorize simply one name already cited in this text: Paulin Hountondji. According to
Mbembe's understanding, should the Beninois philosopher be denounced as a nativist, a neoliberal or
an Afro-radical? Indeed, how would we categorize any of the following according to Mbembe's
schema: Wole Soyinka, Valentin Mudimbe, Chinua Achebe, Nawal El Sadaawi, Amina Mama, Cornel
West, Abiola Irele, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Fatou Sow, Mariama B, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison?
5 From this list alone, a host of questions to put to Mbembe arise: who qualifies as an "African"
writer? Does one have to live on the continent? How would his taxonomy apply to diasporic or exiled
Africans? Moreover, how can Mbembe's text enable a thinking through of different historical [End
Page 31] experiences and legacies of colonialism? From direct rule to indirect rule, the many different
forms of colonialism have each led to constellations of race, class, and gender that are specific to each
situation. Can Mbembe's thought encompass these differences? Finally, can Mbembe account for other ways
of writing Africa that lie outside of the academic or literary text? What if we can uncover other forms of
writing history elsewhere, in cultural practices or other forms of unofficial phenomena?

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Miami (Ohio) 2007 1

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Africa Reps K Index

Alt Traverse The Fantasy...........................................................................................................................................22

Gag Rule Link

Social Constructions Link

Link Civil Society

Alt Traverse The Fantasy

Alt Achmats Pledge

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A2: Critics of Mbembe

A2: Alt Symbolic Order

General Aff Answers

Mbembes criticism reduces the Other to the same

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The alternative lacks agency which is key to solvency

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A2: Alt Rewrite Text

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