America is crumbling.

We have bombed too many wedding parties, maintained too

many aggressive wars, flouted too many international treaties, consumed and
borrowed our economy too far into oblivion to ever lead the free world again. The so-
called Pax Americana has been anything but stabilizing, fueling two endless wars and
inflaming anti-american sentiment, reproducing the violence it was supposed to
protect us from. The affirmative is a call to resurrect the dream. Differing political
strategies will do nothing to alleviate global violence, which runs structurally deep
within American foreign policy, other than satiate our desire to act, reifying faith in
imperial control and digging the trench that separates America from the rest of the
world even deeper.
Chris Hedges, journalist, author, and war correspondent, America’s Wars of Self-Destruction.
November 17th, 2008.
< http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20081117_americas_wars_of_self_destruction/>.
War is a poison. It is a poison that nations and groups must at times ingest to ensure
their survival. But, like any poison, it can kill you just as surely as the disease it is meant
to eradicate. The poison of war courses unchecked through the body politic of the United
States. We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to
wage war. We embrace the dangerous self-delusion that we are on a providential
mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to implant our virtues—which we see as
superior to all other virtues—on others, and that we have a right to do this by force. This
belief has corrupted Republicans and Democrats alike. And if Barack Obama drinks, as it
appears he will, the dark elixir of war and imperial power offered to him by the national
security state, he will accelerate the downward spiral of the American empire.
Obama and those around him embrace the folly of the “war on terror.” They may want to
shift the emphasis of this war to Afghanistan rather than Iraq, but this is a difference in
strategy, not policy. By clinging to Iraq and expanding the war in Afghanistan, the poison
will continue in deadly doses. These wars of occupation are doomed to failure. We
cannot afford them. The rash of home foreclosures, the mounting job losses, the collapse
of banks and the financial services industry, the poverty that is ripping apart the working
class, our crumbling infrastructure and the killing of hapless Afghans in wedding parties
and Iraqis by our iron fragmentation bombs are neatly interwoven. These events form a
perfect circle. The costly forms of death we dispense on one side of the globe are
hollowing us out from the inside at home.
The “war on terror” is an absurd war against a tactic. It posits the idea of perpetual, or
what is now called “generational,” war. It has no discernable end. There is no way to
define victory. It is, in metaphysical terms, a war against evil, and evil, as any good
seminarian can tell you, will always be with us. The most destructive evils, however, are
not those that are externalized. The most destructive are those that are internal. These
hidden evils, often defined as virtues, are unleashed by our hubris, self-delusion and
ignorance. Evil masquerading as good is evil in its deadliest form.
The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It
began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of
production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the Vietnam War, when the
costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil production
began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that
primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a
lifestyle we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East,
to feed our insatiable demand for cheap oil. The years after World War II, when the
United States accounted for one-third of world exports and half of the world’s
manufacturing, gave way to huge trade imbalances, outsourced jobs, rusting hulks of
abandoned factories, stagnant wages and personal and public debts that most of us
cannot repay.
The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals, but
those who promote the perverted ideology of national security that, as Andrew Bacevich
writes, is “our surrogate religion.” If we continue to believe that we can expand
our wars and go deeper into debt to maintain an unsustainable level of
consumption, we will dynamite the foundations of our society.
“The Big Lies are not the pledge of tax cuts, universal health care, family values
restored, or a world rendered peaceful through forceful demonstrations of American
leadership,” Bacevich writes in “The Limits of Power.” “The Big Lies are the truths that
remain unspoken: that freedom has an underside; that nations, like households, must
ultimately live within their means; that history’s purpose, the subject of so many
confident pronouncements, remains inscrutable. Above all, there is this: Power is finite.
Politicians pass over matters such as these in silence. As a consequence, the absence of
self-awareness that forms such an enduring element of the American character
persists.”
Those clustered around Barack Obama, from Madeline Albright to Hillary Clinton to
Dennis Ross to Colin Powell, have no interest in dismantling the structure of the imperial
presidency or the vast national security state. They will keep these institutions intact and
seek to increase their power. We have a childish belief that Obama will magically save us
from economic free fall, restore our profligate levels of consumption and resurrect our
imperial power. This naïve belief is part of our disconnection with reality. The problems
we face are structural. The old America is not coming back.
The corporate forces that control the state will never permit real reform. This is the
Faustian bargain made between these corporate forces and the Republican and
Democratic parties. We will never, under the current system, achieve energy
independence. Energy independence would devastate the profits of the oil and gas
industry. It would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in weapons contracts, spoil the
financial health of a host of private contractors from Halliburton to Blackwater and
render obsolete the existence of U.S. Central Command.
There are groups and people who seek to do us harm. The attacks of Sept. 11 will not be
the last acts of terrorism on American soil. But the only way to defeat terrorism is to
isolate terrorists within their own societies, to mount cultural and propaganda wars, to
discredit their ideas, to seek concurrence even with those defined as our enemies. Force,
while a part of this battle, is rarely necessary. The 2001 attacks that roused our fury and
unleashed the “war on terror” also unleashed a worldwide revulsion against al-Qaida and
Islamic terrorism, including throughout the Muslim world, where I was working as a
reporter at the time. If we had had the courage to be vulnerable, to build on this
empathy rather than drop explosive ordinance all over the Middle East, we would be far
safer and more secure today. If we had reached out for allies and partners instead
of arrogantly assuming that American military power would restore our sense
of invulnerability and mitigate our collective humiliation, we would have done much to
defeat al-Qaida. But we did not. We demanded that all kneel before us. And in our
ruthless and indiscriminate use of violence and illegal wars of occupation, we resurrected
the very forces that we could, under astute leadership, have marginalized. We forgot
that fighting terrorism is a war of shadows, an intelligence war, not a conventional war.
We forgot that, as strong as we may be militarily, no nation, including us, can survive
isolated and alone.
The American empire, along with our wanton self-indulgence and gluttonous
consumption, has come to an end. We are undergoing a period of profound economic,
political and military decline. We can continue to dance to the tunes of self-delusion,
circling the fire as we chant ridiculous mantras about our greatness, virtue and power, or
we can face the painful reality that has engulfed us. We cannot reverse this decline.
It will happen no matter what we do. But we can, if we break free from our self-delusion,
dismantle our crumbling empire and the national security state with a minimum of
damage to ourselves and others. If we refuse to accept our limitations, if do not face the
changes forced upon us by a bankrupt elite that has grossly mismanaged our economy,
our military and our government, we will barrel forward toward internal and external
collapse. Our self-delusion constitutes our greatest danger. We will either confront
reality or plunge headlong into the minefields that lie before us.
A top down approach with no room for intervention is never stabilizing - all of our attempts to follow
through on our military threat have failed, slaughtering civilians, overstretching our military and
exacerbating intra-state violence. The affs endorsement of infantry dominance is a snake eating its tail-
maintaining the macho-fantasy only alienates our allies and forecloses the possibility of cooperation on
every major global problem, turning the case.

Phillip Slater, Ph. D. from Harvard and Professor of Sociology at Harvard, Brandeis, and UCSC.
“Realpolitik vs. Reality”. November 12th, 2008. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/realpolitik-vs-
reality_b_143312.html>.

Obama's election provides an opportunity to reconsider the utility of realpolitik, the guiding principle of American foreign
policy for the past sixty years. Realpolitik is supposed to be 'practical', but one can't escape the feeling that it would
be better termed dummheitpolitik, since it has been the major cause of almost every foreign policy problem we
face in the world today. Building up Osama bin Laden to harass the Russians in Afghanistan comes to mind, not to
mention building up Saddam Hussein to fight Iran. And of course there's Iran--possibly the most democratic nation in the
Muslim world before we sabotaged Mossadegh and installed the Shah's dictatorship, whose oppressive regime opened the
door to the fundamentalist Mullahs.

When you get right down to it, realpolitik is merely macho politics--a kind of Johnny-one-note foreign policy. You rattle
sabers, hoping someone will wimp out. When they don't, you waste billions slaughtering civilians for a few years, then
carry on as before, only with a considerably weakened economy, fewer resources, more enemies, and less
real influence. Or you subvert other countries--overthrowing their democratically-elected governments, as we did all
over Latin America, achieving nothing beyond a few years of easy sailing for American corporations followed by a huge
loss of influence and goodwill all over the continent, so that today more than half of Latin America either views us as
the enemy or simply ignores us altogether.

The dinosaurs are already wetting their drawers over Obama's suggestion that negotiation with Iran might conceivably be
an alternative to another stupid adventure. Our media are also appalled, for the media are consistently more knee-jerk-
macho than the American public. War, after all, is so much more newsworthy than peace. Violence sells.

Why is talking considered so fraught with terrible peril? Why is it, when we've been pushing the rest of the world around
for the last 60 years that negotiating with countries much weaker than we are is considered 'dangerously naïve'? Why is
the assumption always made that American diplomats will be outwitted by evil, sly foreigners? Why are Americans such
Nervous Nellies that they want get out the nukes every time anyone disagrees with us?

When a huge giant acts like a timid little victim in a cartoon, it's humorous. When the world's only superpower, having
bombed and/or invaded sovereign nations on four continents--none of them having threatened us in any way--tries to
pass itself off as a poor little weak victim, it's just disgusting, and unworthy of a great nation.

Realpolitik means reacting to every tension spot in the world by throwing bombs at it.

Realpolitik means making sure an entire nation is against us, when only a small minority is.

Realpolitik means choosing foreign policy leaders on the basis of their belligerence and paranoia.

It's time for Americans to grow up, get their heads out of the sand, and put Realpolitik to bed. Our policy of bombing
wedding parties, torturing prisoners, ignoring international law and international treaties, and treating every nation's
territory as our personal property is not 'realistic', it's just short-sighted.
Realpolitik has always been contrasted with internationalism, which was seen as idealistic. That was true
a century ago. Today, internationalism is the only reality. The problems we face all require international
solutions. The world has shrunk, and the nation-state is obsolete as an ultimate authority. Corporations
are international, terrorism is international, the economy is international, nature is international,
pollution is international, labor is international, poverty is international, disease is international.

The credit crisis should have been a wake-up call. Banks and other corporations have for a long time taken rich advantage
of the fact that politicians cling to meaningless national boundaries. Nations compete with one another, allowing
multinationals to play them off against each other. But when trouble came, the banks were forced to reveal the truth to
their nationalistic suckers: unite or we all go down.

The world we live in today is one of networks. The largest network will succeed, the others will fail. When Citibank tried to
maintain a closed network of ATM machines, for example, several smaller banks banded together to form an open ATM
network, which Citibank was ultimately forced to join because it was larger. Isolationism today is a losing strategy.

And networks are not empires--they're composed of equals. The United States can no longer dictate to
the rest of the world--by attempting to, under the Bush administration, it has seen its influence around
the world sink to its lowest depth in history.

It's time to conduct our foreign policy like grownups, living in a grownup world, not like hyperactive ten-year-old
boys living in comic-book dreams of superheroes.

We control the internal link to war and extinction- Warfare happens when states
believe their vulnerability can be assuaged, and their military deployments are
predictably effective. This happens through ideological mystification- military
intervention is never stabilizing because it cannot map out nor control the socio-
political realities of its object- every US war of occupation proves our argument.
Anthony Burke, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations. 2007.Theory
and Event. “Ontologies of War.”
 This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate
lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath analyses based either on a given
sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional,
economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to
be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason
that has not only come to form a powerful structure of common sense but the apparently solid
ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-
making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments,
rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together;
providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising
systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful and
fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be
maintained as it is.
 I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-
state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of
strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the
classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid
metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising
about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity,
existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual
socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form.
 I see such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the existential
and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate
and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such.
generates
The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that
violence. Here we are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of
violence (the national security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies
are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken
the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and duration, or in unintended
effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and used on
occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being.
 This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the
political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the
rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing
how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification,
especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic
problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody
and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an
'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian
instruments for use, control and destruction, and force -- in the words of one famous Cold
War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises
because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in
strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in
upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror'
dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt
(that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms
that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored
what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment
that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them
betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21

This construction of enemies gives justification for nuclear first striking culminating in extinction
Massumi 07 (Brian, Communication Department of the Université de Montréal , “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption”)
It is certain that there will be adjustments. But it should be remembered that Bush referred to a change in "tactics," not a change in "strategy." Preemption
remains the official military strategy of the United States. It can be argued that preemption is in any case far more than a specific military
doctrine of a particular administration. It can be plausibly argued that preemption is an operative logic of power defining a political age in as
infinitely space-filling and insiduously infiltrating a way as the logic of "deterrence" defined the Cold War era. By an "operative" logic I mean one that
combines an ontology with an epistemology in such a way as to trace itself out as a self-propelling tendency that is not in the sway
of any particular existing formation but sweeps across them all and where possible sweeps them up in its own dynamic. Preemption is not prevention.
Although the goal of both is to neutralize threat, they fundamentally differ epistemologically and ontologically. Epistemologically,
prevention assumes an ability to assess threats empirically and identify their causes. Once the causes are identified, appropriate
curative methods are sought to avoid their realization. Prevention operates in an objectively knowable world in which uncertainty is
a function of a lack of information, and in which events run a predictable, linear course from cause to effect. As we will see, this is
very different from the epistemological premise of preemption, and entails a divergence from it on the ontological level as well. Prevention, in fact, has no ontology of its own because it
assumes that what it must deal with has an objectively given existence prior to its own intervention. In practice, this means that its object is given to it predefined by other formations, in whose terms and on whose terrain it must then operate. A preventive
approach to social conflict might analyze it, for example, as an effect of poverty, objectively quantifiable in terms of economic and health indexes. Each index is defined by a specialist formation (economics, medicine) in relation to a norm specific to that
domain and against which goals may be set and success measured (annual income, mortality rates, life expectancy, etc.). The preventive measures will then operate as a political extension of the concerned specialist domains (economic analysis extended
into politics as aid and development, medicine extended into vaccination programs, etc.). They will be regulated by the specialist logics proper to those fields. Prevention has no proper object, no operational sphere of its own, and no proprietary logic. It is
derivative. It is a means toward a given end. Because of this, preventive measures are not self-sustaining. They must be applied. They must be leveraged from an outside source with outside force. They are not an organizing force in their own right. They

Deterrence makes use of the same epistemology prevention does, in that it

run on borrowed power. Deterrence takes over at the end of this same process, when the means of prevention have failed.

assumes knowability and objective measurability. However, because it starts where prevention ends, it has no margin of error. It must know with
certainty because the threat is fully formed and ready to detonate: the enemy has the bomb and the means to deliver it. The
imminence of the threat means that deterrence cannot afford to subordinate itself to objects, norms, and criteria passed on to it
from other domains. If it did, its ability to respond with an immediacy proportional to the imminence of the threat would be
compromised. Since it would not hold the key to its own knowledge, in the urgency of the situation it would be haunted internally by the spectre of a
possible incompleteness of the knowledge coming from the outside. Since its operations would be mediated by that outside domain, neither would it hold a
direct key to its own actions. Since it would be responding to causes outside its specific purview, it would not be master of its own effects. The only way
to
have the kind of epistemological immediacy necessary for deterrence is for its process to have its own cause and to hold it fast
within itself. The quickest and most direct way for a process to acquire its own cause is for it to produce
one. The easiest way to do this is to take the imminence of the very threat prevention has failed to neutralize and make it the
foundation of a new process. In other words, the process must take the effect it seeks to avoid (nuclear annihilation) and
organize itself around it, as the cause of its very own dynamic (deterrence). It must convert an effect that has yet to eventuate into
a cause: a future cause. Past causes are in any case already spoken for. They have been claimed as objects of knowledge and operational spheres by a
crowded world of other already-functioning formations. Now for a future cause to have any palpable effect it must somehow be able act on the present. This
is much easier to do and much less mysterious than it might sound. You start by translating the threat into a clear and present
danger. You do this by acquiring a capability to realize the threat rather than prevent it. If your neighbor has a nuke, you build
the nuclear weaponry that would enable you to annihilate the adversary, even at the price of annihilating yourself by
precipitating a "nuclear winter." In fact, the more capable you are of destroying yourself along with your enemy, the better. You
can be certain the enemy will follow your lead in acquiring the capability to annihilate you, and themselves as well. The imminent threat is then so
imminent on both sides, so immediately present in its menacing futurity, that only a madman or suicidal regime would ever tip the balance and press the
 button. This gives rise to a unique logic of mutuality: "mutually assured destruction" (MAD). Mutually assured destruction is equilibrium-
seeking. It tends toward the creation of a "balance of terror." MAD is certainty squared: to the certainty that there is objectively
a threat is added the certainty that it is balanced out. The second certainty is dynamic, and requires maintenance. The assurance must be
maintained by continuing to producing the conditions that bring the cause so vividly into the present. You have to keep moving into the dangerous
future. You have to race foward it ever faster. You have to build more weapons, faster and better, to be sure that your systems
match the lethality of your opponent's, give or take a few half-lives. The process soon becomes self-driving. The logic of mutually
assured destruction becomes its own motor. It becomes self-propelling. Now that you've started, you can't very well stop. What
began as an epistemological condition (a certainty about what you and your opponent are capable of doing) dynamizes into an
ontology or mode of being (a race for dear life).

The alternative is to do nothing. We defend the world of the status quo.

Violence sustains itself through a constant reiteration of sovereignty and control. A refusal to act enforces
the realization that fueling the war machine cannot protect us, and endangers global populations who we
are inevitably dependent on. Either we acknowledge our humble membership in an interdependent
international sphere, or our isolating hubris will guarantee nuclear extinction.
Judith Butler, professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, Frames of War. 2009. P. 178-4.
State violence often articulates itself through the positing of the sovereign subject. The sovereign subject
poses as precisely not the one who is impinged upon by others, precisely not the one whose permanent and
irreversible injurability forms the condition and horizon of its actions. Such a sovereign position not only denies its
own constitutive injurability but tries to relocate injurability in the other as an effect of doing injury to that
other and exposing that other as by definition, injurable. If the violent act is among other things, a way of
relocating the capacity to be violated (always) elsewhere, it produces the appearance that the subject who
enacts violence is impermeable to violence, The accomplishment of this appearance becomes one aim of
violence; one locates injurability with the other by injuring the other and then taking the sign of injury as the
truth of the other. The specific moralization of this scene takes place when the violence is "justified" as
"legitimate" and even "virtuous," even though its primary purpose is to secure an impossible effect of
mastery, inviolability, and impermeability through destructive means.
To avow in ju rab ility d oes n ot in an y wa y gu aran tee a politics of non-violence, But what may well make a difference would be the consideration of precarious life, and so too
injurability, as a generalized condition, rather than as a differential way of marking a cultural identity, that is, a recurrent or timeless feature of a cultural subject who is persecuted or injured by
definition and irregardless of historical circumstance. In the first instance, the "subject" proves to be counter-productive for understanding a shared condition of precariousness and interdependency. In the
second instance, the "subject" is re-installed and becomes defined by its injury (past) and injurability (present and future).'' If a particular subject considers her- or himself to be by definition
injured or indeed persecuted, then whatever acts of violence such a subject commits cannot register as "doing injury," since the subject who does them is by definition, precluded from doing
anything but suffering injury. As a result, the production of the subject on the basis of its injured status then produces a permanent ground for legitimating (and disavowing) its own violent actions. As much
as the sovereign subject disavows his injurability, relocating it in the other as a permanent repository, so the persecuted subject can disavow his own violent acts, since no empirical act can
refute the a priori presumption of victimization.

If non-violence has the opportunity to emerge here, it would take its departure not from a recognition of the
injurability of all peoples (however true that might be), but from an understanding of the possibilities of
one's own violent actions in relation to those lives to which one is bound, including those whom one never chose and never knew, and
so those whose relation to me precedes the stipulations of contract. Those others make a claim upon me, but what are the conditions under which I can hear or respond to their claims?
It is not enough to say, in Levinasian vein, that the claim is made upon me prior to my knowing and as an inaugurating instance of my coming into being. That may be formally
true, but its truth is of no use to me when I lack the conditions for responsiveness that allow me to apprehend it in the midst of this social and political life. Those "conditions" include not
just my private resources, but the various mediating forms and frames that make responsiveness pos si ble . In oth er words , th e c la im upon me t ake s place, when it takes place, through
If the claim of the other
the senses, which arc crafted in part through various forms of media: the social organization of sound and voice, of image and text, of tactility and smell.
upon me is to reach me, it must be mediated in some way, which means that our very capacity to respond
with non-violence (to act against a certain violent act, or to defer to the "non- act" in the face of violent
provocation) depends upon the frames by which the world is given and by which the domain of
appearance is circumscribed. The claim to non-violence does not merely interpellate me as an individual
person who must decide one way or another. If the claim is registered, it reveals me less as an "ego" than
as a being bound up with others in inextricable and irreversible ways, existing in a generalized
condition of precariousness and interdependency, affectively driven and crafted by those whose
effects on me I never chose, The injunction to non-violence always presupposes that there is some field
of beings in relation to whom nonviolence ought to be the appropriate bearing. Because that field is
invariably circumscribed, non-violence can only make its appeal by differentiating between those against
whom violence ought not to be waged and those who are simply not covered" by the injunction itself .
For the injunction to non-violence to make sense, it is first necessary to overcome the
presumption of this very differential—a schematic and non-theorized inegalitarianism—that
operates throughout perceptual life. If the injunction to non-violence is to avoid becoming meaningless, it must be allied with a critical intervention apropos the norms
that differentiate between those lives that count as livable and grievable and those that do not. Only on the condition that lives are grievable (construed within the future anterior) does the call to non-
violence avoid complicity with forms of epistemic inegalitarianism. The desire to commit violence is thus always attended by the anxiety of having violence returned, since all the potential actors in the scene
are equally vulnerable, Even when such an insight follows from a eakula don of the consequences of a violent act, it testifies to an ontological interrelation that is prior to any calculation.
apprehension of equality thus follows
Precariousness is not the effect of a certain strategy, but the generalized condition for any strategy whatsoever. A certain
from this invariably shared condition , one that is most difficult to hold fast in thought: non-violence is
derived from the apprehension of equality in the midst of precariousness.
For this purpose, we do not need to know in advance what "a life" will be, but only to find and support
those modes of representation and appearance that allow the claim of life to be made and heard (in this
way, media and survival are linked ). Ethics is less a calculation than something that follows from
being addressed and addressable in sustainable ways, which means, at a global level, there can be no 1.ethics
without a sustained practice of translation—between languages, but also between forms of media.' The
ethical question of whether or not to do violence emerges only in relation to the "you" who figures as the
potential object of my injury. But if there is no "you," or the "you" cannot be heard or seen, then there
is no ethical relation. One can lose the "you" through the exclusive postures of sovereignty and persecution
alike, especially when neither admits to being implicated in the position of the other. Indeed, one effect of such
modes of sovereignty is precisely to "lose the you."
Non-violence thus would seem to require a struggle over the domain of appearance and the senses, asking
how best to organize media in order to overcome the differential ways through which grievability is
allocated and a life is regarded as a life worth living on indeed, as a living life . It is also to struggle
against those notions of the political subject that assume that permeability and injurability can be
monopolized at one site and fully refused at another. No subject has a monopoly on "being persecuted" or "being persecuting," even
when thickly sed imen ted histories (densely compounded forms of iteration) have produced that ontological effect. If no claim to radical impermeability is finally acceptable as true, then no
claim to radical persecutabiliry is finally acceptable either, To call into question this frame by which injurability is falsely and
unequally distributed is precisely to call into question one of the dominant frames sustaining the
current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in the Middle East. The claim of non-violence not only
requires that the conditions are in place for the claim to he heard and registered (there can be no "claim"
without its mode of presentation), but that anger and rage also find a way of articulating that claim in a
way that might be registered by others, In this sense, non-violence is not a peaceful state, but a social and
political struggle to make rage articulate and effective—the carefully crafted "fuck you."
In effect, one has to come up against violence to practice non-violence they are bound together, and tensely so); but, it bears repeating, the violence one is up against does not issue exclusively
from the outside. What we call aggression and rage can move in the direction of nullifying the other; but if who we "are" is precisely a shared precariousness, then we risk our own
nullification. This happens not because we are discrete subjects calculating in relation to one another, but because, prior to any calculation, we are already constituted through ties that
bind and unbind in specific and consequential ways. Ontologically, the forming and un-forming of such bonds is prior to any question of the subject and is, in fact, the social and affective
condition of subjectivity. It is also a condition that installs a dynamic ambivalence at the heart of psychic life. To say that we have "needs" is thus to say that who we "are" involves an
invariable and reiterated struggle of dependency and separation, and does not merely designate a stage of childhood to be surmounted. It is not just "one's own" struggle or the apparent
struggle of "another' but precisely the dehiscence at the basis of the "we," the condition under which we are passionately bound toget her : ragefu ll y, des irous ly , murde rous ly , lovingly.

To walk the line is, yes, to live the line, the impasse of rage and fear, and to find a mode of conduct
that does not seek to resolve the anxiety of that position too quickly through a decision. It is, of course, fine
to decide on nonviolence, but decision cannot finally be the ground for the struggle for nonviolence . Decision
fortifies the deciding "I," sometimes at the expense of relationality itself. So the problem is not really about
how the subject should act, but about what a refusal to act might look like when it issues from the
apprehension of a generalized condition of precariousness or, in other words, of the radically
egalitarian character of grievability. Even the "refusal to act" does not quite capture the forms of
stalled action or stoppage that can, for instance, constitute the non violent operation of the strike. There
are other ways of conceiving the blocking of those reiterated actions that reproduce the taken-for-granted
effects of war in daily life. To paralyze the infrastructure that allows armies to reproduce themselves is
a matter of dismantling military machinery as well as resisting conscription. When the norms of
violence are reiterated without end and without interruption, non-violence seeks to stop the iteration or to
redirect it in ways that counter its driving aims. When that iteration continues in the name of "progress,"
civilizational or otherwise, it makes sense to heed Walter Benjamin's trenchant remark that "Perhaps
revolutions are nothing other than human beings on the train of progress reaching for the emergency
brake.""
To reach for the brake is an "act," but it is one that seeks to forestall the apparent inexorability of a reiterated
set of acts that postures as the motor of history itself. Maybe the "act" in its singularity and heroism is overrated: it loses sight of the iterable process in
which a critical intervention is needed, and it can become the very means by which the "subject" is produced at the expense of a relational social ontology. Of course, relationality is no utopian term, but a
framework (the work of a new frame) for the consideration of those affects invariably articulated within the political field: fear and rage, desire and loss, love and hatred, to name a few. All this
is just another way of saying that it is most difficult when in a state of pain to stay responsive to the equal claim of the other for shelter, for conditions of livability and grievability. And yet, this vexed
domain is the site of a necessary struggle, a struggle to stay responsive to a vicissitude of equality that is enormously difficult to affirm, that has vet to be theorised by the defenders of
when acting reproduces
egalitarianism, and that figures in a fugitive way in the affective and perceptual dimensions of theory. Under such circumstances,
the subject at the expense of another, not to act is, after all, a way of comporting oneself so as to break
with the closed circle of reflexivity, a way of ceding to the ties that bind and unbind, a way of
registering and demanding equality affectively. It is even a mode of resistance, especially when it
refuses and breaks the frames by which war is wrought time and again.