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Americas embargo on Cuba is endemic of a quid pro quo mindset that demands
Cuban liberalization and acceptance of a New World Order defined by Western
democratic ideals, humanitarianism, and market economies. Despite its obvious
failure to produce a Cuban transition, the embargo remains in place as a
moralistic token gesture toward humantiarianism
Ratliff 13
(William, research fellow and former curator of the Americas Collection at the Hoover Institution, expert on Latin America, China, and US Foreign
Policy, Cubas Tortured Transition, 1.30.13, http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/139281, [CL])

Americas post-Cold War embargo on Cuba is a clear example of failed international
interventionism. Making sanctions work, Henry Kissinger wrote in the Los Angeles Times, depends on the ability to define an achievable
objective. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States has not had such an objective in its policy
toward Cuba. Our policy, intended to isolate Cuba, has isolated the United States. This has been most blatantly demonstrated for the past
twenty-one years by the United Nations General Assemblys annual call to lift the embargowhich Havana demagogically calls a genocidal blockade
because it adversely affects Cubans and the freedom of international trade. (The vote in 2012 to condemn the embargo was 188 to 3.) Cuba today
does not warrant this extraordinary isolation. In 2010, former Senator Richard Lugar, then the top-ranking Republican on the
Foreign Relations Committee, correctly noted: We must recognize the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way
that enhances U.S. interests. The Eisenhower administration recognized Fidel Castros government in early 1959 but
soon broke diplomatic relations and imposed an economic embargotightened in 1962 by President John
Kennedybecause Cuba nationalized American properties and became an ally of the Soviet Union. The embargo was an integral part of U.S. Cold War
strategy against the Soviet bloc and should have been lifted after the bloc collapsed, but wasnt. Though some security concerns exist today, including
the gathering of Chinese intelligence from the island, and extensive Cuban meddling in Venezuela, these challenges are not lessened by the embargo.
Post-Cold War embargo supporters included some in government and think tanks, but most were Cubans who had fled to Miami after Castro took
power. It seemed possible that given Cubas economic crisis following the sudden end of massive
bloc aid, a little more pressure might bring Fidel down, but that required shifting the embargos
focus from U.S. national security to nation building in Cuba. The key document was the revealingly titled,
Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act of 1996, which still forms the core of U.S.
policy. The embargo will be lifted only after decisive steps are taken toward democracy,
respect for human rights, and a market economy. The departure of the Castros is also required. Only one of the six
stated purposes of the Act referred (unconvincingly) to national security. One of the co-authors, Senator Jesse Helms, said that Fidel was sustained by
foreign money and that his Helms-Burton Act would choke off the life-support system keeping him in power. He said that eighteen years ago.
President Bill Clinton signed legislation to tighten the embargo in 1992 and 1996 and President George W. Bush did so a decade later. But living
conditions for Cubans did not improve. Instead Fidel used U.S. proactive measures to justify the further harassment and imprisonment of dissidents
because of alleged traitorous links to Washington. The most dramatic instance was in 2003 when 75 were arrested and given long prison terms.
Conditions in Cuba Today In 2006, sickness forced Fidel, now 86, to informally pass power to his brother Ral. Ral, now 81, became President in
2008 and head of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) in 2011. A source close to Cuban intelligence now reports that Fidel has Alzheimer's and will not
survive long. Fidels passing, analysts expect, will heighten domestic tensions and perhaps spark another mass migration by sea. Ral has always been
the more pragmatic brother and, unlike Fidel, is eager to learn from the serious and systematic economic reforms of recent decades in China and
Vietnam. On taking power, he immediately highlighted some of Cubas critical but previously unmentionable economic disasters under Fidel, and set
out to update the economic model, a feel-good phrase that masks criticism of Fidel. The CCP adopted an updating blueprint in 2011. The dean of
Cuban-American economists, Carmelo Mesa-Lago, considers these reforms the most extensive and profound ever undertaken by the government.
And yet the author of Cuba en la era de Ral Castro (2012) added that they fall far short of those in China and Vietnam. New York Times correspondent
Damien Cave has characterized Rals reforms as handcuffed capitalism. Specific problems range from inadequate infrastructure and pervasive
corruption to disincentives imposed by officials who dont understand or really support the updating. Thus more than five decades of
stagnation and atrophied ideological dogmatism still impede Cubas morphing from a retrograde family dynasty
dictatorship into a more modern nation. In general the opening undermines CCP control, as would an absence of reforms. Castroite leaders also fear
the loss of oil handouts if Venezuelan President Hugo Chavezs cancer gets the better of him. There have not been equally significant non-economic
reforms, though there has been a drift to somewhat greater freedom of expression than during the Cold War. Most of Fidel's political prisoners have
been released, but government critics under Ral are still harassed and arrested and pro-democracy advocate Oswaldo Pay died in an automobile
accident last July. Still, some changes may improve life, the most recent being the liberalization of laws on foreign travel. Castros Legacy When Fidel
seized power in 1959 he formed an anti-American, anti-capitalist regime that quickly twisted one of Latin Americas most relatively advanced countries
into a repressed and economically stagnant backwater. The still iconic and untouchable caudillo is responsible for his own legacy, with the only
exceptions to his miserable failures being somewhat impressive programs in education and health. Fidel had an unfailing talent for choosing allies,
ideas, and policies that inflated his own international image above the interests of the Cuban people or other nations. The head of Vietnams
Communist Party zeroed in on Cubas basic challenge last year when he said his visit to the island had convinced him that Cubas greatest need is
changing the mentality [of the people], from the highest level to the grassroots. One tragic irony is that the Cuban exiles that hate Fidel have propped
him up by supporting the embargo, providing him with a scapegoat for his failures. Younger Cuban-Americans, and recent arrivals from the island, are
usually less supportive of sanctions than the earlier refugees whose compulsion to get even with the Castros has often seemed dictated more by
vengeance than logic or reality. This is shown by the fact that while a majority of Cuban-Americans still support the embargo, almost 85 percent believe
it hasn't worked well or at all, according to a 2011 poll by Florida International University. A New Policy to Cuba Since the early 1990s U.S. proactive
policies have done more to stoke than reduce domestic tensions in Cuba, though we profess to seek a peaceful transition. Most U.S.
legislators have supported pro-embargo Cuban-Americans even though Gallup polls have long shown that
most Americans favor diplomatic relations with Havana and lifting the embargo. On balance,
politicians dont think Cuba policy is important enough to be worth stirring up the hornets in the
still fairly militant and well-financed pro-embargo lobby. Not only have all presidential candidates
including Obama supported the embargo, most have resisted even seriously discussing it . This U.S.
commitment to a failed policy has given Washington a "special stake in the islands so-called independent sector whose goals appeal to Americans.
But tragically, paraphrasing journalist Scotty Reston, Americans will do anything for these dissidents except listen
to them. My talks with many in Cuba and abroad suggest that most oppose the embargo and three have co-authored articles with me saying so.
If these dissidents come under focused government fire in the years ahead, many Americans
will feel compelled to intervene even more directlyperhaps militarilyon their behalf. Two points stand out:
Cuba is not the security threat that our current policy treats it as; and our sanctions do not advance the desirable political, economic, and humanitarian
improvements that we say we seek on the island. The bottom line is that we must base our policy on national security interests and realities, not
unattainable dreams, however noble those dreams may seem. During his second and final term, and after having drawn unprecedented electoral
support as a Democrat from Cuban-Americans in Miami, President Obama is in a position to make serious reforms, if he
has the will to do so. He might begin by resurrecting a 1998-99 proposalthen endorsed by former secretaries of state Kissinger and
George Shultz, but killed by President Clintonfor convening a Presidential Bipartisan Commission on Cuba to seriously examine the pros and cons of
the policy. It would certainly see the need for change and its findings would give Obama cover for action. Many significant changes can be made now
without the support of Congress, though since 1996 the latters backing has been necessary to fully lift the embargo. Immediate reforms
should include: securing the release of Alan Gross, the American contractor arrested in 2009 for doing his proactive U.S. government-funded
job; ending provocative proactive programs; allowing more visits to Cuba by all Americans, not just largely Cuban-Americans; expanding trade
beyond the foods and medicines now allowed; bringing our Cuba immigration policy into line with our policies toward immigrants from other
countries; increasing discussions with Cubas political and military leaders on affairs of mutual interest; and looking objectively at the
reforms under way today and deciding how Washington can promote change while defusing
rather than stoking domestic conflict and tensions. Whatever else we do, we must jettison our quid
pro quo approach that holds essential U.S. policy changes hostage to repeated vetoes by both
Cuban-Americans in the States and Castroites in Havana.


And, this practice of messianic exceptionalism in the name of freedom and
democracy is part of a global crusade to impose the myth of American values and
culture all over the world. Human rights is used as a masquerade to justify
military and economic intervention while dismissing accusations of imperialism
Kane 3
(John Kane, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4, December 2003, pp. 772-800, American Values or Human Rights? U.S. Foreign Policy and
the Fractured Myth of Virtuous Power, [CL])

May 2002 brought the odd spectacle of ex-President Jimmy Carter standing shoulder to
shoulder in Havana with one of the U.S. governments oldest enemies, Cuban president Fidel Castro. Carter, on a mission to convey
a message of friendship to the Cuban people and to seek some common ground between Cuba and the United States, made a point of meeting and
encouraging local democratic, religious, and human rights activists. In a televised address, he endorsed the rights of
dissidents and urged democracy on the island nation (Sullivan 2002), He also advocated an end to the U.S. embargo on
Cuba (a call immediately echoed at home by 20 Democratic and 20 Republican representatives in Congress). President George W. Bushs
administration responded angrily to Carters latest adventure as international arbiter. A senior state department official tried to
sabotage the ex-presidents visit with a carefully timed release of a report claiming that Cuba was conducting bio-weapons research and sharing its
Endings with other "rogue nations." Bush himself was quick to reaffirm the sanctions on trade and travel,
demanding free elections and a liberalization of Cuba's economy as preconditions of U.S.
relaxation. Bush was of course concerned with the votes of large numbers of Cuban-Americans in Florida whose Republican sympathies are
closely tied to a strong anti-Castro stance. He was also reportedly angry, in a week when he was finalizing an arms reduction deal with the Russians,
at being upstaged in the media by the peripatetic elder statesman. Nevertheless, there was a certain irony in his implied charge that Carter, who had
once put human rights centrally on the foreign policy agenda of the United States, was giving aid and comfort to a notorious violator. There
was also an interesting question as to the essential difference, if any, between Carters excursion
and Bush's own previous visit (in February 2002) to China where, in a similarly televised address, he had issued a
democratic challenge to the Chinese Communist leadership (Allen and Pan 2002). Bush had not, of course,
made continuing U.S.- Chinese trade dependent on democratic progress in China, but policy
inconsistency is not what concerns me here. I want rather to draw attention to the differences and similarities between
Bush's and Carter's proselytizing appeals . Carter, on his return to the United States, argued that his own
and the administrations aims for Cuba were identical, and that only their opinions on means
and timing were at variance (Carter 2002). I want to argue, however, that there were in contention here two distinct though connected
rhetorical positions whose historical interrelationship it is important to understand. The first rhetoric is that of human rights
per se; the second is the rhetoric of specifically American values. Thus in China, Bush invited the Chinese in
the course of their historical economic transformation to draw on specifically "American ideals of liberty, faith and family" (Allan and Pan 2002;
emphasis added). Bush had begun, quite deliberately and defiantly, to speak this language of American values only
after the events of September 11. It was a highly significant rhetorical move aimed at reaffirming a
national faith which, according to Henry Kissinger (2000; 2001), had been lost decades earlier. Kissinger argued that the
tradition known as American exceptionalism, within which American values were historically embedded, was one of the most
important casualties of the Vietnam War. Characterizing Vietnam 25 years after the fall of Saigon as a national "tragedy," he claimed
that the war had opened a rift, still unhealed, in American society and destroyed faith in the uniqueness and universal relevance of American values.)
One unfortunate consequence was a continuing failure to develop a new, rational foreign policy consensus (Kissinger 2000). Americans after Vietnam
could no longer confidently assert their own values or feel comfortable about imposing them on others, and were consequently at a loss as to what to
do with their own predominant power. Kissingers contention is an important one for understanding a persistent dilemma of American foreign policy,
including its most recent manifestation under the Bush administration. l will argue, however, that it deserves a more satisfactory exploration than he
himself provides in his book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, where he conducts an analysis in terms of opposing historical traditions. The
earliest of these was the "Hamiltonian," which rejected moralizing and based U.S. foreign policy on manipulating balance of power relations solely for
the sake of the national interest-a position that, since Alexander Hamilton`s own time, has apparently been represented only by Theodore Roosevelt
and Richard Nixon (Kissinger 2001, 240-42, 248). The other two more dominant traditions were founded on alternate answers to the question of
how America best fulfills its "historic mission" in international affairs. The "Jacksonian" is broadly "isolationist" and argues that America, by minding
its own business, sets a sufficient example to the world; the "Wilsonian" argues, on the contrary, that America has a
crusading duty to use its power to disseminate its values abroad. While there is no doubt that these traditions
form a vital part of the story, Kissinger tends to treat Jacksonians and Wilsonians as though they were distinct and discernible groups enduring across
time and capable of forming coalitions or falling apart (Kissinger 2001, 245- 49). Because this has hardly been the case since at least World War ll, his
analysis often confuses more than it enlightens. He also uses a thin reading of the Balkan crisis to argue that Wilsonianism has finally triumphed over
competing traditions (2001, 254-SS), but in doing so he conflates trends in U.S. foreign policy with a recent Wilsonian tendency among European
countries and the United Nations to pursue interventions on humanitarian grounds. This radically underestimates the caution and indecision of
American policy in the Clinton era that was a continuing consequence of the trauma of Vietnam. Finally, Kissinger describes the
developing tendency of Congress to impose sanctions on other countries on human rights
grounds as typical (and regrettable) Wilsonian crusading. This may be true, but it misses the political significance of the appeal to
human rights as a direct response to the very crisis of American values he has identified. l believe greater clarity can be brought to
the subject by focusing on the myth, central to the exceptionalist tradition, of the essential unity and
compatibility of American power and American virtue. It was this myth that was shattered in Vietnam producing the
crisis of faith in American values that Kissinger notes, and also provoking a turn to human rights rhetoric in foreign policy. The following is a summary
of the argument l will make. The myth of virtuous American power fell into crisis in Vietnam when its essential terms were undermined and severed
one from the other: American power was defeated, delivering a blow to American pride; American virtue was assailed, causing a loss of faith in
American innocence. This forced an agonizing choice (reflected in the bitter division of patriots and peaceniks at home) between preserving pride by
prosecuting the war ever more ruthlessly, and restoring virtue by immediate withdrawal at whatever cost to pride. President Nixon offered the pretense
of serving both ends by his "Vietnamization" of the war, but the failure of this strategy helped cause his own downfall. Meanwhile, the American
values used to justify intervention in Vietnam were being excoriated by disillusioned Americans
as the culturally biased instruments of an imperialist power, President Carters human rights initiative was a direct
response to this crisis of faith in American values. The attraction of human rights was that they were precisely
not American , despite having a great deal of commonality with traditional American values. With its foreign policy at the
service of universal human rights, America could conceivably avoid the charge of cultural
imperialism. Significantly, Carter did not reject the exceptionalist tradition but intended rather, by this
means, to save it. A human rights policy would ensure consistency and dispel hypocrisy in foreign policy, thus realizing at last the unity of
American power and virtue.


And, this myth of American virtue has resulted in the formulation of freedom-as-
gift the Western desire to liberate the world and purify it of its Evils is a violent
psychosis that turns the entire world into a warzone
Rogers 5
(Juliet Rogers, University of Melbourne Law School, 2005. [Unquestionable Freedom in a Psychotic West, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 1.)

This article was inspired by several encounters I have had with the representation of "freedom,"
as if freedom is a thing-in-itself. The foremost is the description by George Bush of freedom as a gift
to the Middle East; a gift that can be given to the Iraqis in the form of democracy, commodity choice and
religious "tolerance."4 This is particularly notable in his speech to Marines at Camp Lejeune, but repeatedly in other pronouncements,
including his speeches to the Australian parliament and to British citizens, respectively. Freedom, for Bush, is a gift, wrapped and
decorated by the United States, with the assistance of the "coalition of the willing." This image is mirrored in Western popular culture
through cinema, advertising and product imagery. For example, in the Wachowski Brother's Matrix trilogy freedom is had in the caves of Zion, and
celebrated through the very white loins ofKeanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss (in Matrix Reloaded).5 Then, outside the cinema, a momentary glance
towards the shopping complex sees freedom further presented in its presence as inspiring and animating the loins of the Western subject in the form
ofTommy Hilfiger "FreedomJeans," "Freedom Perfume" and the Ford "Freedom Car" (just to name a few).6 Later, at academic forums, when I have
attempted to discuss some ofthese images, I have been confronted by several assertive statements assuring me that freedom is something
the West has, and something the West has to give. Indeed, the response to my questions regarding the conditions of
possibility for thinking about freedom in the West has appeared to offer a platform, in both the US and Australia, for an assertive statement that "we do
have freedom to give!" as if I'd said otherwise; as if the very question itself threatens the having of freedom. Hence, I suggest in this article that
despite - or perhaps because of - the presence of freedom in its presence as image, gift ,
commodity, indeed, as democracy itself, freedom is not something to be thought about . The
war on Iraq and the initiation and application of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" presented freedom
as a gift to the people of the Middle East. This reiterated the already prolific representation of freedom as a quality that inheres
in "freedom" products, images and simply being free in a Western democratic nation. The being of being free is filled with
shifting form and content. Like the ever-attentive Other to the psychotic, freedom approaches at
every moment through its substance and substancelessness, ever interpreted to fill the fantasies
of psychosis. Indeed, freedom has a psychotic place in the imaginary of the Western subject ,
its signified status being conveniently and often contradictorily explained through the assertive
broad sweeps of contemporary liberal democracy. As if democracy itself offers inherent freedom
and the fundamental elements in the enabling of free choice. The Western subject , who might
currently be described as the citizen of the countries signed up as the "coalition of the willing" (to invade Iraq), wants to bask in this
psychotic space and imagine himself the central figure in the Other's gaze . But likeJ.R.R. Tolkien's eye
of Sauron,7 the gaze of the Other is never fixed; even the psychotic must perform an activity to maintain the fantasy
of its omnipotence. The Western subject, having been subjectivized through and subjected to the
dominant narratives of liberal discourse - with an emphasis on individual liberty, representative
democracy and legal positivism - rests (un)easily in his/ her location as a subject in the "free
West." The Western subject is the subject who enjoys their freedom through choosing and
purchasing, and struggles to see (if not assertively resists) the possibility that there was ever
a questionable status to the having of freedom. In contemporary times this subject can now rest a
little easier as s/he who inhabits the world where freedom is had and given significance in a
positive form. Freedom is everywhere and anything that articulates with the tropes of liberalist
democracy. And, freedom is apparently in such excess in the West that it can be given as a gift to
others. The subject of this freedom, the subject who is represented in the speeches of Bush and Howard as s/he who has, who
possesses, this freedom qua gift - the Western subject, who I will hereafter refer to as "West," the man _ can now take up a
fantastical position. West, having been hailed by the (supposedly) popular peoples' choice, is
able to inhabit a position of fantasizing himself as a free subject, as a subject for whom the "I
[he] takes [him] self to be" is a free "I," an I who has freedom to give. But what is this freedom subject West
supposedly has to give? Arguably, the freedom George W Bush claimed to be giving the Iraqi people was the freedom to participate in the governing of
their nation - a protective, if not participatory, version of representational democracy. In his speech to the British people and Queen Elizabeth II he
described "advancing freedom" as a "democratic revolution" no less.'0 This is the freedom for Iraqis to vote for a representative of their choosing. And
indeed, with the sanctions lifted and US companies enabled and protected in their entree into Iraq, Iraqis will soon have the freedom to choose the very
same "freedom" products Americans have in their homes. The US is bringing Iraq "freedom" indeed, and as
Americans are (currently) fond of saying: "Freedom does come at a cost."' 1 George W Bush counters the
quantification of the cost of freedom and asserts the positivity of freedom as an incalculable gift when - in defence of his budget requirements for the
war - he poignantly asks: "how do you measure the benefit of freedom in Iraq?"' 2 Freedom's benefit is incalculable and this
assures its gift status. It is precisely this status that then reinforces the positive parameters of
freedom. George W Bush could well iterate Janice Joplin's sentiment, mutatis mutandis: freedom itself "ain't nothin' Honey if
[it] ain't free," the double negative assuring its positivity and its economic freeness assuring that
it is indeed a gift. In the original lyrics (of Me and Bobby McGee) it is also Janice's freeness as a "free I" that is at stake - "[she] ain't nothin',
Honey if [she] ain't free." The terror of this "nothin'," which we might call the Real of freedom,'3 I will
extrapolate as precisely the psychotic condition of West in the contemporary West.


The embargo places Cuba in a zone of non-recognition in the global community, a
state of exception that turns them into an object of freedom and not a subject able
to think and create it this falls into the trap of modernity that justifies endless
humanitarian intervention in the name of liberation and democracy.
Ranciere 4
(Jacques, a man who needs no introduction, Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103.2/3, 2004, 297-310, [CL])

As we know, the question raised by my title took on a new cogency during the last ten years of the twentieth century. The Rights of Man or Human
Rights had just been rejuvenated in the seventies and eighties by the dissident movements in the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europea rejuvenation that was all the more significant as the "formalism" of those rights had been one of the first targets of
the young Marx, so that the collapse of the Soviet Empire could appear as their revenge. After this collapse, they would appear as the
charter of the irresistible movement leading to a peaceful posthistorical world where global
democracy would match the global market of liberal economy. As is well known, things did not exactly go that way.
In the following years, the new landscape of humanity, freed from utopian totalitarianism, became the stage of new
outbursts of ethnic conflicts and slaughters, religious fundamentalisms, or racial and xenophobic
movements. The territory of "posthistorical" and peaceful humanity proved to be the territory of
new figures of the Inhuman. And the Rights of Man turned out to be the rights of the rightless, of
the populations hunted out of their homes and land and threatened [End Page 297] by ethnic
slaughter. They appeared more and more as the rights of the victims, the rights of those who were unable to enact any
rights or even any claim in their name, so that eventually their rights had to be upheld by others, at the cost of
shattering the edifice of International Rights, in the name of a new right to "humanitarian
interference"which ultimately boiled down to the right to invasion. A new suspicion thus arose: What lies behind this
strange shift from Man to Humanity and from Humanity to the Humanitarian? The actual subject of these Rights of Man became Human Rights. Is
there not a bias in the statement of such rights? It was obviously impossible to revive the Marxist critique. But another form of suspicion could be
revived: the suspicion that the "man" of the Rights of Man was a mere abstraction because the only real rights were the rights of citizens, the rights
attached to a national community as such. That polemical statement had first been made by Edmund Burke against the French Revolution.1 And it had
been revived in a significant way by Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism included a chapter devoted to the "Perplexities of the Rights of
Man." In that chapter, Arendt equated the "abstractedness" of "Men's Rights" with the concrete situation
of those populations of refugees that had flown all over Europe after the First World War. These populations have
been deprived of their rights by the very fact that they were only "men," that they had no
national community to ensure those rights. Arendt found there the "body" fitting the abstractedness of the rights and she stated the paradox
as follows: the Rights of Man are the rights of those who are only human beings, who have no more property left than the property of being human. Put
another way, they are the rights of those who have no rights, the mere derision of right.2 The equation itself was made
possible by Arendt's view of the political sphere as a specific sphere, separated from the realm of necessity. Abstract life meant "deprived life." It meant
"private life," a life entrapped in its "idiocy," as opposed to the life of public action, speech, and appearance. This critique of "abstract"
rights actually was a critique of democracy. It rested on the assumption that modern democracy
had been wasted from the very beginning by the "pity" of the revolutionaries for the poor people,
by the confusion of two freedoms: political freedom, opposed to domination, and social freedom, opposed to necessity. In her view, the Rights of
Man were not an ideal fantasy of revolutionary dreamers, as Burke had put it. They were the paradoxical
rights of the private, poor, unpoliticized individual. This analysis, articulated more than fifty years ago, seems tailor-made,
fifty years later, to fit the new "perplexities" of the Rights of Man on the "humanitarian" stage. Now we must pay close attention to what allows it to fit.
It is the conceptualization by Hannah Arendt of a certain state of exception . In a striking passage from the chapter
on the perplexities of the Rights of Man, she writes the following about the rightless: "Their plight is not that they are not equal
before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed, but that nobody
wants to oppress them."3 There is something extraordinary in the statement "nobody wants to oppress them" and in its plainly
contemptuous tone. It is as if these people were guilty of not even being able to be oppressed, not even worthy of being oppressed. I think that we
must be aware of what is at stake in this statement of a situation and status that would be
"beyond oppression," beyond any account in terms of conflict and repression, or law and violence. As a matter of fact, there were people who
wanted to oppress them and laws to do this. The conceptualization of a "state beyond oppression" is much more a consequence of Arendt's rigid
opposition between the realm of the political and the realm of private lifewhat she calls in the same chapter "the dark background of mere
givenness."4 It is in keeping with her archipolitical position. But paradoxically this position did provide a frame of description and a line of
argumentation that later would prove quite effective for depoliticizing matters of power and repression and setting them in a sphere of exceptionality
that is no longer political, in an anthropological sphere of sacrality situated beyond the reach of political dissensus.

This practice of intervention on the behalf of the rights of the Other produces an
irresolvable opposition between Good and Evil than sanitizes the violence of the
West because its done in the name of ethics without fracturing this model of
action politics becomes impossible
Ranciere 4
(Jacques, a man who needs no introduction, Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103.2/3, 2004, 297-310, [CL])

"The Rights of the Other" is the title of an essay written by Jean-Franois Lyotard, originally a paper given within the auspices of the Oxford Lectures
on the Rights of Man, organized in 1993 by Amnesty International. The theme of the rights of the other has to be
understood as an answer to the question, What do Human Rights mean in the context of the
humanitarian situation? It is part of an attempt to rethink rights by first rethinking Wrong. The issue of rethinking Wrong increasingly
took the floor after the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the disappointing outcomes of what was supposed to be the last step to universal democracy.
In the context of the new outbursts of racial or religious hatred and violence, it was no longer possible to assign crimes
against humanity to specific ideologies. The crimes of dead totalitarian regimes had to be
rethought: they were said to be not so much the specific effects of perverse ideologies and outlaw
regimes as the manifestations of an infinite wronga wrong that could no longer be conceptualized within the opposition
of democracy and antidemocracy, of legitimate state or lawless state, but which appeared as an absolute evil, an unthinkable and
unredeemable evil. Lyotard's conceptualization of the Inhuman is one of the most significant examples of that absolutization. Lyotard did in fact split
the idea of the inhuman. In his view, the forms of repression and cruelty, or the situations of distress that we call "inhuman," are the consequences of
our betrayal of [End Page 307] another Inhuman, what we could call a "good" Inhuman. That Inhuman is Otherness as such. It is the part in us that we
do not control. It may be birth and infancy. It may be the Unconscious. It may be the Law. It may be God. The Inhuman is
the irreducible otherness, the part of the Untamable of which the human being is, as Lyotard says, the
hostage or the slave. Absolute evil begins with the attempt to tame the Untamable, to deny the situation of the hostage, to dismiss our dependency on
the power of the Inhuman, in order to build a world that we could master entirely.15 Such a dream of absolute freedom would have been the dream of
the Enlightenment and of Revolutionary emancipation. It would still be at work in contemporary dreams of perfect communication and transparency.
But only the Nazi Holocaust would have fully revealed and achieved the core of the dream: exterminating the people whose very mission is to bear
witness to the situation of hostage, to obey the law of Otherness, the law of an invisible and unnamable God. "Crimes against humanity"
appear then as crimes of humanity, the crimes resulting from the affirmation of a human
freedom denying its dependency upon the Untamable. The rights that must be held as a response to the
"humanitarian" lack of rights are the rights of the Other, the rights of the Inhuman. For instance, in Lyotard's view, the
right to speak must be identified with the duty of "announcing something new."16 But the "new" that must be announced is nothing but the
immemorial power of the Other and our own incapacity to fulfill the duty of announcing it. The obedience to the rights of the Other sweeps aside the
heterogeneity of political dissensus to the benefit of a more radical heterogeneity. As in Agamben, this means infinitizing the
wrong , substituting for the processing of a political wrong a sort of ontological destiny that
allows only "resistance." Now this resistance is no manifestation of freedom. On the contrary, resistance means faithfulness to the law of
Otherness, which rules out any dream of "human emancipation." This is the philosophical way of understanding the rights of the Other. But there is a
less sophisticated and more trivial understanding of them: if those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact the Human Rights that are their
last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the "right
to humanitarian interference "a right that some nations assume to the supposed benefit of
victimized populations, and very often against the advice of the humanitarian organizations themselves. The "right to
humanitarian interference" might be described as a sort of "return to sender": the disused [End Page 308]
rights that had been sent to the rightless are sent back to the senders. But this back and forth movement is not a null transaction. It gives a new use to
the "disused" rightsa new use that achieves on the world stage what consensus achieves on national stages: the erasure of the boundary between law
and fact, law and lawlessness. The human rights that are sent back are now the rights of the absolute
victim. The absolute victim is the victim of an absolute evil. Therefore the rights that come back to the senderwho
is now the avengerare akin to a power of infinite justice against the Axis of Evil. The expression
"infinite justice" was dismissed by the U.S. government a few days after having been put forward as an inappropriate term. But I think that it was fairly
appropriate. An infinite justice is not only a justice that dismisses the principles of International Law,
prohibiting interference in the "internal affairs" of another state; it is a justice which erases all the distinctions that used
to define the field of justice in general: the distinctions between law and fact, legal punishment and
private retaliation, justice, police, and war. All those distinctions are boiled down to a sheer
ethical conflict between Good and Evil. Ethics is indeed on our agendas. Some people see it as a return to some founding spirit of
the community, sustaining positive laws and political agency. I take a fairly different view of this new reign of ethics. It means to me the erasure of all
legal distinctions and the closure of all political intervals of dissensus. Both are erased in the infinite conflict of Good and Evil. The "ethical"
trend is in fact the "state of exception." But this state of exception is no completion of any essence of the political, as
it is in Agamben. Instead it is the result of the erasure of the political in the couple of consensual policy and
humanitarian police. The theory of the state of exception, just as the theory of the "rights of the other," turns this result into an
anthropological or ontological destiny. They trace it back to the inescapable prematuration of the human animal. I think that we had rather leave the
ontological destiny of the human animal aside if we want to understand who is the subject of the Rights of Man and to rethink politics today, even if out
of its very lack.



PLAN: The United States federal government should completely and
unconditionally lift its embargo on the Republic of Cuba.



We think that the plan represents a withdrawal from the regime of
humanitarianism that says I would prefer not to lifting the embargo
problematizes human rights on an onto-symbolic level, breathing life into
politics and creating new categories of affirmation and agency. The plan is a
refusal to participate in the regime of humanitarian coercion.
Zizek 6
(Slavoj, Half-philosopher, half-bear, half-cocaine, The Obscenity of Human Rights: Violence as Symptom, http://libcom.org/library/the-obscenity-
of-human-rights-violence-as-symptom, 11.23.6, [CL])

This acceptance of violence, this "political suspension of the ethical," is the limit of that which even
the most "tolerant" liberal stance is unable to trespass - witness the uneasiness of "radical" post-
colonialist Afro-American studies apropos of Frantz Fanon's fundamental insight into the
unavoidability of violence in the process of effective decolonization. One should recall here Fredric Jameson's idea that
violence plays in a revolutionary process the same role as worldly wealth in the Calvinist logic of predestination: although it has no
intrinsic value, it is a sign of the authenticity of the revolutionary process, of the fact that this process is
effectively disturbing the existing power relations. In other words, the dream of the revolution without violence is precisely the dream of a "revolution
without revolution"(Robespierre). On the other hand, the role of the Fascist spectacle of violence is exactly
opposite: it is a violence whose aim is to PREVENT the true change - something spectacular should happen all
the time so that, precisely, nothing would really happen. But, again, the ultimate argument against this perspective is the
simple encounter of excessive suffering generated by political violence. Sometimes, one cannot but be
shocked by the excessive indifference towards suffering, even and especially when this suffering is widely reported in
the media and condemned, as if it is the very outrage at suffering which turns us into its immobilized
fascinated spectators. Recall, in the early 1990s, the three-years-long siege of Sarajevo, with the population starving,
exposed to permanent shelling and snipers' fire. The big enigma here is: although all the media were full of pictures and
reports, why did not the UN forces, NATO or the US accomplish just a small act of breaking the siege of
Sarajevo, of imposing a corridor through which people and provisions could circulate freely? It would have cost nothing: with a little bit
of serious pressure on the Serb forces, the prolonged spectacle of encircled Sarajevo exposed to ridiculous terror would have been over. There is
only one answer to this enigma, the one proposed by Rony Brauman himself who, on behalf of the Red Cross, coordinated the help to
Sarajevo: the very presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as "humanitarian ," the very recasting of
the political-military conflict into the humanitarian terms, was sustained by an eminently political choice, that of,
basically, taking the Serb side in the conflict. Especially ominous and manipulative was here the role of Mitterand:
The celebration of 'humanitarian intervention' in Yugoslavia took the place of a political
discourse, disqualifying in advance all conflicting debate. /.../ It was apparently not possible, for Francois Mitterand, to
express his analysis of the war in Yugoslavia. With the strictly humanitarian response, he discovered an unexpected source of communication or, more
precisely, of cosmetics, which is a little bit the same thing. /.../ Mitterand remained in favor of the maintenance of Yugoslavia within its borders and
was persuaded that only a strong Serbian power was in the position to guarantee a certain stability in this explosive region. This position rapidly
became unacceptable in the eyes of the French people. All the bustling activity and the humanitarian discourse permitted him to reaffirm the unfailing
commitment of France to the Rights of Man in the end, and to mimic an opposition to Greater Serbian fascism, all in giving it free rein. 2
From this specific insight, one should make the move to the general level and render problematic the very
depoliticized humanitarian politics of "Human Rights" as the ideology of military
interventionism serving specific economico-political purposes. As Wendy Brown develops apropos Michael Ignatieff, such
humanitarianism "presents itself as something of an antipolitics - a pure defense of the
innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual against immense and potentially
cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of
collective power against individuals." 3 However, the question is: "what kind of politicization /those who intervene on behalf of human rights/ set in
motion against the powers they oppose. Do they stand for a different formulation of justice or do they stand in opposition to collective justice projects?"
4 Say, it is clear that the US overthrowing of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in the terms of ending
the suffering of the Iraqi people, not only was motivated by other politico-economic interests (oil), but
also relied on a determinate idea of the political and economic conditions that should open up the perspective of freedom to the
Iraqi people (Western liberal democracy, guarantee of private property, the inclusion into the global market
economy, etc.). The purely humanitarian anti-political politics of merely preventing suffering thus effectively amounts to the implicit
prohibition of elaborating a positive collective project of socio-political transformation. And, at an even more general level, one should
problematize the very opposition between the universal (pre-political) Human Rights which belong to every
human being "as such," and specific political rights of a citizen, member of a particular political community; in this sense,
Balibar argues for the "reversal of the historical and theoretical relationship between 'man' and 'citizen'" which proceeds by "explaining how man is
made by citizenship and not citizenship by man." 5 Balibar refers here to Hannah Arendt's insight apropos he XXth century phenomenon of refugees:
The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who
professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships - except that
they were still human. 6 This line, of course, leads straight to Agamben's notion of homo sacer as a human being
reduced to "bare life": in a properly Hegelian paradoxical dialectics of universal and particular, it is precisely when a human being is deprived of his
particular socio-political identity which accounts for his determinate citizenship, that he, in one and the same move, is no longer recognized and/or
treated as human. In short, the paradox is that one is deprived of human rights precisely when one is effectively, in
one's social reality, reduced to a human being "in general," without citizenship, profession, etc., that is to say,
precisely when one effectively becomes the ideal BEARER of "universal human rights" (which belong
to me "independently of" my profession, sex, citizenship, religion, ethnic identity...). We thus arrived at a standard "postmodern," "anti-essentialist"
position, a kind of political version of Foucault's notion of sex as generated by a multitude of the practices of sexuality: "man," the bearer of
Human Rights, is generated by a set of political practices which materialize citizenship - is, however,
this enough? Jacques Ranciere 7 proposed a very elegant and precise solution of the antinomy between Human Rights (belonging to "man as such")
and the politicization of citizens: while Human Rights cannot be posited as an unhistorical "essentialist"
Beyond with regard to the contingent sphere of political struggles, as universal "natural rights of man" exempted from history, they also
should not be dismissed as a reified fetish which is a product of concrete historical processes of
the politicization of citizens. The gap between the universality of Human Rights and the political rights of citizens is thus not a gap
between the universality of man and a specific political sphere; it, rather, "separates the whole of the community from
itself," as Ranciere put it in a precise Hegelian way. 8 Far from being pre-political, "universal Human Rights" designate the precise space of
politicization proper: what they amount to is the right to universality as such, the right of a political agent to assert its radical non-coincidence with
itself (in its particular identity), i.e., to posit itself - precisely insofar as it is the "surnumerary" one, the "part with no part," the one without a proper
place in the social edifice - as an agent of universality of the Social as such. The paradox is thus a very precise one, and symmetrical
to the paradox of universal human rights as the rights of those reduced to inhumanity: at the very moment when we try to
conceive political rights of citizens without the reference to universal "meta-political" Human
Rights, we lose politics itself, i.e., we reduce politics to a "post-political" play of negotiation of
particular interests . - What, then, happens to Human Rights when they are reduced to the rights of homo sacer, of those excluded from
the political community, reduced to "bare life" - i.e., when they become of no use, since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no rights, are
treated as inhuman? Ranciere proposes here an extremely salient dialectical reversal:
/.../ when they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be
useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights. It is in this way, as the result
of this process, that the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression
and inhuman conditions of existence. They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of
right. For all this, they are not void. Political names and political places never become merely void. The void is filled by somebody or something else.
/.../ if those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact Human Rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their
rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the "right to humanitarian interference" - a right that some nations assume to the
supposed benefit of victimized populations, and very often against the advice of the humanitarian organizations themselves. The "right to humanitarian
interference" might be described as a sort of "return to sender": the disused rights that had been send to the rightless are sent back to the senders. 9
So, to put it in the Leninist way: what today, in the predominant Western discourse, the "Human Rights of the
Third World suffering victims" effectively mean is the right of the Western powers themselves to
intervene - politically, economically, culturally, militarily - in the Third World countries of
their choice on behalf of the defense of Human Rights. The reference to Lacan's formula of communication (in which the
sender gets back from the receiver-addressee his own message in its inverted, i.e. true, form) is here up to the point: in the reigning discourse of
humanitarian interventionism, the developed West is effectively getting back from the victimized Third World its own message in its true form. And the
moment Human Rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing with them has to change to ethics: reference to the pre-political
opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized. Today's "new reign of Ethics," 10 clearly discernible in,
say, Michael Ignatieff's work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying to the victimized
other political subjectivization. And, as Ranciere pointed out, liberal humanitarianism a la Ignatieff unexpectedly meets the "radical"
position of Foucault or Agamben with regard to this depoliticization: the Foucauldian-Agambenian notion of "biopolitics" as the culmination of
the entire Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of "ontological trap" in which concentration
camps appear as a kind of "ontological destiny: each of us would be in the situation of the
refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared
in the biopolitical trap." 11 When, in a shift from Foucault, Agamben identifies sovereign power and biopolitics (in today's generalized state of
exception, the two overlap), he thus precludes the very possibility of the emergence of political subjectivity. - However, the rise of political
subjectivity takes place against the background of a certain limit of the "inhuman," so that one should
continue to endorse the paradox of the inhumanity of human being deprived of citizenship, and posit the "inhuman" pure man as a necessary excess of
humanity over itself, its "indivisible remainder," a kind of Kantian limit-concept of the phenomenal notion of humanity? So that, in exactly the same
way in Kant's philosophy the sublime Noumenal, when we come too close to it, appears as pure horror, man "as such,"
deprived of all phenomenal qualifications, appears as an inhuman monster, something like Kafka's odradek. The problem with human
rights humanism is that it covers up this monstrosity of the "human as such," presenting it as a sublime
human essence. What, then, is the way out of this deadlock? Balibar ends with an ambiguous reference to Mahatma Gandhi. It is true that Gandhi's
formula "Be yourself the change you would like to see in the world" encapsulates perfectly the basic
attitude of emancipatory change: do not wait for the "objective process" to generate the expected/desired change, since if you just
wait for it, it will never come; instead, throw YOURSELF into it, BE this change, take upon yourself the risk of enacting it directly. However, is not the
ultimate limitation of Gandhi's strategy that it only works against a liberal-democratic regime which refers to certain minimal ethico-political
standards, i.e., in which, to put it in pathetic terms, those in power still "have conscience." Recall Gandhi's reply, in the late 1930s, to the
question of what should the Jews in Germany do against Hitler: they should commit a collective
suicide and thus arouse the conscience of the world... One can easily imagine what the Nazi
reaction to it would have been: OK, we will help you, where do you want the poison to be
delivered to you? There is, however, another way in which Balibar's plea for renouncing violence
can be given a specific twist - that of what one is tempted to call the Bartleby-politics. Recall the two symmetrically
opposed modes of the "living dead," of finding oneself in the uncanny place "between the two
deaths": one is either biologically dead while symbolically alive (surviving one's biological death as a spectral apparition or symbolic authority of the
Name), or symbolically dead while biologically alive (those excluded from the socio-symbolic order, from Antigone to today's homo sacer). And what if
we apply the same logic to the opposition of violence and non-violence, identifying two modes of their intersection? We all know the pop-psychological
notion of the "passive-aggressive behavior," usually applied to a housewife who, instead of actively opposing her husband, passively sabotages him. And
this brings us back to our beginning: perhaps, one should assert this attitude of passive aggressivity as a
proper radical political gesture, in contrast to aggressive passivity, the standard "interpassive" mode of our
participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make it sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change
. In such a constellation, the first truly critical ("aggressive," violent) step is to WITHDRAW into
passivity , to refuse to participate - Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" is the necessary first step
which as it were clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the
coordinates of the constellation.


This refusal is a springboard for the creation of dissensus that politicizes the gap
between the Wests construction of human rights and the claims to rights of those
who are denied a space in the very negotiation of rights themselves. The plan is a
starting point for reframing the global discussion of human rights and democracy
Ranciere 4
(Jacques, a man who needs no introduction, Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103.2/3, 2004, 297-310, [CL])

If we want to get out of this ontological trap, we have to reset the question of the Rights of Manmore
precisely, the question of their subjectwhich is the subject of politics as well. This means setting the question of what politics is on a
different footing. In order to do this, let us have a closer look at the Arendtian argument about the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, an argument that
Agamben basically endorses. She makes them a quandary, which can be put as follows: either the rights of the citizen are the
rights of manbut the rights of man are the rights of the unpoliticized person; they are the rights of those
who have no rights, which amounts to nothingor the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, the rights attached to the
fact of being a citizen of such or such constitutional state. This means that they are the rights of those who have rights, which amounts to a tautology.11
Either the rights of those who have no rights or the rights of those who have rights. Either a void or a tautology, and, in both
cases, a deceptive trick, such is the lock that she builds. It works out only at the cost of sweeping aside the third assumption that would
escape the quandary. There is indeed a third assumption, which I would put as follows: the Rights of Man are the
rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not. Let us
to try to make sense of the sentenceor develop the equation. It is clear that the equation cannot be resolved by the identification of a single x. The
Rights of Man are not the rights of a single subject that would be at once the source and the bearer of the rights and would only use the rights that she
or he possesses. If this was the case, indeed, it would be easy to prove, as Arendt does, that such a subject does not exist. But the relation of
the subject to his or her rights is a little more complicated and entangled. It is enacted through a double
negation. The subject of rights is the subject, or more accurately the process of subjectivization, that bridges the
interval between two forms of the existence of those rights. Two forms of existence. First, they are written rights. They are inscriptions
of the community as free and equal. As such, they are not only the [End Page 302] predicates of a nonexisting being. Even though actual situations of
rightlessness may give them the lie, they are not only an abstract ideal, situated far from the givens of the situation. They are also part of the
configuration of the given. What is given is not only a situation of inequality. It is also an inscription, a
form of visibility of equality. Second, the Rights of Man are the rights of those who make
something of that inscription, who decide not only to "use" their rights but also to build such and such a case for the verification of the
power of the inscription. It is not only a matter of checking whether the reality confirms or denies the rights. The point is about what
confirmation or denial means. Man and citizen do not designate collections of individuals.
Man and citizen are political subjects. Political subjects are not definite collectivities. They are surplus names,
names that set out a question or a dispute (litige) about who is included in their count. Correspondingly,
freedom and equality are not predicates belonging to definite subjects. Political predicates are open predicates: they open up a dispute about what they
exactly entail and whom they concern in which cases. The Declaration of Rights states that all men are born free and equal. Now the question arises:
What is the sphere of implementation of these predicates? If you answer, as Arendt does, that it is the sphere of citizenship, the sphere of political life,
separated from the sphere of private life, you sort out the problem in advance. The point is, precisely, where do you draw the line
separating one life from the other? Politics is about that border. It is the activity that brings it back into question.
This point was clearly made during the French Revolution by a revolutionary woman, Olympe de Gouges, in her famous statement that if women are
entitled to go to the scaffold, they are entitled to go to the assembly. The point was precisely that equal-born women were not equal citizens. They could
neither vote nor be elected. The reason for the prescription was, as usual, that they could not fit the purity of political life. They allegedly belonged to
private, domestic life. And the common good of the community had to be kept apart from the activities, feelings, and interests of private life. Olympe de
Gouge's argumentation precisely showed that the border separating bare life and political life could not be so clearly drawn. There was at least one
point where "bare life" proved to be "political": there were women sentenced to death, as enemies of the revolution. If they could lose their "bare life"
out of a public judgment based on political reasons, this meant that even their bare lifetheir life doomed to deathwas political. If, under [End Page
303] the guillotine, they were as equal, so to speak, "as men," they had the right to the whole of equality, including equal participation to political life.
Of course the deduction could not be endorsedit could not even be heardby the lawmakers. Nevertheless, it could be enacted in the
process of a wrong, in the construction of a dissensus. A dissensus is not a conflict of interests,
opinions, or values; it is a division put in the "common sense": a dispute about what is given, about
the frame within which we see something as given. Women could make a twofold demonstration.
They could demonstrate that they were deprived of the rights that they had, thanks to the Declaration of
Rights. And they could demonstrate, through their public action, that they had the rights that the
constitution denied to them, that they could enact those rights. So they could act as subjects of the Rights of Man in the precise sense
that I have mentioned. They acted as subjects that did not have the rights that they had and had the
rights that they had not. This is what I call a dissensus: putting two worlds in one and the same
world. A political subject, as I understand it, is a capacity for staging such scenes of dissensus. It appears thus that man is not the void term opposed
to the actual rights of the citizen. It has a positive content that is the dismissal of any difference between those who "live" in such or such sphere of
existence, between those who are or are not qualified for political life. The very difference between man and citizen is not a
sign of disjunction proving that the rights are either void or tautological. It is the opening of an interval for political
subjectivization. Political names are litigious names, names whose extension and comprehension are uncertain and which open for that reason
the space of a test or verification. Political subjects build such cases of verification. They put to test the power of political names, their extension and
comprehension. They not only confront the inscriptions of rights to situations of denial; they put
together the world where those rights are valid and the world where they are not. They put together a
relation of inclusion and a relation of exclusion. The generic name of the subjects who stage such cases of
verification is the name of the demos, the name of the people. At the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben emphasizes what he calls the
"constant ambiguity" of the people that is at once the name of the political body and the name of the lower classes. He sees in this ambiguity the mark
of the correlation between bare life and sovereignty.12 But the demosor the peopledoes not mean the lower classes. Nor does it mean bare life.
Democracy is not the power of the poor. It is the power of those who have no qualification for exercising power. [End Page 304] In the third book of
Laws, Plato lists all the qualifications that are or claim to be sources of legitimate authority.13 Such are the powers of the masters over the slaves, of the
old over the young, of the learned people over the ignorant people, and so on. But, at the end of the list, there is an anomaly, a "qualification" for power
that he calls ironically God's choice, meaning by that mere chance: the power gained by drawing lots, the name of which is democracy.
Democracy is the power of those who have no specific qualification for ruling, except the fact of
having no qualification. As I interpret it, the demosthe political subject as suchhas to be identified with the totality made by those who
have no "qualification." I called it the count of the uncountedor the part of those who have no part. It does not
mean the population of the poor; it means a supplementary part, an empty part that separates the political community from the count of the parts of
the population.