At Oklahoma Jive

BLACK KNIGHTS 07/08 Beating You On The West Evidence Since 2007
AT: Oklahoma’s Jive 1/27

INDEX
Give Back (Most Of) The Land......................................................................................2
Trust Me, This Is Exactly The Type Of Nihilism You Are...........................................12
No, Donny, You Can’t Run Nihilism On The Aff........................................................21
AT: Rules Are Meaningless (their dumb answer to topicality).....................................27
Even the young no longer believe their myth, although they are quite willing to promote it when convenient.
Punk nihilism was never more than the nihilism of the commodity itself. – Paul Mann
Give Back (Most Of) The Land
OBSERVATION ONE: THE ALTERNATIVE FAILS
1. THE ALTERNATIVE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT UNCONCEPTUALIZED AND IS ASSUMED TO BE SOME SORT OF

CUMULATIVE SPREAD OF RESISTANCE THAT WILL WIPE THE SLATE CLEAN, UNFORTUNATELY, THIS FOCUS ON
LOCAL CHANGE REINFORCES EXISTING STRUCTURES OF DOMINATION AND SHORT-CIRCUITS THE MOVEMENT.
KATZ 00 [Adam, University of Hartford, Postmodernism and the politics of “culture”, p. 146-147]
However, the
transition from one mode of transformation to another—what should be the fundamental task of
cultural studies—is left unconceptualized and is implicitly understood as a kind of additive or cumulative
spread of local democratic sites until society as a whole is transformed. What this overlooks, of course, is the
way in which, as long as global economic and political structures remain unchanged and unchallenged, local
emancipations can only be redistributions—redistributions that actually support existing social relations by
merely shifting the greater burdens onto others who are less capable of achieving their own local
emancipation. .
2. CREATING LASTING CHANGE IN THE FACE OF AN OFTEN VIOLENT STATE RESPONSE IS INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT
CAREFUL CALCULATION IS CRUCIAL
KHAN 94 [Ali, 1994, 38 How. L.J. 79, p. lexis]

For example, the oppressed should never overestimate the effectiveness of non-legal means. Any
means necessary is an act of defiance, but it is
easier said than done. Most oppressed groups lack the resources to present a serious challenge to a system of
oppression. They may engage in criminal activity endangering the life, liberty, and [*117] property of the
oppressor. 134 They may not, however, have the means to strike at the heart of oppression. In contrast, the
oppressor will have several weapons to fight any rebellion against the system. Most frequently, the
oppressed will lose the opening battles and may have to engage in a protracted armed struggle to wear down
the oppressor. Thus, without caution and calculation, 135 the doctrine of any means necessary is a suicidal
pact prompting the weak to ask for a quick annihilation.
THUS WE OFFER THE FOLLOWING PERMUTATION:

DO THE PLAN AND GIVE BACK ALL THE LAND THAT INDIANS NEVER SIGNED AWAY IN TREATIES. WE RESERVE
THE RIGHT TO CLARIFY INTENT.
OBSERVATION TWO: TOO LEGIT TO QUIT
1. THE PERMUTATION IS NOT INTRINSIC OR SEVERANCE – IT DOES ALL OF THE PLAN AND PART OF THE
ALTERNATIVE.
2. ALSO, TEXTUAL COMPETITION IS BAD:
3. BUT, FUNCTIONAL COMPETITION IS GOOD:
4. EVEN IF THOSE THEORY ARGS MAKE NO SENSE, YOUR ALTERNATIVE IS VAGUE AND JUSTIFIES A SLIGHTLY
INTRINSIC PERMUTATION, CAUSE VAGUENESS IS BAD:
a. THIS TOTALLY GUTS OUR ABILITY TO CRAFT DISADS TO THE ALT WHICH MEANS
THERE IS NEVER A WORLD IN WHICH THE AFF CAN BE OFFENSIVE
b. CX DOESN’T CHECK THIS. THE ALT TEXT IS A STABLE BINDING ADVOCACY IN A WORLD
THAT IT IS VAGUE WE CANNOT CREATE AN OFFENSIVE PERMUTATION THIS CRUSHES AFF
STRAT AND FAIRNESS.
c. THE DAMAGE IS DONE THIS HAS KILLED OUR 2AC STRAT AND TIME ALLOCATE THIS IS
A VOTING ISSUE FOR TIME SKEW, FAIRNESS AND COMPETITIVE EQUITY
OBSERVATION THREE – WE WIN.
1. BASING GIVING THE LAND BACK ON RECOGNITION OF INDIAN TREATY CLAIMS IS KEY TO UNITING
INTERNATIONAL INDIGENOUS STRUGGLES – CHURCHILL SAYS THIS IS THE BEST STARTING POINT AND THE ONLY
PROPER WAY TO UNDERSTAND THE NATIVE STRUGGLE. THIS SOLVES TAXING, REGULATION, STRIP MINING,
MILITARIZATION, HYDROELECTRIC GENERATION, OVERIRRIGATION, AND NUCLEAR TESTING, AND FOCUSING ON
EXISTING TREATY CLAIMS IS KEY TO KEEP THE ISSUE GROUNDED IN INTERNATIONAL LAW AND PREVENT
COOPTION AND “REINTERPRETATION” BY THE NATION-STATE. THE ALTERNATIVE CAN’T ACCESS THIS BECAUSE
IT ENTIRELY IGNORES THAT INDIANS HAVE LEGAL CLAIMS TO SPECIFIC PARTS OF THE COUNTRY UNDER
INTERNATIONAL TREATY LAW
CHURCHILL 93 [Ward, Struggle for the Land, 1993, p.4-5]

Today a lot of people question the necessity and utility of centralized nation-state governances and economics. They find the status quo to be increasingly absurd and are
seeking alternatives to the values and patterns of consumption presently dominating not only North America, but the rest of the planet as well. The living reality of Native
North America, and the bioregionally determined redefinition of polity it represents, offers the model for an alternative arrangement. And, if Leopold Kohr and the Basques
say such a naturally grounded structure could work in Europe, why not here? It is obviously important that everyone learn as much as possible about American Indian
realities, rather than the self-serving junk they usually teach in school. The second important aspect of the map is the legal basis for protecting the environment and its
The native struggle in North America today can only be properly understood as a pursuit of
inhabitants it points up.
the recovery of land rights which are guaranteed through treaties. What Indians ask-what we really expect-
from those who claim to be our friends and allies is respect and support for these treaty rights. What does
this mean? Well, it starts with advocating that Indians regain use of and jurisdiction over what the treaties
define as being our lands. It means direct support to Indian efforts to recover these lands, but not governmental attempts to “compensate” us with money for
lands we never agreed to sell. This, in turn, means that those indigenous governments which traditionally held regulatory and enforcement power within Indian Country-not
the more modern and otherwise non-traditional tribal councils imposed upon Indians by the federal government under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934-should have
By extension, this would mean that much land which is currently taxed, regulated,
the right to resume their activities now.
strip mined, militarized, drowned by hydroelectric generation or overirrigation, and nuked by the U.S. and Canadian
governments would no longer be under their control or jurisdiction any longer. Surely, this is a prospect which all progressive and
socially conscious people can embrace.
What is perhaps most important about Indian treaty rights is the power of the documents at issue to clarify
matters which would otherwise be consigned by nation-state apologists to the realm of "opinion" and
"interpretation." The treaties lay things out clearly, and they are instruments of international law. In this
sense, the violation of the treaty rights of any given people represents a plain transgression against the rights
of all people, everywhere. This can be a potent weapon in the organization of struggles for justice and sanity
in every corner of the globe. And it should be appreciated as such by those who champion causes ranging
from protection of the environment to universal human rights.
2. PERM SOLVES – CHURCHILL DOESN’T ADVOCATE GIVING ALL THE LAND BACK – HE ADVOCATES GIVING
BACK LAND THAT INDIANS NEVER SIGNED AWAY IN TREATIES – WHICH IS ROUGHLY 30% OF THE COUNTRY
THAT THE UNITED STATES HAS NO LEGAL CLAIM TO. THIS SHOULD BE THE BEGINNING POINT FOR ANY
INDIGENOUS ENDEAVOR IN THE UNITED STATES AND IT WILL SET A FOUNDATION FOR A MORE FUNDAMENTAL
RECONFIGURATION OF POWER NOT JUST FOR INDIANS BUT FOR EVERYONE ELSE AS WELL. CHURCHILL
MAINTAINS THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SOLVE, OR EVEN BEGIN TO ADDRESS ANY OF THESE PROBLEMS ABSENT
THIS PARTICULAR STARTING POINT.
CHURCHILL 93 [Ward, Struggle of the Land, 1993, p. 414-415]

When all is said and done, however, even those extremely dubious bases for U.S. title are insufficient to cover the gross territoriality at issue. The federal government itself
tacitly admitted as much during the 1970’s in the findings of the so-called Indian Claims Commission, an entity created in 1946 to make “quiet” title to all illegally taken
What the commission did over the ensuing thirty-five years was in significant part
Indian land within the lower 48 states.
to research the ostensible documentary basis for U.S. title to literally every square foot of its claimed
territory. It found, among other things, that the United States had no legal basis whatsoever-no treaty, no
agreement, not even an arbitrary act of Congress-to fully one-third of the area within its boundaries. At the
same time, the data revealed that the reserved areas still nominally possessed by Indians had been reduced
to about 2.5 percent of the same area. What this means in plain English is that the United States cannot
pretend to have even a shred of legitimacy in its occupancy and control of upwards of thirty percent of its
“home” territory. And, les such matters be totally lost in the shuffle, I should note that it has even less legal basis for its claims to the land in Alaska and Hawai’i.
Beyond that, its “right” to assert dominion over Puerto Rico, the “U.S. Virgin Islands”, “American” Samoa, Guam, and the Marshall Islands tends to speak for itself.
Leaving aside questions concerning the validity of various treaties, the beginning point for any indigenist
endeavor in the United States centers, logically enough, is in efforts to restore direct Indian control over the
huge portion of the continental United States that was plainly never ceded by native nations. Upon the
bedrock of this foundation, a number of other problems integral to the present configuration of power and
privilege in North American society can be resolved, not just for Indians, but for everyone else as well. It is
probably impossible to solve, or even to begin meaningfully addressing, certain of these problems in any
other way. But still, it is, as they say, “no easy sell” to convince anyone outside the more conscious sectors of the American Indian population itself of the truth of this
very simply fact.
3. DEMANDING THE FORECLOSED PROMISES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW ALLOWS US TO READ THE LETTER OF THE
LAW AGAINST ITSELF, CATASTROPHICALLY RUPTURING THE EXCLUSIVE POLITICS OF THE STATUS QUO BY
RESISTING OUR OWN PASSIVE SUBJECTIVITY
ZIZEK 97 [Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociology in Ljubljana, The Plague of Fantasies, p.28-30]
4. LEGAL CHALLENGES HELP TO PRODUCE LOCALIZED SOCIAL CHANGE, GIVE POWER TO MARGINALIZED
GROUPS, AND SPUR MOVEMENTS.
BROWN-NAGIN 2K5
(Tomiko, “Elites, Social Movements, and the Law: The Case of Affirmative Action”, professor of U of Virginia Law School, Columbia Law Review, June)
The critical view has met with resistance in the scholarly community, 306 however, including among legal mobilization theorists. These scholars are skeptical of the critics'
claims that law is unlikely to produce fundamental change. 307 Critics advancing a "legal mobilization" theory urge scholars to focus more closely on precisely what counsel
and client communities hope to achieve through litigation and on how they deploy legal discourse to their advantage - despite its limitations. 308 Mobilization
scholars emphasize law's politically "mobilizing" effect. In their view, Rosenberg's negative assessment of law's
309
ability to produce change is excessively pessimistic. According to mobilization scholars, Rosenberg's unjustified pessimism can be traced to
flawed methodology. Rosenberg was hamstrung by a narrow, institutional focus. He measured success in terms of direct consequences of legal campaigns - whether lawyers
win their cases and whether court victories translate into policy changes with nationwide impact. 310
Legal mobilization theorists argue that top-down scholarship such as Rosenberg's, though vitally important, misses the politically
sophisticated stratagems that lawyers bring to their legal campaigns. Of course, litigators want to win their cases, but they
311
do not view litigation as a "zero-sum" game. 312 These lawyers define success more broadly, in terms that cannot be
captured easily, if at all, by statistical data gleaned from conventional sources such as media reports and surveys of public opinion. They seek to generate
313
and leverage the beneficial, indirect 314 or "radiating" effects that they presume flow from change-oriented
litigation campaigns. Thus, for mobilization theorists, litigation can be indirectly efficacious even if claims never reach the trial stage or lawyers do not
316
prevail in the courts or on appeal. 317
Under this view, law

is deployed as a tactic for altering perceptions and raising expectations about the prospects
for change within client communities. 318 It creates "opportunity structures" and "discursive frameworks"
319 that can be exploited by the socially marginalized. 320 Lawyers can mobilize communities by
"enhancing" a "sense of efficacy"; providing "organizing skills and resources" and "symbols for rallying a
group"; "broadcasting awareness of grievance"; "dramatizing challenge to the status quo"; helping
laypeople "take themselves seriously" and "believe ... in its capabilities"; "lending an air of importance and
legitimacy to what is often a meager group of citizens with very little political experience"; putting at the community's
disposal "litigation and its credible promise of tangible and proximate results in the form of courtroom victories"; and "counseling organizational leaders on how to behave
so as to maximize" the chances of a legal victory. 321 In short, legal
mobilization is conceived as a "social movement tactic" 322 in
and of itself, or as a crucial element in "movement building" 323 that helps lay citizens make "tactical judgments." Lawyers 324
facilitate rather than dominate or fragment movement activity 325 because they have developed "flexible lawyering" [*1501] techniques that make them capable of engaging
in political action and working with nonlawyers. 326
5. READING LEGAL ARGUMENT AS NARRATIVES IS CRITICAL – WE MUST REJECT A READING OF THE LAW AS
PURELY PHILOSOPHICAL BECAUSE DOING SO IS ALWAYS-ALREADY AN INCOMPLETE INQUIRY. ONLY THROUGH
EXPERIENCING LEGAL DISCUSSION THROUGH THE LENS OF MYTHIC NARRATIVE CAN THE READER INTERROGATE
MORALITY
WEST 95 [Robin, Law School Prof. Stanford, JURISPRUDENCE AS NARRATIVE: AN AESTHETIC ANALYSIS OF MODERN LEGAL THEORY 60 N.Y.U.L.
Rev. 145
Legal theory is a product not only of our philosophical commitments and political will, but also of our
narrative imagination. The relatively autonomous world of narrative provides the legal theorist with moral
freedom to translate dreams and nightmares into narrative stories of moral choices set in fictive worlds.
Reading legal theory as narrative forces us to focus upon our imaginative choices -- our responsibility for
the worlds we, as theorists, create with words.Narrative vision, more autonomous than philosophical and political vision, poses choices not open to the
empiricist. Similarly, narrative method poses a choice that philosophical and political analysis often lacks. Only in
recognizing this role of narrative vision and method can we appreciate the moral significance of our legal theory. The narrative in legal theory, like all
narrative, brings us face to face with our moral selves, our moral options and our capacity for moral action.The
legal theorist's narrative visions, unlike empirical descriptions of reality, do not aim for mere accuracy. The comic and tragic undisplaced myths which
are the core of narrative do not try to describe the world accurately. We are not compelled to accept or
reject an aesthetic vision of human nature that appears in a novel or in a legal theory; we need not accept Dworkin's or Holmes's aesthetic premises
any more than we need accept D. H. Lawrence's depiction of human sexuality. Dworkin's apocalyptic, principled legal heaven is not a world we judge by its descriptive
accuracy. Although based on a more or less articulable description [*210] of human nature, the description is a part of narrative, not fact. Dworkin's Hercules is a
romantic hero, not a description of ideal judicial conduct. He is a romanticization of the reasonableness of authority, and his world romanticizes reason itself. The accuracy
of Hercules and his world is beside the point: rather, we must ask whether the imaginative vision Dworkin presents is attractive or repulsive, whether it is "true" not to this
world, but to our hopes for the world.Is Hercules genuinely heroic? Do we find his legal world desirable? Our answers to these
questions reveal something about us and the role of law, authority, and reason in our dreams and
nightmares. The narrative visions that recur in legal theory lead us to focus upon ourselves and the
possibilities we envision for ourselves in a way that strict empiricism does not allow. The narrative vision in
legal theory helps us understand our own internal experience of the real world and our idealistic hopes for
it. At its best, the descriptive component of the narrative in legal theory can lead us to reexamine our initial experiences of authority, to reassess our early reactions to
relationships based on reason and power, and to formulate a wiser, more self-reflective vision of the future moral
possibilities of the law.Similarly, the methodological component of legal theory, read as narrative, reveals a moral choice that a purely analytical reading will
often obscure. We are not "driven" in any sense to choose between romantic and ironic narrative modes. The choice between irony and romance is a free choice between a
"method of discovery" of the actual and a "moral quest" for the ideal. What choice we make depends not on our philosophical commitments, but on whether we trust the
world, whether we have hope for it, whether we find it interesting and are comfortable in it, and which method we find more useful, more compelling, more strategic, and
even more fun. The theoretical methods to which we subscribe or with which we feel ourselves in agreement reveal a range of nonintellectual, affective human experiences
and autonomous human choices.Our choice of vision and method in legal theory thus reflects our hopes for the world
and our vision of our own role within it. The various protagonists created by legal theorists are not signs for the virtues and dangers of legality, any
more than a landscape is a roadmap. They are not about our world -- they, like the law itself, are a part of our artificial
world. Like law itself, they are creations of our desires, fears, and imagination. To the extent that legal theory is narrative,
however, it is also art. Therefore we must decide not whether the worlds we envision are true or false, right or wrong.
Rather, we must decide whether they are attractive or repulsive, beautiful or ugly. Our acceptance or
rejection of these aesthetic visions will in turn influence the historical choices we [*211] must make. The aesthetic
quality of our art, like the quality of our play, deeply affects our lives: our imaginings are not only a part of our present, but a way of determining the limits of our future.
This effect can be quite immediate, for although the literary narrator has a detached relation to his hero, we have a pronounced habit of quickly becoming the legal actors we
like to imagine.Of course, not only legal theorists need to be more sensitive to the aesthetic dimension of their thinking on law. Judges, legislators, and lawyers also make
methodological and visionary choices, and must refer to their personal histories when formulating a theory of human nature and social interaction upon which to ground
their work. However, there is an important difference between the legal theorist and the legal actor: judges, legistors, and lawyers, if acting responsibly, keep these narrative
instincts separate from the act of lawmaking, or at least weigh them against other institutional concerns.Legal theorists, on the contrary, can and should
give full rein to their imaginative, utopian instincts. Legal theorists do not make law: they do not decide
cases, vote on bills, or undertake the representation of clients and hence the furtherance of those clients' interest. Consequently, they have the freedom
which institutional responsibility does not allow; they are a step further removed from history than judges or
legislators. In lieu of the present world, however, theorists can and must be responsible to the future, imaginable world
6. THE ALTERNATIVE IS THE MORAL NIHILISM OF LEGAL POSITIVISM – WITHOUT ANY TIE TO MYTHIC IDEALS,
IT FINDS ULTIMATE EXPRESSION IN TOTALITARIANISM
WEST 95 [Robin, Law School Prof. Stanford, JURISPRUDENCE AS NARRATIVE: AN AESTHETIC ANALYSIS OF MODERN LEGAL THEORY 60 N.Y.U.L.
Rev. 145
It is one thing, of course, to describe our legal world in tragic-ironic tones, another entirely to endorse the
laws such a mythology inspires. Few, if any, modern American theorists would overtly justify oppression with the straightforward assertion that human
nature is at root unavoidably sadistic and complementarily masochistic. The unrecognized and unacknowledged presence of an ironic-
tragic sensibility may, however, be precisely what has left our legal community so habitually unaccustomed to
forming normative judgments of good and evil. In the name of "law" and "legalism" we tolerate much evil:
Nazis marching in a town of Holocaust survivors; literature, film, and speech depicting the violent and [*200]
graphic degradation of women; the continuing creation of an ever more firmly entrenched economic
subterranean underclass. The danger we must face is that our tolerance of evil will blind us to it.
In the middle of this century, the German legal philosopher Gustav Radbruch
warned his colleagues that legal positivism, though the
sword of the English legal reformer, often becomes the protective shield of the coward when the positive law it analyzes
ought to be not merely reformed, but denounced and defied. n204 the Germanic positivism Radbruch feared embraced
state supremacy and exclusivity in much the same way that modern positivist legal practitioners in America embrace political and economic
individualism. For the German positivist and increasingly for this American legal nobility, the world of law exhausts the formal, objective normative universe. n205 For
both, then, there
is no normative ground upon which the legal world can be judged as good or bad: law is what is
real and law is all that is real. Radbruch warned that in this moral nihilism and resignation could be found a partial
explanation for the German legal profession's failure to condemn the totalitarianism of the Nazi state. n206 Our
own legal profession, although not faced with a similarly clear-cut moral crisis, at times exhibits a similar moral paralysis and resigned moral relativism. n207
7. I KNOW, I KNOW, WE USE THE STATE, BUT WE SHOULD EMPLOY STATE SOVEREIGNTY WHEN THE SPECIFICITY
OF A SITUATION DEMANDS IT. ESPECIALLY WHEN YOUR AUTHOR SPECIFICALLY DEMANDS IT. THIS DOESN’T
AFFECT OUR ABILITY TO THINK AND DECONSTRUCT ITS HERITAGE – YOUR ANALYSIS OF “YOU USE THE
COLONIALIST STATE” IS OVERLY SIMPLISTIC.
DERRIDA 04 [Jacques, For what tomorrow?, p. 91-92]

A moment ago you spoke of the regicide as the necessity of an exception, in sum. Well, yes, one can refer provisionally to Carl Schmitt (whatever one may think of him, his
arguments are always useful for problematizing the “political” or the “juridical”; I examined this question in Politics of Friendship). He says in effect that a sovereign is
defined by his capacity to decide the exception. The revolutionaries decided that at that moment that it was necessaryto suspend justice and—in order to establish the law
and to give the Revolution its rights—to suspend the rule of law. Schmitt also gives this definition of sovereignty: to have the right to suspend the law, or the rule of law, the
constitutional state. Without this category of exception, we cannot understand the concept of sovereignty.
Today, the great question is indeed, everywhere, that of sovereignty. Omnipresent in our discourses and in our axioms, under its own
name or another, literally or figuratively, this concept has a theological origin: the true sovereign is God. The concept of this authority or of this power was transferred to the
monarch, said to have a “divine right.” Sovereignty was then delegated to the people, in the form of democracy, or to the nation, with the same theological attributes as
those attributed to the king and to God. Today, whenever the word “sovereignty” is spoken, this heritage remains undeniable, whatever internal differentiation one may
recognize in it. How do we deal with this? Here we return to the question of heritage with which we began. It is
necessary to deconstruct the concept of sovereignty, never to forget its theological filiation and to be reayd to
call this filiation into question wherever we discern its effects. This supposes an inflexible critique of the logic of the state and of the
nation-state. And yet—hence the enormous responsibility of the citizen and of the heir in general, in certain situations—the state, in its actual
form, can resist certain forces that I consider the most threatening. What I here call “responsibility” is what
dictates the decision to be sometimes for the sovereign state and sometimes against it, for its deconstruction
(“theoretical and practical” as one used to say) according to the singularity of the contexts and the stakes. There is no
relativism in this, no renunciation of the injunction to “think” and to deconstruct the heritage. This aporia
is in truth the very condition of decision and responsibility—if there is any.
Trust Me, This Is Exactly The Type Of Nihilism You Are
(AND IF NOT, THIS COVERS ALL OF THEM)
1. NIHILISM DOESN’T EXIST- EVERY CONCEIVABLE FORM OF NEGATION IS ALREADY RECUPERATED. I.E. WHAT
IS OCCURING HERE- A BUNCH OF COLLEGE KIDS WHO KNOW THAT THIS ACTIVITY IS ONLY A GAME STILL
USING IT TO PROPOSE SOCIAL CHANGE…OUR WHOLE LIVES ARE NIHILISTIC PAR EXCELLENCE, AND THEREBY
NOT NIHILISTIC AT ALL.
MANN 1995 [BALLER, STUPID UNDERGROUNDS, POSTMODERN CULTURE 5.3]

One might find it amusing to assume the pose of someone who states problems with brutal simplicity. As in this little nugget: Every historical form of cultural and political
revolt, transgression, opposition, and escape has turned out to be nothing more than a systemic function. The notion of recuperation has encountered a thousand alibis and
counter-tropes but still constitutes the closest thing cultural study has to a natural law. Collage, antimelodic high-decibel music, antimasterpieces, romantic primitivism,
drunkenness and drugs, renegade sexuality, criticism itself: it is amazing that a single radical claim can still be made for any of this, and entirely characteristic that it is.
Every conceivable form of negation has been dialectically coordinated into the mechanism of progress. The
future of the anti has not yet been reconceived. That is why it is ridiculous to accuse some poor kid with a
bad attitude or some putative grownup with a critique but no "positive program for change" of being
nihilistic: strictly speaking, nihilism doesn't exist. What was once called nihilism has long since revealed
itself as a general, integral function of a culture that, in all its glorious positivism, is far more destructive
than the most vehement no. Nothing could be more destructive, more cancerous, than the positive proliferation of civilization (now there's a critical cliché),
and all the forms of opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of advancing it. As for the ethos of "resistance": just because something feels
like resistance and still manages to offend a few people (usually not even the right people) hardly makes it effective. It is
merely ressentiment in one or another ideological drag. And how can anyone still be deluded by youth, by its tedious shrugs of revolt?
Punk nihilism was never more than the nihilism of the commodity itself. You should not credit Malcolm McLaren with having
realized this just because he was once pro-situ. All he wanted was to sell more trousers without boring himself to death; indeed he is proof that the guy with the flashiest
ressentiment sells the most rags. And if he wasn't bored, can he be said to have advanced the same favor to us?
2. EITHER WAY THE ALTERNATIVE TURNS ITSELF – IT CHOOSES HOMELESSNESS IN THIS WORLD IN ORDER TO
ENGAGE IN A HEROIC BATTLE WITH METAPHYSICS BUT THIS REJECTION IS A SYMPTOM OF A SUBJECTIVISM THAT
ISOLATES HUMANS FROM EACHOTHER AND THE WORLD – THE ONLY WAY OUT IS TO LEAVE METAPHYSICS ALONE,
CONNECT WITH OTHERS AND TAKE ACTION TO IMPROVE THE WORLD WE ALL LIVE IN THROUGH ACTIVE
EXPLORATION OF THE HISTORICAL FINITUDE WE FIND OURSELVES THROWN INTO.
THIELE 95 [Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics, Princeton University Press pg. 33-35]
Many have chosen homelessness in one realm in order to find their proper abode in another. Diogenes of Sinope, the
founder of Cynicism, reputedly lived in a tub and was homeless in his native land so that he might declare himself a cosmopolites. Not unlike Diogenes, Nietzsche held
familiar and customary things in disdain. For
Nietzsche, however, the rejection was total and unrelenting. Through the power of
will he sought to overcome and do without not only morality and metaphysics, but also social and political
community. Unlike Diogenes, Nietzsche denied himself refuge in universal citizenship and the realm of natural law. He allowed himself no home
whatsoever. Nietzsche speaks of the will to power as the "strangest of all guests." Heidegger's assessment reveals the core of this
thought: "It is called the 'strangest' because as the unconditional will to will, it wants homelessness as such"
(QB 37).
Heidegger insists that the homelessness evidenced generally in contemporary life and specifically in Nietzsche's
philosophy is a "symptom of the oblivion of Being [Seinsvergessenheit]" (BW 218). More precisely, homelessness is a product
of the subjectivism that isolates humans from each other and from their world. Heidegger traces its
development to the disengagement of Being from becoming, the subsequent preoccupation with the
enduring reality of beings over the presencing nature of Being, and the transformation of these orientations
into an understanding of truth as representational and ultimately subjective. That is to say, homelessness finds its
roots in the sustained reign of metaphysical thought. The remedy for homelessness entails transcending the subjectivist tradition. However,
Heidegger insists that transcendence of metaphysics is not to be achieved in direct battle with it. The only possible
result of such a tactic, as Nietzsche demonstrates, is more metaphysics, albeit with its nature obscured by the
struggle. A "regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics," Heidegger writes.
"Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself" (TB 24).
The preeminent spiritual nomad, Friedrich Nietzsche, could not leave metaphysics alone. He hoped to escape its inherent
nihilism through a heroic struggle with it. He identified the essence of this struggle as a celebration of life out of the depth of his suffering. His
disdain for his time derived from his belief that modern humanity retained neither the capacity for deep suffering nor the heroic passion for worldly life. Nihilism
tortured Nietzsche in large part because he foresaw that it would soon become accepted with complacency.
The Last Man would announce his happiness, his comfort, and blink. As Heidegger describes life after Nietzsche: "What was once
the scream 'The wasteland grows. . . ,' now threatens to turn into chatter" (WCT 49). Nietzsche's rejection of a worldly home intensified as
his world turned into a waste¬land before him. Indeed, he was forced to incorporate homelessness so radically and celebrate homelessness so
tragically in his own life and philosophy because, in the end, he could in no other way tolerate its menace.
Complacency in homelessness threatens to become the postmodern condition. The alternative to such
homelessness entails acknowledging the world as the place of human dwelling. Such an acknowledgment
would maintain humanity as the discloser of the world, rather than its master and possessor; the earth as an abode in
need of caretaking, rather than a resource awaiting exploitation; and human relations as the partnerships—undeniably agonistic at
times—allowing for the discovery of our tasks and potentials, rather than raw material for administration. The learning of
such guardianship in the realm of worldy things is inseparable from the learning of guardianship in the
realm of thought. And this entails leaving metaphysics alone.
Leaving metaphysics alone, however, is not a passive affair. On the contrary, it entails the active exploration
and exercise of human freedom in thought, speech, and action. The transcendence of metaphysics is, for this
reason, a worldly event, both philosophical and political in nature.
3. DON’T GIVE ME THAT “WE’RE NOT THAT KIND OF NIHILISM” B.S. – YOUR ATTEMPT TO REFIT NIETZSCHE
WITH A POLITICAL FACE WILL ALWAYS PROVE EITHER MEANINGLESS AND DEBILITATING OR INTOXICATINGLY
DECADENT AND NIHILIST (THAT’S THE BAD KIND).
EITHER NIETZSCHE’S DESTRUCTION OF METAPHYSICS LEAVES YOUR ALTERNATIVE AT A LOSS TO DEFINE
POLITICS, OR YOUR ALTERNATIVE IS SUCH AN ADULTERATION OF NIETZSCHE’S THOUGHT THAT IT IS NO LONGER
A USEFUL STARTING POINT FOR POLITICAL INQUIRY. EVERY ATTEMPT TO REDEPLOY NIETZSCHE WILL FAIL
UNTIL WE UNLEARN HIS LEGACY AND REACH BEYOND THE HOMELESSNESS OF HIS POSITION – UNLESS YOU’VE
BEEN READING HEIDEGGER, YOU LOSE.
The irony is that Nietzsche, the severest critic of Western culture, would champion the West's most
cherished value: freedom. Nietzsche's brilliance is most evident in his analysis of the constraint, sacrifice, and slavery elicited and maintained in the name of
reason, morality, and their metaphysical truths. The task taken on by many of Nietzsche's postmodern readers is to
demonstrate the liberating effects of his destruction of metaphysics. Applauding Nietzsche for this feat,
however, leaves one rather disadvantaged in the effort to establish or renew social and political sensibilities.
Nietzsche's brand of freedom is simply too powerful an elixir to be left unregulated within the polity. It
serves, alternately, as an anesthetic or an intoxicant.
The difficulty, then, is twofold. First, Nietzsche an freedom may prove a debilitating anesthetic. It comes at the
expense of teleological justifications and moral applause. Precisely for this reason, it remains a heroic achievement.6 Those without the heroic capacities and tragic
dispositions needed to celebrate an ultimately meaningless life will discover that Nietzschean freedom reduces them to a state of jaded
skepticism, cultural despair, and political apathy. Indeed, defenders of Nietzsche who find postmodernism to inspire just such disintegration
and passivity have for this reason sought to deny his paternity of it.7 Effectively they are critical of postmodernists who adopt a Nietzschean skepticism without also
adopting his heroic demeanor. Too suspicious of involvement and action, these postmodernists escape to literary diversions. They end up fiddling with tropes while Rome
burns.
When the "ceremony of innocence is drowned," W. B. Yeats foresaw in "The Second Coming," "things fall apart." Then "The
best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Hence the second problem with
the political inauguration of Nietzschean freedom: while some succumb to apathy and inaction, others
engage in action without boundaries. While the best lack all conviction, the worst, drunk with freedom, lack all restraint.
While the former fail to rise to heroic heights because of their skeptical reserve, the latter exercise their heroic natures unchecked by principle. When freedom
becomes an intoxicant, liberty becomes license. Everything is permitted. Nihilism looms.
If politics is defined by the exercise of freedom and responsibility in tandem, then a freedom gained at the
expense of responsibility is a freedom ill suited to political life. Yet this is the raw, unrestricted, and often
debilitating freedom that Nietzsche delivers to us at the grave of metaphysics. Consequently, commentators on Nietzsche have
been stymied by the challenge of describing how his writings might be viewed as the epitaph of metaphysics but not of responsible judgment and accountable action. But in
Nietzsche's world of constant flux and absolute liberty, where are we to find the criteria and standards that would allow critical evaluation and social obligation? Certain
postmodern Nietz-scheans, following Michel Foucault, propose aesthetic criteria to regulate our freedom. Art is to substitute for the fallen idols of ethics and metaphysics.
For modernists this is an unsatisfying gesture, impractical at best and dangerous at worst. The kind of judgment elicited by art, like judgments of taste, is held to be without
the normative force required to stabilize political life.8
The task of refitting Nietzsche with a political (and all-too-human) face, modern critics argue, has met with little
success. Most efforts may be accused of wanting to eat their metaphysical and moral cakes and destroy them
too. A satisfactory no ethical substitute for ethics, as the motivating and controlling element of politics, and a nonmetaphysical substitute for metaphysics, as the
foundation for such an ethics, remains missing from postmodern recipes.9 To the extent that postmodern theorists are successful in
defending Nietzsche's destruction of metaphysics, they disable themselves from producing a viable politics.
Alternatively, if they are intent on promoting a democratic political vision, they are forced to call a halt to Nietzsche's assault on metaphysics and ethics. Either the
promotion of Nietzschean freedom leaves one at a loss as to how a responsible politics might be fostered, or
the extent of the adulteration of Nietzsche's thought found necessary for his domestication leaves us
unconvinced that his philosophy constitutes a useful starting point for a political inquiry.
It is my conviction that such efforts will continue to be unsatisfactory, their increasing sophistication
notwithstanding. The problem is not with the imaginative political uses to which Nietzsche is put, but with the traditional premises on which these efforts rest. In
short, Nietzsche’s role as a watershed in the history of thought is misunderstood. Nietzsche is not the destroyer of metaphysics. He is at
once its fiercest rival and its unwitting spokesperson. My claim is that only when we see how and to what
extent Nietzsche remains entangled in metaphysics may his efforts serve a promising political purpose.
Nietzsche's lingering metaphysics has not been completely ignored by postmodernists. In attributing to Nietzsche an unconsummated victory over metaphysics, however,
they tend to confront us with a spurious dilemma. We are forced to choose between saving metaphysics from Nietzsche and saving Nietzsche from metaphysics. The former
is the modern mission, which postmodernists (and I) reject as vain. The postmodern alternative thus appears to win by default. But the project of blotting out Nietzsche's
metaphysical residues is self-defeating. Any effort to give metaphysics the coup de grace that uses a Nietzschean strategy for the attack will only iterate Nietzsche's own
reinvestment in metaphysics. The appropriate task, I propose, is to understand Nietzsche as a prodigal son of the Western metaphysical tradition. His political significance is
better illuminated if one outlines his affiliation with this tradition than if one celebrates his disjunction from it. To
explore the potential of a
postmodern politics we must first unlearn the lesson of Nietzsche's destruction of metaphysics, and
subsequently reach beyond the homelessness of his position.
4. NIETZSCHE AND HEIDEGGER WRESTLE WITH THE SAME PROBLEM OF RESENTMENT BUT THE ALT TO THE KRITIK
PROVIDES NO ESCAPE – THE ATTEMPTED MASTERY OF TIME ONLY WINS THE FREEDOM TO CONQUER ONE’S WORLDLY
DWELLING. THE ALTERNATIVE EXCHANGES THE RESENTMENT OF THE SLAVE FOR THAT OF THE MASTER BUT IT IS
RESENTMENT NONETHELESS. THE AFFIRMATIVE ESCAPES THIS BY BEING-IN-TIME – DOING WHAT WE CAN IN OUR LIMITED
HISTORY, QUESTIONING, NOT REJECTING.
THIELE 95 [Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics, Princeton University Press 221-223]
Like Heidegger, Nietzsche addresses the fundamental refusal and rebellion of human being. His thought,
like Heidegger's, wrestles with the question of homelessness. Those who accept the limitations of belief and social convention, habit and morality,
Nietzsche calls the Last Men. They sit complacently ensconced within herd life. Centuries of resentment have encased them in a cocoon that shields them from the tragedy of human life. Here they
incubate ideals out of their frustration with earthly contingencies. In the past, religious projections of heavenly realms were their chief solace. Now, in the age of nihilism, these projections have lost
their allure. No longer are the strains of a limited being with limitless aspirations experienced with awe and anxiety. A comfortable happiness suffices. Confronted with this complacent resignation,
Nietzsche attempts to resuscitate the spirit of the ancient Greeks. When faced with Silenus's wisdom (that the best thing is not to be born, or quickly to return whence one came), the Greeks opted
nonetheless for a fiery burst of life. Nietzsche also makes a tragic and heroic choice. He refuses to accept all-too-human limitations. He attempts to break free of social, moral, and historical
encasements. He observes desperately the wasteland of mummified specimens about him and refuses company with any but higher types. These higher types are the meteors that streak across the
firmament. They light up the sky with a fire that consumes them to avoid the task of sharing a home on earth. Nowhere are the stakes and meaning of this tragic and heroic game made clearer than
in Nietzsche's discussion of time. Human limitation is most harshly endured in our powerlessness to master time. Human freedom, the highest value, is most fundamentally threatened by time itself.
The escape from time, or the mastery of it, thus constitutes the ecstatic victory of the Overman. Failure in this regard, a failure that Nietzsche finds characteristic of humanity at large, is a recipe for
In light of this predicament, Nietzsche attempts
the revenge and resentment of slave morality. Zarathustra proclaims: (pointless Zarathustra speech omitted)
the impossible: to will backward. One must approach one's past anew. Thus he proposes the "Eternal Recurrence of the
Same." To will the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche claims, is to master time. This willing is not simply the resentful resignation to
time's "It was" of slave morality. Rather, one wills the past to be again, as that which will return, endlessly and the same. Consequently, to will the eternal recurrence is to
strive to make each thought, word, and deed of each moment of each day endlessly worth repeating. Willing the eternal recurrence, thinking the
most difficult thought, is Nietzsche's heroic redemption from human limitation and its vengefulness. It is
freedom from time itself. So conceived, the thought of the eternal recurrence appears as the greatest vindication of the here and now. The intent,
Nietzsche stipulates, is for the present never to be depreciated as a mere means to the future: each moment
is to be self-fulfilling. Were it not an end in itself but only a means to some other end, each moment would not merit eternal repetition. Instrumentality
must disappear altogether in the brilliance of performance. Nietzsche's vision is enticing. But Heidegger
gives us pause to reflect on the meaning of Nietzsche's thought experiment. Truly to live in the here and now is resolutely to will
that what is is. To live in the here and now is to let being be. Letting being be, however, entails letting time be, for
being is only in time. Full participation in the timely disclosure of what is, then, is the greatest celebration of life and being. Nietzsche's effort to
will the eternal return, in other words, signifies not the living of one's being in time but the attempt to
administer its unfolding. Yet as thrown, human being neither sets this unfolding in motion nor overcomes its contingency. Psychologically and
philosophically (no less than socially and politically) to flee the horizons of one's historical finitude is to give
up the task of dwelling in time. Nietzsche's effort to will life's endless repetition does not fully translate into an affirmation of life, for it implicitly denies
and deprecates that aspect of human life which it seeks to overcome: its timely and bounded nature. The freedom won is not the freedom to
disclose what is, but the freedom to control and conquer the (psychological or spiritual) effects of historical and
worldly dwelling. Freedom becomes a possessive mastery of time. But herein the slave's basic antipathy
toward time is not really overcome. It is simply redirected. Time is now forced to swallow its tail. Effectively, Nietzsche
exchanges the resentment of the slave for that of the master. He fails to discern the spirit of revenge inherent in the drive to overcome
temporal horizons. The attempt to conquer time by willing the eternal return, to undo time's "It was" by way of a voluntaristic imposition
of ultimate value on the endless repetition of its component parts, is perhaps the most sublime resentment yet achieved. But it is
resentment nonetheless. Heidegger offers an alternative. Human being, he agrees with Nietzsche, is not the naysayer who resentfully
projects life as a punishment. But neither is human being the yea-sayer whose willful affirmation is "a highly spiritualized spirit of revenge" (ERS 228). Human
being is the "why asker." The questioner is neither slave nor master of time. The questioner seeks neither to
escape this world for the next, nor to dominate this world in lieu of any next. Rather, the questioner lives in
time, in anxious and awe-full interrogation of the very medium of her world-liness. The questioner thinks
Being as time, as an unfolding disclosure in which she is privileged to participate but will never fully control.
To practice this questioning is to gain wisdom, as an acceptance of limits. And it is wisdom, Heidegger writes, that teaches us how to dwell in the here and now of the
"permanent everywhere."4 Among
the many types of refusal that humankind has ingeniously invented, only
interrogative refusal does not reduce itself to resentment.
5. THE ONLY WAY TO ESCAPE DOUBTS ABOUT THE REALITY OF OUR WORLD IS TO STOP ASKING – BEING-IN-
THE-WORLD AVOIDS THE NEED FOR METAPHYSICAL LEAPS OF FAITH AND EXCLUDES THE ALTERNATIVE’S TRAGIC
INDIVIDUALISM ALTOGETHER.
In other words, how
does one overcome recurring Cartesian doubts about the reality of the world? Heidegger's
answer is that one does not try. An unassailable demonstration of the world's existence is impossi¬ble. "A sceptic can no more be
refuted," Heidegger straightforwardly admits, "than the Being of truth can be 'proved'" (BT 271). But refuta¬tion is
unnecessary and unwarranted. Indeed, it is illegitimate, for im¬plicit in any attempt to prove the existence
of the world is the un¬founded premise of an isolated subject engaged in the effort of proving. The skeptic's
problem of worldly reality is effectively dissolved by Heidegger's refusal to entertain this premise. Heidegger
refuses to posit the primacy of an isolated "I" or "ego" that subsequently comes to doubt the reality of its world, for any such doubting exposes its precon¬dition, namely, an
already-in-the-world doubter. Heidegger writes: "To wish to prove that the world exists is a misunderstanding of the" very questioning. For such a questioning makes sense
only on the basis of a being whose constitution is Being-in-the-world. . . . World in its most_ proper sense is just that which is already on hand for any questioning"
(HCT215). Facedwith the impossibility and illegitimacy of proof of an external reality, we are not to assume
that the only available alternative is a leap of faith. Any leap of faith would necessarily be grounded in the
supposed preexistence of a leaper. Again, the (potentially faithful) sub¬ject is already illegitimately posited in distinction to its world. "With such
presuppositions," Heidegger explains, "Dasein always comes 'too late'; for in so far as it does this presupposing as an entity (and other¬wise this would be impossible), it is,
as an entity, already in a world. 'Earlier' than any presupposition which Dasein makes, or any of its ways of behaving, is the 'a priori' character of its state of Being" (BT
249). The metaphysical tradition, as Heidegger summarizes the prob¬lem, must always first "bury the 'external world' in nullity 'epis-temologically' before going on to prove
it" (BT 250). Heidegger wants to be done with this metaphysical sleight of hand.
The metaphysical trick works only because it has been carefully prepared. First, Being is reduced to beings. Subsequently, beings are re¬duced to things defined only by
their extantness, their "presence-at-hand" (Vorhandenheit). With Being fully encompassed by presence-at-hand, and this presence verifiable only by the perceiving subject,
reality appears to the individual as a subjective experience, as being "merely 'inner'" (BT 250). Having first created the conditions for this subjecti-vist doubt, metaphysics
then presents us with the impossible task of welding together subjective experience with objective reality. Rather than take on this task, Heidegger begins with a relation of
Being-in-the- world. He rejects the metaphysical supposition, first articulated by Plato, that "man is, in the first instance, a spiritual Thing which subse¬quently gets
misplaced 'into' a space" (BT 83). It is a grave mistake to separate epistemologically the perceiving and knowing subject from its concrete worldliness and it is a vain effort
to try to bridge this chasm once it is formed. Hence Heidegger insists that we do not have bodies. Rather, "we 'are' bodily" (WPA 99). Likewise, we do not have a world.
Rather, we "are" worldly.
Our concrete, spatial existence is not separate from our perceiving, mental existence. A structural unity
exists (BP 164). Knowledge, there¬fore, is not something gleaned by mind from a separate, external reality,
but something absorbed in the midst of worldly existence. In Heideg¬ger's words, "the Dasein is not also extant among things with the
differ¬ence merely that it apprehends them. Instead, the Dasein exists in the manner of Eeing-in-the-world, and this basic determination of its exis¬tence is the
presupposition for being able to apprehend anything at air (BP 164). The upshot is that "every act of knowing always already takes place on the basis of the mode of being of
Dasein which we call Being-in, that is, Being-always-already-involved-with-a-world" (HCT 161). To know or to question is already to have evidence of one's situ¬ated,
worldly being and to undercut any prerogative to a more radical doubt. Heidegger's
understanding of Being-in-the-world allows him to
reject both radical (Nietzschean) individualism and Cartesian dualism.
6. TURN: HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
THE LITTLE A IS: THE ALTERNATIVE’S QUEST FOR NIETZSCHEAN FREEDOM IS TIED TO AN OBSESSIVE DESIRE TO BECOME
THE TRAGIC HERO.
The irony is that Nietzsche, the severest critic of Western culture, would champion the West's most cherished value: freedom. Nietzsche's brilliance is most evident in his
analysis of the constraint, sacrifice, and slavery elicited and maintained in the name of reason, morality, and their metaphysical truths. The task taken on by many of
Nietzsche's postmodern readers is to demonstrate the liberating effects of his destruction of metaphysics. Applauding Nietzsche for this feat, however, leaves one rather
disadvantaged in the effort to establish or renew social and political sensibilities. Nietzsche's brand of freedom is simply too powerful an elixir to be left unregulated within
the polity. It serves, alternately, as an anesthetic or an intoxicant. The difficulty, then, is twofold.
First, Nietzschean
freedom may prove a debilitating anesthetic. It comes at the expense of teleological justifications and
moral applause. Precisely for this reason, it remains a heroic achievement.6 Those without the heroic
capacities and tragic dispositions needed to celebrate an ultimately meaningless life will discover that
Nietzschean freedom reduces them to a state of jaded skepticism, cultural despair, and political apathy. Indeed,
defenders of Nietzsche who find postmodernism to inspire just such disintegration and passivity have for this reason sought to deny his paternity of it.7 Effectively they are
critical of postmodernists who adopt a Nietzschean skepticism without also adopting his heroic demeanor. Too suspicious of involvement and action, these postmodernists
escape to literary diversions. They end up fiddling with tropes while Rome burns. When the "ceremony of innocence is drowned," W. B. Yeats foresaw in "The Second
Coming," "things fall apart." Then "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Hence the second problem with the political inauguration
of Nietzschean freedom: while some succumb to apathy and inaction, others engage in action without boundaries. While the best lack all conviction, the worst, drunk with
freedom, lack all restraint.
While the former fail to rise to heroic heights because of their skeptical reserve, the latter exercise their
heroic natures unchecked by principle. When freedom becomes an intoxicant, liberty becomes license.
Everything is permitted. Nihilism looms.If politics is defined by the exercise of freedom and responsibility in tandem, then a freedom gained at the
expense of responsibility is a freedom ill suited to political life. Yet this is the raw, unrestricted, and often debilitating freedom that Nietzsche delivers to us at the grave of
metaphysics. Consequently, commentators on Nietzsche have been stymied by the challenge of describing how his writings might be viewed as the epitaph of metaphysics
but not of responsible judgment and accountable action. But in Nietzsche's world of constant flux and absolute liberty, where are we to find the criteria and standards that
would allow critical evaluation and social obligation? Certain postmodern Nietz-scheans, following Michel Foucault, propose aesthetic criteria to regulate our freedom. Art
is to substitute for the fallen idols of ethics and metaphysics. For modernists this is an unsatisfying gesture, impractical at best and dangerous at worst. The kind of judgment
elicited by art, like judgments of taste, is held to be without the normative force required to stabilize political life.8
THE LITTLE B IS: THE NEGATIVE’S POLITICAL PARADIGM LOCKS OUR ETHICAL REGARD FOR ALTERITY INTO A
PARADIGM OF FINITUDE – CONTRA OEDIPUS, THE ALTERNATIVE REPLICATES THE TRAGEDY OF ANTIGONE, THE
TRAGIC-HEROIC CHARACTER WHO IDENTIFIES TO THE LAW UNTIL THE END, TO HER OWN DEATH, A POLITICS
THE NEGATIVE OPENLY EMBRACES.
CRITCHLEY 99 (Simon, Reader in Philosophy, University of Eseex: “Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic-Heroic Paradigm in Philosophy and
Psychoanalysis” Constellations v.6 n.1 p.110-111)
Moving from the German to the French context, I would like to focus on how this tragic paradigm is continued in Lacanian psychoanalysis, at least in Seminar VII, The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60).[10] I think it is justified to say that, for Lacan, Antigone
becomes the tragic heroine of psychoanalysis:
she who does not give way on her desire, she who follows the law of desire, which is what Hegel would call "the law of heaven,"
and follows that law all the way to her death.[ 11] We might say that Lacan is the psychoanalytic extension of the German philosophy of the
tragic, and that he extends the tragic paradigm through his choice of Antigone as the heroine of psychoanalysis, as she who embodies the ethical imperative of
psychoanalysis: ne pas ceder sur votre désir.
If I am right in my suggestion that there is a tragic paradigm in Lacanian psychoanalysis, and I will try and make good on this claim below, then
the critical
question that follows for me is very simple: what about the comic? Is there not an Oedpius complex in post-
Kantian philosophy, or an Antigone complex — at the least a Sophocles complex — that has the
consequence of subordinating the comic to the tragic and hence marginalizing the phenomena of jokes,
humor, and laughter?
But what is at stake in this question? The following, I think: returning to my opening sentence, if the post-
Kantian settlement in philosophy has the consequence that questions concerning the ultimate meaning and
value of human life pass from the category of the religious to that of the aesthetic — which initiates the
philosophy of the tragic — then what is presupposed in this passage is the recognition of the essential
finitude of the human being. That is, the question of the meaning and value of human life becomes a matter
of what sense can be made from the fact of finitude. Given the collapse of the possibility — at least for "we
moderns" — of traditional religious belief, it is a question of what forms of aesthetic production and
creation might begin to fill the void left by the historical self-consciousness of the death of God.[ 12]
The critical hypothesis that I would like to explore is that the tragic paradigm in post-Kantian philosophy outlined above provides a way for thinking through the question of
finitude, a thinking through which, moreover, disfigures finitude by making the human being heroic. This is a large claim and I can only hope to begin to substantiate it
within the limitations of this essay. Furthermore, I would not want to advance this claim against all the authors mentioned above: Kierkegaard stands as an obvious
exception, not to mention the complexity of the treatment of the tragic in Hölderlin and its critical or, better, zeitdiagnostisch employment in Hegel and in the tradition
inspired by him, for example in Simmel. My modest ambition here is to begin to develop this critical hypothesis by using the example of Lacan's Ethics seminar.
THE LITTLE C IS: THE NEGATIVE’S ABILITY TO ACT IS MEASURED BY THEIR ABILITY TO TRAGICALLY ENGAGE
THEIR LACK, BUT THE TRAGIC HERO CANNOT ESCAPE DEATH BUT ONLY IDENTIFY WITH IT TO THE END.
CRITCHLEY 99 (Simon, Reader in Philosophy, University of Eseex: “Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic-Heroic Paradigm in Philosophy and
Psychoanalysis” Constellations v.6 n.1 p.110-111)
Looking back over the course of the seminar, Lacan says that he asked his auditors to enter into a thought experiment by adopting the standpoint of the Last Judgment,
namely to ask oneself the question, "Have
you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?" (362/314) That is to say,
the question of ethics is raised as a matter of the relation of action to unconscious desire. It is therefore a
question of what form or forms of action would be appropriate to desire. Which forms of action would be ethical? Of course, the
rather circular answer to this question has already been given insofar as the only form of action that is ethical is the following: not to act in such a way that you give way on
your desire. Now it would be something of an understatement to say that the precise normative consequences of this imperative are not exactly clear, although Alain Badiou
has made some significant advances in this direction, as I discuss elsewhere.[ 20]
In order to explain the relation between action and desire, Lacan has recourse to tragedy; namely, that tragic
action might be an index for ethical action that would conform to one's desire. The ethics of psychoanalysis entails a relation
to "the reality of the human condition" (351/303). This can be expressed with what Lacan calls "the tragic sense of life." Such a tragic sense of life has, for Lacan, nothing to
do with what he calls "speculation about prescriptions for, or the regulation of, what I have called the service of goods" (362/314). The notion of "service of goods" is the
position that Lacan also describes as that of "traditional ethics" (362/314), and is represented — dubiously, I think — by the person of Creon.[21]
With these precisions in mind, I can now turn to the passage I want to discuss. I quote at length,
It is in the tragic dimension that actions are inscribed and we are called to take our bearing with regard to
values. Moreover, this is also the case with the comic dimension and when I began to speak to you about the formations of the unconscious, it was, as you know, the
comic that I had in mind. Let us say as a first approximation that the relation of action to the desire which inhabits it
in the tragic dimension functions in the sense of a triumph of death. I taught you to rectify the latter as
triumph of beingtowards-death (triomphe de l'être-pour-la-mort), that is formulated in Oedipus's me phunai, where this me figures,
the negation that is identical to the entrance of the subject supported by the signifier. This is the fundamental character of all tragic action. In the comic dimension, as a
first approximation, it is less a question of triumph as of a futile and derisory play of vision. However little I have up to now tried to approach the comic with you [my
emphasis], you have been able to see there too the relation f action to desire, and of the fundamental failure of the former to catch up with the latter. The comic dimension
is created by the presence at its center of a hidden signifier, but which, in the Old Comedy, is there in person — the phallus. Who cares if it is subsequently whisked away?
One must simply remember that what satisfies us in comedy, what makes us laugh, what makes us appreciate it in its full human dimension, not excluding the
unconscious, is not so much the triumph of life as its flight, the fact that life slides away, steals away, flees, escapes all those barriers that oppose it, and precisely those
that are most essential, those that are constituted by the agency of the signifier. The phallus is nothing other than a signifier, the signifier of this flight. Life goes by,
triumphs all the same, whatever happens. When the comic hero trips up and falls in the soup, the little fellow still survives. The pathetic side of this dimension is, you see,
exactly the opposite, the counterpart of tragedy. They are not incompatible, since the tragi-comic exists. That is where the experience of human action resides, and it is
because we know better than those who have gone before how to recognize the nature of desire that is at the heart of this experience, that an ethical revision is possible,
that an ethical judgment is possible, that represents this question with its value of the Last Judgment — have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you? (361-
62/313-14) This is an extremely suggestive passage that would merit much commentary, but let me just attempt some provisional remarks both with and against the grain of
the text. To understand the relation between action and desire, Lacan has recourse to tragedy. Now, Lacan goes on to make the extremely Heideggerian claim that the
relation between action and desire in the space of tragedy functions in the direction of being a triumph of being-towards-death, une triomphe de l'être-pourla-mort, which is
simply the French rendering of Sein-zum-Tode. This reading of tragedy finds confirmation in an earlier series of allusions to
Oedipus, where the words me phunai are interpreted in terms that recall Nietzsche's use of the wisdom of Silenus in The Birth of
Tragedy, namely "plutot, ne pas être" (306/353) — the best thing is not to be born, the second best is to die soon. Thus, Lacan's thesis
here would seem to be that tragedy provides an exemplary model of ethical action in conformity with one's desire,
insofar as desire is bound up in a relation to death. Thus, the appropriate ethical comportment in the face of death is beingtowards-death,
where we act in such a way that we do not give way on our desire. Thus, one way of understanding the ethics of psychoanalysis is in terms of the aspiration to a
Schellingian-Heideggerian correspondence between free ethical action and fateful deathly desire, that the subject should pursue the Freiheit-zumTode that is the core of
tragic experience and the tragic-heroic paradigm for thinking finitude. This line of thought is also connected to what Lacan says at the beginning of the penultimate séance
about helplessness (Hilflosigkeit, 351/303-4), where helplessness describes our fundamental relation to finitude. But helplessness is not described, as it was for Freud in the
Entwurf, as the signal of anxiety. Interestingly, Lacan says that such a relation to finitude is "not so much Abwarten as Erwartung" that is, not so much the helplessness of
waiting, but rather the passive openness of expectation or anticipation, something perhaps much closer to Heideggerian Gelassenheit. Thus, tragic experience is one of
"absolute disarray" (361/304), where the tragic hero — Lear as much as Oedipus — finds himself "alone and betrayed" (353/305), cast out from the polis to become
upsipolis, the uncanniest one who, in breaking with all familiarity, makes history. For Lacan, in
this tragic ruination of the hero, a certain
catharsis of desire is achieved. Tragic action achieves a purification of desire in relation to its object, namely
death.
No, Donny, You Can’t Run Nihilism On The Aff
THE 1AC’S PROJECT OF NIHILISM ONLY SEEKS TO CONSTRAIN NATION-STATES WITHIN THEIR BORDERS –
REJECTING THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTIONISM MAY RESTRAIN THE ACTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES AND ITS
ALLIES BUT IT DOESN’T END THEIR VIOLENCE AND MORE IMPORTANTLY IT ELIMINATES THE GLOBAL
CONNECTIONS ESSENTIAL TO ALLOW THE MULTITUDE TO FORM.
THE GLOBAL CRISIS MANAGEMENT SYSTEM THE AFFIRMATIVE TRIES TO RESTRAIN IS THE GLOBALIZING FORCE
KNOWN AS EMPIRE – IT IS CALLED INTO BEING EVERY TIME THE NATION STATE IS CALLED UPON TO RESOLVE
CRISIS
HARDT AND NEGRI 00 [Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2000 (Scholar and terrorist, “Empire”, 2000, available online)]
It follows that, as Kelsen wanted, but only as a paradoxical effect of his utopia, a sort of juridical positivism also dominates the formation of a new juridical ordering.[23]
The capacity to form a system is, in effect, presupposed by the real process of its formation. Moreover, the process of formation, and the subjects that act in it, are attracted
in advance toward the positively defined vortex of the center, and this attraction becomes irresistible, not only in the name of the capacity of the center to exercise force, but
also in the name of the formal power, which resides in the center, to frame and systematize the totality. Once again we find a hybrid of Luhmann and Rawls, but even before
them we have Kelsen, that utopian and thus involuntary and contradictory discoverer of the soul of imperial right! Once again, the
ancient notions of
Empire help us articulate better the nature of this world order in formation. As Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus all teach us
(along with Machiavelli commenting on their work), Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the
capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace. All interventions of the imperial armies are solicited by one or
more of the parties involved in an already existing conflict. Empire is not born of its own will but rather it is called into being and
constituted on the basis of its capacity to resolve conflicts. Empire is formed and its intervention becomes
juridically legitimate only when it is already inserted into the chain of international consensuses aimed at
resolving existing conflicts. To return to Machiavelli, the expansion of Empire is rooted in the internal
trajectory of the conflicts it is meant to resolve. [24] The first task of Empire, then, is to enlarge the realm of
the consensuses that support its own power.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE AFFIRMATIVE’S SOLUTION COMES FROM THE WRONG PLACE – LOCALIZING THE
PROBLEM WITHIN THE IDENTITY OF ONE STATE DOUBLES BACK AND ULTIMATELY FEEDS THE VERY STRUCTURES
THEY SEEK TO ATTACK
Although many of the various postmodernist theorists are lucid in their refusal of the logics of modern
sovereignty, they are in general extremely confused about the nature of our potential liberation from it-perhaps
precisely because they cannot recognize clearly the forms of power that have today come to supplant it. When
they present their theories as part of a project of political liberation, in other words, postmodernists are still
waging battle against the shadows of old enemies: the Enlightenment, or really modern forms of sovereignty
and its binary reductions of difference and multiplicity to a single alternative between Same and Other. The
affirmation of hybridities and the free play of differences across boundaries, however, is liberatory only in a
context where power poses hierarchy exclusively though essential identities, binary divisions, and stable
oppositions. The structures and logics of power in the contemporary world are entirely immune to the
"liberatory" weapons of the postmodernist politics of difference. In fact, Empire too is bent on doing away
with those modern forms of sovereignty and on setting differences to play across boundaries. Despite the
best intentions, then, the postmodernist politics of difference not only is ineffective against but can even
coincide with and support the functions and practices of imperial rule. The danger is that postmodernist
theories focus their attention so resolutely on the old forms of power they are running from, with their heads
turned backwards, that they tumble unwittingly into the welcoming arms of the new power. From this
perspective the celebratory affirmations of postmodernists can easily appear naive, when not purely
mystificatory. What we find most important in the various postmodernist currents of thought is the
historical phenomenon they represent: they are the symptom of a rupture in the tradition of modern
sovereignty. There is, of course, a long tradition of "anti-modern" thought that opposes modern sovereignty,
including the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School (along with the entire republican line we have traced back to Renaissance humanism).
What is new, however, is that postmodernist theorists point to the end of modern sovereignty and
demonstrate a new capacity to think outside the framework of modern binaries and modern identities, a
thought of plurality and multiplicity. However confusedly or unconsciously, they indicate the passage
toward the constitution of Empire.
U.S. ACTION IN THE MIDDLE EAST IS FUNDAMENTAL TO OUR PROJECT OF RESHAPING THE WORLD IN OUR
IMAGE – THE AFFIRMATIVE CUTS OFF THE CURRENT EXPLOSION OF RUNAWAY EMPIRE – U.S. INTERVENTION IN
THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE FOUNDATION OF AN ATTEMPT TO GLOBALIZE HUMANITY VIA FREE TRADE AND
ENTERPRISE. THIS RHETORIC OF GLOBAL SECURITY CONSTRUCTS THE UNITED STATES AS THE LOCATION OF A
GLOBAL SELF, RESULTING IN AN UNPRECEDENT GLOBALIZATION OF VALUES AND DESIRES THAT CAN ONLY BRING
US CLOSER TO THE EMERGENCE OF THE MULTITUDE.
NOORANI 05 [Yaseen, Professor of Near East Studies at University of Arizona, Tucson “The Rhetoric of Security,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 5.1]
The U.S. government's rhetoric of global security draws its power from simultaneously instantiating
Schmitt's vision of the political as non-normative national self-preservation and the liberal vision of the
political as normative civil relations. The consequence is not that this rhetoric disavows political antagonism within the nation,
as Schmitt would have it (though there is an element of this), but that it disavows political antagonism on the global level. I argued above that
the positing of a non-normative situation of national self-preservation, the same as that of a person being murdered, is insupportable due to the inescapable presence of a
moral ideal in defining the nation's self and deciding what threatens it. This applies to all justifications of action grounded in national security. The
U.S. rhetoric
of security, however, lifts the paradox to a global level, and illustrates it more forcefully, by designating the global
order's moral ideal, its "way of life" that is under threat, as civil relations, freedom and peace, but then
making the fulcrum of this way of life an independent entity upon whose survival the world's way of life
depends—the United States. Just as an aggressor puts himself outside of normativity by initiating violence, so is the victim not bound by any norms in
defending his life. As the location of the self of the world order that must be preserved, the United States remains unobligated by the norms of this order as long as it is
threatened by terrorism. So long as it struggles for the life of the world order, therefore, the United States remains external to this order, just as terrorism remains external to
the world order so long as it threatens a universal state of war.
Without the United States everyone is dead. Why should this be? The reason is that the United States fully embodies the values underlying world peace—"freedom,
democracy, and free enterprise" (National Security 2002, i)—and is the key to their realization in the global domain. These values are [End Page 30] universal, desired by all
and the standard for all. "[T]he United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere" (National Security 2002,
3). The fact that the United States "possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world" (1) cannot therefore be fortuitous. It cannot but derive
from the very founding of the United States in universal principles of peace and its absolute instantiation of these principles. This results in "unparalleled responsibilities,
obligations, and opportunity" (1). In other words, the United States as a nation stands, by virtue of its internal constitution, at the forefront of world history in advancing
human freedom. It is the subject of history. Its own principle of organization is the ultimate desire of humanity, and the development of this principle is always at its highest
stage in and through the United States. For this reason, the values of the United States and its interests always coincide, and these in turn coincide with the interests of world
peace and progress. The requirements of American security reflect "the union of our values and our national interests," and their effect is to "make the world not just safer
but better" (1).
The United States therefore is uniquely charged by history to maintain and advance world peace and universal freedom.
America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic
peace—a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman. America acts in this cause with friends and allies at our side, yet we understand our special
calling: This great republic will lead the cause of freedom. (Bush 2004a)
America can lead the cause of freedom because it is the cause of freedom. "American values and American interests lead in the
same direction: We stand for human liberty" (Bush 2003b). For this reason, it has no "ambitions," no private national interests or
aspirations that would run contrary to the interests of the world as a whole. It undertakes actions, like the
invasion of Iraq, that further no motive but the cause of humanity as a whole. "We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove
a threat and restore control of [End Page 31] that country to its own people" (Bush 2003a). In this way, the United States is distinct from all
other nations, even though all of humanity espouses the same values. Only the United States can be
depended upon for ensuring the endurance of these values because they are the sole basis of its existence.
"Others might flag in the face of the inevitable ebb and flow of the campaign against terrorism. But the American people will not" (NSCT 2003, 29).
Any threat to the existence of the United States is therefore a threat to the existence of the world order, which is to say, the values that make this order possible. It is not
merely that the United States, as the most powerful nation of the free world, is the most capable of defending it. It is rather that the United States is the supreme agency
advancing the underlying principle of the free order. The United States is the world order's fulcrum, and therefore the key to its existence and perpetuation. Without the
United States, freedom, peace, civil relations among nations, and the possibility of civil society are all under threat of extinction. This is why the most abominable terrorists
and tyrants single out the United States for their schemes and attacks. They know that the United States is the guardian of liberal values. In the rhetoric of security, therefore,
the survival of the United States, its sheer existence, becomes the content of liberal values. In other words, what does it mean to espouse liberal values in the context of the
present state of world affairs? It means to desire fervently and promote energetically the survival of the United States of America. When the world order struggles to
preserve its "self," the self that it seeks to preserve, the primary location of its being, is the United States.
Conferring this status upon the United States allows the rhetoric of security to insist upon a threat to the existence of the world order as a whole while confining the non-
normative status that arises from this threat to the United States alone. The United States—as the self under threat—remains external to the normative relations by which the
rest of the world continues to be bound. The United States is both a specific national existence struggling for its life and normativity itself, which makes it coextensive with
the world order as a whole. For this reason, any challenge to U.S. world dominance would be a challenge to world peace and is thus impermissible. We read in The National
Security Strategy that the United States [End Page 32] will "promote a balance of power that favors freedom" (National Security 2002, 1). And later, we find out what is
meant by such a balance of power.
The United States must and will maintain the capability to defeat any attempt by an enemy—whether a state or non-state actor—to impose its will on the United States, our
allies, or our friends. . . . Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power
of the United States. (National Security 2002, 30)
The relationship between the United States and the world order, then, is similar to the relationship in Hobbes between the Leviathan and the civil society that it embodies
and represents. The individual members of this civil society are collectively the author of all of the acts of the Leviathan. Yet they have no authority to influence or oppose
the actions of the Leviathan, because they have contracted with each other to give over all of their powers to it. The Leviathan itself remains outside their social contract.
Similarly, insofar as the United States embodies the normativity of the world order and ensures its existence, the members of this order have implicitly agreed to its
protection of their civil existence, since this is the only rational thing to do. Therefore, when America's own existence is at stake, they cannot question the decisions it takes
to preserve itself, even when these decisions impinge on their own autonomy.15
The externality of the United States to the world order, its national status as the agent of freedom, means
that it must both enhance its independence and autonomy, and reshape the world in its own image. "We are
protected from attack only by vigorous action abroad, and increased vigilance at home" (Bush 2002a). Enhancing its
own agency means making itself more free, but what this requires is increased self-discipline. The United States must become more impervious to fear and external coercion
by eliminating its internal vulnerabilities to them. The effect of this imperative is to provide justification for bringing an ever greater number of domains of national life
within the purview of national security. At the same time, the United States must make the world more like itself by [End Page 33] spreading freedom abroad. "We know
that free peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies" (Bush 2004b). This requires the strengthening of American military
power and the use of this power against enemies. "We
have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength;
they are invited by the perception of weakness" (Bush 2003c). The primary field for the exercise of U.S. power in
reshaping the world is the Middle East, because this is the region most engulfed in the state of war. The
Middle East thereby remains outside of the world order and threatens its dissolution.
The Middle East will either become a place of progress and peace, or it will be an exporter of violence and terror that takes more lives in America and in other free
nations. The triumph of democracy and tolerance in Iraq, in Afghanistan and beyond would be a grave setback for international terrorism.... Everywhere that freedom takes
hold, terror will retreat. (Bush 2003c) In
other words, the Middle East can either become a reflection of the United States
or remain its polar opposite. In the latter mode, however, it mirrors the United States more fully, though inversely. As a state of war outside
the world order, it has the capacity to transform the world just as the United States does. Just as the United
States exports peace and freedom, in the form of military conquests and economic goods, the Middle East
exports violence and terror. Whereas the United States is free of "ambitions" in its actions, the terrorists of the Middle East are driven by "hateful
ambitions." The Middle East, in effect, signifies the absence of all the values embodied by the United States, and herein lies its supreme danger. Yet it is in no way
irredeemable. Once the Middle East is reshaped into a lesser replica of the United States, it will take its humble position in the world order. The taming of the
Middle East, therefore, requires intensive military action there, but also requires preventing the Middle East and its state of war from
penetrating the borders of the United States.Reshaping the world order goes beyond this as well: it entails the disciplining of
the members of this order, whose tendencies toward laxity and fragmentation provide openings for
terrorism. The United States must [End Page 34] bring the world into ever greater conformity with the values
that will preserve and advance the world. This means not only securing cooperation for U.S. military and police actions by "convincing or
compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities" (National Security 2002, 6), but reorganizing the world according to the principles
of free enterprise and free trade. Political antagonism can be eliminated through its transformation into
economic competition. "We have our best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where the great powers compete
in peace instead of prepare for war" (Bush 2002b). A world order based on economic competition instead of military competition enables the reign of the politics of civil
relations, leading to peace and prosperity for all. In this order, no nation will need any longer to worry about the politics of self-preservation—that is, no nation but the
United States.
YOU CAN’T POSIT IDENTITY AS SOMETHING OUTSIDE OF EMPIRE, IT MAKES RESISTANCE IMPOSSIBLE, BECAUSE
IDENTITY IS CREATED BY EMPIRE. THE INDIVIDUALIST DREAM OF THE AFFIRMATIVE IS PREDICATED ON THE
ASSUMPTION THAT THE LOCAL MUST BE PROTECTED FROM THE GLOBAL – THIS POSITION NEGATES THE
ALTERNATIVES AND POTENTIALS FOR LIBERATION THAT EXIST SOLELY WITHIN EMPIRE. WE CANNOT STEP
OUTSIDE – WE MUST ENTER THE TERRAIN OF EMPIRE AND GROUND OUR ANALYSIS IN THE POWER OF THE
MULTITUDE.
We are well aware that in affirming this thesis we are swimming against the current of our friends and comrades on the Left. In the long decades of the current crisis of the
communist, socialist, and liberal Left that has followed the 1960s, a large portion of critical
thought, both in the dominant countries of capitalist development and
in the subordinated ones, has
sought to recompose sites of resistance that are founded on the identities of social
subjects or national and regional groups, often grounding political analysis on the localization of struggles. Such arguments are
sometimes constructed in terms of "place-based" movements or politics, in which the boundaries of place (conceived either as identity or as territory) are posed against the
undifferentiated and homogeneous space of global networks.[2] At other times such political arguments draw on the long tradition of Leftist nationalism in which (in the
best cases) the nation is conceived as the primary mechanism of def ense against the domination of foreign and/or global capital. [3] Today the
operative
syllogism at the heart of the various forms of "local" Leftist strategy seems to be entirely reactive: Ifcapitalist
domination is becoming ever more global, then our resistances to it must defend the local and construct
barriers to capital's accelerating flows. From this perspective, the real globalization of capital and the constitution of Empire must be considered
signs of dispossession and defeat. We maintain, however, that today this localist position, although we admire and respect the spirit of
some of its proponents, is both false and damaging. It is false first of all because the problem is poorly posed. In many characterizations the
problem rests on a false dichotomy between the global and the local, assuming that the global entails homogenization and undifferentiated identity whereas the local
preserves heterogeneity and difference. Often implicit in such arguments is the assumption that the differences of the local are in some sense natural, or at least that their
origin remains beyond question. Local differences preexist the present scene and must be defended or protected against the intrusion of globalization. It should come as no
surprise, given such assumptions, that many defenses of the local adopt the terminology of traditional ecology or even identify this "local" political project with the defense
of nature and biodiversity. This view can easily devolve into a kind of primordialism that fixes and romanticizes social relations and identities. What
needs to be
addressed, instead, is precisely the production of locality, that is, the social machines that create and recreate
the identities and differences that are understood as the local.[4] The differences of locality are neither preexisting nor natural but rather
effects of a regime of production. Globality similarly should not be understood in terms of cultural, political, or economic homogenization. Globalization, like
localization, should be understood instead as a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really
of homogenization and heterogenization. The better framework, then, to designate the distinction between the global and the local might refer to
different networks of flows and obstacles in which the local moment or perspective gives priority to the reterritorializing barriers or boundaries and the global moment
privileges the mobility of deterritorializing flows. It
is false, in any case, to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in
some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire. This Leftist strategy of resistance to
globalization and defense of locality is also damaging because in many cases what appear as local identities are not autonomous or
self-determining but actually feed into and support the development of the capitalist imperial machine. The
globalization or deterritorialization operated by the imperial machine is not in fact opposed to localization or reterritorialization, but rather sets in play mobile and
modulating circuits of differentiation and identification. The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and thus masks the enemy.
We are by no means opposed to the globalization of relationships as such-in fact, as we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effectively led this process.
The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire. More important, this strategy
of def ending the local is damaging because it obscures and even negates the real alternatives and the
potentials for liberation that exist within Empire. We should be done once and for all with the search for an
outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our politics. It is better both theoretically and practically to
enter the terrain of Empire and confront its homogenizing and heterogenizing flows in all their complexity,
grounding our analysis in the power of the global multitude.
THE ALTERNATIVE: EMPIRE CAN ONLY BE DEFEATED BY PUSHING IT PAST ITS LIMITATIONS. YES,
GLOBALIZATION IS A TOOL OF DOMINATION USED BY ELITES, BUT EMPIRE HAS A FUNDAMENTAL FLAW – AS THE
ELITES EXPAND THEIR INFLUENCE OVER AND THROUGH BORDERS, THEY ALSO BEGIN TO CONNECT TOGETHER
THE PEOPLE THEY SEEK TO DOMINATE. IT IS THIS GLOBAL TERRAIN THAT GIVES RISE TO THE MULTITUDE THAT
CAN PUSH THROUGH EMPIRE TO THE COMMUNITY ON THE OTHER SIDE.
Our study set out from the hypothesis that the
power of Empire and the mechanisms of imperial sovereignty can be understood only
when confronted on the most general scale, in their globality. We believe that toward the end of challenging and
resisting Empire and its world market, it is necessary to pose any alternative at an equally global level. Any
proposition of a particular community in isolation, defined in racial, religious, or regional terms, "delinked"
from Empire, shielded from its powers by fixed boundaries, is destined to end up as a kind of ghetto. Empire
cannot be resisted by a project aimed at a limited, local autonomy. We cannot move back to any previous
social form, nor move forward in isolation. Rather, we must push through Empire to come out the other
side. Deleuze and Guattari argued that rather than resist capital's globalization, we have to accelerate the process. "But
which," they ask, "is the revolutionary path? Is there one?-To withdraw from the world market . . ? Or might it be
to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and
deterritorialization?"[1] Empire can be effectively contested only on its own level of generality and by
pushing the processes that it offers past their present limitations. We have to accept that challenge and learn
to think globally and act globally. Globalization must be met with a counter-globalization, Empire with a
counter- Empire. In this regard we might take inspiration from Saint Augustine's vision of a project to
contest the decadent Roman Empire. No limited community could succeed and provide an alternative to
imperial rule; only a universal, catholic community bringing together all populations and all languages in a
common journey could accomplish this. The divine city is a universal city of aliens, coming together, cooperating, communicating. Our
pilgrimage on earth, however, in contrast to Augustine's, has no transcendent telos beyond; it is and remains
absolutely immanent. Its continuous movement, gathering aliens in community, making this world its home,
is both means and end, or rather a means without end.
AT: Rules Are Meaningless (their dumb answer to topicality)

YOU’RE RIGHT, RULES ARE ARBITRARY AND MEANINGLESS:
COUNTER-FRAMEWORK: PUSH-UP COMPETITION FOR THE BALLOT
COUNTERPLAN: DO PLAN AND VOTE NEGATIVE
COUNTERPLAN: WRITE AFF ON YOUR BALLOT, CROSS IT OUT, AND WRITE NEGATIVE. NET BENEFIT 1: PISSES
OFF THE TAB ROOM. CHAOS ROCKS.
COUNTERPLAN: DON’T DO THE PLAN – AFFIRM THE ETERNAL RECURRANCE OF THE SAME
NIETZSCHE 82 [The Gay Science, google it]
The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say
to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times
more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and
everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and
sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again
and again—and you with it, speck of dust!"— Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon
who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You
are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!" If this thought gained possession of you, it would
change you as you are or perhaps crush you; the question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once
more, and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well
disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate
eternal confirmation and seal? —
THE LITTLE B IS THIS IS NIETZSCHE’S FORMULA FOR HUMAN GREATNESS – HE’D VOTE NEG
NIETZSCHE 08 [Ecce Homo, google it]
At the absurdly tender age of seven, I already knew that no human speech would ever reach me: did any one ever see me disconsolate therefor? To-day I still possess the
same affability towards everybody, I am even full of consideration for the humblest: in all this there is not an ounce of arrogance or contempt. He whom I despise divines
the fact that I despise him; my mere existence angers those who have bad blood in their veins.
My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: that a man should wish to have nothing altered, either in the
future, the past, or for all eternity. Not only must he endure necessity, and on no account conceal it--all
idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity--but he must love it. . . .
COUNTERPLAN: BRING NIETZSCHE BACK TO LIFE AND HAVE HIM VOTE NEG. HE WOULDN’T CARE ABOUT
SAVING THE WORLD FROM THE U.S.
LAST ARG: WE CAN’T LOSE. IF NIHILISM IS BAD VOTE NEG; IF NIHILISM IS GOOD THEN FUCK IT, VOTE NEG
ANYWAY. THE NET BENEFIT IS A GOOD LAUGH FROM OUR PAUL MANN EVIDENCE.

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BLACK KNIGHTS 07/08 Beating You On The West Evidence Since 2007

AT: Oklahoma’s Jive 1/27

1. THE ALTERNATIVE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT UNCONCEPTUALIZED AND IS ASSUMED TO BE SOME SORT OF

KHAN 94 [Ali, 1994, 38 How. L.J. 79, p. lexis]

THUS WE OFFER THE FOLLOWING PERMUTATION:

2. ALSO, TEXTUAL COMPETITION IS BAD:

3. BUT, FUNCTIONAL COMPETITION IS GOOD:

CHURCHILL 93 [Ward, Struggle for the Land, 1993, p.4-5]

CHURCHILL 93 [Ward, Struggle of the Land, 1993, p. 414-415]

prevail in the courts or on appeal. 317

Under this view, law

DERRIDA 04 [Jacques, For what tomorrow?, p. 91-92]

MANN 1995 [BALLER, STUPID UNDERGROUNDS, POSTMODERN CULTURE 5.3]

AT: Rules Are Meaningless (their dumb answer to topicality)

COUNTER-FRAMEWORK: PUSH-UP COMPETITION FOR THE BALLOT

COUNTERPLAN: DO PLAN AND VOTE NEGATIVE

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