K - Agamben

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1NC Legal Reform
1NC Short
The 1ACs instance of legal reform fails and legitimizes a
permanent state of emergency. This has three implications:
1. No Solvency: The sovereign will always be able to justify
extralegal surveillance in the name of necessity within the
state of exception the 1AC is a useless attempt to
manipulate the law in a place where it has been deactivated
2. Biopolitics: The state of exception guarantees the inevitable
production of bare life
3. Turns Case: The premise of restraining the state masks
disciplinary domination while allowing the sovereign to
suspend the law to institute more insidious forms of
surveillance at will
Frost 10 [Tom, Professor of Legal Theory at the University of Sussex and PhD from the University of
Southampton, Agambens Sovereign Legalization of Foucault, Oxford Legal Studies, Volume 30, Issue 3, pp. 545577] Hebron ADN
B. Agamben, Law and Bare Life Agamben builds upon this zo/bios opposition at the start of Homo Sacer to develop
his formulations of how law and biopower interact. Whilst Foucault joined together both disciplinary power and
biopower at the micro and macro levels, respectively, with disciplinary power affecting the individual and biopower
operating at the level of populations,53 Agamben replaces this distinction, with biopower being tied directly to the
individual. Power acts in both creating and maintaining bios, political life, by directly acting upon zo and granting
natural life the political rights that transform it into bios.54 Agambenian biopower therefore subsumes disciplinary
power. Unlike Foucault, who saw both forms of power as attempting to cover all of life, Agambens biopower can be
biopolitics, far from complimenting the disciplines, or existing in a tensional

is today causing disciplinary institutions to retreat in their
influence over life.55 Yet at the same time this biopower is aligned with and acts through the
law.
described as totalizing in its operation. This
relation with normative operations of power,
Agambenian biopower aims to transform all zo into bios, attempting to regulate, order and increase powers hold over every human action. Life is aligned with and lived through the law. Political life, bios, becomes a
legal subject, as the juridical order constructs legal subjects that can be acted upon by power. There are no longer separate spheres of power, only a juridical biopower. Thus Agamben argues that biopower aims to dominate every
aspect of being a human; there can be no human actions that are outside of biopolitical regulation and control. In this manner biopower and the biopolitical juridical order maintain the fiction of immanentism.56 Sergei Prozorov
describes immanentism as having the aim to recast the social order as a closed universal self-propelling system without an outside. Immanentism denies that there can be any human action outside of the order, as it denies that
such an outside exists. It is a fiction because such a view pre-supposes an all-encompassing social order that is always already encapsulating acts that have not yet happenedthe order is given omnipotent and omniscient powers
as it is able to subsume any act within itself. The analogy needs to be modified slightly here as Agamben deals primarily with a juridical order, rather than a social order. The distinction made between legality and illegality may not
necessarily correlate with Foucauldian concepts of normality and abnormality developed in Discipline and Punish. Agamben sees human actions as constrained not by denotations of normality, but by denoting them as legal or
otherwise. Nevertheless, Prozorovs conception of immanentism is helpful here in analogizing the structure of Agambenian biopower. Agambens totalizing biopower ties in directly to his notion of bare life, the necessary yet
contradictory element of his formulation of biopower, by focusing upon, and modifying, Carl Schmitts concept of the sovereign decision.57 For Schmitt, sovereignty was not identifiable through statutes, ordinances or constitutions,
but instead rested on one concrete political fact, namely which individual or body could declare a state of exception and thus suspend the existing legal order. It was therefore the decision, rather than any pre-ordained power, that
decided who was sovereign. Adopting and modifying Schmitts definition of sovereignty, Agamben contends that the sovereign and sovereign power can be identified through the creation of bare life; the individual or body that
creates bare life will be by definition imbibed with sovereign power. This sovereign decision is tied directly to the operation of law. In State of Exception Agamben posits bare life not only being created through a sovereign decision,
but also through the operation of the law, and specifically through the state of exception, which exists as a zone of indistinction between law and anomie, laws beyond.58 C. The State of Exception The state of exception is not a true
exception as understood by the theorists of emergency powers, as Agamben denies that the exception can be temporally or spatially separated from the norm. Instead the exception is a zone of indistinction where law and fact
completely coincide. In his work on the exception Agamben distinguishes between the juridical order (il diritto) and the law (la legge). The juridical order maintains the fiction of immanentism; the abstract notion of law pre-supposes
that it applies to all of reality, to all of life itself. Whilst the law (la legge) of a State may be unprincipled and contain lacunae in certain areas,59 the juridical order maintains that there are no lacunae, in the sense that the juridical
order covers all lacunae and all situations that arise. The fiction of immanentism is maintained even when the law seems conflict and contradict itself internally. Agambens exception then does not exist as separate from or as
dichotomous to the law. Although Agamben appropriates Schmitts notion of the sovereign decision, he argues that attempts to relate the exception into the juridical order result in paradoxes and aporias that cannot be explained. If
the exception is contained within the juridical order as part of positive law, such as the process of derogation, then the paradoxical situation arises where the exception that suspends the juridical order is contained within the very
objectthe juridical orderthat it is suspending.60 Likewise, if the exception is, like Schmitt maintains, a purely political, de facto, extra-juridical situation, then the juridical order must contain a lacuna precisely where the decisive
situation concerning its existence in the face of grave threats exists. To conclude this is to support a fiction that the juridical order does not legislate for exceptions, which is patently not the case.61 Agamben has argued that in the
20th century, with increasing recourse to emergency governance in Western democracies, the exception can no longer be distinguished from the norm, and today we live in a permanent state of exception. This is quite a curious
claim, taking into account his works on the primacy of the figure of bare life and his emphasis upon the paradigmatic method. It appears, at least on the face of things that Agamben embarks upon a genealogical diversion explaining
how the exception developed throughout the 20th century. With his statement in Homo Sacer that the exception is the originary form of the law,62 it may be questionable to state that the exception has become the norm only during
the 20th century. Despite this point, Agambens development of the concept of the exception deserves further attention. The exception is neither inherent to law, nor other to law; the problem of defining the exception cannot be
resolved through a simple opposition of inside/outside. Rather, the exception should be understood as a zone of indistinction where inside and outside blur with one another. Agamben explains the importance of the exception for
the law through the analogy of language and linguistics. Agamben argues that the law and language are interconnected; the aporias to be found in language are equally to be found in law. Thus linguistic elements exist in langue, in
language, without any real meaning. These linguistic elements only gain meaning through their use in actual speech, parole. Equally, speech, concrete linguistic activity, only gains meaning if a language is pre-supposed.63 The
relationship between speech and language is not based upon any logical operation; the only way in which a generic proposition endowed with a merely virtual reference (e.g. a tree) passes to a concrete reference that corresponds
to a segment of reality is through a practical activity (pre-supposing what is meant when the linguistic element tree is used). As it is for language, so it is for law. The application of a norm is in no way contained within the norm and
cannot be derived from the norm. There is no internal logical nexus that allows the norm to be derived from its application.64 The nexus that holds the norm in relation to its application is found in the exception, which exists as a
zone of indistinction where the norm and application reveal their separation. In other words, in the exception the norm is applied even though its application has been suspended. In order to apply a norm, it is ultimately necessary to
produce an exception, to suspend its application. This can be seen most clearly in the case of necessity, which shows the being-in-force of the law even though it is suspended. In a case of necessity, legal norms still remain in force,
the law is suspended but still remains in force .65 Equally, factual
situations that are justified through necessity can gain legal status, in that they do not
constitute transgressions of the law. In this way, an act that contradicts legal norms can gain legal
force. However the decisive act to which necessity applies elides all definition, in that it is neither fact nor law. If the act is
yet the norm is not applied to a concrete factual situation. In effect,
considered legal and not factual, then why, asks Agamben, does that act need to be approved ex post facto by a judicial or
legislative decision? 66 Yet if the decisive act is considered as factual rather than legal, then another problem arises, namely that
the legal effects of the action begin not from the moment that it is converted from law to fact at the moment of decision after the
event, but from the very moment of its taking place. The laws retroactive ratification of such necessary acts, delimiting them as
lawful, can be seen as a fiction, concealing the very status of the act of necessity. Far from being a matter of law or a matter of fact,
the act of necessity is a zone of indistinction that is subsumed into the law and considered legal in character, despite the fact that
Every interpretative act thus becomes an

instance of the exception, trying to contain within the law that act which is neither
law nor fact, and in doing so legitimizing the act of bare power
the actual necessary act defies all logical subsumption into either fact or law.
that has occurred in the necessary act. The law therefore becomes completely
indistinct and is exercised solely through a concrete praxis in the exception, a zone of indistinction. Agamben concludes that the exception is the opening of a fictitious lacuna in the juridical order. It is fictitious as the lacuna is not
real and there is no gap in the law that the judge has to fill. Instead the lacuna is fictitious as it suspends the order that is in force, safeguarding the existence of the norm and its applicability to the normal situation.67 Through
suspending the norm the exception guarantees the norms pre-eminence for future cases; only by demarcating when the norm does not apply can it be possible to constitute and give the norm its content. This leads to the exception
having some curious characteristics. First, in the zone of indistinction all legal determinations are deactivated, 68 but this does not mean that there is no law in the exception. The exception is full of legality, and, perhaps even more
curiously, this means that potentially any action taken in the exception can gain legal force.69 Yet the exception is not part of the law, or the juridical order. To pre-suppose this would be to reduce the exception to a function of law,
and misses the key point about the actions that occur in the state of exception, namely their radical dis-location to the juridical order and the potential for any act to gain legal status. The legal norm is suspended but still in force, but
in thus suspending the norm the norms force-of-law is also separated from its application. By force-of-law Agamben refers to the constitutive essence of the law, the element that literally gives laws, decrees and other measures
their force.70 With the norm remaining in force but not being applied, acts that do not have the value of law can acquire the force-of-law that is separated from the norms application. Such acts are characterized by Agamben as
having the force-of-law (without law), the norm still being in force but not being applied. The force-of-law (without law) can be claimed by both the State and non-State groups not just to justify their actions, but to give them the
force-of-law, to make their actions legal.71 The exception is tied by Agamben directly to both the operation of the sovereign decision to create bare life and the exercise of law. Drawing upon his analysis of the relationship of the
norm to its application, Agamben argues that it is through the exception that the bare life that the political order requires to operate is created. Because bare life is created through the exception, it is created through a zone of
the creation of bare life in the exception can

gain the force-of-law (without law). This allows an action that may contradict legal
norms to suspend those norms and at the same time be declared as legal. In this way the law can
indistinction that is neither fact nor law. In this way, drawing upon Agambens analysis, it is possible to conclude that
remain in force yet not be applied to bare life. Such an analysis calls into question the efficacy of all legal rights in protecting the
individual against the power controlled by the State. D. Agamben, Benjamin and the Exception To help support these arguments
Agamben draws upon the work of Walter Benjamin, and specifically his Critique of Violence, Zur Kritik der Gewalt in the original
German.72 Gewalt signifies legitimized force or judicial power and also carries the meanings of authority, dominion, might and
control.73 In this text, Benjamin made explicit the connection between law and violence (Gewalt). For Benjamin, law and violence
are intertwined and cannot be separated. Violence is the foundation of law, although today the law seems not to recognize its
violent past. Benjamin argued that modern law has developed out of the violent revolutions and wars of the past and it preserves
itself through violence by stopping challenges to the law and legitimizing its own actions. Benjamin posited two forms of violence to
illustrate the connection the violence has to law: law-making violence, violence used against the existing laws and conditions with
the effect of constituting new laws, and law-preserving violence, which maintains the authority and laws of the current system.
Despite the differences between the two types of violence, Saul Newman argues that they both lead to a perpetuation of the law
and power as neither type of violence affects the laws position; law-making and law-preserving violence are used everyday by the
law in order to perpetuate itself.74 In other words, every legal act can be classified as using law-making violence or law-preserving
the exception extends the legal violence Benjamin explored beyond its own
by making it possible for extra-legal actions to acquire legal status , to gain forceof-law.75 The exception as a zone of indistinction deactivates the law that is contained
within it. In doing so it produces a violence that has shed every relation to law,76 making it appropriable by
anyone, potentially allowing any action to acquire legal force through this legal violence that has shed its
violence. Agamben argues that
boundaries
relation to law: It is as if the suspension of law freed a force that both the ruling power and its adversaries, the constituted power
as well as the constituent power, seek to appropriate.77 The paradox Agamben identifies is that suspending law only increases its
violent activity; the exception produces law-making violence through the laws suspension. Building upon this paradox, which
Agamben states is representative of the force-of-law (without law), Agamben argues that the biopolitical law is caught within a
Any legal attempt to subsume or contain the

exception within the law does not work because the exception by its very
definition is a zone of indistinction where legal terms are deactivated, thus
escaping the very law that sought to contain it. Therefore the sovereign
decision creating bare life will always already be legal, allowing Agamben to predict that: The
dialectic akin to Benjamins dialectic of violence.
normative aspect of law can be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that whilst ignoring
international law externally and producing a state of exception internally nevertheless claims to be applying the law.78 E. Foucault,
Post-Structuralism and Law In Foucaults Law, Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick reinterpret Foucaults writings on law and develop a
Foucauldian approach to law that is markedly similar to Agambens own direction. Their approach does not have the theoretical
drawback of existing within a violent dialectic where power subsumes political resistance within itself. This post-structuralist account
of law does not get subsumed by relations of power, although it is susceptible to domination by power.79 It is Golder and
Fitzpatricks argument that Foucault did not do away with either sovereignty or law in modernity but on the contrary, the two
persisted in an integral relation.80 In fact, it is disciplinary power that is dependent upon the law, a law which acts as a constituent
It is through the law acting as a restraint to disciplinary power that

the law actually constitutes disciplinary power , rather than being subsumed under disciplinary power as
the expulsion thesis argues. By acting in a supervisory jurisdiction over the abuses and
excesses of the disciplines, law implicitly confirms the claim at the heart of disciplinary
power to adjudicate on questions of normality and social cohesion.82 By the law
power in relation to the disciplines.81
confining its jurisdiction to the periphery of the disciplines the core of disciplinary power is left reinforced, whilst at the same time
the law masks the

disciplinary domination through offering the veil of legality ; law and the disciplines exist within a
the disciplines remain constituently reliant upon law to curb their abuses.83 In this way,
relation where they are dependent on one another
The alternative is to embrace whatever-being to create the

coming community a refusal to recognize categorical
identities in order to to reject the ability of the sovereign to
isolate bare life. Only the dissolution of identity politics can
solve for the 1AC and the state of exception.
Robinson 11
[Andrew, is a political theorist and activist at Ceasefire, Ceasefire, In Theory Giorgio Agamben:
destroying sovereignty, 1/21/11, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-destroyingsovereignty/] Hebron ADN
Agamben proposes whatever-singularity as an alternative basis for political action, which escapes the logic of sovereignty. Taken
from Deleuze and Guattaris thought, a singularity is something which is unique and which cant be reduced to a measurement or
representation. Agamben likes it because it avoids his having to choose between universality and particularity. Whatever in
English has unfortunate overtones of indifference (whatever, talk to the hand) which is not at all what Agamben means. Rather, he
is referring to something mattering whatever it is, always mattering regardless of what it is

as opposed to the sovereign decision to divide life into things which matter and
things which dont. A whatever-singularity is neither reducible to its attributes nor expressible as an
abstract generality such as universal humanity; rather, it is something which has general value as it is, with all of its attributes (and
does not depend on any standard of conformity or

subjectification or normality, or on belonging to the people or masses. It also denies that there is any
particular essence which makes people human instead, being human is a scattering of singularities.
especially, as potentiality or possibility). It
Whatever-singularity is also a kind of being which people are assumed to already have, which for instance motivates resistance to
being normalised. In a sense, this is a radicalised version of human rights discourse, since anyone, whatever they are and whatever
they do, is recognised as having a kind of autonomous ethical value. This is fundamentally an ethics of letting be (with overtones of
being who you are). It entails doing away with normativity as usually defined, with standards of good and evil which declare certain
people to be valueless because of some particularly heinous deviant act theyve committed (in contrast to the more common
approach of either contracting normativity to cover a smaller range of acts, or altering it to focus on oppressive abuses). For
instance, Agamben argues that ideas such as guilt and responsibility are derived from legal thought and hence from sovereignty.
The ethical challenge Agamben poses is to still view every person and, in line with the discussion in The
Open, every animal as fundamentally valuable in their own life , as having forms of life and particularity
worthy of respect and autonomous existence, regardless of how bad they are or what crimes they commit. In effect,
Agamben aims to take away, through choices in terms of language, ethics and philosophy, the threat
posed by others ethical judgements in constituting a person or being as vulnerable. This does
not remove human vulnerability per se, but does remove the particular risk of being made into homo sacer. It does, however, leave
a particular ethical problem: are agents of sovereignty also to be treated as whatever-singularities, or as the negation of all such
singularities? The coming community corresponds on a collective level to whatever-singularity. It is related to the people to
come, a concept Deleuze and Guattari borrow from Bergson, and to messianic ideas of a coming liberation. Agamben refers to the
The
coming community is defined in Agamben as a kind of post-consumerist condition, emerging
from a passage through current forms of life, such as the indifference of mass media images and of
commodities through which one can reshape ones identity. It passes through and beyond such forms
of life by radicalising their challenge[s] to normativity and sovereignty. It is not a hybrid space hybridity is
coming community as a form of social togetherness which is also a non-state and is counterposed to the logic of sovereignty.
already actualised in homo sacer and the sovereign but rather, a negation, the un-man. It is based on whatever-singularities in
their antagonism with the state and sovereignty (hence it cannot seek to seize state power). Agamben believes that whatever-
It also
does not rest on categories of identity (even the identity of excluded or marginalised
groups), which for Agamben, remain trapped within old forms of politics which reproduce
sovereignty (mainly because the recognition of an identity is necessarily separate from the processes of life which constitute
it). In conditions of sovereignty, life has to separate itself from the orders of subjects and
objects, to free itself from biopower and from hierarchical relations with living things , to become
singularities can form communities without affirming representable conditions of belonging (such as laws, norms, etc).
whatever-singularity and to attain radical immanence. In Potentialities, Agamben argues for an almost Buddhist stance of
contemplative separation which preserves instead of deciding. Agambens stance also has a revolutionary aspect. Rather than
starting from identity, Agambens ethical theory starts from the standpoint of bare life. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben argues
that the ethical standpoint from which one should start is provided by the experience of concentration camp inmates. More
precisely, it should start from the standpoint of the most abject sub-group of inmates, the so-called Musselmanner who were near
death and had lost the will to live, who hence embodied directly the idea of bare life. This is because of a particular moment of
inversion. The moment of catastrophe is taken also to contain the moment where salvation becomes possible, with passage through
the low point of the current expansion of sovereignty acting as a transition to liberation. This is a rather strange argument, but
based on a viable observation: that only when the logic of sovereignty is fully unfolded (only when we are faced with a giant tree
instead of a sapling) does the nature of the problem or the nature of what needs to be got rid of become clear. This also means
that, in Agambens view, liberation is ambiguously tied to sovereignty, as its negation. In a sense, therefore, Agamben remains
within a Marxist model of historical becoming. Richard Day has expanded Agambens argument, claiming that social networks of
marginalised groups are already coming communities, and also that the term should always be kept plural. He views the Marxist
element in Agambens thought as unhelpful, arguing that post-consumers are not the most likely source of the coming communities.
Another aspect of the coming community is that, on one level, it is a very small shift. Inspired by Jewish theology and authors such
as Walter Benjamin, Agamben draws on messianic ideas of a total transformation of the existing world into a different world through
a small gesture, the addition of an aura, or a new way of seeing. In a sense, everything stays as it is, and yet is rendered different by
the removal of the transcendent moment of sovereignty.
1NC Long

law.


boundaries


the law masks the

The paradox of sovereignty is the inclusive exclusion of bare

life in a state of exception - the construction of spaces where
the exception becomes the rule, and where the sovereign
commits legitimate mass murder.
Taylor 10 [Mark Todays State of Exception: Abu-Jamal, Agamben, Janmohamed, and The Democratic
State of Emergency Mark Lewis Taylor is Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton
Theological Seminary. April 2010
http://marklewistaylor.net/wpcontent/uploads/2012/10/Political.Theology.Essay_.Mumia_.Agamben.pdf] Hebron AR
Bare life is a stripping away of a persons subjectivity, their humanity, such that
they are barely existing beings; they are in fact those whose death can be ordered by
the powerful and whose death would register neither as a homicide nor as a sacrice
valuable in some sense (for themselves or for the social order). Sovereign is the power that decides the state of exception and
rules over a growing sphere of bare life. This is the state of exception today. This is a crucial trait of sovereign power in the political
The state of exception which was instantiated in the Nazi concentration camps, then, is seen by Agamben
to be a generalized mode of rule that prepares a death camp for the entire West and its environs,
creating zones of abandonment for those reduced to bare life, a domain of the killable, those
order today.
whose lives are deemed so bare, they can be dispatched to death by sovereign power, routinely and sometimes en masse via
massacre and holocaust. We should have learned from the tradition of the oppressed, Agamben suggests following Benjamin, that
the exception becomes

the rule and we all enter the sphere of violence, and as subject to that violence, we all enter
the tradition of the oppressed, tasting the bitterness of bare life . What Agamben does not
when power decides the exception under conditions of emergency and expands its powers,
highlight so much is the full meaning of the Benjamin quote, about the traditions of the oppressed. He too quickly assumes that
the oppressed being referenced by Benjamin are only the sufferers of the death camp, and then all of us caught up in a coming
racialized populations that

have been crucial to the very formation of the West . I think here especially of the sufferers of slavery
global civil war in the West. He rarely treats as exception those speci - cally targeted and
and colonization, of indigenous peoples loss of life and land, as well as others who have long lived, and often still live, the exception
These communities, so crucial to the rise of the West, have lived the exception as the
rule and are still being reduced to bare life. To be sure, Agamben does make brief reference to some of the
as the rule.
colonized on the underside of the Western modernity when he acknowledges a link between Western death camps and the
campos de concentraciones created by the Spanish in Cuba in 1896 to quell popular insurrection in that colony.17 In this way,
Agamben points to colonial war as the birthplace of the states of exception and of the martial law that are so destructive now,
even for the West.18 However, other scholars and theorists have made similar claims before Agamben and these claims have
provided the central animating theoretical axis for understanding the development of modern political power. The Martinican poet,
politician, and political theorist Aim Csaire argued in his Discourse on Colonial- ism that Nazism and the exceptional holocaust
were visitations upon European soil of the spirit and practice of slaughter and subjugation that Europe had long visited upon colonial
others.19 Similarly, W. E. B. Du Bois, in his Darkwater, pointed out at the conclusion of World War I that the slaughter of war on
European soil was a complex legacy of Europes colonial subjugation of its colonies. Little Belgium, suffering slaughter in World
War I, should have remembered, Du Bois intoned, the fate it meted out to peoples of the Congo during Belgiums ruthless colonial
rule over them.20 One need not posit any metaphysical payback (what goes round comes around) to explain the Wests suffering
a state of exception as rule that it had meted out to the peoples it colonized, nor even a historical blowback (they, the colonized,
are coming back at us in the West to take their revenge). Rather, in order to develop a better comprehension of the political
the Wests own patterns and habits

of sovereignty must be contextualized within the histories of racial slavery, colonial
war and administration, and capitalist imperialism so that these patterns are viewed as near re ex
organization of the contemporary world and its theoretical logics and legacies,
responses of sovereign rule within the West, as well as between the West and its Others.

Robinson 11
representation. Agamben likes it because it avoids his having to choose between universality and particularity.
Whatever in


The
It also
Explanation:
1NC Hegemony
1NC
The drive for hegemony is founded in a paranoid desire to find
threats against which to define ourselves thus the imperial
state can legitimize its sovereign power by finding imaginary
enemies to justify the escalation of the military colossus
McClintock 9
[Anne, Chaired Professor of English and Womens and Gender Studies at the University of
WisconsinMadison, M.Phil. from Cambridge University, Ph.D. from Columbia University, Paranoid Empire: Specters
from Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib, in Small Axe, March 2009, Issue 28, p. 50-74,
http://smallaxe.net/repository/file/sx%2028/5-SA28%2520McClintock%2520%2850-74%29.pdf] Hebron ADN
the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and dangerous
hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat
of the war on terror. I have come to feel that we cannot understand the
extravagance of the violence to which the US government has committed itself after 9/11
two countries invaded, thousands of innocent people imprisoned, killed, and tortured
unless we grasp a defining feature of our moment, that is, a deep and disturbing doubleness with
respect to power. Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global omnipotence
(Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with nightmares of impending
attack, the United States has entered the domain of paranoia: dream world and
catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both
deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral and
nightmarish quality of the war on terror, a limitless war against a limitless threat, a war
By now it is fair to say that
vaunted by the US administration to encompass all of space and persisting without end. But the war on terror is not a real war,
for terror is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls
the US government can fling its military might against ghostly

apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the cost of catastrophic selfdelusion and the infliction of great calamities elsewhere. I have come to feel that we urgently need to make
elsewhere a consensual hallucination, 4 and
visible (the better politically to challenge) those established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war
on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence abroad with the
vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxesthe modern slave-ships on the middle passage to nowherethat have
come to characterize the United States as a super-carceral state. 5 Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of
national things? If a long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as
an overt empire, does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political responsibility, not also
extend beyond that useful fiction of the exceptional nation to embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we theorize
the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary, but which also at
the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion with a
complicit corporate media would render itself invisible, casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into
specters? For imperialism is not something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored.
Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to
perplexing questions: Who under an empire are we, the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nationstate who, in turn, constitute us? We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence
that the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow
the spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and penumbra of
empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the
traditional self-identity of the United States as the uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious,
national mythology of originary innocence now in tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to
theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6 Perhaps in the labyrinths of
torture we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the authority of vision and the hauntings of popular
memory disrupt the great forgettings of official history. Paranoia Even the paranoid have enemies. Donald Rumsfeld Why
imperial violencethe very

understanding the
pervasive presence of the paranoia that has come, quite violently, to manifest itself
across the political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply
Hofstadters famous identification of the US states tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia
as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of
grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is
held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can produce pyrotechnic displays
of violence. The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous
paranoia?
Can we fully understand the proliferating
circuits of
eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast without
relation to violence. 8 Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its
structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or
Hegelian cunning of reason, nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national terror dream. 9 Nor am I interested in evoking
paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have psyches or an unconscious;
only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as paranoid if the dominant
powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies,
practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and
engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national psyche, nor as a
description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive to
contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence
that the state tries to conceal. Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person
and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for its
violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and
humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of
unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty? A critical question still remains: does not
something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary
people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the
paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and
aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then reintegrated (incorporated) into
the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body, the methods by which schools, the military, training camps not to
mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate mediainstill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up collective
but unstable fantasies of omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths
of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial
legitimacy, and what I call the enemy deficit. I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at
Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantnamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia
incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carbys brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial racism,
sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11 The Enemy Deficit: Making the Barbarians Visible Because night is here but
the barbarians have not come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution. C. P. Cavafy, Waiting for the
Barbarians The barbarians have declared war. President George W. Bush C. P. Cavafy wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in
1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient dj vu. To what dilemma are the
Every modern empire faces a crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its

an imperial state
claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians . It is only the threat of
the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empires borders in the first place. On
the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual
nightmares of impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot part.
And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing
phantom. Those people were a kind of solution. With the collapse of the Soviet
Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States and the USSR evaporated like
barbarians a kind of solution?
power over territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafys insight is that
a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism, Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and
Where were the enemies now to justify the continuing escalation of

the military colossus? And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
infiltration vanished.
By rights, the thawing of the cold war should have prompted an immediate downsizing of the military; any plausible external
threat had simply ceased to exist. Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit:
Its no use having an army that did nothing but train, he said. Theres got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist
for. Dick Cheney likewise complained: The threats have become so remote. So remote that they are difficult to ascertain.
Colin Powell agreed: Though we can still plausibly identify specific threatsNorth Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like thatthe real
threat is the unknown, the uncertain. Before becoming president, George W. Bush likewise fretted over the postcold war
dearth of a visible enemy: We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there. It is now well established that
the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but there was no clear rationale with which to sell
such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New American Century produced a remarkable report in
which they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would require a catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl
Harbor. 12 The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy, offering the
Bush administration what they would claim as a political casus belli and the military unimaginable license to expand its reach.
General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon: There is a huge silver lining in this
cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have
actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph. In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking
during the attack, Now we can perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin
Powell noted, America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of
before. Charles Krauthammer, for one, called for a declaration of total war. We no longer have to search for a name for the
post-Cold War era, he declared. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. 13


relation with normative operations of power, is today causing disciplinary institutions to retreat in their
law.

law nor fact, and in doing so legitimizing
the act of
bare power

boundaries


the law masks the


solve for the 1AC and the state of exception.Robinson 11 [Andrew, is
a political theorist and activist at Ceasefire, Ceasefire, In Theory Giorgio Agamben: destroying
sovereignty, 1/21/11, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-destroyingsovereignty/] Hebron ADN


The
It also
Explanation:
1NC - Democracy
1NC Short
The 1ACs democratic idealism ignores the fact that democracy
and totalitarianism are indistinguishable within the context of
biopolitics. Even so-called democracies build their foundation upon the
exclusion of bare life. Attempts to expand democracy resinscribe the individual
within the state and mask the fundamentally totalitarian nature of all modern
states, taking out solvency and turning case
Agamben 98 [Agamben, G. (1998). Sovereign power and bare life (pp. 121-2). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press.] Hebron ADN
Karl Lowith was the first to define the fundamental character of totalitarian states as a "politicization of life" and, at the same time,
to note the curious contiguity between democracy and totalitarianism: Since the emancipation of the third estate, the formation of
bourgeois democracy and its transformation into mass industrial democracy, the neutralization of politically relevant differences and
postponement of a decision about them has developed to the point of turning into its opposite: a total politicization of everything,
even of seemingly neutral domains of life. Thus in Marxist Russia there emerged a worker-state that was "more intensively stateoriented than any absolute monarchy"; in fascist Italy, a corporate state normatively regulating not only national work, but also
"after-work" [Dopolavoro) and all spiritual life; and, in National Socialist Germany, a wholly integrated state, which, by means of
racial laws and so forth, politicizes even the life that had until then been private. The contiguity between mass democracy and
totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden transformation (as Lowith, here following in Schmitt's
footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his
every decisive
political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by
individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a[n]
tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new
and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to
liberate themselves. "The 'right' to life," writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue,
life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It is almost as if, starting from a certain point,
"to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or 'alienation,' the 'right' to
rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right' -which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of
comprehending-was the political response to all these new procedures of power" (La volonte, p. 191). The fact is that one and the
same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties
over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of
only because biological life and its needs had become the politically
decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which
twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which
sovereign decisions. And
this century's totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both
cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics,
the only real question to be decided was which form of organization would be
best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once their
fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between
Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter
into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling classes' unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the
and in which
Serbian program of "ethnic cleansing") and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.
The 1ACs legitimizes sovereignty and normalizes a permanent

state of emergency. This has three implications:

law.

the act of
bare power

boundaries


the law masks the


Robinson 11


The
It also
1NC (One-off)
biopolitics. The normalization of the state of exception is
founded upon a question of necessity what rights must be
given up so that democracy can be preserved?
McGovern 11 [Mark McGovern is a Program on the Global Demography of Aging Fellow at the
Department of Global Health and Population, and the Harvard Center for Population and Development
Studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from University College Dublin. The Dilemma of
Democracy: Collusion and the State of Exception, Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 213230, 2011] Hebron ADN
The State of Exception The Significance of the State of Exception For Agamben the state of exception is crucial for understanding
the paradigm of modern governance and fundamental to the western political and legal tradition upon which the character and
practice of contemporary so-called democracies are based (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Indeed, Agambens argument is specifically
designed to challenge liberal conceptions of the origins and nature of the legitimacy of contemporary democratic states in late
capitalism; namely that such legitimacy derives from a tradition of adherence to a set of legal norms that are certain, predictable
and guarantee a range of minimal freedoms in opposition to the The Dilemma of Democracy 217 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5,
Issue 2, 2011 arbitrary exercise of governmental power. Rather than a genealogy of the contemporary liberal democratic state that
foregrounds the role of the social contract and of rights, Agamben sets out to explore what (following Carl Schmitt) is understood as
the basis of sovereignty, the sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception (Carl Schmitt, 1922, quoted in Agamben, 2005,
p. 1). For Agamben the state of exception is one that involves the suspension of law and of legal norms and the exercise of arbitrary
decision. He argues that it is pivotal for understanding the nature of contemporary state practice and of lifting the veil on the
ambiguous zone [the] no-mans land between public law and political fact (Agamben, 2005, pp. 1-2) for two main reasons. First,
Agamben (2005) argues that the state of exception is the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its
own suspension (p. 3). For Agamben this is deeply historically embedded in the western political tradition. Following Foucault,
Agamben suggests this represents a form of bio-political power but, unlike Foucault, he finds its origin predates the modern. Rather,
the
inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original if concealed
nucleus of sovereign power the production of a bio-political body is the original activity of sovereign power
(Agamben, 1998, p. 6). What is distinctive about the modern state is that it places the regulation of biopolitical life as explicit to its
purpose and in so doing bring[s] to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life (Agamben, 1998, p. 6). In many ways identifying
this lineage from the ancient to the modern is one of the key genealogical tasks of Agambens work. It also provides the logic for his
exploration of apparently obscure figures and archetypes (such as homo sacer and the iustitium) found in ancient (particularly
Roman) law as a means to explore the contemporary. Second, Agamben holds that the state of exception as
the
voluntary
creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has
become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so called
democratic ones (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Writing against the backdrop of the Global War on Terror Agamben contends
that the state of exception is increasingly the dominant paradigm of government in
contemporary politics (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Crucially too, while he is at pains not simply to conflate the two, the
increasing reliance on the state of exception as a technique of governance calls into
question the (all too politically and ideologically significant) juxtaposition of totalitarianism and
democracy as distinct constitutional forms. The space between public law and political fact opened up, for
example, by the status of the detainee in Guantanamo Bay, and his reduction to the condition of
bare life, is one in which the state of exception appears as a threshold of
indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). The State of Exception,
the State of Necessity and the Intensification of State Power The state of exception is also significant because it is the limit of the
juridical order. Rather than being identified as either inside or outside the juridical order (as different legal traditions would have
it) Agamben wants to deconstruct this 218 Mark McGovern Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2011 simple topographical
opposition and to argue instead that the state of exception should be conceived as a threshold, or a zone of indifference where
inside and outside blur with each other. The suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition and the zone of anomie that it
establishes is not unrelated to the juridical order (Agamben, 2005, p. 23). This characterization of the state of exception as a
zone of indistinction, an anomic space and a void of law can provide a language through which to capture and represent state
practices (such as that of collusion) that lie at one and the same time apparently beyond and yet inextricably bound up with the
juridical order. As well as providing an evocative conceptualization of the fluid and indistinct character of the anomic space that is
the state of exception, Agambens analysis of two strands within western legal traditions, and their interaction with the changing
character of the state through the twentieth century, also provides important insights. One tradition (prevalent in France and
Germany) makes specific constitutional or legal provision for the regulation of the state of exception. The other (evident in
England and the USA) consists of states that prefer not to regulate the problem explicitly (Agamben, 2005, p. 10). That said,
Agamben (2005, p. 10) contends that the distinction between the two, clear in principle but hazier in fact has done little or nothing
to prevent something like a state of exception developing in all of the identified western state orders since the early twentieth
century. Indeed, the term state of exception, readily found in French and German legal traditions has its direct equivalent in the
the suspension of
legal norms is invariably founded on arguments of necessity; that exceptional powers must be
introduced, and rights suspended, so that the democratic order may be preserved. Indeed such
an argument can be seen to lie at the heart of the terrorist experts democratic dilemma in
posing the question - what aspects of democracy must we give up in order to preserve
democracy? Legal concepts of necessity (that necessity creates its own law) can be subject to a range of critiques. Perhaps
English tradition; martial law or emergency powers. Justification for the state of exception and
the most persuasive is that, while claims of necessity tend to be couched in objective terms they are always founded on a subjective
decision. As Balladore-Pallieri notes (as cited in Agamben, 2005) the concept of necessity is: An entirely subjective one, relative to
the aim one wants to achieve. It may be said that necessity dictates the issuance of a given norm, because otherwise the existing
juridical order is threatened with ruin; but there must be agreement on the point that the existing order must be preserved. (p. 30)
Necessity was presented as the underlying logic justifying the intensification of state power through the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. This involved powers previously evident only in a real state of siege (for example, an actual condition of war) becoming
a paradigm of governance in peacetime where a fictitious state of siege has been enacted (Agamben, 2005, p. 17). Agamben sees
the great conflagrations of the twentieth century, particularly the two world wars, as pivotal in this build up of state power. Based on
the The Dilemma

transference of wartime conditions to
peacetime governance results in the normalization of the state of exception (Agamben,
the needs of wartime economies and characterized by the ever-encroaching power of the state over civilian life,
of Democracy 219 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2011
2005, p. 18). To illustrate the crucial role of wartime conditions in generating this move toward the permanence of exceptional
measures in the British case Agamben specifically cites the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). The DORA was introduced in August
1914 and did indeed massively expand the direct power of the state over the lives of citizens. It also provided the template for the
emergence of such exceptional measures as a norm in peacetime Britain. This was even more obviously the case in Ireland.
Even so-called democracies build their foundation upon the exclusion of bare life.
Attempts to expand democracy resinscribe the individual within the state and mask
the fundamentally totalitarian nature of all modern states, taking out solvency and
turning case
every decisive
individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a[n]
tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new
and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to
liberate themselves. "The 'right' to life," writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue,
"to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or 'alienation,' the 'right' to
rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right' -which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of
Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter
into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling classes' unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the
and in which
Serbian program of "ethnic cleansing") and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.
The 1ACs legitimizes sovereignty and normalizes a permanent

state of emergency. This has three implications:

law.
Every
interpretative
act thus becomes an

boundaries by making it possible for extra-legal actions to acquire legal status , to gain forceof-law.75 The exception as a zone of indistinction deactivates the law that is contained


the law masks the


Robinson 11


The
It also
Explanation:
Democracy 3 Specific links in the first two cards
1. A uniquely destructive form of biopolitics has become the
central concern of all modern states, whether democratic or
not thus the 1ACs expansion of democracy is actually an
expansion of the totalitarian management of bare life.
2. The individual rights of the citizen can only be granted by
the state thus, gains in democratic liberties only serve to
further reinscribe individuals within sovereign power.
3. Democracy promotion serves as a justification for the
normalization of the state of exception you have to grant
the government emergency powers and give up your civil
liberties in order to preserve democracy
1NC - Foucauldian Biopower
1NC
Foucaults conception of biopower only focuses on the
opposition of the macropolitical against the micropolitical this
precludes an analysis of nonpolitical bare life in the state of
exception, which is totally unable to engage in Foucaults
process of subjectivization
Agamben 98 [Agamben, G. (1998). Sovereign power and bare life (pp. 119). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press.] Hebron AN
ln the last years of his life, while he was working on the history of sexuality and unmasking the deployments of power
at work within it, Michel Foucault began to direct his inquiries with increasing insistence toward the
study of what he defined as biopolitics, that is, the growing inclusion of man's natural life in
the mechanisms and calculations of power. At the end of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault, as we
have seen, summarizes the process by which life, at the beginning of the modern age, comes to be what is at stake in politics: "For
millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is
Foucault
continued to investigate the "processes of subjectivization" that, in the passage from the
ancient to the modern world, bring the individual to objectify his own self, constituting himself
as a subject and, at the same time, binding himself to a power of external control. Despite what one might have legitimately
expected, Foucault never brought his insights to bear on what could well have appeared to be
the exemplary place of modern biopolitics: the politics of the great totalitarian
states of the twentieth century. The inquiry that began with a reconstruction of the
grand enfermement in hospitals and prisons did not end with an analysis of the
concentration camp. If, on the other hand, the pertinent studies that Hannah Arendt dedicated to the structure of
an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question." Until the very end, however,
totalitarian states in the postwar period have a limit, it is precisely the absence of any biopolitical perspective. Arendt very clearly
discerns the link between totalitarian rule and the particular condition of life that is the camp: "The supreme goal of all totalitarian
stares," she writes, in a plan for research on the concentration camps, which, unfortunately, was nor carried through, "is nor only the
freely admitted, long-ranging ambition to global rule, but also the never admitted and immediately realized attempt at total
domination. The concentration camps are the laboratories in the experiment of total domination, for human nature being what it is,
this goal can be achieved only under the extreme circumstances of human made hell" (Essays, p. 240). Yet what escapes Arendt is
the radical
transformation of politics into the realm of bare life (that is, into a camp) legitimated and
necessitated total domination. Only because politics in our age had been entirely
transformed into biopolitics was it possible for politics to be constituted as
totalitarian politics to a degree hitherto unknown. The fact that the two thinkers who may well have reflected most deeply
that the process is in a certain sense the inverse of what she rakes it to be, and that precisely
on the political problem of our age were unable to link together their own insights is certainly an index of the difficulty of this
"bare life" or "sacred life" is the focal lens through which we shall try to
make their points of view converge. In the notion of bare life the interlacing of politics and life has become so
tight that it cannot easily be analyzed. Until we become aware of the political nature of bare life and
its modern avatars (biological life, sexuality, etc.), we will not succeed in clarifying the opacity at their
center. Conversely, once modern politics enters into an intimate symbiosis with bare life, it loses the intelligibility that still seems
problem. The concept of
to us to characterize the juridicopolitical foundation of classical politics.
The 1ACs instance of resistance fails and legitimizes a


law.

the act of
bare power

boundaries


the law masks the

Explanation
1NC Identity (WIP)
1NC
Identity politics are bad dude
Armstrong 8 [Armstrong, A. (2008, November 5). Beyond Resistance: A response to ieks critique of
Foucaults subject of freedom.] Hebron ADN
political
strategies of resistance might be both problematic and insufficient. Insofar as a politics of
resistance, like the project of liberation, inevitably emerges in reaction to the injuries or
constraints imposed by the system against which it struggles, it is likely to give rise
to an attachment to the identity formed through the social injury suffered and, thus,
to reinforce rather than question the terms of domination that generated it. For example, the
contemporary trend to seek legal redress for injuries related to social subordination
marked by race or sex tends, as Wendy Brown has noted, to fix the identities of the injured and the
injuring as social positions and to cast the law and the state as protectors against
injury and, thus, the injured as in continuing need of such protection .14 One of the risks
contained in this demand for protection is that it may serve to reinforce an economy
premised on the distinction between victims and perpetrators by encouraging a politics of
blame directed not at empowering the injured or vulnerable, but at punishing the
perpetrators. There are, thus, two related dangers to which politics-as-resistance is susceptible. The first derives from the
manner in which those who are oppressed by power come to be invested in that
oppression in so far as their selfidentity becomes bound up with the terms through
which they are marginalized, excluded and discriminated against. In other words, politicized identity
becomes attached to its exclusion because its existence is premised on this
exclusion. The danger, then, is that in reacting to domination through the defensive assertion of a subordinated or
marginalized identity, a politics of resistance may fail to address the way in which oppressive
structures are reproduced at the level of attachments to forms of identity which
Reflection on the theme of practices of freedom in Foucaults late work on ethics suggests a further sense in which
presuppose and support those structures. It is, perhaps, in recognition of this danger that Foucault worries especially about that
mode of modern power which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his identity, imposes a
law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him.15 The other danger is that resistance to
oppression may tend, by virtue of the suffering that undergirds it, to be transformed into a politics of resentment which reinforces
social powerlessness by making that powerlessness the basis for political recognition and legal redress.
Using the ballot as a referendum on identity cedes agency to

the sovereign, which recreates the violence against social
movements that they kritik
Campbell 98 [Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle
(David, Performing Politics and the Limits of Language 1998)]

Those who argue that hate speech demands juridical responses assert that not only
does the speech communicate, but that it constitutes an injurious act. This presumes that
not only does speech act, but that "it acts upon the addressee in an injurious way" (16). This argumentation
is, in Butler's eyes, based upon a "sovereign conceit" whereby speech wields a
sovereign power, acts as an imperative, and embodies a causative understanding
of representation. In this manner, hate speech constitutes its subjects as injured victims unable to respond
themselves and in need of the law's intervention to restrict if not censor the offending words, and punish the
This idealization of the speech act as a sovereign action (whether positive or

appears linked with the idealization of sovereign state power or, rather, with the
imagined and forceful voice of that power. It is as if the proper power of the state
has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens, and the state then reemerges as
a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to protects as from other citizens ,
speaker:
negative)
who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign power (82). Two elements of this are paradoxical. First,
the
sovereign conceit embedded in conventional renderings of hate speech comes

at a time when understanding power in sovereign terms is becoming (if at all ever
possible) even more difficult. Thus the juridical response to hate speech helps deal with an onto-political
problem: "The constraints of legal language emerge to put an end to this particular
historical anxiety [the problematisation of sovereignty], for the law requires that we resituate
power in the language of injury, that we accord injury the status of an act and trace
that act to the specific conduct of a subject " (78). The second, which stems from this, is that (to use
Butler's own admittedly hyperbolic formulation) "the state produces hate speech." By this she means not that the
state is the sovereign subject from which the various slurs emanate, but that within the frame of the juridical
account of hate speech "the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's
judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state
plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of
publicly acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and
The sovereign conceit

of the juridical argument thus linguistically resurrects the sovereign subject at
the very moment it seems most vulnerable, and reaffirms the sovereign state and
its power in relation to that subject at the very moment its phantasmatic condition
is most apparent. The danger is that the resultant extension of state power
will be turned against the social movements that sought legal redress in
the first place (24)
retaining the power to make and sustain the line of consequential demarcation" (77).
Explanation:
1NC Environment
1NC
The affs visions of climatic disaster inevitably bring about a
climate leviathan that has absolute control of people for the
purpose of saving the planet
Mann and Wainwright 12 [Joel Wainwright is a professor of geography at Ohio State University
Geoff Mann is professor of geography at Simon Fraser University, Climate Leviathan, Antipode Vol. 45 No. 1]
Hebron ADN
climate Leviathan is a direct descendant in the line from

Schmitts sovereign: when it comes to climate, Leviathan will decide, and is constituted
precisely in the act of decision. It is the pure expression of a desire for , the recognition of the
absolute necessity of, a sovereignindeed, the first truly planetary sovereignto seize command,
declare an emergency and bring order to the globe. If Agamben (2005:14) is correct that the
declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented
generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government ,
then the consolidation of climate Leviathan represents the rescaling of the normal
technique[s] to encompass planetary security , or the making secure of planetary life. With this
Why call this Leviathan? In the first place,
Hobbes original to
achievement the state of nature and the nature of the state would enmesh perfectly. Geographically at least, climate Leviathan
exceeds its lineage, for it must somehow transcend the state-based territorial container fundamental to Hobbes and Schmitts
independent regulatory
regimes are inadequate to the global challenge of sharply reducing carbon emissions.
This contradictionrending deep fissures in the UNFCCC processmay lead, as with other public good collective action
problems, to the construction of a nominally global frame which is in fact a political and
geographical extension of the rule of the extant hegemonic bloc, ie the capitalist global North.
thought. Even for those states most committed to national autonomy, it is increasingly clear that
But this is by no means certain, partly because climate change has broken the surface of elite consciousness at a moment of global
political- economic transition. Any realizable planetary climate Leviathan must be constructed with the approval of a range of actors
formerly excluded from global governance China and India most notably, but the list could go on. Ensuring Chinas support for any
binding carbon regulation complicates the role of capital in the Leviathan.5 We conjecture that Leviathan could take two forms. On
one hand, a variety of authoritarian territorial sovereignty, arguably truer to Hobbes own vision, could emerge in nations or regions
where political economic conditions prove amenable. We name this possibility climate Mao, and discuss it below. On the other
we could see Leviathan emerge as the means by which to perpetuate the extant
rule of northern liberal democratic capitalist states. Arguably the most likely scenario here is that sometime in the
coming decades the waning US-led liberal capitalist bloc will endeavor to impose a global carbon
regime that, in light of political and ecological crisis, will brook no opposition in defense of a human future for which it
hand,
volunteers itself as the last line of defense. The pattern of mobilization will likely be familiar, in which the United Nations or other
international fora serve as a means of legitimizing aggressive means of surveillance and discipline. This could make the construction
of climate Leviathan a key means by which to salvage American international hegemonya prospect that, if anything, only
increases the likelihood of its consolidation.6 One might find, for example, the personification of this effort in John Holdren, Harvard
physicist and National Science Advisor to President Obama. Since his 2008 appointment, right-wing media have derided Holdren as
a harbinger of a climate police state. One website claims he has called for forced abortions and mass sterilization to save the
planet.7 Paranoid hyperbole, certainly, but the underlying critique is not entirely misplaced. Holdren was an early visionary of what
we call climate Leviathan. Consider these lines from the conclusion of Holdrens (1977) textbook on resource management, in which
he outlines a new sovereignty he calls Planetary Regime: Toward a Planetary Regime:...Perhaps those agencies, combined with
UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regimesort of an international
superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development,
the Regime could have the power

to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as
rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might
also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade , perhaps including assistance
from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market. The Planetary Regime might be
given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each
region and for arbitrating various countries shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the
administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources . . . Thus
responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits (Ehrlich, Ehrlich and Holdren
1977:942943).
Environmental securitization cements a division between

humanity and nature whereby the natural world becomes a
strange other to be tamed and conquered this guarantees
planetary abuse and destruction of the resources the plan
seeks to control turns the case
Trenell 9 [Paul, Graduate Student in International Politics at the University of Wales, "The (Im)possibility of
'Environmental Security," dissertation submitted September 2006, accessed 11/30/09
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/410/2/trenellpaulipm0060.pdf] Hebron ADN
Before tracing the response to the emergence of environmental hazards it is necessary to say a word about the causes of
environmental degradation. By this I refer not to the scientific explanations of the process, but the deeply rooted societal and
environmental
threats are the result of the kind of society that the current global political economy produces.
Industrial activity, agricultural monocultures, and rampant individual consumption of
disposable items (all of which are efforts to enhance some forms of human welfare through domination and control of
facets of nature) produce other forms of insecurity (1992a: 113). A large hand in the development of
contemporary environmental problems must be attributed to the enlightenment faith in
human ability to know and conquer all. In the quest for superiority and security, an erroneous
division between humanity and nature emerged whereby the natural world came to
be seen as something to be tamed and conquered rather than something to be
respected (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1973). Over time, this false dichotomy has become accepted as given, and as a result
humankind has lost sight of its own dependence on nature. It is this separation which allows the
continued abuse of planetary resources with such disregard for the long-term implications. What is at stake in
philosophical developments that have allowed the process to continue. As Simon Dalby has detailed,
how we respond to environmental insecurity is the healing of this rift and, in turn, the preservation of human life into the future. Any
suggested solutions to environmental vulnerability must account for these concerns and provide a sound basis for redressing the
imbalance in the humanity-nature relationship.
The impact is an ongoing politics of indistinction which makes

violence inevitable only a refusal to engage with the
sovereign can resolve the production of bare life
Prozorov 10 [Prozorov, S. (2010, October 25). Why Giorgio Agamben is an Optimist. Retrieved December
31, 2015.] Hebron ADN
Both the supporters and the critics of Agambens political thought agree that his account of the contemporary state of politics offers
a staggering account of a total crisis of a global scope. In contrast to the tendency in todays critical political thought to appreciate
differences, discontinuities, distinctions and diversity, Agamben presents a totalizing image of the global state of exception, which
appears bent on collapsing all differences in the zone of indistinction, which is the privileged topos of Agambens writings.3 Among
his more famous zones of indistinction are those between democracy and totalitarianism, violence and law, nature and culture, etc.
In the logic of Agambens argument, our era of nihilism, which he dates back to the First World War, is marked by the ultimate
dissolution of these and other distinctions that grounded political orders and the consequent vacuity both of the ideologies and the
practices of western modernity that were based on these distinctions. The contemporary condition that Agamben, following Carl
global civil war is thus not a result of a malfunctioning, ineffectiveness, abandonment, or betrayal of
a holistic crisis of occidental politics, which reveals the
nullity of its foundational distinctions that was there all along but was concealed by the relatively
ordered character of political life.4 In this holistic crisis there is literally nothing in our tradition that we can rely
Schmitt, likens to a
any of the classical political paradigms but rather
on as a foundation for political transformation. Agambens political stance is therefore radically anti-strategic insofar as it explicitly
renounces any involvement in the contemporary apparatuses of sovereignty and governmentality for the purpose of, for example,
tactical alliances or reversals, playing one logic of power against the other, internal subversion, etc.5 While the latter form of
strategic intervention into the field of power relations is most usually associated with Michel Foucaults work, which emphasized the
plurality, diversity and reversibility of power relations that offer opportunities for immanent resistance, Agamben is inspired by a
different, less widely discussed position of Foucault with respect to power, his anti-strategic stance on resistance, formulated in the
context of the Iranian Revolution.6 Agamben explicitly rejects any possibility of transforming power relations within the immanent
logic of their game, since the game in question has long lost any recognizable meaning and is running on empty. This totalized
image of the global state of exception has been criticized as both hyperbolically excessive and internally contradictory. Paul
Passavant has argued that Agambens theory suffers from a contradictory concept of the state that also plagues his affirmative
vision of the coming politics.7 While Agamben is most famous for his deconstruction of the logic of sovereignty that radicalizes
Schmitts conception,8 he has also, from his earliest work onwards, confronted the more dispersed, governmentalized modes of
power relations characteristic of late capitalism in the manner highly influenced by Guy Debords work on the society of the
spectacle.9 Against the argument that this conjunction of sovereignty and governmentality in the analysis of late-modern power
relations constitutes a contradiction, we must recall that this duality of the contemporary apparatus of power is explicitly affirmed by
Agamben himself, who, similarly to Foucaults claim for the indissociability of sovereignty, discipline and government,10 regularly
insists that the system is always double.11 The inextricable link between the two aspects of the contemporary social order consists
state sovereignty and the late-capitalist

society of the spectacle are biopolitical and thus permanently feed into each other. The
contemporary neo-liberal governmentality extends the operation of economic rationality to life
itself, whereby life is conceived as a paradigmatic form of enterprise,12 and in this manner expropriates the being-in-language
in the nihilistic deployment of life itself as a (post-)historical task. Both
that defines human existence and subjects it to the laws of exchange-value or, in Agambens later works, exhibition value.13
sovereign power expropriates the potentiality of human existence,

transforming it into the bare life that it then grounds itself in and applies itself to in the perpetual
state of exception. The state does nothing more than sustain the spectacle with its
apparatuses of security, while the spectacle does nothing more than perpetually produce the
degraded forms-of-life that sovereign power can apply itself to. Yet, how can this claim about
Conversely,
the mutual reinforcement of the sovereign state and the society of the spectacle under the aegis of biopolitical nihilism ground any
optimistic disposition? It is precisely this totalized image that allows Agamben to claim that in the contemporary situation there is
nothing to lose from a total halting of the machine.14 On the one hand, Agamben refuses both the possibility of reforming or even
revolutionizing social life by re-engaging with sovereignty, e.g. through the political struggle for hegemony along the lines of
Laclaus populism or the Habermasian formation of a more inclusive political community through communicative action. Neither is
there any point in a Derridean deconstructive subversion of sovereignty in the name of the undeconstructible justice and
democracy to come, which serves only to highlight the undecidability at the heart of the law, which is essential to the latters
Since the state of anomie is the constitutive outside of any nomos, it is

bound to remain inscribed within it irrespectively of the way the positive structure of
order is transformed. The state of exception and its product, the bare life of homo sacer, are not a
political problem to be resolved within any positive system, but rather a problem of the
political itself.16 Any search for a more effective, exception-proof positive order is entirely in
vain, especially in todays condition of nihilism , in which the vacuity of historical forms-of-life has brought
existence.15
the sovereign ban to the foreground as the sole substance of politics.

solve for th
Robinson 11


The
It also
Explanation:
1NC Security K on roids
1NC
The 1ACs instance of state reform is the invocation of the legal
regulation of violence their existential threats are
spectacularized to normalize the state of exception. The 1AC
was not objective political discourse is militarized and
distorted to justify a state of exception the resulting global
civil war causes unending warfare
McLoughlin 12 [Daniel McLoughlin is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of New South
Wales, working on the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. Giorgio Agamben on Security, Government and the
Crisis of Law, Griffith Law Review, Volume 21, Issue 3, 2012] Hebron ADN
One of the decisive effects of total war, according to Junger, was the tendency to demolish the difference between war and peace
or, in Agambens terms, between the emergency and normal conditions. Similarly, Agamben argues that we are currently faced with
the seemingly unstoppable progression of a global civil war.77 Although Agamben does not explain what he means by this in
State of Exception, he does flesh the idea out in Means Without Ends in two different directions. The first of these is the emergence
of the sovereign police.78 Modern political philosophy has historically distinguished between the states right to use coercive
violence against its citizens and the sovereign right to go to war against enemy states. This was accompanied by a distinction
between the legal regulation of violence within a states territory and the regulation of war between states through international
states no longer declare war against one

another, and war is disguised as a police operation, in which the outright
invasion of a sovereign state is presented as an act of internal jurisdiction .80 This, for Agamben,
confirms Carl Schmitts assertion that every war in our time has become a civil war.81The second sense in which
law.79 Within the contemporary political horizon, however,
Agamben deploys the idea of global civil war pertains not to the exercise of state violence, but to contemporary forms of social
social life has

become the site of a global civil war whose storm troopers are the media,
whose victims are all the peoples of the Earth.82 In this sense, civil war does not
refer to a military conflict being waged between two parties vying for control of the
state, but to contemporary forms of biopolitical regulation that seek to
control the forms of life within the state through the manipulation of public opinion. While
this description of contemporary social regulation as a civil war is rather metaphorical, what is at stake in it is the
attempt to mobilise, for radical political ends, the language of threat and war that so
dominates contemporary political discourse. Agamben argues that the voluntary creation of a
permanent emergency has become an essential practice of contemporary
states, including the so-called democratic ones.83 Here, the state of exception operates as a
technique of government in that the production and manipulation of a sense of emergency is
used as a tool of socio-political regulation. The generalisation of actual combat
through the development of the sovereign police plays a crucial role in the normalisation of the state
of emergency as a technique of government. War plays an extraordinarily useful political role, as it helps to rally
support for the state and to quell opposition, and can aid in justifying policies and legal
measures that would not be acceptable without the sense of an immediate and
pressing danger.84 Invoking the language of warfare for political problems that fall far short of actual
warfare can also help to produce many of the same political effects as the threat posed by
combat, allowing for the total mobilisation of social forces for a united purpose that is
regulation: state power is, he argues, now principally founded on the control of appearance, and as a result
typical of warfare.85 Indeed, since the period of total war, there has indeed been a continued and extensive militarisation of
the
language of existential threat and emergency is such extraordinarily
common political currency that it is deployed to frame all kinds of social
and economic problems, from football hooliganism to famine, flood and child abuse.86 Agambens description of
contemporary social regulation as a form of civil war is an attempt to reappropriate this kind of political language. The media
spectacle of war (and war-like states of emergency) presents the existence of a threat that
authorises state action to protect the population . For Agamben, however, the major threat
political discourse, from the Cold War through to other so-called wars (on poverty, drugs, terror and so on), and
the contemporary spectacular-democratic

form of world organisation actually runs the risk of being the worst tyranny that
ever materialized in the history of humanity, against which resistance and dissent
will be practically more and more difficult and all the more so in that it that is increasingly clear that such
that we face is the political and economic status quo:
an organisation will have the task of managing the survival of humanity in an uninhabitable world.87 The decisive conflict of our
time is thus not that between states or ideologies, or between state terrorism and the terrorism of non-state actors; rather, it is the
conflict between the forces preserving the political and economic status quo (the state, mercantile economy and media) and a
global populace whose common interest in an inhabitable world is being profoundly endangered. This rather lopsided civil war is
being waged by those forces interested in the preservation of the current order through modes of biopolitical regulation that
perpetuate prevailing forms of life and close down the possibility of the alternatives emerging.
The impact is an ongoing politics of indistinction which makes

violence inevitable only a refusal to engage with the
sovereign can resolve the production of bare life
Prozorov 10 [Prozorov, S. (2010, October 25). Why Giorgio Agamben is an Optimist. Retrieved December
31, 2015.] Hebron ADN
Both the supporters and the critics of Agambens political thought agree that his account of the contemporary state of politics offers
a staggering account of a total crisis of a global scope. In contrast to the tendency in todays critical political thought to appreciate
differences, discontinuities, distinctions and diversity, Agamben presents a totalizing image of the global state of exception, which
appears bent on collapsing all differences in the zone of indistinction, which is the privileged topos of Agambens writings.3 Among
his more famous zones of indistinction are those between democracy and totalitarianism, violence and law, nature and culture, etc.
In the logic of Agambens argument, our era of nihilism, which he dates back to the First World War, is marked by the ultimate
dissolution of these and other distinctions that grounded political orders and the consequent vacuity both of the ideologies and the
of western modernity that were based on these distinctions. The contemporary condition that Agamben,
global civil war is thus not a result of a malfunctioning, ineffectiveness, abandonment,
or betrayal of any of the classical political paradigms but rather a holistic crisis of occidental politics, which
reveals the nullity of its foundational distinctions that was there all along but was concealed by
the relatively ordered character of political life.4 In this holistic crisis there is literally nothing in our tradition
practices
following Carl Schmitt, likens to a
that we can rely on as a foundation for political transformation. Agambens political stance is therefore radically anti-strategic
insofar as it explicitly renounces any involvement in the contemporary apparatuses of sovereignty and governmentality for the
purpose of, for example, tactical alliances or reversals, playing one logic of power against the other, internal subversion, etc.5 While
the latter form of strategic intervention into the field of power relations is most usually associated with Michel Foucaults work, which
emphasized the plurality, diversity and reversibility of power relations that offer opportunities for immanent resistance, Agamben is
inspired by a different, less widely discussed position of Foucault with respect to power, his anti-strategic stance on resistance,
formulated in the context of the Iranian Revolution.6 Agamben explicitly rejects any possibility of transforming power relations
within the immanent logic of their game, since the game in question has long lost any recognizable meaning and is running on
empty. This totalized image of the global state of exception has been criticized as both hyperbolically excessive and internally
contradictory. Paul Passavant has argued that Agambens theory suffers from a contradictory concept of the state that also plagues
his affirmative vision of the coming politics.7 While Agamben is most famous for his deconstruction of the logic of sovereignty that
radicalizes Schmitts conception,8 he has also, from his earliest work onwards, confronted the more dispersed, governmentalized
modes of power relations characteristic of late capitalism in the manner highly influenced by Guy Debords work on the society of
the spectacle.9 Against the argument that this conjunction of sovereignty and governmentality in the analysis of late-modern power
relations constitutes a contradiction, we must recall that this duality of the contemporary apparatus of power is explicitly affirmed by
Agamben himself, who, similarly to Foucaults claim for the indissociability of sovereignty, discipline and government,10 regularly
insists that the system is always double.11 The inextricable link between the two aspects of the contemporary social order consists
state sovereignty and the late-capitalist

society of the spectacle are biopolitical and thus permanently feed into each other. The
contemporary neo-liberal governmentality extends the operation of economic rationality to life
itself, whereby life is conceived as a paradigmatic form of enterprise,12 and in this manner expropriates the being-in-language
in the nihilistic deployment of life itself as a (post-)historical task. Both
that defines human existence and subjects it to the laws of exchange-value or, in Agambens later works, exhibition value.13
sovereign power expropriates the potentiality of human existence,

transforming it into the bare life that it then grounds itself in and applies itself to in the perpetual
state of exception. The state does nothing more than sustain the spectacle with its
apparatuses of security, while the spectacle does nothing more than perpetually produce the
degraded forms-of-life that sovereign power can apply itself to. Yet, how can this claim about
Conversely,
the mutual reinforcement of the sovereign state and the society of the spectacle under the aegis of biopolitical nihilism ground any
optimistic disposition? It is precisely this totalized image that allows Agamben to claim that in the contemporary situation there is
nothing to lose from a total halting of the machine.14 On the one hand, Agamben refuses both the possibility of reforming or even
revolutionizing social life by re-engaging with sovereignty, e.g. through the political struggle for hegemony along the lines of
Laclaus populism or the Habermasian formation of a more inclusive political community through communicative action. Neither is
there any point in a Derridean deconstructive subversion of sovereignty in the name of the undeconstructible justice and
democracy to come, which serves only to highlight the undecidability at the heart of the law, which is essential to the latters
Since the state of anomie is the constitutive outside of any nomos, it is

bound to remain inscribed within it irrespectively of the way the positive structure of
order is transformed. The state of exception and its product, the bare life of homo sacer, are not a
political problem to be resolved within any positive system, but rather a problem of the
political itself.16 Any search for a more effective, exception-proof positive order is entirely in
vain, especially in todays condition of nihilism , in which the vacuity of historical forms-of-life has brought
existence.15
the sovereign ban to the foreground as the sole substance of politics.

solve for th
Robinson 11


The
It also
Explanation
1NC Turns on Case
Generic
Biopolitical regulation is rooted in the logic of killing to save
the division of different forms of life into that which is valuable
and that which is disposable is is the root cause of
racialization, totalitarianism, and war.
Reid 8 [Julian, Political theorist, philosopher, and professor of International Relations Life Struggles: War,
Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Foucault on Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael
Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008, p. 89-90] Hebron ADN
It is in turn in response to this reconceptualisation of war, a war in defence of the state rather than against the state, that we see the
emergence of the discourse of population and the development of the range of biopolitical techniques that guarantee the existence
and proliferation of what George Ensor described classically in 1818 as populousness (Ensor, 1967: p. 12). If state security is,
it is also more importantly the strategic

object of war to secure the life of populations themselves. The species life of populations
becomes the battlefield on which these new forms of biopolitical war are to be waged. A
according to Foucault, the object of war by the end of the eighteenth century,
war conducted through the development of security mechanisms that act to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average,
establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population ... so as to optimise a state of life
state security is always by necessity a commitment to the

security of society which is also always a commitment to the security of a particular
form of life. The development of the range of normalising techniques, the constitution of populations
around various discourses of the normal is in turn, Foucault insists, a kind of continual race war. What in
fact is racism? he asks. It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under powers control, the
break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of
the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are
described as good and that others , in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way
of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out
the groups that exist within a population. (Foucault, 2003b: pp. 2545) The constitution of
species life itself as the referent object of the security practices of state power allows for the specification of
any and every form of life that can be held to install degenerative effects within the field of population as the enemy
upon which war must be waged. Not necessarily a war of the military type, but a war of quiet extermination,
(Foucault, 2003b: p. 246). The commitment to
carried out with the continual deployment of regulatory and normalising techniques. A war that rages at the heart of modern
societies. A war of the biological type (Foucault, 2003b: p. 255). At the same time, then, that we see wars of the military type
we see the legitimisation of new

warmaking as the right to kill becomes aligned in proximity to the new necessity to
make live (Foucault, 2003b: p. 256). In turn we see the emergence of new practices of colonisation
justified on racial grounds. Subsequently we witness the emergence of fascist states and
societies in which the power over life and death, adjudicated on explicitly racial criteria, is
disseminated widely, to the point where everyone has the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only
addressed as a moral scandal and the major political problematic of modernity, so
forms of
because of the practice of informing, which effectively means doing away with the people next door, or having them done away
with. (Foucault, 2003b: p. 259) Likewise the emergence of socialisms based on the pursuit of the elimination of class enemies within
capitalist society emit, for Foucault, an essential form of racism (Foucault, 2003b: pp. 2612). These strategies of states, as well as
counter-state, counter-hegemonic struggles, are all fundamentally tied up with this problem of the relations between war, life and
security. Once politics is construed as the continuation of war,
of possibility for life,
once war becomes conceived as a condition
for the pursuit of its security and the increase of its being, however that conception may be
life itself becomes the object for variable forms of

destruction, annihilation and quiet exterminations.
grounded, the conditions are created whereby
2NC/1NR Overview
Legal Reform
Hegemony
Democracy
2NC Blocks
Top Level
A/T: State Action Solves

1. State of Exception: Any legal attempt to reform surveillance
and contain the state of exception fails because the state of
exception is by definition a place where the law has been
suspended. The 1AC is only masking the fact that the
production of bare life will always be legal the aff can solve
neither for the 1AC or the K because circumvention of the
law is guaranteed
2. Depoliticization: Crossapply the Frost evidence the
transformation of bios to zoe creates nonpolitical bare life
that is abandoned outside the state by the law the
existence of bare life outside the realm of politics means
that legal reform cannot assist depoliticized bare life that
exists outside the state. Neither the 1AC nor the perm can
address the impacts of the critique or the root cause of their
harms
3. Solvency Turn: Transcending bare life through better laws is impossible
every positive right is mirrored by the sovereigns preservation of the
ability to punish and create states of exception to circumvent those
rights - bare life is a problem inherent to the political system itself
Prozorov 9 [Professor of Political Science at the University of Helenski Sergie, The Appropriation of
Abandonment: Girgio Agamben on the State of Nature and the Political, February 15 th, International Studies
Association, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313215_index.html] Hebron ADN
Agambens understanding of the state of nature as a product of sovereign power rather than the precondition of its institution
entails a reconsideration of its ontological status. While for Hobbes the state of nature is an ideologem, a fiction deployed to
gain adherence to the sovereign, for both Schmitt and Agamben, the state of nature, insofar as it is present within the
sovereign order in the mode of the state of exception, is no longer a fiction but a reality. Both Schmitt and Agamben affirm
precisely that which Hobbes, according to Foucault, attempted to efface: the historical reality of (civil) war as the origin of all
constituted authority. While Schmitt affirms this reality in his exaltation of the political and indeed valorizes it as the instance of
reality that ruptures the simulacra of normative systems, Agamben clearly abhors it. However, his own analysis makes it
the state of exception

cannot be transcended by perfecting the legal system in order to banish every trace of
exception from it. The legal positivist argument that characterizes the liberalism of Schmitts time as well as
many of its contemporary descendants is clearly refuted by Agambens radicalization of Schmitts
decisionism, which demonstrates the dependence of the rule on the exception,
whereby every positive right is conditioned by the sovereigns preservation of the right
to punish. The state of exception and its product, the bare life of homo sacer, are not a
political problem to be resolved within the normative system, but rather a problem
of the political itself (Rasch 2007, 102). Any search for a more effective, exception-proof legal
system is entirely in vain, especially in todays condition of nihilism , in which the
vacuity of historical forms of life has brought the sovereign ban to the foreground as the sole
substance of politics. We cannot hope to evade the state of nature by a
denaturalizing gesture of the closure of the normative system into self-immanence, if
only because the state of nature is always already immanent to it (Agamben 2005a, 87).
remarkably difficult to see how it can be escaped. On the one hand, it is obvious that
Reform is impossible in the current apparatus - exclusion is the

foundation to the modern juridicial-political system of the west
Agamben 13 [Giorgio Agamben is an Italian continental philosopher best known for his work
investigating the concepts of the state of exception, What is a destituent power?
http://www.envplan.com/fulltext_temp/0/d3201tra.pdf, pg. 6] Hebron ADN
What was my intention when I began the archeology of politics that developed into
the Homo Sacer project? For me it was not a question of criticizing or correcting this or that concept, this or
that institution of Western politics. It was, rather, first and foremost a matter of shifting the very
site of politics itself. (For centuries, politics remained in the same place where Aristotle, then Hobbes and
Marx, situated it.) The first act of investigation was therefore the identification of bare life
as the first referent and stake of politics. The originary place of Western politics
consists of an ex-ceptio, an inclusive exclusion of human life in the form of bare life.
Consider the peculiarities of this operation: life is not in itself political, it is what must be excluded and, at the same
time, included by way of its own exclusion. Lifethat is, the Impolitical (lImpolitico)must be politicized through a
The autonomy of the political is founded,

in this sense, on a division, an articulation, and an exception of life. From the outset,
Western politics is biopolitical . 2. The structure of the exception was identified in Homo Sacer 1 starting
from Aristotle. The exception is an inclusive exclusion . Whereas the example is an exclusive inclusion
complex operation that has the structure of an exception.
(the example is excluded from the set to which it refers, in as much as it belongs to it), the exception is included in
It is this inclusive exclusion that defines the originary

structure of the arch. (1) The dialectic of the foundation that defines Western
ontology since Aristotle cannot be understood if one does not understand that it
functions as an exception in the sense that we have seen . The strategy is always
the same: something is divided, excluded, and rejected at the bottom,
and, through this exclusion, is included as the foundation . This is true for life, which
the normal case through its exclusion.
is said in many ways vegetative life, sensitive life, intellectual life, the first of which is excluded to function as the
foundation for the others but also for being, which is also said in many ways (to on legetai pollakos), one of which
In the sovereign exception that founds the juridical-political system

of the West, what is included through its exclusion is bare life. It is important not to confuse
bare life with natural life. Through its division and its capture in the dispositif of the
exception, life assumes the form of bare life, life that was divided and separated
from its form. It is in this sense that one must understand the assertion at the end of Homo Sacer 1 that the
fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as the originary political element. And it is
this bare life (or sacred life, if sacer designates primarily a life that can be killed without committing murder)
that, in the juridical-political machine of the West, acts as a threshold of articulation
between zo and bios, natural life and politically qualified life . And it will not be
possible to think another dimension of life if we have not first managed to
deactivate the dispositif of the exception of bare life. (If we relate the dispositif of the
will act as foundation.
exception to anthropogenesis, it is possible that it will be clarified through the original structure of the event of
It is, in
the words of Mallarm, a beginning that is based on the negation of every principle,
on its own situation in the arch. The ex-ceptio, the inclusive exclusion of the real from the logos and in
language. Language, in its taking place, both separates from itself and includes in itself life and the world.
the logos, is thus the original structure of the event of language.)
Their turn assumes biopolitics takes the form of one of two

poles: either overt control by institutions or regulation through
production as individuals. The proper question for modern
politics is to ask how the process of individuation facilitates
the control of sovereign power. *gendered language under
erasure
Agamben 98 (Giorgio Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, Stanford UP, p. 5-6)
<One of the most persistent features of Foucault's work is its decisive abandonment
of the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based on juridicoinstitutional models (the definition of sovereignty, the theory of the State), in favor
of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates
subjects' very bodies and forms of life. As shown by a seminar held in 1982 at the
University of Vermont, in his final years Foucault seemed to orient this analysis
according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand, the study
of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the
State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals
into its very center; on the other hand, the examination of the
technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivization bring the
individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the
same time, to an external power. Clearly these two lines (which carry on two
tendencies present in Foucault's work from the very beginning) intersect in many
points and refer back to a common center. In one of his last writings, Foucault
argues that the modern Western state has integrated techniques of
subjective individualization with procedures of objective totalization to an
unprecedented degree, and he speaks of a real "political `double bind,'
constituted by individualization and the simultaneous totalization of
structures of modern power" (bits et ecrits, 4: 229-32).
Yet the point at which these two faces of power converge remains strangely unclear
in Foucault's work, so much so that it has even been claimed that Foucault would
have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power. If Foucault
contests the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is exclusively
based on juridical models ("What legitimates power?") or on institutional models
("What is the State?"), and if he calls for a "liberation from the theoretical privilege
of sovereignty" in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as
its model and code, then where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction
(or, at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individualization and
totalizing procedures converge? And, more generally, is there a unitary center in
which the political "double bind" finds its raison d'etre? That there is a subjective
aspect in the genesis of power was already implicit in the concept of servitude
volontaire in Etienne de La Boetie. But what is the point at which the voluntary
servitude of individuals comes into contact with objective power? Can one
be content, in such a delicate area, with psychological explanations such as the
sujestive notion of a parallelism between external and internal neuroses?
Confronted with phenomena such as the power of the society of the spectacle that
is everywhere transforming the political realm today, is it legitimate or even
possible to hold subjective technologies and political techniques apart?
Although the existence of such a line of thinking seems to be logically implicit in
Foucault's work, it remains a blind spot to the eye of the researcher, or rather
something like a vanishing point that the different perspectival lines of Foucault's
inquiry (and, more generally, of the entire Western reflection on power) converge
toward without reaching.
The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection
between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power.
What this work has had to record among its likely conclusions is precisely that the
two analyses cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the
political realm constitutes the original-if concealed-nucleus of sovereign
power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original
activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the
sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the center of its calculations,
the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the
secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond (derived
from a tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic which one
encounters in the most diverse spheres) between modern power and the most
immemorial of the arcana imperii.>
Negative actions by the state do not resolve the state of

exceptiontheir attempt to solve bare life by reigning in
government only reentrenches sovereign power
Prozorov 9 [Prozorov, S. (2009, February 15). The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the
State of Nature and the Political. Retrieved December 29, 2015.] Hebron ADN
neither is it a question of returning to a pre-political state of nature, not

yet contaminated by the sovereign exception. If the state of nature were temporally
antecedent to sovereignty, then it could at least be envisioned, in a naturalist or
essentialist gesture, as a site of possible redemption. However , there is no passage
back from bios to zoe and any attempt at such passage only throws us back into the
state of exception and the production of bare life, which, contrary to numerous
misreadings, is not identical to zoe but is rather a destroyed or degraded bios, from which all positive determinations
have been subtracted (see Ziarek 2008; Ojakangas 2008; Mills 2004, 2005). There are not first life as a
natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature and then their implication
in law through the state of exception. On the contrary, the very possibility of
distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation in
the biopolitical machine. (Agamben 2005a, 88) Bare life has nothing natural about it; instead it is nothing but a
degraded life, a life reduced to survival (Agamben 1999b, 132-35). If bare life were identical to zoe qua
natural life, then Agambens critical project would be reduced to a banal affirmation
of bios over zoe, political life vs. animal existence, which would simply reproduce
the constitutive opposition of the Western ontopolitical tradition rather than
transcend it as Agamben certainly attempts to do. In contrast to such simplifications, Agamben
asserts that the human being is constitutively separated from its natural or animal
existence by virtue of its subjectification in language. In his early book Infancy and History (2007a,
50-70), he argues, following Benveniste, that the entrance of the human being into language
necessarily traverses the stage of the expropriation of all its pre-linguistic
experience as a living being so that any subjectification in language always
correlates with a correlate desubjectification (see also 1999b, 115-123). Similarly, Agambens inquiry into
On the other hand,
the event of language in Language and Death (1991), which, as Mika Ojakangas (2008) aptly demonstrates, is structurally
homologous to the theory of the state of exception in Homo Sacer, treats human speech as conditioned by the removal of natural
In exactly the same manner, the political

existence of humanity is from the outset accompanied by the removal or crossing
or animal voice (phone) that makes possible the passage to logos.
out of zoe, whose inclusive exclusion as a negative foundation of the political order
makes impossible any return to nature, other than in the obscene and degrading
manner practiced in the concentration camps and other loci of the state of
exception.
A/T: Law Good

The apparent neutrality of the law is only a mask for its ability
to create its own exceptions - its try or die for the alternative
to form solutions outside of the law.
Kohn 6 [Margaret Kohn, assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida, Bare Life and the
Limits of the Law Theory and Event] Hebron ADN
At this point it should be clear that Agamben would be deeply skeptical of the liberal call for more vigorous enforcement of the rule
of law as a means of combating cruelties and excesses carried out under emergency powers. His brief history of the state of
exception establishes that the phenomenon is a political reality that has proven remarkably resistant to legal limitations. Critics
might point out that this descriptive point, even if true, is no reason to jettison the ideal of the rule of law. For Agamben, however,
the link between law and exception is more fundamental; it is intrinsic to politics itself. The
sovereign power to declare the state of exception and exclude bare life is the same
power that invests individuals as worthy of rights . The two are intrinsically linked. The disturbing
implication of his argument is that we cannot preserve the things we value in the Western tradition
(citizenship, rights, etc.) without preserving the perverse ones. Agamben presents four theses that summarize
the results of his genealogical investigation. (1) The state of exception is a space devoid of law. It is not the logical consequence of
the state's right to self-defense, nor is it (qua commissarial or sovereign dictatorship) a straightforward attempt to reestablish the
norm by violating the law. (2) The space devoid of law has a "decisive strategic relevance" for the juridical order. (3) Acts committed
during the state of exception (or in the space of exception) escape all legal definition. (4) The concept of the force-of-law is one of
the many fictions, which function to reassert a relationship between law and exception, nomos and anomie. The core of Agamben's
critique of liberal legalism is captured powerfully, albeit indirectly, in a quote from Benjamin's eighth thesis on the philosophy of
the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of

exception' in which we live is the rule. We must attain a concept of history that accords with this fact. Then we
history. According to Benjamin,
will clearly see that it is our task to bring about the real state of exception, and this will improve our position in the struggle against
fascism. (57) Here Benjamin endorses the strategy of more radical resistance rather than stricter adherence to the law. He
recognizes that legalism is an anemic strategy in combating the power of fascism . The
problem is that conservative forces had been willing to ruthlessly invoke the state of exception in order to further their agenda while
the moderate Weimar center-left was paralyzed; frightened of the militant left and unwilling to act decisively against the
the rule of law, by

incorporating the necessity of its own dissolution in times of crisis, proved itself an
unreliable tool in the struggle against violence . From Agamben's perspective, the civil libertarians' call for
uniform application of the law simply denies the nature of law itself. He insists, "From the real state of exception in
which we live, it is not possible to return to the state of law. . ." (87) Moreover, by masking the
logic of sovereignty, such an attempt could actually further obscure the zone of
indistinction that allows the state of exception to operate. For Agamben, law serves to
legitimize sovereign power. Since sovereign power is fundamentally the power to place people into the category of
bare life, the law, in effect, both produces and legitimizes marginality and exclusion.
authoritarian right, partisans of the rule of law passively acquiesced to their own defeat. Furthermore,
A/T: Cede the Political

1. Equalization: The alternative is a fundamental rejection of
identity politics in the world of whatever-being, there is no
distinction between state and subject or liberal and
conservative. Cede the political doesnt apply because the
alternative reforms politics so that there is no liberal to
backlash against
2. Try or Die: The political is already ceded the sovereign has the absolute power
to produce bare life and create states of exception now, meaning that theres no
risk that trying that the alternative makes anything worse theres only a risk
that it solves all the harms of the 1AC and the K
The alternative is a prerequisite to effective politics, meaning

that were a prior question all the political problems of
Western society can be attributed to a failure to investigate
the link between bare life and sovereignty
Agamben 98 [Agamben, G. (1998). Sovereign power and bare life (pp. 7-8). Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press.] Hebron ADN
Foucaults death kept him from showing how he would have developed the concept and study of biopolitics. In any
case, however, the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polisthe
politicization of bare life as such

constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the politicalphilosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if politics today seems to be passing through a
politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of

modernity. The enigmas (Furet, LAllemagne nazi, p. 7) that our century has proposed to
historical reason and that remain with us (Nazism is only the most disquieting among them) will be solved
only on the terrainbiopoliticson which they were formed. Only within a biopolitical
horizon will it be possible to decide whether the cate gories whose opposition
founded modern politics (right/left, private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc.)and which have been
steadily dissolving, to the point of entering today into a real zone of indistinction will have to be
abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very horizon. And only a
reflection that, taking up Foucaults and Benjamins suggestion, thematically interrogates the link
between bare life and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant
from one another, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the
same time, return thought to its practical calling.
lasting eclipse, this is because
A state of exception leaves us with no relations of power only

relations of violence- concentration camps prove.
Edkins and Pin-Fat 5 [Jenny Edkins, professor of international politics at Prifysgol Aberystwyth
University (in Wales) and Veronique Pin-Fat, senior lecturer in politics at Manchester Universit, Through the Wire:
Relations of Power and Relations of Violence, Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2005] Hebron ADN
In Agambens analysis of sovereign power, the concentration camp is the

ultimate expression of the sovereign exception and the arena where all life
becomes nothing but bare life, life included by its exclusion: Inasmuch as its
inhabitants have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to
naked life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been
realised a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life
without any mediation. The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the
point in which politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer becomes
indistinguishable from the citizen.31 In modern biopolitics, Agamben argues, the
zone of indistinction exemplified in the camp is no longer localised and the
state of exception becomes the rule. The birth of the camp signals the point at
which the political system of the modern nation state ... enters into lasting
crisis, and the State decides to assume directly the care of the nations
biological life.32 Bare life becomes the technologised subject of administration,
governance and discipline, and political life disappears: The camp, which is now
securely lodged within the citys interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the
planet.33 This leads him to the question with which we began this section: Is today
a life of power (potenza) available?.34 For Agamben, such a life is not possible
within present forms of sovereign power and their reliance on the division of pure
living itself into forms of life. A life of power, which for Agamben is a political life,
would mean an exodus from sovereign power, a non-statist politics, and the
emancipation from such a division.35 It would entail something like a form-of-life, a
life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living.36 He goes on to
elaborate what he means by this: Only if I am not already and solely enacted, but
rather delivered to a possibility and a power [potenza] ... only then a form of life can
become, in its own factness and thingness, form-of-life, in which it is never possible
to isolate something like naked life.37 When Agamben asks the question Is today a
life of power available? the Italian term he uses for power is potenza, which, as
histranslator notes, can often resonate with implications of potentiality as well as
with decentralised or mass conceptions of force and strength.38 In the phrase
sovereign power he uses the different term, potere, which refers to the might or
authority of an already structured and centralised capacity, often an
institutionalised apparatus such as the State.39 It is potere or sovereign power that
founds itself ... on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the
forms of life.40 Form-of-life, a life in which something like naked life cannot be
separated, is a life of power as potenza. Significantly, Foucaults notion of relations
of power contains within it a sense of potentiality or possibility comparable to
potenza. As we have seen, freedom and resistance are a central part of Foucauldian
power relations. A power relation operates on the field of possibilities in which the
behaviour of active subjects is able to inscribe itself. It is a set of actions on possible
actions.41 Power as potenza in Agamben is the realm of politics, or what we will
call later properly political power relations. Bare Life as a Life without Power
Relations In this section, we suggest that when the insights of Foucault and
Agamben are combined there are unexpected implications for the notion of
resistance, implications that are to be found in the depoliticised and technologised
administrative depths of the camp. We argue that both Foucault and Agamben are
gesturing towards the conclusion that bare life is a life where power relations
are absent, and, correspondingly, that life constituted within biopolitics
cannot be a political life. This moves us then towards the somewhat surprising
conclusion that far from seeking to escape power relations, we should be
attempting to reinstate them, and with them the possibility (and possibilities or
potentialities) of politics.42 Sovereign power, despite its name, is not a properly
political power relation, we will argue, but a relationship of violence. For
Foucault, power relations are a very specific form of social relation: power
relations ... are distinct from objective capacities as well as from relations of
communication.43Power as a relation is distinct fromtechnical or objective
capacities. In addition, a power relation is to be seen as distinct from a
relationship of violence. Arelationship of violence acts immediately and
directly on others, whereas a relationship of power acts upon their
actions.44 Slaves in chains, for example, are not in a power relation but in a
relationship of violence: Where the determining factors are exhaustive, there is no
relationship of power: slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains,
only when he has some possible mobility, even a chance of escape.... At the very
heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of
the will and the intransigence of freedom.45 For Foucault power relations and
freedom occupy the same moment of possibility. Resistance is inevitable
whenever and wherever there are power relations. Without power
relations there is no possibility of resistance and no freedom. Taking this
insight from Foucault and turning the question of power on its head, we can begin to
ask what examples there might be, in practice, of a mode of being where
resistance is impossible, and hence where there is no power relation. It can
be argued, following Agamben, that the concentration camp is such an
example. In the camp the majority of prisoners become what is termed in camp
jargon Muselmnner. Primo Levi describes these as the drowned:Their life is
short, but their number is endless; they ... form the backbone of the camp, an
anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march
and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really
suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in
the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.46 The
drowned are bare life their concerns are limited to where the next mouthful of
food is coming from and they are also homines sacri, sacred men: they can be
killed at will by the camp guards, without ceremony and without justification having
to be offered or provocation demonstrated. More significantly for the argument
here, the drowned offer no resistance. Indeed they are indifferent to their fate. They
are reduced to a state wherethey are unable even to commit suicide: they do not
have the possibility of killing themselves as, even if there were ways in which they
could engineer their own death, they no longer have the will either to live or die. In
Foucaults terms, then, for the drowned of the concentration camp there are no
relations of power, only relations of violence. The camp then is an example of
where power relations vanish. What we have in the camps is not a power relation.
All we have is the administration of bare life. In the camps, for those inmates
who reached the depths, who faced the Gorgon, there were no relations of power,
only relations of violence. As we have noted, Agamben importantly argues that
what took place in the camp as a zone of indistinction has extended in the
contemporary world to encompass regions outside the camp as well. In the
face of a biopolitics that technologises, administers and depoliticises, and thereby
renders the political and power relations irrelevant, we have all become homines
sacri or bare life.
A/T: Krishna / Coalitions

Progressivism Fails: The aligment of progressive projects
with the established political order makes systemic change
impossible and guarantees the preservation of the status quo.
Agamben 2000 [Agamben, G. (2000). Means without end: Notes on politics (pp. 136-8). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.] Hebron ADN
the so-called leftist coalitions have

won in the large cities where there have been elections. One is struck by the victors' excessive
preoccupation with presenting themselves as the establishment and with reassuring
at all costs the old economic, political, and religious powers. When Napoleon defeated the Mamluks in
Today, the political parties that define themselves as "progressive" and
Egypt, the first thing he did was to summon the notables who constituted the old regime's backbone and to inform them that under
the new sovereign their privileges and functions would remain untouched. Since here one is not dealing with the military conquest of
a foreign country, the zeal with which the head of a party-that up until not too long ago used to call itself Communist-saw fit to
reassure bankers and capitalists by pointing out how well the lira and the stock exchange had received the blow is, to say the least,
inappropriate. This much is certain: these politicians will end up being defeated by their very will to win at all costs.
The desire
to be the establishment will ruin them just as it ruined their predecessors .6 In a recent
book, Jean-Claude Milner has clearly identified and defined as "progressivism" the principle in whose name the following process has
taken place: compromising. The revolution used to have to compromise with capital and with power, just as the church had to come
to terms with the modem world. Thus, the motto that has guided the strategy of progressivism during the march toward its coming
one has to yield on everything, one has to reconcile everything

with its opposite, intelligence with television and advertisement, the working class with capital,
freedom of speech with the state of the spectacle , the environment with industrial development,
science with opinion, democracy with the electoral machine, bad conscience and abjuration with memory and loyalty.
Today one can see what such a strategy has led to. The left has actively collaborated in setting up in
every field the instruments and terms of agreement that the right , once in power, will just
need to apply and develop so as to achieve its own goals without difficulty. It was exactly
to power slowly took shape:
in the same way that the working class was spiritually and physically disarmed by German social democracy before being handed
while the citizens of goodwill are being called on to keep watch and to wait
frontal attacks, the right has already crossed the lines through the
breach that the left itself had opened up.
over to Nazism. And
for phantasmatic
Wounded Attachments: Whatever-being is not a form of

resistance, but it constitutes radical indifference towards the
sovereigns attempt to define bare life. The use of coalitions is
a form of resistance that reattaches bare life to its own
identity, re-entrenching the states power
Frost 15 [Frost, T. (2015). The Dispositif Between Foucault and Agamben.] Hebron ADN
Despite this focus upon resistance,
Foucault held reservations for the politics of what I term mere
resistance, and cautioned against the equating of resistance with liberation. Decisively, Foucault distinguishes freedom from
liberation. Whilst admitting that liberation does exist, for example in the colonial setting, Foucault makes clear that liberation is not
sufficient to define the practices of freedom needed for individuals to define admissible and acceptable forms of existence or
political society. Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination that release a pre-existing identity from an
liberation from
domination only gives way to new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of
oppressive external force.i Freedom bears essentially on relations of power and domination
freedom.ii It is these practices of freedom which allows the subject to practice self-construction and in turn, resist and rework the
resistance to power, like liberation, has the drawback of

emerging in reaction to oppression and domination by dispositifs of control. iii As such it
is likely to create an attachment to an identity which is formed through that
oppression, and therefore will reinforce those self-same dominating biopolitical
dispositifs. More fundamentally, due to the spectre of biopolitics and the latent role of dispositifs in letting die, such a
dispositifs that constitute them. Mere
iv
resistance and attempt to escape the dispositif will only, almost paradoxically, end up repeating its logic
of deciding and regulating life and death. This is why Foucault sees power, and the dispositif, as imposing on
the subject a law of truth ... which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in him. v Instead, the practice of freedom
is a limit-experience: The idea of a limit-experience that wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me ... however
erudite my books may be, Ive always conceived of them as direct experiences aimed at pulling myself free of myself, at preventing
me from being the same.vi Following this theme, we can read Foucault in What is Enlightenment? as supporting the claim that this
practice of freedom should be considered as a way of being: We must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a
philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of ourselves
This philosophical ethos may be characterised as a limit-attitude We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have
freedom is not mere

resistance to power. Freedom is the careful and innovative deployment of power, and by extension, dispositifs, in the
to be at the frontiers.vii The politics of liberation is not enough to guarantee freedom, as
effort to constitute the free self. In other words, the dispositif is needed to constitute the ethos of freedom: I do not think that a
society can exist without power relations The problem, then, is ... to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and
also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as
possible.viii This game of power is agonistic. There is no essential freedom to be found, but a permanent provocation between the
The key task is to refuse what we are, to promote

new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been
self and the dispositifs of power relations.ix
imposed on us for several centuries.x The creation of new forms of subjectivity involves freedom as a practice which requires the
subject to self-create themselves anew, taking into account the dispositifs which constrain and control, and enabling the individual
to discern the types of actions and interventions that are needed to effect change and create new subjectivities. Freedom connects
the dispositif and what is always beyond, the outside. It is here that the connection can be made to Foucaults last essay, and his
view of error as the proper domain of life. When Foucault writes that life is that which is destined to err, we can conclude that such a
life contains the possibility to transcend dispositifs and break free of the logic of deciding who should live and who should be left to
die. Freedom is experienced at the limit of power relations through their transgression, their erring, which is always-already a
possibility, or destiny, for individuals to enact: The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they
possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely
crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.
A/T: Cant Solve Case

1. This argument is irrelevant because we still control the most
offense in the round for two reasons
A. The turns on the case prove that the production of bare
life within the state of exception is the root cause of all
their impacts. Only the alternative can solve for the
implication of the global population as homo sacer and
perpetual genocide and war.
B. They cant solve for the case either because the 1AC
ensures that the sovereign state continues to function,
making worse forms of surveillance inevitable the state
is inherently biopolitical and is founded upon the creation
of states of exception
2. Root Cause: Biopolitics is in the constant act of generating a
new periphery which must be eliminated. This exclusion of
bare life is at the heart of all violence, meaning that the
alternative is key to deconstruct the sovereign exception.
When seen in this light, the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany acquires a radically new meaning. As a people that
refuses integration in the national body politic (it is assumed, in fact, that its assimilation is actually only a feigned one), the
Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people, of that naked life that modernity
necessarily creates within itself but whose presence it is no longer able to tolerate in any way. We ought to understand the lucid
fury with which the German Volk-representative par excellence of the people as integral body politic-tried to eliminate the Jews
forever as precisely the terminal phase of the internecine struggle that divides People and people. With the final solution-which
included Gypsies and other unassimilable elements for a reason-Nazism
tried obscurely and in vain to free the

Western political stage from this intolerable shadow so as to produce finally the German Volk
as the people that has been able to heal the original biopolitical fracture. (And that is why the Nazi chiefs
repeated so obstinately that by eliminating Jews and Gypsies they were actually working also for the other European peoples.)
modern biopolitics is
supported by the principle according to which "where there is naked life, there
has to be a People," as long as one adds immediately that this principle is valid also in its inverse formulation, which
prescribes that "where there is a People, there shall be naked life." The fracture that was believed to
have been healed by eliminating the people -namely, the Jews, who are its symbol-reproduced
itself anew, thereby turning the whole German people into sacred life that is
doomed to death and into a biological body that has to be infinitely purified (by eliminating the mentally ill and the
carriers of hereditary diseases). And today, in a different and yet analogous way, the capitalistic-democratic
plan to eliminate the poor not only reproduces inside itself the people of the
excluded but also turns all the populations of the Third World into naked life.
Only a politics that has been able to come[s] to terms with the fundamental biopolitical split
of the 'West will be able to arrest this oscillation and put an end to the civil war that
divides the peoples and the cities of the Earth.
Paraphrasing the Freudian postulate on the relation between Es and Ich, one might say that
3. If we win substantial link turns on case, that proves root

causality and means that if we win alternative solvency, we
solve the 1AC
A/T: Case Outweighs

1. The () evidence proves that the exclusion of bare life within
the state of exception is the root cause of their impacts and
global violence state violence can only happen once the
sovereign divides populations into life worth killing for and
bare life.
2. Root Cause: Biopolitics is in the constant act of generating a
new periphery which must be eliminated. This exclusion of
bare life is at the heart of all violence, meaning that the
alternative is key to deconstruct the sovereign exception.
When seen in this light, the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany acquires a radically new meaning. As a people that
refuses integration in the national body politic (it is assumed, in fact, that its assimilation is actually only a feigned one), the
Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people, of that naked life that modernity
necessarily creates within itself but whose presence it is no longer able to tolerate in any way. We ought to understand the lucid
fury with which the German Volk-representative par excellence of the people as integral body politic-tried to eliminate the Jews
forever as precisely the terminal phase of the internecine struggle that divides People and people. With the final solution-which
included Gypsies and other unassimilable elements for a reason-Nazism
tried obscurely and in vain to free the

Western political stage from this intolerable shadow so as to produce finally the German Volk
as the people that has been able to heal the original biopolitical fracture. (And that is why the Nazi chiefs
repeated so obstinately that by eliminating Jews and Gypsies they were actually working also for the other European peoples.)
modern biopolitics is
supported by the principle according to which "where there is naked life, there
has to be a People," as long as one adds immediately that this principle is valid also in its inverse formulation, which
prescribes that "where there is a People, there shall be naked life." The fracture that was believed to
have been healed by eliminating the people -namely, the Jews, who are its symbol-reproduced
itself anew, thereby turning the whole German people into sacred life that is
doomed to death and into a biological body that has to be infinitely purified (by eliminating the mentally ill and the
carriers of hereditary diseases). And today, in a different and yet analogous way, the capitalistic-democratic
plan to eliminate the poor not only reproduces inside itself the people of the
excluded but also turns all the populations of the Third World into naked life.
Only a politics that has been able to come[s] to terms with the fundamental biopolitical split
of the 'West will be able to arrest this oscillation and put an end to the civil war that
divides the peoples and the cities of the Earth.
Paraphrasing the Freudian postulate on the relation between Es and Ich, one might say that
3. If we win substantial link turns on case, that proves root

causality and means that if we win alternative solvency, we
solve the 1AC
4. Outweighs: The reduction of bios to zoe is the worst impact
imaginable
A. Social Death: The exclusion of bare life destroys
subjectivity and is the historical basis for genocide,
colonialism, perpetual warfare, and slavery
B. Abandonment: The entire global population is implicated
as bare life in a permanent state of exception where the
sovereign can suspend the laws protecting us at any time
- the exception has become the rule.
C. The Camps: Sovereignty can only result in the
construction of places for the purpose of legitimate mass
murder
http://marklewistaylor.net/wpcontent/uploads/2012/10/Political.Theology.Essay_.Mumia_.Agamben.pdf]
Hebron AR
Bare life is a stripping away of a persons subjectivity, their humanity, such

that they are barely existing beings; they are in fact those whose death can be ordered by the
powerful and whose death would register neither as a homicide nor as a sacrice
valuable in some sense (for themselves or for the social order). Sovereign is the power that decides the state of exception
and rules over a growing sphere of bare life. This is the state of exception today. This is a crucial trait of sovereign power in the
The state of exception which was instantiated in the Nazi

concentration camps, then, is seen by Agamben to be a generalized mode of rule that prepares a death
camp for the entire West and its environs, creating zones of abandonment for those reduced
to bare life, a domain of the killable, those whose lives are deemed so bare, they can be
dispatched to death by sovereign power, routinely and sometimes en masse via massacre and
holocaust. We should have learned from the tradition of the oppressed, Agamben suggests following Benjamin, that
when power decides the exception under conditions of emergency and expands its powers, the exception
becomes the rule and we all enter the sphere of violence, and as subject to that violence,
we all enter the tradition of the oppressed, tasting the bitterness of bare life . What
political order today.
Agamben does not highlight so much is the full meaning of the Benjamin quote, about the traditions of the oppressed. He too
quickly assumes that the oppressed being referenced by Benjamin are only the sufferers of the death camp, and then all of
us caught up in a coming global civil war in the West. He rarely treats as exception those speci - cally targeted and
racialized populations that have been crucial to the very formation of the West . I
think here especially of the sufferers of slavery and colonization, of indigenous peoples loss of life and land, as well as others
who have long lived, and often still live, the exception as the rule.
These communities, so crucial to the rise of the
West, have lived the exception as the rule and are still being reduced to bare life. To
be sure, Agamben does make brief reference to some of the colonized on the underside of the Western modernity when he
acknowledges a link between Western death camps and the campos de concentraciones created by the Spanish in Cuba in
1896 to quell popular insurrection in that colony.17 In this way, Agamben points to colonial war as the birthplace of the
states of exception and of the martial law that are so destructive now, even for the West.18 However, other scholars and theorists have made similar claims before Agamben and these claims have provided the central animating theoretical axis for
understanding the development of modern political power. The Martinican poet, politician, and political theorist Aim Csaire
argued in his Discourse on Colonial- ism that Nazism and the exceptional holocaust were visitations upon European soil of the
spirit and practice of slaughter and subjugation that Europe had long visited upon colonial others.19 Similarly, W. E. B. Du
Bois, in his Darkwater, pointed out at the conclusion of World War I that the slaughter of war on European soil was a complex
legacy of Europes colonial subjugation of its colonies. Little Belgium, suffering slaughter in World War I, should have
remembered, Du Bois intoned, the fate it meted out to peoples of the Congo during Belgiums ruthless colonial rule over
them.20 One need not posit any metaphysical payback (what goes round comes around) to explain the Wests suffering a
state of exception as rule that it had meted out to the peoples it colonized, nor even a historical blowback (they, the
colonized, are coming back at us in the West to take their revenge). Rather, in order to develop a better comprehension of the
the Wests own patterns

and habits of sovereignty must be contextualized within the histories of racial
slavery, colonial war and administration, and capitalist imperialism so that these patterns
political organization of the contemporary world and its theoretical logics and legacies,
are viewed as near re ex responses of sovereign rule within the West, as well as between the West and its Others.
A/T: Link Turn (Surv. Key)

1. Value our links over their link turns theyre more
encompassing
A. Surveillance only constitutes a small part of sovereign
power most of it comes from law enforcement, the
military, and economics
B. Even if surveillance is important, the 1AC doesnt get rid
of all of it
2. Exceptionalism: Attempts to contain the state of exception
by reforming the law are doomed to fail the state of
exception is by definition the place where the rule of law has
been suspended
3. The alternative accounts for surveillance in the world of
whatever-being, nobody identifies with a certain group or as
zoe or bios, making it impossible for the sovereign to isolate
bare life since subjectivity is homogenized.
A. This tears down sovereignty because sovereign powers
foundation is the exclusion of bare life the need for
control by the state breaks down once there are no
threats to identify and no specific populations to manage
B. Even in a world with surveillance, we still solve
A/T: Impact Defense
A/T: Impact Defense (Dickinson)

1. The Dickinson impact defense evidence is powertagged he
never says that democracies solve for bare life, he just says
that democratic biopolitics and totalitarian biopolitics are
different both systems still maintain the ability to create the
state of exception
2. Their appeal to democracy ignores the fact that democracy
biopolitics liberties gained in the fight for democracy simply
help to build a more insidious foundation for the totalitarian
management of bare life.
every decisive
individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared
a[n] tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a
new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they
wanted to liberate themselves. "The 'right' to life," writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a
political issue, "to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or 'alienation,' the
'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right' -which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of
Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and
enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling classes' unexpected fall into the most extreme racism
and in which
(as in the Serbian program of "ethnic cleansing") and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.
A/T: We Challenge Particular Abuse

We must focus on the universal aspect of sovereignty not its state
centered manifestation.
Brophy, 9 Professor at York University
(Susan Dianne, Lawless Sovereignty: Challenging the State of Exception, Sage
Publishing, Social Legal Studies, Vol 18., No. 2)
This leads to the question of the inversion itself, which has long been alluded to in
this article, but never directly formulated. In bowing to Agambens conception of
sovereign power as it relates to the state of exception which is necessary to do in
order to understand externality thus conceived, particularly in the colonial context
the potential to formulate a version of non-state sovereignty also presents itself as
the basis for challenging state authority. By formulating a version of lawless
sovereignty, the concept of sovereignty itself is necessarily under dispute by virtue
of nullifying the very notion that there could be such a thing as an ultimate power
that can call itself sovereign. In Agambens text, there is at most a subtle
questioning of the states given right as sovereign power but this never seems to
develop into any deep inquiry as to the possibility that sovereignty can exist in a
lawless capacity outside of the state. The constituting power of this always already
externalized universal standpoint rests in the fact that it is not intricately related to
any one state, but rather all states and no states simultaneously, as illustrated in
the aforementioned bridging of historical distinctiveness (the particular) and
universalized externality (the general). Sovereignty, as the instance of supreme
power within a given state, remains unchallenged as long as the concept of
sovereignty itself is never questioned. A universalized perspective of sovereignty
must therefore be brought to bear on the state-centered version in a way that not
only challenges the state of exception by exposing the fiction of law and life from
the perspective of lawlessness, but also supplants the state as the ultimate
sovereign power by breaking the fictitiousness of the relationship between state law
and justice.
Permutations
Legal Reform / Generic: Link Extension
Hegemony: Link Extension
Democracy: Link Extension
Link Extension: Militarism

Militarism DA: Extend the McLoughlin evidence the perm
cannot escape the securitized discourse of the 1AC
A. No Solvency: The threat of the 1ACs impacts will
inevitably be distorted and exaggerated to justify the
state of exception and reinforce the power of the
sovereign
B. Civil War: Militarized discourse is actually what justifies
the states use of legitimate violence, making the impacts
that the 1AC tries to prevent inevitable. That means you
weigh the affs harms as disadvantages to the perm
because only the alternative alone can solve
Specific Severance Violations

1. Hegemony: they sever from their pursuit of primacy which
creates bare life by finding imaginary enemies and
legitimizing sovereignty
2. Democracy: they sever from their attempt to solve for
democracy, which just serves to legitimate the democratic
states creation of bare life and its underlying
totalitarianism
3. Identity: They sever from their advocacy for Identity politics,
which is bad because it ensures that oppressed populations
become defined by their own exclusion as bare life,
perpetuating their own condition and reifying sovereignty
A/T Perm: Short

1. Severance: Either the perm links or its severanceThe perm
severs from the 1ACs use of the state. The Frost and
Robinson evidence say that we must refuse to engage with
the state to solve. Secondly, the link proves severance
[insert specific severance violation] Severance is a voter
because shifting advocacies allows them to sever out of all
our links and means we cant predict the 2AR
2. [Insert Link Extension]
3. Line-Drawing DA: Engaging with sovereignty is a question of
negotiating the distinctions between different forms of life
and political agency, which is what creates bare life in the
first place
A. This is a specific DA to the perm their attempt to
validate the exception to the alternative in the form of
the plan constructs differing regimes of power that
legitimize the political violence of sovereignty
B. No Solvency: The perm cannot resolve the state of
exception because it validates the sovereigns
methodology of control through political distinction.
Edkins and Pin-Fat 4 [Jenny University of Wales Aberystwyth international politics professor,
Veronique University of Manchester IR lecturer, Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat,
and Shapiro, p. 18] Hebron ADN
In challenging sovereign
power, we are not facing a power relation but a relationship of violence, one that
denies a political voice to the form-of-life it has produced. Other forms of opposition must be
What this tells us is that to contest sovereign power we need something different.
found, forms that seek to reinstate a properly political relationship by producing sovereign power as a form of power relation.
The abstract drawing

of lines is the way in which sovereign power produces bare life. This drawing
of lines must be refused, wherever the lines are drawn. Negotiating the precise location of the
lines remains within the violence of sovereignty power. On the other hand, a
refusal to draw any line takes away the ground upon which sovereign
power is constituted. It insists instead on the politics of decisioning and particular distinctions and demands
that specifics of time, place, and circumstance be attended to in each instance. Second, the acceptance. When life is
produced as bare life, it is not helpful for that life to demand its
reinstatement as politically qualified life. To do so would be to validate
the very drawing of lines upon which sovereignty depends and which produces life
as bare life in the first place. An alternative strategy is the acceptance or what we have called
the assumption of bare life. Through this strategy, the subject at one and the same time both acknowledges
its status as nothing but life and demands recognition as such. It refuses the distinction between
bare life and politically qualified life and demands that all life as such is
worthy of recognition. As is apparent, the two strategies are the same at heart. Both seek to overturn the
Two strategies of contestation were suggested: a refusal and an acceptance. First, the refusal.
denial of politics that has taken place under biopolitics and to reinstate properly political power relations, with their
accompanying freedoms and potentialities.
4. Masking DA: The perms claim to solve for the production of

bare life hides the maintenance of the state of exception
below the surface the perm is even worse than the 1AC
because it pretends to solve for the state of exception while
building a more insidious foundation for totalitarian
biopolitics
Karl Lowith was the first to define the fundamental character of totalitarian states as a "politicization of life" and, at the same
time, to note the curious contiguity between democracy and totalitarianism: Since the emancipation of the third estate, the
formation of bourgeois democracy and its transformation into mass industrial democracy, the neutralization of politically
relevant differences and postponement of a decision about them has developed to the point of turning into its opposite: a total
politicization of everything, even of seemingly neutral domains of life. Thus in Marxist Russia there emerged a worker-state that
was "more intensively state-oriented than any absolute monarchy"; in fascist Italy, a corporate state normatively regulating not
only national work, but also "after-work" [Dopolavoro) and all spiritual life; and, in National Socialist Germany, a wholly
integrated state, which, by means of racial laws and so forth, politicizes even the life that had until then been private. The
contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden transformation
(as Lowith, here following in Schmitt's footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light in our century, the
river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It is almost as if, starting
the liberties, and the rights

won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously
prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order,
thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power
from which they wanted to liberate themselves. "The 'right' to life," writes Foucault, explaining the
from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces,
importance assumed by sex as a political issue, "to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and,
beyond all the oppressions or 'alienation,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right' -which the
classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending-was the political response to all these new procedures of
power" (La volonte, p. 191). The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a
primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian
only because biological

life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to
understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary
democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century's totalitarian
states were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both cases, these
transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics had
already turned into biopolitics , and in which the only real question to be decided was which
form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care,
control, and use of bare life. Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life,
traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and
public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling
states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions. And
classes' unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the Serbian program of "ethnic cleansing") and the rebirth of new
forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.
A/T Perm: Medium

1. Severance: The perm severs from the 1ACs use of the state.
The Frost and Robinson evidence say that we must refuse to
engage with the state to solve. Secondly, the link proves
severance [insert specific severance violation] Severance
is a voter because shifting advocacies allows them to sever
out of all our links and means we cant predict the 2AR
2. [Insert Link Extension]
first place
C. This is a specific DA to the perm their attempt to
D. No Solvency: The perm cannot resolve the state of


biopolitics


5. No Solvency: The Coming Community can only be created in

a world in which all of its participants refuse to engage with
the sovereign otherwise the state of exception remains the
rule.
Agamben 2000 [Professor of philosophy at the University of Verona (Giorgio; Means without End:
Notes on Politics; conference; Pg. 113;] Hebron ADN
Sovereignty, therefore, is the guardian who prevents the undecidable threshold between
violence and right, nature and language, from coming to light. We have to fix our gaze,
instead, precisely on what the statue of Justice (which, as Montesquieu reminds us, was to be state
of exception) was not supposed to see , namely, what nowadays is apparent to everybody: that the state
of exception is the rule, that naked life is immediately the carrier of the
sovereign nexus, and that, as such, it is today abandoned to a kind of violence that
is all the more effective for being anonymous and quotidian. If there is today a social power
[potenza], it must see its own impotence [impotenza] through to the end, it must decline any will to either posit or preserve
right,
it must break everywhere the nexus between violence and right , between the living
that constitutes sovereignty.
and language
A/T Perm: Long

1. Severance: If they claim that the perm avoids our links, its
severance
A. Interpretation: The Affirmative can only kick advantages
not sever advocacies.
B. Violation: Firstly, the Frost and Robinson evidence says
that we must refuse to engage with the state to solve
the perm severs from the 1ACs use of the state.
Secondly, the link proves severance - [insert specific
severance violation]
C. Standards:
1. Ground: Severance prevents the Neg from getting any
links no matter the framework.
2. Floating Affs: If the Aff is allowed to change its
advocacy theres no predicting the 2AR meaning the
Neg can never win.
3. Advocacy Shift: Not defending their ideological base or
advocacy destroys education through clash.
4. Reject the Team: They sever from their advocacy which
means:
a. They concede that the 1AC advocacy is problematic.
b. They no longer have an advocacy to vote for meaning
you vote for the alternative or Neg on presumption.
D. Voter for fairness, ground, and education.

first place
E. This is a specific DA to the perm their attempt to
F. No Solvency: The perm cannot resolve the state of


biopolitics


8. Wounded Attachments DA: Whatever-being is not a form of

resistance, but it constitutes radical indifference towards
the sovereigns attempts to define bare life. The inclusion of
the 1AC into the perm attempts to work within the state to
resist it. Unfortunately, resistance emerges in reaction to
domination and ensures that oppressed populations become
defined by their own exclusion as bare life, perpetuating
their own condition and reifying sovereignty
Frost 15 [Frost, T. (2015). The Dispositif Between Foucault and Agamben.] Hebron ADN
Foucault held reservations for the politics of what I term mere
resistance, and cautioned against the equating of resistance with liberation. Decisively, Foucault distinguishes freedom
Despite this focus upon resistance,
from liberation. Whilst admitting that liberation does exist, for example in the colonial setting, Foucault makes clear that
liberation is not sufficient to define the practices of freedom needed for individuals to define admissible and acceptable forms
of existence or political society. Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination that release a pre-existing
liberation
from domination only gives way to new power relationships, which must be controlled by
identity from an oppressive external force.xi Freedom bears essentially on relations of power and domination
practices of freedom.xii It is these practices of freedom which allows the subject to practice self-construction and in turn, resist
resistance to power, like liberation, has the

drawback of emerging in reaction to oppression and domination by dispositifs of
control.xiii As such it is likely to create an attachment to an identity which is formed
through that oppression, and therefore will reinforce those self-same dominating
biopolitical dispositifs. More fundamentally, due to the spectre of biopolitics and the latent role of dispositifs in
and rework the dispositifs that constitute them. Mere
xiv
resistance and attempt to escape the dispositif will only, almost paradoxically, end up
repeating its logic of deciding and regulating life and death. This is why Foucault sees power,
letting die, such a
and the dispositif, as imposing on the subject a law of truth ... which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in
him.xv Instead, the practice of freedom is a limit-experience: The idea of a limit-experience that wrenches the subject from
itself is what was important to me ... however erudite my books may be, Ive always conceived of them as direct experiences
aimed at pulling myself free of myself, at preventing me from being the same. xvi Following this theme, we can read Foucault in
What is Enlightenment? as supporting the claim that this practice of freedom should be considered as a way of being: We
must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are
saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of ourselves This philosophical ethos may be characterised as a
limit-attitude We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.xvii The politics of
liberation is not enough to guarantee freedom, as freedom is not mere resistance to power . Freedom is
the careful and innovative deployment of power, and by extension, dispositifs, in the effort to constitute the free self. In other
words, the dispositif is needed to constitute the ethos of freedom: I do not think that a society can exist without power relations
The problem, then, is ... to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the
practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible. xviii This game of power
is agonistic. There is no essential freedom to be found, but a permanent provocation between the self and the dispositifs of
The key task is to refuse what we are, to promote new forms of

subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for
power relations.xix
several centuries.xx The creation of new forms of subjectivity involves freedom as a practice which requires the subject to selfcreate themselves anew, taking into account the dispositifs which constrain and control, and enabling the individual to discern
the types of actions and interventions that are needed to effect change and create new subjectivities. Freedom connects the
dispositif and what is always beyond, the outside. It is here that the connection can be made to Foucaults last essay, and his
view of error as the proper domain of life. When Foucault writes that life is that which is destined to err, we can conclude that
such a life contains the possibility to transcend dispositifs and break free of the logic of deciding who should live and who
should be left to die. Freedom is experienced at the limit of power relations through their transgression, their erring, which is
always-already a possibility, or destiny, for individuals to enact: The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever
density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and reciprocally, transgression would be
pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.
9. Sovereignty DA: The sovereign state is inherently

biopolitical because the politically qualified life of the citizen
can only be defined against inferior forms of life bare life is
doomed to remain inscribed within the state of exception as
long as we engage with the sovereign attempts at political
reform take out solvency and turn the perm. That also
means they cant weigh the 1AC as a net benefit to the
perm.
No Solvency: The Coming Community can only be created in a
world in which all of its participants refuse to engage with the
sovereign otherwise the state of exception remains the rule.
Agamben 2000 [Professor of philosophy at the University of Verona (Giorgio; Means without End:
Notes on Politics; conference; Pg. 113;] Hebron ADN
violence and right, nature and language, from coming to light. We have to fix our gaze,
instead, precisely on what the statue of Justice (which, as Montesquieu reminds us, was to be state of
exception) was not supposed to see , namely, what nowadays is apparent to everybody: that the state of
exception is the rule, that naked life is immediately the carrier of the sovereign
nexus, and that, as such, it is today abandoned to a kind of violence that is all the more
effective for being anonymous and quotidian. If there is today a social power [potenza], it must see its own
impotence [impotenza] through to the end, it must decline any will to either posit or preserve right, it must break
everywhere the nexus between violence and right , between the living and language that
constitutes sovereignty.
Alternative Solvency
Top Level
1. Try or Die: There is only a risk that the alternative works
the turns on case prove that we are preferential
2. There are several framing issues:
A. Mitigation: We dont have to solve for all state violence
in the world of the alternative to win because they
cant either whatever-being is the only chance for
more positively confronting that violence and mitigating
some of the impact.
B. Ontology: Only the alternative establishes the ability to
have a meaningful death. Whatever-being allows us to
die on our terms rather than through our exclusion as
bare life in the state of exception
A/T: Biopower/State Inevitable

1. No Link: The alternative does not claim to solve for all
biopower we only reject the abuse of biopower by the
sovereign to produce bare life, meaning that their
inevitability claims are non-responsive and not specific to
our ability to solve for the exclusion of bare life.
2. Divisions: The alternative is a homogenization of identity
that makes it impossible for the sovereign to divide people
into politically qualified life and life without value, meaning
we solve for bare life and the turns on case
3. Equalization: The alternative equalizes the relationship
between the sovereign and the citizen because the
dissolution of identities and our infinite love of the Other
breaks down the distinction between zoe and bios, and the
city vs the state of nature the sovereign cant exist postalternative.
4. The state isnt inevitable - the isolation of bare life within the
state of exception is the original foundation for modern
sovereignty. The alternative is key to tear out this
foundation.
"The rule lives off the exception alone" must therefore be taken to the letter. Law is
made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive
exclusion of the exceptio: it nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter
without it. In this sense, the law truly "has no existence in itself, but rather has its being in the very life of men." The
The statement
sovereign decision traces and from time to time renews this threshold of in distinction between outside and inside, exclusion
and inclusion, nomos and physis, in which life is originarily excepted in law. Its decision is the position of an
undecidable. If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an
it is
the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by
suspending it. Taking up Jean-Luc Nancy's suggestion, we shall give the name ban (from the old Germanic term that
exclusively juridical category, a power external to law (Schmitt), or the supreme rule of the juridical order (Hans Kelsen):
designates both exclusion from the community and the command and insignia of the sovereign) to this potentiality (in the
proper sense of the Aristotelian dynamis, which is always also dy namis me energein, the potentiality not to pass into actuality)
of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying. The relation of exception is a relation of ban.
He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather
abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and
law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has
been banned is outside or inside the juridical order. (This is why in Romance languages, to be "banned" originally means both
to be "at the mercy of" and "at one's own will, freely," to be "excluded" and also "open to all, free.") It is in this sense that the
The originary relation of law to

life is not application but Abandonment. The matchless potentiality of the nomos, its originary 'force of law, "is that
paradox of sovereignty can take the form "There is nothing outside the law."
it holds life in its ban by abandoning it. This is the structure of the ban that we shall try to understand here, so that we can
eventually call it into question.
5. Turn: Inevitability claims posit a monolithic view of the

present that destroys the potential to effectuate change.
Rather, the present is constituted by variety of
contingencies that can each be changed
Barry, Osborne, and Rose 96 [Andrew - lecturer in the Department of Sociology
Goldsmiths College, University of London. Thomas - lecturer in the Department of Sociolou, University of Bristol,
Nikolas - Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Foucault and Political Reason,
Introduction: Writing the History of the Present, London, GBR: U C L Press, Limited p. 4-5] Hebron ADN
Foucault might be said to approach the question of the present with a

particular ethos but not with any substantive or aptiti understanding of its
status. His concern is not to identify some current, perhaps definitive, crisis in
the present. Foucault makes no reference to concepts such as postfordism, postmodernity, McDonaldization or late capitalism that have
often been used to characterize a certain kind of break with the past.
Nor is he concerned simply with a blanket denunciation of the present.
No political programmatics follow automatically from his work in this
field. Foucault once argued in an interview, that one of the most
destructive habits of modern thought. . . is that the moment of the
present is considered in history as the break, the climax, the fulfilment,
the return of youth, etc. - confessing that he had himself found
himself at times drawn into the orbit of such a temptation (Foucault
1989~: 251). But if it is the case that, for example, the closing pages of Madness
and civilization are unquestionably apocalyptic in their pronouncements on the
present, and that Foucault himself was to regret the adoption of such apocalyptic
tones, in a sense, the conception of the present does retain a certain stability
across his work. Above all, one might say, Foucault was concerned to
introduce an untimely attitude in our relation towards the present.
Untimely in the Nietzschean sense: acting counter to our time,
introducing a new sense of the fragility of our time, and thus acting on
our time for the benefit, one hopes, of a time to come (Nietzsche 1983: 60, cf.
Rose 199313: 1, Bell 1994: 155). Our time, that is to say, is not presumed to be
the bearer or culmination of some grand historical process, it has no
inevitability, no spirit, essence or underlying cause. The present, in
Foucaults work, is less an epoch than an array of questions ; and the
coherence with which the present presents itself to us - and in which guise it is re-imagined by so
much social theory - is something to be acted upon by historical investigation, to be cut up and
decomposed so that it can be seen as put together contigently out of heterogeneous elements
each having their own conditions of possibility. Such a fragmentation of the present
is not undertaken in a spirit of poststructuralist playfulness. It is undertaken with a more
serious, if hopefully modest, ambition - to allow a space for the work of freedom.
Here, indeed, the place of ethics is marked in Foucaults thought. Analyses ofthe present
are concerned with opening up a virtual break which opens a room,

understood as a room of concrete freedom, that is possible
transformation; the received fixedness and inevitability of the present is destabilized,
shown as just sufliciendy fragile as to let in a little glimpse of freedom - as a practice of difference through its fractures.
Turn: The dominance of biopolitics is what has made these

institutions inevitable. Whatever being is an abandonment of
the tradition of identity and teleology that has maintained the
current political philosophy. Its refusal to accept any finite end
and stay permanently in potentiality refuses the logic of
supposedly inevitable metanarratives.
A/T: Utopianism / Mjahweh

1. We are manifestly anti-utopian Agamben is very clear
about how the coming community would we created
Prozorov 10 [Sergei Professor of Political and Economic Studies at the University of Helsinki, Why
Giorgio Agamben is an optimist, in Philosophy Social Criticism, Volume 36, Number 9, p. 1057, November 2010,
http://psc.sagepub.com/content/36/9/1053.abstract] - Hebron ADN
It is evident that the danger at issue in Agambens work is nihilism in its dual form of the sovereign ban and the capitalist spectacle.
If, as we have shown in the previous section, the reign of nihilism is general and complete, we may be optimistic about the possibility of jamming its entire apparatus since there is nothing in it that offers an alternative to the present double subjection. Yet,
It would be easy to misread Agamben

as an utterly utopian thinker, whose intentions may be good and whose criticism of the present may be valid
if exaggerated, but whose solutions are completely implausible if not outright embarras- sing.23 Nonetheless, we must
rigorously distinguish Agambens approach from utopianism . As Foucault has
argued, utopias derive their attraction from their discursive structure of a
fabula, which makes it possible to describe in great detail a better way of life, precisely because it is manifestly impossible.24
where are we to draw resources for such a global transformation?
While utopian thought easily provides us with elaborate visions of a better future, it cannot really lead us there, since its site is by
Agambens works tell us quite little about life in a community of happy life that has
are remarkably concrete about the practices that are
constitutive of this community, precisely because these practices require nothing
that would be extrinsic to the contemporary condition of biopolitical nihilism . Thus,
Agambens coming politics is manifestly anti-utopian and draws all its
resources from the condition of contemporary nihilism .
definition a non-place. In contrast,
done away with the state form, but
2. This is offense against you - an inability to imagine a

different world doesnt change its possiblity
Kelly 14 [Mark GE Senior Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, Against prophecy
and utopia: Foucault and the future, in Thesis Eleven, Volume 120, Number 1, p. 112-113,
http://the.sagepub.com/content/120/1/104.full.pdf+html] - Hebron ADN
It might be said that such a position is itself utopian, positing a utopian vision of a world devoid of utopianism, by which to condemn
the present, predicting, without knowing it, that things will work better without utopianism. Neither Foucault nor I do this, however.
We offer no vision of how a world without utopianism might operate, no claim that it will lead to any particular practical
We only identify a certain form of practice existing in the present that we

advocate, over other practices in the present that I argue are immanently self-contradictory. I make no claim about
consequence.
the dangers or lack thereof in non-utopian procedures, only that they avoid the specific dangers of utopianism and prophecy.
Another possible line of objection is that anti-utopianism is associated today with reactionary politics. Alain Badiou (2001: 13) points
out that today any positive political project is attacked as utopian, which is to say as unrealistic. It is true that such criticisms are
revolutionary thought is not

generically utopian. Revolution is compatible with my position, in the form of an immanent revolution from below, in
widespread, but they are often incorrect. While there are utopianisms on the left,
which the participants attend to and deal with the radically new and unforeseeable conditions as they emerge in a revolutionary
situation. The point is to prevent revolution being utopian or prophetic. The critique that castigates left-wing politics in general as
utopian is the inverse of our critique of utopianism. Where we claim that utopianism fails because it attempts to say how society
should work, critiques of left-wing thought as utopian tend to claim that left-wing positions are insufficiently articulated, hence
utopianism is marked not by the

absence of a utopian vision, but by its presence. According to my argument, the inability
to imagine how something would work is no argument against its possibility,
just as the ability to imagine how something would work does not adequately
demonstrate that it is actually possible, since the complexity of the social outstrips our ability to
utopian because they cannot offer an alternative vision. We would argue that
model society in our minds. There is nothing utopian about saying that another world is possible, where this slogan is raised
without detailing what this world would look like. Badious own position is utterly non-utopian, because it is a matter of fidelity to a
truth event in the past that is neither about reviving the past situation nor aiming at producing any particular future situation.
it is
problematic to say that another world is not possible, that there is no alternative .
Badious philosophy is one of profound openness which is inimical to utopianism as I have described it. Conversely, however,
Such pronouncements are prophetic. The claim that communism is impossible has the same flaw as the claim that communism is
we cannot know whether a determinate form of social organization is either

inevitable or impossible, possible or desirable, in advance. Grand historical claims are prophetic,
inevitable:
even if they are negative, like Fukuyamas famous neo-Hegelian diagnosis of the end of history
1. The alternative is neither utopian nor impossible embracing

whatever being is key to emancipation.
Prozorov, 9 Professor of Political Science at the University of Helenski
(Sergie, The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State
of Nature and the Political, February 15th, International Studies Association,
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313215_index.html)
In his analysis of contemporary world politics (1993; 63-65, 79-86; 2000, 7390, 109-120), which goes beyond the critique of sovereignty to address the
wider context of global capitalism from a post-Marxist perspective of e.g.
Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord (see Passavant 2007, 149-153), Agamben
offers a somewhat similar diagnosis of the dissolution of sovereignty in the
global society of the spectacle, with three important caveats that arise from
the features of his post-sovereign politics addressed above. Firstly, his nonidentitarian and anti-statist politics does not seek control of the state but
rather the deactivation of its powers and its expulsion from the domain of
social life, which permits the rearticulation of zoe and bios in the figure of the
integral form-of-life. Secondly, while the indirect powers of Schmitts lifetime
were animated by a certain positive project of transformation, Agambens
ethics of inoperosity brackets off the teleological dimension of politics and
instead focuses on the free use of the ruins of the sovereign order rather than
the reconstruction of a new order upon these ruins. Thirdly, these indirect
powers are no longer defined in particularistic terms of class, race, ethnicity,
etc. but in the neo-universalist terms of whatever singularity, which wagers
on the attainment of peace not through the reciprocity of mutual recognition
under a better covenant but in the cessation of the struggle for recognition as
such. What Agamben proposes is the radicalization of the dismantlement of
sovereign statehood by whatever powers that are indiscernible in
identitarian and statist terms. Concurring with Schmitts critique of the
nihilistic and depoliticizing tendencies of global liberalism, Agamben
nonetheless finds in this very degradation of politics that all over the planet
unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions,
identities and communities (1993, 83) the possibility of a radically new form
of political praxis. Whereas utopian thought easily provides us with elaborate
visions of a better future, to which it can never lead us, since its site is by
definition a non-place, Agambens post-sovereign politics draws its austere
resources from the very degradation of historical forms of life in the
contemporary global state of exception and thus does not require the
articulation of a new emancipatory project. While the conversion of the
disastrous scene of contemporary nihilism into the ethos of integral life is not
predetermined within history as its telos and rather requires a radical
interruption of the historical process as such (see Prozorov 2009), any
possible obstacles to such a conversion are presently removed by the process
of the dissolution of particularistic communities, the emptying out of
traditions and the liquidation of identities. It is for this reason that despite the
bleak and even morbid character of the subject-matter of Agambens
writings, he is able to claim that he is far less pessimistic than his critical
interlocutors (see Smith 2004). [The] planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably

the form in which humanity is moving towards its own destruction. But this
also means that the petty bourgeoisie represents an opportunity unheard of
in the history of humanity that it must at all costs not let slip away. Because if
instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper
and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to
this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being- thus not an identity
and an individual property but a singularity without identity, then they would
for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without
subjects. (Agamben 1993, 65)
A/T: No Impact Outside the Round

Although perhaps imperceptible, a small displacement of what
is thought to be true can create a new reality. This tiny
displacement is what is needed for singularity to take hold
Agamben 93 [Agamben, G. (1993). The coming community (pp. 53-6). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.] Hebron ADN
THERE is a well-known parable about the Kingdom of the Messiah that Walter
Benjamin (who heard it from Gershom Scholem) recounted one evening to Ernst
Bloch, who in turn transcribed it n Spuren: "A rabbi, a real cabalist, once said that in
order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to
begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this bush or this
stone just a little, and thus everything. But this small displacement is so difficult to
achieve and its measure is so difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans
are incapable of it and it is necessary that the Messiah come." Benjamin's version of
the story goes like this: "The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that
says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be
in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other
world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there.
Everything will be as it is now, just a little different." There is nothing new about the
thesis that the Absolute is identical to this world. It was stated in its extreme form
by Indian logicians with the axiom, "Between Nirvana and the world there is not the
slightest difference." What is new, instead, is the tiny displacement that the story
introduces in the messianic world. And yet it is precisely this tiny displacement, this
"everything will be as it is now, just a little different," that is difficult to explain. This
cannot refer simply to real circumstances, in the sense that the nose of the blessed
one will become a little shorter, or that the cup on the table will be displaced
exactly one-half centimeter, or that the dog outside will stop barking. The tiny
displacement does not refer to the state of things, but to their sense and their
limits. It does not take place in things, but at their periphery, in the space of ease
between every thing and itself. This means that even though perfection does not
imply a real mutation it does not simply involve an external state of things, an
incurable "so be it." On the contrary, the parable introduces a possibility there
where everything is perfect, an "otherwise" where everything is finished forever,
and precisely this is its irreducible aporia. But how is it possible that things be
"otherwise" once everything is definitively finished? The theory developed by Saint
Thomas in his short treatise on halos is instructive in this regard. The beatitude of
the chosen, he argues, includes all the goods that are necessary for the perfect
workings of human nature, and therefore nothing essential can be added. There is,
however, something that can be added in surplus (superaddi), an "accidental
reward that is added to the essential," that is not necessary for beatitude and does
not alter it substantially, but that simply makes it more brilliant (clarior). The halo is
this supplement added to perfectionsome-thing like the vibration of that which is
perfect, the glow at its edges. Saint Thomas does not seem to be aware of the
audacity of introducing an accidental element into the status perfectionis, and this
by itself would be enough to explain why the questio on halos remains practically
without commentary in the Latin Patristics. The halo is not a quid, a property or an
essence that is added to beatitude: It is an absolutely inessential supplement. But it
is precisely for this reason that Saint Thomas so unexpectedly anticipates the
theory that several years later Duns Scotus would pose as a challenge on the
problem of individuation. In response to the question of whether one of the blessed
can merit a halo brighter than the halos of others, he said (against the theory
whereby what is finished can neither grow nor diminish) that beatitude does not
arrive at perfection singularly but as a species, "just as fire, as a species, is the most
subtle of bodies; nothing, therefore, prevents one halo from being brighter than
another just as one fire can be more subtle than another." The halo is thus the
individuation of a beatitude, the becoming singular of that which is perfect. As in
Duns Scotus, this individuation does not imply the addition of a new essence or a
change in its nature, but rather its singular completion; unlike Scotus, however, for
Saint Thomas the singularity here is not a final determination of being, but an
unraveling or an indetermination of its limits: a paradoxical individuation by
indetermination. One can think of the halo, in this sense, as a zone in which
possibility and reality, potentiality and actuality, become indistinguishable. The
being that has reached its end, that has consumed all of its possibilities, thus
receives as a gift a supplemental possibility. This is that potentia permixta actui (or
that actus permixtus potentiae) that a brilliant fourteenth century philosopher called
actus confusionis, a fusional act, insofar as specific form or nature is not preserved
in it, but mixed and dissolved in a new birth with no residue. This imperceptible
trembling of the finite that makes its limits indeterminate and allows it to blend, to
make itself whatever, is the tiny displacement that every thing must accomplish in
the messianic world. Its beatitude is that of a potentiality that comes only after the
act, of matter that does not remain beneath the form, but surrounds it with a halo.
Whatever Being k2 Politics

The alternative is a prerequisite to effective politics, meaning
that were a prior question all the political problems of
Western society can be attributed to a failure to investigate
the link between bare life and sovereignty
Foucaults death kept him from showing how he would have developed the concept and study of biopolitics. In any case, however,
the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis the
politicization of bare life as suchconstitutes the

decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical
thought. It is even likely that if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse,
this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of
modernity. The enigmas (Furet, LAllemagne nazi, p. 7) that our century has proposed to
historical reason and that remain with us (Nazism is only the most disquieting among them) will be solved only
on the terrainbiopoliticson which they were formed. Only within a biopolitical horizon
will it be possible to decide whether the cate gories whose opposition founded
modern politics (right/left, private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc.)and which have been steadily dissolving, to the
point of entering today into a real zone of indistinctionwill have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain
the meaning they lost in that very horizon. And only a reflection that , taking up Foucaults and Benjamins suggestion,
thematically interrogates the link between bare life and politics , a link that secretly governs the
modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one another, will be able to bring the political out of its
concealment and, at the same time, return thought to its practical calling.
-- Whatever being is characterized by pure belonging free from

identity. This is conducive to a new form of politically charged
community freed from domination.
Agamben 93 (Giorgio Prof Philosophy University Macerata, The Coming
Community, Trans. Michael Hardt, U Minnesota Press, p. 9-11)
One concept that escapes the antinomy of the universal and the particular has long
been familiar to us: the example. In any context where it exerts its force, the
example is characterized by the fact that it holds for all cases of the same type,
and, at the same time, it is included among these. It is one singularity among
others, which, however, stands for each of them and serves for all. On one hand,
every example is treated in effect as a real particular case; but on the
other, it remains understood that it cannot serve in its particularity.
Neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that
presents itself as such, that shows its singularity. Hence the pregnancy of the
Greek term, for example: para-deigma, that which is shown alongside (like the
German Bei-spiel, that which plays alongside). Hence the proper place of the
example is always beside itself, in the empty space in which its
undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds. This life is purely linguistic life.
Only life in the word is undefinable and unforgettable. Exemplary being is purely
linguistic being. Exemplary is what is not defined by any property, except
by being-called. Not being-red, but being-called-red; not being-Jakob, but beingcalled-Jakob defines the example. Hence its ambiguity, just when one has decided
to take it really seriously. Being-called-the property that establishes all
possible belongings (being-called-Italian, -dog, -Communist)-is also what can

bring them all back radically into question. It is the Most Common that
cuts off any real community. Hence the impotent omnivalence of whatever
being. It is neither apathy nor promiscuity nor resignation. These pure
singularities communicate only in the empty space of the example,
without being tied by any common property, by any identity. They are
expropriated of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself, the sign e.
Tricksters or fakes, assistants or 'toons, they are the exemplars of the coming
community.
Whatever Being k2 Ethics

Whatever being is being as it always matters. It cannot be
divided into forms to be valued over one another, rather it is
being without particular essence, attributes, or distinguishable
qualities. The example of love is telling in that love is only
given to a whatever singularity, to a loved one as whatever
they may be, regardless of their attributes.
Agamben 93 (Giorgio prof of philosophy at College of International Philosophy - Paris, The
Coming Community, p. 1-2)
<THE COMING being is whatever being. In the Scholastic enumeration of

transcendentals (quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum-whatever
entity is one, true, good, or perfect), the term that, remaining unthought in each,
conditions the meaning of all the others is the adjective quodlibet. The common
translation of this term as "whatever" in the sense of "it does not matter which,
indifferently" is certainly correct, but in its form the Latin says exactly the opposite:
Quodlibet ens is not "being, it does not matter which," but rather "being such that
it always matters." The Latin always already contains, that is, a reference to the
will (libet). What-ever being has an original relation to desire.
The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference
with respect to a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being
French, being Muslim), but only in its being such as it is. Singularity is thus
freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between
the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal. The
intelligible, according to a beautiful expression of Levi ben Gershon _(Gersonides),
is neither a universal nor an individual included in a series, but rather
"singularity insofar as it is whatever singularity." In this conception, suchand-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which
identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds,
the French, the Muslims) -and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the
simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for
belonging itself. Thus being-such, which remains constantly hidden in the
condition of belonging ("there is an x such that it belongs toy") and which is in no
way a real predicate, comes to light itself: The singularity exposed as such is
whatever you want, that is, lovable.
Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being
blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the
properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants
the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover
desires the as only insofar as it is such-this is the lover's particular fetishism. Thus,
whatever singularity (the Lovable) is never the intelligence of some thing,
of this or that quality or essence, but only the intelligence of an
intelligibility. The movement Plato describes as erotic anamnesis is the movement
that transports the object not toward another thing or another place, but toward its
own taking-place-toward the Idea.
Refusal Solves
The refusal to draw lines is necessary to having a proper
political power relation and any social change.
Jenny Edkins, professor of international politics at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University
(in Wales) and Veronique Pin-Fat, senior lecturer in politics at Manchester
Universit, Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence,
Millennium - Journal of International Studies 20 05, PG 23)
Conclusion We have traced how sovereign power, that form of rule that today
pervades the globe, produces bare life as the form of life under its sway. We have
argued here that, despite appearances, sovereign power is most productively
considered not as a form of power relation but rather as a relationship of violence.
In that it seeks to refuse those whose lives it controls any politically valid response,
it operates as a form of technologised administration. A power relation is one that is
invariably accompanied by resistance: the subjects it produces are party to the
relation, and their resistance is a necessary component of what is happening.
Sovereign power on the other hand, with its production of bare life, not political
subjects, attempts to rule out the possibility of resistance. A properly political power
relation is not practicable in those circumstances. What this tells us is that to
contest sovereign power we need something different. In challenging sovereign
power we are not facing a power relation but a relationship of violence, one that
denies a political voice to the form of life it has produced. Resistance such as would
be possible from within a power relation, and indeed as an inherent part of it,
cannot take place. Other forms of opposition must be found, forms that seek to
reinstate a properly political relationship. Two strategies of contestation were
suggested: a refusal to draw lines and an assumption of bare life. First, the
refusal. The drawing of lines between forms of life is the way in which sovereign
power produces bare life. That drawing of lines must be refused, wherever the lines
are drawn. Negotiating the precise location of the lines remains within the violence
of sovereign power. A refusal to draw any line between forms of life, on the other
hand, takes away the ground upon which sovereign power is constituted. Second,
the assumption. When life is produced as bare life it is not helpful for that life to
demand its reinstatement as politically qualified life. To do so would be to validate
the very drawing of lines upon which sovereign power depends and which produces
life as bare life in the first place. An alternative strategy is the taking on or
what we have called the assumption of bare life. Through this strategy the
subject at one and the same time both acknowledges its status as nothing but life
and demands recognition as such. It refuses the distinction between bare life and
politically qualified life. As is apparent, the two strategies are at heart the same.
Both seek to overturn the denial of politics that has taken place under
biopolitics and to reinstate properly political power relations, with their
accompanying freedoms and potentialities. We have discussed an example of what
such contestation of sovereign power might look like. Practices that challenge or
refuse sovereign power are apparent in many locations: whether in hunger strikes or
street demonstrations, creative ways of provoking sovereign power and embroiling
it into a political or power relation have been and are being found, through the wire.
The use of violent dissent will be successful in solving the

state of exception empirics prove.
McQuillan 15 Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing at Goldsmiths,
University of London (Dan; PhD in Experimental Particle Physics, Director of Ecommunications for Amnesty International, co-founder of Social Innovation Camp;
Algorithmic States of Exception; European Journal of Cultural Studies 18(4/5);
SAGE Journals; 01/07/15; http://ecs.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/18/45/564.full.pdf+html)
Means of resistance
When considering what is to be done about the state of exception, Agamben draws
on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, specifically the possibility of pure violence or pure
means. Benjamins (1995) line of thought is laid out in his essay On the Critique of
Violence, which sets out to escape the forms of violence (e.g. state vs
revolutionary) that are offered as alternatives but in fact co-define each other. He
asserts that all violence as a means is either law-making or law-preserving. By this
he means that violence either plays a part in constituting a new situation or is
carried out by institutions trying to preserve the status quo. Taken together, these
forms of violence are mythic in the sense that they form an inescapable cycle.
Moreover, they can never be easily separated because the practice of lawpreserving always involves extension into constituting new sanctions. Benjamins
escape is a pure means that breaks the cycle of mythic violence. So in Benjamins
mostly abstract reasoning, we have a model for contesting states of exception,
according to Agamben (2005), because it does not ultimately rest on the authority
of a legal framework which has at its centre the state of exception [which] is
essentially an empty space (p. 86). Against a space that is devoid of law, we have a
resistance that escapes the cycle of law-making and law-preserving. In the
remainder of this article, I take this approach to suggesting lines of resistance to
algorithmic states of exception. I do this through two historical examples that, I
suggest, crystallise Benjamins and Agambens ideas as concrete social possibilities.
I link each historical example to signs of similar modalities in contemporary
struggles, and ask whether they constitute viable starting points for resistance.
The first historical example is antinomianism, which manifested itself in the 13th
and 14th centuries through the movement known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit.
For the Brethren of the Free Spirit, God was immanent in everything and could
therefore be directly experienced (Cohn, 1970). Those who were able to share this
experience of oneness considered that they had moved beyond religious morality
and earthly authority. As one said defiantly to his inquisitor, Those who are in this
degree of perfection and in the freedom of spirit are no longer obliged to obey men,
or any precept, or the rules of the Church: they are truly free (Vaneigem, 1998).
The message was one of a radical freedom through a direct immersion in the very
ground of being. Although heavily repressed, antinomianism frustrated the
Inquisition by frequently resurfacing and led directly to later currents of social
change such as the Levellers and Ranters of the English Civil War (Hill, 1991). We
can still experience some of their intoxicating irreverence through surviving texts
such as Abiezer Coppes (1973 [1649]) A Fiery Flying Roll, whose fiery rhetoric is
designed to punch through rational understanding. Antinomianism as a philosophy
and social practice fits Benjamins description of action from the outside that
neither creates nor preserves law. I suggest that we can hear an echo of
antinominianism in the contemporary social movement known as Anonymous.
Anonymous is a social movement with roots in the taboo-breaking irreverence of the
online image board 4chan. It was constituted through Operation Chanology, a set of
actions against the Church of Scientology. While Anonymous is difficult to pin down
using any of the traditional categories of ethics, sociology or history (Coleman,
2011), it draws its strength from a deep immersion in the technical ground of the
Internet and finds affinity through the subcultural memes that move freely across
the web. It rejects external morality or constraints and features calls for absolute
freedoms, especially freedom of speech. The splinter group Lulzsec was a
breakaway from Anonymous that specialised in hacking into private security firms
and state surveillance agencies. It combined its online dumping of hacked data with
ranting statements filled with a sense of revelation about the state of the world and
the new apparatus. It was Anonymous at its most antinomian, marked by a mocking
contempt for worldly powers in the form of corporations and governments. Lulzsecs
(2011) final communiqu 50Days of Lulz is a hacker version of Coppes ranter
rhetoric. While experiencing its own version of the Inquisition in the form of Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sting operations, Anonymous has multiplied and
spread offline, with the signature Guy Fawkes masks visible at protests across the
globe. Most importantly, for the purposes of this article, the antinomian activism of
Anonymous and Lulzsec has been disruptive of the data-fuelled apparatus of
prediction and control. Lulzsec targeted agencies and companies who are avowedly
spying on us by hacking into their databases and, in a kind of ritual inversion of the
operations of those companies, releasing their data to the public. Anonymous
sought more broadly to disrupt the apparatus of control, for example, through
Distributed Denial of Service attacks that overloaded the websites of organisations
they saw as complicit. I suggest, therefore, that the countercultures of the Internet
are already generating forms of resistance that disrupt algorithmic enclosure
without themselves engaging in the cycle of law-making and law-preserving.
Agamben makes it clear that only peoples own determination can be relied on to
challenge the state of exception. The task is not to confine the state of exception by
appealing to rights and norms that are ultimately founded on it. To show law in its
nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between
them for human action (p. 88), Agamben (2005) writes. The second historical
example shows such human action in a form we could call pure norms, that is,
values that enact themselves with an internal consistency that does not appeal to
an already captured system. The events in question are the 18th century food riots,
as analysed by E.P. Thompson (1993) in his book Customs in Common. Dispelling
the food riots as an instinctive response to hunger, he discovers that the central
action is not looting but setting the price. People collectively appropriated the
grain from farms and granaries to be sold at an affordable price. As the Sheriff of
Gloucestershire wrote in 1766,
They returned in general the produce (i.e. the money) to the proprietors or in their
absence left the money for them; and behaved with great regularity and decency
where they were not opposed, with outrage and violence where they was: but
pilfered very little.
Here, we have a picture of ordinary people intervening to correct what they see as
excess, without relying on a legal framework. Thompson referred to it as a moral
economy. I suggest that a similar re-assertion of normative relations without an
appeal to law is present in the practice of Cryptoparties.
The idea of Cryptoparty was conceived in August 2012, following a Twitter

conversation between Australian privacy advocate Asher Wolf and computer
security experts in the wake of the Australian Cybercrime Legislation Amendment
Bill (Blum-Dumontet, 2012), and the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement quickly spread
with Cryptoparties popping up in cities across Australia, United States, United
Kingdom and Germany. They are peer-learning events where people share their
knowledge and skills to ensure that private online chats stay private and that email
and web browsing are as secure and anonymous as possible. Rather than trying to
explain the complex mathematical concepts behind cryptography, cryptoparties
encourage people to look at the landscape of tracking and surveillance and to
develop a sense of how they can raise the barrier to big data collection from their
online activities. The shared ethos is a deep unease with the current direction of
travel revealed by pervasive corporate tracking and blanket state surveillance. As
Smari McCarthy has argued, the aim of easier-to-use encryption is to raise the cost
for the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, by forcing them to use scarce
human resources to apply specific targeted techniques, or to use a lot of costly
processing power to break the encryption: They can scoop up the data of 2.5 billion
internet users, making the cost per person per day a mere 13 cents. My five-year
plan is to increase that cost to $10,000 per person per day. (McCarthy, 2014) Thus,
Cryptoparties can also be seen as an example of autonomous price-setting,
motivated by community norms acting in the space between law and life.
Nayar
Namely, the plan must answer the question Should the USFG
end its employment of zooveillance in the only zoo it is directly
responsible for?
Nayar, 1999.
(Nayar, Jayan. Professor. Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems. University of

Warwick. Fall 1999. Re-Framing International Law for the 21 st Century. Order of
Inhumanity.)
The description of the continuities of violence in Section II in many ways is familiar
to those who adopt a critical perspective of the world. "We" are accustomed to
narrating human wrongs in this way. The failures and betrayals, the victims and
perpetrators, are familiar to our critical understanding. From this position of
judgment, commonly held within the "mainstream" of the "non-mainstream," there
is also a familiarity of solutions commonly advocated for transformation; the
"marketplace" for critique is a thriving one as evidenced by the abundance of
literature in this respect. Despite this proliferation of enlightenment and the
profession of so many good ideas, however, "things" appear to remain as they are,
or, worse still, [*620] deteriorate. And so, the cycle of critique, proposals for
transformation and disappointment continues.
Rightly, we are concerned with the question of what can be done to alleviate the
sufferings that prevail. But there are necessary prerequisites to answering the "what
do we do?" question. We must first ask the intimately connected questions of "about
what?" and "toward what end?" These questions, obviously, impinge on our vision
and judgment. When we attempt to imagine transformations toward preferred
human futures, we engage in the difficult task of judging the present. This is difficult
not because we are oblivious to violence or that we are numb to the resulting
suffering, but because, outrage with "events" of violence aside, processes of
violence embroil and implicate our familiarities in ways that defy the simplicities of
straightforward imputability. Despite our best efforts at categorizing violence into
convenient compartments into "disciplines" of study and analysis such as
"development" and "security" (health, environment, population, being other
examples of such compartmentalization)--the encroachments of order(ing) function
at more pervasive levels. And without doubt, the perspectives of the observer,
commentator, and actor become crucial determinants. It is necessary, I believe, to
question this, "our," perspective, to reflect upon a perspective of violence which not
only locates violence as a happening "out there" while we stand as detached
observers and critics, but is also one in which we are ourselves implicated in the
violence of ordered worlds where we stand very much as participants. For this
purpose of a critique of critique, it is necessary to consider the "technologies" of
ordering.
A. Technologies of Ordering: The Regulation of Truth, Imagination and Action
In my identification of what may be regarded as the technologies of ordering, I have
consciously omitted sustained discussion of one--the regulation of regulation.
Regulation, as the coercive agent of ordering, means to be "included," kicking and
screaming, into the global market-place, to engage in "free-trade" and be subject to
the decisions of the WTO, to be persuaded of the necessary good of the Multilateral
Agreement of Investment, to be "assisted" by the prescriptions of the "experts" of

the World Bank and the IMF, to be good "subject-citizens" and be willing (or
unwilling--it does not really matter) objects of "security"-related surveillance, to be
modernized, trained, moved, developed. Regulation, then, is for the "critic" an
obvious focus of analysis. My omission of any further discussion of the violence of
the regulation of regulation, therefore, is not because I consider it unimportant, but
rather, because this is the aspect of world (mis)ordering which has already been the
subject of much sophisticated discussion. n39 For the purposes [*621] of the
present discussion, I take it as a given that we stand informed by the effective
repudiations of much of contemporary regulatory endeavors aimed at the coercive
"integration" of human sociality into a universalizing and violent "order" of
destructive globalization. Having said this, I wish instead to invite reflection on what
is perhaps less often the focus of critiques of "ordering."
A/T: Impact Turns
A/T: Biopower Good Top Level

1. Distinction: The impact turn misunderstands biopolitics we
critique the production of bare life, and not just zoe. Western
politics creates a distinction between political and non-political
life which requires subsets of the population to be annihilated
to care for the population
Caldwell 4 [Anne, Asst Prof in the Dept of Poli Sci @ Louisville, Theory & Event, 7:2] Hebron ADN
Although homo sacer is the figure who will "unveil" the mysteries of sovereignty (p.8), Agamben's account of sovereignty is
equally indebted to Greek thought. As Agamben reports, something of homo sacer appears in Aristotle's distinction between zoe
The good life of the polis emerges

from a distinction between natural and political life, and their integration into the exception . What at first
as the natural life shared by all animals, and bios as a specific political way of life.
appears an opposition between natural life and political life is rather an implication "of bare life in politically qualified life" (p. 7),
political life is defined by the exception of natural life. Agamben here treats zoe (natural life) as bare life or homo sacer. That
usage is strange. He finds a Roman category in a Greek world that would not have known it, and appears to treat bare life as
identical to natural life.10
Despite periodic uses of bare life and zoe interchangeably, their distinction is essential to his
Bare life is distinct from natural life because its precarious status is due to its capture by
sovereign power. As Agamben explains, homo sacer is "the hinge on which each sphere [zoe and bios] is
articulated at the threshold at which the two spheres are joined in becoming indeterminate . Neither
argument.
political bios nor natural zoe, sacred life is the zone of indistinction in which zoe and bios constitute each other in including and
excluding each other (p. 90). Like sovereignty, homo sacer is a creature of the limit; it belongs to the zone of indeterminacy
Homo sacer, regardless of whether it lives a life of happiness or misery, is defined by its
dependence upon sovereign power for its status. This nexus, in which sovereignty emerges by
capturing life in the exception, defines the nature of political belonging in the West. The terminology we
generated by sovereignty. 11
are familiar with from modernity, especially of contract and rights, are, on this analysis, secondary phenomena.
2. No Link: The alternative is not a rejection of all biopower

and doesnt prevent people within the coming communities
from influencing eachothers actions. We only reject the
specific use of biopolitics by the sovereign to define and
exclude bare life. Their evidence doesnt say that the
production of bare life is good
3. Flows Neg: The McLoughlin and Taylor evidence proves that
the abuse of sovereign power is the root cause of all their
impacts, meaning that theyre link turning their own case
4. The K Outweighs: The paradox of sovereignty is the

inclusive exclusion of bare life in a state of exception - the
construction of spaces where the exception becomes the rule,
and where the sovereign commits legitimate mass murder. This
necessitates global civil war, endless massacres, and the
creation of the camps. These impacts are happening now on a
global scale
prepares a death camp for the entire West and its environs,
order today.
to be a generalized mode of rule that


as the rule.

5. Turn: Even if we cant access the offense from the impact

turn in the world of the alternative, whatever-being solves the
root cause of all violence and thus solves the need for
biopower to control the population. The alternative is
preferential because it is empirically proven that biopower
sometimes causes violence and other times cant always solve
for violence despite the fact that it permeates our society.
A/T: Biopower Good - Sacredness

The affs claims that they are assumptive of the sacredness to life are
bankrupt they only serve as another way for the sovereign to exert
power
Hussain and Ptacek 2k [Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst University
[Nasser and Melissa Review: Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred Publiched by Blackwell Publishing, Law &
Society Review, Vol 34, No 2, pp. 495-515. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115091] Hebron ADN
It might be argued in response to Agamben that the numerous demands for the
protection of life, which we hear today with increasing frequency, and from many
corners, and which are premised on an assertion of the sacredness inherent to life
as such, are attempts precisely to close the spaces of exception. Agamben likely
would counter that it is telling that such demands are attempts to compel the
sovereign to decide on the exception. Thus, whatever their intention, they work to
establish that "new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power"
that is disputed; they work, in the end, therefore, to expand the space of exception
so that the exception increasingly becomes the rule. Indeed, it could be asked what these
various movements register if not the infinite violability of life as such, of bare (or sacred) life. As Agamben says of
the crisis in Rwanda:
It takes only a glance at the recent publicity campaigns to gather funds for refugees
from Rwanda to realize that here human life is exclusively considered (and there are
certainly good reasons for this) as sacred life-which is to say, as life that can be killed but not
sacrificed-and that only as such is it made into the object of aid and protection. The
"imploring eyes" of the Rwandan child, whose photograph is shown to obtain money
but who "is now becoming more and more difficult to find alive," may well be the
most telling contemporary cipher of the bare life that humanitarian organizations, in
perfect symmetry with state power, need. (pp. 133-34, our emphasis.)
These remarks could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to other contemporary efforts to protect life.
Agamben's concern is with the relationship of "sacred" life to the supremely unspectacular violence to which this
"What confronts us today," as he says, "is a life that

as such is exposed to a violence without precedent precisely in the most profane
and banal ways" (p. 114). Such an exposure, he maintains, owes nothing to the
operations of sacrifice, however loosely we construe the meaning of sacrifice.
Agamben's comments on sacrifice, however, are not altogether clear and at times
appear contradictory.
life as such is ever-increasingly threatened.
A/T: Biopower Good (Freedom)

Their version of freedom is the worst form of social control
Hall 2007 [Hall, Lindsay. MA Political Science. Death, Power, and the Body: A Bio-political Analysis of Death
and Dying. Thesis. Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2007. Blacksburg. Print.] Hebron ADN
sovereign acts of power, according to Foucault, were extremely brutal and public so as to
discourage future enemies from taking what the sovereign possessed. Because
even the smallest crime was considered to be a direct challenge to sovereign authority,
the sovereign was constantly seeking the elimination of his enemies. He eliminated
foreign enemies through long and brutal wars, and he, as in the case of Damiens, eliminated
domestic enemies through the act of a torturous public execution . However, despite its vicious
All
spectacle, sovereign power[s] was wholly one dimensional, its ultimate aim being .to reinforce, strengthen, and protect the
principality, but with this last understood to mean not the objective ensemble of its subjects and the territory but, rather, the
the sovereign did not act to protect

the land or the lives of the people who lived there . Instead, he acted to protect only his
ownership of his territory and his subjects, territory taking precedence over the latter (Foucault 1994b, 232). These
prince.s relation with what he owned. (Foucault 1994b, 232). In other words,
observations of sovereign power came directly from Foucault.s reading of certain treatises, like The Prince by Machiavelli, written
with the expressed objective of advising the sovereign on the most appropriate ways to wield his absolute power of life and death
(1994b, 229). Though the sovereign.s power was said to be absolute, Foucault described his right over life and death as a .strange
right. (2003c, 240). Though the sovereign was said to posses the power over both life and death equally, the sovereign obviously
could not grant life in the way that he could inflict death. Thus, as Foucault claims, his power over the body was always exercised in
an unbalanced way (2003c, 240).
A/T: Ojakangas
Ojakangas is wrong - even if biopolitics cares for part of the
population, it REQUIRES that bare life be annihilated so that
the rest can optimize the quality of their lives this is the logic
of killing to save that we critique
Dillon 5 [Michael Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, Cared to Death:
The Political Time of Your Life, in Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 37-38, May 2005, http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucaultstudies/article/viewFile/858/876] - Hebron ADN
The key point of dispute with Ojakangas concerns the self-immolating logic of biopolitics. "Not bare life that is exposed to an
unconditional threat of death," he says in the introduction to his paper, "but the care of'all living' is the foundation of biopower."
(emphasis in the original). Ojakangas says: "Foucault's biopower has nothing to do with that [Agamben] kind of bare life." I agree.
Foucault's biopolitics concerns an historically biologised life whose biologisation continues to mutate as the life sciences themselves
offer changing interpretations and technical determinations of life. This biologised life of biopolitics nonetheless also raises the stake
for Foucault of a life that is not a biologised life. So it does for Agamben, but differently and in a different way. For Foucault, the
biologised life of biopolitics also raises the issue of a life threatened in supremely violent and novel ways. So it does for Agamben,
but again differently and for the same complex of reasons. In contesting Agamben in the ways that he does, Ojakangas marks an
important difference, then, between Foucault and Agamben. That done, perhaps the difference needs however to be both marked
differently and interrogated differently. I have argued that there is a certain betrayal in the way Agamben reworks Foucault. There is
however much more going on in this 'betrayal' than misconstruction and misinterpretation. There is a value in it. Exploring that
value requires another ethic of reading in addition to that of the exegesis required to mark it out. For Agamben's loathing of
biopolitics is I think more 'true' to the burgeoning suspicion and fear that progressively marked Foucault's reflections on it than
Ojakangas' account can give credit for, since he concentrates on providing the exegetical audit required to mark it out rather than
evaluate it. In posing an intrinsic and unique threat to life through the very ways in which it promotes, protects and invests life,
'care for all living' threatens life in its own distinctive ways. Massacres have
become vital. The threshold of modernity is reached when the life of the species is wagered on its
own (bio) political strategies. Biopolitics must and does recuperate the death function. It
does teach us how to punish and who to kill. Power over life must adjudicate punishment and
death as it distributes live across terrains of value that the life sciences constantly revise in the cause
of life's very promotion. It has to. That is also why we now have a biopolitics gone geopolitically
global in humanitarian wars of intervention and martial doctrines of virtuous
war. Here, also, is the reason why the modernising developmental politics of biopolitics go racist: "So you can understand the
importance - I almost said the vital importance - of racism to such an exercise of power." In racism, Foucault insists: "We are dealing
with a mechanism that allows biopower to work." But: "The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound
up with mentalities, ideologies or the lies of power. It is bound up with the techniques of power, with the technology of power." In
thus threatening life, biopolitics prompts a revision of the question of life and especially of the life of a politics that is not
exhaustively biologised; comprehensively subject to biopolitical governance in such a way that life shows up as nothing but the
Emphasising care for

all living - the promotion, protection and investment of the life of individuals and populations - elides the issue of
being cared to death. Being cared to death poses the issue of the life that is presupposed, nomologically for Agamben
material required for biopolitical governance, whether in terms posed by Foucault or Agamben.
and biologically for Foucault, in biopolitics. Each foregrounds the self-immolating logic that ineluctably applies in a politics of life that
understands life biologically, in the way that Foucault documents for us, or nomologically, in the way that Agamben's bare life
Ojakangas seems to emphasize a line of

threatens to elide the intrinsic violence
of biopolitics and its essential relation with correction and death.
contends. When recalling the significance of the Christian pastorate to biopolitics,
succession rather than of radical dissociation. One, moreover, which
If life is a production of biopolitics it is circular to claim

biopolitics saves lives
Dillon 5 (Michael Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster

University, Cared to Death: The Political Time of Your Life, in Foucault Studies, No.
2, p. 37-38, May 2005, http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucaultstudies/article/viewFile/858/876)
The nomological concerns the law, the biological concerns 'life' and the theological concerns the relation of life to transcendence in
the form of divinity. At a philosophical level, the life of politics may be said to find its bearings in relation to the changing
interpretations and correlations of force that characterise the intimate relationality of this trinity of nomos, bios and theos.
Agamben takes Foucault's account of biopolitics away from history and relocates it back in the centre of these key determinants of
political philosophy. Whereas Agamben's nomological account of biopolitical violence threatens a certain kind of political paralysis,
Ojakangas' insistence on the productivity of

biopolitics threatens to elide the violent inner logic of biopolitics and to miss what
Agamben's nomologically driven ontologisation nonetheless does rigorously expose.
Incomparably the most interesting thinker thinking today, one of the things that Agamben is thinking in
response to the provocations of biopolitics is the question of life undetermined by
the life of biopolitics, a life elevated in addition by a refiguration of transcendence without a godhead, in the form
of the immanence of the messianic. He also thinks the facticity of a corporeality beyond the reduction of the
however, in as much as it ontologises that violence,
body to biology. It is in these moves, among others, that he thinks beyond the initial provocation to political thought that he takes
from Foucault's biopolitics. Like any such response, the issue becomes less the degree of faithlessness than the worth of the
betrayal.
Death is a function of biopolitics --- it must eliminate the

threat to life
Dillon 5 (Michael Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster
University, Cared to Death: The Political Time of Your Life, in Foucault Studies, No.
2, p. 37-38, May 2005, http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucaultstudies/article/viewFile/858/876)
Moreover, in the biopolitical context of the circulation of life as species being , Foucault says
death is not so much disqualified, but, "something to be hidden away." It loses that spectacular ritual character
it once had, marking the move from one power, that of secular sovereignty, to another power, that of a sovereign God. Death
does not disappear from biopolitics . Neither is it attenuated beyond political concern, quite the contrary. It
changes its character, undergoing political transformation as biopolitics re-inscribes death in the process of 'recuperating the death
Whereas no power can ultimately exercise power over death , biopower can
and does exercise power over life. One of the means by which it does so is via the biopolitical preoccupations
with mortality, morbidity, pathology and mutation. Concerned with death in terms of the vital signs of
life, biopolitics is also increasingly concerned these days with the re-inscription of
the vital signs of life in terms of code , both molecular and digital. Contra Ojakangas, then, biopolitics
does reclaim the death function, for a number of reasons and in a variety of changing ways. It must do so.
Reclaiming the death function is integral to its logic . It also reflects the changing operational dynamics
of biopolitics. In relation to biopolitical logic: "In the biopower system... killing , or the imperative to
kill, is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the
elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race ." It
function'.
is acceptable and biopolitically necessary to kill, if not necessarily in the nomological sense of being exposed to death formulated in
Agamben's thesis of bare life. In relation to the operationalisation of biopolitics: if biopolitics is to promote, protect and invest life, it
This continuous biopolitical assaying of life proceeds

through the epistemically driven and continuously changing interrogation of the
worth and eligibility of the living across a terrain of value that is constantly
changing. It is changing now, for example, in response to what the life sciences are teaching about what it is to be a living
must engage in a continuous assay of life.
thing. It is changing as biopolitical investment analysts (politicians, risk analysts, governmental technologisers) also interrogate
where the best returns on life investment happen to be located in the manifold circulation and transformation of life locally and
globally. Life itself mutates in and through these very circuits, not least in relation to molecular biology and electronic
communication. We can broadly interpret life science now to range from molecularised biology, through digitalization, to the new
social and managerial sciences of development now prominent in the fields of global governmentality, global development policies,
human security and even military strategic discourse including, for example, 'Operations Other than War".
A/T: Sovereignty Solves War

1. The alternative takes the possibility of war into account
the only way that war can be justified is when the sovereign
creates divisions between populations to identify some as
being more valuable than others so that it can inflict genocidal
violence upon inferior populations. The alternative is a
rejection of subjectivity that homogenizes identities, thus
making it impossible to create divisions between forms of life
2. Even if you think theres a chance that sovereignty solves
some wars, thats not a reason to vote aff firstly sovereignty
obviously cant solve all war the 1NC evidence proves that
the world is in a perpetual state of warfare now despite the
fact that sovereignty exists everywhere secondly, the
exclusion of bare life by the sovereign is the root cause of
state violence, meaning theres a low chance it solves
3. Turn: The sovereign is an endless state of war it will always
be able to justify the use of lesser violence to keep
imaginary threats at bay
Tran-Creque 13
[Bard College, interdisciplinary research, education and art community working to

understand unmanned and autonomous vehicles. By bringing together research from diverse academic and artistic
perspectives which have, up until now, remained fairly silent on the issue, we aim to encourage new creative
thinking and, ultimately, inform the public debate. We want to encourage dialogue between the tech world and the
non-tech world, and explore new vocabularies in diverse disciplines. This is an online space for people to follow the
latest news, encounter disparate views, access good writing and art, find resources for research, and engage a
diverse community of thinkers and practitioners with the shared goal of understanding the drone. (Steven, Center
for the Study of the Drone, The Forever War is Always Hungry, July 5, 2013, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/theforever-war-is-always-hungry/] Hebron ADN
The Raw Material of Sovereignty Weizmans question is simple. How, after the evacuation of the ground surface of Gaza, did bodies,
rather than territories, or death, rather than space, turn into the raw material of Israeli sovereignty? In Weizmans Thanato-tactics,
sovereignty is simply the management of death. The Israeli General Security Services assassination
program, which began in 2000before 9/11produced the sprawling surveillance and counterinsurgency apparatus of the
occupation. But it also provided the template and testing grounds for the United States own assassination program. What Weizman
is really interested in is the logic of the lesser evil, by which economizing language produces this environment of managed death.
collateral damage calculations are not a humanitarian triumph limiting the scope of
are a crucial part of the ideological apparatus by which acts of state
violence [is] rendered legal and legitimate , encompassed within the permissible logic of forestalling greater
From this perspective,
violence. Rather, they
violence. Weizman quotes Israeli Air Force commander Eliezer Shkedi saying, before the 2006 invasion of Gaza, that the only
alternative to aerial attacks is a ground operation and the reoccupation. Assassination, he added, is the most precise tool we
have. So too with proportionality, balancing, efficiency, pragmatism, the injunction to be realistic, and the entire pantheon of
reasonable constraints. All of the oppositional forces of military interests and intelligence agencies, human rights groups and
journalists, can be incorporated within the same project: the maintenance of humanitarian violence, albeit one that bills itself as a
lesser form of violence compared to the alternatives. As Will Saletan put it in Slate earlier this year with memorable enthusiasm:
Drones kill fewer civilians, as a percentage of total fatalities, than any other military weapon. Theyre the worst form of warfare in
the history of the world, except for all the others. civilian casualties? Thats not an argument against drones. Its the best thing
about them. The choice presented is always between assassination and invasion, between Hellfire missiles and imprecise bombs
It is not a choice between war and peace . Well-trained commentators

one never questions the
legitimacy of the system in which, as Hannah Arendt emphasized, one must choose evil.
Periodic eruptions of unchecked violence as in the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2008 and the bombardment in
2012are neither accidents nor failures. The normal practice of violence through checkpoints,
between fewer dead and more dead.
cannot even imagine a world in which such things simply do not happen. And
annexation, resource extraction, and assassination is maintained against the ever present
threat of greater violence, regularly demonstrated. The greater evil kept at bay by the lesser
evil, in an endless state of war. This permanent threat of arbitrary violence is
precisely what we call sovereignty.
Turn: The biopolitical imperative to secure life, in any instance,

through the prevention of war by liberal means, powers a
global war machine that exponentially expands in lethality
Evans and Hardt 10 [Brad, lecturer in the School of Politics and International
Studies at the University of Leeds, Michael, Professor of Literature and Italian at
Duke University, Barbarians to Savages: Liberal War Inside and Out, Theory &
Event 13:2, 2010]
One of the most important aspects of your work has been to argue why the
original sentiment which provoked Deleuze and Guattaris Nomadology narrative
needed to be challenged. With the onset of a global war machine which showed
absolutely no respect for state boundaries, matched by the rise of many local fires
of resistance which had no interest in capturing state power, the sentiment that History is always written
Evans:
from the victory of States could now be brought firmly into question. On a theoretical level alone, the need to bring
the Nomadology Treatise up to date was an important move. However, there was something clearly more at stake
One gets the impression from your

you were deeply troubled by what was taking place with this new found
humanitarianism. Indeed, as you suggest, if we accept that this changing political terrain
demanded a rewriting of war itselfaway from geo-political territorial struggles which once
monopolised the strategic field, towards bio-political life struggles whose unrelenting
wars were now to be consciously fought for the politics of all life itself, then it could be
argued that the political stakes could not be higher. For not only does a bio-political
for you than simply attempting to canonise Deleuze and Guattari.
works that
ascendency force a re-conceptualisation of the war effortto include those forces which are less militaristic and
more developmental (one can see this best reflected today in the now familiar security mantra War by Other
Means), but through this process a new paradigm appears which makes it possible to envisage for the first time in
it was rather easy to find

support for this non-State paradigm during the 1990s especially when the indigenous
themselves started writing of the onset of a Fourth World War which was enveloping the
human history a Global State of War or a Civil War on a planetary scale. Whilst
planet and consuming everybody within, some have argued that the picture became more clouded with the
The familiar language that has been

routinely deployed here would be of US Exceptionalism. My concern is not really to attend to this
revival of an out-dated theoretical persuasion. I agree with your sentiments in Multitude that this account
can be convincingly challenged with relative ease . Foucault has done enough himself to
show that Liberal War does not demand a strategic trade-off between geo-political
and biopolitical aspirations. They can be mutually re-enforcing, even, or perhaps
more to the point, especially within a global Liberal Imaginar y. And what is more, we should
not lose sight of the fact that it was when major combat operations were effectively
declared over, that is when the borderlands truly ignited. My concerns today are more
invasion of Iraq which was simply geo-politics as usual.
attuned to the post-Bush era, which going back to the original War on Terrors life-centric remit is once again calling
for the need to step up the humanitarian war effort in order to secure the global peace. Indeed, perhaps more
worrying still, given that the return of the Kantian inspired humanitarian sensibility can now be presented in an
altogether more globally enlightened fashion, offering a marked and much needed departure from the destructive
but ultimately powerless (in the positive sense of the word) self-serving neo-con, then it is possible to detect a more
intellectually vociferous shift taking place which is rendering all forms of political difference to be truly dangerous
on a planetary scale. With this in mind, I would like your thoughts on the Global State of War today. What for
instance do you feel have been the most important changes in the paradigm since you first proposed the idea? And
a global civil
war starts from the question of sovereignty. Traditionally war is conceived (in the field of
would you argue that war is still the permanent social relation of global rule? Hardt: The notion of
as armed conflict between two sovereign

powers whereas civil war designates conflict within a single territory in which one or both of the parties is not
international relations, for instance, or in international law)
sovereign. War designates, in other words, a conflict in some sense external to the structures of sovereignty and
civil war a conflict internal to them. It is clear that few if any of the instances of armed conflict around the world
today fit the classic model of war between sovereign states. And perhaps even the great conflicts of the cold war,
from Korea and Vietnam to countries throughout Latin America, already undermined the distinction, draping the
conflict between sovereign states in the guise of local civil wars. Toni Negri and I thus claimed that in our era there
is no more war but only civil wars or, really, a global civil war. It is probably more precise to say instead that the
distinction between war and civil war has been undermined, in the same way that one might say, in more
metaphorical terms, not that there is no more outside but rather that the division between inside and outside has
been eroded. This claim is also widely recognized, it seems to me, among military and security theorists. The
change from the framework of war to that of civil war, for instance, corresponds closely to thinking of armed
conflicts as not military campaigns but police actions, and thus a shift from the external to the internal use of force.
The general rhetorical move from war to security marks in more general terms a similar shift. The security mantra
that you cite war by other means also indicates how the confusion between inside and outside implies the
mixture of a series of fields that are traditionally separate: war and politics, for example, but also killing and
generating forms of social life. This opens a complicated question about the ways in which contemporary military
actions have become biopolitical and what that conception helps us understand about them. Rather than pursuing
that biopolitical question directly, though, I want first to understand better how the shift in the relationship between
In a war
conventionally conceived, it is sufficient for the two sovereign powers to justify their
actions primarily on the basis of national interest as long as they remain within the confines of
war and sovereignty that Toni and I propose relates to your notion of liberal and humanitarian war.
international law. Whereas those inside , in other words, are at least in principle privilege to the liberal framework of
When the relationship of sovereignty

shifts, however, and the distinction between inside and outside erodes, then there are no such
limits of the liberal ideological and political structures . This might be a way of understanding
why contemporary military actions have to be justified in terms of discourses of
human rights and liberal values. And this might be related, in turn, to what many political theorists
analyze as the decline of liberal values in the US political sphere at the hands of
rights and representation, those outside are not.
neoliberal and neoconservative logics.1 In other words, perhaps when the division declines between the inside and
outside of sovereignty, on the one hand, the liberal logic must be deployed (however inadequately) to justify the
use of violence over what was the outside while, on the other, liberal logics are increasingly diluted or suppressed in
what was the inside. Evans: What I am proposing with the Liberal War Thesis borrows from some pioneering works
which have already started to cover the main theoretical ground2 . Central to this approach is an attempt to
critically evaluate global Liberal governance (which includes both productive and non-productive elements) by
Liberal Peace is thus challenged, not on the basis of its abstract claims to
universalityjuridical or otherwise, but precisely because its global imaginary shows a
remarkable capacity to wage warby whatever meansin order to govern all
species life. This is not, then, to be confused with some militaristic appropriation of the democratic body
questioning its will to rule.
politica situation in which Liberal value systems have been completely undermined by the onslaught of the
military mind. More revealing, it exposes the intricate workings of a Liberal rationality whose ultimate pursuit is
global political dominance. Traces of this account can no doubt be found in Michael Ignatieffs (completely
sympathetic) book Empire Lite, which notes how the gradual confluence between the humanitarian and the military
has resulted in the onset of an ostensibly humanitarian empire that is less concerned with territory (although the
Liberalism
as such is considered here ( la Foucault) to be a technology of government or a
means for strategising power which taking life to be its object feels compelled to wager the
destiny of humanity against its own political strategy. Liberalism can therefore be said to betray a
particularly novel strategic field in which the writing of threat assumes both
planetary (macro-specific) and human (micro-specific) ascriptions. Although it should be noted that it
is only through giving the utmost priority to life itselfworking to secure life
from each and every threats posed to an otherwise progressive existence, that its global
imaginary could ever hold sway. No coincidence then that the dominant strategic paradigm for
Liberals is Global Human Security. What could therefore be termed the Liberal problematic of security
of course registers as a Liberal bio-politics of security, which in the process of
promoting certain forms of life equally demands a re-conceptualisation of war in the
sense that not every life lives up to productive expectations, let alone shows its
compliance. In a number of crucial ways, this approach offers both a theoretical and
State no doubt still figures) than it is with governing life itself for its own protection and betterment.
empirical challenge to the familiar IR scripts which have tended to either valorise Liberalisms visionary
potential or simply castigate its misguided idealism. Perhaps the most important of these is to insist upon a
rewriting of the history of Liberalism from the perspective of war. Admittedly, there is much work to be done here.
Not least, there is a need to show with greater historical depth, critical purpose, and intellectual rigour how Liberal
war (both externally and internally) has subsequently informed its juridical commitments and not vice versa. Here I
am invariably provoking the well rehearsed Laws of War sermon, which I believe more accurately should be
rephrased to be the Wars of Law. Nevertheless, despite this pressing need to rewrite the Liberal encounter in
language whose familiarity would be capable of penetrating the rather conservative but equally esoteric/specialist
field of International Relations, sufficient contemporary grounds already exist which enable us to provide a
challenging account of global civil war from the perspective of Liberal bio-political rule. Michael Dillon and Julian
Reids The Liberal Way of War encapsulates these sentiments, with the following abridged passage worth quoting:
bio-political discourse of species existence is also a bio-political discourse of

species endangerment. As a form of rule whose referent object is that of species existence, the liberal
way of rule is simultaneously also a problematisation of fear and danger involving threats to the
peace and prosperity of the species. Hence its allied need, in the pursuing the peace and
prosperity of the species, to make war on whatever threatens it. That is the reason
why liberal peacemaking is lethal. Its violence a necessary corollary of the aporetic character of its
mission to foster the peace and prosperity of the species... There is, then, a martial face to liberal peace. The liberal
way of rule is contoured by the liberal way of war...
Liberalism is therefore obliged to exercise a

strategic calculus of necessary killing, in the course of which calculus ought to be
able to say how much killing is enough...[ However] it has no better way of saying how much killing
is enough, once it starts killing to make life live, than does the geopolitical strategic calculus of necessary killing3 .
is quite suggestive to account

for this conflation by acknowledging the onset of a global political imaginary that no
longer permits any relationship with the outside. One could then support the types of hypothesis
you mention, which rather than affirming the best of the enlightened Liberal
tradition actually correlate the hollowing out of Liberal values to the inability to carve out
This brings me to the problem of the inside/outside. On the face of it, it
any meaningful distinctions between inside/outside, peace/war, friend/enemy, good/evil, truth/falsehood and so
forth. However, whilst this approach would no doubt either re-enforce the militaristic paradigm or raise further
The
collapses of these meaningful distinctions are not inimical to Liberal rationality . To the
contrary, the erosion of these great dialectical interplays now actually provides
Liberalism with its very generative principles of formation . I felt that you began to explore this
critical doubts about the post-modern/post-structural turn in political thought, it is nevertheless misleading.
in Empire by noting how Foucaults bio-politics was inadequate to our complex, adaptive and emergent times. To
rectify this, Deleuzes notion of Control Societies was introduced which is more in line with contemporary systems of
rule.
Biosovereignty is supplanting nation-state sovereignty distinctions

between war and peace no longer exist and war has turned into an
action aimed at maintaining order
Caldwell 04 Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Louisville
(Anne, Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity, Theory & Event, Volume
7, Issue 2, Project Muse)
Arendt's account of the fate of those caught in such institutional arrangement
remains decisive. As she observes, "contemporary history has created a new kind of
human beings -- the kind that are put in concentration camps by foes and in
internment camps by their friends" (1978: 56). Such permanent "ad hoc"
arrangements indicate the extent to which states of exception are increasingly
interwoven with law. Nothing has become more "normal" than the creation of
internment camps for refugees and displaced persons. Those arrangements have
the desired effect of placing camp inhabitants outside the framework of
international law and domestic law so as to avoid obligations of asylum and legal
rights to refugees (Hyndman 2000: xxv). / The shift from standing law to exception
evident in the treatment of refugees also appears in humanitarian military
interventions. Those interventions increasingly take place as exceptions to both
domestic and international law, exposing "the allied face of human war" (Dillon and
Reid 2000: 5). The American led NATO intervention into Kosovo, for example, was
carried out as an exception to the U.S. Constitution, the NATO Charter and the
UN.13 The new American doctrine of pre-emptive strikes has made the decision on
the exception official policy. Indeed, new forms of post-Cold War warfare are having
the general effect of internationalizing the exception. Modern wars typically
occurred between two or more legally equal sovereigns. Contemporary conflicts are
more akin to police actions. They take the form of a "diffuse and continuous"
violence seeking to guarantee order rather than control territory (Guehenno
1995:119). One of the clearest signs of this change in conflict is the growing
difficulty in distinguishing between civil and international wars, and between
intranational and international wars (Meron 2000: 261; Kaldor 1998: 102). Modern
distinctions "between 'war' and peace', 'internal' and 'external' . . . associated with
the autonomy of the nation-state, seem to be breaking down" (Kaldor 1998:91). As
a result, interventions into what might once have appeared independent nationstates no longer involve "independent juridical territories." They appear rather as
"actions within a unified world," aimed "at maintaining an internal order" (Hardt and
Negri 2000: 35, 38). The effect is to place the rights of humanity in "the hands of
the international community police" (Ranciere 1999: 127).14
A/T: Friend-Enemy Distinction Good

Western politics is not built on friend/enemy but rather on
inclusion/exclusion
Agamben 98 [Agamben, G. (1998). Sovereign power and bare life (pp. 8). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
The question In what way does the living being have language? corresponds exactly to the question In what way does bare
life dwell in the polis? The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the
Politics therefore appears as the truly

fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation
between the living being and the logos is realized. In the politicization of bare lifethe metaphysical task par
polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it.
excellence the humanity of living man is decided. In assuming this task, modernity does nothing other than declare its own
The fundamental categorial pair of Western

politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/ bios, exclu sion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who , in language, separates and opposes
himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an
inclusive exclusion.
faithfulness to the essential structure of the metaphysical tradition.
A/T: Liberalism Solves Biopower
Liberalism becomes totalitarianism when it becomes concerned with

biopolitical management
Hoffmann 7 (Kasper, International Development Studies at Roskilde University, May, Militarised Bodies and
Spirits of Resistance, http://diggy.ruc.dk:8080/handle/1800/2766 //shree)
In modern forms of government, concepts of the norm and normal have played a kind mediating role in the
It is through
the systematic accumulation of knowledge about certain social
problems and deviations that we come to know the normal and the
norm that stabilise and indicate it in social contexts (Ewald 1990: 140). By
aligning delinquent or abnormal subjectivities (through, for instance, techniques of
pedagogy, health, economic development, human development, spirituality etc.) to the norm, the
normal order, can be restored allowing normative goals to be
considered for the good: [T]he good is figured in terms of adequacy the good product is
adequate to the purpose it was meant to serve. Within the normative system, values
are not defined a priori, but instead through an endless process of
comparison and normalization (Ewald 1990: 152). Rose has made the point that the very
formulation and execution of normative projects (Canguilhem 2005 [1966]; Ewald 1990).
notion of normality has emerged out of a concern with types of conduct, thought, expression deemed
troublesome or dangerous (Rose 1996: 26), so that normality can only be understood in relation to the
even if the norm has allowed modern biopower to

transform negative restraints of power into more positive controls or
normalisation, it is still producing dangerous subjectivities. Within
liberal forms of government, at least, there is a long history of people
who, for one reason or another, are deemed not to possess or to
display the attributes (e.g. autonomy, responsibility) required of the juridical and
political subjects of rights and who are therefore subjected to all
sorts of disciplinary, bio-political and even sovereign interventions.
abnormal. Therefore,
(Dean 1999: 134) The list of those so subjected would include at various times those furnished with the status
of the indigent, the degenerate, the feeble-minded, the native, the savage, the homosexual, the delinquent, the
liberal practices of government therefore also

entail illiberal aspects (see Hindess 2001; Dean 1999 Chapter 7). Liberalism always
contains the possibility of non-liberal interventions in the lives of
those who do not possess the attributes required to be a citizen.
dangerous etc. Modern so-called
However, bio-politics is not confined to liberal forms of rule: liberalism just makes the articulation in a specific
authoritarian or totalitarian forms, also depend on

the elements of a bio-politics that is concerned with the detailed
administration of life. Rather than denying that non-liberal practices are indeed an integral part of
way. Other types of rule, such as
all forms of liberal democratic government, we could see the will to establish the authority of liberal democracy
In modern
processes of government, the focus is on the fostering and
promotion of life, though in certain circumstances this fundamental
security of the population is experienced as threatened. In such
circumstances the community calls upon its fundamental right to
this will to power as an element of sovereignty in the heart of the democracy.
exist as such and thus evokes its right to deny the right to life of
those who are seen as a threat to the life of that same population.
This allows us to consider what might be thought of as the dark side of bio-politics
(Dean 1999: 139). In Foucaults account, bio-politics, as concrete political method of security, does
not put an end to the practice of war; it provides it with renewed
scope. This new scope allows the actual neutralization, or even elimination of
life at the level of entire populations, or micro populations. It intensifies the
killing, whether by ethnic cleansing that visits holocausts upon
whole groups or by the mass slaughter of classes and groups in the
name of the utopia to be achieved. Governance is now exercised at
the level of life and of the population, and wars will be waged at that
level on behalf of the security of each and all. This brings us to the heart of
Foucaults challenging thesis about bio-politics, namely that there is an intimate connection
between the exercise of a life-administering power and the
commission of genocide: If genocide is indeed the dream of modern
powers [] it is because power is located at the level of life, the
species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population
(Foucault 1976: 180, my translation). Thus, there seems to be a kind of inescapable
connection between the power to foster life and the power to
disqualify life which is characteristic of bio-power. The emergence of
a bio-political racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached
as a trajectory in which the demand for a homogenous social space
articulated by the norm appears to turn into a life necessity. Through the
establishment of the norm, abnormality is inscribed upon individual other
bodies, casting certain deviations as both internal dangers to the
body politic and as inheritable legacies that threatens the well-being
of race: On behalf of the existence of everyone entire populations
are mobilised for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of
the life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of
life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have
been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed
at stake is the biological existence of a population . (Foucault 1976: 180, my
translation, emphasis) Bio-politics presides over the processes of birth, death, production and illness. It
acts on the human species. Within this bio-political practice the
sovereign right to kill appears in a new form; as an excess of
biopower that does away with life in the name of securing it, and in
its most radical form it is a means of introducing a fundamental
distinction between those who must live and those who must die. It
fragments the biological field and establishes a break within the
biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of
races, a set of subdivisions in which certain races are classified as
good, fit and superior (Stoler 1995: 84). It therefore establishes a positive
relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life . It posits that,
the more you kill and let die, the more you will live. Thus, in modern biopolitical
practice, war does more than reinforce ones own kind by eliminating a
racial adversary: it regenerates ones own race (Stoler 1995: 56). It is
essential to note that racism as a bio-political practice does not draw on a
particular theory of race it does not need to. Instead racism
designates a much more general practice which introduces a rift in
the biological continuum that is the human species between those
who are worthy of citizenship and those who are not. Internal
threats to the health and wellbeing of a social body come from those
who were deemed to lack an ethics of how to live and thus the
ability to govern themselves. It is worth remembering that the Nazi
concentration camps housed not only Jews, but also Gypsies,
homosexuals, Bolsheviks and other inassimilable elements. To sum up,
Foucault understands racism as a sort of permanent feature of
biopower and not as the paroxysmal convulsion of a decaying moral order (Stoler, 1995: 64). Foucaults
argument is that racism is not only confined within those obviously racist
forms of authoritarian government such as the German Nationalist
Socialist state, but that it is intrinsic to the nature of all modern,
normalising governmental rationalities and their bio-political
technologies. By showing how racism possesses a polyvalent mobility, he shows that racism is
not merely an ideological discourse of exceptionally cruel regimes,
but a fundamental feature of modern processes of government.
A/T: State Good

Their authors have it backwards the state of nature is produced, not
replaced, by sovereign authority.
(Sergie, The Appropriation of Abandonment: Girgio Agamben on the State of
Nature and the Political, February 15th, International Studies Association,
In contrast to Hobbess mythologization of the state of nature, Agambens goal is to
restore the state of nature to its status of the product of sovereign power, a
contingency that is an effect of sovereign decision as opposed to a contingency that
calls for sovereign decision. Thus, what Agamben does is not dehistoricise Hobbess
state of nature, but rather restore reality to this ahistorical figure by dismantling the
spatiotemporal distinction between the state of nature and the Commonwealth and
recasting the state of nature as a principle internal to the City. The political does
not replace nature; it creates it. The state from which Hobbess sovereign rescues
us is the state into which Agambens sovereign plunges us. (Rasch 2007, 101) The
state of nature is constituted by the sovereign decision that, by treating the civil
state as dissolved, suspends the operation of its internal laws and norms that define
it as bios and thereby reduces the existence of its population to bare life, which
differs from the natural zoe that human beings have irrevocably left behind
precisely because it only comes into existence by being stripped of all positive
attributes of its bios (Cf. Agamben 1998, 181. See also Mills 2005, 219; Ziarek 2008,
90).
In this condition, the Covenant is treated as void and the subject is simultaneously
abandoned by the sovereign, i.e. left without his protection, and abandoned to the
sovereigns unlimited exercise of violence. Homo sacer is thus in a strict sense the
remnant not of the state of nature but of the covenant that is no longer in force by
the decision of the sovereign. Rather than being pre-juridical, the state of nature is
then graspable as an instance of the non-juridical within the juridical, a constitutive
outside of a juridical order or its inherent transgression (see Ojakangas 2004, 23-29;
Rasch 2000). In Foucaults terms (2003, 93), instead of being spatially and
temporally transcended in the establishment of the Commonwealth, the state of
nature remains a permanent backdrop of every constituted authority. Let us now
address the way in which this anomic backdrop enters and survives in the nomos of
the Commonwealth.
The State isnt the problem in this context the production of bare life is.
Dillon and Reid 2K1, Professor and PhD Student IR University of Lancaster 2001
Millennium 30.1
Although Foucault did not use the term governance he explored similar practices under the terms
governmentality and this biopower, he also noted, has its own biohistory.23 Its early modern
expression arose in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe but its antecedents
were to be found in the pastoral power of the Christian Church.24 In the eighteenth
century, it became intimately related both to liberal opposition to police, or
policy, and to the advent of a novel understanding of society as a complex and
independent reality that has its own laws and mechanisms of disturbance.25
Liberal forms of biopower thus entered early modern discourse on the problems of
government in the form of a critique of rival cameralist and mercantilist solutions to

the problematic of government. The Liberal problematisation of government was
distinguished by its concern with striking the balance between governing too much
and governing too little as well as with governing through encouraging the
autonomous existence and selfregulating freedoms of populations. It was also
concerned to keep its own regimes of governance under continuous and critical
review.26 Whereas sovereign power is distinguished by its reliance on instituting the
law and threatening death, for Foucault,27 governmentality or, as we will now refer
to it, governance, operates on populations and seeks to promote life by
commanding detailed knowledge of it. It thus establishes what he called the
biopolitics of the population.28 In the biopolitical discourse of global liberal
governance without government, the term governance does not refer to seizing or
ruling the State according to some legitimating principle, such as that of
representative and accountable government. Biopolitical governance is less
concerned with States and non-governmental organisations as pre-formed political
subjects, than it is concerned with the detailed knowledgeable strategies and tactics
that effect the constitution of life and the regulation of the affairs of populations, no
matter how these are specified. It is also concerned with the discursive economies
of power/knowledge through which people in their individual and collective
behaviour are analysed and subject to selfregulatory freedoms and methods of
control.29
A/T: Ks of Agamben
A/T: Pragmatism
Overcoming sovereign power is impossible as long as political
options are confined to the application of praxis to sovereign
goals. Only a transition from a politics of potentiality to one of
impotentiality can resolve the exclusion of bare life
constituting power,
when conceived in all its radicality, ceases to be a strictly political concept and
necessarily presents itself as a category of ontology. The problem of constituting power then becomes the
The strength of Negri's book lies instead in the final perspective it opens insofar as it shows how
problem of the "constitution of potentiality" (II potere costituente, p. 383), and the unresolved dialectic between constituting power
and constituted power opens the way for a new articulation of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which requires
nothing less than a re-thinking of the ontological categories of modality in their totality. The problem is therefore moved from
Only an entirely new

conjunction of possibility and reality, contingency and necessity , and the other path(' tou ontos,
will make it possible to cut the knot that binds sovereignty to constituting power. And
only if it is possible to think the relation between potentiality and actuality
differently-and even to think beyond this relation-will it be possible to think a constituting power
wholly released from the sovereign ban. Until a new and coherent ontology of
potentiality (beyond the steps that have been made in this direction by Spinoza, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) has
replaced the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality and its relation to potentiality, a
political theory freed from the aporias of sovereignty remains unthinkable .
political philosophy to first philosophy (or, if one likes, politics is returned to its ontological position).
A/T: Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis has enabled modern governmentality --- its techniques are
used manage populations and develop disciplinary society
Milchman and Rosenberg 02 Milchman teaches in the department of Political
Science of Queens College of the City University of New York. He has published on
Marxism, modern genocide, Max Weber, Heidegger, Foucault, and postmodernism.
He has co-edited Postmodernism and the Holocaust, with Alan Rosenberg (Rodopi,
1998) and Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust, with Alan Rosenberg (Humanities
Press, 1996), Alan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queens College of the City
University of New York. He has published widely on psychoanalysis, the Holocaust,
and the philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. Among the books that
he has co-edited are Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, with Alan
Milchman (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming); Contemporary Portrayals of
Auschwitz: Philosophical Challenges, with James Watson and Detlef B. Linke
(Humanity Books); Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition, with Paul
Marcus (NYU press, 1998); Healing Their Wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocaust
Survivors and Their Families, with Paul Marcus (Praeger, 1989); and Echoes from the
Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, with Gerald Myers (Temple
University Press, 1988). A Foucauldian Analysis of Psychoanalysis: A Discipline that
Disciplines Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts,
http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/milch&rosen.htm/
the very genesis of the discipline of psychoanalysis is itself linked to

historical changes in the exercise of power-relations, and in particular to the
emergence of governmentality. According to the later Foucault, modern power-relations cannot be
For Foucault,
grasped on the basis of political theory's traditional model of power-law-sovereignty-repression. This juridical model
of power, which still dominates political theory, and sees power as emanating from a sovereign, from the top down,
ignores the fact that power today also comes from below. As Leslie Paul Thiele has argued in his explication of
Foucault's contribution to a theory of power: "Power forms an omnipresent web of relations, and the individuals who
support this web are as much the producers and transmitters of power as they are its objects." In place of the
juridical model of power, Foucault argues that modern power-relations are instantiated through what he designates
as "governmentality." For Foucault: The
exercise of power consists in guiding the

possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome . Basically power is
less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. This
word must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. `Government' did not refer
only to political structures or to the management of states; rather it designated the way in which the conduct of
individuals or groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the
To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others.

For Foucault, then, the operations of the modern state are not restricted to interdiction or
repression in the political sense, but have expanded to incorporate the practices of
governmentality. Government, in the Foucauldian sense, depends on the knowledge
generated by the human sciences, by the disciplines, in particular
psychoanalysis; indeed, the state claims that it governs on the basis of that
knowledge. Here, the central role of the human sciences in the operation of the
developing disciplinary society, and its techniques for the control and
management of its citizens becomes especially clear. Moreover,
governmentality, and the technologies for the control of individuals, are by
no means limited to the state. Indeed, according to Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, modern,
liberal societies do not leave the regulation of conduct solely or even
primarily to the operations of the state and its bureaucracies: "Liberal
government identifies a domain outside 'politics,' and seeks to manage it
sick. ....
without destroying its existence and its autonomy." This is accomplished

through the activities of a host of institutions and agents not formally part of
the state apparatus, including psychoanalytic facilities and analysts. As Nikolas
Rose has pointed out, psychoanalysis, like "All the sciences which have the prefix `psy-' or `psycho-' have
their roots in this shift in the relationship between social power and the
human body, in which regulatory systems have sought to codify, calculate,
supervise, and maximize the level of functioning of individuals. The `psy
sciences' were born within a project of government of the human soul and
the construction of the person as a manageable subject." As a manifestation of
governmentality and its power-relations, psychoanalysis is implicated in the control of the individual. For Foucault,
psychoanalysis is a discipline that "disciplines," that helps to create

politically and economically socialized, useful, cooperative , and -- as one of
the hallmarks of bio-power -- docile individuals. Indeed, according to John Forrester, for
Foucault, psychoanalysis is "the purest version of the social practices that
exercise domination in and through discourse, whose power lies in words,
whose words can never by anything other than instruments of power." Of
course, the aim of the analyst is not control, but the "mental health" of the
individual and the "betterment" of society. Nonetheless, the result of the
psychoanalytic management-oriented conception of the subject is an
individual who is susceptible to techno-medical control. Moreover, as Nikolas Rose
has suggested, the power-knowledge obtained by psychoanalysis (and indeed all of the psy
sciences) and its technologies for the control of the individual: fed back into social life at a
number of levels. Individuals could be classified and distributed to particular social
locations in the light of them -- in schools, jobs, ranks in the army, types of
reformatory institutions, and so forth. Further, in consequence, new means
emerged for the codification and analysis of the consequences of organizing
classrooms, barracks, prisons, production lines, the family, and social life
itself....Hence, the psy knowleges could feed back into more general
economic and social programs, throwing up new problems and opportunities
for attempts to maximize the use of the human resources of the nation and
to increase its levels of personal health and well-being. Whatever its impact or health
and welfare, this power-knowledge enhanced the degree of control to which the
person was subject, and made it possible to effectively discipline the
individual. Indeed, the existence of our developing disciplinary society is
inconceivable without the psy sciences, and the power-relations which they
consolidate. The discipline and control of the individual to which
psychoanalysis made its signal contribution, was linked to its conception of,
and commitment to, normalization. Foucault signalled the increasing role of normality and
normalization in the functioning of the developing disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish: "The judges of
normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge,
the `social worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual,
wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements."
discipline and normalization were inseparable components of the

emergence of the human sciences, and their technologies. Indeed, he asserted that "a
normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power
centered on life." Psychoanalysis did not break with this complex. Indeed, according to Foucault, "Freud
For Foucault,
was well aware of all this. He was aware of the superior strength of his position on the matter of normalization."
Indeed,
psychoanalysis was thoroughly implicated in the societal process in
which the norm increasingly supplanted the law, in which the West was
"becoming a society which is essentially defined by the norm." For Foucault: "The
norm becomes the criterion for evaluating individuals. As it truly becomes a society of the norm, medicine, par
excellence the science of the normal and the pathological, assumes the status of a royal science." Lest one
conclude that Foucault is not referring to psychoanalysis here, he is quick to point out that " psychoanalysis,
functions massively as a medical practice:

even if it is not always practiced by doctors, it certainly functions as therapy,
as a medical type of intervention. From this point of view, it is very much a part of
this network of medical 'control' which is being established all over." Deviation
not only in the United States, but also in France,
from the norm, in the establishment of which psychoanalysis played a signal role, the anomaly, became the object
The
theological conception of evil had given way to the psychoanalytic
conception of deviance, in the combat against which the analyst was now
enlisted to play a leading role. As Hubert Dreyfus has claimed, "Freudian theory thus reinforces the
of the technologies and therapeutic techniques of the psy sciences, psychoanalysis among them.
collective practices that allow norms based on alleged sciences of human nature to permeate every aspect of our
These practices then become a lynchpin of the developing disciplinary

society and its techniques for managing people.
lives."
The negative attempts to put us on the couch, interpreting our fantasies

for us until we dont know what we want anymore --- the rule of
psychoanalysis is regardless of what you say, you mean something else --this paradox makes politics impossible --- the impact is the 1ac
Deleuze 2004 (Gilles, thinker, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, pg.
274-280 [Originally published in Italian. "Relazione di Gilles Deleuze" and
discussions in Armando Verdiglione, ed., Psicanalisi e Politica; Atti del Comvegno di
studi tenuto a Milano l'8-9 Maggio 1973. Milan: Feltrinelli, 19-3, pp. 7-11, 17-21,
37-40, 44-45, 169-172. Abridged and edited.])
I would like to present five propositions on psychoanalysis. The first is this:
psychoanalysis today presents a political danger all of its own that is different from
the implicit dangers of the old psychiatric hospital. The latter constitutes a place of
localized captivity; psychoanalysis, on the other hand, works in the open air. The
psychoanalyst has in a sense the same position that Marx accorded to the merchant in feudal society:
working in the open pores of society, not only in private offices, but also in schools,
institutions, departmentalism , etc. This function puts us in a unique position with respect to the
psychoanalytic project. We recognize that psychoanalysis tells us a great deal about the
unconscious; but, in a certain way, it does so only to reduce the unconscious, to
destroy it, to repulse it, to imagine it as a sort of parasite on consciousness . For
psychoanalysis , it is fair to say there are always too many desires . The Freudian conception of
the child as polymorphous pervert shows that there are always too many desires. In our view, however, there are
never enough desires. We do not, by one method or another, wish to reduce the unconscious: we prefer to produce
it: there is no unconscious that is already there; the unconscious must be produced politically, socially, and
historically. The question is: in what place, in what circumstances, in the shadow of what events, can the
unconscious be produced. Producing the unconscious means very precisely the production of desire in a historical
My second proposition is
that psychoanalysis is a complete machine, designed in advance to prevent
people from talking, therefore from producing statements that suit them and the
groups with which they have certain affinities . As soon as one begins analysis, one
has the impression of talking. But one talks in vain; the entire psychoanalytical
machine exists to suppress the conditions of a real expression. Whatever one says
is taken into a sort of tourniquet, an interpretive machine; the patient will never be
able to get to what he really has to say. Desire or delirium (which are in a deep sense the same
social milieu or the appearance of statements and expressions of a new kind.
thing), desire-delirium is by its nature a libidinal investment of an entire historical milieu, of an entire social
environment. What makes one delirious are classes, peoples, races, masses, mobs. Psychoanalysis, possessed of a
pre-existing code, superintends a sort of destruction. This code consists of Oedipus, castration, the family romance;
the most secret content of delirium, i.e. this divergence from the social and historical milieu, will be destroyed so
that no delirious statement, corresponding to an overflow in the unconscious, will be able to get through the
We say that the schizophrenic has to deal not with family, nor with
his parents, but with peoples, populations, and tribes. We say that the
unconscious is not a matter of generations or family genealogy, but rather of
world population, and that the psychoanalytical machine destroys all this. I will cite
analytical machine.
just two examples: the celebrated example of president Schreber whose delirium is entirely about races, history,
and wars. Freud doesn't realize this and reduces the patient's delirium exclusively to his relationship with his
father. Another example is the Wolfman: when the Wolfman dreams of six or seven wolves, which is by definition
a pack, i.e. a certain kind of group, Freud immediately reduces this multiplicity by bringing everything back to a
single wolf who is necessarily the Father. The entire collective libidinal expression manifested in the delirium of
the Wolfman will be unable to make, let alone conceive of the statements that are for him the most meaningful.
My third proposition is that psychoanalysis works in this way because of its

automatic interpretation machine. This interpretation machine can be described in
the following way: whatever you say, you mean something different. We can't
say enough about the damage these machines cause . When someone explains to me that
what I say means something other than what I say, a split in the ego as subject is produced . This
split is well known: what I say refers to me as the subject of an utterance or statement, what I mean refers to me
This split is conjured by psychoanalysis as the basis for castration and prevents
all production of statements . For example, in certain schools for problem children,
dealing with character or even psychopathology, the child, in his work or play
activities, is placed in a relationship with his educator, and in this context the child
is understood as the subject of an utterance or statement ; in his psychotherapy, he is put
as an expressing subject.
into a relationship with the analyst or the therapist, and there he is understood as an expressing subject.
Whatever he does in the group in terms of his work and his play will be compared
to a superior authority, that of the psychotherapist who alone will have the job of
interpreting, such that the child himself is split; he cannot will acceptance for any
statement about what really matters to him in his relationship or in his group . He
will feel like he's talking, but he will not be able to say a single word about what's
most essential to him. Indeed, what produces statements in each one of us is not ego as subject, it's
something entirely different: multiplicities, masses and mobs, peoples and tribes, collective arrangements; they
cross through us, they are within us, and they seem unfamiliar because they are part of our unconscious. The
challenge for a real psychoanalysis, an anti-psychoanalytical analysis, is to discover these collective
arrangements of expression, these collective networks, these peoples who are in us and who make us speak, and
who are the source of our statements. This is the sense in which we set a whole held of experimentation, of
My fourth
proposition, to be quick, is that psychoanalysis implies a fairly peculiar power
structure. The recent book by Castel, Le Psychanalysme, demonstrates this point very well. The power
personal or group experimentation, against the interpretive activities of psychoanalysis.
structure occurs in the contract, a formidable liberal bourgeois institution. It leads to "transference" and
culminates in the analyst's silence. And the analyst's silence is the greatest and the worst of interpretations.
Psychoanalysis uses a small number of collective statements, which are those of

capitalism itself regarding castration, loss, and family, and it tries to get this small
number of collective statements specific to capitalism to enter into the individual
statements of the patients themselves. We claim that one should do just the opposite, that is, start
with the real individual statements, give people conditions, including the material conditions, for the production
of their individual statements, in order to discover the real collective arrangements that produce them.
A/T: Threats Real

1. No Link: Were not saying that
2. We are a critique of how their impacts are
Their impacts are constructed- theyre there to line the
pockets of the Trumanites.
Glennon 14Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Glennon National Security and Double Government, Harvard National Security Journal / Vol. 5, pg 1-114
Michael
Tina
The Trumanites propensity to define security in military and intelligence terms rather than political and diplomatic ones reinforces a
Overprotection of national security

creates costs that the Trumanite network can externalize; under-protection creates
costs that the network must internalize. The resulting incentive structure
encourages the exaggeration of existing threats and the creation of
imaginary ones. The security programs that emerge are, in economic terms, sticky
downeasier to grow than to shrink. The Trumanites sacrifice little when
disproportionate money or manpower is devoted to security. The operatives that they direct do not
incur trade-off costs.152 The Trumanites do, however, reap the benefits of that disproportionality
a larger payroll, more personnel, broader authority, and an even lower risk that
they will be blamed in the event of a successful attack .153 Yet Madisonian institutions
incur the costs of excessive resources that flow to the Trumanites. The President must submit a budget that
powerful structural dynamic. That dynamic can be succinctly stated:
includes the needed taxes. Members of Congress must vote for those taxes. A federal agency must collect the taxes. When it comes
to picking up the tab, Trumanites are nowhere to be seen. If national security protection is inadequate, on the other hand, the
Trumanites are held accountable. They are the experts on whom the Madisonian institutions rely to keep the nation safe. They are
the recipients of Madisonian largesse, doled out to ensure that no blame will be cast by voters seeking retribution for a job poorly
In the event of a catastrophic attack, the buck stops with the Trumanites. No
Trumanite craves to be the target of a 9/11 commission following a catastrophic
failure. Thus they have, as Jeffrey Rosen put it, an incentive to exaggerate risks and
pander to public fears154an incentive to pass along vague and unconfirmed
threats of future violence, in order to protect themselves from criticism 155 should
another attack occur. Indeed, a purely rational actor in the Trumanite network might
hardly be expected to do anything other than inflate threats. In this way, the
domestic political dynamic reinforces the security dilemma familiar to international relations
students, the quandary that a nation confronts when, in taking steps to enhance its security, it
unintentionally threatens the security of another nation and thus finds its own
security threatened when the other nation takes compensatory action.156 An inexorable and
destabilizing arms race is thereby fueled by seemingly rational domestic actors
responding to seemingly reasonable threatsthreats that they unwittingly
helped create.
done.
A/T: Realism
Recourse to a prediscursive realm of realist politics is exactly how

the state of exception operates. Discourse acts as the law and
expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion that is the structure of
sovereignty and politics
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 21)
language is at
once outside and inside itself and the immediate (the nonlinguistic) reveals itself to be
nothing but a presupposition of language. Language, he wrote in the Phenomenology of Spirit,
Hegel was the first to truly understand the presuppositional structure thanks to which
is the perfect element in which interioriry is as external as exteriority is internal (see Phdnomenologie des
Geistes, pp. 52729). We have seen that only the sovereign decision on the state of exception
opens the space in which it is possible to trace borders between inside and outside and
in which determinate rules can be assigned to determinate territories. In exactly the
same way, only language as the pure potentiality to signify, withdrawing itself from
every concrete instance of speech, divides the linguistic from the nonlinguistic and
allows for the opening of areas of meaningful speech in which certain terms correspond to
certain denotations. Language is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception,
declares that there is nothing outside language and that language is always beyond
itself. The particular structure of law has its foundation in this presuppositional
structure of human language. It expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion to which a
thing is subject because of the fact of being in language, of being named. To speak
[dire] is, in this sense, always to speak the law, ius dicere.
A/T: Bare Life Bad
A/T: Derrida
Derrida fundamentally misunderstands Agamben hes a
dumbass
Donahue 13 (Luke Donahue is a writer who specializes in deconstruction, Erasing Differences
between Derrida and Agamben 2013 Oxford Literary Review p. 29-30)///CW
While Part One of Homo Sacer focuses on the sovereign who appears most in the law, Part Two focuses on the
banished ex-citizen who appears most devoid of law and most animal. This exile is homo sacer, excluded from the
legal order. But while exiled from the polis, he is not completely abandoned to animal life: just as the sovereign
When Agamben calls homo sacer

bare life, he does not mean that bare life is the pure, unqualified life of zoe. Rather,
bare life is a zone of indistinction between zoe and bios, between life that is absolutely animal
and life that is qualified as human and political. While bare life is commonly confused with zoe, Agamben says
clearly: Neither political bios nor natural zoe, sacred life is the zone of indistinction
in which zoe and bios constitute each other in including and excluding each other (HS, 90).7 What is more,
state of exception still holds a relation to law, so too does homo sacer.
while bare life is the play between bios and zoe, there is no bios or zoe prior to the bare life of homo sacer. Just as
nature and culture only appear after the originary confusion between them, so the condition of possibility of the
appearance of either pure bios or pure zoe is the originary co-contamination that precedes either of them.
Derrida continually misunderstands these points when he identifies bare life with
zoe, as in the following apposition: bare life (zoe) .8 This confusion gives Derrida the
impression that Agamben is required to demonstrate that the difference between
zoe and bios is absolutely rigorous (BS, 326). But Agambens point is just the opposite:
the distinction never was rigorous. There never was an original unity or an original and secure
difference.
Derrida misunderstands Agambens argument the fact that

bios and zoe cannot be separated is the entire point
Kotsko 12 (Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago and
the translator of Giorgio Agambens Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath, The Highest
Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, and Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty On Derridas critique
of Agamben 6/30/12 https://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/30/on-derridas-critique-ofagamben/)///CW
I have not closely studied Derridas critique of Agamben from The Beast and the Sovereign, yet given how
that
bios and zo cannot be neatly distinguished does not undermine Agambens project,
but is indeed the entire point. Agamben reads the Western tradition as a series of
increasingly destructive failed attempts to separate them out in some kind of stable and
sustainable way. The reason these attempts fail is that the neat distinction is impossible
frequently its been deployed by Agamben skeptics, I feel comfortable giving a brief, blog-style response to it:
indeed, even in the encounter between the sovereign (the very embodiment of bios as political life) and the
homo sacer (the emblem of zo as bare life), which should surely count as the starkest possible contrast between
these two concepts of life, an uncanny overlapping occurs wherein both are included through their very exclusion.
Agamben is thus not trying to get rid of bios in favor of a pure zo i.e., to abolish politics
and allow us all to return to our raw animality or unblemished nature but to get at another politics,
another form of life that would not be governed by this founding opposition of the
contingent historical reality that is Western politics. There is doubtless a lot to be said in critique
of Agambens project, but Derridas critique misses its target as far as I can tell.
A/T: Foucault Wrong

Agambens theory of Biopower is fundamentally different than
Foucoults analysis
Kendrick 2012
[Kendrick, J. (2012, June 11). Foucault, Biopower & IR: A Methodological Discussion. Retrieved
December 29, 2015.] Hebron ADN
In summary, both sets of authors discussed above commit, from a Foucauldian

perspective, fundamental methodological errors. Hardt & Negri explain power
relations according to a transcendent logic, and explicitly break one of Foucaults
methodological rules; not to attempt some kind of deduction of power starting from
its centre and aimed at the discovery of the extent to which it permeates into the
base, of the degree to which it reproduces itself down to and including the most
molecular elements of society.48 Meanwhile , Agambens analysis is also anti-
genealogical, in that it places the present need of explaining zones of

exception at the supposed origin of sovereignty, albeit an origin that
perpetually re-inscribes itself as the function of sovereignty. Yet both sets of
authors have a predominant influence in the IR literature, over a dearth of more

accurate Foucauldian readings. It should seem odd then, that when the
shortcomings of biopower in IR literature are identified, it is Foucault that gets
the blame. This is especially so when Foucault made it quite clear that, although his
concepts and insights were produced to be freely interpreted and redeployed
according to the directions of others investigations, certain methodological
principles were integral to his work. I maintain that a Foucauldian IR can only be
built upon a certain level of methodological adherence to these principles. The
direction in which Agamben, and Hardt & Negri have ultimately led biopower is
best represented by Michael Dillon, probably the most explicit and prolific
theorist of biopower in IR.49 Dillon is particularly interested in the ramifications of
Foucaults insights into security, war, and race, and views biopolitics from this
perspective. For Dillon, the central import of biopower is not that it is a strategy
which promotes life, but that in promoting life its central concern is to differentiate
between the fit and unfit. Biopolitics is therefore always involved in the sorting of
life for the promotion of life. Sorting life requires waging war on behalf of life against
life forces that are inimical to life.50War becomes a central concern for Dillon
because, as Foucault first states in The History of Sexuality, vol 1, biopower not
only is a power that fosters life, but concomitantly disallows life. 51 Foucault,
however, did not pursue this line of inquiry to fully develop its implications,
and Dillons project launches itself from the point made by Bigo that [t]he
question of security as it relates to war, and to international war, is not really
discussed by Foucault and the Foucaultians. 52
***TAG***
Kendrick 2012 Victoria University of Wellington (Foucault, Biopower & IR)
Due to Agambens view of sovereignty, it is clear that his conception of biopower is
fundamentally dissimilar to Foucault. Some go so far as to say they are not talking
about the same thing.40 Agambens biopower rests on the idea that bare life
is its object, a mode of life that is exposed to an unconditional threat of death
via the suspension of sovereignty, a foundational practice that serves to

perpetually constitute sovereign power. Bare life exists in a state of exception,
a constitutive operation that links bare life directly to sovereign power. The state of
exception thus produces bare life which is the hidden foundation of biopolitics,
which itself had been concealed until Foucault identified practices of government
that made it explicit. This objectification of bare life is absolutely incongruent with
Foucaults subjectification of the life processes of a population. It also directly
contradicts Foucault. For Agamben, sovereign biopower produces bare life to
establish itself, a process that is immensely reductive,41 while for Foucault,
the practice of biopower is productive to turn the mere being of life into wellbeing.42 Ojakangas sums up the problem with Agambens perspective most
succinctly when he says that is[b]io-power needs a notion of life that
corresponds to its aims.43 The necessary correspondence between

biopower and more-than-life does mean Agamben is effectively talking
about something different to what Foucault meant. Schinkel (2010) even
resolves this divergence in a model based on citizenship as a technology of
government. On this reading Foucauldian biopolitics is directed towards the
bios, taking as its object the social body, while Agambean biopower is a
zopolitics externally directed to persons outside the state.44 This is an
important and helpful distinction, but it leaves unresolved what branch of biopower
is most pertinent to the study of international relations. Like Hardt & Negri, the
influence Agambens work wields within the discipline of IR forces a complete

appraisal of his conceptualisation, and from a Foucauldian perspective
methodological problems upset his argument. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History
Foucault eschews the search for truth in origins, whereby history becomes a
handmaiden to philosophy.45 Agamben does not observe this methodological
precaution and effectively identifies an originary moment, whereby the articulation
of the concepts of zo and bios by Aristotle constitute the birth-moment of
sovereignty. Not only does this naively and problematically [assume] that
there was once a separation between zo and bios,46 Blencowe points out
that this reading also de-historicises biopower in a dual sense. First it removes
Foucaults work from its contexts of concern with constructed and historical
statuses, which [forecloses] any transhistorical distinctions such as zo/bios, bare
life/human life, or nature/culture. Second, the historical specificity of notions that
are central to biological thinking, such as species, is obliterated while all thought of
living physicality is subsumed under a mere physicality.47 The genealogical
component of Foucaults insight is thus completely removed, and an abstract

transhistorical category zo is introduced.
A/T: Hall
Some biopolitics might be good, but thats not the aff --- we
specifically critique the juridical biopolitics of the 1ac
THEIR AUTHOR Hall, 5/7/2007 Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay,
Death, Power, and the Body: A Bio-political Analysis of Death and Dying, Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University, p. 9)//roetlin
Foucault was careful to distinguish sovereign power from the mechanisms of power
that emerged in modernity. For him, an essential aspect of modern power is its surreptitious natureit
works so well precisely because we are intent on looking for power in rules and laws; in
prohibitive mechanisms rather than in productive ones. While Damiens execution was
perhaps the last great hurrah for pure sovereign authorityas it would only be a few decades later that the French
King himself would see his power stripped away by the cold steel blade of the guillotineFoucault famously
contended that, in
political thought and analysis, we still [have yet to] cut off the head
of the king (1978, 88-89). In other words, for Foucault, power is still represented in juridical
terms despite the fact that deduction, the primary manifestation of sovereign authority, has become merely one
element in a range of mechanisms working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize and organize the forces
under it (1978, 136).
A/T: Holocaust Trivialization

Agamben isnt making a direct comparison, and his theories
have clear reasons for the parallels he draws
Robinson 11 (Andrew political theorist, activist based in the UK and research
fellow affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ),
University of Nottingham, In Theory Giorgio Agamben: the state and the
concentration camp, in Ceasefire Magazine, 1-7-11,
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-the-state-and-theconcentration-camp/)
Doubtless some will reject his theories for violating Godwins Law, or because they feel it is
trivialising or decontextualising the camp to compare it to every instance of
repression. This, I suspect, is based on a misunderstanding. For one thing, Agamben is not
actually saying that we are all treated like camp inmates, simply that were all at risk
from being treated as if we are of this status we could be killed by the state with
impunity, even if we arent. Also, this is not just a case of Agamben calling people he dislikes Nazis. There are
clear, structural reasons for the parallels he draws. I would argue that, in contrast, the
tabooing of discussion of fascistic elements of present state practices is based on a
kind of irrational splitting, which wards off the subversive implications of never
again by keeping them at a distance, pretending they dont apply to us, they only
apply to issues behind some imaginary boundary (in undemocratic societies for instance) which
historically would prove to be far more porous . It is, I think, a peculiar perspectival blockage of radicalisms
in countries like Britain to confine anti-fascism to opposing small neo-Nazi groups. In contrast, German antifa have long recognised
the parallels between the repressive practices (and even the personnel) of the current German state and those of the Third Reich; so
have radicals in Italy, Spain, Greece and Japan. It is only in countries like Britain and America, with no recent fascist past to compare
to, where the existence of a continuum between fascism and the deep state is something of a public secret, even among radicals.
Even if the term holocaust is a mistake, we must use it to be truly understood

Agamben 1999 (Giorgio, Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy at the University of
Verona, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, P. 26-28, BH.)
1.9 In Greek the word for witness is martis, martyr. The first Church Fathers coined
the word martin urn from maitis to indicate the death of persecuted Christians, who
thus bore witness to their faith. What happened in the camps has little to do with
martyrdom. The survivors are unanimous about this. "By calling the victims of the
Nazis 'martyrs,' we falsify their fate" (Bettelheim 1979: 92). Nevertheless, the
concepts of "witnessing" and "martyrdom" can be linked in two ways. The first
concerns the Greek term itself, derived as it is from the verb meaning "to
remember." The survivor's vocation is to remember; he cannot not remember. "The
memories of my imprisonment are much more vivid and detailed than those of
anything else that happened to me before or after" (Levi 1997: 225). "I still have a
visual and acoustic memory of the experiences there that I cannot explain....
sentences in languages I do not know have remained etched in my memory, like on
a magnetic tape; I have repeated them to Poles and Hungarians and have been told
that the sentences are meaningful. For some reason that I cannot explain,
something anomalous happened to me, I would say almost an unconscious
preparation for bearing witness" (ibid.: 220). The second point of connection is even
more profound, more instructive. The study of the first Christian texts on martyrdom
for example, Tertullian's Scorpiacus reveals some unexpected teachings. The
Church Fathers were confronted by heretical groups that rejected martyrdom
because, in their eyes, it constituted a wholly senseless death (perire sine causa).
What meaning could be found in professing one's faith before men persecutors
and
exe-cutioners who would understand nothing of this undertaking? God
could not desire something without meaning. "Must innocents suffer these things?...
Once and for all Christ immolated himself for us; once and for all he was killed,
precisely so that we would not be killed. If he asks for the same in return, is it
perhaps because he too expects salvation in my death? Or should one perhaps think
that God demands the blood of men even while he disdains that of bulls and goats?
How could God ever desire the death of someone who is not a sinner?" The doctrine
of martyrdom therefore justifies the scandal of a meaningless death, of an execution
that could only appear as absurd. Confronted with the spectacle of a death that was
apparently sine causa, the reference to Luke 12: 8-9 and to Matthew 10: 32-33
("Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before
my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I
also deny before my Father which is in heaven") made it possible to interpret
martyrdom as a divine command and, thus, to find a reason for the irrational. But
this has very much to do with the camps. For what appears in the camps is an
extermination for which it may be possible to find precedents, but whose forms
make it absolutely senseless. Survivors are also in agreement on this. "Even to us,
what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable" (Anteime 1992: 3). "All the
attempts at clarification ... failed ridiculously" (Amery 1980; vii). "I am irritated by
the attempts of some religious extremists to interpret the extermination according
to the manner of the prophets: as a punishment for our sins. No! I do not accept
this. What is terrifying is that it was senseless...." (Levi 1997: 219). The unfortunate
term "holocaust" (usually with a capital "H") arises from this unconscious demand to
justify a death that is sine causa to give meaning back to what seemed
incomprehensible. "Please excuse me, I use this term 'Holocaust' reluctantly
because I do not like it. But I use it to be understood. Philologically, it is amistake...."
(ibid.: 243). "It is a term that, when it first arose, gave me a lot of trouble; then I
learned that it was Wiesel himself who had coined it, then regretted it and wanted
to take it back" (ibid.: 219).
The Holocaust happened for contingent, historical reasons but

the camp was a key precondition
Robinson 11 (Andrew political theorist, activist based in the UK and research
fellow affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ),
University of Nottingham, In Theory Giorgio Agamben: the state and the
concentration camp, in Ceasefire Magazine, 1-7-11,
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-the-state-and-theconcentration-camp/)
The concentration camp, and Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz in particular, are for Agamben particularly definitive or telling
The camp (which preceded the Holocaust by a long time ) was a

turning-point for Agamben because it made the temporary state of exception
permanent, locating it in space instead of time (unlike the declaration of a state of emergency), and
local to the core area of power, within its territory but outside its law (unlike the colony or warzone). This fixing
examples of sovereignty.
of the state of exception as a permanent feature at a site in time and space intensifies the danger to people declared homo sacer.
Formerly, an outlawed person would be literally banished , becoming a wandering figure driven into
exile. Now, an outlawed person is not allowed to go into exile (think for instance of the immense efforts put into
catching high-profile fugitives), but rather, is put in a situation suspended between inside and
outside, constantly at risk of arbitrary power. For Agamben, camps differ from other disciplinary spaces
(prisons, asylums and so on) because in them, anything is possible, and the guard is absolutely
sovereign. The Nazi Holocaust marks a second turning point in which the horrors of the camp are revealed in all their
monstrosity. The Holocaust happened when and where it did for contingent, historical
reasons, but its real causes were the creation of a particular kind of space , the camp,
where people were defined as having lives not worth living , and as being vulnerable
to being killed with impunity. Auschwitz is the high point of the logic of sovereignty, showing its ontological nature in
its realisation: it shows where the combination of biopolitics and sovereignty leads. Auschwitz marks the point of no return which
reveals the nature of sovereignty for what it really is. It thus marks the starting point for a new politics.
Hes obviously not being literal --- hes not even claiming our
experiences are on par with nazi victims
Van Munster, 5/28/2014 Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for
International Studies (DIIS) and teaches security studies at the Department of
Political Science, University of Southern Denmark (Rens, The War on Terrorism:
When the Exception Becomes the Rule, Danish Institute for International Studies, p.
144)//roetlin
Supra fn. 4, at p. 181, passim , Agambens outspoken statement that the concentration camp is
the political paradigm of the West does not purport that life today faces the same
horrors that inhabitants of concentration camps had to confront.
Biopolitics generates the groundwork for racism and eugenics

--- these invisible violences outweigh any purported benefits of
biopolitics --- FYI we also dont link to h triv

144-146)//roetlin
Taking his cue from Michel Foucault, Agamben maintains that the sovereign right to take life has
become supplemented and permeated by a right to make life . In modern societies the
sovereign threat of death has been complemented with a concern to take charge
of biological life in order to make it more productive, fertile, healthy, etc. 11 Instead of threatening
with death, biopolitics is a form of power that is concerned with the correction,
administration and regulation of populations . Seeking to take charge of life, it does not have
to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it
effects distributions around the norm. 12 The inclusion of pure life in politics, then, also marks a shift from law to
bare life is not only, or not even first and foremost,

produced in the sovereign process of taking life, but through the process of making
life, i.e. through the distribution of human life around a norm with the purpose of reducing lifes distance to this
norm. Although the incorporation of bare life in the political realm has made it
possible to reduce, amongst others, famine and mortality in the West, it has also given rise
to caring practices such as racism and eugenics: What follows is a kind of
bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques.
For the first time in history ... it becomes possible both to protect life and to
authorize a holocaust. 13 Agambens rendering of sovereign power and bare life is driven by an
ethical drive to lay bare the juridico-political mechanisms of power that make it possible to
commit acts of violence that do not count as crime. 14 While not denying the
uniqueness of the suffering in the Nazi concentration camps, Agamben discovers
similar structures in contemporary society. He points out that camp-like structures such as
detention centres for illegal migrants, airport holding zones and humanitarian relief
camps all produce bare life in the sense that decisions on the life of people can be taken outside the
the (statistical) norm in the sense that
normal framework of rule, but which nevertheless are not completely illegal and without connection to that law. In
Guantanamo Bay detention centre for suspected terrorists is another case

in point. 15 However, as Edkins has noted, Agamben has not inquired deeper into the politics of emergency or
the context of this paper, the
the politics of the ban in which the sovereign and homo sacer are constituted as each others mirror image. 16
Therefore, the following sections aim to provide insight into the ways in which the American governance of the
emergency of 9/11 constitute global American sovereignty on the one hand and reduce political subjects to the
naked life of homo sacer .
A/T: Schmitt
The affirmation of enmity re-creates violent states of exception
in which the sovereign is able to enact racialization as a tool of
colonial domination
Canavan, 2011 - Assistant Professor @ Marquette University (Gerry; Fighting a
war you've already lost: Zombies and zombis in Firefly/Serenity and Dollhouse;
Science Fiction Film and Television > Volume 4, Issue 2, Autumn 2011; Pg. 175-176;
DOA: 7/19/15, ProjectMUSE || NDW)
To draw out this relationship between biopolitics, capitalism and resistance I begin with the zombie's mythic origins in Haiti. For
Achille Mbembe, the figure of the zombie perfectly captures the self-undermining
way in which biopolitics, through ever-widening gaps of permanent emergency and
states of exception, has always been as much a technology of death as of life - in his
[End Page 175] memorable terminology, a necropolitics. In his essay of that name, Mbembe, echoing Agamben in proclaiming
death camps the 'nomos of the political world in which we still live', argues that in the contemporary
moment 'the human being truly becomes a subject - that is, separated from the
animal - in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts death
(understood as the violence of negativity)' (14). Consequently, 'the state of exception and the relation
of enmity have become the normative basis of the right to kill . . . . power (and not
necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency,
and a fictionalized notion of the enemy. It also labors to produce that same
exception, emergency, and fictionalized enemy' (16). Extending Foucault's theory that race war is the
constitutive foundation of the modern state, as well as Hannah Arendt's argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the two
world wars reflected the reimportation of technologies of violence from the colonies (in which they were first developed) into
Mbembe argues that the declaration of enmity required by the

state of exception is an act of racialisation that has its origins in colonialism and
imperialism, as well as plantation economics and the slave trade ('Necropolitics' 18).
Sovereignty in this (post)colonial valence operates in accordance with a zombic
logic of quarantine and extermination: 'sovereignty means the capacity to define
who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not' ('Necropolitics' 27). This
'civilised' metropolitan Europe,
basic assumption of disposability, and the reign of terror it engenders, has necessarily taken many different forms in the many
examples range from the

'"savages" of the colonial world' to refugees, stateless persons, enslaved persons
and the working class. Mbembe's work suggests that colonialism's assignation of
nonhuman disposability to human beings can be abstracted as modernity's
foundational theoretical investment, its original (and ongoing) sin. For Mbembe, the history of this assignation of
different locations and contexts in which it has been deployed; Mbembe's own
disposability and the consequent 'rise of modern terror' begins not with state action but with the plantation system and the figure of
the slave, which he notes 'could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation' ('Necropolitics' 21). But the
exclusion of the slave from the body politic and her subsumption into the market as an object-commodity can never be completely
realised; the productive capacity, creativity and intentional mind of the enslaved are required to produce wealth for the slave-owner,
but these same human values must be denied in order for the practice of slavery to be justified in the first place. This is to say, the
humanity of the slave must be retained even as it is denied: [End Page 176]
Schmitts ontology leads to marginalizing violence dont trust

their apologism
Farr 9 [Evan, PhD Student in Political Science. With Friends Like These...Carl Schmitt,
Political Ontology, and National Socialism]
In the next section, I will work from this foundation to map Schmitts ontology. In doing this, I will demonstrate
that Schmitts errors involve much more than bath water. 2: Problems with the Schmittian
Ontology As seen above, the agonistic attempt to salvage Carl Schmitt focuses upon
Schmitts attacks on a certain universalistic understanding liberalism. In this reading, it is
liberalism that suppresses the possibility of difference, while Schmitts antagonism and
decisionism merely recognize reality: that the political always inevitably involves conflict
and difference, and no matter the insufficiency of Schmitts solution the key goal for
political theorists is to navigate the seemingly incommensurable struggle between
sometimes violently different theories of democratic legitimacy. But how compatible are
the agonistic and Schmittian perspectives? In this section, I will argue that Schmittian
antagonism and democratic agonism are more deeply conflicting than Chantal Mouffe and others
recognize. Because Schmitt is oriented toward a statist and action-centric ontology, his
theory is significantly more dangerous than his apologists admit.
Schmitts epistemology is flawed his arguments are based

around a defense of Nazism prefer this evidence, its from the
top of the article and cut by a straight beast
Emden 2009 [J. Emden, Department of German Studies, Rice University. How to
Fall into Carl Schmitt's Trap. July.]
This is a long review and perhaps a controversial one. The much-awaited English translation of Raphael Gross's
seminal book on Carl Schmitt's antisemitism, based on a doctoral dissertation at the University of Essen and first
published by Suhrkamp ten years ago to much media attention in Germany, and subsequently in France, makes a
substantial contribution to contemporary scholarship on Schmitt, one of the most influential public lawyers and
constitutional theorists of the Weimar Republic. Preceded by a well-balanced preface by Peter C. Caldwell, which
elegantly situates Gross's argument in the contemporary intellectual field, Joel Golb's translation is accurate and
precise. It is, however, the argument of Gross's study which seems initially strikingly persuasive, but emerges as
Schmitt held deeply entrenched

antisemitic views throughout his life. As such, Gross's study serves as a warning against the uncritical
increasingly problematic. On the one hand, no doubt remains that
Schmitt enthusiasm that occasionally marks contemporary cultural studies, that is, a kind of desire for political
Eigentlichkeit now that poststructuralist theories have run their course. On the other hand, Gross's study has a far
more ambitious goal than simply providing an account of Schmitt's antisemitism and, in this respect, it does have
severe limitations that require a more detailed assessment. Most importantly, Gross unwittingly falls into Carl
Schmitt's trap. The central question of Gross's study is not whether Schmitt really was antisemitic-- not
even
the most enthusiastic Schmitt apologists would seriously deny this . Neither is the central
question whether traces of Schmitt's antisemitic convictions can be found throughout his
political thought and his work as a constitutional scholar --needless to say, they can. Rather,
Gross's project seeks to reduce Schmitt's entire way of thinking about the political and about law to the binary
opposition between "friend" and "enemy"--introduced in Der Begriff des Politischen (1932)--which Gross interprets
the perspective of Schmitt's involvement in the Nazi state as the difference

between a homogeneous German Volk and a perceived "other ," that is, Judaism, that is
not only "alien" to this Volk but threatens the latter's existential survival .[1] Seen from this
from
perspective, Gross claims, not only does Schmitt's thought stand in clear opposition to the tradition of the liberal
the very source of his critique of the modern democratic state is to

be found in his antisemitic convictions.
Rechtsstaat--indeed,
The alternative is the state of exception makes the affs

impacts inevitable
Boersma, 5 (Jess Boersma teaches courses in Peninsular literatures, critical
thought, and Spanish language at U of NC, What About Schmitt? Translating Carl:
Schmitts Theory of Sovereignty as Literary Concept, published in Discourse,
27.2&3, Spring & Fall 2005, pp. 215-227 (Article), accessed 7/16/13, projectMUSE)
It would be too hasty to conclude that Schmitts current critical standing indicates
any kind of resolution of the polemics between left and right regarding the legacy of
his legal thought and his political association with the Nazi party. It almost goes
without saying that the extreme right has taken pains to revive the friend-enemy
distinction, developed in Schmitts The Concept of the Political and, in many cases,
has reduced it further to a friend-foe distinction in order to justify strategies of total
war and cultural, religious, and ethnic cleansing.3 On the other side of the
spectrum, Giorgio Agamben, in his Homo Sacer series argues that the possibly
tyrannical consequences of Schmitts thinking on the friend-enemy distinction and
the sovereign decision are not isolated to the followers of the Crown Jurist of the
Third Reich, but rather are only too alive and well within the practices of present
day liberal democratic states.4 Let me give one quick example of Agambens line of
thought in the form of biopolitics and the sovereign decision. In Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life Agamben argues that the state of exception is fast
becoming the rule, with the consequence that the state of nature and the state of
law are nearly indistinguishable (38). Rather than a pure Hobbesian state of nature
of all against all, the sovereign state maintains the monopoly over violence and yet
the demand for obedience is no longer contingent upon the guarantee of protection.
In Remnants of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp is shown to be the end
result of a legal process which produces a separation between the living being (zoe)
and the speaking being (bios) with the aim no longer to make die or to make live,
but to survive (155). Agamben then seeks to illustrate how states of exception
have played out in American history by following the sovereign decisions of
presidents Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George W.
Bush. In the last case, he states that as a result of September 11 Bush is
attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and
the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war)
becomes impossible (State of Exception 22). Evidence for Agambens claims would
appear to be provided externally by the suspended legal status of the Guantanamo prisoners; and internally by the recent ethical and legal battles over the coma
case of Terri Schiavo (whose last name happens to mean slave in Italian), along with
the present debates between the legislative and the executive branches in which
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has defended the constitutional legality of
President Bushs decision to not fully disclose matters regarding domestic spying.5
Schmitts politics lead to Nazism dont discard the obvious in

favor of his apologists
Farr, 9
Evan, With Friends Like These...Carl Schmitt, Political Ontology, and National
Socialism, PhD Student in Political Science, University of Virginia Graduate Student
Conference,
http://www.virginia.edu/politics/grad_program/print/Farr_gradconference09.pdf
3: Schmitts Nazism: Interlude or Inevitability? Carl Schmitts membership in the
Nazi Party from 1933 to 1936 is the most obvious problem for his apologists, and
it has spawned a thriving body of literature seeking to demonstrate that his
involvement with the Third Reich was negligible.49 According to his defenders, if
Schmitt was a Nazi he was only a Nazi of opportunity, stringing along the NSDAP
leadership (especially Hermann Goering) in order to retain his academic posts.
Like Heidegger or Pound, Schmitt is forgiven his transgression for the sake of
ostensibly non-fascist work elsewhere. This section will argue that it is a mistake
to discount Schmitts Nazism as an opportunistic interlude. Although he
certainly did not share the millenarian, mystical mania marking the hardcore Nazi
ideologues, the ontological commitments described in the foregoing section
predisposed Schmitt to sympathize with a totalitarian and ultimately
genocidal regime.
A/T: Determinate Site

Sovereign exceptionalism is spatializing, not spatially bounded
Belcher et al. 8 (Oliver Belcher postdoctoral researcher on the RELATE Center of

Excellence located at the University of Oulu, Finland, former postdoctoral researcher
on the BIOS Project at the Arctic Center, University of Lapland, Finland, Lauren
Martin Academy of Finland, Postdoctoral Researcher, RELATE Centre of Excellence,
Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland, PhD in Geography,
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, Anna Secor
Full Professor, University of Kentucky, Geography Department, PhD, University of
Colorado, Stephanie Simon, Tommy Wilson, Everywhere and Nowhere: The
Exception and the Topological Challenge to Geography, Published in Antipode,
Volume 40, Issue 4, pages 499503, September 2008,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00620.x/abstract)
Geography's use of Giorgio Agamben's work has proliferated in recent years. While approaches and interpretations of Agamben's
political theory have varied, a common aim has been to apply his theory of exception to socio-geographical phenomena and to
disclose the ban as the originary political relation (Diken and Laustsen 2005:2425; Ek 2006:363; Kearns 2006; Minca 2005,
focus on the space of the exception as a determinate sociotemporal site, such as Guantanamo Bay. We argue that this focus on determinate spaces elides the
real spatializing work of the exception, which, we emphasize, is topological (see also Coleman
2007). The problem with focusing on a static geometry of exceptional spaces is that it
obscures the ways in which the exception operates as an unlocalizable process of
transformation. As Brian Massumi (2002:184) puts it, the distinction between topology and static
geometry is the distinction between the process of arriving at a form through
continuous deformation and the determinate form arrived at when the process
stops (see also Hannah 2006). Topologies, unlike topographies, do not map discreet locations
or particular objects. While it is true that we can identify operative spaces of exception ,
the exception also materializes ordinary spaces. As a topological figure that creates
the conditions for particular materialized sites, the exception is emergent, which is to say
that it is not a preformed category but a dynamic set of techniques of power . In this way,
2006). The result has been a
we emphasize Agamben's relationship with Foucault, an affinity that is often lost in various interpretations of his writings. The
implications of a topological and emergent understanding of the exception become clearer in the context of Agamben's idea of
sovereignty as potential and actual. At the same time, our intervention aims to show how a topological, emergent understanding of
If the spatiality of Agamben's political theory

has been treated in too fixed a manner , this tendency might in no small part be due
to a confusion between Agamben's political theory and that of the primary theorist of the
sovereign exception, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argues that juridical rule and State authority are
made possible by the decision on what constitutes the normal case (where the rule of law
holds) versus the exception (where the law is suspended) (Schmitt 1985). Schmitt's idea of the
ordering of space involves above all the decision on the exception that establishes the
inside and the outside of the law. The state of exception, according to Schmitt, designated a zone of free and
the exception might open up a potential for radical politics.
empty space, that is, a suspension of all law for a certain time and in a certain space (Schmitt 2003:99). For Schmitt, therefore,
the decision on the exception performs a juridical and territorial ordering at the same time as it demarcates a specific spatio-
Agamben's departure from Schmitt on the question of

space is clear in Homo Sacer, where he writes: In its archetypal form, the state of
exception is therefore the principle of every juridical localization , since only the state of
exception opens the space in which the determination of a certain juridical order
and a particular territory first becomes possible . As such, the state of exception itself is
thus essentially unlocalizable (even if definite spatio-temporal limits can be
assigned to it from time to time) (Agamben 1998:19). Thus for Agamben the state of exception is the principle of
temporal orderthe space of the exception.
territorialization (ordering and orienting) but is itself essentially unlocalizable. While Schmitt explicitly renders the state of exception
as spatially and temporally bounded, Agamben's contribution to the theory of the exception is to reread Walter Benjamin's
engagement with Schmitt and to bring into sharp relief its contemporary relevance. For Agamben, this state inaugurates a rupture
within the Schmittian correspondence between order and orientation, between law and space. For Schmitt the decision on the
for Agamben the exception also

produces and diffuses a zone of indistinction within which the law and its
suspension become indistinguishable. This state of exception is not itself a kind of
space, but rather a technique of government (Agamben 2005:2) that produces a
topographical juridical-territorial order by determining the inside and the outside of
law (as Schmitt also argues); establishes the principles by which we distinguish law from its
application; and produces a topological relationship between the inside and outside
of law such that they become indistinguishable (delocalization). Because topological space is always a
exception merely demarcates the inside and the outside of the law, but
process of becoming, we use analytics of governmentality, which itself refers to the everyday emergence of power and control, to
think through how the exception works. For Foucault, governmentality refers to a field of everyday practices, organized by a
complex of techniques of power that govern and optimize processes immanent to a population. In this field, discipline, government,
and sovereignty are imbricated and indistinguishable, so that the exception operates as a potential (dis)ordering principle, a
potential technique of government (Foucault 1991:102). For Agamben, the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been
replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government (Agamben
governmentalization of the structure of the exception forms a complex

topological figure in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of
nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another (Agamben 1998:37). As a
technique of government, then, the exception is never completely hidden, nor is
it purely manifested. The state of exception produces material effects, even when
it remains virtual. This poses an important question for geographers: how do we analyze the material effects of the virtual?
2005:14). This
If the topological character of the state of exception means that it operates at the edges of materiality, how should we make use of
Agamben's theories to understand the spatiality of the exception (and governmentality, for that matter)? We argue that
Agamben's limit case, the state of exception, is spatializing, not spatialized. When we say
that the exception is spatializing, we emphasize processes of transformation and emergence
(the topological) and fold the operation of spatialization into the field of potential .
The exception thus produces a governmental potential to link specific arrays of
discursive objects, procedures, and rationalities towards particular ends . Based on this
understanding of Agamben, which emphasizes the emergent spatialization of the exception rather than its determinate spaces, we
argue for foregrounding the idea of potentiality in geographical analyses of the
exceptional. Situated on the edge of materiality, the state of exception has the potential to materialize or not to materialize
actual spaces of exception. Potentiality, for Agamben, is the tension between actuality (materialization)
and the potential not to bethe faculty to say I can, without the action being
materialized (Agamben 1999:179). To have a faculty, argues Agamben, means to have a privation, ie the potential not to
be. This potentiality, argues Agamben, maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of
its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is sovereignly capable of
its own im-potentiality (Agamben 1998:45). For example, in his discussion of sovereignty, Agamben poses
abandonment, the rationality of power that marks the exception, as topological in that it has the ability not to be: it is potential.
The exception is the zone of indistinction between constituting and constituted

power. The decision on the exception realizes itself by simply taking away its own
potentiality not to be, letting itself be (Agamben 1998:46). Topological space is therefore
not only emergent and governmental, but also always potential that is, both capable
of becoming and of not becoming. It is no coincidence that in the denouement of his essay On potentiality that
Agamben finds the root of freedom also within the abyss of potentiality (Agamben
1999:183). Agamben's political praxis is one of radical desubjectivation , a
desubjectification that refuses to be captured in a topological state of exception [a
synthesis between Walter Benjamin's divine violence (1996) and Gilles Deleuze's (2006)Immanence: a life ]. He writes, We
between immanence and a life there is a kind of crossing with neither

distance nor identification, something like a passage without spatial movement
(Agamben 1999:223). This passage without a spatial movement is a matrix of infinite
desubjectification (Agamben 1999:232). Absolute immanence (ie potential freedom) is a call for Benjamin's barbarians:
those law-destroying lives that cannot be captured in a sovereign's state of exception. It is a life whose
principle is infinite desubjectification, which cannot be abandoneda de-subject
that preempts the potential state of exception, and therefore cannot be striated into
can say that
the biopolitical subject of bare life, that succubus that haunts our political
landscape. Just as the subjective homo sacer is the material kernel for the sovereign exception, Agamben's radical
desubjectification is the material kernel for freedom . This praxis of Agamben's may be what Deleuze
once said was philosophy, nothing else but philosophy (cited in Ek 2006:363) in response to a question on the utility of A
Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). This poses a challenge to geographers of how to produce knowledge and
geographical imaginaries that at once promote just political and intellectual projects and refuse to produce subjects that can be
captured.
A/T: Totalizing
Agamben is not totalizingthe original form of politics is the
sovereign ban and implicit in this process is the death of homo sacer
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 84-85)
This symmetry between sacratio and sovereignty sheds new light on the category of
the sacred, whose ambivalence has so tenaciously oriented not only modern studies on the
phenomenology of religion but also the most recent inquiries into sovereignty. The proximity between
the sphere of sovereignty and the sphere of the sacred, which has often been observed and
explained in a variety of ways, is not simply the secularized residue of the originary religious
character of every political power, nor merely the attempt to grant the latter a theological
foundation. And this proximity is just as little the consequence of the sacredthat is, august and accursed
character that inexplicably belongs to life as such. If our hypothesis is correct, sacredness is instead
the originary form of the inclusion of bare life in the juridical order, and the syntagm
homo sacer names something like the originary political relation, which is to say,
bare life insofar as it operates in an inclusive exclusion as the referent of the sovereign
decision. Life is sacred only insofar as it is taken into the sovereign exception, and to
have exchanged a juridico-political phenomenon (homo sacers capacity to be killed but not
sacrificed) for a genuinely religious phenomenon is the root of the equivocations that
have marked studies both of the sacred and of sovereignty in our time. Sacer esto is not
the formula of a religious curse sanctioning the unheimlich, or the simultaneously august and vile
character of a thing: it is instead the originary political formulation of the imposition of
the sovereign bond. The crimes that, according to the original sources, merit sacratio (such as
terminum exarare, the cancellation of borders; verberatio parentis, the violence of the son against the
parent; or the swindling of a client by a counsel) do not, therefore, have the character of a
transgression of a rule that is then followed by the appropriate sanction. They
constitute instead the originary exception in which human life is included in the
political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed. Not the act of
tracing boundaries, but their cancellation or negation is the constitutive act of the city
(and this is what the myth of the foundation of Rome, after all, teaches with perfect clarity ). Numis
homicide law (parricidas esto) forms a system with homo sacers capacity to be killed
(parricidi non damnatur) and cannot be separated from it. The originary struc ture by which
sovereign power is founded is this complex.
A/T: Suffering Reps

1. No Link: We dont use narratives of suffering or personal
representations of pain to make our arguments or appeal to
emotions the critique is a scholarly analysis of sovereign
power
2. Turn: If an objective description of the harms of biopolitics is
enough to justify voting for them, then you you should
reject their suffering reps critique since it creates a world
that precludes a description of impacts or meaningful
critique.
3. Representations of suffering test the limits of biopower by bearing
responsibility to naked life --- this breaks through the imperfection of
language demanding solidarity beyond identity or universality
Athanasiou 3 (Athena prof of social anthropology University of Thessaly,
Department of History, Archaeology, and Social Anthropology, Technologies of
Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity, differences:
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.1, p. 127-128)
My theme here is the political engagement with the technoperformativity of biopolitics in the age of genocide
and in light of what Giorgio Agamben has called the Nomos of modernitythe concentration camp and its
spectral echoes in Europe and the Balkans. Martin Heideggers critique of technology will provide the basis on
which to address and develop my questions: What happens to the language of representation when it
encounters the challenge of the conveyance of broken, abandoned, dismembered human corporeality onto the
I attempt to trace the

technoperformativity of modern biopolitics at its choppy limits, designated as
they are by the palpable and yet ineffableat once all too represented and
radically unrepresentablecorporeality of deported, tortured, raped, violated ,
detained, dismembered, quarantined, annihilated, and surviving bodies. It is on the ethicopolitical
force of such engagement that rests the responsibility to face up to the exigency
of thinking and responding, even if there can be no question of knowing what it
means, even if one cannot sense what it would be like to suffer the pain of the
marked Other as s/he stands before the totalizing nomos of the power over
naked life and living death, before biopolitical sovereignty and its demand for a uniform and [End Page 127]
unified body politic. This act of responding, mediated as it may be by the unfixable
semantic and performative forces of language, exceeds the formal structure of
mere naming or re-membering. It even exceeds bearing witness. It is, above all, a movement
of imagining the necessary possibility of shifting, evading, or disrupting this
limitation, this irreparable limit to othering the self and selfing the other; a
movement of reckoning with the radical incalculability of the possibility of
perverting the limits of this impasse , even thoughor rather, becausethere can be no question
of fully overcoming it; and even thoughor rather, becauselanguage will always fail us.
body of the text? How does unrepresentability organize the representable?
Build-a-1nc
Links Policy Affs
Link - Democracy
biopolitics liberties gained in the fight for democracy simply
help to build a more insidious foundation for the totalitarian
management of bare life.
The contiguity between mass

democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden
transformation (as Lowith, here following in Schmitt's footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light in
racial laws and so forth, politicizes even the life that had until then been private.
our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It is almost as if,
every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the

liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers
always simultaneously prepared a[n] tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives
within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very
sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. "The 'right' to life," writes
starting from a certain point,
Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, "to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction
of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or 'alienation,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right'
-which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending-was the political response to all these new procedures
of power" (La volonte, p. 191). The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy
of the private over the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the
only because biological life and

its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the
otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to
turn into totalitarian states and with which this century's totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost
decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions. And
without interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which for
the only real question to be decided was

which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care,
control, and use of bare life. Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life ,
traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public)
lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist
quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which
ruling classes' unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the Serbian program of "ethnic cleansing") and the rebirth of new
Democratic governance normalizes a state of exception and

reduces subjects to bare life
McGovern 11 [Mark McGovern is a Program on the Global Demography of Aging Fellow at the
Department of Global Health and Population, and the Harvard Center for Population and Development
Studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from University College Dublin. The Dilemma of
Democracy: Collusion and the State of Exception, Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 213230, 2011] Hebron ADN
The State of Exception The Significance of the State of Exception For Agamben the state of exception is crucial for understanding
the paradigm of modern governance and fundamental to the western political and legal tradition upon which the character and
practice of contemporary so-called democracies are based (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Indeed, Agambens argument is specifically
designed to challenge liberal conceptions of the origins and nature of the legitimacy of contemporary democratic states in late
capitalism; namely that such legitimacy derives from a tradition of adherence to a set of legal norms that are certain, predictable
and guarantee a range of minimal freedoms in opposition to the The Dilemma of Democracy 217 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5,
Issue 2, 2011 arbitrary exercise of governmental power. Rather than a genealogy of the contemporary liberal democratic state that
foregrounds the role of the social contract and of rights, Agamben sets out to explore what (following Carl Schmitt) is understood as
the basis of sovereignty, the sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception (Carl Schmitt, 1922, quoted in Agamben, 2005,
p. 1). For Agamben the state of exception is one that involves the suspension of law and of legal norms and the exercise of arbitrary
decision. He argues that it is pivotal for understanding the nature of contemporary state practice and of lifting the veil on the
ambiguous zone [the] no-mans land between public law and political fact (Agamben, 2005, pp. 1-2) for two main reasons. First,
Agamben (2005) argues that the state of exception is the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its
own suspension (p. 3). For Agamben this is deeply historically embedded in the western political tradition. Following Foucault,
Agamben suggests this represents a form of bio-political power but, unlike Foucault, he finds its origin predates the modern. Rather,
the
inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original if concealed
nucleus of sovereign power the production of a bio-political body is the original activity of sovereign power
(Agamben, 1998, p. 6). What is distinctive about the modern state is that it places the regulation of biopolitical life as explicit to its
purpose and in so doing bring[s] to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life (Agamben, 1998, p. 6). In many ways identifying
this lineage from the ancient to the modern is one of the key genealogical tasks of Agambens work. It also provides the logic for his
exploration of apparently obscure figures and archetypes (such as homo sacer and the iustitium) found in ancient (particularly
the state of exception as the

creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical
sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so
called democratic ones (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Writing against the backdrop of the Global War on Terror Agamben
contends that the state of exception is increasingly the dominant paradigm of
government in contemporary politics (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Crucially too, while he is at pains not simply to
conflate the two, the increasing reliance on the state of exception as a technique of
governance calls into question the (all too politically and ideologically significant) juxtaposition of
totalitarianism and democracy as distinct constitutional forms. The space between public law and
political fact opened up, for example, by the status of the detainee in Guantanamo Bay, and his
reduction to the condition of bare life, is one in which the state of exception appears as
a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). The
Roman) law as a means to explore the contemporary. Second, Agamben holds that
voluntary
State of Exception, the State of Necessity and the Intensification of State Power The state of exception is also significant
because it is the limit of the juridical order. Rather than being identified as either inside or outside the juridical order (as different
legal traditions would have it) Agamben wants to deconstruct this 218 Mark McGovern Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2,
2011 simple topographical opposition and to argue instead that the state of exception should be conceived as a threshold, or a
zone of indifference where inside and outside blur with each other. The suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition and
the zone of anomie that it establishes is not unrelated to the juridical order (Agamben, 2005, p. 23). This characterization of the
state of exception as a zone of indistinction, an anomic space and a void of law can provide a language through which to
capture and represent state practices (such as that of collusion) that lie at one and the same time apparently beyond and yet
inextricably bound up with the juridical order. As well as providing an evocative conceptualization of the fluid and indistinct
character of the anomic space that is the state of exception, Agambens analysis of two strands within western legal traditions, and
their interaction with the changing character of the state through the twentieth century, also provides important insights. One
tradition (prevalent in France and Germany) makes specific constitutional or legal provision for the regulation of the state of
exception. The other (evident in England and the USA) consists of states that prefer not to regulate the problem explicitly
(Agamben, 2005, p. 10). That said, Agamben (2005, p. 10) contends that the distinction between the two, clear in principle but
hazier in fact has done little or nothing to prevent something like a state of exception developing in all of the identified western
state orders since the early twentieth century. Indeed, the term state of exception, readily found in French and German legal
Justification for the state

the suspension of legal norms is invariably founded on arguments of necessity; that
exceptional powers must be introduced, and rights suspended, so that the democratic order
may be preserved. Indeed such an argument can be seen to lie at the heart of the terrorist
experts democratic dilemma in posing the question - what aspects of democracy must we
give up in order to preserve democracy? Legal concepts of necessity (that necessity creates its own law)
traditions has its direct equivalent in the English tradition; martial law or emergency powers.
of exception and
can be subject to a range of critiques. Perhaps the most persuasive is that, while claims of necessity tend to be couched in objective
terms they are always founded on a subjective decision. As Balladore-Pallieri notes (as cited in Agamben, 2005) the concept of
necessity is: An entirely subjective one, relative to the aim one wants to achieve. It may be said that necessity dictates the issuance
of a given norm, because otherwise the existing juridical order is threatened with ruin; but there must be agreement on the point
that the existing order must be preserved. (p. 30) Necessity was presented as the underlying logic justifying the intensification of
state power through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This involved powers previously evident only in a real state of siege
(for example, an actual condition of war) becoming a paradigm of governance in peacetime where a fictitious state of siege has
been enacted (Agamben, 2005, p. 17). Agamben sees the great conflagrations of the twentieth century, particularly the two world
wars, as pivotal in this build up of state power. Based on the needs of wartime economies and characterized by the everencroaching power of the state over civilian life,
the The Dilemma of Democracy 219 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2,
2011 transference of wartime conditions to peacetime governance results in the
normalization of the state of exception (Agamben, 2005, p. 18). To illustrate the crucial role of wartime
conditions in generating this move toward the permanence of exceptional measures in the British case Agamben specifically cites
the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). The DORA was introduced in August 1914 and did indeed massively expand the direct power
of the state over the lives of citizens. It also provided the template for the emergence of such exceptional measures as a norm in
peacetime Britain. This was even more obviously the case in Ireland.
Democracy requires a form of bare life to function. A body that

is subjected to the sovereign. This is democracys greatest
contradiction and it must be rejected.
Agamben 95. Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, p 21 Stanford University Press Stanford California 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life was originally published as Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, 1995 Giulio Einaudi
editoreTina
of the all the various jurisdictional regulations concerned with the protection of
individual freedom, it was habeas corpus that assumed the form of law and thus became
inseparable from the history of Western democracy is surely due to mere circumstance. It is just as
certain, however, that nascent European democracy thereby placed at the center of its battle
against absolutism not bios, the qualified life of the citizen, but zo the bare,
anonymous life that is as such taken into the sovereign ba n (the body of being
taken . . . , as one still reads in one modern formulation of the writ, by whatsoever name he may be called
The fact that,
therein). What comes to light in order to be exposed apud Westminster is, once again, the body of homo sacer,
This is modern democracys strength and, at the same time, its inner
contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it
and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in
political conflict. And the root of modern democracys secret biopolitical calling lies here: he who will
appear later as the bearer of rights and , according to a curious oxymoron, as the new
sovereign subject (subiectus superaneus, in other words, what is below and, at the same time, most
which is to say, bare life.
elevated) can only be constituted as such through the repetition of the sovereign exception and the isolation of
corpus, bare life, in himself.
If it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if

one can speak, in this sense, of laws desire to have a body, democracy responds
to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body. This ambiguous (or polar)
character of democracy appears even more clearly in the habeas corpus if one considers the fact that the same
legal procedure that was originally intended to assure the presence of the accused at the trial and, therefore, to
keep the accused from avoiding judgment, turns in its new and definitive form into grounds for the sheriff to
detain and exhibit the body of the accused. Corpus is a two-faced being, the bearer both of subjection to sovereign
power and of individual liberties. This new centrality of the body in the sphere of politico-juridical terminology
thus coincides with the more general process by which corpus is given such a privileged position in the philosophy
in political
reflection corpus always maintains a close tie to bare life, even when it becomes the
central metaphor of the political community, as in Leviathan or The Social Contract. Hobbess use
and science of the Baroque age, from Descartes to Newton, from Leibniz to Spinoza. And yet
of the term is particularly instructive in this regard. If it is true that in De homine he distinguishes mans natural
body from his political body (homo enim non modo corpus naturale est, sed etiam civitatis, id est, ut ita loquar,
corporis politicipars, Man is not only a natural body, but also a body of the city, that is, of the so-called political
part [De homine, p. i]), in the De cive it is precisely the bodys capacity to be killed that founds both the natural
equality of men and the necessity of the Commonwealth:
Totalitarianism and democracy are indistinguishable. Theyre

simply means of establishing and using bare life. Reject both.
editoreTina
The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden
transformation (as Lowith, here following in Schmitt's footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to
light in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous
It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event
were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their
conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing
inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more
dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to
liberate themselves. "The 'right' to life," writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as
fashion.
a political issue, "to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppres
sions or 'alienation,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right'-which the classical
juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending-was the political response to all these new procedures of
one and the same affirmation of bare life

leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of
individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian
states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign
decisions. And only because biological life and its needs had become the politically
decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible
rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to turn
into totalitarian states and with which this century's totalitarian states were able
to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary
democracies. In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which
for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the
only real question to be decided was which form of organization would be best
suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once their
fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as
those between Right and Left, liberal ism and totalitarianism, private and
public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction.
The ex-communist ruling classes' unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in
the Serbian program of "ethnic cleansi ng") and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe
also have their roots here.
power" (La volonte, p. 191). The fact is that
Democracy has failed. The biopolitical obsession with

preserving the population will inevitably converge with
Nazism.
editore page 13 Tinav
modern
democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zo, and that it is
constantly trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find , so to
speak, the bios of zo. Hence, too, modern democracys specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and
happiness of men into play in the very place bare life that marked their
subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden process that leads to the recognition of
rights and formal liberties stands once again the body of the sacred man with his
double sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed.
If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy, then, it is that
To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather,
democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally

proved itself incapable of saving zo,
to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin . Modern
democracys decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states in postdemocratic spectacular societies (which begins to become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds
its final sanction in the analyses of Guy Debord) may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks
the beginning of modern democracy and forces it into complicity with its most
implacable enemy. Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than
life, and until the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and
fascism which transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme political
principle will remain stubbornly with us . According to the testimony of Robert Antelme, in fact,
to try to understand once and for all why
triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height,
what the camps taught those who lived there was precisely that calling into question the quality of man provokes
an almost biological assertion of belonging to the human race (Lespce humaine, p. II)
Democratic discourse drives biopolitical action by the state

Gven, 08 (Ferit, professor of philosophy at Earlham College. Received MA. and
Ph.D. from the philosophy department, of DePaul University, Foucault, Biodisciplinary Power and the Problem of Democracy Abstracts: Foucault Circle 2008
http://foucault.siu.edu/pdf/abs08.pdf)//BW
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Foucaults conception of power developed in Discipline and Punish
(disciplinary power) and The History of Sexuality (bio-power), provides an adequate starting point for understanding
the functioning of the ideal of democracy. My paper aims to demystify our unreflective fascination with democracy
today and sets the concept of democracy into a critical context. My argument has two dimensions: First, I propose
claims made from within democratic discourse regarding other political systems
are claims of bio-disciplinary power. Second, the specific power relations that exist within democracy
that
can neither be reduced to struggles for emancipation or freedom, nor to the structures of oppression and
repression.
This does not mean that there are no claims for freedom and resistance to
oppression within democracies. However, these claims do not function outside of
bio-discipline, indeed these claims are the concretion of bio-disciplinary power. Hence my claim is not that
democracy functions in a totalitarian or oppressive way, but rather the functioning of democracy can be
best explained in terms of bio-disciplinary power. My analysis of democracy relies neither on
some kind of conspiratorial thought-control strategy nor on a liberal commitment to the sovereign subject, who
cuts through the darkness associated with evil forces in society and reaches the light through struggle. I do not say
that this discursive subject does not exist, but I claim that it functions in an entirely different way within democratic
discourse. Foucaults notion of bio-disciplinary power also explains the difference between modern democracy and
the ancient Greek conception of democracy without appealing to the classical conception of sovereignty. This
conception of sovereignty presupposes a unity. Consequently, critiques of democratic structures presume the same
kind of unity when they criticize the power elite, agenda setting media etc .
Democractic discourse
does not manufacture consent, but rather produces the unity of a political subject .
The bio-disciplinary power does not function as a unified system, in a comprehensive and exhaustive fashion. It,
therefore, does not rely on a unified theory of sovereignty. Foucaults conception of bio-disciplinary power, however,
By cogitological
power, I mean neither the power of the cogito, nor the power of logic. This power
emanates neither from the thinking subject (cogito), not from the rules of logic, or
reason, but rather it is a discursive power that manufactures the rational, thinking
subjects of democracy. Cogitological power functions as a third dimension of the bio-disciplinary axis. In
has to be supplemented by what I call cogito-logical power, or cogito-logical effects.
addition to obedient subjects and populations, cogito-logical power forms political, thinking subjects imagining
the functioning of democratic discourse

as well as its practice can be most effectively understood in terms of cogito-logical
power.
The affs attempt to spread democracy strips the human of his or her
dignity and fuels radical evil
Raffin, 08 - Professor and Researcher at the University of Buenos Aires of
Philosophy, Social and Political Theory, and Human Rights; PhD in Philosophy,
University of Paris
(Marcello, Symposium 2008: The United Nations Genocide Convention: A 60th
Anniversary Commemoration: Metaphysics, Politics, Truth: Genocide Practices as a
Way of Deploying the Modern Paradigm, Lexis)
themselves at the center of the problem of unity. I claim that
As we can see - and we can also recall the letter that Arendt sent to Karl Jaspers on
March 4, 1951 n38 - she identifies the phenomenon of radical evil with
superfluousness, that is, human life deprived of its dignity and unpredictability. / But
her decisive discovery is not only that radical evil takes place in the context of a
system that is generally totalitarian, but [*120] also, and particularly, a democratic
one. n40 Specifically, she writes that the danger of the corpse factories and holes of
oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the
increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to
think of our world in utilitarian terms. Political, social, and economic events
everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for
making men superfluous. The implied temptation is well understood by the
utilitarian common sense of the masses, who in most countries are too desperate to
retain much fear of death. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their
factories of annihilation which demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of
overpopulation, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses,
are as much of an attraction as a warning. Totalitarian solutions may well survive
the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up
whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a
manner worthy of man. / This form of radical evil is not consequently exclusive of
totalitarian regimes, but it can also happen under democratic ones.
Squo Democracy is integral to biopolitics and indifferent from
totalitarianism
Agamben 98, philosopher and professor of aesthetics at University of Verona
Italy, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998, p. 121-121,
http://korotonomedya2.googlepages.com/GiorgioAgambenHOMOSACERSovereignPow.pdf
The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless,
does not have the form of a sudden transformation (as with, here following in
Schmitts footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light in
our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in
a hidden but continuous fashion. It is almost as if, starting from a certain point,
every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and
the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always
simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals lives
within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the
very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. The right
to life, writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political
issue, to ones body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and,
beyond all the oppressions or alienation, the right to rediscover what one is
and all that one can be, this rightwhich the classical juridical system was
utterly incapable of comprehendingwas the political response to all these new
procedures of power (La voIont~ p. 191). The fact is that one and the same
affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private
over the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet
becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary
realm of sovereign decisions. And only because biological life and its needs had
become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise
incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary
democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this
centurys totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost without
interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both cases, these
transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics
had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be
decided was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of
assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once their fundamental referent
becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right
and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and
intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-com munist ruling
classes unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the Serbian program
of ethnic cleansing) and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have
their roots here.
Link - Domestic Surveillance

Modern surveillance forms the foundation of sovereign power
the surveillance state will continue to operate indefinitely.
Reform within the law fails to protect bare life within the state
of exception and only serves to legitimize legalistic violence
Douglas 9
[Jeremy independent scholar, Disappearing Citizenship: surveillance and the state of exception,
in Surveillance & Society, Volume 6, Number 1, 2009, p. 32-42, http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillanceand-society/article/viewFile/3402/3365] Hebron ADN
However, although many of the concepts and techniques we see at work in the camp are not fundamentally different today, not
The importance of a juridical- political system that acts

according to the state of exception, or suspension of the law, is evident in the emergence of
recent totalitarian and democratic permanent states of emergency ; for example, the UK and
everything has remained the same.
the US have normalised the exception through the passing of laws (Terrorism Act, Patriot Act, etc.) that essentially nullify the
application of normal laws protecting human rights, while still holding them technically in force. We see also that these
exceptional laws go hand in hand with increased surveillance, both of which are tactics that establish control of the population. Yet
what remains to be analysed is the relation(s) between surveillance, territory, and the state of exception - how does surveillance
allow for the rise of the state of exception and the camp? And, more broadly, how are all there concepts integrated in an art of
Surveillance must be regarded as the point at which the camp and the
bare of the state of exception intersect in the governmental control of the population.
government?
Defining the Terms: Foucault and Agamben Although Michel Foucault wrote a book (Discipline and Punish) that dealt extensively with
one method of surveillance, the panoptic, his more useful contribution to the theory of surveillance comes from his study of
governmentality, or the art of governing. In the course of his 1970s lectures at the College de France, Foucault underwent a significant shift in
the emphasis of his theory, moving from the power- territory relationship of sovereignty to the politico-economic governmentality of population; the concept of sovereignty concerned with maintaining power and territory is a dated
pre-modern concept, and what needs to be analysed now is the governing of a population though various circulatory (that is, relational) mechanisms: it is not expanse of land that contributes to the greatness of the state, but
fertility and the number of men (Fleury quoted in Foucault 2007, 323). In other words, what is emerging in Foucaults writings, beginning with The History of Sexuality Vol 1, is the concept of biopolitics: the management of life
rather than the menace of death (Foucault 1990, 143). Broadly, what is taking place in Foucaults works and lectures in the mid to late 1970s is his description of the differences (not transitions) between sovereignty, discipline, and
governmental management (Foucault 2007, 107). The essential goal of sovereignty is to maintain power, which is achieved when laws are obeyed and the divine right of the throne is reaffirmed. Power is the essential defining
component of sovereignty, while government is more or less just an administrative component within the sovereign state - a component that is the function of the family; the family, oikos, in ancient Greece was the private
management (government) of economic matters where the father ensured the security, health, wealth, and goods of his wife and children, while the polis was the public realm where man realised his political significance in striving
for the good life. The rise of government in the sixteenth century is marked by this family government model being applied to the state as a whole (ibid, 93), as well as by the rise of mercantilism - the former not realizing its
full scope and application until the eighteenth century and the latter being a stage of rasion detat between sovereignty and governmentality. However, when the art of governing becomes the predominant goal of the state in the
eighteenth century, the family is relegated to the position of an instrument and population emerges as the main target (ibid, 108) of the government (territory is the main target of sovereignty insofar as a sovereign defines itself
according to its territory, while government defines itself in term of its population). With population as the central concern for government, other institutions and sites - such as territory, the family, security (military), police, and
discipline - all become elements or instruments in the management of the population - these biopolitical tactics are what primarily distinguish governmentality from sovereignty. Conduct and Subjectivization Foucault wants to
situate bio-power in the multiplicity of relations within the overarching structure of the state, and therefore not discard the notion of power but instead couch it in terms of governmentality. Biopolitics is produced in the relations
between biological life and political power (bio-power), which is possible when a population is confronted with and in relation to the biopoliticizing (not to be confused with disciplining) techniques of institutions, territory, police,
security, and surveillance; rather than positing a sovereign-people dialectic (which Agamben tends to do), Foucault wants to complicate the notion of biopolitics by accounting for a state that spreads it tentacles (Virilio 1997, 12)
through its various instruments and tactics. It seems as though, with the beginning of a governmentality discourse developing in the Security, Territory, Population course, Foucault feels he has said enough about biopolitics as such
and can now move towards the art and techniques of governmental and subjective conduct, in which biopolitics is implicit. Yet what emerges is, on the one hand, a theory of the top-down management of a population that is
controlled through governmental mechanisms such as statistics-guided surveillance and police practices, and, on the other hand, the bottom-up subjectivization of population through the regulation of actions confronted with state
power relations; this may also be regarded as biopolitical population control and individualizing discipline, respectively. These two streams of governmentality surface in Foucaults later writings from time to time, but he never clearly
reconciles the art of government and subjectivization. This subjective conduct or governing the self is a self-disciplining that is made possible through the knowledge of oneself as the other, as the object of an unseen seer (as is
discussed with the panoptic model in Discipline and Punish). This self-conduct, however, is framed in terms of the problematic of government that uses the power relation techniques of governing others to govern themselves
(Foucault 2000, 340-342); but again, where do these two points converge and differ? It seems as though we must look to surveillance to answer this question. We know that surveillance is certainly a governmental technique for the
management and control of the population, but we also see that subjectivization is only possible via surveillance, as just mentioned with the panoptic model. However, panoptic surveillance is an ancient notion, developed at least as
far back as EBII, sometime around 3000-2650BC (Yekutieli 2006, 78). The relation between the seer and the subject is no longer that of a physical perspective from a point fixe, nor is it localised in a contained space, as with
Benthams prison model. Rather, as Paul Virilio would argue, surveillance is making the traditionally confined space of the camp the very centre of the city. However, before examining the juridical-political applications of this notion,
we must understand Giorgio Agambens conception of biopolitics in terms of bare life and the state of exception. Redefining Biopolitics Following and completing Foucaults discussion of biopolitics, Agamben seeks to further
explore the relation between state power and life, not in terms of governmentality, but rather, in terms of sovereign power. That is, what affect(s) does the state have upon the lives of citizens in relations of power and control? In a
sense, Agambens position is formulated in accordance with what Arendt and Foucault failed to do: Agamben completes Arendts discussion of totalitarian power, in which a biopolitical perspective is altogether lacking (Agamben
1998, 4), and completes Foucaults discussion of biopolitics, which fails to address the most paradigmatic examples of modern biopolitics, such totalitarianism and the camp. This revision of Arendt and Foucault is achieved through
the exemplification of the state of exception and bare life, which find their ultimate realization in modern examples of the camp. But first, it is necessary to understand how Agamben arrives at this conclusion. In Politics, Aristotle
distinguishes between natural, simple life , Zoe, and political life, bios. Zoe is private life confined to the home, oikos, while bios is life that exists in the public (political) realm of the city, the polis; the former is life regulated by the
economy of the family, while the latter is good life regulated by the state. It appears, then, that Zoe and bios are mutually exclusive, and man moves from an animal life to a distinct political life, as Aristotle seems to argue.
Foucault picks up on this Aristotelian animal/political life when he writes of the threshold of biological modernity (Foucault 1990, 143), in The History of Sexuality, and modifies it to reflect the transition from a politics of the powerlimit of death to the politicization of biological (or, more accurately, zoological - i.e. Zoe-logical) life: For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal [Zoe] with the additional capacity for a political existence
[bios]; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question (ibid). The distinction between Zoe and bios is called into question; what were once two distinct forms of life are now indistinguishable
- biology has become political and politics has become biological, giving rise to biopolitics. Agambens claim, however, is that Foucault, Arendt, and others have misread Aristotle; in interpreting Aristotle, they believe that the human
capacity for political organization is not only different from but stands in direct opposition to that natural association whose center is the home (oikia) and the family (Arendt 1998, 24, authors italics). On the contrary, the
simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of life in politics - that is, the production of a biopolitcal life - is the original activity of sovereign power (Agamben 1998, 6). Although Aristotle appears to present zoe and bios as polar forms of
life - animal versus political - he provides indications that the supposed exclusion of natural life from the political realm is at the same time its inclusion, and therefore the originary biopolitical act: we may say that while [the polis]
grows for the sake of mere life, it exists for the sake of a good life (Aristotle quoted in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 3). This implies, as Agamben notes, that natural life had to transform itself into political life; political life is not
in direct opposition to natural life, then, but is born of it. The very notion of bios is itself only possible through its inclusion of zoe - Nation-state means a state that makes nativity or birth (that is, naked human life) the foundation
of its own sovereignty (Agamben 1998, 20); biopolitics is this indistinction between private life and public life, an undecidability...between life and law (Agamben 2005, 86). Bare Life and the State of Exception This conception of
biopolitics as an ancient and founding notion of sovereignty needs to be distinguished from what Agamben terms bare life or homo sacer (life that may be killed but not sacrificed). Biopolitical life, as mentioned above, is still
within the juridical-political realm, but bare life is that which is banished from the polis. It is not pure political life as such, but a life that exists at the threshold between zoe and bios. Bare life is the indistinguishability between natural
life and political life - a life that exists neither for the sake of politics nor for the sake of life: bare life.. .dwells in the no-mans-land between the home and the city (Agamben 1998, 90). It is a life that is banished from politics outside of law - but included in its exclusion - still within the force of law: The ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something presupposed as
nonrelational [i.e. bare life]. What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it - at once excluded and included, removed and at the same
time captured. (ibid, 110) How is this possible? How can bare life be excluded and included? What implications would this have? In order to understand how bare life is produced and how it can exists both within and outside of the
polis, it is necessary to introduce another concept: state of exception. This notion is derived, by in large, from Carl Schmitts book Political Theology, as well as from a fairly extensive debate between Walter Benjamin and Schmitt
concerning the nature of the state of exception. The state of exception is a suspension of law, which is usually instituted during a period of war or another state of emergency: The exception, which is not codified in the existing
legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like (Schmitt 1922, 6). Under the state of exception there becomes a threshold between law that is in the norm but
is suspended and law that is not the norm - i.e. not necessarily part of the juridical order - but is in force; so, in the state of exception there appears this ambiguous and uncertain zone in which de facto proceedings, which are
themselves extra- or antijuridical, pass over into law, and juridical norms blur with the mere fact - that is, a threshold where fact and law seem to become undecidable (Agamben 2005, 29). What needs to be underlined here is the
relation between the state of exception and bare life. This point is absolutely crucial for Agamben and for understanding the role of governmental surveillance: the state of exception opens up the possibility of bare life and of the
camp, where bare life is outside law but constantly exposed to violence and unsanctionable killing (Agamben 1994, 82). Agambens position can be understood in the triadic relation state of exception-camp-bare life; the ultimate
power of the sovereign, and the complete dissolution of democracy into totalitarianism - two political systems that, according to Agamben, already have an inner solidarity (ibid, 10) - happens at the point when the state of
exception becomes the rule and the camp emerges as the permanent realization of the indistinguishability between violence and law, to which we all, as homines sacri, are exposed. The paradigmatic example is, of course, Nazi
Germany; but what remains to be seen is how this triad can be applied to our current political milieu. The Potentiality of/for Violence Perhaps the closest Agamben comes to discussing the relations between the state of exception and
surveillance is his 11th January 2004 article in Le Monde, entitled, No to Bio-Political Tattooing (Agamben, 2004). This article comes as a result of Agambens cancellation of a course he was scheduled to teach at New York
entry to the US as a result of his refusal to provide biometric data as part of post9/11 US security measures. The resulting article is mostly a brief, simplistic version of his book Homo Sacer, but Agamben does
University that March. The reason he cancelled the course was because he was denied
modern security and surveillance techniques are emerging as the new paradigm
of the state of exception, in which the exception has
become the rule: There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal
imply that
(though not to the extent of the camp)
dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional. Thus, no one
the control exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices ,
such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels. (Agamben 2004)
Electronic and biometric surveillance are the tactics through which the government is creating a
is unaware that
space in which the exception is routine practice. The biopolitical implication of

surveillance is the universalization of bare life: History teaches us how practices first reserved for
foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry (ibid). These new control measures have
created a situation in which not only is there no clear distinction between private and political life, but there is
no fundamental claim, or right, to a political life as such - not even for citizens from
birth; thus, the originary biopolitical act that inscribes life as political from birth is
more and more a potential de-politicization and ban from the political realm. We are
all exposed to the stateless potentiality of a bare life excluded from the political
realm, but not outside the violence of the law (and therefore still included): states, which should constitute the precise space of
political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that it's humanity itself that has become
the dangerous class (ibid). Making people suspects is equivalent to making people
bare life - it is the governmental (a Foucauldian governmentality rather than an Agambenian sovereignty I would argue)
production of a life exposed to the pure potentiality of the state of exception: the sovereign ban, which applies to the exception in
no longer applying, corresponds to the structure of potentiality, which maintains itself in relation to actuality precisely through its
Surveillance is the technique that opens up this

potentiality, which allows for the normalization of the exception . In this particular instance - i.e.
ability not to be (Agamben 1994, 46).
biometric data collection and surveillance in the US - the state of exception as a permanent form of governmentality and the
universalization of homines sacri has been brought into existence though the USA Patriot Act and the Patriot Act II . I have used the
term potentiality a number of times precisely to point to the state in which the citizens (or, more broadly, the population) of a
number of countries find themselves. The potentiality I want to analyse can follow two directions: it is the potentiality to be stripped
of citizenship, to be banned, to be abandoned to the law, and to be subjected to political violence, or it is the potentiality for the
government to exercise violence and exceptional law upon the population. So, this potentiality can be both negative and positive.
violence becomes indistinguishable from law - or, more specifically, indistinguishable from
surveillance and control - in the state of exception , what needs to be emphasised is that it is not a
power relation of pure violence, but rather, of potential violence. It is important, as Benjamin notes in Critique of
Although
Violence, to understand that violence is a function of the power mechanisms of the government (although Benjamin would probably
say sovereign): the
laws interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained

by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence,
when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law
the
population (rather than individuals per se) is regulated by surveillance methods, in order to
ensure that the norm of the law is not threatened ; and for this norm to remain in force an indefinite
(Benjamin 1933, 136). The state of exception arises when the population threatens to take violence away from the law -
period of state of exception is often exercised, as we see with the example of the USA Patriot Act. The American State of Exception
Surveillance and the External 'Threat' This politics of potentiality is created through the de facto laws of state of exception
legislation like the Patriot Act. Looking at actual parts of the Act, we can see that it exemplifies the state of emergency referred to by
the normal law of the state is not abolished but its application is
suspended so that it still technically remains in force (Agamben 2003, 31). As such, the
Agamben et al.;
suspension of the normal application of the law is done on the basis of its right of self-preservation (Schmitt 1985, 12), so that the
exception is that which must produce and guarantee the norm. Obviously then the state of exception is not intended to be anything
more than a temporary safeguarding of normal law. In fact, there can be no normal law without the state of exception: the
state of exception allows for the foundation and definition of the normal legal order
(Agamben 1999, 48). The use of the state of emergency to protect the normality of the legal order dates back at least as far as the
Roman Empire. Whenever the Senate believed the state to be in danger, they could implement the iustitium, which allowed for the
consuls to take whatever measures they considered necessary for the salvation of the state (Agamben 2005, 41). Looking back at
the Judean Roman camp example, the detention of the Jews could be seen as enacted during an iustitium when Jewish
rebelliousness was endangering the newly acquired Roman providence of Judea. The iustitium, as with other examples of the state
of exception, is a void in which the suspension of the law creates a zone that evades all legal definition. Thus, the state of
exception is neither within nor outside of jurisprudence - it is situated in an absolute non-place with respect to the law (ibid, 5051). This non-place, however, also has literal geographic implications - the place of the camp is no longer necessary for creating
bare life. Rather, the mutually operative surveillance and state of exception allow for a city-camp, which maintains control and
suspicion over a population without necessitating borders. But, we must distinguish - and this is relevant for the Roman camp
example - between the functionality and mechanization of camps (see abstract). For example, the Roman camp, prison, border
camp, work camp, etc. all have a different functionality - from the suppression of a rebellion to idle detention - but the
mechanizations they employ to carry out this functionality are the same - to monitor and maintain control over a given population
by creating bare life (the reason the population is in a camp in the first place is surprisingly irrelevant). Although the functionality of
camps may differ, I want to emphasize that the mechanizations of power will always employ a structure of surveillance; this is the
link between ancient and modern camps. Moving away from ancient examples of the state of exception and looking at the current
modern
politics are defined by the permanence of a state of exception in which the
exception becomes the rule, or the norm. An example of this exception-as-the-rule can be seen in an American 2006
American judicial-political situation, Agambens central argument in Homo Sacer and State of Exception is that
CRS Report for Congress on national emergency powers: those authorities available to the executive in time of national crisis or
exigency have, since the time of the Lincoln Administration, come to be increasingly rooted in statutory law (Relyea 2006, 2,
authors italics). It continues: Under the powers delegated by such statutes [constitutional law, statutory law, and congressional
delegations], the President may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military
forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private
enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens. (ibid, 4, authors italics). This report
alludes to biopolitical powers for one, but also the ways in which the state of emergency is implemented through a variety of
it is becoming more
difficult to identify juridical documents that provide state of exception powers that are
clearly distinguishable from normal law. The Patriot Act, to be sure, is clearly identifiable from normal
statutes, and not instituted as one bill or act that can be in or out of force en bloc. Rather,
US law, but The Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003 was not passed under that name (nor under the alias Patriot Act II), but
was tacked on to other Senate Bills piecemeal. For example, some enhanced surveillance measures were not passed under the
Patriot Act, but were passed into US Code - under title 50, chapter 36, subchapter I, 1802 of the US Code: Notwithstanding any
other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this
subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year. So, snooping
surveillance
tactics will still be part of normal law even if the Patriot Act is not renewed; this is
what Agamben means when he writes of the permanent state of emergency (Agamben 2005, 2). There are a
few sections of the Patriot Act that are worth discussing in order to demonstrate the modern state of exception, as well as its link to
surveillance and the camp. Under Section 412 of the Act, entitled Mandatory detention of suspected terrorists, the Attorney General has the power to certify that an alien meets the criteria of the
terrorism grounds of the Immigration and Nationality Act, or is engaged in any other activity that endangers the national security of the United States, upon a reasonable grounds to believe standard, and take such aliens into
custody. The Attorney General must review the detention every six months and determine if the alien is to remain in detention because of a continued risk to security. But what remains ambiguous, and allows for the indistinction
between law and violence and between police and sovereignty, is this reasonable grounds to believe standard. Suffice it to say, without going into greater depth, this standard is grounds for racial profiling and the detention of
political opponents. Also, the detention of aliens on a belief is the production of bare life, since it is the stripping of rights without reference to a violation under normal law; in other words, these suspected terrorists are detained
without having done anything wrong, but must be situated in the state of exception camp for those who may threaten the normal force of the law - this is the aforementioned void, or nonplace, of the law. Since these aliens
cannot be detained under the normal law, a camp of suspects must emerge in a national security emergency. What is also telling about this Act is that the ten Titles may be seen as different governmental tactics, networked in one
state of emergency act; Titles include, Enhancing Domestic Security against Terrorism, Protecting the Border, Strengthening the Criminal Laws against Terrorism, and Increased Information Sharing for Critical Infrastructure
Protection. Foucault would be quick to point out that this Act characterizes the population conducting tactics that define governmentality: policing, disciplining, and security. However, Title II, Enhanced Surveillance Procedures, not
only becomes implicit in many of the other areas of the act that discuss intelligence and security, but also allows the Act to go beyond the protection of the norm in a sovereign nation-state through foreign surveillance
provisions. Section 214 functions in collaboration with and amends several parts of the Foreign Intelligence Service Act 1978 (FISA) in order to allow for international surveillance activities in order identify suspected terrorists: during
periods of emergency (i.e. state of exception), the US invests itself with the power to collect foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or information to protect against international terrorism or
clandestine intelligence activities (Sec. 214(b) (1)). The detention and surveillance of aliens continues though other mechanisms of jurisprudence, which, as mentioned, are becoming normalised through bills, acts, etc. that are not
designed as state of emergency law per se. On 13th November 2001, George W. Bush issued a military order for the Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism; by certain this order
means anyone believed to be associated with al Qaida (PoTUS, 2001). Like with Section 412 of the Patriot Act, suspected terrorists are to be detained without a court order. Similarly, under the Terrorism Act 2000 in the UK, A
constable may arrest without a warrant a person whom he reasonably suspects to be a terrorist (Section 41(1)). As with the US, any person detained under this Act can remain in detainment following and pending a review
(Schedule 8, Part II). The Disappearance of Citizenship What we have been discussing thus far applies to the indefinite and mandatory detention of aliens, but the Patriot Act and the Terrorism Act contain various sections on
increased surveillance measures that target aliens and native citizens alike. These surveillance activities include the collection of DNA from anyone detained for any offence or suspected of terrorism, phone taps, wiretaps for
electronic communications, the collection of individual library records (Section 215; this Section in particular has received heavy criticism and debate), the collection of banking and financial records, and other indirect surveillance
methods, such as the collection of biometric data at US borders (as Agamben experienced). However, these universal surveillance methods become much more significant when we consider the proposed increased governmental
powers outlined in the Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003 (alias, Patriot Act II). Under Section 501 of Patriot Act II the mandatory dentition of aliens suspected of terrorism extends to include Americans, who can also be
stripped of their citizenship and made stateless detainees. As Gore Vidal remarks, under Patriot Act I only foreigners were denied due process of law as well as subject to arbitrary deportation...Patriot Act II now includes American
citizens in the same category, thus eliminating in one great erasure the Bill of Rights (Vidal 2003). Section 501, Expatriation of Terrorists, of the Act states: This provision (i.e. Section 501) would amend 8 U.S.C. 1481 to make
clear that, just as an American can relinquish his citizenship by serving in a hostile foreign army, so can he relinquish his citizenship by serving in a hostile terrorist organization. Specifically, an American could be expatriated if, with
the intent to relinquish nationality, he becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United States has designated as a "terrorist organization, if that group is engaged in hostilities against the United
States. With the power proposed in this section of the Patriot Act II, the government would be able to produce bare life with both aliens and American citizens - a process leading to the disappearance of citizenship by transforming
the residents into foreigners within, a new sort of untouchable [homo sacer], in the transpolitical and anational state where the living are nothing more than the living dead (Virilio 2005, 165). We have seen how a permanent state
of emergency creates a situation in which foreign residents or visitors can be detained without a court order for an indefinite period of time; even greater governmental powers are now aiming at expanding this exposure to the pure
power of the juridical-political system to citizens as well. Citizenship and political significance are becoming less fundamental and inalienable rights and more categorizations that are only maintained though blind adherence to socalled democratic polices, which look more and more like a dictatorial structure (see: Arendt 1973). What should also be mentioned is the production of bare life in foreign states; or, conversely, the loss of political rights to another
state power within ones own country. The power to detain and expose individuals to pure violence and even death is characteristic of the CIAs and MI5s borderless security, policing and surveillance mechanisms, which becomes
more evident with the Patriot Act and FISA. This may be seen as grounds for a debate between sovereignty and governmentality. Is sovereignty concerned, above all, with the territorial nation-state, as Foucault argues (Foucault
2007, 14)? Or, is sovereignty more accurately defined as that which decides on the exception, as Schmitt and Agamben maintain? Neither of these questions can be properly answered until we understand the relations between
sovereignty and foreign states. That is to say, is sovereignty only possible in a contained nation-state, or is it something broader that can be applied to foreign nations and even to the point of being able to declare a state of
suspension of other sovereigns law - maybe it is something that should, as Foucault insists,
be called governmentality. What should be understood as common to both conceptions of sovereignty and governmentality,
however, is the production of camp, in which the state of exception reaches its ultimate realization. It should be clear that the Patriot
Act and other juridical-political provisions precondition and allow for the continued existence of the camp. Conclusion The difficulty
exception in a foreign land? But if this latter situation is possible - the
theorizing surveillance is that it cannot be done positivistically - it needs to be

situated within a state system that has a biopolitical relationship with the population
with
through a network of various techniques and conducting mechanisms. Failing to do so will result in a superficial study of surveillance
that neglects the crux of governmental tactics. On the other hand, accounting for the various relations that condition and require
surveillance can make theoretical examinations appear as though they are not about surveillance. But this is certainly not the case.
Before we can even ask why a state uses surveillance mechanisms, we need to define what state structure we are talking about.
Following Foucault, governmentality best describes our current political situation, as it is above all concerned with managing the
internal structure of the state according to a biopoliticization of the population, rather than maintaining the power over life and
death, as is characteristic of sovereign politics. Governmentality is literally an art of governing, in which the population is
conducted through various relations and tactics employed by the state, such as institutions, security, statistics, and surveillance.
So, governmentality is the structure in which surveillance can operate as one of the arms of state power. When we move towards
the juridical-political situation of the state of exception, we see another area in which surveillance plays a crucial biopolitical role.
The use of exceptional legal measures in order to protect the normal force of law is
what defines the state of exception. The normal law that is suspended is often that which guarantees the
rights and the citizenship of foreign and national citizens; thus, under an exceptional juridical situation, individuals with no political
significance are produced: bare life. The USA Patriot Act (among other documents) embodies this loss of rights, production of bare
The state of exception, Agamben argues, is

becoming more and more the normal course of politics - this is nowhere more exemplary than in the
life, and increased surveillance based on a perceived national threat.
camp. The camp is the place where bare life is produced and the exception becomes the rule. Yet, the Roman camp in Judea shows
us that the emersion of surveillance in a camp-state of exception- territory structure is nothing new. What is primarily modern is
not biopolitics (Foucault) or the camp (Agamben), but the governmental control of the disappearance of citizenship. With digital
technology, the erasure of a definite here or there means that the localised camp is no longer a paradigmatic place where the
limit of the state of exception is realised; rather, the non-place of a population in constant movement is what defines the new non-
surveillance is deeply imbedded in and necessary for the

governmental system that seeks to be instantly aware of any potential threats to the
state so that it can quash those threats by depoliticizing dangerous portions of
the population and exposing them to the pure potentiality of the management of
life.
place of the city camp. Thus,
The logic of the state of exception ensures that domestic

surveillance will be unfettered
Barnard-Wills 12 (David Senior Research Analyst at Trilateral Research &

Consulting, Ph.D. in Politics from Manchester University, Surveillance,
Governmentality, Identity and Discourse, in Surveillance and Identity: Discourse,
Subjectivity and the State, p. 23-24)
However, the state retains a role in surveillance research, especially at the boundary
between surveillance studies and International Relations. Giorgio Agamben has analysed how
by creating states of emergency which were previously limited to wartime ,
contemporary states have been able to create states of exception which remove
prior limits on government action, including the use of surveillance, alongside permanent
detention of terrorists or enemy combatants (Agamben 2005). The logic allowing Guantanamo Bay also
allows for increased state surveillance. Similarly, Bigo has shown the importance of the nation state with the
continued existence (and the reinforcement) of the national border, even in (and because of) a globalised world of supposedly free
movement (Bigo 2006b:47). Bigo situates this amongst sovereignty debates in International Relations and the construction by the
United States of a global state of in-security. e suggests that the heavy monitoring of the border (see for example the fortified USMexico border, the so-called security fence built in the Palestinian territories by Israel and the experience of asylum seekers in UK
detention centres) and the treatment of the immigrant should be understood as techniques of government by unease through the
normalisation of a state of watchful emergency (Bigo 2006b:63). As Mathiesen prefigured, in many ways the state itself can be
subject to surveillance by other actors. The contemporary example would of course be the whistleblowing WikiLeaks website,
making publicly available internal secret state documents in an attempt to hold states to account for their actions. WikiLeaks found
a way to effectively hijack and redirect the internal military and government surveillance infrastructures, demonstrating the way
that information systems can be put to a variety of political uses. States also exist in an international system which features other
states and the interactions between these can also be understood as having a surveillant dimension. The arguments around the
invasion of Iraq essentially focused upon the information produced by different regimes of inspection and surveillance UN weapons
inspectors or the CIA intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (CNN 2003a, CNN 2003b). It is important not to forget that the
Despite discourses of globalisation discussing

the weakening of the nation state in the face of international pressures it should be
remembered that this may be a weakening of specific elements of the nation state .
Control over economic and fiscal policy may be reduced whilst other elements may
remain strongly intact or even redoubled in response to these pressures (security and
state retains substantial coercive capacity and resources.
policing). Surveillance studies must proceed with recognition that there are multiple surveillance actors, with multiple technologies,
resources and motivations underpinning their surveillance activities, yet it must not forget that
one of these surveillant
actors is the nation state, and that it is still a significant actor. From a political studies perspective,
attempting to address the political effects of surveillance, this is a highly important consideration.
Domestic surveillance has spread beyond the homeland into a

global apparatus of inclusion and exclusion
Gates 12 (Kelly, Associate Professor of Communication, Science Studies, and
Critical Gender Studies at University of California, San Diego, The globalization of
homeland security in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies Edited by Kirstie
Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon, p. 293)
How have the priorities of homeland security in the post-9/11 era been mobilized
to bolster an expanding global industry, and what are the consequences of this
industry expansion on surveillance practices transnationally? It is the aim of this chapter to
consider the globalization of homeland security. It examines the extent to which the US model of homeland
security has been exported to other countries, and what the results have been for the spread of new
surveillance practices across national borders. Homeland security is typically understood as a
policy program instituted in the United States as a response to the 9/11 terrorist
attacks. I argue that it is more adequately understood as a broader governmental
rationality that reconfigures the US Cold War national security regime in ways
more amenable to the post-Cold War context , and to the priorities of an emerging
global security industry. In order to be promoted as a form of national identity, the US model of homeland security
has been and must continue to be defined as uniquely American. However, it is also being globalized in
particular ways in order to serve as a powerful political and economic strategy in

the war on terror (see also Hayes, this volume). One focus of this strategy has been the USAled effort to create a global surveillance apparatus , a dispersed system of
monitoring and identification that aims to enact a USA-centric politics of inclusion
and exclusion on a global scale. Not only the USA, but much of the world, is
engaged in what Giorgio Agamben (2005) has called a permanent state of exception. Here
constitutional laws and human rights are suspended indefinitely , and individuals are
continuously called upon to demonstrate their legitimate identity and right to exist.
As the USA and its allies carry out the seemingly endless war on terror, a heavily
financed security-industrial complex has taken shape. Along with it has come a
seemingly endless and increasingly integrated stream of new surveillance systems
and practices.
Link - Drones
The rhetorical focus on drones as unique form of surivllence and violence
is naive and fuels militarism
Trombly 12 (Dan Trombly, The Drone War Does Not Take Place, 16 November
2012, http://slouchingcolumbia.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/the-drone-war-does-nottake-place/, mjb)
Ill try to make this a bit shorter than my usual fare on the subject, but let me be
clear about something. As much as I and many others inadvertently use the term,
there is no such thing as drone war. There is no nuclear war, no air war, no
naval war. There isnt really even irregular war. Theres just war. There is, of
course, drone warfare, just as there is nuclear warfare, aerial warfare, and naval
warfare. This is verging on pedantry, but the use of language does matter.
The changing conduct and character of war should not be confused with
its nature, as Colin Gray strives to remind us in so many of his writings. When we
believe that some aspect of warfare changes the nature of war whether
we do so to despair its ethical descent or praise its technological marvels,
or to try to objectively discern some new and irreversible reality we lose
sight of a logic that by and large endures in its political and conceptual
character. Hence the title (with some, but not too much, apology to Baudrillard).
There is no drone war, there is only the employment of drones in the
various wars we fight under the misleading and conceptually noxious War
on Terror. Why does this matter? To imbue a weapons system with the
political properties of the policy employing it is fallacious, and to assume
its mere presence institutes new political realities relies on a denial of
facts and context. This remains the case with drones. The character of
wars waged with drones is different the warfare is different but the
nature of these wars do not change, and very often this argument
obscures the wider military operations occurring. Long before the first drone
strikes occurred in Somalia, America was very much at war there. Before their
availability in that theater, the U.S. had deployed CIA and SOF assets to the region.
It supported Ethiopias armies and it helped bankroll and coordinate proxy groups,
whether they were Somali TFG units, militias, or private contractors. It bombarded
select Somali targets with everything from naval guns to AC-130 gunships to
conventional strike aircraft. It deployed JSOC teams to capture or kill Somalis. That
at some point the U.S. acquired a new platform to conduct these strikes is not
particularly relevant to the character of that war and even less to its nature. We
sometimes assume drones inaugurate some new type of invincibility or
some transcendental transformation of war as an enterprise of risk and
mutual violence. We are incorrect to do so. The war in Somalia is certainly not
risk free for the people who the U.S. employs or contracts to target these drones. It
is not risk free for the militias, mercenaries, or military partners which follow up on
the ground. Nor is it risk free for those who support the drones. Just ask Abu Talha
al-Sudani, one of the key figures behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya
and Tanzania, who sent operatives to case Camp Lemonier and launch a commando
raid one which looks, in retrospect, very much like the one that crippled Marine
aviation at Camp Bastion recently that might have killed a great many U.S.
personnel on a base then and now critical to American operations in the Horn of
Africa and Gulf of Aden. The existence of risk is an inherent product of an enemy
whose will to fight we have not yet overcome. The degree of that inherent risk
whether it is negligible or great is a product of relative military capabilities and
wars multifarious external contexts. Looked at through this lens, its not drones
that reduce U.S. political and material risk, its the basic facts of the
conflict. In the right context, most any kind of military technology can significantly
mitigate risks. A 19th century ironclad fleet could shell the coast of a troublesome
principality with basic impunity. When Dewey said, You may fire when ready,
Gridley, at Manila Bay, according to most history and much legend he lost only one
man due to heatstroke! while inflicting grievous casualties on his out-ranged and
out-gunned Spanish foes. That some historians have suggested Dewey may have
concealed a dozen casualties by fudging them in with desertions, which were in any
case were a far greater problem than casualties since the Navy was still in the habit
of employing foreign sailors expendable by the political standards of the day is even
more telling. Yes, there are always risks and almost always casualties even
in the most unfair fights, but just as U.S. policymakers wrote off Asian
sailors, they write off the victims of death squads which hunt down the
chippers, spotters, and informants in Pakistan or the contractors training
Puntlands anti-piracy forces. And no, not even the American spooks are
untouchable, the fallen at Camp Chapman are testament to that. This is hardly
unique to drones or todays covert wars. The CIAs secret air fleet in Indochina
lost men, too, and the Hmong suffered mightily for their aid to the U.S. in the
Laotian civil war. The fall of Lima Site 85, by virtue or demerit of policy, resonated
little with the American public but deeply marks the intelligence community and
those branches of the military engaging in clandestine action. The wars we wage in
Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are not drone wars any more than our war in Laos
was an air war simply because Operation Barrel Rolls bombers elicit more attention
than the much more vulnerable prop-driven spotting aircraft or Vang Paos men on
the ground. There is a certain hubris in thinking we can limit war by
limiting its most infamous weapons systems. The taboo and treaties
against chemical weapons perhaps saved men [and womyn] (but not the
Chinese at Wuhan, nor the Allied and innocents downwind of the SS John
Harvey at Bari) from one of the Great Wars particular horrors, but they
did nothing appreciable to check the kind of war the Great War was, or the
hypersanguinary consequences of its sequel but a generation later. The
Predators and Reapers could have never existed, and very likely the U.S.
would still be seeking ways to carry out its war against al Qaeda and its
affiliates under the auspices of the AUMF in all of todays same theaters.
More might die from rifles, Tomahawks, Bofors guns or Strike Eagles JDAMs than
remotely-launched Griffins, and the tempo of strikes would abate. But the same
fundamental problems the opaque decisions to kill, the esoteric legal
justifications for doing so, the obtuse objectives these further would all
remain. Were it not for the exaggerated and almost myopic focus on
killer robots, the U.S. public would likely pay far less attention to the
victims, excesses, and contradictions. But blaming drones qua drones for
these problems. or fearing their proliferation at home, makes little more
sense than blaming helicopters for Vietnam , or fearing airmobile assaults
when DC MPDs MD-500s buzz over my neighborhood. That concern that
proliferation of a weapons system equates to proliferation of the
outcomes associated with them, without regard to context, is equally

misleading. Nobody in America should fear the expansion of the Chinese UAV fleet
because, like the U.S. UAV fleet, it is merely going to expand their ability to do what
similar aircraft were already doing. Any country with modern air defenses can make
mincemeat of drone-only sorties, and for that reason China, which unlike Yemen and
Pakistan would not consent to wanton U.S. bombing of its countryside, need not fear
drones. For an enormous number of geographical, political, and military reasons, the
U.S. ought fear the drone war coming home even less. Drones do not grant a
country the ability to conduct the kind of wars we conduct against AQAM.
The political leverage to build bases and clear airspaces, and the military
and intelligence capabilities to mitigate an asymmetric countermeasure
operation do. If another country gains that ability to conduct them against
a smaller country, even, it is not because they lacked the ability to put
weapons on planes, but because of the full tapestry of national power and
military capabilities gave them such an ability. It was not asymmetry in basic
technical ability that made the U.S. submarine blockade of Japan so much more
effective than the Axiss attempts to do the same against Americas shores, but the
total scope of the assets in the field and context of their use. It was not because of
precedent or moral equivalence, or lack thereof that the Axis could bomb Britain or
lose the ability to do so, but because of the cumulative effect of military capabilities
and the judgments guiding them. What might expand the battlefield of a drone
war is much the same. Americas enemies do not refrain from attacking
bases in CONUS or targeting dissidents in the U.S. (not that they have not
before), they wait for an opportunity and practical reason to do so, and
that has very little to do with drones in particular and even less the nature
of the war itself. Fearing that the mere use of a weapons system
determines the way in which our enemies will use it without regard to this
context is not prophetic wisdom. It is quasi-Spenglerian hyperventilation
that attributes the decision to use force to childlike mimesis rather than
its fundamentally political purposes. Iran and Russia do not wait on drones
to conduct extrajudicial targeted killings, and indeed drones would be of
much less use to them in their own political contexts. Focusing on drones
and the nature of targeted killings as some sort of inherent link ignores
those contexts and ultimately does a disservice to understanding of wars
past, present, and future, and by doing so, does little help and possibly a
great deal of harm to understanding how to move forward.
***note: evidence edited for gendered language
Link - Economy
The economy produces biopower as a way to control
production
Giroux 06 (Henry A., Prof of Cultural Studies @ McMaster University, Reading
Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v033/33.3giroux.html)//BW
Within the last few decades, matters of state sovereignty in the new world order have been retheorized so as to
the political nature

of social and cultural life, and the merging of life and politics as a new form of
biopolitics. While the notion of biopolitics differs significantly among its most prominent theorists, including
provide a range of theoretical insights about the relationship between power and politics,
Michel Foucault (1990, 1997), Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2002, 2003), and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004),
the convergence of life and politics,

locating matters of "life and death within our ways of thinking about and imagining
politics" (Dean 2004, 17). Within this discourse, politics is no longer understood exclusively through a disciplinary
what these theorists share is an attempt to think through
technology centered on the individual bodya body to be measured, surveilled, managed, and included in
forecasts, surveys, and statistical projections. Biopolitics points to new relations of power that are more capacious,
concerned not only with the body as an object of disciplinary techniques that render it "both useful and docile" but
also with a body that needs to be "regularized," subject to those immaterial means of production that produce ways
of life that enlarge the targets of control and regulation (Foucault 1997, 249). This shift in the workings of both
sovereignty and power and the emergence of biopolitics are made clear by Foucault, for whom biopower replaces
the power to dispense fear and death "with that of a power to foster lifeor disallow it to the point of death. . . .
[Biopower] is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living
in the domain of value and utility. Its task is to take charge of life that needs a continuous regulatory and corrective
mechanism" (Ojakangas 2005, 6). As Foucault insists, the logic of biopower is dialectical, productive, and positive
(1990, 136). Yet he also argues that biopolitics does not remove itself from "introducing a break into the domain of
life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die" (1997, 255). Foucault
the death-function in the economy of biopolitics is justified primarily

through a form of racism in which biopower "is bound up with the workings of a
State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the
race, to exercise its sovereign power" (258). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have both modified and
extended Foucault's notion of biopower, highlighting a mode of biopolitics in which immaterial labor
such as ideas, knowledge, images, cooperation, affective relations, and forms of
communication extend beyond the boundaries of the economic to produce not just
material goods as "the means of social life, but social life itself. Immaterial
production is biopolitical (2004b, 146). In this instance, power is extended to the educational force of the
believes that
culture and to the various technologies, mechanisms, and social practices through which it reproduces various
of biopolitics is that power

remains a productive force, provides the grounds for both resistance and
domination, and registers culture, society, and politics as a terrain of multiple and
diverse struggles waged by numerous groups in a wide range of sites . For my purposes,
forms of social life. What is crucial to grasp in this rather generalized notion
the importance of both Foucault's and Hardt and Negri's work on biopolitics is that they move matters of culture,
especially those aimed at "the production of information, communication, [and] social relations . . . to the center of
politics itself" (Hardt and Negri 2004b, 334). Within these approaches, power expands its reach as a political force
beyond the traditional scope and boundaries of the state and the registers of officially sanctioned modes of
Biopolitics now touches all aspects of social life and is the primary political
and pedagogical force through which the creation and reproduction of new
subjectivities takes place.
domination.
Neoliberalism/Capitalism is the driving force of biopower in the

modern day

I want to further this position by arguing that neoliberalism, privatization, and
militarism have become the dominant biopolitics of the mid-twentieth-century social
state and that the coupling of a market fundamentalism and contemporary forms of
subjugation of life to the power of capital accumulation, violence, and disposability,
especially under the Bush administration, has produced a new and dangerous version of
biopolitics.4 While the murder of Emmett Till suggests that a biopolitics structured around the
intersection of race and class inequalities, on the one hand, and state violence, on the other, has
long existed, the new version of biopolitics adds a distinctively different and more dangerous register. The new
biopolitics not only includes state-sanctioned violence but also relegates entire
populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability . As William DiFazio points out, "the
state has been so weakened over decades of privatization that it . . . increasingly
fails to provide health care, housing, retirement benefits and education to a massive
percentage of its population" (2006, 87). While the social contract has been suspended in varying
degrees since the 1970s, under the Bush Administration it has been virtually abandoned. Under such
the state no longer feels obligated to take measures that prevent

hardship, suffering, and death. The state no longer protects its own disadvantaged
citizensthey are already seen as dead within a transnational economic and
political framework. Specific populations now occupy a globalized space of ruthless politics in which the
circumstances,
categories of "citizen" and "democratic representation," once integral to national politics, are no longer recognized.
In the past, people who were marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the
government, either because of the persistence of a drastically reduced social contract or because they still had
This new form of

biopolitics is conditioned by a permanent state of class and racial exception in
which "vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the
status of living dead" (Mbembe 2003, 40), largely invisible in the global media, or, when disruptively
some value as part of a reserve army of unemployed labour. That is no longer true.
present, defined as redundant, pathological, and dangerous. Within this wasteland of death and disposability, whole
populations are relegated to what Zygmunt Bauman calls "social homelessness" (2004, 13). While the rich and
middle classes in the United States maintain lifestyles produced through vast inequalities of symbolic and material
the "free market" provides neither social protection and security nor hope to
those who are poor, sick, elderly, and marginalized by race and class . Given the
capital,
increasing perilous state of the those who are poor and dispossessed in America, it is crucial to reexamine how
biopower functions within global neoliberalism and the simultaneous rise of security
states organized around cultural (and racial) homogeneity. This task is made all the
more urgent by the destruction, politics, and death that followed Hurricane Katrina.
Economic securitization reduces humans to bare life and

furthers the biopolitical agenda

Under the logic of modernization, neoliberalism, and militarization, the category "waste" includes no
longer simply material goods but also human beings, particularly those rendered
redundant in the new global economy, that is, those who are no longer capable of
making a living, who are unable to consume goods, and who depend upon others
for the most basic needs (Bauman 2000, 2003, 2004). Defined primarily through the combined discourses
of character, personal responsibility, and cultural homogeneity, entire populations expelled from the benefits of the
marketplace are reified as products without any value to be disposed of as "leftovers in the most radical and
Even when
young black and brown youth try to escape the biopolitics of disposability by joining
the military, the seduction of economic security is quickly negated by the horror of
senseless violence compounded daily in the streets, roads, and battlefields in Iraq
and Afghanistan and made concrete in the form of body bags, mangled bodies, and
amputated limbsrarely to be seen in the narrow ocular vision of the dominant
media. With the social state in retreat and the rapacious dynamics of neoliberalism,
unchecked by government regulations, the public and private policies of investing in
the public good are dismissed as bad business, just as the notion of protecting
people from the dire misfortunes of poverty, sickness, or the random blows of fate is
viewed as an act of bad faith. Weakness is now a sin, punishable by social exclusion.
This is especially true for those racial groups and immigrant populations who have
always been at risk economically and politically . Increasingly, such groups have become part of
effective way: we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking (2004, 27).
an ever-growing army of the impoverished and disenfranchisedremoved from the prospect of a decent job,
productive education, adequate health care, acceptable child care services, and satisfactory shelter. As the state is
transformed into the primary agent of terror and corporate concerns displace democratic values, dominant "power
is measured by the speed with which responsibilities can be escaped" (Qtd. in Fearn 2006, 30). With its pathological
disdain for social values and public life and its celebration of an unbridled individualism and acquisitiveness, the
Bush administration does more than undermine the nature of social obligation and civic responsibility; it also sends
a message to those populations who are poor and blacksociety neither wants, cares about, or needs you (Bauman
1999, 68-69). Katrina revealed with startling and disturbing clarity who these individuals are: African-Americans
those ghettoized frontier-zones created by

racism coupled with economic inequality. Cut out of any long term goals and a
decent vision of the future, these are the populations, as Zygmunt Bauman points
out, who have been rendered redundant and disposable in the age of neoliberal
global capitalism.
who occupy the poorest sections of New Orleans,
Link - Environment
Attempts to recover the damage of the environment renders
all beings calculable under a sovereign gaze. Calls of
moderation and conservation serve to create zones of
distinction between useful and useless forms of life. This
reterritorization of life artificially constructs hierarchies of
human domination that make collapse of ecological
redundancies possible.
Halsey 4 [School of Law at the Flinders University of South Australia (Mark; Environmental Visions: Deleuze
and the Modalities of Nature; Ethics & the Environment 9.2 (2004) 33-64;] Hebron ADN
A second monstrous becoming has to do with the declaration of the Errinundra

National Park in 1988. This may come as somewhat of a surprise since orthodoxy
dictates that such parks must ipso facto be beneficial to ecological processes and,
therefore, reside at the opposite end of the spectrum to things terrible or monstrous. However, national parks, special
protection zones, conservation zones, heritage river corridors, and the like, are as much imbued and
troubled by the rhetorics of similitude and the representative as general
management areas or logging zones. The surveying and naming of Errinundra
National Park has in no way guaranteed becomings conducive to the preservation of bodies without organs. Rather, it has
ushered in a different set of stratifications and binary oppositions for the governing
of Nature. Put another way, Nature is not any more wild or free in national parks so
much as it is captured (or envisioned) in a different way by other kinds of abstract machines (those of botany, law,
conservation, aesthetics, and the like). Nature is as intensively managed and surveyed within
national parks (and indeed wilderness areas) as outside such places. The problems of fire, of
disease, of litter, of sewage disposal, of road maintenance, of tourist facilities, and
the like, are problems constituted by a particular brand of conservation as much as
they are constituted by the pressures of industrialization. This is a mode of
conservation that insists, firstly, on packaging Nature, and, secondly, of privileging
certain of its parts (those within park boundaries) above all others (those outside park boundaries). It is therefore
the height of misconception to think of such places as devoid of, or divorced from, the monstrous. The obvious retort
here is that it is better to save some parts of the environment rather than let it
all be given over to the ravages of industry. However, one could also say that by
naming (seeing) certain spaces as rare, more precious , more vital than others, perpetuates the
problems attending the hierarchization of earth . This hierarchization provides the point of reterritorialization for
those supporting clear-felling regimes and the lione nes which divide industrial zones from conservation zones. The form of
the statements which effect such a reterritorialization are well known: The best
timber has been locked up by (you) greenies , Sixty percent of old-growth is in conservation reserves,
what more do you want? and so forth. It is a game of binaries (loggers/ protesters, industry/conservation) rather than flows (of
species, income, votes, aesthetics, leisure). And as the history of forest struggle in Australia and elsewhere has shown, it is
incredibly difficult to imagine the landscape in terms of its immanence and interconnectedness where it has for over a century been
(re)written in a stochastic manner (in terms of its significant and expendable attributes). There are other monstrous categories
lurking with respect to Goolengook. A chief example is the division between old-growth, negligibly disturbed, and regrowth forest.
that recent conflict over Goolengook has largely been

concomitant with attempts to establish the threshold at which old-growth status can
be legitimately and popularly ascribed. These are monstrous categories in the
sense that those who impose them believe there is some kind of intrinsic and
timeless causal connection between word and object between things uttered and things existing
independently and objectively in the world. They are also monstrous because, from the perspective of State/
Royal science, they perpetuate the idea that the task of conserving ecological
Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say
vitalities is complete when it has, in fact, only been reconfigured . The texts which formally
articulate the thresholds dividing the three aforementioned categories display, at first glance, an irrefutable logic. This runs
something akin to: There are forests. Forests exhibit various growth stages. Each growth stage has the potential to be impacted
either by human or natural processes. Typically these are reduced to the effects of industrial activities (logging, mining, grazing) or
to those of fire and disease. The label ascribed to a given stand or section of forest will therefore depend on two factorsage
(denoted by the proportion of dead material in the upper most stratum) and known or surmised disturbance history. In all instances,
age will take precedent over disturbance history in deciding the ultimate applicability of categories. The critical point to glean from
this brand of logic is that it only holds together so long as one ignores the multiplicity of
alternatives with which to think through the vicissitudes of forest status. It is a logic
which, although exhibiting all the classic traits of a positivist vision of the world
objectivity, rigidity, lucidityis nonetheless haunted by the volatile nature of the forces it
wishes to capture/represent. There is no good reason for coding the proportion of dead matter within the forest crown as
that which necessarily separates old-growth from negligibly disturbed forest. Here, time is the only element separating the
Naming, therefore, both makes and interrupts time. It violates

the becomings-other normally nascent within the plane of consistency . To be clear, this
equates to a monumental violencing. And it is a violencing not of some eternal or immutable natural world and
its innate rhythms, but of the possibility of discovering and inventing new ways to facilitate
the widest possible array of bodies without organs. A clear-felled coupethe
projected result of earmarking terrains in one fashion rather than anotherdraws
forth no body without organs. It is a space lacking in intensity. Of course one could, and indeed the
Department of Natural Resources and Environment does, attempt to conjure a
monoculture of bodies in such places (all sharing the same age, disturbance history, height, density, etc.).
These bodies are, no doubt, easier to name, manage, count, monitor, and sort. But their existence is also
concomitant with the destruction of a diversity of life-forms and capacities still barely
comprehensible to modern science and other ways of knowing / seeing. .
imposition of one category as opposed to another.
The affs visions of climatic disaster inevitably bring about a

climate leviathan that has absolute control of a people for the
purpose of saving the planet
Mann and Wainwright 12. Joel Wainwright is a professor of geography at Ohio State University
Geoff Mann is professor of geography at Simon Fraser University, Climate Leviathan, Antipode Vol. 45 No. 1 Tina
Why call this Leviathan?
In the first place, climate Leviathan is a direct descendant in the

line from Hobbes original to Schmitts sovereign: when it comes to climate,
Leviathan will decide, and is constituted precisely in the act of decision. It is the
pure expression of a desire for, the recognition of the absolute necessity of, a
sovereignindeed, the first truly planetary sovereignto seize command, declare
an emergency and bring order to the globe. If Agamben (2005:14) is correct that
the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an
unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique
of government, then the consolidation of climate Leviathan represents the
rescaling of the normal technique[s] to encompass planetary security, or the
making secure of planetary life. With this achievement the state of nature and the
nature of the state would enmesh perfectly . Geographically at least, climate Leviathan exceeds its
lineage, for it must somehow transcend the state-based territorial container fundamental to Hobbes and Schmitts
thought.
Even for those states most committed to national autonomy, it is increasingly

clear that independent regulatory regimes are inadequate to the global challenge of
sharply reducing carbon emissions. This contradictionrending deep fissures in the
UNFCCC processmay lead, as with other public good collective action problems,
to the construction of a nominally global frame which is in fact a political and
geographical extension of the rule of the extant hegemonic bloc, ie he capitalist
global North. But this is by no means certain, partly because climate change has broken the surface of elite
consciousness at a moment of global political- economic transition. Any realizable planetary climate Leviathan must
be constructed with the approval of a range of actors formerly excluded from global governance China and India
most notably, but the list could go on. Ensuring Chinas support for any binding carbon regulation complicates the
role of capital in the Leviathan.5 We conjecture that Leviathan could take two forms. On one hand, a variety of
authoritarian territorial sovereignty, arguably truer to Hobbes own vision, could emerge in nations or regions where
political economic conditions prove amenable. We name this possibility climate Mao, and discuss it below. On the
we could see Leviathan emerge as the means by which to perpetuate the

extant rule of northern liberal democratic capitalist states. Arguably the most likely
scenario here is that sometime in the coming decades the waning US-led liberal
capitalist bloc will endeavor to impose a global carbon regime that, in light of
political and ecological crisis, will brook no opposition in defense of a human future
for which it volunteers itself as the last line of defense . The pattern of mobilization
will likely be familiar, in which the United Nations or other international fora serve as
a means of legitimizing aggressive means of surveillance and discipline . This
other hand,
could make the construction of climate Leviathan a key means by which to salvage American international
hegemonya prospect that, if anything, only increases the likelihood of its consolidation.6 One might find, for
example, the personification of this effort in John Holdren, Harvard physicist and National Science Advisor to
President Obama. Since his 2008 appointment, right-wing media have derided Holdren as a harbinger of a climate
police state. One website claims he has called for forced abortions and mass sterilization to save the planet.7
Paranoid hyperbole, certainly, but the underlying critique is not entirely misplaced. Holdren was an early visionary
of what we call climate Leviathan. Consider these lines from the conclusion of Holdrens (1977) textbook on
resource management, in which he outlines a new sovereignty he calls Planetary Regime: Toward a Planetary
Regime:...Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might
eventually be developed into a Planetary Regimesort of an international superagency for population, resources,
and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration,
the Regime could have the power to

control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes
that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also
be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including
assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market. The
Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum
population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries
shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the
responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to
enforce the agreed limits (Ehrlich, Ehrlich and Holdren 1977:942943).
conservation, and distribution of all natural resources . . . Thus
Environmental policy is used to further biopolitics

Fletcher 10 (Robert, Department of Environment, Peace, and Security, University
for Peace, Neoliberal environmentality: Towards a poststructuralist political ecology
of the conservation debate, http://www.conservationandsociety.org/article.asp?
issn=09724923;year=2010;volume=8;issue=3;spage=171;epage=181;aulast=Fletcher)//BW
This distinction between disciplinary and neoliberal forms of governmentality has
intriguing implications for our understanding of conservation practice that have yet
to be extensively explored (for preliminary applications to environmental
governance in general see Oels 2005). Efforts to conserve biodiversity, of course,
have been described as an exercise of biopower, in that: 1) interventions are
commonly justified in terms of their role in nurturing and sustaining life, both
human and that of other organisms (even the whole of life) as well (Luke 1999a);
and 2) interventions' object is commonly 'populations' (both human and non-) as a
whole, seeking to maximise the total area of protected forest and amount of land
under forest cover minimise, the quantity of extinct species, etc. As Youatt (2008)
observes, the United Nations Environmental Program's (UNEP) Global Biodiversity
Assessment can be seen as a paradigmatic biopolitical approach to conservation,
endeavouring to appraise the total health of global life according to a set of

statistical indicators and thereby establish a baseline upon which to intervene in
order to manipulate these indicators (reducing the rate of fish depletion, for
instance) so as to augment and sustain this life-as-a-whole. As with a more
conventional, human-centred exercise of biopower, biopolitical conservation policy ,
while aimed at populations, is actually applied to individual human bodies , often
through disciplinary techniques intended to alter their natural resource use
(Borgerhoff Mulder & Coppolillo 2005). In this respect, conservation has often been
described as a form of 'green' governmentality intended to inculcate an
environmental ethic by means of which people will self-regulate their behaviour in
conservation friendly ways (e.g., Luke 1999a, 1999b; Rutherford 1999; Neumann
2001; Peluso & Watts 2001; Sundar 2001; Agrawal 2005a, 2005b). Agrawal (2005b:
162), for instance, building upon Luke (1999a, 1999b), describes an
'environmentality' aimed at the creation of 'environmental subjects-people who care
about the environment'. Environmental education would constitute a paradigmatic
example of this environmentality in action, whereby, through diverse decentralised
institutions (state schools, NGO trainings, community workshops, ecotourism
excursions, etc.), norms intended to encourage in situ natural resource preservation
are advocated. Agrawal's (2005a, 2005b) environmentality describes a disciplinary
form of conservation governmentality. Neoliberal governmentality, as described
above, implies a much different approach to natural resource policy. Rather than
attempting to inculcate ethical norms vis--vis the environment, within a neoliberal
framework conservationists would simply endeavour to provide incentives sufficient
to motivate individuals to choose to behave in conservation-friendly ways. In this
perspective as well, 'environmental problems cease to be discussed in moral terms
and are now addressed as issues that require cost-benefit-analyses' (Oels 2005:
196). Finally, neoliberal policy would be directed first and foremost towards
encouraging economic growth as the means to include concerns for social justice
within conservation policy. This, of course, is the essence of the approach termed
neoliberal conservation described at the outset. Hence, we might describe
neoliberal conservation as the expression of a novel 'neoliberal environmentality' in
natural resource policy, an effort to combat environmental degradation in the
interest of biopower through the creation of incentive structures intended to
influence individuals' use of natural resources by altering the cost-benefit ratio of
resource extraction so as to encourage in situ preservation.
Efforts to reform environmental policy guarantee cooption and

enhance biopolitical control
It is this contest among incommensurate governmentalities, indeed, that Foucault
sees as constituting the terrain of political debate. Just as Foucault describes four
distinct governmentalities operating within politics in general, we might observe a
similar situation within contemporary conservation policy as well, viewing the
conservation debate described above as embodying a variety of distinct
environmentalities. First, we have the commodifying, market-based neoliberal
environmentality outlined earlier. Second, we have the disciplinary environmentality

described by Agrawal (2005a) and others, which is an effort to create
'environmental subjects' through diffusion of ethical norms. In addition to these, we
might observe a third, sovereign environmentality in the 'fortress conservation'
approach, wherein resource preservation is enacted through the creation and patrol
of so-called protected areas (the 'fences and fines' strategy), usually on the part of
nation-state regimes for the recreational use of societal (or international) elites
(Igoe 2004). Finally, one might add to all of this a fourth environmentality,
corresponding with Foucault's 'art of government according to truth'. This 'truth
environmentality' might be observed, for instance, in the perspective advocated by
deep ecologists, who often argue for a particular approach to resource preservation
based on claims concerning humans' essential interconnection with nature , an
interconnection commonly understood as evolutionarily derived (Roszak et al. 1995;
Fletcher 2009b). Alternative resource use regimes, such as those practiced by many
indigenous peoples drawing on so-called traditional ecological knowledge (TEK),
might be seen as variants of truth environmentality as well (Berkes 2008). These
various environmentalities may be mixed and matched in particular positions within
the conservation debate. Community-based conservation might be seen to embody
alternate strands of disciplinarity and neoliberalism, depending upon whether a
programme emphasises ethics or incentives (or a combination of the two) in its
efforts to motivate local participation. A disciplinary environmentality might be
observed in some of the recent critiques of neoliberal conservation. McCauley, for
instance, contends that 'market-based mechanisms for conservation are not a
panacea for our current conservation ills. If we mean to make significant and longlasting gains in conservation, we must strongly assert the primacy of ethics and
aesthetics in conservation' (2006: 27). Elements of a sovereign environmentality
might be identified in the recent backlash to the CBC approach, calling for a return
to a protectionist, fortress conservation model in which rules will be enforced and
borders patrolled irrespective of the desires of local residents altogether (Wilshusen
et al. 2002). While in Foucault's (2003) original formulation biopower was described
as arising in opposition to sovereign authority, within contemporary conservation
discourse a sovereign governmentality may be harnessed to biopower itself, with
state-centred protectionism justified as the defense of non-human life. At the same
time, in the neoprotectionist backlash sovereign governmentality may be decoupled
from the state through the process that Ferguson (2006) calls the 'privatization of
sovereignty'. We can observe this, for instance, in the creation of private protected
areas (Langholz 2003) or those operated by NGOs, who may at times employ
coercive means to secure these areas' preservation (e.g., Clynes 2003). As I
intimate elsewhere, the use of ecotourism as a conservation tool may combine
disciplinary and neoliberal environmentalities, involving not only the promotion of
economic incentives but also the use of various disciplinary techniques intended to
condition local participants to an 'ecotourism discourse' (Fletcher 2009a). Neoliberal
and truth environmentalities may come together in the charismatic authority
exercised by 'conservation celebrities' who champion environmental causes on
behalf of BINGOs and their corporate partners (Brockington 2006, 2009). Likewise,
truth and sovereign environmentalities might be combined in certain strands of a
fortress conservation approach. For instance, early advocates of fortress protected
areas such as Muir and Thoreau self-consciously framed their advocacy in terms of
an essential human need for connection with the sacred in nature (Igoe 2004).
Similarly, Edward Abbey, one of the main sources of inspiration for the deep ecology
group EarthFirst!, famously asserted "The wilderness once offered men a plausible
way of life... Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge... Soon there will be no place to
go... Then the madness becomes universal... And the universe goes mad" (2000:
63). In such views, truth may be harnessed to biopower as well (EarthFirst!'s central
slogan, for instance, is 'No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth'). In the
framework proposed here then, governmentality, biopower, discipline, sovereignty,
neoliberalism, and truth would all be viewed as distinct yet interrelated concepts
that may alternately merge, divide, compete, conflict, or coexist within any given
context [Table 1]. Contemporary trends and debates within conservation policy
might thus be understood as instances of the 'interplay' (Foucault 2008) among
incommensurate though not incompatible environmentalities in which these various
elements intersect.
Link - FISA
FISA is a tool of biopower that allows the state to
reconfigure itself to further utilize their control over
citizens
Passavant 5 (Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges
The Strong Neo-liberal State: Crime, Consumption, Goverance https://muse-jhuedu.turing.library.northwestern.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.3passavant.html#aut
hbio ) Foronda
political mentality of the consumer-criminal double based in a politics of

fear that identifies the risk of certain threats as beyond toleration informed political practices
prior to September 11th. For example, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act
of 1996 (AEDPA) extended the government's power to obtain Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants, warrants that are excepted
from Fourth Amendment protections in the name of national security's need
for counter-intelligence. The Fourth Amendment limits governmental
searches to situations where there is "probable cause" of a crime, the
suspect being searched is presented with the warrant, knows that he or she
is being searched (the "knock and announce" rule), and can challenge the
constitutionality of the warrant. FISA warrants, however, are under no such
limitations -- in "spy world" the object of surveillance must not know that he
or she is being searched -- and the basis for the warrant remains secret so
that should a target of surveillance be charged with a crime, that person
could not challenge the grounds on which the warrant was issued. While the
1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act sought to create something of a
"wall" (better described as a "filter") between spy world and civil society (it
was passed in the wake of the Church Committee revelations about J. Edgar
Hoover's misuse of power to spy on civil rights organizations and individuals
based on their political beliefs), the AEDPA began to circumvent that wall by
allowing the government to spy on not only those suspected of having
committed terrorist acts, but on those who provide "material support" for
organizations deemed by the Secretary of State to be "terrorist."49 This
change, which would have brought those who worked to end apartheid in South Africa by supporting the African
The
National Congress (ANC) within the law's provisions if it had been in effect during the 1980s (since the Reagan
allows the government to

identify those it deems to be intolerable risks and to act preemptively to
prevent possible future illegal action.50 If the AEDPA began to circumvent the "wall"
between spy world and civil society to allow the government to act preemptively based on fear or suspicion, then
the USA PATRIOT Act obliterates this "wall" by further amending FISA to
extend the government's power to engage in secret searches from situations
where the primary purpose of the warrant is foreign intelligence to situations
where only a significant purpose of the warrant is foreign intelligence.51 This,
administration considered the ANC to be a terrorist organization),
and the rules Attorney General John Ashcroft has issued to implement this legislation, will allow law enforcement
officials concerned with criminal law to direct FISA searches and to use this secret evidence for law enforcement
purposes as long as they can create a counter-intelligence rationalization for the search. Needless to say, this
allows law enforcement officials to evade Fourth Amendment safeguards for individual freedoms that are necessary
FISA orders
increased by 31 percent while the number of ordinary criminal surveillance
warrants dipped by 9 percent," and the fact that FISA warrants now account
for over half of all federal wiretapping conducted, it appears that the DOJ is
doing an end-run around the Fourth Amendment in its criminal justice policy.
Rather than the government searching those who have committed a crime or
who have taken significant steps towards committing a crime, now it appears
that the government targets those it predicts are likely to commit a crime
based on who they are or their political associations.52 The Government of Consumer
for civil society. In light of statistics showing that between 2001 and 2002, "the number of
Capitalism
Of course we are not only governed out of a fearful criminology by the state, but also as
consumers within a post-Fordist capitalist regime, and here too surveillance has grown enormously. As has been
noted by political scientists Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, after September 11th , when George Bush
While
the consumer is a privileged subjectivity within contemporary socio-political
discourse, there is a mutually reinforcing character to society's twin fetishes
of crime and consumerism. On the one side, the professional discourse of
security and criminology explicitly uses consumerism and safe shopping for
the tourist as a primary justification for increased policing or public-private
security partnerships.54 On the other side, the religious commitment to
consumerism in the U.S. requires increased delivery of crime control and
security services since not only the reality of victimhood but the fear of it is
understood to be consequential for determining the behavior of shoppers.55
Indeed, post-September 11, fear of terrorism only further fuels the way that
safe shopping requires a zero-tolerance approach to domestic security as
Israeli policies have become an exemplary guide for securing U.S. malls
amidst the war on terror.56 I will focus in what follows on three aspects of governing subjects as
consumers. First, governing subjects as consumers means inserting subjects into
networks of surveillance that can vastly expand state power in light of the
state's powers to compel a search (for example, through a FISA warrant).
addressed the nation to do its part in face of tragedy, he tellingly asked the nation to go shopping.53
Second, consumerism has led to a merger of market and state interests that vastly expands state power such that
the state no longer needs to rely upon a warrant to compel a single private party like a bookstore or a library to
produce information. Increasingly,
the state is governing through consumerism and the

commodification of information that this produces. This merger of state and market
interests has produced two consequences. (A) Consumerism leads to the compilation of vast databases, and
companies have formed to take advantage of this situation by compiling information from multiple sources and then
selling access to this data. Indeed, information compilation has become a highly profitable industry. As I shall
explain below, the fact that these databases are privately compiled paradoxically enhances the state's powers. (B)
Furthermore, in light of the fact that much of this information profiles consumers and that, in seeking access to this
information, the state is relying upon consumerist mentalities, we can see that the logic of governance is
increasingly based on hierarchized market segments rather than a logic of equal citizenship. Third, utilizing
consumerism to seek security means that as markets are established for security -- often thanks to government
contracts -- stakeholders in this order (i.e., those who hold a financial stake in this state order) are created who will
resist any future change.
and capitalism.
Governing through consumerism, then, reconfigures both the state
Link Hegemony
The desire for global hegemony is merely an attempt by the
sovereign to rectify its own perceived weaknesses. The pursuit
of primacy has become the best way to dispose of those who
refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the sovereign state
Gulli 13 [Bruno Gulli is a professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College in
New York, For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence] Hebron ADN
The sovereign everywhere, be it the political or

fakes the legitimacy on which its power and authority supposedly rest . In
truth, they rest on violence and terror, or the threat thereof . This is an obvious and essential aspect of
the singularity of the present crisis. In this sense, the singularity of the crisis lies in the fact that the
struggle for dominance is at one and the same time impaired and made more brutal by the
lack of hegemony. This is true in general, but it is perhaps particularly true with respect to the greatest power on earth,
I think that we have now an understanding of what the situation is:
financial elite,
the United States, whose hegemony has diminished or vanished. It is a fortiori true of whatever is called the West, of which the US
Lacking hegemony, the sheer drive for domination

has to show its true face, its raw violence. The usual, traditional ideological justifications for
dominance (such as bringing democracy and freedom here and there) have now become very weak
because of the contempt that the dominant nations (the US and its most powerful allies) regularly
show toward legality, morality, and humanity. Of course, the so-called rogue states, thriving on corruption,
has for about a century represented the vanguard.
do not fare any better in this sense, but for them, when they act autonomously and against the dictates of the West, the specter of
punishment, in the form of retaliatory war or even indictment from the International Criminal Court, remains a clear limit, a
who will stop the United States from striking anywhere at

will, or Israel from regularly massacring people in the Gaza Strip, or envious France from once
again trying its luck in Africa? Yet, though still dominant, these nations are painfully aware of their structural,
ontological and historical, weakness. All attempts at concealing that weakness (and the uncomfortable
awareness of it) only heighten the brutality in the exertion of what remains of their
dominance. Although they rely on a highly sophisticated military machine (the technology of drones is a clear instance of
possibility. Not so for the dominant nations:
this) and on an equally sophisticated diplomacy, which has traditionally been and increasingly is an outpost for military operations
they know that they have lost their

hegemony. It is then important to ask the question of what power can alter this racism that, as Foucault says, first develops
and global policing (now excellently incarnated by Africom),
with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide (1997: 257). From its first development, we then get to a situation
racist violence becomes a global and biopolitical

regime of terror, a war between two main classes: the war of the political and financial elites against the
class of those who have been dispossessed to various degrees once again, the violence
of the 1% against the 99%. As Foucault says, this is a question of the technique of power, more than of ideologies (as
where, as I noted at the outset of this paper,
it was the case with the traditional type of racism), because the sovereign elites, the State, are well aware of the urgency of the
struggle, the fact that, again, what is left to them is the raw use of the violence that, as Walter Benjamin (1978) says, informs the
law, domination without hegemony. Especially at the present stage of the world, where information and knowledge make it
unnecessary and thus impossible for the General Intellect or common understanding and reason to be governed, brutal domination
and potentially genocidal methods of repression seem to be the only instruments left to a decaying and ruthless global ruling class.
Then, the old sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of racism (Foucault 1997:
258). Foucault makes the example of Nazi Germany, where murderous power and sovereign power [were] unleashed throughout
the entire social body (p.259) and the entire population was exposed to death (p.260). But this is today a common and global
The sovereign right to kill (ibid.), from cases of police brutality in the cities to war atrocities throughout
has become the most effective way to deal with a population that refuses to
recognize the false legitimacy of the sovereign , the sovereign right to govern. What Foucault says of
the Nazi State but he acknowledges it applies to the workings of all States (ibid.)s hows the terminal stage of
sovereign power: a desperate will to absolute domination no longer able to count on
hegemony: We have an absolutely racist State, an absolutely murderous State, and
an absolutely suicidal State (ibid.). This certainly shows the crisis of sovereignty as State power, but more broadly,
paradigm:
the world,
in a globalized world, it shows the crisis of the sovereign elites, who are facing a final solution. No one can blame them. Their
unintelligent worldview is bound to that. The hope is that they will not destroy everything before they are gone. Yet, they will not go
by themselves, without the workings of an altering power, bound to inherit the earth. This is the power of individuation, the dignity
of individuation, whose workings are based on disobedience and care. It is the power of those who, in the age of biopolitical terror,
have nothing to sell except their own skins, (Marx 1977: 295), reversing the history of racist violence, of conquest, enslavement,
robbery, [and] murder (ibid.).
The drive for hegemony is founded in a paranoid desire to find

threats against which to define ourselves thus the imperial
state can legitimize its sovereign power by finding imaginary
enemies to justify the escalation of the military colossus
McClintock 9
[Anne, Chaired Professor of English and Womens and Gender Studies at the University of
WisconsinMadison, M.Phil. from Cambridge University, Ph.D. from Columbia University, Paranoid Empire: Specters
from Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib, in Small Axe, March 2009, Issue 28, p. 50-74,
http://smallaxe.net/repository/file/sx%2028/5-SA28%2520McClintock%2520%2850-74%29.pdf] Hebron ADN
the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and dangerous
extravagance of the violence to which the US government has committed itself after 9/11
two countries invaded, thousands of innocent people imprisoned, killed, and tortured
unless we grasp a defining feature of our moment, that is, a deep and disturbing doubleness with
respect to power. Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global omnipotence
(Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with nightmares of impending
attack, the United States has entered the domain of paranoia: dream world and
catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both
deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral and
nightmarish quality of the war on terror, a limitless war against a limitless threat, a war
By now it is fair to say that
vaunted by the US administration to encompass all of space and persisting without end. But the war on terror is not a real war,
for terror is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls
the US government can fling its military might against ghostly

apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the cost of catastrophic selfdelusion and the infliction of great calamities elsewhere. I have come to feel that we urgently need to make
elsewhere a consensual hallucination, 4 and
visible (the better politically to challenge) those established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war
on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence abroad with the
vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxesthe modern slave-ships on the middle passage to nowherethat have
come to characterize the United States as a super-carceral state. 5 Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of
national things? If a long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as
an overt empire, does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political responsibility, not also
extend beyond that useful fiction of the exceptional nation to embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we theorize
the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary, but which also at
the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion with a
complicit corporate media would render itself invisible, casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into
specters? For imperialism is not something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored.
Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to
perplexing questions: Who under an empire are we, the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nationstate who, in turn, constitute us? We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence
that the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow
the spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and penumbra of
empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the
traditional self-identity of the United States as the uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious,
national mythology of originary innocence now in tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to
theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6 Perhaps in the labyrinths of
torture we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the authority of vision and the hauntings of popular
memory disrupt the great forgettings of official history. Paranoia Even the paranoid have enemies. Donald Rumsfeld Why
imperial violencethe very

understanding the
pervasive presence of the paranoia that has come, quite violently, to manifest itself
across the political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply
Hofstadters famous identification of the US states tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia
as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of
grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is
paranoia?
Can we fully understand the proliferating
circuits of
eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast without
can produce pyrotechnic displays

of violence. The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous
held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11),
relation to violence. 8 Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its
structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or
Hegelian cunning of reason, nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national terror dream. 9 Nor am I interested in evoking
paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have psyches or an unconscious;
only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as paranoid if the dominant
powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies,
practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and
engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national psyche, nor as a
description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive to
contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence
that the state tries to conceal. Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person
and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for its
violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and
humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of
unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty? A critical question still remains: does not
something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary
people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the
paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and
aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then reintegrated (incorporated) into
the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body, the methods by which schools, the military, training camps not to
mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate mediainstill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up collective
but unstable fantasies of omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths
of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial
legitimacy, and what I call the enemy deficit. I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at
Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantnamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia
incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carbys brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial racism,
sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11 The Enemy Deficit: Making the Barbarians Visible Because night is here but
the barbarians have not come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution. C. P. Cavafy, Waiting for the
Barbarians The barbarians have declared war. President George W. Bush C. P. Cavafy wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in
1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient dj vu. To what dilemma are the
Every modern empire faces a crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its

an imperial state
claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians . It is only the threat of
the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empires borders in the first place. On
the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual
nightmares of impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot part.
And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing
phantom. Those people were a kind of solution. With the collapse of the Soviet
Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States and the USSR evaporated like
barbarians a kind of solution?
power over territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafys insight is that
a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism, Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and
Where were the enemies now to justify the continuing escalation of

the military colossus? And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
infiltration vanished.
By rights, the thawing of the cold war should have prompted an immediate downsizing of the military; any plausible external
for. Dick Cheney likewise complained: The threats have become so remote. So remote that they are difficult to ascertain.
Colin Powell agreed: Though we can still plausibly identify specific threatsNorth Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like thatthe real
threat is the unknown, the uncertain. Before becoming president, George W. Bush likewise fretted over the postcold war
dearth of a visible enemy: We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there. It is now well established that
the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but there was no clear rationale with which to sell
such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New American Century produced a remarkable report in
which they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would require a catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl
Harbor. 12 The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy, offering the
Bush administration what they would claim as a political casus belli and the military unimaginable license to expand its reach.
General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon: There is a huge silver lining in this
cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have
actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph. In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking
during the attack, Now we can perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin
Powell noted, America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of
before. Charles Krauthammer, for one, called for a declaration of total war. We no longer have to search for a name for the
post-Cold War era, he declared. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. 13
Hegemony is dead and we know it. Attempts to mask our

weakness through global power inevitably lead to violence and
domination
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli is a professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College in
New York, For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence, Tina
that we have now an understanding of what the situation is: The sovereign
everywhere, be it the political or financial elite, fakes the legitimacy on which its
power and authority supposedly rest. In truth, they rest on violence and terror,
or the threat thereof. This is an obvious and essential aspect of the singularity of the
present crisis. In this sense, the singularity of the crisis lies in the fact that the
struggle for dominance is at one and the same time impaired and made more brutal
by the lack of hegemony. This is true in general, but it is perhaps particularly true
with respect to the greatest power on earth, the United States, whose hegemony
has diminished or vanished. It is a fortiori true of whatever is called the West, of
which the US has for about a century represented the vanguard. Lacking hegemony,
the sheer drive for domination has to show its true face, its raw violence. The usual,
traditional ideological justifications for dominance (such as bringing democracy and
freedom here and there) have now become very weak because of the contempt that
the dominant nations (the US and its most powerful allies) regularly show toward
legality, morality, and humanity. Of course, the so-called rogue states, thriving on corruption, do not
I think
fare any better in this sense, but for them, when they act autonomously and against the dictates of the West, the
specter of punishment, in the form of retaliatory war or even indictment from the International Criminal Court,
who will stop the United States

from striking anywhere at will, or Israel from regularly massacring people in the
Gaza Strip, or envious France from once again trying its luck in Africa ? Yet, though still
dominant, these nations are painfully aware of their structural, ontological and historical, weakness. All
attempts at concealing that weakness (and the uncomfortable awareness of it) only heighten
the brutality in the exertion of what remains of their dominance. Although they rely on a
remains a clear limit, a possibility. Not so for the dominant nations:
highly sophisticated military machine (the technology of drones is a clear instance of this) and on an equally
sophisticated diplomacy, which has traditionally been and increasingly is an outpost for military operations and
global policing (now excellently incarnated by Africom),
they know that they have lost their
hegemony.
War and the pursuit of hegemony are used by the sovereign to

further biopower leads to reproduction of patriarchy, racism
and neoliberalism
Corva, 09 (Dominic, University of Washington, Biopower and the Militarization of
the Police Function, ACME,
http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/article/view/828/685)//BW
Hardt and Negris central claim with respect to this task is that war has become a regime of
biopower, a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing
and reproducing all aspects of social life (2004, 13). It is well beyond the scope of this review to
examine Foucaults theorization of biopower, 2 but it is important to point out that Hardt and Negris inclusion of
controlling the population in their definition is consistent with an often-overlooked aspect of governmentality,
the mode of governance in which strategies of sovereign power are subsumed by

biopower. This aspect is the inclusion of sovereign power, rather than its total
eclipse, in strategies associated with liberal governmentality (see Foucault in Burchell et al,
1991, 102). In this article, I use the term sovereign power to denote the use of state-sanctioned force (what
Foucault calls negative or repressive power) to control domestic and/or foreign territories. And biopower,
though it is articulated with strategies of sovereign power, positively produces

subjects of governance through techniques of normalization. Biopolitical strategies
of governance secure the reproduction of hegemonic social orders (capitalist,
patriarchal, masculinist, sexist, racist and so forth). For Foucault, both strategies are articulated
and dispersed through the territorial state, to address the problem of governing a national population. The state,
with its attendant sovereign functions, is an effect of hegemonic orders, while at the same time a necessary nexus
for the dispersal of hegemony-friendly, mostly biopolitical but also sovereign, strategies of governance.
Sovereign power, in the last instance, takes life or lets live (Foucault, 1984, 261). Biopower,
on the other hand, which functions through the proliferation of acceptable freedoms, fosters life or disallows it to
the point of death. It fosters life through the production of knowledge about the (legitimate) self, especially in
relation to a given population. This is what is meant by normalization, which refers to the construction of what
behavior, and therefore who, is normal in the population. While Foucaults work examines the relationship
between the liberal, European nation-state and its subjects, Hardt and Negris Empire theorizes a (sort of)
global
governmentality that produces the neoliberal , capitalist world subject whose

national citizenship is increasingly secondary to global economic citizenship. If Empires
biopower is truly hegemonic, then the exercise of sovereign power should be articulated with and
disciplined by the biopolitical practices of what Hardt and Negri refer to as the global aristocracy: transnational
corporations (TNCs), the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and so forth. Empires
imperialism should reproduce the neoliberal order, in the long run, rather than disrupt or de-legitimate it.
Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy --- the strategy of

omnipotence sees threats to empire everywhere, which
necessitates constant violence
McClintock 9 (Anne Chaired Professor of English and Womens and Gender
Studies at the University of WisconsinMadison, M.Phil. from Cambridge University,
Ph.D. from Columbia University, Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantnamo and
Abu Ghraib, in Small Axe, March 2009, Issue 28, p. 50-74,
http://smallaxe.net/repository/file/sx%2028/5-SA28%2520McClintock%2520%285074%29.pdf)
By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and dangerous
extravagance of the violence to which the US government has committed itself
after 9/11two countries invaded, thousands of innocent people imprisoned, killed, and
torturedunless we grasp a defining feature of our moment , that is, a deep and
disturbing doubleness with respect to power . Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies
of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with
nightmares of impending attack, the United States has entered the domain of
paranoia: dream world and catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that one finds
simultaneously and in such condensed form both deliriums of absolute power and
forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral and nightmarish quality of the war on
terror, a limitless war against a limitless threat , a war vaunted by the US
administration to encompass all of space and persisting without end. But the war on
terror is not a real war, for terror is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what
William Gibson calls elsewhere a
consensual hallucination, 4 and the US government can fling its

hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the
cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the infliction of great calamities
elsewhere. I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the better
politically to challenge) those established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that
now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect
those circuits of imperial violence abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxesthe modern
slave-ships on the middle passage to nowherethat have come to characterize the United States as a super-carceral
state. 5 Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but primarily covert US
military might against ghostly apparitions and
does the terrain and object of

intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political responsibility, not also extend
beyond that useful fiction of the exceptional nation to embrace the shadowlands of
empire? If so, how can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our
imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire,
kinship with the ordinary, but which also at the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an
casting states of
emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For imperialism is
not something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored.
Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the nation-state
imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would render itself invisible,
itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are we, the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people
a crisis of violence and the visible.

How do we insist on seeing the violence that the imperial state attempts to
render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow the spectral, disfigured
people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and penumbra of empire to
be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held US claim of moral and cultural
exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of the U nited States as the uniquely
superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national
mythology of originary innocence now in tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to
beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute us? We now inhabit
see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6
we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters

disturb the authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt the
great forgettings of official history. Paranoia Even the paranoid have enemies. Donald Rumsfeld Why
paranoia? Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of imperial violence
the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast without understanding
the pervasive presence of the paranoia that has come, quite violently, to
manifest itself across the political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our
Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture
time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadters famous identification of the US states tendency toward conspiracy theories.
7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates
a deep and dangerous

doubleness with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11),
can produce pyrotechnic displays of violence. The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I
precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat,
argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8 Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a
primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some
collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or Hegelian cunning of reason, nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national terror
dream. 9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do
not have psyches or an unconscious; only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be
spoken of as paranoid if the dominant powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory
cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and
omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a description
of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a
way of seeing and being attentive to contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the
contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal. Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon,
articulated between the ordinary person and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that
sense dialectical rather than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate
memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a
way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty? A critical
question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to
instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with,
and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously
humiliating and aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then reintegrated
(incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body, the methods by which schools, the military, training
camps not to mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate mediainstill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally
conjure up collective but unstable fantasies of omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial
paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the
visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call the enemy deficit. I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as
they emerge in the torture at Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantnamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that
torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carbys brilliant work, those contradictory
sites where imperial racism, sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11 The Enemy Deficit: Making the Barbarians
Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there
are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
C. P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians The barbarians have declared war. President George W. Bush C. P. Cavafy wrote
Waiting for the Barbarians in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient dj
vu. To what dilemma are the barbarians a kind of solution? Every modern empire faces an abiding
crisis of
legitimacy in that it flings its power over territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafys insight is
that an imperial state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the
barbarians. It is only the threat of the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of
the empires borders in the first place. On the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the
empire with perpetual nightmares of impending attack. The enemy is the abject of
empire: the rejected from which we cannot part. And without the barbarians the
legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing phantom. Those people were a
kind of solution. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of
the United States and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism,
Where were the enemies now

to justify the continuing escalation of the military colossus? And now what
shall become of us without any barbarians? By rights, the thawing of the cold war
should have prompted an immediate downsizing of the military ; any plausible external
Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished.
for. Dick Cheney likewise complained: The
threats have become so remote. So remote that

they are difficult to ascertain. Colin Powell agreed: Though we can still plausibly identify specific threats
North Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like thatthe real threat is the unknown, the uncertain. Before becoming president, George
W. Bush likewise fretted over the postcold war dearth of a visible enemy: We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they
are out there. It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but
there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New American
Century produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would require a
catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl Harbor. 12 The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy
political casus belli

and the military unimaginable license to expand its reach . General Peter Schoomaker would
deficit and the problem of legitimacy, offering the Bush administration what they would claim as a
publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon: There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous
focus. . . . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our homeland,
which gives it some oomph. In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking during the attack, Now we can
perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, America will have a
continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before. Charles Krauthammer, for one,
called for a declaration of total war. We no longer have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era, he declared. It will
henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. 13
Unipolar power precludes an effective long-term solution to

nuclear deterrence and encourages proliferation --- only a
return to previous balance of power can solve
van Munster and Sylvest 13 (Rens Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for
International Studies, Casper Associate Professor at University of Southern
Denmark, paper prepared for the ISA Annual convention, March 2013, p. 5-13,
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/media/sites/researchwebsites/classicalrealism/vanMunster
&Sylvest_NuclearRealism_ISA2013.pdf)
The existence of nuclear weapons could thus not be downplayed as an unintended
consequence of the scientific enlightenment (Walker, 2007: 431). To the contrary, the
thermonuclear revolution was made possible by science , technology and rationality.
In that sense, nuclear realists would have strongly agreed with Adornos (1966: 320) famous remark that there is no universal
a
blind faith in the principles of science and rationality was unwarranted in light of the
horrors of the twentieth century. It could even be outright dangerous , as Herz realized after
history leading from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. At any rate,
having witnessed, at close range in Geneva, the breakdown of the reformed international order with the League of Nations at its
center an order he as an ardent liberal had politically supported (Herz, 1939; Herz, 1942; Herz, 1951). Mumford underwent a
similar conversion. Having visited Germany in the early 1930s during a time when the national socialist movement was growing
rapidly and making its political presence felt, he had failed to note both the movements presence and the intensity of its anti-liberal
ideals. When Mumford belatedly realized what was at stake, his atonement took the form of a fight against what he termed
pragmatic liberalism and its isolationist implications for American foreign policy. As he argued, such a liberalism was too noble to
surrender, too sick to fight, plagued by a total incapacity to face the worst and thereby risking the ultimate perversion: being too
Nuclear realists therefore argued for a more sober and humble

calibration of liberalism and its optimistic belief in progress . What was needed was a
language and understanding of politics in the face of dark realities that no rational
theory could provide a bulwark against.4 Such a language had to be formulated between the optimist belief in
virtuous to live.3
universal values of a rational science and progress on the one hand and a pessimistic retreat from emancipation and liberty on the
Given the absolute materiality of nuclear weapons and the political context in
which they existed at the height of the Cold War , liberalism required a healthy dose
of realism without illusions (Philp, 2012) that should not begin from an idea of how
people ought to act ideally or rationally, but from an appreciation of the context
within which politicians and policy-makers have to make choices as well a critical
examination of their actual conduct. This realist form of liberalism has strong affinities with Foucaults later
injunction that: We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are
historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical
other.
inquiries that are as precise as possible; and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the essential kernel of
rationality that can be found in the Enlightenment and would have to be preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the
contemporary limits of the necessary, that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as
autonomous subjects (Foucault, 1986: 42, 43) For nuclear realists, the contemporary limit of the necessary was nothing less that
In their view a state-dominated configuration of

international politics was bound to produce a politically suicidal and morally
unacceptable great power nuclear war (or a great power conventional war that risked escalating into a nuclear
the question of survival of the species.
war), something that classical realists familiar to IR scholars, even if somewhat belatedly, also came to accept (Craig, 2003). This
appreciation of the limits of science and means-ends rationality guides for political action also informed their critique of deterrence
and the dangerous illusion amongst government officials that the H -bomb was a usable, if not a winning, weapon rather than a
technique of extermination. The central element in the nuclear realist critique of deterrence was an appreciation of how the politics
of deterrence coalesced with the changing knowledge economy of the emerging military-industrial complex. Although civilians
managed to break the military monopoly on strategy in these years, they did so from positions of intellectual authority established
by funds from within this ever-expanding complex; whether in think tanks like RAND or in the several centers dealing in nuclear
strategy that were established at major universities during this period (Kuklick, 2006; Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2000). To nuclear realists this
reconfiguration of knowledge production failed to adequately face the challenge of these new weapons; indeed, it merely signaled
how the scientific method that had spurred (and been spurred by) modern civilization was incapable of confronting the moral and
existential dimensions of military force after the thermonuclear revolution. Clearly, science and technology had brought wonders to
the modern world, but when dictated and pursued by power-intoxicated agents the prospects for civilization were dim (see also
Nuclear realists kept stressing that the focus on short-term order and
stability amounted to moral failure: it produced a false sense of security, a host of
negative side-effects and precluded a sustainable long term solution. The moral critique of
deterrence was strongly rooted in epistemological concerns and nuclear realists maintained that the majority of
politicians and strategists relied on an overtly thin or too rationalist concept of
deterrence that in their realist conception of politics was untenable . While both Herz and
Sylvest, 2013a).
Russell conceded in the late 1950s that deterrence had been paradoxically successful, they also argued that it was based on rather
optimistic assumptions. When Herz made these points he also offered a knowledgeable and in some respects sympathetic
security through nuclear weapons meant

complete insecurity and that the most potent weapon was shot through with
paradoxes and ambivalences. In making these points, Herz clearly grasped that credibility was the crucial issue
(Herz, 1959: 198, 202, 215). But then a host of problems remained, none of them negligible: lunatics,
application of rationality in a context of uncertainty , risks of misinterpretation,
different kinds of trigger-happiness in officials running so-called fool proof systems
and, not least, the endless second-guessing of intentions (Herz, 1959: 183f.; Herz, 1962: 131-133). With
discussion of nuclear strategy. He began by noting that
respect to the latter Herz sarcastically remarked that [i]t may be doubted that even the theory of games as applied to international
relations can cope with this one (Herz, 1959: 207n.). Against the background of the elevation of deterrence to dogma (Herz, 1959:
unilateral and mutual deterrence. The former mainly based on the concept of massive
was plagued by confusion and lack of precision (a common refrain
among critics of Eisenhower administrations policies in the 1950s). The notion of mutual deterrence was not
straightforward either and Herz argued that only a strict concept of mutual deterrence, only threatening retaliation
against nuclear attacks, could work (Herz, 1959: 189).5 Everything else would be illogical , since it would
presume an adversary (or deteree) to be deterred by something that would not
deter the deterrer. Unfortunately, Western policy was founded on such shaky foundations .
A policy of retaliation that was not precise and determinate, i.e. based on a proclamation of nofirst use, might provoke rather than prevent war and especially coupled with a
defense policy underemphasizing conventional military force it could mean an
involuntary rush into the very conflict we want to avoid (Herz, 1959: 194-5). Russell made many
184) Herz examined both
retaliation was found wanting: it
similar points (Russell, 1959: 30-31, 39, 70-1), but he was more outspoken about the motivation behind his dissection of nuclear
strategy and simulation; namely to counter the widespread belief that the H-bomb constituted a winning weapon and to unmask
the long-term instability of the concept of deterrence (or what Dulles called brinkmanship). Russell did this by invoking an analogy
the game played by

running two cars against each other, testing the resolve of both drivers before being
decided by a crash or the first turn away from it symbolized the inherent instability
of deterrence. Russell was at pains to refute the argument that there was no alternative to continue playing a suicidal game
to the game of chicken made popular in a Hollywood movie a few years previously. For Russell,
or surrendering to the Soviet adversary (Russell, 1959: 30-1). The chicken analogy was Russells most insightful contribution to
contemporary nuclear strategy and secured for him a supporting role in the development of strategic thought: the following year
RAND theorist Herman Kahn used Russells analogy in his notorious treatise On Thermonuclear War (1960). The virtue of Russells
analogy was its perceptiveness in relation to the crucial issue of credibility.6 In Kahns hands, however, chicken became an
argument for blind, automated resolve along the lines of the infamous doomsday machine that later made it into Western folklore
Russell engaged in the kind of

simulation that characterized Kahns strategizing , he did so in order to expose the
absurdity and futility of considering the use of military force after the thermonuclear
revolution. His purpose was completely contrary to that of Kahn, who thought it important to think the unthinkable and
through its appearance in Stanley Kubricks Dr. Strangelove. Although
contemplate the possibility of nuclear war. Indeed, when it came to American policy, Russell pointed out I can find almost nothing
that seems to me compatible with rationality in Kahns adoption of deterrence (Russell, 1961: 17). The fact that Kahn thought
the effects of this

phenomenon landed Kahn in a paradox not unlike that presented by the weapons he
strategized about: the notion that thermonuclear war could be fought led to a bleak
and cheerless outlook, but it is the best that Mr. Kahn can offer us even by stretching optimism to the very limits of
credibility (Russell, 1961: 17). In an environment populated by fallible , pugnacious and
occasionally mad human beings, a concept based on how decision-makers rationally
ought to act was not just unrealistic , but also extremely dangerous.7 The political
rationality underlying the traditional conduct of international politics , whatever its severe
shortcomings in the pre-nuclear era, reached an absolute limit in the mid-twentieth century. The horrifying nature of
World War II both its increasingly total, unstrained character , the German
extermination policy towards the Jews and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki that(virtually) brought the war to a close obviously contributed to this increasing realization, but it
was the advent of thermonuclear weapons that finally undermined time-honored practices of international society. Three
interrelated institutions are of particular importance: the balance of power ,
diplomacy and war. Herz, who had much in common with other classical realists of his time, had argued that the
traditional European balance of power policy was a safeguard against imperial
ambitions that, with Britain strategically placed at the center as the holder of the
balance, had achieved near-perfection in the eighteenth century . In contrast to a more
thermonuclear war in some instances rational and that he underestimated, according to Russell,
mechanical system where order was achieved at random Herz stressed that [b]alance of power politics is an applied art, not an
Two challenges to this (idealized) construction of the balance

of power presented themselves in the post-war era . First, the power shifts of the international system
applied science (Herz, 1951: 216).8
made it doubtful whether a balance of power (policy) could function in a more rigid configuration with only two major players and no
After the arrival of the thermonuclear bomb , furthermore, combating

Kremlins false ideology required an altogether different strategy of genuinely
appealing to the people in the communist world . Emphasis should not be put on a
fabricated, hollow fantasy of the American dream but on the actual pluralistic
system which allows the greatest variety and play to whatever economic forces and
institutions, private or public, will efficiently further the common good (Mumford, 1954a: 8).
Second, the classical balance of power had, when it worked best, depended on the
existence of a system of diplomacy that allowed for frank exchanges of view and , in
case diplomacy failed, war as a continuation of diplomacy by other means. Again,
however, injecting thermonuclear weapons into this already fragile and dangerous
organization of international politics exposed the limits of traditional political
rationality and diplomacy. Drawing on George F. Kennan, Herz (1959: 180) pointed out how the nature of
new weapon made it unsuitable for being used as a threat in diplomatic
relations. Russell repeatedly stressed this same point during the 1950s. With the existence of the thermonuclear bomb, he
argued, [d]iplomats ... are deprived of their traditional weapon . They are in fact
reduced to a game of bluff and blackmail . If it is thought that the other side would rather exterminate the
holder of the balance.
onesided rationality entails defeat for the less irrational .9 War, or the threat of war, similarly
lost its meaning in the modern Clausewitzian sense . Although the dictum that war is a continuation of
policy has been true hitherto, it is true no longer (Russell, 1954b: 251), since [i]n a war using the H-bomb,
there can be no victor.10 Of the nuclear realists treated here, Russell was the most outspoken in stressing the novelty
human race than yield, it is rational to give way to the lunacy of opponents. There is thus a premium on madness, and
of situation that the thermonuclear revolution had brought about. The Bikini tests, his early grasp of the physics and scale of the Hbomb, as well as his attention to those few facts and judgments about the new weapon made available by politicians and military
the ends of war can no longer

be achieved with the most advanced weapons. As he starkly put it, [w]e can all live or all die, but it is no
officials at the time, led him to stress the wholly new fact (Russell, 1954d: 51) that
longer possible to think that only our enemies will die.11 Towards the end of the 1950s, when John Herz published International
Unlimited war ... can no longer

bestow on any power waging it in the form of nuclear war that which used to be the
fruit of superiority and thus of victory: the attainment of war aims, whether
security or any others (Herz, 1959: 21). This situation was brought about by guided,
intercontinental missiles and the revolutionary force of fusion bombs that achieved
an uncanny absoluteness of effect (Herz, 1957: 488). Consequently, security meant
insecurity, while victory was a mere word. This state of affairs was particularly
dangerous, in Herzs analysis, in a situation where war was increasingly
bureaucratized or reified (Herz, 1959: 274) and where the dynamics of the security
dilemma played itself out in a context of ideological conflict and mutual
suspicion. Oppenheimers metaphor of two scorpions in a bottle was highly appropriate (Herz, 1959: 13). Lewis Mumford was
Politics in the Atomic Age (1959), he entirely agreed with Russells point:
in complete agreement with Herz and Russell about the fundamental point: There will be no victor in World War III, Mumford
argued, since a genuine war of extermination would bring about our own downfall (Mumford, 1954b: 88 [italics in original], 77). In
Mumford warned that modern

war pursued to its logical end would mean not the defeat of the enemy but his
total extermination: not the resolution of conflict but the liquidation of the
opposition (Mumford, 1954b: 170). Anders concurred and drove home the point with characteristic simplicity: because
nuclear weapons overwhelm their targets, their almightiness is their defect [Ihre
Allmacht ist ihr Defekt] (Anders, 1956: 258). The H-bomb flouts the conventional understanding of
a means by entailing the destruction of the end. Or simply: the bomb is too big. In Anders
words, the end discovered its own end in the effect of the means , which signaled nothing less
than the degeneration of the conceptual distinction between means and end. Nowhere was this more obvious
than in the context of arms racing, where [t]he production of means has become
the end of our existence [Dasein] (Anders, 1956: 251). For these reasons, nuclear realists were also sceptical about
the possibility of fighting a limited nuclear war. After it was clear that the Soviet Union had obtained a thermonuclear device, the
combination of a nuclear standoff and a doctrine of massive retaliation that
despite several attempts at qualification (e.g. Dulles, 1954) was still seen as risking a
major nuclear exchange over a minor conflict led to an attempt to make war
fighting possible and plausible again . It was feared that the credibility of the nuclear
threat was compromised by touting it in the context of minor conflicts or any kind of
aggression. Lodged in such moves was a tacit recognition that the H-bomb (a strategic weapon) transgressed
the category of a military weapon that could be used for political purposes and a
conviction that tactical nuclear weapons were a weapon like any other . As Henry Kissinger
re-publishing and developing ideas published as a reaction to the atomic bomb,
phrased it in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), [t]he prerequisite for a policy of limited war is to reintroduce the political
element into our concept of warfare and to discard the notion that policy ends where war begins or that war can have goals distinct
from those of national policy (Kissinger quoted in Freedman, 2003: 97). Although nuclear realists had some sympathy with the
argument that the superpower conflict needed a safety valve,12 they ultimately were unconvinced by the argument for limited
nuclear war. The main problem they foresaw here concerned escalation, a problem which advocates of limited nuclear war has never
None of the various suggested

distinctions as to graduated deterrence, targets, tactical as opposed to strategic atomic weapons, and
so forth, seems to offer a sufficient guarantee against eventual (or even immediate) outbreak
of all-out nuclear war; only avoidance of the first use of any and all atomic and
nuclear weapons (in the sense of fission and fusion weapons) might guarantee this (Herz, 1959: 200). This
convincingly cracked (Freedman, 2003: xiv). As Herz put this point in 1959:
was an argument that Herz shared with Russell (as well as with more conventional strategic thinkers opposed to limited nuclear
war). Indeed, this discussion of limited nuclear war led straight back to the overriding theme in the nuclear realist analysis of how
military force was reconfigured in the wake of the thermonuclear revolution. By falsely considering the H-bomb a weapon let alone a
military strategists and

defenders of deterrence failed to appreciate the reorganization of basic truths that
followed in the wake of technological progress .
winning weapon in effect by even entertaining the notion that they were usable
American hegemony is deadthe only thing that remains is a

racist sovereign violence that makes all their impacts and the
destruction of American policy only a matter of inevitability
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at
Kingsborough College in New York, For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence, pg. 14
It is then important to ask the question of what power can alter this racism that, as Foucault says, first develops
with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide (1997: 257). From its first development, we then get
racist violence becomes a global and

biopolitical regime of terror , a war between two main classes: the war of the
political and financial elites against the class of those who have been dispossessed
to various degrees once again, the violence of the 1% against the 99%. As Foucault says,
this is a question of the technique of power , more than of ideologies (as it was the case
with the traditional type of racism), because the sovereign elites, the State, are well aware of
the urgency of the struggle, the fact that, again, what is left to them is the raw
use of the violence that, as Walter Benjamin (1978) says, informs the law, domination
without hegemony. Especially at the present stage of the world, where information and
knowledge make it unnecessary and thus impossible for the General Intellect or
common understanding and reason to be governed, brutal domination and
potentially genocidal methods of repression seem to be the only instruments left
to a decaying and ruthless global ruling class . Then, the old sovereign power of
life and death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of racism
(Foucault 1997: 258). Foucault makes the example of Nazi Germany , where murderous
power and sovereign power [were] unleashed throughout the entire social body
(p.259) and the entire population was exposed to death (p.260). But this is today
a common and global paradigm : The sovereign right to kill (ibid.), from cases of
police brutality in the cities to war atrocities throughout the world, has become the
most effective way to deal with a population that refuses to recognize the
false legitimacy of the sovereign, the sovereign right to govern. What
Foucault says of the Nazi State but he acknowledges it applies to the workings of all
States (ibid.)shows the terminal stage of sovereign power : a desperate will to
absolute domination no longer able to count on hegemony : We have an
absolutely racist State , an absolutely murderous State , and an absolutely
suicidal State (ibid.). This certainly shows the crisis of sovereignty as State power, but more broadly, in a
globalized world, it shows the crisis of the sovereign elites, who are facing a final
solution . No one can blame them. Their unintelligent worldview is bound to that . The
hope is that they will not destroy everything before they are gone . Yet, they
will not go by themselves, without the workings of an altering power, bound to
inherit the earth. This is the power of individuation, the dignity of individuation, whose workings are based on
to a situation where, as I noted at the outset of this paper,
disobedience and care. It is the power of those who, in the age of biopolitical terror, have nothing to sell except
their own skins, (Marx 1977: 295), reversing the history of racist violence, of conquest, enslavement, robbery,
[and] murder (ibid.).
The impact is the sovereigns ability to exploit fundamental

flaws in the legal system and continue the global biopolitical
warthe ballot should side with the global countermovement
against such violence
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at
Kingsborough College in New York, For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence, pg. 1
We live in an unprecedented time of crisis . The violence that characterized the
twentieth century, and virtually all known human history before that, seems to have entered the
twenty-first century with exceptional force and singularity . True, this century opened with the
terrible events of September 11. However, September 11 is not the beginning of history . Nor are
the histories of more forgotten places and people, the events that shape those histories, less terrible and violent
The singularity of this violence, this paradigm of

terror, does not even simply lie in its globality , for that is something that our century shares with
the whole history of capitalism and empire, of which it is a part. Rather, it must be seen in the fact
that terror as a global phenomenon has now become self-conscious . Today, the
struggle is for global dominance in a singularly new way, and war regardless of
where it happensis also always global. Moreover, in its self-awareness, terror has
become, more than it has ever been, an instrument of racism. Indeed, what is new in
the singularity of this violent struggle, this racist and terrifying war, is that in the
usual attempt to neutralize the enemy, there is a cleansing of immense
proportion going on . To use a word which has become popular since Michel Foucault, it is a
biopolitical cleansing. This is not the traditional ethnic cleansing, where one ethnic
group is targeted by a state power though that is also part of the general
paradigm of racism and violence. It is rather a global cleansing , where the
sovereign elites, the global sovereigns in the political and financial arenas (capital and
the political institutions), in all kinds of ways target those who do not belong with them on
account of their race, class, gender, and so on, but above all, on account of their way
of life and way of thinking . These are the multitudes of people who, for one
reason or the other, are liable for scrutiny and surveillance, extortion (typically,
in the form of overtaxation and fines) and arrest, brutality, torture, and violent death .
The sovereigns target anyone who, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) shows with the figure of homo sacer,
can be killed without being sacrificed anyone who can be reduced to the paradoxical and
though they may often be less spectacular.
ultimately impossible condition of bare life, whose only horizon is death itself. In this sense, the biopolitical
The biopolitical struggle for dominance is a

fight to the death. Those who wage the struggle to begin with, those who want to dominate, will
not rest until they have prevailed. Their fanatical and self-serving drive is also very
much the source of the crisis investing all others. The point of this essay is to show that the
present crisis, which is systemic and permanent and thus something more than a
mere crisis, cannot be solved unless the struggle for dominance is
eliminated . The elimination of such struggle implies the demise of the global
sovereigns, the global elites and this will not happen without a global revolution, a
restructuring of the world (Fanon 1967: 82). This must be a revolution against
the paradigm of violence and terror typical of the global sovereigns. It is not a
movement that uses violence and terror , but rather one that counters the primordial
terror and violence of the sovereign elites by living up to the vision of a new
world already worked out and cherished by multitudes of people . This is the nature
cleansing is also immediately a thanatopolitical instrument.
of counter-violence : not to use violence in ones own turn, but to deactivate

and destroy its mechanism . At the beginning of the modern era, Niccol Machiavelli saw the main
distinction is society in terms of dominance, the will to dominate, or the lack thereof. Freedom , Machiavelli
says, is obviously on the side of those who reject the paradigm of domination: [A]nd
doubtless, if we consider the objects of the nobles and of the people, we must see that the first have a great desire
to dominate, whilst the latter have only the wish not to be dominated, and consequently a greater desire to live in
the enjoyment of liberty (Discourses, I, V). Who can resist applying this amazing insight to the many situations of
From Tahrir Square to

Bahrain, from Syntagma Square and Plaza Mayor to the streets of New York and
Oakland, the people speak with one voice against the nobles ; the 99% all
face the same enemy: the same 1%; courage and freedom face the same police and
military machine of cowardice and deceit, brutality and repression . Those who do
not want to be dominated, and do not need to be governed, are ontologically on the
terrain of freedom , always-already turned toward a poetic desire for the
common good , the ethics of a just world . The point here is not to distinguish between good
resistance and revolt that have been happening in the world for the last two years?
and evil, but rather to understand the twofold nature of power as domination or as care. The biopolitical (and
The
other side ontologically, if not circumstantially, free and certainly wiser does not want to dominate;
rather, it wants not to be dominated. This means that it rejects domination as
such . The rejection of domination also implies the rejection of violence, and I have already spoken above of the
meaning of counter-violence in this sense. To put it another way, with Melvilles (2012) Bartleby, this other side
would prefer not to be dominated, and it would prefer not to be forced into
the paradigm of violence. Yet, for this preference, this desire, to pass from potentiality
into actuality, action must be taken an action which is a return and a going
under, an uprising and a hurricane . Revolution is to turn oneself away from the
terror and violence of the sovereign elites toward the horizon of freedom and care,
which is the pre- existing ontological ground of the difference mentioned by Machiavelli
between the nobles and the people, the 1% (to use a terminology different from Machiavellis) and the 99%. What
is important is that the sovereign elite and its war machine, its police apparatuses,
its false sense of the law, be done with . It is important that the sovereigns be
shown, as Agamben says, in their original proximity to the criminal (2000: 107) and
that they be dealt with accordingly . For this to happen, a true sense of the law must
be recuperated, one whereby the law is also immediately ethics . The sovereigns
will be brought to justice . The process is long, but it is in many ways already
underway. The recent news that a human rights lawyer will lead a UN investigation
into the question of drone strikes and other forms of targeted killing (The New York Times,
January 24, 2013) is an indication of the fact that the movement of those who do
not want to be dominated is not without effect . An initiative such as this is perhaps
thanatopolitical) struggle for dominance is unilateral, for there is only one side that wants to dominate.
necessarily timid at the outset and it may be sidetracked in many ways by powerful interests in its course. Yet,
even positing , at that institutional level, the possibility that drone strikes be a
form of unlawful killing and war crime is a clear indication of what common reason
(one is tempted to say, the General Intellect) already understands and knows . The hope of those
who would prefer not to be involved in a violent practice such as this , is that
those responsible for it be held accountable and that the horizon of terror be
canceled and overcome. Indeed, the earth needs care . And when instead of caring
for it, resources are dangerously wasted and abused, it is imperative that those
who know and understand revolt and what they must revolt against is the
squandering and irresponsible elites, the sovereign discourse, whose authority,
beyond all nice rhetoric, ultimately rests on the threat of military violence and police
brutality.
Link - Human Rights

Human rights enforce the authority of the sovereign by
delineating citizenry throughout humanity
Agamben, 1998 - Professor of philosophy at the University of Verona (Giorgio;
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; pg. 75-77;
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/biopolitics/HomoSacer.pdf; DOA 7/19/15 || NDW)
A simple examination of the text of the Declaration of 1789 shows that it is precisely bare natural life which is to say, the pure fact
of birth that appears here as the source and bearer of rights. Men,
the first article declares, are born

and remain free and equal in rights (from this perspective, the strictest formulation of all is to be found in La
Fayettes project elaborated in July 1789: Every man is born with inalienable and indefeasible rights). At the same time,
however, the very natural life that, inaugurating the biopolitics of modernity, is
placed at the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in whom
rights are preserved (according to the second article: The goal of every political association is
the preservation of the natural and indefeasible rights of man ). And the Declaration
can attribute sovereignty to the nation (according to the third article: The principle of all sovereignty
resides essentially in the nation) precisely because it has already inscribed this element of birth
in the very heart of the political community. The nation the term derives etymologically from nascere (to
be born) thus closes the open circle of mans birth. 2.2. Declarations of rights must therefore be viewed
as the place in which the passage from divinely authorized royal sovereignty to
national sovereignty is accomplished. This passage assures the exceptio of life in
the new state order that will succeed the collapse of the ancien rgime. The fact
that in this process the subject is, as has been noted, transformed into a citizen
means that birth which is to say, bare natural life as such here for the first time becomes (thanks to a
transformation whose biopolitical consequences we are only beginning to discern today) the immediate bearer of
sovereignty. The principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty, which were separated in the ancien rgime (where birth
marked only the emergence of a sujet, a subject), are now irrevocably united in the body of the sovereign subject so that the
It is not possible to understand the national

and biopolitical development and vocation of the modern state in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries if one forgets that what lies at its basis is not man as a free
and conscious political subject but, above all, mans bare life, the simple birth that
as such is, in the passage from subject to citizen, invested with the principle of
sovereignty. The fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation such that there can be no interval of
separation [scarto] between the two terms. Rights are attributed to man (or originate in him) solely
to the extent that man is the immediately vanishing ground (who must never come to light as
such) of the citizen. Only if we understand this essential historical function of the doctrine
of rights can we grasp the development and Metamorphosis of declarations of rights
in our century. When the hidden difference [scarto] between birth and nation entered into a lasting crisis following the
foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted.
devastation of Europes geopolitical order after the First World War, what appeared was Nazism and fascism, that is, two properly
biopolitical movements that made of natural life the exemplary place of the sovereign decision. We are used to condensing the
essence of National Socialist ideology into the syntagm blood and soil (Blut und Boden). When Alfred Rosenberg wanted to express
his partys vision of the world, it is precisely to this hendiadys that he turned. The National Socialist vision of the world, he writes,
springs from the conviction that soil and blood constitute what is essential about Germanness, and that it is therefore in reference
to these two givens that a cultural and state politics must be directed (Blut und Ehre, p. 242). Yet it has too often been forgotten
that this formula, which is so highly determined politically, has, in truth, an innocuous juridical origin. The formula is nothing other
than the concise expression of the two criteria that, already in Roman law, served to identify citizenship (that is, the primary
inscription of life in the state order): ius soli (birth in a certain territory) and ius sanguinis (birth from citizen parents). In the ancien
rgime, these two traditional juridical criteria had no essential meaning, since they expressed only a relation of subjugation. Yet with
Citizenship now does not simply identify

a generic subjugation to royal authority or a determinate system of laws, nor does it
simply embody (as Chalier maintained when he suggested to the convention on September 23,1792, that the title of citizen
be substituted for the traditional title monsieur or sieur in every public act) the new egalitarian principle;
citizenship names the new status of life as origin and ground of sovereignty and,
the French Revolution they acquire a new and decisive importance.
therefore, literally identifies to cite Jean-Denis Lanjuinaiss words to the convention les membres du souverain,
the members of the sovereign. Hence the centrality (and the ambiguity) of the notion of
citizenship in modern political thought, which compels Rousseau to say, No
author in France... has understood the true meaning of the term citizen. Hence too,
however, the rapid growth in the course of the French Revolution of regulatory provisions specifying which man was a citizen and
which one not, and articulating and gradually restricting the area of the ius soli and the ius sanguinis. Until this time, the questions
What is French? What is German? had constituted not a political problem but only one theme among others discussed in
philosophical anthropologies. Caught in a constant work of redefinition, these questions now begin to become essentially political, to
the point that, with National Socialism, the answer to the question Who and what is German? (and also, therefore, Who and what
Fascism and Nazism are, above all,

Biopolitics and the Rights of Man 77 redefinitions of the relations between man and citizen, and become
fully intelligible only when situated no matter how paradoxical it may seem in
the biopolitical context inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of
rights.
is not German?) coincides immediately with the highest political task.
Human rights condition bare life producing the parameters of

ideal citizenship in which the subject of power is either
abandoned by or violently brought within the folds of the
political order.
Agamben 2k
[Giorgio prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ.
Minnesota Press, p. 18-21]
<This is not the place to retrace the history of the various international
organizations through which single states, the League of Nations, and later, the
United Nations have tried to face the refugee problem, from the Nansen Bureau for
the Russian and Armenian refugees (1921) to the High Commission for Refugees
from Germany (1936) to the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees (1938) to
the UN's International Refugee Organization (1946) to the present Office of the High
Commissioner for Refugees (1951), whose activity, according to its statute, does
not have a political character but rather only a "social and humanitarian"
one. What is essential is that each and every time refugees no longer
represent individual cases but rather a mass phenomenon (as was the case
between the two world wars and is now once again), these organizations as well
as the single states-all the solemn evocations of the inalienable rights of
human beings notwithstanding-have proved to be absolutely incapable not
only of solving the problem but also of facing it in an adequate manner.
The whole question, therefore, was handed over to humanitarian
organizations and to the police.
#The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and
blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of
the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of
life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her
book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem "The Decline of the NationState and the End of the Rights of Man."2 One should try to take seriously this
formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of
the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily
implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the
figure that should have embodied human rights more than any othernamely, the refugee-marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The
conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human
being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who
profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who
have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure
fact of being human.3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and
inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection
precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the
citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the
1789 Declaration des droits de 1'homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear
whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to
form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already
contained in the second.
That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nationstate for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very
least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has
always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to
naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is
inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
#It is time to cease to look at all the declarations of rights from 1789 to the present
day as proclamations of eternal metajuridical values aimed at binding the legislator
to the respect of such values; it is time, rather, to under-stand them according to
their real function in the modern state. Human rights, in fact, represent first of
all the originary figure for the inscription of natural naked life in the
political-juridical order of the nation-state. Naked life (the human being),
which in antiquity belonged to God and in the classical world was clearly distinct (as
zoe) from political life (bios), comes to the forefront in the management of the
state and becomes, so to speak, its earthly foundation. Nation-state means
a state that makes nativity or birth [nascita] (that is, naked human life) the
foundation of its own sovereignty. This is the meaning (and it is not even a
hidden one) of the first three articles of the 1789 Declaration: it is only because this
declaration inscribed (in articles 1 and 2) the native element in the heart of any
political organization that it can firmly bind (in article 3) the principle of sovereignty
to the nation (in conformity with its etymon, native [nano] originally meant simply
"birth" [nascita]). The fiction that is implicit here is that birth [nascita] comes
into being immediately as nation, so that there may not be any difference
between the two moments. Rights, in other words, are attributed to the
human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately
vanishing presupposition (and, in fact, the presupposition that must never come
to light as such) of the citizen.>
Human rights are the platform for the destabilization of the

resistance against state violence they are intrinsically tied
with security
Goldstein 7 [Daniel M. Goldstein is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, where he
has taught since 2005. A political and legal anthropologist, Prof. Goldstein studies the global meanings
and practices of security, democracy, and human rights. Human rights as culprit, human rights as
victim: rights and security in the state of exception, msm]
The discourses of security and human rights , in many ways perceived as inherently at odds with
one another, thus share a fundamental principle in the state of exception. At the heart of
both of these paradigms each in a sense seeking to define the permissible at the
conjuncture of state and civil society we find not the rule of law but an exception to the
rule, a back door through which limitless state violence and the abrogation of basic
rights re-enter supposedly democratic society uncontested. And while human rights has
received considerably more anthropological attention than security, both paradigms constitute a set
of practices and discourses that in an era of global terrorism, preventive war, and
the consolidation of neoliberal democracy are distinctly transnational in scope and
effect, transcending the territorial and discursive space of the nation-state and
jointly serving to define the landscape of political domination and resistance within
and across nation-states today. But, as the ethnographic discussion below suggests, the discourse of rights
is vulnerable to critique from the security paradigm: given the states practical failures to defend rights equitably
across social groups and classes, and the fear and insecurity generated by the permanent state of exception found
the quest for security the

ability of human rights to serve as a platform for resistance against state violence
becomes debilitated.
within neoliberal democracy, rights themselves come under scrutiny, and in
The legal defense of human rights is bankrupt- action through

the government breaks the body down into its rights, thus
stripping away their humanity. They become subjects of the
sovereign.
Amoore 08. Louise Amoore is with the Department of Geography at the University of Durham, Risk Before
Justice: When the Law Contests Its Own Suspension, Leiden Journal of International Law, 21, 2008
Tina
The claim to rights to privacy, bodily integrity, or human dignity, however, faces
particular difficulties in relation to risk technologies that dissect and fragment
the person into a series of risk factors. What happens to the legal subject when risk
visualizations extending from imaging devices such as Backscatter to the screened visual displays of risk
scores specifically divide and subclassify the body into differential traits,
characteristics, behaviours? What are the limits of the citizens obligation to reveal the elements, the
prosaic daily intimacy of their lives? As Engin Isin has argued compellingly, the neurotic citizen, once
reduced to a species body, actively strips herself down in order to calibrate itself
to the anxieties and dangers of the border.54 Thus, the very category of legal
subject, or indeed of citizen, is exposed in its full fragility. What happens to the body that
cannot be verified, that does not calibrate to the mobile norm, or is not recognized or is misrecognized under
the law once more

confronts the making of its own categories. If it recognizes only a a nonsubstantial, a thin personality, a public image that seriously mis-matches peoples
self-image,55 then legal intervention risks mirroring the stripping-down and
denuding strategies of the homeland security state itself: Human rights break
down the body into functions and parts and replace its unity with rights . . .
Encountering rights annihilates and dismembers the body: the right to privacy
isolates the genital area and creates a zone of privacy around it; free speech
severs the mouth and protects its communicative but not its eating function, while
free movement does the same with legs and feet, but offers no right of abode .56 Put
simply, the abstractions that are made in the defence of peoples rights to privacy,
just as in the digitized imaging of the body, risk recognizing only a facsimile of a
person. The reduction of a person to their rights recognizes, as Douzinas puts it,
only the man of the rights of man, who appears without differentiation or
distinction in his nakedness and simplicity, united with all others in an empty nature
deprived of substantive characteristics.57 Certainly the nakedness of the strippeddown man in the rights of man is not recognized in its full political difficulty by the
international law? In the contestation of risk technologies such as Backscatter, then,
continual redrawing of a legal boundary. It is this redrawing that runs through most of the current
legal appeals to privacy: the infringement on privacy must be proportionate to the security
threat; the collection and use of personal data must be transparent; subjects
must be informed if they are on a no-fly list.58 Where someone is left to make a claim for
recognition based on corporeal difference I am pregnant; I have a prosthetic limb; I have a mastectomy they
are rendered invisible, slipping away from the juridical domain .
Link - Immigrants
Extending rights to immigrants strips them of their ability to
fight the state of exception only a lack of identification leaves
them invulnerable to expulsion
Ellerman, 2009 - Professor of Political Science at the University of British
Colombia (Antje; Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State of
Exception; Presentation;
http://www.unc.edu/euce/eusa2009/papers/ellermann_02G.pdf; DOA: 7/16/15 ||
NDW)
The exercise of sovereignty over homo sacer is ultimately contingent on the states
knowledge of the individuals identity. As John Torpey argued, individuals who remain
beyond the embrace of the state necessarily represent a limit on its penetration
(1997, 224). In contemporary states, identity is the authoritative marker of exclusion and
inclusion, and, in the case of illegal migrants, a necessary condition for expulsion
from the national territory. Migrants whose name and nationality is unknown to the
state cannot be issued the identity and travel documents on which lawful
deportation to anothers states territory hinges. In other words, unidentifiable
migrants are constitutionally rather invulnerable to expulsion (van der Leun 2003, 108). As
liberal states have stepped up their deportation efforts, migrants, in particular
unsuccessful asylum seekers, have sought to escape the states reach by destroying
or hiding their identity documents. This act of resistance is far from exceptional. While
the following figures and illustrations all refer to immigration enforcement in Germany, they could easily apply to control contexts
elsewhere in the advanced democratic world. German interior officials estimate that, in the mid-1980s, immigration authorities had
to obtain travel documents for about 30 to 40 percent of all asylum seekers. By the year 2000, the population of undocumented
asylum applicants is estimated to have increased to 85 percent (Bhling 2001). The dilemma that an unknown identity poses to the
state is aptly captured by a deportation officers account of the resistance strategies of illegal migrants: People
have
started to realize, if they dont know who I am, they cant touch me .1 What is
important to note is that homo sacers ability to render herself unidentifiable is
ultimately contingent on bare life. The lives of illegal migrants and refugees in many
ways exemplify the condition of rightlessness that marks bare life. The
territorialization of life means that the refugee is put in a position where she lacks
apportioned rights but depends on the charity or goodwill of aid workers or the
police. The refugee is outside the law. Levels of innuendo and violence unthinkable to regular human beings,
citizens, are regularly perpetrated against the refugee or asylum seeker. The refugee as homo sacer describes
the condition of exclusion that those exempt from the normal sovereignty are
subject to. (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004, 41) While much has been written on the dehumanizing consequences of the
denial of membership, the absence of rights at the same time makes possible acts of
resistance such as identity-stripping. The vast majority of those who lead
politicized lives have entered into too many bureaucratic relationships with the
state to have the choice to render themselves unknowable. Liberal states infrastructurally
penetrate their societies far too deeply (Mann 1984) to allow for a pervasive creation of fog (Broeders and Engbersen 2007, 1593)
Thus, it is the rightlessness of the illegal migrant that is the source of her
capacity for resistance by means of identity-stripping. These self-stripping strategies
clearly exemplify the possibility of resistance in the state of exception . In the words of
by their citizens.
Broeders and Engbersen, [t]he strategy of noncooperation shows that many immigrants are not docile persons who fully cooperate
Many of them are difficult to manage by state officials, and they are
able to very effectively frustrate the administrative processing of return programs.
(2007, 1603)
with the authorities.
Reducing state immigration law increases xenophobic violence

Africa proves that immigrants are pushed into the state of
exception that makes them vulnerable and despised
Gordon 10
(Steven L., 2010 Migrants in a State of Exception Transience, Volume 1, Issue 1,

http://www2.hu-berlin.de/transcience/Vol1_Issue1_2010_3_21_gordon.pdf\\EJH)
The transition from a regime based on racial oppression and authoritarianism to a
multiracial democracy has produced a multitude of new democratic and social rights
for South Africas citizens. However, this transition has at the same time created a
deep conflict over the realisation of these rights. As the status of citizenship
becomes the key to economic and social resources, this status becomes the scene
of contestation. The shift in political power and status has produced a range of new
discriminatory practices as the struggle to realise social and economic rights
becomes more intense. One of the most prominent victims of this struggle is the
foreign national, particularly the black African foreign national. Emergent as an
especially vulnerable group in post-apartheid society, immigrants have become the
target of violence, exploitation and discrimination. As struggles to realise the social
and economic promises of the transition have deepened, incidences of
antiimmigrant violence have intensified. However, while local individuals and
communities are themselves accountable for this trend, this climate of xenophobia
has been shaped in large part by South Africas own immigration policy.
For more than a decade, immigration policy has permeated an internal logic among
state officials and law enforcement personnel that foreigners, especially black
foreign nationals from Africa, are not subject to the normal protections of
constitutional democracy and human rights obligations. Instead, migrants are
treated as an exception, and as such, are relegated to a space outside the workings
of the law. In effect, the isolation and persecution implemented by the current
immigration policy fuels the xenophobia witnessed among the general public.
Subsequently, the absence of constituted protection, and the anti-immigrant
sentiments of the law and policy provide the opportunity and justification for
xenophobic within post-apartheid South Africa.
This state of affairs produces a system that contributes to new economies of
corruption and violence existing either entirely outside the realm of state regulation
or more alarmingly through legitimate avenues. This study hopes to uncover and
discuss the forces shaping the state of exception, and to investigate the different
ways in which xenophobia has been contextualised and understood in postapartheid South Africa. The focus is on how migrants exist within legal spaces of
exception and how their extortion, exploitation and maltreatment are propagated
by the post-apartheid state. These spaces of exception, will be examined through
an analysis of the content and construction of relevant immigration legislation, with
reference to the logic of both contemporary immigration legislation and the
immigration regime by the different actors, notably the Department of Home Affairs
and law enforcement agencies. Finally, this state of exception will be discussed in
the light of the work of Carl Schmidt and Agambens analysis of sovereignty centred
on the notion of exception.
The affirmative plunges the immigrant into the state of

exception villigantes take the place of border security absent
the legal protection the state confers
Gordon 10

In other words, immigrants pose a supposed challenge to the unity and realisation
of the post-apartheid project through their criminality. Through the image of the
illegal, Peberdy advances the notion that the migrant is depicted as a criminal, a
threat to the body politic. In this lexicon, the foreigner becomes in the words of
Giorgio Agamben homo sacer12, a figure who threatens the body politic and has
therefore forfeited her constitutional rights.
The ambiguities and contradictions that imbue the Immigration Act have spawned a
legal vacuum regarding immigrants. The regulation of migrants rests less with the
law and lawmakers than with law enforcers. Central figures in the implementation of
immigration law are the legal authorities charged with its execution, including
police, border units, ad hoc special units, commandos and even vigilante-style
organisation13. The Immigration Act effectively justifies equipping many of these
law enforcement agencies with arbitrary powers to arrest, search, detain and deport
suspected illegal migrants without reference to normal constitutional or legal
protection14. The often contested legality of these migrants locates them in spaces
of exception that exist outside the law. Misago et. al. (2009:15), in their study of
xenophobia immediately following the anti-immigrant violence in 2008, note that
foreignness has come to be seen as a crime in itself by many local communities,
a perception that is not discouraged by the constant scapegoating of foreign
nationals in political rhetoric and the careless use of the label illegal immigrant in
the media.
Agamben (1998:110) argues that within these spaces, human beings have been
so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing
any act against them would no longer appear as a crime. However, the state of
exception logic of contemporary legislation is nowhere more evident than in the
very principle of the national deportation system. Agamben (1998) argues that the
socalled sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely unprotected
at the very moment it is no longer possible to characterise them as rights of the
citizens of a state. Detention and deportation is classified as a preventative
measure that allows individuals to be taken into custody on the basis that their
mere presence serves as a danger to the security and integrity of the state. This
can be witnessed in the series of anti-immigrant police campaigns that have been
launched in the first half of 2008. Landau and Segatti (2009:45), in their UNDP
research paper on the human development impacts of migration in South Africa,
noted that the heavy handed way in which police have conducted immigration
raids [particularly in recent years] has [...] led to a perception by perpetrators of
violence that they are assisting in removing illegals from the country. Reports of
excessive violence, sexual abuse, extortion and theft are commonplace, and police
have even been known to ignore or even destroy legal identity or refugee
documents.
Perhaps most disturbing is that these notions of exceptionism have justified
shifting from externalising immigration control and prevention towards internal
immigration control with monitoring at the community level. The Immigration Act
allows for the transferring administrative and policy emphasis from border
control to community and workplace inspection with the participation of
communities and the cooperation of other branches and spheres of government
(DHA 1999:1). In other words, detection of illegal migrants will take the form of
community participation in residential areas, workplaces, educational institutions
and other places where migrants access services. In this new system, the DHAs
responsibility for immigration law enforcement has been partly devolved, not only
to other law enforcement agencies but to civilians within the community. Such a
strategy relies heavily the cooperation of the public, leading some researchers to
argue that this strategy condones xenophobic practices among participant
communities (see Crush and Williams 2001; Crush and Dobson 2007; Misago et. al.
2009; and HSRC 2009). This 'state of exception' allows a culture of impunity to exist
with Landau and Segatti (2009:45) noting that "previous responses to xenophobic
violence include arresting and deporting the undocumented non-national victims of
violence who had sought refuge at police stations". Hence, this 'state of exception'
has been viewed as providing a tacit condoning of anti-immigrant violence in that
government action was/has assisted xenophobic citizens to forcibly remove 'illegal'
immigrants. This system potentially contributes to new economies of corruption and
violence existing either within or entirely outside the realm of state regulation. New
forms discrimination and anti-immigrant policing fuel and legitimise the creation of
spatially defined zones of exception. Within these zones, extortion, corruption, and
violence are becoming normalised in ways that ultimately undermine the concept of
universal rights articulated in South Africas commitment to constitutional, regional
and international conventions
The affirmatives inclusion of immigrants is part of a system of

contrast that utilizes undocumented immigrants in an attempt
to define what is and what is not a citizen of the law. Such
inclusion attempts always result in further violence
Astor, 2009 - PhD from the University of Michigan (Avi; Unauthorized
Immigration, Securitization and the Making of Operation Wetback; Palgrave

Journals, Sociological Abstracts; DOA: 7/16/15 || NDW)
Bare life is life that is excluded from the political order. The relation of bare life to
the political order, however, is not purely a relation of exteriority. Rather, bare life is
the "zone of indistinction" in which political life and natural life "constitute each
other in including and excluding each other" (p. 90). Citizenship, the lynchpin of the modern political
order, would be meaningless without the presence, whether real or imaginary, of noncitizens. But the role played by non-citizens in constituting the political order is
contingent on their exclusion from this order. Agamben sees this exclusive logic as
the fatal flaw of the modern nation-state, and attributes the myriad abuses suffered
by refugees and denaturalized subjects during the last two centuries to its
immanent unfolding. The utility of Agamben's insights derive from their uncanny ability to highlight both the constitutive
role that politically marginalized populations play in shaping the modern political order and the logic of their exclusion from this
They are not excluded simply by virtue of being non-citizens, refugees or

stateless persons, but by virtue of being the embodiment of pure life itself, which
has no place in the modern political order when decoupled from political existence.
order.
Scholars must be cautious, however, not to lose sight of the fact that Agamben's analysis of bare life emerged from his analysis of
specific European events, most notably the Holocaust, and therefore may miss unique aspects of the experiences of racism and
exclusion in non-European contexts. Hesse (2004), for instance, argues that Agamben's conception of racism is "Eurocentric," as it
defines racism as a "relation of exception" and consequently overlooks the ways in which racism is built into social institutions.
Taking the Holocaust as the ideal-typical case of biopolitical exclusion, Hesse writes, obscures other experiences of racist exclusion
that cannot be assimilated into this paradigm.
Link - Internet
The internet and the subtle surveillance conducted
through it is the states tool to extend their mechanisms
of discipline
Boyle 97 (James, Professor of Law at Washington College of Law at American
University Foucault In Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hardwired Censors
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1552&context=faculty_scholarship) Foronda
one of Foucault's most interesting contributions was

to challenge a particular notion of power, power-as-sovereignty, and to juxtapose
against it a vision of "surveillance" and "discipline."2 At the heart of this project was a
From the point of view of this Article,
belief that both our analyses of the operation of political power and our strategies for its restraint or limitation were
rather than the public

and formal triangle of sovereign, citizen, and right, we should focus on a
series of subtler private, informal, and material forms of coercion organized
around the concepts of surveillance and discipline. The paradigm for the idea
of surveillance was the Panopticon, Bentham's plan for a prison constructed in the shape of a
inaccurate or misguided. In a series of essays and books Foucault argued that,
wheel around the hub of an observing warden. At any moment the warden might have the prisoner under
Unsure when authority

might in fact be watching, the prisoner would strive always to conform his
behavior to its presumed desires. Bentham had hit upon a behavioralist equivalent of the
superego, formed from uncertainty about when one was being observed by the powers that be. The echo of
contemporary laments about the "privacy-free state" is striking. To this, Foucault
observation through a nineteenth century version of the closed-circuit TV.22 '
added the notion of discipline-crudely put, the multitudinous private methods of regulation of individual behavior
ranging from workplace time-and-motion efficiency directives to psychiatric evaluation."
out the apparent conflict
Foucault pointed
between a formal language of politics organized around relations between
of power
being exercised through multitudinous non-state sources, often dependent on
material or technological means of enforcement. Writing in a manner that managed to be
sovereign and citizen, expressed through rules backed by sanctions, and an actual experience
simultaneously coy and sinister, Foucault suggested that there was something strange going on in the coexistence
of these two systems: Impossible to describe in the terminology of the theory of sovereignty from which it differs
so radically, this disciplinary power ought by rights to have led to the disappearance of the grand juridical edifice
But in reality, the theory of sovereignty has continued to exist

not only as an ideology of right, but also to provide the organising principle
of the legal codes .... Why has the theory of sovereignty persisted in this fashion ... ? For two reasons, I
believe. On the one hand, it has been.., a permanent instrument of criticism of the
monarchy and all the obstacles that can thwart the development of a
disciplinary society. But at the same time, the theory of sovereignty, and the
organisation of a legal code centered upon it, have allowed a system of right
to be superimposed upon the mechanisms of discipline in such a way as to
conceal its actual procedures .... 24 Foucault was not writing about the
Internet. He was not even writing about the twentieth century. But his words provide a good
starting place from which to examine the catechism of Internet inviolability . They
created by that theory.
are a good starting point precisely because, when viewed within the discourse of sovereign "commands backed by
threats" aimed at a defined territory and population, the Internet does indeed look almost invulnerable.
Things
look rather different when viewed from the perspective of a type of power
which is constantly exercised by means of surveillance rather than in a discontinuous
manner by means of a system of levies or obligations distributed over time [and which].... presupposes a tightly
knit grid of material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign." 25 What is more, there is a sense
in which the "system of right [is] superimposed upon the mechanism of discipline in such a way as to conceal its
actual procedures ... ,, 26 The jurisprudence of digital libertarianism is not simply inaccurate; it may actually
obscure our understanding of what is going on. Thus, even the digerati may find the analysis that follows of
interest, if only to see how far the Internet can be made to treat censorship as a feature not a bug, how far local
ordinances may reach in cyberspace, and how information's desire for freedom may be curbed.
Link - Law
The 1ACs belief in law based solutions simply perpetuates and
props up the state of exception
Newman 9 [Saul, PhD in Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, Deleuze and New Technology edited by
Mark Poster and David Savat, 2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb] Hebron ADN
It is here also that the logic of the exception must be considered. For Agamben, as well as for other theorists of sovereignty like
sovereignty is conditioned by the exception - that is, the ability of the

sovereign to stand inside and outside the law at the same time. In other words, in order to guarantee the
law, the sovereign is not bound by the law but stands outside it, having the power to
suspend it through a unilateral decision. In the words of Schmitt, the sovereign is 'he who decides on
the state of exception' (Carl Schmitt, cited in Agamben 2005: 1). The hidden secret of sovereignty, then,
is this radical indistinction between law and lawlessness, between politics and violence. However, what
was once the secret of political philosophy has now become explicit. The state of the exception has become
the rule. That is to say, the intensification of control and surveillance techniques, coupled with
Hobbes and Carl Schmitt,
practices of extra-judicial detention and governments thumbing their nose at constitutional checks and human rights norms,
suggests a normalisation of the state of exception. Governments in so called liberal

democracies are operating in an increasingly extra-judicial way; the state of
exception is becoming the dominant paradigm of politics today (Agamben 2005: 1-31). However, we
should be clear here that it is not simply that governments are acting illegally or outside the law as such: rather sovereignty and law
enter into a 'zone of indistinction' in which their limits become unclear - a kind of grey zone in which sovereignty appears as law and
law appears as sovereignty. For instance, the practice of extra-judicial detention is still authorised through legislation - but here the
law appears in the form of its withdrawal. At the same time, we see the excessive production of petty laws and restrictions that
characterises the societies of control, with governments working frenetically on their 'legislative agendas'. Both instances signify a
kind of crisis of the law - marked simultaneously by its absence and its overabundance:
the law, in other words, can no
longer protect us from sovereign power and operates
today simply as a vector for it. The

'war on terrorism', then, has the effect of intensifying social control measures, as well as revealing the sovereign state of exception
through which they are authorised. The 'war on terrorism' has to be seen as a kind of total and permanent war: a war whose real
purpose is not the defeat of some shadowy terrorist enemy - the figure of the terrorist is itself constituted through this war - but
rather the global control and regulation of populations. 8 Capitalist globalisation demands control, and this control is now articulated
and intensified through a permanent state of war. Here the promised freedom and deregulation of the global free market find its
ultimate answer in increased restrictions and surveillance. As Jean Baudrillard says: To the point that the idea of freedom, a new and
recent idea, is already fading from minds and mores, and liberal globalisation is coming about in precisely the opposite form - a
police state globalisation, a total control, a terror based on 'law-and-order' measures. Deregulation ends up in a maximum of
our understanding of
the society of control should include not simply the subtle technologies that Deleuze speaks of, but also the
whole panoply of control measures we see today : everything from the permanent
detention of terrorist suspects, to the heightened policing of national borders, forms
a new paradigm of power and a new logic of politics that must be critically analysed.
constraints and restrictions, akin to a fundamentalist society. (Baudrillard 2002: 32) Therefore
The affirmative team is starry-eyed but ignorant- passing

legislation to limit domestic surveillance and decrease
government power just legitimizes law as a practice, which
results in a more malicious form of regulation.
Miller and Rose 8 [Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose Governing the Present, Political Power beyond the
State: Problematics of Government. Pgs 59-60. <APY>]
Liberalism, in this respect, marks the moment when the dystopian dream of a totally administered society was abandoned, and
government was confronted with a domain that had its own naturalness, its own rules and processes, and its own internal forms of
self-regulation (Foucault 1986). As Graham Burchell has pointed out, liberalism disqualifies the exercise of governmental reason in
the form of raison d'etat, in which a sovereign exercised his totalizing will across a national space (Burchell 1991). Power is
confronted, on the one hand, with subjects equipped with rights that must not be interdicted by government. On the other hand,
government addresses a realm of processes that it cannot govern by the exercise of sovereign will because it lacks the requisite
knowledge and capacities. The objects, instruments and tasks of government must be reformulated with reference to this domain of
civil society with the aim of promoting its maximal functioning.
The constitutional and legal codification and
delimitation of the powers of political authorities did not so much 'free' a private
realm from arbitrary interferences by power as constitute certain realms , such as those of
market transactions, the family and the business undertaking, as 'non-political', defining their form and
limits. Liberal doctrines on the limits of power and the freedom of subjects under the
law were thus accompanied by the working out of a range of new technologies of government,
not having the form of direct control by authorities, that sought to administer these
'private' realms, and to programme and shape them in desired directions. This does not mean that
liberalism was an ideology, disguising a state annexation of freedom. The inauguration of liberal societies in Europe accords a vital
role to a key characteristic of modern government: action at a distance (as noted in the previous chapter, we adapt this term from
Bruno Latour and Michel Calion: see Calion 1 986; Calion and Latour 1981; Calion et al. 1986; cf. Miller and Rose 1990 [reproduced
Liberal mentalities of government do not conceive of the

regulation of conduct as dependent only upon political actions: the imposition of
law; the activities of state functionaries or publicly controlled bureaucracies; surveillance and discipline by an
all-seeing police. Liberal government identifies a domain outside 'politics', and
seeks to manage it without destroying its existence and its autonomy. This is made possible through
as chapter 2 of this volume]).
the activities and calculations of a proliferation of independent agents, including philanthropists, doctors, hygienists, managers,
planners, parents and social workers. And it is dependent upon the forging of alliances. This takes place, on the one hand, between
political strategies and the activities of these authorities and, on the other, between these authorities and free citizens, in attempts
to modulate events, decisions and actions in the economy, the family, the private firm, and the conduct of the individual person.
Appeals to the law authorize a militaristic world that

culminates in necro political destruction. Our only hope is
mass movement to rise up collectively against an oppressive
government.
Gregory 11 The everywhere wargeoj_426 238..250 DEREK GREGORY Department of Geography, University
of British Columbia, 217-1984 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2 E-mail:
derek.gregory@geog.ubc.ca This paper was accepted for publication in May 2011 Tina
The invocation of legality works to marginalise ethics and politics by making

available a seemingly neutral, objective language: disagreement and debate then
become purely technical issues that involve matters of opinion, certainly, but not
values. The appeal to legality and to the quasi-judicial process it invokes thus
helps to authorise a widespread and widening militarisation of our world. While I think it
is both premature and excessive to see this as a transformation from governmentality to militariality (Marzec
2009), I do believe that Foucaults (2003) injunction Society must be defended has been transformed into an
unconditional imperative since 9/11 and that this involves an intensifying triangulation of the planet by legality,
biopolitics, one of the central projects of late modern

war, requires a legal armature to authorise its interventions, and that necropolitics
is not always outside the law. This triangulation has become such a commonplace and provides such an
security and war. We might remember that
established base-line for contemporary politics that I am reminded of an interview with Zizek soon after 9/11
the new wars of the

twenty-first century would be distinguished by a radical uncertainty: it will not even
be clear whether it is a war or not (Deich- mann et al. 2002). Neither will it be nor is it clear
where the battlespace begins and ends. As I have tried to show, the two are closely connected. For
this reason I am able to close on a less pessimistic note. As I drafted this essay, I was watching events unfold on
the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities, just weeks after similar scenes in Tunisia. I
hope that the real, lasting counterpoint to 9/11 is to be found in those places, not in
Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq. For those events show that freedom and democracy cannot
be limited to the boastful banners of military adventurism, hung from the barrels of
guns or draped across warships, and that ordinary people can successfully rise up
against autocratic, repressive and corrupt regimes: including those propped up for
so long by the United States and its European allies. Perhaps one day someone will
be able to write about the nowhere war and not from Europe or North America.
which for him marked the last war of the twentieth century when he predicted that
Attempts to balance security and privacy only serve to justify

the state. The Law and legal reforms are constantly
transformed and will always articulate normative assumptions
about the world.
Krasmann 12 Laws knowledge: On the susceptibility and resistance of legal practices to security
matters Susanne Krasmann University of Hamburg, Germany Theoretical Criminology 16(4) 379 394 The
Author(s) 2012 sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav p380-381 Tina
problems in the relationship between law and security government within

this debate form a point of departure of critical considerations; emergency
government today, rather than facing the problem of gross abuses of power,
has to deal with the persistent danger of the exceptional becoming normal (see Poole,
2008: 8). Law gradually adjusts to what is regarded as necessary .3 Hence, law not only
constrains, but at the same time also authorizes governmental interference.
Furthermore, mainstream approaches that try to balance security and liberty are
rarely able, or willing, to expose fully the trade-offs of their normative
presuppositions: [T]he metaphor of balance is used as often to justify and defend
changes as to challenge them (Zedner, 2005: 510). Finally, political responses to threats
never overcome the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies any decision
addressing future events. To ignore this uncertainty, in other words, is to ignore the political moment any
such decision entails, thus exempting it from the possibility of dissent. Institutional arrangements that
Traditional
enforce legislative control and enable citizens to claim their rights are certainly the appropriate responses to the
concern in question, namely that security gradually seizes political space and transforms the rule of law in an
establish political spaces of dispute and provide sticking points

against all too rapidly launched security legislation, and thus may foster a culture
of justification, as David Dyzenhaus (2007) has it: political decisions and the exercise of state
power are to be justified by law, in a fundamental sense of a commitment to the
principles of legality and respect for human rights (2007: 137). Nonetheless, most of
these accounts, in a way, simply add more of the same legal principles and
institutional arrangements that are well known to us. To frame security as a public good
inconspicuous manner. They
and ensure that it is a subject of democratic debate, as Ian Loader and Neil Walker (2007) for example demand, is a
promising alternative to denying its social relevance. The call for security to be civilized, though, once again
echoes the truly modern project of dealing with its inherent discontents. The limits of such a commitment to legality
and a political culture of justification (so termed for brevity) will be illustrated in the following section. Those
normative endeavours will be challenged subsequently by a Foucauldian account of law as practice. Contrary to the
idea that law can be addressed as an isolated, ideal body and thus treated like an instrument according to
Law
is susceptible, in particular to security matters. As a practice, it constantly transforms
itself and, notably, articulates its normative claims depending upon the forms of
knowledge brought into play. Contrary to the prevailing debate on emergency government, this
normative aspirations, the present account renders laws reliance on forms of knowledge more discernable.
perspective enables us, on the one hand, to capture how certain forms of knowledge become inscribed into the law
in a way that goes largely unnoticed.
Government is the reason biopower exists

Nadesan, 08 (Majia Holmer, professor of communication in the School of Social and
Behavioral Sciences in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences,
Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life, https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=QEqTAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%22economic+security
%22+and+biopower+and+agamben&ots=iSmmUdVRPC&sig=c0GAKJJxPEdjnZJV7BjudTumx
H4#v=snippet&q=biopower%20and%20government&f=false)//BW
Foucault contended that the emergence of the early modern liberal state depended
upon the institution of more diffuse, but ultimately more pervasive, forms of
government that slowly replaced the authoritarian and repressive power of the
feudal sovereign. In the premodern eraprior to the development of the modern

statepower was largely localized in the corporeal body of the sovereign monarch,
who exercised his or her will absolutely on those within his or her scope of
execution, or territory, in the form of the power of life and death (Foucault, 2003b).
Foucault observed: it is at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he
exercises his right over life (Z003b, p. 240), However, sovereign power was subtly
transformed across time with the development of the modern state through three
important developments. First, state and sectional interests motivated by security
and wealth extended governable spaces," beginning in the sixteenth century but
particularly in the late eighteenth century. Second, the development of new ways of
thinking about governmentprincipally in relation to juridical administration, the
states appropriation of pastoral power over the administration of population, and
curtailment of sovereignty over political economyaltered the nature and
operations of societal control and power leading ultimately to more diffuse, but
simultaneously permeating, technologies of government. Third, these changes
realigned sovereignty around the power and the right to make live and let die "
(2003h, p. 241) as sovereignty became entwined with biopower, Foucaults
genealogy of the transformation from sovereignty to government began by
exploring how sovereignty and political rule started to he theorized in political
philosophy. In particular, Foucault was interested in the development of rationalities
of government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that articulated the
responsibilities and modes of conduct appropriate for sovereign and patriarchal
authorities in the context of the evolution of the early modern state. Foucault
specifically focused on how seventeenth century texts on the art of government
created lines of continuity between the government of the family and the
government of the state, These lines of continuity addressed the twin problem of
maximizing population-wealth, a dilemma seen as vital for securitizing the
territorially delimited nation and central to the administrative practices of police.
Accordingly, Foucault described how the rationalities of government developed
during the seventeenth century included (a) the art of self- government, connected
with morality; (h) the art of properly governing a family, which belongs to
oeconomy; and (c) the science of ruling the state" (1979b, p. 9). Foucault read
these seventeenth-century texts as articulating a continuum linking the diverse
forms of government. Foucault used the term police to describe the downwards
line, which transmits to individual behavior and the running of the family the sample
principles as the government of the state {1979b, pp. 9-10). In contrast, the proper
training of the sovereignhis pedagogyensures the upward continuity of the arts
of government.
Governmental action fails to solve for the biopower of the

sovereign
Lemke 13, (Thomas, sociologist and social theorist, Foucault, Politics, and
Failure A Critical Review of Studies of Governmentality, Foucault, Biopolitics, and

Governmentality, http://www.divaportal.org/smash/get/diva2:615362/FULLTEXT03.pdf)//BW
Studies of governmentality distance themselves from realist sociology and from
sociologies of rule that study the ways in which rule is actually accomplished . By
contrast, work on governmentality focuses on the projects and programs of government, on rationalities and
technologies rather than on their outcomes and effects.28 This self-understanding parallels Foucaults explicit
interest in the lectures on governmentality in investigating the art of governing, that is to say, the reasoned way of
governing best and, at the same time, reflection on the best possible way of governing or governments
consciousness of itself.29 Taking up this line of investigation, studies of governmentality have analyzed
mentalities of rule.30 This does not mean that the research has focused on ideal types and normative
interpellations. Rather, studies of governmentality have examined governmental programs as empirical facts,
insofar as they shape and transform the real by providing specific forms of representing and intervening in it. While
programs
have been analyzed that has given rise to a number of problems . First, some authors have
it has rarely been disputed that studies of governmentality focus on programs, it is the way such
tended to treat programs as closed and coherent entities, as achievements and accomplishments rather than as
projects and endeavors. They have often explicated in what ways programs have successfully obscured political
Governmental programs were often depicted

as totalizing and powerful, while contestation remains residual and marginal . However,
alternatives, obstructing resistance and opposition.
opposition and struggles do not only take place in an interval between programs and their realization; they are
not limited to some kind of negative energy or obstructive capacity. Rather than distorting the original plans,
they are instead always-already part of them, actively contributing to compromises, fissures and
incoherencies constitutive of such programs. Thus, an analytics of government must take into account the
breaks or gaps interior to programsviewing them not as signs of their failure but as the very condition of their
existence.31 There is a second tendency in the governmentality literature that contrasts and complements the first.
regarding government as a permanently

failing operation.32 Failure stands here for the collision between program and reality .
Many authors have stressed the importance of failure,
While this reading rightly subverts the idea of a closed and coherent program or idealized schemein the stress
that it places on the fragility and the dynamic aspect of governmentthe focus on failure is nonetheless somewhat
ambivalent. As Pat OMalley remarks, failure is not an intrinsic property of an event so much as it is a property of a
program. To think in terms of failure puts the emphasis on the status of the collision from the programmers
While failure points to the

incompleteness and contingencies of governmental programs, it inadvertently
reduces the role of opposition, struggle and conflict to that of obstruction and
refusal. For many studies of governmentality contestation is not part of the programs and its role remains
viewpoint, and consequently reduces resistance to a negative externality.33
purely negative and limited to resistance. As a consequence, the constructive (and not only obstructive) role of
struggles, and the ways in which opposition and rule interact, tend not to be analyzed.34 Thus it seems the focus
on failure is insufficient. To contrast rationalities and technologies of government does not trace any clash between
program and reality, the confrontation of the world of discourse and a field of practices. The relations between
rationalities and technologies, programs and institutions, are much more complex than a simple application or
transfer. The difference between the envisioned aims of a program and its actual effects does not refer to the
distance between the purity of the program and the messy reality, but, rather, to different layers of reality. To
capture this dynamic relationship, it might be useful to take into account Foucaults insistence on the strategic
In contrast to many studies of governmentality, Foucault not only

shows that government fails or how it gives rise to unintended effects . Moreover
he takes into account that actors respond to changing outcomes, calculating and
capitalizing upon them and integrating them into their future conduct .35 Let me illustrate
character of government.
this through an example Foucault provides in Discipline and Punish, namely the failure of the prison system, which
produced delinquency as an unintended effect. In his genealogy of the prison Foucault does not confront program
and reality, nor does he frame the problem in terms of functionality. The institutionalization of the prison in the
nineteenth century produced an entirely unforeseen effect which had nothing to do with any kind of strategic ruse
on the part of some meta- or trans-historic subject conceiving and willing it. This effect was the constitution of a
delinquent milieu [...]. The prison operated as a process of filtering, concentrating, professionalizing and
circumscribing a criminal milieu. From about the 1830s onward, one finds an immediate re-utilization of this
unintended, negative effect within a new strategy which came in some sense to occupy this empty space, or
transform the negative into a positive. The delinquent milieu came to be re-utilized for diverse political and
economic ends, such as the extraction of profit from pleasure through the organization of prostitution. This is what I
Emphasizing the strategic

dimension of government allows the focus to be placed on the conflicts and
contestations advanced against the very technologies and rationalities constituting
governmental practices. Political struggles cannot be confined to the expression of a contradictory logic or
call the strategic completion (remplissement) of the apparatus.36
an antagonistic relation; they have their own dynamics, temporalities and techniques.37 With due focus on the
governmentshoning in specifically upon their

failures and shortcomings what becomes possible is the,
circumventing of any functionalist bias. If contestation is limited to the refusal of programs,
parasitic relationship38 of
then the following question arises: what exactly does failure mean? Since the criteria of judging both failure and
success are an integral part of rationalities, they cannot be regarded as external yardsticks. In fact, the success of
a program is no guarantee of its continuation, since success might eventually abolish the material foundations or
preconditions for a given program, making it redundant thereby. Conversely, the putative failure of a program
could mean its success, since it might give rise to strategic reinvestment. Put differently: a program might work
well because it does not work at all or only works badly, for example, by creating the very problems it is
supposedly there to react to. Therefore, the failure of the prison as a means to combat criminality might possibly
help to account for its raison d'tre.39
The governments neoliberal structure uses biopower to

manipulate the people into following artificial policies
guarantees cooption

The distinction among Foucaultian concepts such as governmentality, biopower,
discipline, and neoliberalism outlined above may help to clarify previous analyses of
environmental governance within a Foucaultian frame, in which various of these
concepts are commonly conflated. For instance, in the introduction to their edited
volume Violent environments, a political ecology critique of environmental security
scholarship, Peluso and Watts (2001) describe governmentality and disciplinary
power as interchangeable concepts (indeed, their index lists the terms
interchangeably as well) (see also Neumann 2001; Sundar 2001 in that volume).
Conversely, Li (2007: 5) distinguishes discipline and governmentality yet conflates
the latter with biopower, writing that "the concern of government is the well-being
of populations at large". Others describe governmentality and biopower
interchangeably as well (Luke 1999a, 1999b; Rutherford 1999). Li also conflates
disciplinarity and neoliberalism in her discussion of biopower, observing that
"government operates by educating desires and configuring habit s" while quoting
Bentham to describe governmentality as "artificially arranging things so that
people, following their own self-interest, will do as they ought" (2007: 5). Still
others, by contrast, distinguish disciplinary and neoliberal governmentalities yet
conflate the former with biopower, describing biopower as the opposite of neoliberal
forms of influence (Bckstrand & Lvbrand 2005; Oels 2005). These conflations are
understandable, given that much of Foucault's discussion of these various terms
occurs only in his most recently-released work. The larger context surrounding his
famous Governmentality lecture only became available to Anglophone readers in
2007. Similarly, 2003 first saw the English-language publication of Foucault's earlier
(1976-1967) lecture series Society must be defended (2003), in which he clearly
distinguishes among sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopower. In addition,
in that work, Foucault suggests the possibility of articulating sovereignty and
biopower. In his Biopower lectures, first available in English in 2008 (although
commentary on the original audio recordings of these lectures dates back to at least
2001; see Lemke 2001), Foucault clearly describes neoliberalism as a possible
vehicle for the exercise of biopower as well. In addition to disciplinary and neoliberal
governmentalities, Foucault (2008) also introduces two additional arts of
government into his equation in the Biopolitics lectures. One involves the direct
exercise of sovereign power through the construction and enforcement of codified
rules. While in his lecture series of the previous year, Foucault (2007) seemed to
describe governmentality as opposed to sovereign rule, as noted above, in his
Biopolitics talks Foucault describes sovereign power as a form of governmentality in
its own right, aimed at the rational governance of a territory through compelling
subjects' obedience to sovereign will by direct threat of punishment (2008: 312).

While these first three governmentalities are all seen to operate on principles of
calculation and rationality, Foucault's fourth governmentality is different, what he
calls the 'art of government according to truth', that is, 'the truth of religious texts,
of revelation, and of the order of the world' (2008: 311). In this approach, authority
and prescriptions for appropriate behaviour derive not from rules, norms, or even
incentives but rather from the claim that such prescriptions accord with the
fundamental nature of life and the universe (Foucault's main contemporary example
of this approach is Marxism). Foucault, of course, recognises that these different
governmentalities, while distinct, are not mutually exclusive, but may coexist in any
given context, alternately conflicting or acting in concert. For instance, neoliberal
governmentality could be seen as reliant upon certain disciplinary techniques to
facilitate its operation. That is, disciplinary governmentality would be necessary to
construct the rational actors upon which neoliberal governmentality would then
operate by inculcating subjects' self-perceptions as self-interested, competitive
individuals through such mechanisms as schools and sports leagues encouraging
these types of behaviours. The various techniques that Martin (1994) describes as
serving to encourage workers to embrace the uncertainties of a 'flexible' neoliberal
global economy (e.g., adventure ropes courses) can be seen as examples of
disciplinary governmentality in service of neoliberalism as well. Similar
complimentarity could be found among other governmentalities. On the other hand,
different governmentalities may conflict as well, leading to debate concerning the
proper approach to governance within a given situation. In short, Foucault (2008:
313) suggests that In the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a
series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each
other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of
government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of
government according to the rationality of economic agents, and more generally
according to the rationality of the governed themselves.
Link - Legal Protections

Legal protections are a sovereign regulation of life that is the
foundation of modern politics. Life under the sovereign is life
stripped of value and that may be killed with impunity
*gendered language under erasure.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford UP, p. 87-89)

<4.1. "For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign
power was the right to decide life and death." Foucault's statement at the end
of the first volume of the History of Sexuality (La volonte, p. 119) sounds perfectly
trivial. Yet the first time we encounter the expression "right over life and death" in
the history of law is in the formula vitae necisquepotestas, which designates not
sovereign power but rather the unconditional authority [potesta] of the pater over
his sons. In Roman law, vita is not a juridical concept but instead indicates either the
simple fact of living or a particular way of life, as in ordinary Latin usage (in a single
term, Latin brings together the meaning of both zoe and bios). The only place in
which the word vita acquires a specifically juridical sense and is transformed into a
real terminus technicus is in the very expression vitae necisque potesta . In an
exemplary study, Yan Thomas has shown that que in this formula does not have a
disjunctive function and that vita is nothing but a corollary of nex, the power to kill
("Vita," pp. 5o8-9). Life thus originally appears in Roman law merely as the
counterpart of a power threatening death (more precisely, death without the
shedding of blood, since this is the proper meaning of necare as opposed to
mactare). This power is absolute and is understood to be neither the
sanction of a crime nor the expression of the more general power that lies
within the competence of the pater insofar as he is the head of the domus: this
power follows immediately and solely from the father-son relation (in the instant in
which the father recognizes the son in raising him from the ground, he acquires the
power of life and death over him). And this is why the father's power should not be
confused with the power to kill, which lies within the competence of the father or
the husband who catches his wife or daughter in the act of adultery, or even less
with the power of the dominus over his servants. While both of these powers
concern the domestic jurisdiction of the head of the family and therefore remain, in
some way, within the sphere of the domes, the vitae necisque potestas attaches
itself to every free male citizen from birth and thus seems to define the very model
of political power in general. Not simple natural life, but life exposed to death
(bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element.
The Romans actually felt there to be such an essential affinity between the father's
vitae necisque potestas and the magistrate's imperium that the registries of the ius
patrium and of the sovereign power end by being tightly intertwined. The theme of
the pater imporiosus who himself bears both the character of the father
and the capacity of the magistrate and who, like Brutus or Manlius Torquatus,
does not hesitate to put the treacherous son to death, thus plays an
important role in the anecdotes and mythology of power. But the inverse
figure of the father who exerts his vitae necisque potestas over his magistrate son,
as in the case of the consul Spurius Cassius and the tribune Caius Flaminius, is just
as decisive. Referring to the story of the latter, who was dragged down from the
rostra by his father while he was trying to supersede the authority of the senate,
Valerius Maximus defines the father's potestas, significantly, as an imperium
privatum. Thomas, who has analyzed these episodes, could write that in Rome the
patria potestaswas felt to be a kind of public duty and to be, in some way, a
"residual and irreducible sovereignty" ("Vita," p. 528). And when we read in a late
source that in having his sons put to death, Brutus "had adopted the Roman people
in their place," it is the same power of death that is now transferred, through the
image of adoption, to the entire people. The hagiographic epithet "father of the
people," which is reserved in every age to the leaders invested with sovereign
authority, thus once again acquires its originary, sinister meaning. What the
source presents us with is therefore a kind of genealogical myth of
sovereign power: the magistrate's irnperium is nothing but the father's
vitae necisque potestas extended to all citizens. There is no clearer way to
say that the first foundation of political life is a life that may be killed,
which is politicized through its very capacity to be killed.> <87-89>
Link - Mexico
Discourse of the Mexican narco-state under siege by cartels
leads to exceptional violence through racialized colonialism by
positioning Mexico as culturally inferior and in need of
development these representations reinforce violent
sovereign apparatuses of power which makes structural
violence and Mexican instability inevitable
Carlos, 2014 Junior Fellow with the School of Management and Labor Relations
at Rutgers, PhD Candidate in Political Science at UC Irvine (Alfredo; Mexico Under

Siege: Drug Cartels or U.S. Imperialism?; Latin American Perspectives Volume 41
Number 2; DOA: 7/12/15, SagePub || NDW)
According to major U.S. newspapers and policy makers, Mexico is currently waging a war on drugs.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (quoted in Dibble, 2010) described the situation
as starting to resemble an insurgency and compared it to Colombias crisis some two decades earlier. The
Los Angeles Times (February 19, 2009) sponsored a conference with the University of San Diegos Trans-Border Institute at which it
Regular updates on the drug war appear in U.S.

newspapers. For instance, on January 20, 2010, the Associated Press ran a story entitled 7 Bodies Linked to Drug Cartels
suggested that Mexico is under siege by drug cartels.
Found in Mexico; on March 19, CNN had one entitled Drug Criminals Block Roads in Mexico; and on June 23 the New York Daily
News announced, Mexican Drug Violence Nears Bloodiest Month, President Felipe Calderon Pleads for Countrys Support. A simple
Google News search will show that Mexican drugs, drug-related violence, and antidrug efforts are front and center in Mexico and the
Drug-related violence is not, however,

Mexicos foremost problem, and the reporting on it obscures the more serious and
immediate economic and social problems it faces. More important, it masks their origin in
U.S. economic foreign policy while providing justification for continued and future
U.S. paternalism and domination. The media and the government in the United
States have a long history of constructing and perpetuating this type of discourse
about Mexico. It is linked to discourses surrounding the colonization of the Americas,
the white mans burden, the extermination of the native population, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican-American War,
racial segregation in the United States, and prejudice against immigrants . While the current discourse regarding
United States and have become the primary issue between the two countries.
Mexico is different in that Mexicans themselves are concerned about what is going on, the way it is shaped and manipulated by the
media reflects the earlier ones. Gilbert Gonzalez (2004: 7) suggests that the current understandings and representations of Mexico
The original discourse was

expressly linked to economic processes, and the same is true of the current drugrelated violence story. In that regard discourse can be and in this case is extremely powerful. Meta-Narratives
and Dominant Discourses Michel Foucault (19721977: 120) argues that discourse serves to make
possible a whole series of interventions, tactical and positive interventions of
surveillance, circulation, control and so forth. Discourses generate knowledge and truth, giving those
date back to the 1800s, when U.S. capital interests sought to penetrate Mexico.
who speak this truth social, cultural, and even political power. This power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of
objects and rituals of truth (Foucault, 1979: 194). For Foucault (19721977: 119), what makes power hold good, what makes it
accepted, is . . . that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. In essence,
power produces discourse that justifies, legitimates, and increases it . Similarly, Edward Said
(1994: 14), speaking in reference to literary discourse, says that literature as a cultural form is not just about literature. It is not
autonomous; rather, it is about history and politics. He says that literature supports, elaborates, and consolidates the practices of
empire. Television, newspapers, magazines, journals, books, advertisements, and the Internet all help construct stories, creating
cultures of us that differentiate us from them (Said, 1994: xiii). They all elaborate and consolidate the practices of empire in
Dominant discourses are

constructed and perpetuated for particular reasons. As Kevin Dunn (2003: 6) points out,
representations have very precise political consequences. They either legitimize or
delegitimize power, depending on what they are and about whom (Said, 1994: 16). Said asserts that a narrative emerges
multiple overlapping discourses from which a dominant discourse emerges.
that separates what is nonwhite, non-Western, and non-Judeo/Christian from the acceptable Western ethos as a justification for
imperialism and the resulting policies and practices and argues that discourse is manipulated in the struggle for dominance (36).
Discourses are advanced in the interest of exerting power over others; they tell a story that provides a
justification for action. For Said, there is always an intention or will to use power and
therefore to perpetuate some discourses at the expense of others . It is this intentionality that
makes them dangerous and powerful. As Roxanne Doty (1996: 2) suggests, through repetition they become regimes
of truth and knowledge. They do not actually constitute truth but become accepted
as such through discursive practices, which put into circulation representations that
are taken as truth. Dominant discourses, meta-narratives (master frames that are often unquestioned [see Klotz and
Lynch, 2007]), and cultural representations are important because they construct realities that are taken seriously and acted upon.
Cecelia Lynch (1999: 13) asserts that dominant
narratives do work even when they lack

sufficient empirical evidence, to the degree that their conceptual foundations call
upon or validate norms that are deemed intersubjectively legitimate . They establish
unquestioned truths and thus provide justification for those with power to act accordingly. They allow the production of specific
relations of power. Powerful social actors are in a prime position to construct and perpetuate discourses that legitimize the policies
they seek to establish. Narrative interpretations dont arise out of thin air; they must be constantly articulated, promoted,
legitimized, reproduced, and changed by actual people (Lynch, 1999). Social actors with this kind of power do this by what Doty
(1996) calls self-definition by the other. Said (1994: 52) suggests that the formation of cultural identities can only be understood
Western1 powers, including the

United States, have maintained hegemony by establishing the other: North vs.
South, core vs. periphery, white vs. native, and civilized vs. uncivilized are identities that have
provided justifications for the white mans civilizing mission and have created the
myth of a benevolent imperialism (Doty, 1996: 11; Said, 1994: 51). The historical construction of this other
contrapuntallythat an identity cannot exist without an array of opposites.
identity produces current events and policies (Dunn, 2003). Through constant repetition, a racialized identity of the non-American,
barbaric other is constructed, along with a U.S. identity considered civilized and democratic despite its engagement in the
Consequently, dominant discourses and metanarratives provide a veil for imperial encounters, turning them into missions of
salvation rather than conquests or, in Mexicos case, economic control (Doty, 1996). Dunn
(2003: 174) suggests that dominant discourses legitimize and authorize specific political
actions, particularly economic ones. Scholars, intellectuals, and academics also engage in the perpetuation of
discourses and participate in their construction. There is a large body of scholarly literature that
describes Latin America as a backward region that irrationally resists
modernization. Seymour Martin Lipset (1986), drawing on Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, portrays Latin
America as having different, inherently faulty and detrimental value systems
that lack the entrepreneurial ethic and are therefore antithetical to the systematic
accumulation of capital. A newer version of this theory is promoted by Inglehart and Welzel (2005), who focus on
oppression, exploitation, and brutalization of that other.
countries that allow self-expression and ones that do not. Howard Wiarda (1986) suggests that the religious history of Latin
America promotes a corporatist tradition that is averse to democratic and liberal values, asentiment more recently echoed by the
political scientist Samuel Huntington (1996). Along these same lines, Jacques Lambert (1986) argues that the paternalistic latifundia
the
discourse created by the modernization and development literature focuses on the
backward values of the other and becomes the Wests justification for the
continued underdevelopment of the region. These interpretations lead to partial,
misleading, and unsophisticated treatment of complex political and economic
dynamics, particularly in Latin America. They ignore the long history of colonization and imperialism. Several
(feudal-like) social structure of Latin America provides no incentive for self-improvement or mobility. Ultimately,
notable Latin American intellectuals have countered with a critique of the development literature through dependency theory and
Marxist theories of imperialism. Writing on underdevelopment, Andre Gunder Frank (1969) focuses on exogenous factors affecting
Latin American economic development, among them the penetration of capital into the region and the asymmetrical trading
relationships that were created. Celso Furtado (1986) expands this notion and writes about the international division of labor and
Latin Americas weakened position as the producer of primary raw materials for Europe and the United States. Fernando Henrique
domestic economic processes in Latin American

states emerged from this relationship of dependency. More notably Raul Fernandez and Jorge Ocampo
Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1979) suggest that the
(1974) argue that the Marxist theory of imperialism provides an explanation for the persistence of backwardness and identifies the
basic contradictions in Latin America as between imperialism and the Latin American nations. This Latin American scholarship, with
rich critiques of mainstream modernization theory, has been dismissed, however, because it comes from non-mainstream academic
and professional circles. Doty (1996: 164) views scholarship as an inventory in which non-Western scholarship is excluded because it
is not regarded as legitimate. While dependency theory and Marxist theories of imperialism were briefly allowed into the inventory in
the late 1980s and the 1990s, they quickly went out of fashion and are now excluded from the canon, easily dismissed and
ultimately illegitimate. Dale Johnson (1981) suggests that these theories were rejected for their determinismthe assumption that
Latin American nations had no agency in their own economic development. Others criticized them for assuming that economic
development in its neoliberal form was a positive goal and still others for providing no prescriptions for change or alternatives to
modernization. Scholars critical of modernization theories, including Theotnio dos Santos (1971) and Fernandez and Ocampo
(1974), addressed all of these critiques and argued that these theories were not in fact deterministic but, rather, merely sought to
highlight exogenous historical processes, including the penetration of industrialized capital, that had affected endogenous economic
and political dynamics in Latin America and led to the persistence of backwardness. Yet dependency theory and Marxist theories
of imperialism and their corresponding discourse remained marginalized, largely because the scholarship itself is not from an
There is an asymmetrical
relationship between scholars from the North (the United States) and scholars from
the South (Latin America, Africa, et al.) and even between white and nonwhite
(American Latino) scholars. The literature, while rich in analysis and highlighting critical issues, is read by many
industrialized society or from scholars in the mainstream of their disciplines.
Northern scholars from an impoverished, reductionist, and simplistic perspective. Discursive authorship is thus not equal, and clearly
Western representations exert hegemony by constructing discourses, representations, and narratives from underdeveloped regions
as illegitimate (Dunn, 2003). It is important, then, to understand and deconstruct discourses, unmasking their political and economic
The goal, as Lynch (1999) points out, is to expose the material and
ideological power relationships that underlie themin the current case, U.S.
imperialismand to examine counterhegemonic alternatives. The U.S. Discourse on
Mexico The original U.S. discourse on Mexico dates back to the 1800s, when Mexicans were depicted as an
uncivilized speciesdirty, unkempt, immoral, diseased, lazy, unambitious and
despised for being peons (Gonzalez, 2004: 8). This discourse set the stage for the creation
of what Gonzalez calls a culture of empire, in which the United States made a concerted
effort to dominate Mexico economically and subordinate it to U.S. corporate
interests (2004: 6). This narrative depicted the country as a huge social problem and its
people as inferior to Americans, and it continues to dominate U.S. understandings of
Mexico. Sometimes this is done with the help of Mexican politicians themselves, as in President Felipe Calderns
extension of the hegemonic discourse of the war on drugs. The problem with this contemporary
representation is that it oversimplifies the countrys complex political dynamics and
obscures what is really going on. Mexico is suffering much more from extreme
economic inequality, caused in large part by U.S. economic imperialism and capital
extraction (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank), than from
drug-related violence. The great migration that has occurred since 1994 has been the result of a decimated economy.
While some people may leave Mexico out of fear of violence, the vast majority of the millions of emigrants
have left because of the necessity to feed their families. The discourse about drugrelated violence detracts from the recognition of this fact. Media coverage of drug-related violence
motivations and consequences.
and other negative reporting about Mexico have steadily increased over the past 1015 years and skyrocketed in the recent past.
The Los Angeles Times, for example, has dedicated a web site to the series Mexico Under Siege: The Drug War at Our Doorstep. It
has reported, among other things, that President Caldern deployed 45,000 troops and 5,000 federal police to 18 states (Los
Angeles Times, February 3, 2010) and that there were 10,031 deaths from drug-related violence between January 1, 2007, and June
5, 2009 (Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2012). (One may question the reliability of these figures, given that on February 3, 2010, the
paper had reported 9,903 such deaths since January 2007 and that on August 18 of that year it had reported a total of 28,228.) As
far back as 1997, M. Delal Baer (1997: 138), the director of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, DC, suggested that skewed
coverage is just another example of how the U.S.

media, average Americans, and their representatives in Congress increasingly
subscribe to a tabloid view of Mexico . He asserted that drug and corruption stories have
increased every year in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, leaping from 338 in 1991, to 515 in
1996, and 538 during the first eight months of 1997 alone (138). This was 16 years ago; one can only imagine what the numbers
are today as the drug problem in Mexico is depicted more and more as a U.S. national security problem. The U.S. State Department
sent out travel warnings in 2009, 2010, and 2011 to all U.S. universities regarding spring-break travel to Mexico, cautioning them
about the increase in crime and spreading fear about Mexico (Gomez, 2010). The same was done with the outbreak of H1N1,
originally referred to as the swine flu. Within days of the outbreak Mexico was under pressure from the world community and
The
association of a disease named after swine with Mexico reinforced the dirty,
unkempt, and uncivilized representations that Gonzalez discusses . Lost on the majority
especially the United States to close down schools and heavily populated areas in order to avert the spread of the flu.
of the U.S. media and, consequently, on average Americans, however, was the fact that the outbreak originated in a town where the
Smithfield Corporation, an American company with massive hog-raising operations known to improperly handle its waste, had a
The CDCP (2010) reported that only around 11,000 people died
of the H1N1 virus between April through December of 2009, in comparison with the
average of 36,000 people dying in the United States each year of the regular
seasonal flu. If the H1N1 flu was such an epidemic, why was no one reporting on the
deaths from the regular seasonal flu in the United States, which were clearly more
numerous? A large portion of the U.S. Department of State web page on Mexico is dedicated to warning Americans about such
factory farm (Morales, 2009).
It currently advises citizens to delay

unnecessary travel to Mexico because of the drug war. One may expect this type of warning from an
crime, safety, security, and health issues (U.S. Department of State, 2011).
agency concerned with its citizens welfare, but it is disturbing when the negative narrative becomes common knowledge and is
The Joint
Operation Environment offering perspectives on future trends, shocks, contexts, and implications for future joint force
commanders and other leaders and professionals in the national security field. Part 3, Section C, of the report, entitled
Weak and Failing States, describes the usual suspects in this categoryin SubSaharan Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Discussing the
concept of rapid collapse, it asserts that while, for the most part, weak and
failing states represent chronic, long-term problems that allow for management
over sustained periods, the collapse of a state usually comes as a surprise, has a
rapid onset, and poses acute problems. It goes on to suggest that two large and
important states bear consideration for rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and
Mexico. The discussion of Mexico is as follows (U.S. Department of Defense, 2008: 35): The Mexican
included in government military strategic reports. In 2008 the U.S. Department of Defense published a report entitled
possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault
and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major
Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an

American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.
Among the many things that make this statement problematic is its simplification of
Mexicos political dynamics. First, it assumes that politicians, the police, and the
judiciary are separate from and therefore adversaries of criminal gangs and drug
cartels. Jorge Chabat (2002), a Mexican expert on drug trafficking and national security,
challenges this assumption, arguing that the drug cartels buy off politicians and are
imbedded in political structures and institutions. While the Mexican state has sought
to clean up its politics and provide more transparency, historically the political elite
and government technocrats have used their positions of power to increase their
wealth, turning a blind eye to illicit operations. The Department of Defense
statement is noteworthy because it goes on to lay the groundwork for potential military
intervention in the event that Mexico descends into chaos. The problem here, of
course, is who gets to define chaos. The Drug Enforcement Administration is
already preparing for such an event, maintaining a presence in Mexico (see Toro, 1999).
Representing Mexico as a potential failing state in the midst of violent anarchy
provides the U.S. justification for continued economic paternalism. The U.S. media
and government have become extremely effective in representing a strange and
threatening foreign culture for the American audience and thus manufacturing
consent as it is considered necessary for action in Mexico, whether it be further
neoliberal economic development or military intervention. It is therefore not surprising to see the
impact on the stability of the Mexican state.
rise in negative reporting parallel the time line of increased U.S. capital penetration into Mexico in the mid-1990s. Deconstructing
the Dominant Discourse Since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States has historically operated as if it had the moral high
ground in the international community. It has contrasted its supposed traditional commitment to human dignity, liberty, and self-
This American exceptionalism has been

used to legitimate its domination over other countries. The notion of world
responsibility is the rationale for its economic or military endeavors. Because of this, it may
determination with the barbaric brutality of the others (Said, 1994).
be instructive to look at its track record on some of the issues for which it criticizes other countries. Because the current negative
discourse about Mexico is constructed around crime, comparing crime statistics in the two countries is helpful in deconstructing it. In
2010 there were an estimated 23 million reported crimes of violence and/or theft in the United States. Of these 1,246,248 were
violent crimes,2 403 per 100,000 people, and of these 14,748 were homicides (U.S. Department of Justice, 2010a). A murder is
committed every 31 minutes (Watt, 2008). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1.35 million high school
students in 2009 were either threatened or injured with a weapon on school property at least once, while approximately 1.2 million
acknowledged having carried a weapon on school property (CDCP, 2009). In the 20072008 school year, a record 34 Chicago public
school students were killed (IOSCC, 2008). The proportion of prisoners to its population in the United States is at an all-time high,
with 1.6 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation in the world; 1 in every 31 adults is in some part of the criminal
justice system (U.S. Department of Justice, 2010b). This proportion of prisoners to the total population is six times the world average
(IOSCC, 2008). This snapshot does not include crimes committed or provoked by U.S. military aggression abroad.3 However, these
statistics clearly do not justify any assertion that the United States is a failing state. Yet such data and observations are used to
perpetuate a discourse that jumps to that conclusion about Mexico. In comparison, Mexicos rate of homicides per 100,000
inhabitants as recently as 2007 was 8.1 and has only risen in response to a heavy government crack-down in what Youngers and
Rosin (2005) call the cockroach effect. The most recent data suggest that in 2011 the rate was 23.7, still middling and actually low
compared with those of other Latin American nations (see Table 1). The United States, with a rate of 4.8, is barely better than
Uruguay and much worse than Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. Compared with other industrialized countries, it lags
Mexico
is far from being an extreme outlier. It is safe to say that there are many countries in Latin America that have
similar if not much more serious problems of crime and violence, while at the same time the United States faces
similar issues within its own borders. Yet, Mexico is scrutinized much more closely
and is the only one viewed with concern as a possible failing state. Furthermore, while
behind, closer to chaos. While proportionally more people are victims of homicide in Mexico than in the United States,
more people are killed in Mexico, more people kill themselves in the United States. Are we to conclude, then, that people in the
No one would argue that U.S. society is

disintegrating into chaos because a sizable number of its citizens want to end their
lives. Yet similar figures are used to arrive at this very conclusion when regarding
Mexico. Some argue that Mexico is scrutinized because it borders the United States in a post-9/11 world or because of
corruption or the ineffectiveness of the Mexican judicial system. And while these critiques have some merit, the negative
discourse that dominates is about the violence, not about Mexican corruption or
their ineffective institutions. If looked at historically, Mexicos violence problem has remained
relatively constant over the course of the past 25 years, while the negative
discourse has grown exponentially in this same time period. The condescending
discourse perpetuated in the United States makes it seem as though Mexico were
becoming uninhabitable, when in reality this is far from the case. While many residents do have
United States are more self-destructive or psychotic?
concerns about the violence and it has in fact affected tourism, there are still people in Mexico going about their daily lives. There is
a web site called The Truth about Mexico that is dedicated to making this very point. It was created by Americans who have moved
to Mexico to live but is now used by Mexicans as well to challenge the dominant discourse. One story, entitled Mexico Murder Rate
Reality Check, suggests that, according to the Mexican attorney general in 2009, the drug-related violence has scared away
tourists and prompted some commentators to warn that Mexico risks collapse . . . but the country registered about 11 homicides per
100,000 residents last year, down from 16 in 1997 (quoted in Brown, 2009). This was at the height of the negative reporting and
was still a decrease of 30 percent since 1997 at that point in time. An article regarding the U.S. State Departments spring-break
advisory by Frank Koughan (2009), a former CBS News 60 Minutes producer who has been living in Queretaro since 2006, suggests
that consumers of American media could easily get the impression that Mexico is a blood-soaked killing field, when in fact the bulk
of the drug violence is happening near the border. (In fact, one way of putting this would be that Mexico is safe as long as you stay
far, far away from the US.) While there may have been an increase in the numbers since 2009, the dominant discourse at the time
was at least as horrific as todays, even though the statistics show that between 1997 and 2009 homicide rates had actually fallen
There has also been strong public

pressure and civic engagement regarding the violence. One example is the Marcha por la Paz, a
and have since grown in proportion to the expansion of the war on drugs.
march led by the poet-journalist Javier Sicilia seeking to draw attention to the governments militaristic tactics for fighting
narcotrafficking, which have only increased and intensified the violence (Samano and Alonso, 2011). The march in 2011 attracted
tens of thousands of participants from 38 cities in different states in Mexico and from 26 other countries. Yet, the average television
viewer in the United States never hears about events like this or about the people who have been fighting to end the violence. Is
there drug violence in Mexico? Yes, but this does not make Mexico a failing state. While people are victims of drug violence in
Both
countries experience senseless violence that stems from complex societal and
political dynamics that cannot be easily simplified. It is essential that the dominant
narrative be deconstructed in order to see why such narratives are perpetuated to
begin with, which in the case of Mexico brings us back to continued economic
domination. Implications of the Dominant Discourse The importance of the drug-related violence story lies in its
masking the nature of U.S. involvement in Mexicos social and economic problems. It perpetuates a relationship of
imperialism between the United States and Mexico that manifests itself in NAFTA,
International Monetary Fund and World Bank lending policies, and direct
intervention in Mexicos sovereign internal politics disguised as economic
development and military assistance to help bring order to Mexico. Mexican politicians have
Mexico, in the United States they are also victims of drug, gang, or random violence and more recently of mass shootings.
bought the story and have been willing collaborators with economic development to help Mexico. Former President Carlos Salinas
de Gortari and his Institutional Revolutionary Party vigorously pursued NAFTA as a mechanism for injecting foreign capital into
Mexicos ailing economy (Castaeda, 1993). Jaime Serra, a former secretary of trade, and J. Enrique Espinoza, an economist formerly
on the council of economic advisers to the president of Mexico, have fervently proclaimed NAFTA a resounding success (Serra and
Espinoza, 2002a), pointing to increased foreign direct investment as evidence. However, free trade has led only to the enrichment of
a few monopolistic corporations in the United States while the economic situation of Mexicos people deteriorates (Robledo, 2006).
Gilbert Gonzalez and Raul Fernandez (2003: 54) argue that NAFTA is just one of the most recent examples of U.S. domination over
They describe
NAFTA as having two purposes: to guarantee a free hand to U.S. enterprises willing
and able to invest in Mexico to take advantage of that countrys cheaper wages
and to deny in various forms and degrees to other economic powers the advantage
Mexico and how it continues to misdevelop and tear apart the socioeconomic integrity of that society.
of operations in and exporting from Mexico. In effect this means continuing Mexicos long history as a U.S.
economic colony, providing cheap labor, raw materials, and manufactures for consumption in the United States while restricting
Mexicos access to the U.S. market. NAFTA called for the privatization of state companies and the flexibilization of the labor market
through restrictions on wage increases, curtailment of vacations and sick-leave time, extensions of workweek, and increased
This process was supposed to lead to an

opening for investment, economic growth, and access to diversified export markets
for Mexico. The impact of NAFTA on Mexican agriculture has been greater because
agricultural production was once the foundation of Mexicos national development.
management powers (Gonzalez and Fernandez, 2003: 55).
State investment in agriculture was reduced by 95.5 percent and credit made available to the rural sector by 64.4 percent
(Quintana, 2004: 251). Disinvestment in Mexican agriculture has meant that agricultural enterprises are unable to compete with
subsidized U.S. commodities. The United States maintains domestic subsidies that allow it to export corn at 30 percent below the
cost of production, wheat at 40 percent below, and cotton at 57 percent belowa practice known as asymmetrical trading and
dumping and deemed illegal in world commerce (Fernandez and Whitesell, 2008). Serra and Espinoza (2002b) suggest that this is
a nonissue because of NAFTAs tariff-rate quota system, which charges tariffs for exceeding the import quotas. However, Cavanaugh
and Anderson (2002) point out that under NAFTA the tariffs were mandated to be phased out in 2008, and even while they were
intact the Mexican government declined to collect them. The outcome has been the disappearance of profitability for Mexican
national agricultural producers. Five years after NAFTA, corn had lost 64 percent of its value and beans lost 46 percent while at the
same time prices of staple consumer goods rose 257 percent (Quintana, 2004: 256). Despite these figures the Office of the U.S.
Trade Representative (OUSTR, 2006) points to the growth of Mexican agricultural exports to the United States by US$5.6 billion
during the past 12 years as proof of the success of NAFTA. However, producers continue to abandon agricultural endeavors en
masse, vacating 1.6 million previously cultivated hectares (3.95 million acres) in the first eight years of NAFTA (Quintana, 2004:
256). Peter Goodman (2007) tells the story of Ruben Rivera, who sat on a bench in a forlorn plaza, rather than working on his sevenacre farm. He used to grow tomatoes and onions, hiring 150 workers to help at harvest. Now he doesnt even bother to plant. He can
buy onions in the supermarket more cheaply than he can grow them. A crop of tomatoes yields less than the taxes. He lives off the
$800 sent home monthly by his three sons, who run a yard work business in Macon, Ga. Stories like this have become all too
common. As Quintana (2004: 256) puts it, One of the historically great agricultural civilizations of the world [now places] its food
supplies in foreign hands. Mexico now imports 95 percent of its edible oils, 40 percent of its beef, pork, and other meat products, 30
percent of its corn, and 50 percent of its rice. NAFTA has resulted in the complete inability of the Mexican nation to produce the
food required to feed its own people (Gonzalez and Fernandez, 2003: 57). In the end, free trade has made Mexico a completely
NAFTA was
never meant as a development policy for Mexico or a policy to help cure its social
ills. It was a policy of U.S. economic expansion for the purpose of deepening U.S.
hegemony while allowing the continued extraction of capital. It was promoted by
huge U.S. multinational corporations as benevolent economic development to allow
them to integrate themselves into the Mexican market without having to deal with
that countrys requirements and legislative issues. Mark Weisbrot (2004) of the Center of Economic
open market for U.S. products while U.S. producers are guarded against Mexicos products by subsidies and tariffs.
Policy Research in Washington suggests that, had Mexicos economy grown at the same pace from 1980 to the present as it did in
the period from 1960 to 1980, today it would have the same standard of living as Spain. . . . To have 25 years of this rotten
It is hard to make the case that

Mexicos aggregate economic performance would have been even worse without
NAFTA. Not only has NAFTA not accomplished the growth propulsion its supporters
promised in Mexico but it has had devastating social costs for Mexican society.
Poverty in rural areas has risen significantly from 37 percent in 1992 to 52.4 percent in 2002, with
86.2 percent of rural inhabitants living in poverty (Quintana, 2004: 257). NAFTA has left nearly half of
economic performance, youd have to conclude something is wrong. . . .
Mexicos 106 million people, 51 percent of the total population in 2010, living in poverty, causing the mass displacement of workers
and forced migration (Dickerson, 2006; World Bank, 2013). Since 1994 an average of 600 peasants a day (at least 1.78 million
people) have migrated from rural areas, many to northern cities along the U.S.-Mexican border and others into the United States
Migration means family disintegration and the destruction of the

social fabric of Mexico. Many of these jobless displaced workers will try their luck at crossing a militarized border into
(Quintana, 2004: 258).
the United States. Peter Goodman (2007), interviewing Luz Maria Vazquez, a tomato picker from Jalisco, reports that six of her
brothers and sisters are in the United States, most of them without papers. More than 11 million Mexicans (a conservative estimate)
now live in the United States without documents, and 7 million of them immigrated after NAFTA, between 1994 and 2005 (Passel,
2006).4 Clearly the politics in Mexico are much more complex than the drug story in the United States makes them out to be.
The dominant discourse about Mexico in the United States has a long history
and has affected the way Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Chicanos are viewed and treated.
While much has changed since the 1800s, the current discourse about Mexico serves the same basic purpose. The
United States legitimizes its expansionist economic foreign policy in terms of the burden
of civilizing, uplifting, and promoting development in less developed countries,
beginning with its neighbor to the south (Gonzalez, 2004: 185). It employs a foreign policy that
advances its imperialist interests. U.S. government and media agencies generate a
representation of Mexico that has provided avenues for very specific courses of
action. Promoting a discourse of a chaotic, unruly, failing state has provided
Conclusion
justification for direct U.S. military intervention, especially along the border, now
potentially with armed drones (OReilly, 2013), and legitimized the penetration of U.S. capital interests in Mexico at
the expense of Mexicos own economy and, more important, its people. Even at its most basic level, we can only call this
imperialism. While Mexico has an ineffective justice system, government corruption, and crime and drug-related violence, these are
problems that most modern nation-states also face. In fact, the United States is itself heavily implicated in the drug trade, holding
by far the largest stocks of cocaine in the world and being Mexicos primary market (INCB, 2008). It is also the largest supplier of
Latin American countries are working

together toward the decriminalization of drugs, which has produced very promising
results in Portugal, while, in stark contrast, the coercive procedures of the 40-year
U.S. drug war have had virtually no effect . . . while creating havoc through the continent (Chomsky, 2012).
arms not just to Mexico but to all of Latin America (Chomsky, 2012).
But the conversation doesnt revolve around what the United States can do to clean up its own act; it is about othering Mexico.
The United States has had a tremendous impact on Mexicos internal dynamics
regarding migration, unemployment, poverty, and crime. Its economic imperialism
has contributed to the weakness of Mexicos economy and as a result its internal
politics. NAFTA has stunted Mexican economic growth and led to the mass
displacement of workers, forcing them into job markets that they would not have considered had they had access to
jobs with dignity. For many it has led to migration to the United States, while for others it has meant lives of crime and violence. But
no one discusses this, and it gets no media coverage because the focus is not on the failed U.S.-imposed neoliberal economy but on
drug-related violence. This is done purposefully, since the story does specific work and is perpetuated because it benefits U.S.
economic interests and works as a mechanism of justification for continued U.S. imperialism. For the most part, the concerns that
the vast majority of people experience the vast majority of the time on a daily basis are not about these drug-violence outrages.
Instead they are economichow they will pay their bills and clothe, shelter, and feed their families. Even in the conversation about
immigration reform, no one discusses the fundamental right that people have to live and grow in the place they consider home. No
one discusses that people choose to migrate only when they have no other options. U.S. imperialism has led to peoples having no
other option. Representing Mexico as a failing state allows the United States to evade responsibility for creating many of these
problems in Mexico while also providing a powerful story to convince American citizens and Mexican politicians that U.S. economic
intervention in Mexico is necessary. The irony of it all is that NAFTA continues to be justified through a narrative of a chaotic and
violent Mexico needing economic programs of development to solve its social problems, when in fact it is the penetration of U.S.
capital that has caused many of those problems. The meta-narrative helps to perpetuate an asymmetrical power relationship
The dominant discourse provides the veil for this imperial

encounter to become a mission of salvation rather than of economic conquest. In
the end, the way Mexico is represented in the United States has little to do with its
actual internal political or social dynamics, instead it is a means to expand and
maintain U.S. imperialism in Mexico. Over the past 150 years, one thing that has
stayed the same is Mexicos position as an economic colony of the United States, a
place to go for cheap labor, raw materials, and cheap manufactures for
consumption at home. Focusing on drugs and violence obscures this. While Mexico does have serious issues of drugbetween Mexico and the United States.
related crime, this crime is not the most severe of Mexicos problems. Those problems are poverty and unemployment and the
Mexico is indeed under siegenot

by drug lords but by U.S. economic interestsand this has had disastrous social
costs for the Mexican people. This is not, however, the discourse we engage in. That
discourse is purposefully absent.
countrys inability, for the first time in its history, to feed its own people.
Link - Negative State Action

Writing protection from the state into the law isnt a neutral
actit actively produces a sovereign subject through the guise
of rights and reinforces state power
Tamas 02 (G.M. Director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences, From subjectivity to privacy and back again - Part V:

Democratic Process and Nonpublic Politics, Social Research, Spring, online:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_1_69/ai_88584147/pg_3)
The legal person or legal subject is a iunctim positioning of a biopolitical
hypothesis and the social facts of ownership and privilege ("privilege" here
meaning simply an entitlement specified for people or groups that is not necessarily
unfair). "The Idiot"--the private person cut off from his or her civic aspect or
dimension--partakes of the immortality of society by law adjudicating his or her
continuity or even identity with his or her forebears: what had belonged to my dead
father now belongs to me, since legally I am he. The idea of an estate chooses to
ignore death. The proof that I am legal heir proves my excellence, my pure blood.
People are born because sexual acts are taking place, but not any kind of sexual
acts: only those that happened between people in a specific legal position, legal
spouses. For those born out of wedlock or those unmentioned in wills, death (in this
case, the death of parents or of a parent) is absolute. Their link to their ancestors is
biological and civic, but it is not legal, social, or economic. Bastards are not Idiots.
Traditionally, inheritance law had also established the immutability of phallic power.
The dominant male's seed constituted the main criterion for legitimate claims to
hereditary title (membership in a caste) and property. Social immortality is not a
general trait of humanity but a differential distinction defined by prevailing ideas of
mastery, usually identified with "purity." Some families, a notion mocked ad
nauseam by Enlightenment pamphleteers, are "old families." Those not well-born
are homines novi, newcomers, as if only some people had ancestors, but others not.
Socially and legally, this is quite true. Property is not spontaneously and freely
acquired and enlarged (it never is, under no conceivable regime); however, it is
not property that is legally delineated and circumscribed but the kind of
person who is allowed by the reigning social order to be or to become a
propertied individual. It is this distinct embodiment of social immortality
to whom the idea of "privacy" has referred (and up to a point, still does),
granting him (much less her) the protection of law and the political might
drafted to uphold it. Empirically, "privacy" ensures that propertied
individuals, in legal possession of their fortified dwellings, live untroubled .
Homeless vagrants and the disenfranchised, heimatlos, apatride refugees, cannot
possibly enjoy "privacy," since aid and forcible social assistance are necessarily
interfering, and that is of course the best case. Even civic rights are associated
with "Idiocy" (a permanent address, a social security number, for example),
indicating political recognition of a minimal social status such as "selfownership." Mere citizenship, let alone mere membership in the human race, will
not do. Place of birth within a given state, ancestry that is proof of entitlement
(parents having been citizens of a given state) are still necessary to constitute a
legally recognizable person to whom liberty, dignity, and privacy pertain. Citizenship
is still being constructed from social immortality, a legally recognized private
capability to own, to be settled, and to claim entitlements and privileges. "The Idiot"
is the fons et origo of the citizen whose quality as a citizen is still determined by
how he or she was born. If not born the proper way, your lot is social death. The
moral onus of legitimate possession of title and wealth is shifted from
personal, individual virtue (like plunder and territorial conquest in wartime,
speculation on the stock exchange or the commodities market) to a special
version of the constitution of public personhood--that is, public recognition of
your title by law in virtue of succession or inheritance, within which the privilege
that defines your social standing is bequeathed to you by your forebears, primarily,
your father. It is law that tells you who you are, but it will do it in an
orderly, uniform fashion, making private property and the necessarily
ensuing inequality and exploitation be (or seem to be) not at all a question
of self-choice that could be contested on grounds of justice or moral
fairness, but a matter of natural selection and legal protection. Thus the
sphere of private affairs has been delimited. Interference with this legally fortified
area would appear both unnatural and illegal. You will succeed or inherit not by
virtue of what you have done, not as a function of your just deserts, but according
to who the law establishes you are. If you are, for example, legitimate issue, and the
testator's last will and testament is in harmony with this definition (so it cannot be
challenged in court), then you can and will be lord and proprietor over whatever
your forebear's estate happens to be, including your legal privileges if such are
stipulated. It is within these boundaries that privacy develops. You are
secure and safe from external interference (and this noninterference is
established and guaranteed by the state independent of anyone's wishes,
impartially, "objectively," anonymously) within this area from which the
"public" is excluded by a synthesis of law and nature (your father's "blood" or
"seed"). Your claim to the inviolability of your person and your possessions is always
sustained by this synthesis. Law can even create artificial "blood" or "seed" through
the artifice of adoption. Your citizenship/nationality is dependent on the fact of
nature of whose daughter you are and where you have been born; even your civic
rights (as opposed to the much weaker "human" rights) are deduced from such
facts (and not universal principles), which do not appear as a matter of choice but
are pre-existent states of affairs. The inviolability of your person depends
further on law's impersonal definition of normalcy, hence legal
competence: to wit, are you or are you not sane, healthy, and law-abiding?
Madness, a natural, perhaps even physical condition, is targeted by reigning ideas
of rationality. If you fail to satisfy the criteria of rationality established by your
society (and other societies may have different criteria), your physical freedom and
the limitless enjoyment of your possessions may be impaired, a situation caused by
factors beyond your control, beyond your personal will (on the one hand, your state
of health, on the other, society's prevalent judgment on sanity and such; legally,
you are above moral suspicion if you do not have a so called criminal record--that is,
the law will legitimize its implicit moral judgment by itself). The boundaries of
your privacy do not coincide with the boundaries of your person . If
somebody is declared insane by competent medical and legal authority, her privacy
will be limited or suspended precisely because this private person cannot pretend to
partake of the public sphere in ways prescribed by the public. Privacy is, of course,
a public matter or a matter of public interest, an affair of the state that
stands at an Archimedic point; a third force, high above the natural fact
and moral dispute from which it has originated.
Link - Nuclear Discourse

The use of nuclear discourse constitutes a construction of
exceptional power to be used only by the sovereign for their
own ends.
Masco 12. Joseph Masco, Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago,
The Ends of Ends, Anthropological Quarterly Volume 85, Number 4, Fall 2012, pg.
Tina
Today we can see that in addition to the new weapons systems built at the end of the 1950s, there was also an
important political discovery crucial to the evolving cold War: namely, the universal utility of threat proliferation in
The raw political value of existential threat as a motivating narrative

became a well-worn domestic strategy in the Us, one linking the missile gap of the
1950s to the window of vulnerability of the 1970s, to the strategic defense
initiative of the 1980s to the space based Pearl Harbor narratives of the 1990s to
the terrorist WMD discourses of the 2000s as illustrations of a nuclear culture. In each of these
cases, we can see how the bomb (as a consolidated form of existential threat) has been good for
Americans to think with, becoming the basis for building a nuclear state and a
global military system but also for transforming raw military ambition into a
necessary form of defense. but if the bomb has been crucial to constituting US
superpower status, it has also produced a complex new domestic affective
political domain, allowing images of, and appeals to, existential threat to become a
US security culture.
central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.
Peace has become the exception, not the norm. The affs
nuclear rhetoric re-inscribes this state of exception and
guarantees that peace remains and extreme, ensuring that
one day well push the big red button and succumb to an
atomic end.
The Ends of Ends, Anthropological Quarterly Volume 85, Number 4, Fall 2012, Tina
The constant slippages between crisis, expertise, and failure are now well established in an American political
culture. The cultural history of cold War nuclear crisis helps us understand why. Derrida (1984), working with the
long running theoretical discourse on the sublimity of death (which links Kant, Freud, and benjamin), describes the
problem of the nuclear age as the impossibility of contemplating the truly remainderless event or the total end of
the archive. For him, nuclear war is fabulously textual because until it occurs all you can do is tell stories about
it, and because to write about it is to politically engage in a form of future making that assumes a reader, thus
US nuclear war
overkill, referencing the redundant use of hydrogen bombs to destroy
targets (rosenberg 1983). This overkill installs a new kind of biopower, which fuses an
obliteration of the other with collective suicide. The means to an end here
constitutes an actual and total end, making the most immediate problem of the
nuclear age the problem of differentiating comprehension from compensation in the
minute-to-minute assessment of crisis. This seems to be a fundamental problem in
Us national security culturean inability to differentiate the capacity for war with
the act itself, or alternatively to evaluate the logics of war from inside war . Today, space
performing a kind of counter-militarization and anti-nuclear practice. In the early 1960s, the
policy was
officially known as
is filled with satellites offering near perfect resolution on the surface of the earth and able to transmit that data with
great speed and precision to computers and cell phones, as well as early warning systems, missiles, and drones.
What we cannot seem to do is find an exterior viewpoint on war itselfa

perspective that would allow an assessment not only of the reality of conflict but
also of the motivations, fantasies, and desires that support and enable it. Indeed
expert systems of all sortsmilitary, economic, political, and industrialall seem
unable to learn from failure and instead in the face of crisis simply retrench and
remobilize longstanding and obviously failed logics. War, for example, is not the
exception but the norm in the US todaywhich makes peace extreme. so what
would it take for Americans to consider not only the means to an endthat is, the tactics, the surges, the
preemptions, and surgical strikesbut also to reevaluate war itself? What would it take to consider an actual end to
such ends?
Nuclear rhetoric justifies biopolitical control over a population

and leads to permanent war and genocide over indigenous
cultures
Bussolini 08 (Jeffrey, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies,
College of Staten Island Nuclear State of Exception: Reading and Extension of

Foucault's Concepts of Biopower and Biopolitics in Agamben and the Nuclear Age
Abstracts: Foucault Circle 2008)//BW
Near the beginning of Stato de eccezione, Giorgio Agamben includes a very telling
quotation from Rossiter: Nellera atomica in cui il mondo sta ora entrando,
probabile che luso dei poteri di emergenza costituzionale divenga la regola e non
leccezione. (In the atomic era into which the world is now entering, it is likely that
the use of constitutional emergency powers will become the rule rather than the
exception). Studying the atomic age along these lines, as well as those of the
earlier considerations on biopolitics in Agambens Homo Sacer and Michel Foucaults
lecture courses at the College de France from 1976-1979 (including the crucial
concepts of permanent war and the importance of conquest and colonization in
contemporary state structures), bears out Rossiters quotationthe advent of
nuclear technology has indeed coincided with an augmentation of biopolitics and
continued hostility both between and within states. By any reckoning nuclear
weapons are major artifacts of geopolitics and biopolitics. They are inherently
geopolitical tools that emerged from a history of intense inter-state conflict, and
their scope and effects make any use a geopolitical event (despite repeated
attempts to fashion smaller battlefield or tactical nukes and come up with
scenarios for their employment). The nuclear age is characterized by distrust and
hostility between states as well as suspicion of a states own citizens and
populations (as foreign agents, active threats, or as insufficiently disciplined to
handle the secrets and necessary actions of security). Lending credence to the
notion that the atomic age is closely linked to a state of exception as nationalist
norm, all countries that have developed nuclear arms have substantial secret
institutions devoted to developing them and devising plans for their possible use.
Nuclear secrets are among the most closely guarded of national security matters. In
the United States, all information about nuclear arms is born classified and
automatically subject to strict controls, the only such category in U.S. classification.
The 1947 Smyth Report on the Manhattan Project and U.S. nuclear science says that
the secrets of the weapons must remain secret now and for all time. Clearly these
are regarded as central pillars of geopolitics. The very real threat of Armageddon
from these weapons easily gives way to thinking of expediency and triage which
instrumentalizes certain populations The fate of those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
as well as the continuing collection of data about them by the Atomic Bomb
Casualty Commission, has been described in Robert Jay Liftons Death in Life.
Thousands of soldiers and scientists from different nations have been exposed in
tests and research. Indigenous people from the American southwest to the Pacific
Islands, Kazakhstan, and Algeria have been forcefully relocated to make room for
atomic tests, exposed to radiation, or both. Groups such as prisoners and mental
patients have been subjected to radiation experiments against their will or

knowledge, supposedly for the purpose of building up crucial knowledge about
nuclear effects, as documented in Eileen Welsomes Plutonium Files and
Department of Energy reports on Human Radiation Experiments. These weapons,
then, are intimately tied to power over life and death and the
management of subject populations. As such, it seems that the exigency
related to nuclear thinking justifies (or is the expression of) significant
sovereign power over bare life. In the histories mentioned here, survival and
protection of the population at large was seen to validate causing death or illness
among smaller subsets of that population. One can note that, given their scale,
nuclear weapons force consideration of population-level dynamics, as whole
populations are placed at risk. In this respect, these arms follow on and accentuate
the massive strategic bombing of World War II in which enemy populations were
targeted as vital biopolitical resources. In developing his thoughts on states of
exception and bare life, Agamben draws explicitly on the work of Michel Foucault. In
addition to being of interest in terms of the intellectual history of geopolitics, I
believe that the aspects of Foucault upon which he draws also help us to notice
some important aspects of the nuclear age and its attendant shifts in government.
Agamben draws especially on Foucaults lecture courses from 1976-1979 at the
College de France (Il faut dfendre la societ; Scurit, territoire, population; and
Naissance de la biopolitique). I have been undertaking study of those courses, along
with Agambens Stato di eccezione and Homo Sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda
vita, in order to investigate the Nuclear State of Exception under which the
acquisition and production of nuclear arms justifies permanent emergency powers,
intense secrecy, and harm or sacrifice of portions of state population. In Il faut
defendre la societ, Foucault begins to elucidate his concept of permanent war (la
guerre perptuelle) as a model for modern society. According to him this state of
permanent war is the backdrop (or the foreground) for thinking about sovereignty,
and it has to do with the fact of invasion, conquest, and colonization. Through
considering the examples of the Norman conquest of England, the Franc conquest of
Gaulle, and, briefly, the example of the European colonization of Native Americans,
he describes a situation of invasion in which permanent antagonism between
conqueror and conquered is inevitable, hence a permanent war. Seen from this
point of view, it is not surprising that major nuclear powers including the United
States, France, and the Soviet Union all carried out dangerous nuclear experiments
in colonized territories populated by indigenous peoplesthese tests were an active
symbol and a continuation of the conquest. State sovereignty is a mechanism used
to legitimize and increase the power of the conqueror , preventing the outbreak of
the dreaded war of all against all that Hobbes feared. But, in another sense, this
situation is the war of all against all. According to this line of thinking, the Nuclear
State of Exception is also a special kind of class warfare in which the power of the
sovereign state is increased to maddening levels while the state population is
increasingly seen as a conquered group upon whom the sovereignty must be
secured. Certainly, communists in the United States bore an especially intense
brunt of the Nuclear State of Exception.
The atomic age and nuclear threats have been constructed in

order to enhance the biopower of the state and create a state
of exception
Bussolini 08 (Jeffrey, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies,
College of Staten Island Nuclear State of Exception: Reading and Extension of
Foucault's Concepts of Biopower and Biopolitics in Agamben and the Nuclear Age
Abstracts: Foucault Circle 2008)//BW
Near the end of this volume Foucault makes the explicit linkage between the
nuclear age and biopolitics as, he says, placing the population under an absolute
risk of death was a necessary precursor and transition to biopolitical management
of life. In Securit, territoire, population, Foucault further elucidates his thinking on
sovereignty by considering the way that it focuses on the need for demonstrable
securing of territory and population. The emphasis on protection of territory in the
nuclear age, through extensive radar, satellites, strategic bombers, missiles,
undersea sonar nets, submarines, and the like, is well known. Especially, Foucault
focuses on the need for regulation and guidance of populations to ensure national
vitality (in ascending liberalism). As a result public health campaigns and human
government (governmentality) come to have new importance. He relates this to the
augmentation of state sovereignty through the increasing development of a liberal,
laissez-faire system in which subjects and workers must be fit, self-guiding, and
motivated. It is interesting to note that the atomic age/Cold War discourse of the
United States was heavily oriented in this direction in which the integrity of
populations and the motivation of individual citizens was seen as crucial to the
overall vitality of the nationand thus intimately tied to chances of winning or
losing the geopolitical contest. Recall the insane General Ripper from Kubricks
masterpiece Dr. Strangelove and his maniacal obsession with Purity of Essence on
the part of the American population. In Naissance de la biopolitique Foucault
continues his treatment of liberalism and neoliberalism as modern forms of
government, calling liberalism the general frame of biopolitics (le cadre general
de la biopolitique). One important aspect of this is the pairing of laissez-faire
liberal emphasis on rights with strong sovereign states of overwhelming power.
Flowing from this is a bifurcation (or multiple segmentation) of populations into
more and less desirable groups. The agents and workers of neoliberalism versus
those who do not fit within, or who oppose, the liberal model. It is precisely this
aspect of biopolitics that Agamben picks up on in Homo Sacer and the section on la
vita indigna di essere vessuta (life that is not worth living). As we have already
seen, the Nuclear State of Exception bears this out as some parts of the population
were selected as vital/productive, while other parts of the population, especially the
colonized and undesirables, were classed as expendable and subjected to various
harms of nuclear technology
Link - Resistance
Acting as a singularity and attempting to reject all formalized identiy in
favor of its own being separate from the state is what we call becoming
identifiable, in other words, becoming the principle enemy of the
state. Our opponents valorize this position as the one of most
resistance, yet they fail to realize that calling us to join in their
demonstration will inevitably result in state-sponsored violence.
Agamben 1993 (Giorgo, The Coming Community 83-5)
WHAT COULD be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose
community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian,
being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negative community,
such as that recently propsed in France by Maurice Blanchot), but by belonging
itself? A herald from Beijing carries the elements of a response. What was most
striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May was the relative absence of
determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too
generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only
concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao-Bang, was immediately granted).
This makes the violence of the States reaction seem even more inexplicable . It is
likely, however, that the disproportion is only apparent and that the Chinese
leaders acted, from their point of view, with greater lucidity than the Western
observers who were exclusively concerned with advancing increasingly less
plausible arguments about the opposition between democracy and communism.
The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the
conquest of control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State
(humanity), and insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the
State organization. This has nothing to do with the simple affirmation of the social
in opposition to the State that has often found expression in the protest movements
of recent years. Whatever singularities cannot form a societas because they do not
possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek
recognition. In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identityeven
that of a State identity within the State (the recent history of relations between the
State and terrorism is an eloquent confirmation of this fact). What the State cannot
tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without
affirming potentiality to be , potentiality has as its object a certain act, in the sense
that for it energhein, being-in-act, can only mean passing to a determinate activity
(this is why Schelling defines the potentiality that cannot not pass into action as
blind); as for the potentiality to not-be, on the other hand, the act can never consist
of a simple transition de potentia ad actum: It is, in other words, a potentiality that
has as its object potentiality itself, a potentia potentiae. Only a power that is
capable of both power and impotence, then, is the supreme power. If every power is
equally the power to be and the power to not-be, the passage to action can only
come about by transporting (Aristotle says saving) in the act its own power to
not-be. This means that, even though every pianist necessarily has the potential to
play and the potential to not-play, Glenn Gould is, however, the only one who can
not not-play, and, directing his potentiality not only to the act but to his own
impotence, he plays, so to speak, with his potential to not-play. While his ability
simply negates and abandons his potential to not-play, his mastery conserves and
exercises in the act not his potential to play (this is the position of irony that affirms
the superiority of the positive potentiality over the act), but rather his potential to
not-play.
The 1AC fails to solve their harms with only mere resistance--their one stop shop liberation only serves to reproduce
oppressive structures of identity politics- indentity politics
only serve to clearly define our relationship to the state
Frost, 15--Tom, Prof of Law, Politics and Sociology @ U of Sussex, "The Dispositif Between
Foucault and
Agamben," https://www.academia.edu/9151315/The_Dispositif_Between_Foucault_and_Agamben
Despite this focus upon resistance, Foucault held reservations for the politics of
what I term mere resistance, and cautioned against the equating of resistance with
liberation. Decisively, Foucault distinguishes freedom from liberation. Whilst
admitting that liberation does exist, for example in the colonial setting, Foucault
makes clear that liberation is not sufficient to define the practices of freedom
needed for individuals to define admissible and acceptable forms of existence or
political society. Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination
that release a pre-existing identity from an oppressive external force. xxi Freedom
bears essentially on relations of power and domination liberation from domination
only gives way to new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of
freedom.xxii It is these practices of freedom which allows the subject to practice selfconstruction and in turn, resist and rework the dispositifs that constitute them.
Mere resistance to power, like liberation, has the drawback of emerging in reaction
to oppression and domination by dispositifs of control. xxiii As such it is likely to create
an attachment to an identity which is formed through that oppression, and therefore
will reinforce those self-same dominating biopolitical dispositifs. xxiv More
fundamentally, due to the spectre of biopolitics and the latent role of dispositifs in
letting die, such a resistance and attempt to escape the dispositif will only, almost
paradoxically, end up repeating its logic of deciding and regulating life and death.
This is why Foucault sees power, and the dispositif, as imposing on the subject a
law of truth ... which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in
him.xxv Instead, the practice of freedom is a limit-experience: The idea of a limitexperience that wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me ...
however erudite my books may be, Ive always conceived of them as direct
experiences aimed at pulling myself free of myself, at preventing me from being the
same.xxvi Following this theme, we can read Foucault in What is Enlightenment? as
supporting the claim that this practice of freedom should be considered as a way of
being: We must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a
philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and
doing, through a historical ontology of ourselves This philosophical ethos may be
characterised as a limit-attitude We have to move beyond the outside-inside
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. xxvii The politics of liberation is not enough
to guarantee freedom, as freedom is not mere resistance to power. Freedom is the
careful and innovative deployment of power, and by extension, dispositifs, in the
effort to constitute the free self. In other words, the dispositif is needed to constitute
the ethos of freedom: I do not think that a society can exist without power relations
The problem, then, is ... to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques,
and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play
these games of power with as little domination as possible. xxviii This game of power
is agonistic. There is no essential freedom to be found, but a permanent
provocation between the self and the dispositifs of power relations. xxix The key task
is to refuse what we are, to promote new forms of subjectivity through the
refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several
centuries.xxx The creation of new forms of subjectivity involves freedom as a
practice which requires the subject to self-create themselves anew, taking into
account the dispositifs which constrain and control, and enabling the individual to
discern the types of actions and interventions that are needed to effect change and
create new subjectivities. Freedom connects the dispositif and what is always
beyond, the outside. It is here that the connection can be made to Foucaults last
essay, and his view of error as the proper domain of life. When Foucault writes that
life is that which is destined to err, we can conclude that such a life contains the
possibility to transcend dispositifs and break free of the logic of deciding who should
live and who should be left to die. Freedom is experienced at the limit of power
relations through their transgression, their erring, which is always-already a
possibility, or destiny, for individuals to enact: The limit and transgression depend
on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it
were absolutely uncrossable and reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it
merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. xxxi The act of freedom
constitutes itself through acting at the limit of the dispositif, transgressing that limit,
erring, calling out to thought from the limit of the network of power relations,
creating new subjectivities through the very response of the dispositifs to those
transgressive acts. The dispositif thus controls life, but also is required for freedom
in the form of self-creation. Crucially for this argument, this transgressive freedom
which brings about the self-creation of the new is a transcendent possibility, which
the individual effects and which power relations and dispositifs must react to in
response to these creative acts. This is why Deleuze spoke of this kind of selfrelation as the folding of power relations back upon themselves. It is not possible
to move outside of the totalizing dispositif in terms of liberation. However, it is
possible to think from the outside, from the limit, in a manner which brings together
both the inside of the dispositif and the outside, of which the dispositif is an
operation. As Deleuze states: The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter
animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an
inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the
outside The inside as an operation of the outside: in all his work Foucault seems
haunted by this theme of an inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the
ship were a folding of the sea.xxxii In acting on the individual, dispositifs produce an
inside as an interiorisation of the outside. xxxiii This folding allows a subject to
differentiate itself from dispositifs and no longer has an internal dependence upon
them for Deleuze reading Foucault, there will always be a relation to oneself that
resists such dispositifs.xxxiv The individual has the potential to distance themselves
from the dispositifs that create our identity. This folding of power relations opens a
space for the individual to transgress. The question remains as to precisely how this
transcendent transgressive freedom is effected. Foucault did write of the need to
bring about a historical ontology of ourselves, xxxv such a questioning of current
modes of existence does, on a certain reading, suggest that if we discovered the
reality about how power operates in this world the individual can break free of its
chains.xxxvi This view comes close to a Marxist view of false consciousness, and
ignores the agonistic element to this reading of Foucault. xxxvii Rather, following
Aurelia Armstrong, I draw upon comments suggesting that it is only under the
pressure of an event which makes our present identity and control problematic that
we are forced to exercise our freedom. xxxviii Foucault suggests the following: [F]or a
domain of action, a behaviour to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a
certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its
familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These
elements result from social, economic, or political processes their role is
instigation.xxxix These transgressions or errors of life, of action, and of existing, are
the transcendent experience of events which force a questioning of the current
dispositifs controlling the reality we inhabit. These errors allow the individual to
interiorize the outside, and practice freedom as a transgressive limit-experience,
agonistically questioning and forcing dispositifs to react to new subjectivities. These
events do not have to be epochal, or revolutionary. xl As Foucault states, different
processes can instigate this process the key is that it is the individual who
responds to such instigation and practices this freedom through their actions and
errors, causing the very conception of life to be changed through an experimental
mode of inquiry.xli
That project of liberal subject building is a nihilistic violent

enterprise that destroys value to life and causes endless
warfare
Evans and Reid 13
[Brad, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Bristole, and Julian, Dangerously exposed: the
life and death of the resilient subject, Resilience, 2013, Vol. 1 (2), pp. 83-98]
Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or
but instead adapt to their enabling
conditions. This renders them fully compliant to the logics of complexity with its
concomitant adaptive and emergent qualities. Resistance here is transformed from being a
political capacity aimed at the achievement of freedom from that which threatens
and endangers to a purely reactionary impulse aimed at increasing the
capacities of the subject to adapt to its dangers and simply reduce the degree to
which it suffers. This conflation of resistance with resilience is not incidental but indicative
of the nihilism of the underlying ontology of vulnerability at work in
contemporary policies concerned with climate change and other supposedly catastrophic processes.
What is nihilism, after all, if it is not a will to nothingness drawn from a willing
reactive enslavement to forces deemed to be beyond our control as one merely
lives out the catastrophic moment? It also alerts us to the fundamentally liberal nature of
such policies and framings of the phenomenon of climate change defined, as
liberalism has been since its origins, by a fundamental mistrust in the abilities of
the human subject to secure itself in the world.10 Liberalism, as we have both explored
extensively elsewhere, is a security project.11 From its outset, it has been concerned with
seeking answers to the problem of how to secure itself as a regime of governance
through the provision of security to the life of populations subject to it.12 It will, however, always
be an incomplete project because its biopolitical foundations are flawed; life is not
securable. It is a multiplicity of antagonisms and for some life to be made to
live, some other life has to be made to die.13 That is a fundamental law of life which is
biologically understood. This is the deep paradox that undercuts the entire liberal
project while inciting it to govern ever more and ever better, becoming more inclusive and more assiduous at
secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with
the provision of security to life, while learning how better to take life and make die that which falls outside and
Liberal regimes, in essence and from the outset, thrive on the

insecurities of life which their capacity to provide security to provides the source of
their legitimacy, becoming ever more adept at the taking of life which the provision
of security to life requires.14 It is no accident that the most advanced liberal
democracy in the world today, the United States of America, is also the most heavily armed
state in the world. And not just the most heavily armed state today, but also the most heavily armed in
human history. Liberal regimes do not and cannot accept the realities of this
paradox. Which is why, far from being exhausted, the liberal project remains and has to be, in order
for it to be true to its mission, distinctly transformative. Not only of the world in general and hence its
endless resorts to war and violence to weed out those unruly lives that are the
source of insecurity to the life that is the font of its security, but also, and yet
threatens the boundaries of its territories.
more fundamentally, of the human subject itself; for this is a paradox which plays out, not just territorially, socially
The
liberal subject is divided and has to be in order to fulfil its mission, critically astute at
discerning the distinctions within its own life between that which accords with the
demands made of it in order to accord with liberal ways of living and those which do not comply with
its biopolitical ambitions.15 Being divided means the liberal subject will always be
incomplete, needing work, critical, insecure and mistrustful of itself for the purpose of its own selfimprovement. The liberal subject is a project; one that renders life itself a project,
subject to an endless task of critique and self-becoming, from cradle to grave . Sadly,
or between individuals, but within the diffuse and ultimately unknowable domain of human subjectivity itself.
many still find the concept of life appealing and even utopian. We are taught to think that we ought to choose life
Liberalism
is the greatest of all nihilisms. In giving us over to
life, it gives us no ends to live for but the endless work on the self that
contemporarily permeate our ways of living devoid of any meaning as such.
over emptiness or negation, Rentons law.16 In fact, it is the source of the worlds greatest nihilisms.
too is and has always been a nihilism. Perhaps it
The alt is existential resistanceonly by affirming life from an

ontological standpoint can we reveal our true individuality
Joronen 13 (Mikko, dept of geography and faculty of mathematics and natural

sciences, genius, U of Turku,
http://www.mediafire.com/view/djj55v7gah3d9ms/Joronen.pdf>
As Giorgio Agamben has argued, by being self-consciously Heideggerian, Foucaults
understanding of the historical regimes of power is grounded on a more original
relation between the constituted (or actualised) forms of power and the constituting
power of potentiality. While the constituting power works as a condition of possibility
for the constituted modes of power to emerge, all historical actualisations of power
intrinsically depend on the suspension of the potentialities of constituting power, on
their concealment. 44 In this sense, constituting power has a similar ontological
structure with Aristotles notion of potentiality: it maintains itself without ever fully
passing into actuality, without being exhausted into actualisations. 45 It is not my
intention here to go into details of Agambens complex and nuanced argument in
Homo Sacer, but instead to emphasise, as Agambens re-reading of the distinction
between potentiality and actuality indicates, how the coalescence of state power
with neoliberal governmentality constitutes politics at the domain of ontology. The
constituting power does not merely refer to the ontological possibility for the
constituted modes of constituted power, but also to the fundamental possibility for
the political action as such. Accordingly, also the question of resistance needs to be
explored and confronted at this proper level of ontology: as a question of existential
resistance. In order to scrutinise the ontological implications Agambens distinction
has for the question of existential resistance, it is essential to pay attention to
what Agamben calls in Homo Sacer the life of possibility. It is life that opposes the
operations of constituted power: it constitutes an inex- haustible possibility, which
can be never entirely corralled into constituted forms of political power. The power
of potentiality in life, thus, denotes a power to constitute, a possibility to ground
new modes of life, to be otherwise. Governmentalities of neoliberal enframing
evidently close this possibility, or to use Rancires words in Disagreement, 46
follow the logic of the police, the logic of designating ontological positions and
divisions of power rather than opening them up for the power of potential life. The
ontological resistance, hence, does not only liberate life from the grasp of
ontological monopolisations, such as neoliberal enframing, but from all coded and
corralled forms of belonging, including the state. Agambens thinking evidently
resolves the question of politics by moving it from the sphere of actualised forms
of political power to the realm of ontology. Agambens ontological discussion
concerning the power of life can be thus subordinated to what Heidegger defines as
the fundamental condition of possibility for the constitution of all ontologies: the
appropriation of revealing from the abyssal source (Ab-Grund) of open being. 47
Supported by the fact that Agamben was heavily influenced by Heideggers
seminars he participated in during the 1960s, 48 the eclectic position of Agamben
with one foot in the realm of biopolitics, the politics over life, and the other in the
realm of ontology can be re-thought from an explicitly Heideggerian perspective.
Agamben, however, accuses Heidegger precisely of ignoring what he thinks is the
fundamental origin of all revealing: the pure fact of living things. 49 Heidegger
evidently goes through a great effort, at least in his early major contribution Being
and Time (1927), to separate his existential-ontological analysis of Dasein from the
analyses of life formulated, in particular, by the key representatives of the German
life-philosophy movement (Lebensphilosophie), Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg
Simmel. 50 For Heidegger, the fundamental flaw of the Lebensphilosophie was that
it never came to properly treat life in ontological terms, that is, as a mode of
being/revealing. Heideggers separation, however, remained quite ambiguous: it is
not clear whether Heidegger was able to truly recede his existential-ontological
analysis of being from the strains of life-philosophy, or whether Heideggers own
thinking would have evolved into its shape without the significant influence of lifephilosophy in the early phase of his thinking. 51 Moreover, the compulsive
distancing of life from being may, in the end, afford nothing by a cul-de-sac. First of
all, by locating the potential, even necessary, linkages between questions of life and
being, we may find more proper ways to grasp some of the crucial contemporary
forms of power and government, such as the biopolitical techniques, which have
taken life itself as the target of ontological politics. Second, in order to grasp the
ontological politics behind neoliberalism, and further, to enable alternatives that
have the potential to widen the scope of ontological imagination, we need to take
into account how constituted forms of life and power are framed through the
different ontological monopolisations of revealing.
Link - Prisons
The prison has moved from a disciplinary apparatus to one of
exceptional measures that have become routine
Lyon 6 (David, Queens Research Chair in the Sociology Department and Director of
the Surveillance Project at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada,
Theorizing Surveillance: The panopticon and beyond, edited by David Lyon, p.11-12)
Agambens work, like Baumans and Arendts, also speaks to surveillance theories. The panopticon was a distinct
and bounded area; now, he says, zones of indistinction are crucial, and in fact, are the locus
of power. Where (as he argues) Arendt or Foucault failed to connect their analyses of the world of power with those of everyday
life, Agamben now proposes that sovereign power and bare life converge in the camp . As
Didier Bigo argues, however, one way this happens is through mechanisms of surveillance
power that create and perpetuate the ban . And as some of these mechanisms are
technological, we also must examine the virtualizing of the ban . Does carrying a
national ID card or a Permanent Resident Card also express the zone of
indistinction and the ban each time it is swiped or scanned? The ongoing quest for surveillance
theory It seems clear that some constructive contributions to surveillance theory are needed. Surveillance theory cannot ignore the
panopticon but it can surely move beyond it. Quite which directions will be taken beyond is a matter of ongoing debate. First the
ground has to be cleared. Kevin Haggerty makes no bones about his project: Tear down the walls! He comments effectively on
demolishing the panopticon, a project that has several significant rationales. His key point is that what might be called
panopticism as an all-embracing model or paradigm should be abandoned. And rather

than contribute any single such explanatory model in place of the panopticon , Haggerty
hints that another Foucaldian theme, governmentality, should be seen as a source of useful
insights that serve to frame a range of activities under the surveillance studies
rubric. Didier Bigo picks up this theme by proposing some quite specific forms of analysis that relate security with surveillance
studies in the context of early twenty-first century global developments. For this time, Bigo insists, the inclusive
panopticon simply will not work as a heuristic. In its place, he explores the implications of his
alternative exclusion-stressing formulation, deriving partly from Agamben, the banopticon. The
governmentality of uncertainty, fear and unease, argues Bigo, is characterized above all
by exceptional practices, extraordinary measures, that paradoxically are now
routine. These involve profiling and containing foreigners at the same time as
promoting the normative imperative of mobility. Increasingly, he demonstrates, the idea is
advanced of the formation of a world empire to protect us all from fanatics . But while
this may be seen in various agreements, legal developments and new institutions, these should not deflect
attention from the routine technologies of control that surveillance studies attempts
to illuminate. Bigo pleads for further analysis of security and surveillance that is attuned to our times and prepared to
confront current political trends driven by what might be called the security-informational complex.
Reforms to the prison systems fail and guarantee

circumvension
Lacombe 96 (Dany, Professor of Sociology, received her BA from Universite de
Sherbrooke, and her MA and PhD from the University of Toronto, Reforming
Foucault: A Critique of the Social Control Thesis,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/591730.pdf?acceptTC=true)//BW
In Discipline and Punish (1979) Foucault demonstrates this productive aspect of
power through an analysis of the relationship between punishment, a technology of
power, and the development of the social sciences. He demonstrates that out of the
modern practices of punishment (observation, examination, measurement,
classification, surveillance, record keeping, etc.) emerged a systematic knowledge
of individuals that provided the seed for the development of the human sciences
(psychology, criminology, sociology, etc.), a knowledge that allowed for the exercise
of power and control over those individuals. Foucault's analysis, therefore, reveals
how knowledge, as forms of thought and action, is intricately connected to the
operation of power. Indeed, power and knowledge are intimately linked by a process
of mutual constitution; one implies the other. Hence Foucault coined the expression
'powerknowledge' and set out to investigate the relationship that linked the two
practices: 'there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of
knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the
same time power relations'. (Foucault 1979: 27) 'Powerknowledge' implies that
there can be no assertion without a field of power, or stated differently, that there is
no truth without a politics of truth. This concept has methodological implications for
the way we approach the study of power. Rather than trying to determine why
power exists, which would lead us to define it in terms of an essence, the concept
'powerknowledge' invites us to inquire about how power operates, that is about the
strategies and procedures through which power is exercised. As Ewald (1975)
indicates in his review of Discipline and Punish, Foucault approaches the truth
claims of the prison reform movements and the discourses they emanate from in a
descriptive fashion: Which strategy of production do they come from? Which
relations of power do you proceed from? What kinds of subjection or liberation do
you produce? (Ewald 1975: 1 230)
Link - Securitized Rhetoric

Rhetoric of security constructs an abject outside that must be
violently suppressed to comply with dominant identities.
Campbell 2k5
[David - professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University in the U.K., The Biopolitics
of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle, American Quarterly 57.3, p. 947-948]
<As an imagined community, the state can be seen as the effect of

formalized practices and ritualized acts that operate in its name or in the
service of its ideals. This understanding, which is enabled by shifting our
theoretical commitments from a belief in pregiven subjects to a concern with the
problematic of subjectivity, renders foreign policy as a boundary-producing
political performance in which the spatial domains of inside/outside,
self/other, and domestic/foreign are constituted through the writing of
threats as externalized dangers. [End Page 947] The narratives of primary
and stable identities that continue to govern much of the social sciences
obscure such an understanding. In international relations these concepts of
identity limit analysis to a concern with the domestic influences on foreign
policy; this perspective allows for a consideration of the influence of the internal
forces on state identity, but it assumes that the external is a fixed reality that
presents itself to the pregiven state and its agents. In contrast, by assuming that
the identity of the state is performatively constituted, we can argue that there are
no foundations of state identity that exist prior to the problematic of
identity/difference that situates the state within the framework of inside/outside and
self/other. Identity is constituted in relation to difference, and difference is
constituted in relation to identity, which means that the "state," the
"international system," and the "dangers" to each are coeval in their
construction. Over time, of course, ambiguity is disciplined, contingency is
fixed, and dominant meanings are established. In the history of U.S. foreign
policyregardless of the radically different contexts in which it has operatedthe
formalized practices and ritualized acts of security discourse have worked
to produce a conception of the United States in which freedom, liberty,
law, democracy, individualism, faith, order, prosperity, and civilization are
claimed to exist because of the constant struggle with and often violent
suppression of opponents said to embody tyranny, oppression, anarchy,
totalitarianism, collectivism, atheism, and barbarism. This record demonstrates that
the boundary-producing political performance of foreign policy does more
than inscribe a geopolitical marker on a map. This construction of social space also
involves an axiological dimension in which the delineation of an inside
from an outside gives rise to a moral hierarchy that renders the domestic
superior and the foreign inferior. Foreign policy thus incorporates an
ethical power of segregation in its performance of identity/difference.
While this produces a geography of "foreign" (even "evil") others in conventional
terms, it also requires a disciplining of "domestic" elements on the inside that
challenge this state identity. This is achieved through exclusionary practices
in which resistant elements to a secure identity on the "inside" are linked
through a discourse of "danger" with threats identified and located on the
"outside." Though global in scope, these effects are national in their

legitimation.12>
The drive for security results in the creation of threats to

legitimate the surveillance state
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University
Press, Deleuze and New Technology edited by Mark Poster
and David Savat, 2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb , mmv)
The reterritorialising effects of global capitalism also have a paradoxical effect on
the state itself. The modern state is undergoing a kind of convulsion, whereby on
the one hand its sovereignty is undermined - at least with respect to its control over
economic life - and yet on the other hand we have also seen an aggressive
reassertion of state sovereignty and power with the so-called 'war on terrorism'. In
the wake of September 1 1, and with the emergence of this permanent global state
of war, we have seen hitherto unthinkable control and surveillance measures being
implemented in the dubious name of 'security'. Liberal democracies have been
taking on the characteristics of totalitarian police states. While governments assure
us that they are trying to 'strike the right balance between liberty and security',
they have been introducing legislation that undermines even the most basic civil
liberties such as the right to due process. The usual techniques and practices of
control have been intensified and given new impetus and consistency in the 'war on
terrorism'. The sophistication of technologies of control and surveillance find their
strange counterpart in a rediscovery of torture and the practice of permanent
detention;5 the mise-en-scene of the control society is now to be found in the
torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Is it still reasonable, then, to talk about the control society - have we not gone back
to a disciplinary or even a pre-disciplinary sovereign power; do the barbed wire of
the prison camp, and the electric shocks delivered by the military torturer (now
privately contracted of course), now not serve as the dominant symbols of power in
the twenty-first century? Has not the 'softness' of control been replaced with the
hardness and brutality of a now unlimited sovereign power? I would argue instead
that the two modalities of power have intersected, and that the off-shore prison
camps and extra-legal spaces of detention that have now become emblematic of
the 'war on terrorism' are actually a kind of obscene excrescence of the society of
control, symbolising - in an extreme form - the constraints and controls that are
already characteristic of contemporary society.6 And if Guantanamo Bay is closing
down, this is only because the techniques of detention, discipline and control
employed in such spaces are already infused - in more subtle ways - throughout the
rest of society'? Control and sovereign exceptionalism become indistinguishable in
the 'war on terrorism'.
How are we to understand the political nexus that allows this intersection to take
place? First, the discourse of 'security' itself must be rigorously analysed. 'Security'
is the word on everyone's lips today, from media outlets and politicians across the
political spectrum. The ability to provide security from terrorism is now the single
stamp of legitimacy for any government, and is considered the overriding

responsibility of the modern state. However, as Agamben shows - referring to
Foucault's work on eighteenth-century governmental discourses - 'security' consists
not in the prevention of crises and catastrophes, but rather in their continual
production, regulation and management. Therefore, by making security central to
modern governance, there is the danger of producing a situation of clandestine
complicity between terrorism and counterterrorism, locked in a deathly embrace of
mutual incitement (Agamben 2002).
The 1ACs attempts to securitize itself from the impacts

reinforce biopolitical control by the sovereign
Stockdale, 10 (Liam P.D., Ph.D. in International Relations, Department of
Political Science, McMaster University, Securitizing the Future? A Critical

Interrogation of the Pre-emptive Turn in the Theory and Practice of Contemporary
Security, http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2010/Stockdale.pdf)//BW
As mentioned above, an explicitly temporal element has underwritten the development of security
practices in the post-9/11 era, and this trend is particularly evident in the activities
of what are popularly termed liberal or Western states. 2 Indeed, empirically speaking,
the majority of the pre-emptive practices with which I am here concerned take place
either within the context of the WOTsuch as the indefinite detention of terror suspects without
charge (Mutimer 2007)or vis--vis the purported threat of large inflows of migrants
exemplified by the myriad detention centres on the periphery of the EU and by Australias so-called pacific
These issues represent

top security concerns for states that are conventionally identified as liberal
democratic polities, and therefore the pre-emptive practices upon which I focus
most often originate from the sovereign decisions undertaken by the governments
and security agents of such states. This is important in theoretical terms because the fact that it is
solution of mandatory pre-emptive detention (Isin & Rygiel 2007, L. Weber 2007).
precisely states which are avowedly liberal democratic states, openly committed to the rule of law (Mutimer
the types of pre-emptive practices I seek to problematize renders

the logic underlying such actsand perhaps even the concept of the liberal polity
itself in the current security momentquite problematic . This latter point will be central to the
2007) that are behind
second half of the paperand will be discussed in greater depth below in relation to Derridas notion of
autoimmunityand thus a more detailed discussion of pre-emption as it is practiced by contemporary liberal
the idea of pre-emption with regard to discourses of

security is perhaps most often associated with the so-called Bush Doctrine in US foreign
polities is warranted at this juncture. While
policymakingmost clearly exemplified, of course, by the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Ehrenberg et al. 2010, C. Weber
taking explicit action in the present to preempt

potential irruptions of danger in the futurewhat might be termed the logic of
preemptionis far from limited in its deployment to the realm of interstate security
relations alone. Indeed, as criminologist Richard Ericson asserts, the logic of pre-emption can be
seen to permeate all aspects of the exercise of sovereign power in the current
moment, to the point where the contemporary security environment might be best
termed a state of pre-emption (Ericson 2008: 58). Under such conditions, security is conceived in
2007)it must also be stressed that the notion of
terms of safeguarding the future from what may occur by undertaking precautionary measures in the present that
are conceived in relation to an imagined future. Security is thus pursued by attempting to police the future by
anticipation, with the ultimate goal being the realization of an imagined future perfect where the risks against
which these present exceptional practices are deployed will no longer be of concern (Bigo 2007: 31). Accordingly,
the logic of pre-emption is innately concerned with exerting control over the
temporal dimension of human existence. Sovereign power deployed in pursuit of the
logic of pre-emption is thus active in both the spatial and temporal realms, as it
attempts to manipulate and control the relationship between present and future
through calculations about probable futures in the present [the temporal element], followed by interventions into
the present in order to control that potential future [the spatial element] (Aradau et al. 2008: 149). The crucial
point is that a security climate premised upon the logic of pre-emption is concerned primarily with safeguarding the
future, while the present is constructed in instrumental terms as a site of intervention through which this ultimate
under the logic of preemption, the future is securitized (Buzan et al. 1998). The result is that the proverbial door is opened
aim might be realized. As such, to use the terminology of the Copenhagen School,
for the deployment of exceptional practices beyond the realm of normal politics in the present, since the logic of
pre-emption holds that it is through proactive/preemptive/precautionary measures enacted in the present that the
security of the future can be ensured
Biometrics are used to marginalize subjects and leads to a

state of exception Dooms us to error replication Only the aff
can solve
Stockdale, 10 (Liam P.D., Ph.D. in International Relations, Department of
Political Science, McMaster University, Securitizing the Future? A Critical

Interrogation of the Pre-emptive Turn in the Theory and Practice of Contemporary
Security, http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2010/Stockdale.pdf)//BW
It is this last point, as stressed by Amoore, that is most important to note for present
purposes, in that, although many of the governmental technologies employed by sovereign
power under the pre-emptive security logic are explicitly directed at arbitrarily
marginalized subjectivities such as migrants or particular racial or religious groups , it
is crucial to note that no individuals are a priori absolved under the logic of pre-emption .
Indeed, the immanent uncertainty of the future necessitates that as wide an logic of the Agambenian
state of exception, as the contravention of civil liberties and human rights norms
that are an explicit consequence of pre-emptive acts can only be legitimated within
the juridical framework of the liberal states enacting them if this framework is
deemed not to apply under the present exceptional circumstances (Agamben 2005).
The securitization of the future and the logic of pre-emption that is its
corollary thus necessarily produce a discourse of the exception, as the practices
necessary to uphold that logic require the presence of such a state to be justifiably enacted (Muller 2008: 208). Yet,
the very nature of the move of securitizing the future

ensures that this present state of exception can never be transcended so long as
the logic of pre-emption continues to hold , as the latter is concerned only with securing a future
as will be seen in the following sections,
that has yet to come to pass through exceptional interventions in the present. In this sense, we might conceive of
this condition as a state in which the present is, in some ways, taken hostage in the name of the future.
Modern day biometrics are being used to further biometric

warfare
Shapiro 11 (Michael J., professor of political science at the University of HawaiI,
Every Move You Make: Bodies, Surveillance, and Media, Surveillance,

http://eprints.cscsarchive.org/136/1/_xeNZR9zc.pdf)//BW
Along with the territorial ambiguities that the new warfare-as-crime- fighting entails,
a new biopolitics is emerging. The criminalization of military adversaries has been
accompanied by a biometric approach to intelligence and surveillance. The significance of
this change becomes evident if one contrasts Giddenss treatment of the surveillance technologies that
paralleled the modern states monopolization of violence with the current ones.
Throughout his discussion Giddens refers primarily to the use of paper trails. He begins with a treatment of the
states use of writing, proceeds to the states coding of information, and concludes with some observations about
cultural governance, the sponsoring of printed materials, not only for surveillance but also for enlarging the scope
of the public sphere.20 Certainly, the paper trail and its electronic realization in the form of computer files remain
new modes of warfare-as-crime-fighting involve the development of a

biological rather than merely a paper trail, as new genetic tracing discoveries are
being recruited into intelligence gathering. Is the biometric, designer weapon far
behind? Anticipating the role of biometric coding in futuristic forms of warfare, the science fiction writer William
significant, but the
Gibson began his novel Count Zero with this passage: They set a SLAMHOUND on Turners trail in New Delhi,
slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and
came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram
of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.21 Thanks to advanced cloning technology in Gibsons futuristic war
world, Turner is reassembled from some of his own parts and some others (eyes and genitals bought on the open
market). He lives on as the novels main character, a commando, operating in a war over research and
Whether or not the military logistics of biometric warfare is now

underway, the surveillance dimension is being rapidly developed . And the use of
development products.
pheromones in the Gibson account is technologically anachronistic. The technology of DNA tracing, now well
developed, is complementing the photograph and paper trial to surveil and intercept dangerous bodies.22
Shortly after the destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, thenU.S.

Attorney General John Ashcroft sought changes in federal law to allow the Federal
Bureau of Investigation to maintain a DNA databank of profiles taken from al-Qaeda
and Taliban fighters detained in Afghanistan and Cuba .23 Subsequently, forensic experts
were dispatched to Afghanistan to test the human tissue found in one battlefield to see if any of the dead included
bin Laden or his senior associates. Of course, policy makers face legitimation issues when introducing new modes of
surveillance and criminalization. When those operating the reasons of state are involved in implementing a
an extraordinary mode of surveillance, and

management of the global order and the domestic population they have to produce
warrants for the new policy initiatives. Accordingly, after the 9/11 episode, the Bush administration
began operating on two fronts to solicit acquiescence to its simultaneous intensification of domestic
surveillance and preparation for global military incursions (a strategy of preemptive
defense).24 On the one hand, there was a feverish search for legal precedents, hence the designation of
an American citizen as an enemy combatant to apply a law of war that was earlier
applied only to foreign nationals; on the other hand, the administration approached fi lm and television
historically unorthodox governmentalityin this case
producers to encourage them to create patriotic feature films and TV dramas designed to elicit public support for
the new policies. For example, in early November 2002, the media carried a story about a meeting between White
House adviser Karl Rove and several dozen top television and film executives. Aware of the film industrys role in
World War II, the Bush administration wanted to encourage patriotic war movies that characterized the early years
of that war.25 After that meeting, nearly a dozen patriotic war movies were under production and television
dramas followed suit. Among the most notable of the TV genre was an episode of JAG (a CBS drama about military
lawyers). The 30 April 2002 episode, produced with the Pentagons help, featured a trial of a defiant al-Qaeda
terrorist (undoubtedly modeled after Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged twentieth 9/11 hijacker) by a military tribunal
at which he received a fair trial (a promise by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to the media after the tribunal
plan was floated). As one commentary notes: The strategy behind the Tribunal episode is more transparent than
ever: the show creates the wish-fulfillment fantasy of capturing a terrorist responsible for the attacks, depicts an
more terror in the works, affirming the

governments real-life message that America must remain vigilant .26
idealized military, yet ends with an ominous threat of
Link - Terrorism
Terrorism creates a diversion that the government uses to
create a state of exception to justify violent inteventionism
Aretxaga, 2001 Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texis at Austin,
visiting professor at the University of Chicago, former professor at Harvard

University (Begoa; Terror as Thrill: First Thoughts on the War on Terrorism
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 1, Winter 2001, , pp. 139-150.; DOA: 7/18/15;
JSTOR || NDW]
I cannot help but think now about Afghanistan and about the way the new disasters
of war taking place in that remote country are skillfully cut off from the thriller-like
media images of the war against terrorism. Among Goya's de- sastres, there is one entitled "Murio la
Verdad" ("Truth Died"). The drawing shows a young woman as allegory of truth lying down on the ground. A bish- op stands over her
body, officiating, surrounded by a crowd held at bay by priests, while on the side Justice cries desperately. The drawing conveys the
perverse ideological function of organized religion in the production of a version of reality in the service of sovereign power. Truth
the truth of the "War

against Terrorism" is also disappearing fast in the interest of national security and
patriotic unity. In its place, fantasies organize reality as fear and thrill. The Scene of the War I
and Justice are sacrificed to the official reality of church and sovereign. As in Goya's drawing,
watched the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) with the same sense of unreality as everyone I know. In the Basque city of San
Sebastian where I grew up and where I was visiting, it was 3:00 pm, prime time news. An annual international festival was about to
begin and small snippets of film were repeatedly shown on televsion. For a moment, the attack on the WTC seemed like a film
preview that had crawled unannounced into the wrong place. The very familiarity of the scene, already seen in popular Hollywood
disaster movies made reality unreal and shocking. It was not that a terrorist attack on the U.S. was unimaginable, it had in fact been
Not only had the imaginary of a disaster saturated

public culture with apocalyptic anxieties during the last decade, but so too had
filled the imagination of the United States Department of State. After the end of the
Cold War, terrorism had become the object of obsessive publishing by the state
department, replacing the old figure of communism as the spectral enemy. The
anxious scene of foreign terrorists attacking the United States was not new but was
in fact in place and ready to be occupied. Fantasy constitutes a scenario within
which real action can take place and be interpreted. What was unimaginable was
then not the attack itself, but that the fantasy of the attack could materialize. If inside
imagined to satiety in films like "Independence Day."
the United States there was trauma, outside the country what followed the stunned moment of seeing the impossible materialized
The
fear was made stronger by the mix of religious trascendentalism and cowboy justice
in which the response to the attack was initially cast. The President of the U.S., George W. Bush,
spoke about a monumental "crusade" of good against evil, while demanding
Osama bin Laden's body "dead or alive." The attack was immediately framed as an
attack on American values which, under attack, appeared all of the sudden
obscurely pristine; then it was framed as an attack on Western values, then an
attack on civilization. The "War against Terrorism" was presented as both inevitable
and epic: "a war to save the world" as George Bush said just before starting the
bombing in Afganistan, a "just war."
was fear, not of terrorism, but of a military intervention by the United States and its consequences for the rest of the world.
Monsterization of terrorists is a biopolitical tool used to control

the populations Creates terrorists
Rai, 04 (Amit S., Senior Lecturer in New Media and Communications, OF
MONSTERS: Biopower, terrorism and excess in genealogies of monstrosity
http://dferagi.webs.ull.es/d/politicas2/docs/Biopolitica.2.pdf)//BW
Terrorism, in this abstract machine, is a symptom for the deviant psyche, the psyche
gone awry, or the failed psyche; the terrorist enters the stage as an absolute
violation. Not surprisingly, then, coming out of this discourse, we find another very common way
of trying to psychologize the monster-terrorist is by positing a kind of failed
heterosexuality, or, as in the quote above, a crypto-homosexuality . Therefore, we hear
often the idea that sexually frustrated Muslim men are promised the heavenly reward of 60, 67 or sometimes even
70 virgins if they are martyred in jihad. But as Asad Abu Khalil (2001) has argued, In reality, political / not sexual /
frustration constitutes the most important factor in motivating young men, or women, to engage in suicidal
violence. The tendency to dwell on the sexual motives of the suicide bombers belittles these sociopolitical causes.
Now, of course, that is precisely what terrorism studies intends to do: to reduce complex social, historical and
political dynamics to various psychic causes rooted in childhood family dynamics. As if the Palestinian intifada or
the long, brutal war in Afghanistan can be simply boiled down to bad mothering or sexual frustration! Finally, all of
these explanatory models and frameworks function to: (1) reduce complex histories of struggle, intervention, and
(non)development to Western psychic models rooted in the bourgeois heterosexual family and its dynamics; (2)
exclude systematically questions of political economy and the problems of cultural translation; (3) master the fear,
anxiety and uncertainty of a form of violent political dissent by resorting to the banality of a taxonomy; and (4)
consolidate the practical solidarity between abstract methods of psychological enquiry and modern apparatuses of
we should recall Deleuzes warning of the new role of

psychoanalysis as a strategy of biopower . There is no state which does not need an image of
power. On this last point,
thought which will serve as its axiomatic system or abstract machine, and to which it gives in return the strength to
function: hence the inadequacy of the concept of ideology, which in no way takes into account this relationship. This
was the unhappy role of classical philosophy ... / that of supplying ... the apparatuses of power, Church and State,
with the knowledge which suited them. Could we say that the human sciences have assumed this same role, that of
providing by their own methods and abstract machine for modern apparatuses of power / receiving from them
valuable endorsement in term? So psychoanlysis has submitted its tender, to become a major official language and
knowledge in place of philosophy; to provide an axiomatic system of man in place of mathematics; to invoke the
the mass function of

counter-terrorism discourses in our conclusion, but we must pursue another line first: What are the
Honestas and a mass function. (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, p. 88) We will return to
specific racial and sexual genealogies of this taxonomizing abstract machine of counter-terror? One answer: a
specifically colonial genealogy, an aspect of which could be named Oriental despotism. Since at least the
eighteenth century, the despots of the East have been constructed as the quintessential enemies of (Western)
civilization. Indeed British colonial justice, having secured order where previously only the riot of the imagination
(James Mills phrase) had reigned, was predicated on its radical difference from that recurring example of otherized
oppression, Oriental despotism. Let us recall some of the key points in the construction of Oriental despotism as it
appeared in hegemonic discourses in the nineteenth century. Developed in the wake of the Enlightenment (and
later codified in the Utilitarian) critique of the ancien regime, the divine right of kings and aristocratic privilege, the
discourse of Oriental despotism posited an essentially Western order as a civilizational corrective to Eastern
The representatives of this moderate and reasonable West would confront

(and eventually dominate) their supposed opposite in the colonial mirror of
nineteenth century discourse.11 It was almost as if these inherent differences logically and naturally
irrationality.
gave rise to two radically different traditions of political and economic organization. For Europe, a constitutional
monarchy or republic would be the characteristic form of polity, while the capitalist mode of production its
the arbitrary or
capricious rule by fear of an all-powerful autocrat over docile and servile masses
would be the normal and distinctive form of government ; these peasant masses distributed
characteristic economic institution (Inden 2001, p. 53). For the East, despotism /
over innumerable, self-sufficient villages, engaging in a mixture of low-grade agriculture and handicrafts / make
over to the despot the surplus of what it produces in the form of a tax, and subsist on the remainder a mode of
production that Marx termed Asiatic (see Habib 1990).12
US counter-terrorist discourse is a form of biopower

Rai, 04 (Amit S., Senior Lecturer in New Media and Communications, OF
MONSTERS: Biopower, terrorism and excess in genealogies of monstrosity

http://dferagi.webs.ull.es/d/politicas2/docs/Biopolitica.2.pdf)//BW
Such responses oblige us to recognize that in a moment of what is termed an ongoing national crisis even
platitudinous dissent in beyond the pale of the proper. How does a drug charge disallow a subject from speaking
from a space that is morally legitimate / how does any kind of impropriety disqualify a subject who would dissent
from such norms of citizenship? But what this reviewers diatribe points to are the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of
normalization that the new patriotism demands of all us. Of course, this demand is never represented as such:
Indeed, biopower, as it invests life, and as bodies come to being through its very
modes, takes on the form and substance of ever more democratic rule, and
through which diffuse relations of power are rendered ever more immanent to the
social field, distributed through the brains and bodies of citizens . But what we see in
discourses of American counter-terrorism is the very production of the citizen
through strategies demanding cultural and national belonging , and sexual and gender
normality / perhaps their greatest achievement is the construction of a common sense understanding of this
historically contingent experience of normalization as democracy in a time of monsters. Consider, then, the
Terrorist Episode as itself a kind of abstract machinery of

biopower that relays images and narratives, producing subject-effects as part of network imagination. On the
doubled TV frame of this special
one hand, it would seem these TV relays arrest the attention of the viewer in ways that would be appropriate to a
pluralistic America inviting us to repeat a certain pledge of allegiance. On the other, specific images seem to give
themselves to undecideable lines of flight whose aporias draw us to another future.19 Keep in mind: we see a
double-framed reality. On the one side, brightly lit and close to the hearth (invoking the home and the family) is the
Presidential classroom, a racially and gender plural space, where the President as Father enters and says what we
need right now are not suicidemartyrs but life-affirming heroes; where the First Lady as Mother tells the precocious,
and sometimes troublesome, youngsters a kind of bedtime story of two once and future brothers, Isaac (the Jews)
where male experts regale them with fantastic facts concerning

the first acts of terrorism committed back in the tenth century by drug frenzied Muslims; where one
and Ishmael (the Arabs);
woman staff member (C.J. Cregg, played by Allison Janney) declares, We need spies. Human spies ... Its time to
give the intelligence agencies the money and the man power they need; and where Josh finally advises the
students to remember pluralism. You want to get these people? I mean, you really want to reach in and kill them
where they live? Keep accepting more than one idea. It makes them absolutely crazy.
US Counter-terrorism is used to justify biopower and extend

the sovereign control
Hannah 06 (Matthew, Ph.D., Adjunct Associate Professor, Torture and the
Ticking Bomb: The War on Terrorism as a Geographical Imagination of

Power/Knowledge, Annals of the Association of American Geographers Volume 96,
Issue 3, 2006, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.14678306.2006.00709.x#.VaZ7LxNVikp)//BW
Administration policy since 11 September 2001 (hereinafter 9/11) and the American
public's continued willingness to live with it can be explained to a significant degree
by a particular discursive construction: the ticking-bomb scenario. To the extent that this scenario
frames official and public understandings of the threat of terrorism, it tends to make torture appear more
reasonable as a response. The ticking-bomb scenario prompts a reimagining of the landscapes of everyday life as
suffused with an unacceptably high level of risk. If unacceptable risk is extrapolated to cover the entire national
territory, the imperative to eliminate such risk is intensified. The imagined imperative to eliminate this risk at all
costs constitutes an opening for the contemplation of torture. This argument is circumstantial in nature and is
probably stronger as an explanation of relative public complacency than as an explanation of the Bush
administration's actual motives. Even on the latter point, however, it is a plausible account of a stance many
The threat of terrorism and the response

of torture are fruitfully understood in terms of power/knowledge, particularly by
means of the concepts of biopower and governmentality. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
(2004, 19) are correct to claim that, when individualized in its extreme form, biopower
becomes torture. But they do not fully explain why this is so. Like Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004), Giorgio
commentators find difficult to explain fully in other ways.
Agamben (1998,;2005) and Judith Butler (2004) have also drawn on these Foucaultian concepts to explain the
complex of extraterritorial prisons within which torture has occurred. But together these authors have only partly
explained the response to terrorism, and little of the perceived threat. Once the threat of terrorism is understood as
a threat to forms of power/knowledge, it becomes possible to supplement, to sort out more clearly, and then to tie
together the still somewhat loose and incomplete biopolitical analysis found in the writings of Hardt and Negri,
Agamben, and Butler. No account of torture in the current geopolitical context can be complete if it is not linked to
the threat of terrorism that serves as its justification . If forms of power

that involve life, knowledge, and the body are indeed as central to the maintenance
of modern social order as Foucault and many others believe them to be, it is necessary to attempt to relate
an analysis of
torture, which represents an extreme example of the political articulation of life, knowledge, and the body, to wider
questions of social order. In his recent review of geographical approaches to such issues, Colin Flint cautions social
scientists against succumbing to the temptation to characterize the present geopolitical conjuncture as one of
chaos or unfathomable disorder: geographers and other scholars need to offer parsimonious theories that help
uncover the multiple roots of all contemporary geopolitical acts (Flint 2003, 100). Viewing torture as a geopolitical
act of apparently renewed importance, this article is one response to Flint's call. The argument presented here does
not attempt to answer once and for all the question of whether any particular interrogation practice actually
constitutes torture. As the now copious documentary evidence makes clear (Danner 2004; Greenberg and Dratel
2005), legal debates over the definition of torture can themselves become quite tortured. And as the public
discourse has made abundantly clear, the credibility of the Bush administration does not hang on whether what is
happening at Guantnamo Bay or in Iraqi prisons technically constitutes torture. What is important for the
how anything like torture could be seen as a

potentially legitimate tool in the attempt to counter terrorism . Therefore all that is needed is
argument presented here is simply the question of
a fairly basic functional definition of torture (in this article, I use the terms torture, abuse, and brutal
interrogation practices interchangeably): torture is the infliction of unwanted physical and/or psychological
suffering on an individual in order to induce him or her to surrender information. Whether the suffering crosses any
particular threshold of acuteness or severity, whether it produces lasting damage, whether the individual
extent to which the act of inflicting suffering

represents a symbolic ritual of domination, these issues are all immaterial for the purposes of the
actually possesses the information sought, or the
present argument.
The functioning of the law relies simultaneously in the

transformation of bare life into good life while attempting to
preserve bare life as such. This differentiation between forms
of life is responsible for the oppressive potential of democracy
and precluding new forms of emancipation. *gendered
language under erasure.

<If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy,
then, it is that modern democracy presents itself from the beginning as a
vindication and liberation of zoe, and that it is constantly trying to
transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find, so to speak, the
bios of zoe. Hence, too, modern democracy's specific aporia: it wants to put
the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place-"bare life"that marked their subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden process that
leads to the recognition of rights and formal liberties stands once again
the body of the sacred man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot
be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed. To become conscious of this
aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplishments of democracy. It is,
rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very
moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries
and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoe, to
whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin.
Modern democracy's decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian
states in post-democratic spectacular societies (which begins to become
evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds its final sanction in the analyses of Guy
Debord) may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks the beginning of
modern democracy and forces it into complicity with its most implacable enemy.
Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and
until the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascismwhich transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme political principle-will
remain stubbornly with us. According to the testimony of Robert Antelme, in fact,
what the camps taught those who lived there was precisely that "calling into
question the quality of man provokes an almost biological assertion of belonging to
the human race" (L'esppce humaine, p. II). The idea of an inner solidarity
between democracy and totalitarianism (which here we must, with every
caution, advance) is obviously not (like Leo Strauss's thesis concerning the secret
convergence of the final goals of liberalism and communism) a historiographical
claim, which would authorize the liquidation and leveling of the enormous
differences that characterize their history and their rivalry. Yet this idea must
nevertheless be strongly maintained on a historico-philosophical level, since it alone
will allow us to orient ourselves in relation to the new realities and unforeseen
convergences of the end of the millennium. This idea alone will make it possible
to clear the way for the new politics, which remains largely to be
invented.>
The affirmatives gesture of democracy is a guise for modern

totalitarianism, through the insistence on rights that do
nothing but write subjects into the letter of the law, beholding
them to the powers of the sovereign.
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Book; Pg. 9-10; DOA: 7/16/15 ||
NDW)
If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to clas sical democracy, then, it is that
modern democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation
of zoe, and that it is constantly trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life
and to find, so to speak, the bios of zoe. Hence, too, modern democracy's specific aporia: it wants to
put the freedom and happiness of men into play in rhe very place-"bare life" -that
marked their subjection. Behind the long , strife-ridden process that leads to the
recognition of rights and formal liberties stands once again the body of the sacred
man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet may,
nevertheless, be killed. To become conscious of this aporia is not to belirde the conquests and accomplishments of
democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very
moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and
reached irs greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoe , to whose happiness it had
dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin. Modern democracy's decadence and gradual
convergence w:rh totalitarian states in post-democratic spectacular societies (which
begins to become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds its final sanction in the analyses of Guy Debord) may well be
rooted in this aporia, which marks the beginning of modern democracy and forces it
into complicity with its most implacable enemy. Today politics knows no value (and,
consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the contradictions that this fact implies
are dissolved, Nazism and fascism-which transformed rhe decision on bare life into
the supreme political principle-will remain stub bornly with us. According to the testimony of
Robert Antelme, in fact, what the camps taught those who lived there was precisely that "calling into question the quality of man
provokes an almost biological assertion of belonging to the human race" (L'espece hu maine, p. u).
The global consolidation of politics into democratic states

effaces the possibility of progressivism and empties
institutions and identities of their liberatory potential.
Agamben 2K
[Giorgio prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ. Minnesota Press, p.
109-110]
<THE FALL of the Soviet Communist Party and the unconcealed rule of the
capitalist-democratic state on a planetary scale have cleared the field of
the two main ideological obstacles hindering the resumption of a political
philosophy worthy of our time: Stalinism on one side, and progressivism and
the constitutional state on the other. Thought thus finds itself, for the first
time, facing its own task without any illusion and without any possible
alibi. The "great transformation" constituting the final stage of the stateform is thus taking place before our very eyes: this is a transformation
that is driving the kingdoms of the Earth (republics and monarchies, tyrannies
and democracies, federations and national states) one after the other toward
the state of the integrated spectacle (Guy Debord) and toward "capitalist
parliamentarianism" (Alain Badiou). In the same way in which the great
transformation of the first industrial revolution destroyed the social and
political structures as well as the legal categories of the ancien regime,
terms such as sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy, and general
will by now refer to a reality that no longer has anything to do with what
these concepts used to designate-and those who continue to use these
concepts uncritically literally do not know what they are talking about. Consensus
and public opinion have no more to do with the general will than the
"international police" that today fight wars have to do with the
sovereignty of the jus publicum Europaeum. Contemporary politics is this
devastating experiment that disarticulates and empties institutions and
beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities all throughout
the planet, so as then to rehash and reinstate their definitively nullified
form.>
Their terror discourse normalizes a state of exception we are

no longer citizens but detainees of the war on terrorism kills
agency and turns the case - public discourse is militarized and
replicates a violent pedagogy that reinforces the death drive
and causes extinction
GIROUX 3-30-15 [Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for
Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished
Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. Terrorism, Violence, and the Culture of Madness,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/30/terrorism-violence-and-the-culture-of-madness/, msm]
Chris Hedges crystalizes this premise in arguing that Americans now live in a society in which violence
is the habitual
response by the state to every dilemma, legitimizing war as a permanent
feature of society and violence as the organizing principle of politics .[1] Under
such circumstances, malevolent modes of rationality now impose the values of a
militarized neoliberal regime on everyone, shattering viable modes of agency, solidarity,
and hope. Amid the bleakness and despair, the discourses of militarism, danger and war now fuel a
war on terrorism that represents the negation of politicssince all interaction is
reduced to a test of military strength war brings death and destruction, not only
to the adversary but also to ones side, and without distinguishing between guilty
and innocent.[2] Human barbarity is no longer invisible, hidden under the bureaucratic
language of Orwellian doublespeak. Its conspicuousness, if not celebration, emerged in the new editions of
American exceptionalism ushered in by the post 9/11 exacerbation of the war on terror. In the aftermath of these monstrous acts of
terrorism, there was a growing sense among politicians, the mainstream media, and conservative and liberal pundits that history as
we knew it had been irrefutably ruptured. If politics seemed irrelevant before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, it now seemed both urgent and despairing. But history cannot be erased, and those traditional public spheres in which
people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly continued to appear
to have little significance or political consequence. Already imperiled before the aftershocks of the terrorists attacks, democracy
the historical rupture produced

by the events of 9/11 has transformed a terrorist attack into a war on terror that
mimics the very crimes it pledged to eliminate . The script is now familiar. Security
trumped civil liberties as shared fears replaced any sense of shared responsibilities .
Under Bush and Cheney, the government lied about the war in Iraq, created a torture state,
violated civil liberties, and developed new antiterrorist laws , such as the USA PATRIOT ACT. It
imposed a state of emergency that justified a range of terrorist practices, including
extraordinary rendition and state torture, which made it easier to undermine those basic civil liberties that
became even more fragile in the aftermath of 9/11. Almost fourteen years later,
protect individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions.[3] Under the burgeoning of what James Risen
has called the homeland security-industrial complex, state secrecy and organized corporate corruption filled the coffers of the
defense industry along with the corporate owned security industriesespecially those providing drones who benefited the most
from the war on terror.[4] This is not to suggest that security is not an important consideration for the United States. Clearly, any
democracy needs to be able to defend itself, but it cannot serve, as it has, as a pretext for abandoning civil liberties, democratic
values, and any semblance of justice, morality, and political responsibility. Nor can it serve as a pretext for American exceptionalism
Agamben has suggested rightly warned that under

the so war on terrorism, the political landscape is changing and that we are no
longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo
not by an indifference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had
the misfortune to be incarceratedor unexpectedly executed by a missile from an
unmanned aircraft.[5] The war on terror morphed into a legitimation for state
terrorism as was made clear under the willingness of the Obama administration to
pardon the CIA torturers, create a kill list, expand the surveillance state, punish whistleblowers, and use
drones to indiscriminately kill civiliansall in the name of fighting terrorists . Obama expanded the
reach of the militarized state and along with Democratic and Republican Party extremists preached a
notion of security rooted in personal fears rather than in a notion of social
security that rallied against the deprivations and suffering produced by war,
poverty, racism, and state terrorism. The war on terrorism extended the discourse ,
space, location, and time of war in ways that made it unbounded and ubiquitous making
everyone a potential terrorists and the battlefield a domestic as well as
foreign location, a foreign as well as a domestic policy issue. Obama has become the master of
permanent war seeking to increase the bloated military budget close to a trillion dollars
while turning to lawless violence.translated into unrestrained violent interventions from Libya to
Syria and back to Iraq, including an attempt to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send
more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine.[6] Fear became total and the imposition of
punitive standards included not only the bombing, abduction, and torture of enemy
combatants, but also the use of the police and federal troops for drug interdictions,
the enforcement of zero tolerance standards in public schools, and the increasing
criminalization of a range of social behaviors that extended from homelessness to
violating dress codes in school. Under the regime of neoliberalism with its war-like view of
competition, its celebration of self-interest, and its disdain for democratic values and shared compassion for others, any
notion of unity has been contaminated by the fog of misguided patriotism, a hatred
of the other now privileged as an enemy combatant , and an insular retreat into mindless consumerism
and the faux safety of gated communities. With the merging of militarism , the culture of surveillance, and a
neoliberal culture of cruelty, solidarity and public trust have morphed into an endless display
of violence and the ongoing militarization of visual culture and public space .
[7] The war on terror has come home as poor neighborhoods are transformed
into war zones with the police resembling an occupying army . The most lethal expressions of
and its imperialist expansionist goals. The philosopher Giorgio
racism have become commonplace as black men and boys such as Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are repeatedly beaten, and killed by
the police.[8] As Jeffrey St. Clair has pointed out,
one index of how state terrorism and lawlessness
have become normalized is evident not only by the fact that the majority of
Americans support torture, even though they know it is totally ineffective as a
means of intelligence gathering, but also by the American publics growing
appetite for violence, whether it parades as entertainment or manifests itself in the growing demonization and
incarceration of black and brown youth, adults, Muslims, immigrants, and others deemed as disposable.[9] It should come as no
surprise that the one issue the top 2016 GOP presidential contenders agree on is that guns are the ultimate symbol of freedom in
America, a bellwether of individual liberty, a symbol of what big wants and shouldnt have.[10] Guns provide political theater for
the new political extremists and are symptomatic less of some cockeyed defense of the second amendment than willingness to
maximize the pleasure of violence and building a case for the use of deadly force both at home and abroad. As Rustom Bharacuha
and Susan Sontag have argued in different contexts, There is an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of
violence,[11] one that dissolves politics into pathology.[12] Notions of democracy increasingly appear to be giving way to the
discourse of revenge, domestic security, stupidity, and war. The political reality that has emerged since the shattering crisis of 9/11
increasingly points to a set of narrow choices that are being largely set by the jingoistic right wing extremists, the defense
department, conservative funded foundations, and fueled by the dominant media. War and violence now function as an aphrodisiac
for a public inundated with commodities and awash in celebrity culture idiocy. This surrender to the pleasure of violence is made all
the more easy by the civic illiteracy now sweeping the United States. Climate change deniers, anti-intellectuals, religious
fundamentalists, and others who exhibit pride in displaying a kind of thoughtlessness exhibit a kind of political and theoretical
helplessness, if not corruption, that opens the door to the wider publics acceptance of foreign and domestic violence. The current
extremists dominating Congress are frothing at the mouth to go to war with Iran,
bomb Syria into the twilight zone, and further extend the reach of the American
empire through its over bloated war machine to any country that questions the use
of American power. One glaring example can be found in the constant and under
analyzed televised images and stories of homegrown terrorists threatening to blow
up malls, schools, and any other conceivable space where the public gathers. Other
examples can be found in the militarized frothing and Islamophobia perpetrated by the Fox News Network, made concrete by the an
almost fever pitched bellicosity that informs the majority of its commentaries and reactions to war on terror. Missing from the
endless call for security, vengeance, and the use of state violence is the massive lawlessness produced by the United States
government through targeted drone attacks on enemy combatants, the violation of civil liberties, and the almost unimaginable
human suffering and hardship perpetrated through the American war machine in the Middle East, especially Iraq. Also missing is a
history of lawlessness, imperialism, and torture that supported a host of authoritarian regimes propped up by the United States.
Capitalizing on the pent up emotions and needs of an angry and grieving public for
revenge, fueled by an unchecked Islamophobia, almost any reportage of a terrorist attack
throughout the globe, further amplifies the hyped-up language of war, patriotism,
and retaliation. Similarly, conservative talking-heads write numerous op-eds and appear
on endless talk shows fanning the fires of patriotism by calling upon the United
States to expand the war against any one of a number of Arab countries that are
considered terrorist states. For example, John Bolton , writing an op-ed for the New York Times insists
that all attempts by the Obama administration to negotiate an arms deal with Iran is a sign of weakness. For Bolton, the only way to
deal with Iran is to launch an attack on their nuclear infrastructure. The title of his op-ed sums up the organizing idea of the article:
To Stop Irans Bomb, Bomb Iran.[13] In the current historical moment, the language of indiscriminate revenge and lawlessness
seems to be winning the day. This is a discourse unconscious of its own dangerous refusal to acknowledge the important role that
democratic values and social justice must play in a truly unified rationale response, so as to prevent the further killing of innocent
people, regardless of their religion, culture, and place of occupancy in the world. Instead of viewing the current crisis as simply a
new and more dangerous historical conjuncture that has nothing to learn from the past, it is crucial for the American public to begin
to understand how the past might be useful in addressing what it means to live in a democracy at a time when democracy is not
only viewed as an excess, but as a liability to the wishes and interests of the new extremists who now control the American
government. The anti-democratic forces that define American history cannot be forgotten in the fog of political and cultural
amnesia. State violence and terrorism have a long history in the United States, both in its foreign and domestic policies, and
ignoring this dark period of history means that nothing will be learned from the legacy of a politics that has indulged authoritarian
ideologies and embraced violence as a central measure of power, national identity, and patriotism.[14] At stake here is the need to
establish a vision of society and a global order that safeguards its most basic civil liberties and notions of human rights. Any struggle
against terrorism must begin with the pledge on the part of the United States that it will work in conjunction with international
organizations, especially the United Nations, a refusal to engage in any military operations that might target civilians, and that it will
rethink those aspects of its foreign policy that have allied it with repressive nations in which democratic liberties and civilian lives
are under siege. Crimes overlooked will be repeated and intensified just as public memory is rendered a liability in the face of the
discourse of revenge, demonization, and extreme violence. Many news commentators and journalists in the dominant press have
September 11 within the context of World War II, invoking daily the symbols of revenge, retaliation,
is now used to justify and fuel a politics of in-security, fear, precarity,
and demonization. The dominant media no longer functions in the interests of a democracy. Mainstream
media supported Bushs fabrications to justify the invasion of Iraq and never apologized for such despicable actions. It
taken up the events of
and war. Nostalgia
has rarely supported the heroic actions of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou,
Jeffrey Sterling, and others.[15] Mainstream media has largely remained mute about the pardoning of those who tortured as a
Against an endless onslaught of images of jets bombing countries

the dominant
media connects the war abroad with the domestic struggle at home by
matter of state policy.
extending from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and Gaza, amply supplied by the Defense Department,
presenting numerous stories about the endless ways in which potential

terrorists might use nuclear weapons, poison the food supply, or unleash
biochemical agents on the American population. The increased fear and
insecurity created by such stories simultaneously serve to legitimatize a host of antidemocratic practices at home-including a concerted attack on civil liberties , freedom of expression, and
freedom of the press,[16] and a growing sentiment on the part of the American public that people who suggest that terrorism is, in
part, caused by American foreign policy should not be allowed to teach in the public schools, work in the government, and even
make a speech at a college.[17] This legacy of suppression has a long history in the United States, and it has returned with a
vengeance in academia, especially for those academics, such as Norman Finkelstein and Steven G. Salaita, who have condemned
Americas policies in the Middle East and the governments support of the Israeli governments policies towards Palestinians.
Language itself has become militarized fed by an onslaught of extreme

violence that now floods Hollywood films and the violence that dominates American television. Hollywood blockbusters such
as American Sniper glorify war crimes and produce demonizing views of Islam.[18] Television programs such as Spartacus, The
Following, Hannibal, True Detective, Justified, and Top of the Lake intensify the pleasure quotient for viewing extreme and graphic
violence appears to provide one of the few outlets for

Americans to express what has come to resemble what could be construed as a spiritual
release. Extreme violence, including the sanctioning of state torture , may be one of the few
practices left that allows the American people to feel alive, to mark what it means to be
close to the register of death in a way that reminds them of the ability to feel
within a culture that deadens every possibility of life . Under such circumstances, the reality of
violence is infantilized, transformed into forms of entertainment that produce
and legitimate a carnival of cruelty. The privatization of violence does more than maximize the pleasure
violence to an almost unimaginable degree. Graphic
quotient and heighten macho ebullience, it also gives violence a fascist edge by depoliticizing a culture in which the reality of
violence takes on the form of state terrorism. Authoritarianism in this context becomes hysterical because it turns politics and
neoliberalism into a criminal system and keeps working towards the expansion of the realm of pure violence, where its
The extreme visibility of violence in American culture represents a

willful pedagogy of carnage and gore designed to normalize its presence
in American society and to legitimate its practice and presence as a matter of
common sense. Moreover, war making and the militarization of public discourse
and public space also serve as an uncritical homage to a form of hypermasculinity that operates from the assumption that violence is not only the most
important practice for mediating most problems, but that it is also central to identity
formation itself. Agency is now militarized and almost completely removed from any
notion of civic values. We get a glimpse of this form of violent hyper-masculinity not only in the highly publicized
advancement can proceed unhindered.[19]
brutality against women dished out by professional football players, but also in the endless stories of sexual abuse and violence now
Violence has
become the DNA of war making in the U nited States, escalating under Bush and Obama into a kind of
war fever that embraces a death drive. As Robert J. Lifton points out, Warmaking can quickly
become associated with war fever, the mobilization of public excitement to the point of
a collective experience with transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a task
that must be carried out for the defense of ones nation , to sustain its special historical destiny and
taking place in frat houses across America, many in some of the most prestigious colleges and universities.
the immortality of its people. ..War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety,
in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or against Americans abroadand later to growing
The war on terror is the new normal. Its adoration and

intensification of violence, militarization, and state terrorism reach into
every aspect of American life. Americans complain over the economic deficit but say little about the democracy and
casualties in occupied Iraq.[20]
moral deficit now providing the foundation for the new authoritarianism. A police presence in our major cities showcases the visible
parameters of the authoritarian state. For example, with a police force of 34,000 New York City resembles an armed camp with a
force that as Thom Hartman points out is biggerthat the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Kenya, and a number of other countries.[21] At the same time, the Pentagon has given billions of dollars worth of military
equipment to local police forces all over America. Is it any wonder, that minorities of color fear the police more than the gangs and
criminals that haunt their neighborhoods? Militarism is one of the breeding grounds of violence in the United States and is visible in
the ubiquitous gun culture, the modeling of schools after prisons, the exploding incarceration state, the paramilitarization of local
police forces, the burgeoning military budget, and the ongoing attacks on protesters, dissidents, black and brown youth, and
Under the war on terrorism, moral panic and a culture of fear have not only
redefined public space as the sinister abode of danger, death and infection and
fueled the collective rush to patriotism on the cheap, it has also buttressed a fear
economy and refigured the meaning of politics itself .[22] Defined as the complex of
women.
military and security firms rushing to exploit the national nervous breakdown ,[23] the
fear economy promises big financial gains for both the defense department, and the anti-terroristsecurity sectors, primed to terror-proof everything from trash cans and water systems to shopping malls and public
restrooms. The war on terrorism has been transformed into a new market, a consumer goods for the hysterical war mongers and
Fear is no longer an attitude as much as it is a culture that

functions as the enemy of reason [while distorting] emotions and perceptions, and
often leads to poor decisions .[24] But the culture of fear does more than undermine critical judgment and
suppress dissent, as Don Hazen points out, it also: breeds more violence, mental illness and trauma,
social disintegration, job failure, loss of workers rights, and much more. Pervasive
fear ultimately paves the way for an accelerating authoritarian society with increased police power,
legally codified oppression, invasion of privacy, social controls, social anxiety and PTSD.[25] Fear and
repression reproduce rather than address the most fundamental anti-democratic elements of terrorism. Instead of
mobilizing fear, people need to recognize that the threat of terrorism cannot be
understood apart from the crisis of democracy itself. The greatest struggle faced by the American public is not
their acolytes in the media while making politics and extension of war.
terrorism, but a struggle on behalf of justice, freedom, and democracy for all of the citizens of the globe. This is not going to take
place, as President Obamas policies will tragically affirm, by shutting down democracy, eliminating its most cherished rights and
freedoms, and deriding communities of dissent. Engaging terrorism demands more than rage and anger, revenge and retaliation.
American society is broken, corrupted by the financial elite, and addicted to violence and a culture of permanent war.
The war on terror institutionalizes a permanent state of

exception that normalizes bare life among the population and
justifies endless interventions in the name of security turns
the case
van Munster 4 [RENS VAN MUNSTER is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for
International Studies (DIIS) and teaches security studies at the Department of Political Science,
University of Southern Denmark. The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule,
ARTICLE in INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW JANUARY 2004,
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rens_Van_Munster/publication/226766473_The_War_on_Terroris
m_When_the_Exception_Becomes_the_Rule/links/00b7d5385a862d6ad2000000.pdf, msm]
the
semiotics of the war on terrorism points at a significant shift in United States
discourses on security. This shift is best described as a move from defence to prevention or as a move from
1. INTRODUCTION Building upon the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, this article argues
deterrence to risk management. Whereas defence and the politics of threat are closely related to the rule-governed
the war on terrorism takes place largely outside the

framework of domestic or international law and seems to consolidate something akin to a
permanent state of exception, in which distinctions such as inside/outside,
peace/war, friend/enemy and rule/exception are blurred to the point of
indistinction. Indeed, this article argues that the United States war on terrorism is a particular
form of governing an emergency, in which the United States constitutes itself as
the sovereign of the global order by exempting itself from the (international)
framework of law. In this process, the sovereign power reduces the life of (some) people
to that of homo sacer: life that can be killed without punishment . The argument
realm of war, this article claims that
will proceed in four stages. The next section will discuss Agambens essay Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare
Life (1998) in some detail, since it seems key to understanding the exceptional mode of operation of the war on
terrorism. Picking up on this, Section 3 will apply the framework of Agamben to the war on terrorism, arguing that
the United States security response to terrorism institutionalises the state of exception as a permanent condition of
the global order. Due to a shift in US politics of security, now informed by a discourse on eventualities rather than
actual events, the United States calls for a permanent military policing through the mechanisms of prevention and
pre-emption. Section 4 will argue that in this permanent state of exception,
the other, the enemy is
encountered mainly as homo sacer. Section 5 concludes this paper. 2. ZONES OF INDISTINCTION:
SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE This section seeks to elaborate Agambens treatise on sovereign power and
bare life as it seems key to grasping what is currently at stake in the war on terrorism. It will begin with a discussion
of the relation between sovereignty and the camp, arguing that the camp is characterised by a permanent state of
exception in which law 142 RENS VAN MUNSTER and chaos enter into a zone of indistinction. In this zone of
indistinction, the central figure one encounters is that of homo sacer, bare life stripped of all its value in the sense
that violence against him/her remains unpunished. Agambens writings on sovereign power, bare life and the camp
are based on his reading of Carl Schmitts definition of sovereignty. According to Schmitt, the kernel of sovereignty
lies in declaring the state of exception. The state of exception is constitutive of the juridical order in the sense that
no rule exists without an exception: Order must be established for juridical order to make sense. A regular
situation must be created, and sovereign is he who definitely decides if this situation is actually effective.3 Schmitt
thus inverses the traditional Hobbesian definition of sovereignty as the juridical sanctioned power to rule.
Sovereignty is not established after the state of nature; rather, the sovereign declaration of the state of exception
simultaneously creates the state of nature and the rule of law through the abandonment of life, reducing (some)
subjects to bare life.4 Sovereign power thus constantly reproduces what it claims to presuppose. That is, the social
contract that brings the sovereign into being masks the fact that sovereignty essentially operates through a ban:
The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment.5 First, the sovereign is characterised by
the fact that he can exempt himself from the law. Second, in doing so sovereign power excludes sacred life from the
human-made juridical order in the sense that the latter can be killed without punishment. Thus, the sovereign and
homo sacer are the mirror images of the sovereign operation: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all
men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.6 To
put it simply: if the sovereign is defined by his capability to exempt himself from the law, homo sacer is defined as
the bearer of this sovereign ban. Hence, for Carl Schmitt sovereignty shows itself not in a normal situation (or more
accurately: it shows itself only in its potentiality) but in the state of exception, which is the authentic self-definition
of a political community in the sense that it both constructs and delimits political space.7 Although Agamben finds
Schmitts definition of sovereignty useful, he identifies a third variation of order and localisation besides the rule of
law and the state of exception: To an order without localization (the state of exception, in which law is suspended)
there now corresponds a localization without order (the camp as the permanent space of exception).8 For
Agamben, the camp exemplifies the space that is opened up when the state of exception finds a more permanent
location: The camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception the possibility of deciding on which founds
sovereign power is realized normally[It] actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto
suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on the law but on the civility and
ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign.9 Originally, the camp was an exclusive, secret, space
surrounded by walls that divided social life within the political community from the bare life in the camps. However,
according to Agamben the space of the state of exception has transgressed the spatiotemporal boundaries of the
camp. The exception has become the rule: Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental
the
sovereign right to take life has become supplemented and permeated by a right to
make life. In modern societies the sovereign threat of death has been complemented with
a concern to take charge of biological life in order to make it more productive,
fertile, healthy, etc.11 Instead of threatening with death, biopolitics is a form of power that is concerned with
biopolitical paradigm of the West.10 Taking his cue from Michel Foucault, Agamben maintains that
the correction, administration and regulation of populations. Seeking to take charge of life, it does not have to
draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around
the norm.12 The inclusion of pure life in politics, then, also marks a shift from law to the (statistical) norm in the
sense that bare life is not only, or not even first and foremost, produced in the sovereign process of taking life, but
through the process of making life, i.e. through the distribution of human life around a norm with the purpose of
reducing lifes distance to this norm. Although the incorporation of bare life in the political realm has made it
possible to reduce, amongst others, famine and mortality in the West, it has also given rise to caring practices
such as racism and eugenics: What follows is a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most
sophisticated political techniques. For the first time in historyit becomes possible both to protect life and to
Agambens rendering of sovereign power and bare life is driven

by an ethical drive to lay bare the juridico-political mechanisms of power that make
it possible to commit acts of violence that do not count as crime.14 While not denying the
authorize a holocaust.13
uniqueness of the suffering in the Nazi concentration camps, Agamben discovers similar structures in contemporary
society. He points out that camp-like structures such as detention centres for illegal migrants, airport holding zones
and humanitarian relief camps all produce bare life in the sense that decisions on the life of people can be taken
outside the normal framework of rule, but which nevertheless are not completely illegal and without connection to
that law. In the context of this paper, the Guantanamo Bay detention centre for suspected terrorists is another case
in point.15 However, as Edkins has noted, Agamben has not inquired deeper into the politics of emergency or the
politics of the ban in which the sovereign and homo sacer are constituted as each others mirror image.16
Therefore, the following sections aim to provide insight into the ways in which the American governance of the
emergency of 9/11 constitute global American sovereignty on the one hand and reduce political subjects to the
A
direct parallel, then, can be drawn between Agambens notion of the camp as a zone
naked life of homo sacer. 3. THE WAR ON TERRORISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF AMERICAN SOVEREIGNTY
of indistinction and the logic that informs the United States war on terrorism. In addition to the
physical emergence of camp-like structures such as the detainment centres for suspected terrorists, it can be said
the war on terrorism operates through the sovereign ban in the sense that it
blurs the distinction between inside/ outside, domestic
politics/international relations, order/anarchy, trust/fear police/military
and friend/enemy. This section argues that the blurring is brought about by a
fundamental change in the United States politics of security. Contrary to the pre-9/11 period,
that
the starting point of post-9/11 security politics is prevention rather than the defence against an actual threat: We
must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of todays adversariesTo forestall or
the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.17 The semiotic shift from defence to prevention takes its point of departure in the behavioural
prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries,
potentialities of states rather than their actual behaviour: [T]he United States can no longer solely rely on a
reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of todays
threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be unleashed by our adversaries choice of weapons, do
not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.18 Whereas anticipatory self-defence as it is
the war on terrorism

replaces this picture with that of proactive intervention: We must deter and defend against
the threat before it is unleashed.19 As such, prevention entails a move from danger to
risk.20 The aim is no longer to confront a concrete danger, but to intervene
before threats have fully emerged. Thus, preventive security is virtual security:
it is one step further away from danger in its potentiality, but at the same time it is
real, for the future increasingly determines present security choices. 21 The shift from
defence to prevention, re-action to pro-action, deterrence to intelligence, and events
to eventualities is to be considered mainly on an ontological level. Contrary to defence,
prevention takes insecurity rather than security as the underlying value of
security politics: We are today a nation at risk to a new and changing threat. The terrorist threat to
America takes many forms, has many places to hide, and is often invisible. Yet the need for homeland
understood in international law still operates with an image of reactive violence,
security is tied to our enduring vulnerability.22 While defence implies protection, safety and trust, prevention
Security discourses, in other words,

are increasingly dominated by the logic of risk management, a logic which calls for the
management and government of potentialities of risky populations by means of
(statistical) calculations and proactive management rather than through the reactive management of
operates on the basis of permanent feelings of fear, anxiety and unease.
real events and threats. The war on terrorism cannot be pinpointed in spatiotemporal terms. The time and place of
terrorism are of the terrorists choosing. The success of terrorism lies in the provocation of fear and anxiety that
all perceived dangers

can be and are linked to terrorists. Fear is the
result from the uncertainty regarding the time and place of the next attack. Hence,
(anthrax, serial killers, illegal immigration, etc.)
rationale of the war on terrorism in which, in the end, everything can become suspicious. The National
Security Strategy (2002) summarises it nicely: Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder,
often supported by outlaw regimes, are now spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off
security politics has to operate

on a global level: to be safe here means that the world has to be freed from
terrorists everywhere. In terms of its effects on the contours of the global order, the prevention
doctrine lays the basis for the United States exemption from international law and
other norms that govern conduct in international society. In this sense, prevention
invalidates the law without declaring international law openly obsolete .
Faced with a non-localisable and open-ended threat, the war on terrorism effectively
institutionalises a permanent state of exception in which the United
States reserves for itself the right to act unilaterally, while simultaneously
demanding compliance with the law from the other states . As Hardt and Negri
argue: Here therefore, is born, in the name of the exceptionality of the intervention, a
form of right that is really a right of the police [that] is inscribed in the deployment
of prevention, repression, and rhetorical force aimed at the reconstruction of the
social equilibrium.24 As such, the war on terrorism replaces the current order with a
without warning.23 Victory is remote and to protect the local homeland,
smooth, infinite space of endless surveillance, detection and prevention. Prevention

produces American sovereignty, but it is also produces bare life, life that is abandoned in the
process of constituting global American sovereignty. 4. THE WAR ON TERRORISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF BARE
the figure of the terrorist embodies the bare life that is the bearer
of the sovereign ban. While the language of war might seem to elevate terrorism from the realm of criminal
justice (low politics) to that of war and international security (high politics), a closer look reveals that terrorists
are in fact not considered a legitimate party in the war. Rather, they are criminalised
and referred to as unlawful combatants. The distinction between enemy combatant and unlawful
LIFE In the war on terror,
combatant has much in common with the Schmittian distinction between enemy and foe. While the first refers to
the concrete other that constitutes an existential threat to the self, the foe refers to the criminalised and morally
degraded other, who should not only be defeated but utterly destroyed. Perhaps, it is in this sense that one should
the comment by the American Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, that the
goal of the war in Afghanistan was to kill rather than defeat as many Taleban as
possible.25 At any rate, the framing of the war on terrorism as a war on behalf of
civilisation itself denies that such values are presented in the other.26 Thus Zizek argues
make sense of
that in the war on terrorism ...we cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organization like the Red Cross
mediating between the warring parties, organizing the exchange of prisoners, and so on: one side of the conflict
(the US-dominated global force) already assumes the role of the Red Cross it perceives itself not as one of the
warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order crushing rebellions and, simultaneously,
providing humanitarian aid to the local populations. Perhaps the ultimate image of the treatment of the local
population as Homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistan one is never sure what it
will drop, bombs or food parcels.27 As noted earlier, a second aspect in which the transformation of life into bare
life is visible in the war on terrorism concerns the status and treatment of detained suspects of terrorism. Although
many of the detainees have been taken into American custody during the armed conflict in Afghanistan, they are
not granted the prisoner of war status in the way it is required by the Geneva Conventions. Speaking of unlawful
combatants, the United States successfully keeps their detainment outside the realm of international regulation. In
a parallel movement, the fate of the detainees is also kept outside the jurisdiction of the national American criminal
justice system as a result of the extra-territorial location of the Guantanamo base where many detainees are held.
While the suffering of these detainees obviously is not comparable to the atrocities faced by inhabitants of the
concentration camps, it is nevertheless possible to detect the juridico-political structure of the state of exception
(the camp) in detainment centres such as the Guantanamo base, as detainees are stripped from all legal rights,
while they remain subjected to the power exercised over them.28 However, the biopolitical production of bare life
the production of
homo sacer is made possible through bureaucratic techniques of risk management,
enabled by new laws such as the Patriot Act, that apply well beyond the theatres of military conflict. These
techniques of bureaucratic surveillance subject life to statistical methods by which
norms of behaviour are identified within the population according to the laws of
probability.29 In risk management, the subject is not encountered as a unique person with
some sort of indispensable inner singularity, but as an aggregate of risk factors, a
modulation that can be managed and tamed through continuous monitoring. As Rose
does not just take place in the camp or the immediate conflict in Afghanistan. In fact,
argues, risk management is not a question of instituting a regime in which each person is permanently under the
alien gaze of the eye of power exercising individualizing surveillance. It is not a matter of apprehending and
normalizing the offender ex post facto. Conduct is continually monitored and reshaped by logics immanent within all
networks of practice. Surveillance is designed in to the flows of everyday existence.30 Turning individuals into
risk management reduces life to the naked life of biographic profiles on the
basis of which new collective identities or risk classes are created.31 The aim of the
dividuals,
Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS) system, for instance, is to gather data about all passengers
flying to the United States. On the basis of information about name, age, address, passport, credit card number and
previous travels, CAPPS classifies the potential dangerousness of all travellers. It constructs three different risk
classes/identities: green, yellow and red, with green meaning non-dangerous and red meaning very dangerous.
Muslim visitors from the Middle East are automatically assigned the yellow identity.32 However, surveillance is not
just limited to foreigners entering the United States. The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), a joint initiative of the
Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the Intelligence Community, the FBI and the State
Department, seeks to install surveillance and data collection as a routine of every-day life within and outside the
United States. As Attorney General Ashcroft argues: The Terrorist Screening Center will provide one-stop shopping
so that every federal anti-terrorist screener is working off the same page whether its an airport screener, an
embassy official issuing visas overseas, or an FBI agent on the street.33 The result is that the differences between
inside/outside, police/military and FBI/CIA become increasingly blurred. On the one hand, there is an increasing
internalisation of external security in the form of domestic spying and data collection within the United States. On
the other hand, externalisation of internal security (policing beyond borders) is taking place in remote places such
as Afghanistan. Hence, Tom Ridges (Secretary of Homeland Security) remark, that the Terrorist Screening Center
will make it possible to put intelligence to immediate use at the front lines of the battle against terrorism misses the
crucial point that there are no clear front lines in the war on terror. Rather, the front is everywhere and no one can
expect to be exempted from the network of surveillance and inspection. In a sense, everybody is a suspect. The
administration and classification of biographical risk profiles does not work as an immediate exclusion (monitored
subjects can freely move around), but as a form of inclusive exclusion. That is, prevention does not perform its
exclusive function in simple binary terms of friend/foe, but fabricates the foe within the social order as potentially
dangerous. The aim of intervention is no longer the exclusion of dangerous elements, but to interfere on the
actuarial basis of risk factors in order to anticipate and prevent groupings from becoming dangerous. Through the
inclusion of risk classes in a system of control, the life of legal subjects is not reduced to that of homo sacer. Rather,
the figure of homo sacer dwells in everybody in the sense that all
life is bare life until class credentials prove otherwise the elevation from homo
sacer to an autonomous subject is only a secondary move. 5. CONCLUSION Following
Agamben, this paper has argued that the centrality of the state of exception and the sovereign
ban as the non-localisable foundation for the political order are crucial for
understanding the war on terrorism, the production of American sovereignty and the
production of bare life. Due to its emphasis on prevention, the war on terrorism
institutionalises the state of exception as a permanent aspect of the
global order. In it, American sovereignty is constituted in a Schmittian sense as
much as bare life is subjected to technological processes of risk
identification, administration and assessment. Indeed, in the sense that prevention
calls for a system of social control that envelopes the entire globe, it is best
understood as a blurring of the boundaries between inside/outside,
domestic/international and peace/war. The dispersion of surveillance throughout domestic and
the reverse is happening:
international society implies that heterogeneous factors and events such as place of birth, religion, travel records,
reading records, visa applications and immigration all become part of a cybernetics of control in which risk
information is intrinsic to all decisions made on these issues. Prevention, then, is not concerned with the production
of something good. Its aim is to repress anxiety through the development of new and better technologies of risk. It
does not work towards some utopian goal, but is guided by the principle of apocalypse: Risk society is a
catastrophic society. In it the exceptional condition threatens to become the norm.34 The semiotic shift from
defence to prevention in American security discourse, to conclude, implies that the freedom of human beings is in
constantly constrained, restricted and assessed. Hence, while the battle against terrorism is fought in the name of
freedom and democracy, risk management neutralises real democratic participation by classifying groups in
categories that affect the chances and choices of people in every-day life. To quote Agamben: A state which has
security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to
become itself terroristic.
Links K Affs
Link - Capitalism
Critique of capitalism functions not merely on the concrete
allocation of resources but becomes disparate and violent due
to linguistic patterns creating identity. This critique of the
universal imposition of identity is mutually exclusive from
conventional concrete analysis of political economy in that the
actors within economies are actively constituted by their
representations.
Agamben 2k
82-83]
<How can thought collect Debord's inheritance today, in the age of the complete
triumph of the spectacle? It is evident, after all, that the spectacle is language,
the very communicativity and linguistic being of humans. This means that
an integrated Marxian analysis should take into consideration the fact that
capitalism (or whatever other name we might want to give to the process
dominating world history today) not only aimed at the expropriation of
productive activity, but also, and above all, at the alienation of language
itself, of the linguistic and communicative nature of human beings, of that
logos in which Heraclitus identifies the Common. The extreme form of the
expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, in other words, the politics
in which we live. But this also means that what we encounter in the
spectacle is our very linguistic nature inverted. For this reason (precisely
because what is being expropriated is the possibility itself of a common good), the
spectacle's violence is so destructive; but, for the same reason, the
spectacle still contains something like a positive possibility-and it is our
task to use this possibility against it.>
Focus on production and consumption obfuscates the

functioning of disciplinary practices on laborers that are at the
core of capitalism.
Lazzarato 2k5
[Maurizo - sociologist and social theorist and a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes,
July 9, Multitudes, Biopolitics/Bioeconomics: a politics of multiplicity,online:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001567.php]
<Labour is a factor in production, but at the same time it is passive in

itself and only finds employment and activity thanks to a rate of
investment. Foucault widens the critique and asserts that it could also be
applied to Marxian theory. Why have both classical economists and Marx
paradoxically neutralised labour ? Because their economic analysis limits
itself to the study of the mechanisms of production, exchange and
consumption and thus glides over the qualitative modulations of
labourers, their choices, behaviour and decisions. Neo-liberals, on the other
hand, want to study labour as an economic conduct that operates, is rationalised
and calculated by those who work. This is the theory of human capital, elaborated
between the 1960s and 1970s, and Foucault uses it to illustrate this passage and
deepening of the logic of government. From the standpoint of the worker, wages are
not the sale price of his labour power but his income. An income of what ? Of its
capital, that is to say a human capital that cannot be separated from its bearer, a
capital that is one and the same as the worker. From the standpoint of the
worker, the problem is the growth, accumulation and amelioration of
his/her human capital.>
Link - Deleuze
Sovereign surveillance imposes self-regulation upon the
populace --- we become objectified through the gaze of an
unseen seer
Douglas, independent scholar, 2009 (Jeremy, Disappearing Citizenship:
surveillance and the state of exception, published in Surveillance & Society Vol 6,
No 1, p. 34-35 http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//roetlin
Yet what emerges is, on the one hand, a theory of the top-down management of a population that
is controlled through governmental mechanisms such as statistics-guided surveillance
and police practices, and, on the other hand, the bottom-up subjectivization of population
through the regulation of actions confronted with state power relations ; this may also be
regarded as biopolitical population control and individualizing discipline, respectively. These two streams of
governmentality surface in Foucaults later writings from time to time, but he never clearly reconciles the art of
This subjective conduct or governing the self is a selfdisciplining that is made possible through the knowledge of oneself as the other,
as the object of an unseen seer (as is discussed with the panoptic model in Discipline and Punish).
This self-conduct, however, is framed in terms of the problematic of government
that uses the power relation techniques of governing others to govern themselves
(Foucault 2000, 340-342); but again, where do these two points converge and differ? It
seems as though we must look to surveillance to answer this question. We know that
government and subjectivization.
surveillance is certainly a governmental technique for the management and control of the population, but we also
see that subjectivization is only possible via surveillance , as just mentioned with the
panoptic model. However, panoptic surveillance is an ancient notion, developed at least as far back as EBII,
The relation between the seer and the subject

is no longer that of a physical perspective from a point fixe , nor is it localised in a contained
space, as with Benthams prison model. Rather, as Paul Virilio would argue, surveillance is
making the traditionally confined space of the camp the very centre of the city .
sometime around 3000-2650BC (Yekutieli 2006, 78).
However, before examining the juridical-political applications of this notion, we must understand Giorgio Agambens
conception of biopolitics in terms of bare life and the state of exception.
Link - Gender/Sex/Race
Classifications of gender, sex, and race divide forms of life
establishing categories of social belonging and undermining
being as pure means.
Athanasiou 03 (Athena prof of social anthropology University of Thessaly,
Department of History, Archaeology, and Social Anthropology, Technologies of

Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity, differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.1, p. 128)
The coercive monologism of an all-encompassing body politic that brings
the body into History by means of the hegemonic codes and recognizable
splits of gender, sex, and race, the Ur-media of representation, is
perturbed by the quivering humanity of the barely livingin pain and in
pleasurebodies resisting, differing, sexing, living, aging, and dying, touched and
touching otherwise, elsewhere. The coming politics of this new body of
humanity, to borrow Agambens phrase, 1 haunts and exceeds the ontology
of representable institutional conditions of social belonging, the
apparatuses of capturing, counting, measuring, naming, recording,
appropriating, and hailing that the medical, legal, and demographic Law
establish in the name of the social bond. The problem, then, remains how to
seek out the impossible and yet necessary possibilities: how to think
representation (cultural, political, textual) without the ontological
presuppositions of authoritarian self-presence; how to think the body beyond
the ontic, beyond the representational presuppositions of the birth to presence;
how to think the political beyond sovereignty; and, finally, how to think the
language of the political beyond denomination. Facing this multifaceted problem
entails taking the risk of facing and witnessing the bodily self and human
sociality in ways not assimilated or submitted to the representational
epistemes required by the metaphysics of presencein spite of and yet
with(in) Heideggers engagement with technology, language, and metaphysics. In
what respect does the venture into that risk involve us in a possibility of theorizing
the limit, or theorizing at the limit? [End Page 128]
Link - Islamophobia
We control the root cause specifically in the context of
islamaphobia
Sheth 2011 [Falguni A., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory
Hampshire College. Foucault and Ontopolitics: Another Framework to Think about

Race, Law, and Power April 11th]
Foucaults linking of bio-politics and the inscription of racism is a crucial inroad to
understanding politico-racial fragmentation in contemporary society. This view is pathbreaking,
since it disarticulates the scientific objectivity of race in favor of a discursive
production of race, namely where race is transcribed through the language of
biology rather being grounded in biology. Foucaults concern, to be fair: is to illustrate one modern mode of
racism, namely either the domination of one population by another, or the elimination of heterogeneous elements from a monistic
analysis of biopower seems to pave the way

for a reified biological transcription of raceone in which the race literature is dominated by
State racism (as in the case of 1930s Germany). Still, this
medical/health/biological discussions of race. Moreover, there is a burgeoning literature today that reflects myriad applications of
biopolitics to contemporary understandings of racism.6
Consider the following example: in March 2005, when the FBI detained two female Muslim teenagers from Queens, NY, on suspicion
of being potential suicide bombers. Initially detained for different reasons, the girls encountered each other for the first time while
separately being escorted to immigration facilities in Manhattan. FBI agents were alerted to Tashnuba Hayder five months earlier
when her parents, Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh, reported that she had run away. Fearing that Tashnuba would elope with a
stranger in Michigan, her parents trusted the local police to find her. They canceled their request after she returned home
voluntarily. Five months later, FBI agents searched Tashnubas room and computer.62 After an initial interrogation, and on the false
pretext of an immigration violationher mothersthey detained her at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
(USCIS) offices in Manhattan. The FBI was concerned by Tashnubas religious fervor, apparent in her propensity to listen to sermons
by fundamentalist imams over the Internet, her chatroom comments about those sermons, class notes from a discussion on the
religious ethics of suicide, and perhaps most symbolically, her decision to observe full purdah full Islamic veil. Their suspicions
increased when Tashnuba and her government escorts encountered Adamah Bah in front of the BCIS building at 26 Federal Plaza.
Adamah, who wears the hijab, was originally detained because she missed a USCIS appointment in order to go on a high school field
trip to see Christos Gates exhibit in Central Park. During their encounter, Tashnuba Hayder and Adamah Bah reportedly
acknowledged each other with an unspecified traditional Muslim greeting, most likely salaam aleikum.63 That greeting,
combined with their orthodox dress, were the basis of the FBIs concern that the teenagers might be collaborators as potential
suicide bombers in a terrorist conspiracy.64 Both teens were sent to a detainment facility in Pennsylvania without access to lawyers
or parents, where they were subjected to constant interrogation for seven weeks. Now, at the level of regulatory power, we can
account for this event by turning to the USA PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, but also a spate of immigration and antiterrorism
laws that were enacted well before September 2001, including the 1996 Welfare and Immigration Act, the Telecommunications Act
of 1996, the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a 1908 Conspiracy Law, a 1918 Sedition Law, and others long on
laws enable federal agents to circumvent any norms against

search and seizure, and privacy. They also single out certain kinds of individuals
who are deemed to be more expendable than others. They criminalize associations
with certain organizations post-facto, i.e. they will name certain interactions that were legal one or even two
the American law books. These
decades before as now terroristic and therefore illegal. They name certain kinds of communications obscene, and illegal. In
combination with a repeal of mandatory judicial review in the case of many immigration violations ,
it becomes evident
how Muslims can be targets of persecution through regulatory and even disciplinary
measures. Western Europe has also long been interested in pushing a racial agenda that involves the regulation of Muslim
women who wear the hijab and niqab65: this seems to be a departure from biopower and of a diffuse sovereign power. Rather, it
seems to be directed by a much more central sovereign authority. It is clear that these laws are at best, tangentially connected to
the racism in question, the kind that has long driven domestic
politics in the United States, is even more tangential to bio-politics. Indeed, this racism
has much less to do with biology or lifeeven when it has claimed to, such as at the turn of the 20th century
and much more to do with conceptions of domestic security, and national identity. Are biothe politics of biopolitical racialization. But
politics the relevant level by which to analyze this set of racialregulations? Moreover, at the level of disciplinary power, we can
the neo-panoptical public gaze which intensifies the suspicion of racial

others through the wearing of the hijab and full purdah . In conjunction with other gestures of
Muslim devotion, the hijab or purdah are symbols that signify a threat to a larger regime. But who decides this threat?
consider
There are also other, more violent actshijackings, bombings, mass murder, insurgencieswhich, especially in a post 9-11 political
discourse, have come to be understood as gestures of Islamic piety. The hijab was the source of disciplinary regulation in several
regions of Europe over a decade before 9-11.66 There are various modes of discipline and regulation that are at work; but as we
know, while all populations are implicated in disciplinary and regulatory regimes, they are not implicated in the same way, same
degree, nor at the same time. And so the question arises: why the hijab? Why Muslim women? Why not Orthodox Jewish67 or Bahai
or Nigerian women? Is this racial focus bio-political? Or is it engaged at some other level? And who has decided that Muslim
women should be targeted as terrorists?
vehicles by which
race is expressed.68 These vehicles may draw on bio-power,69 or they may not, but they can still account
Foucaults framework does not appear to account for other, fundamentally existential (or ontological),
for divisions and breaks in the population. Nor can it account for how, why and which portions of a population become targeted for
by circumscribing the scope of his analysis through biopower ,

something insightful is gainednamely a keen understanding about the latent
operation of power that underlies all social relations . But something important is lost as well: an
discipline and regulation. Moreover,
understanding of who will and wont be subject to certain kinds of power, and why this is the case. We also lose the opportunity to
ask who decides who will be placed on one side of a racial division and who will be placed on the other. And finally, it does not
account for the empirical evidence that such racialization is produced through a centralized sovereign powera source that has not
become obsolete since Hobbes, but rather persisted, albeit in a masquerade of liberal representation. These questions must be
answered in order to fill out his account.
Link - Race / Identity

The affirmatives subscriptions to a particular mode of being
created by the state reaffirms the sovereigns control over the
populace which allows the state to commit endless violence
towards bodies marked for violence Sheth 2011 [Falguni A., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory
Hampshire College. Foucault and Ontopolitics: Another Framework to Think about

Race, Law, and Power April 11th]
As such, race, or racialization, is the transformation of a threat into a set of categories by
which to divide populations against themselves bio-politically, culturally, 86 Ibid., 30-31. My emphasis.
Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth 37 socially, etc. It is one method by which sovereign power can fulfill its
mandate to control and manage its populace, maintain its hold over them. Then, it would
seem that the states mission to divide is not dictated by random biological or material
characteristics, but rather by locating that which is potentially pernicious to sovereign power and managing
it through the technology of race: the production of a classification (medical, political, legal,
cultural, moralor some combination thereof) in which the unruly is embedded ; its subsequent
naturalization or reification as an objective category; and finally, its concealment as the expression of
the relationship between sovereign power and its populace as one of potential violence . Any or all of these
technological dimensions may be augmented or informed through bio-politics; however, there must be an unruly threat that drives
the threat
might manifest itself along the surface of ontological distinctions that are infused in
the political and cultural discourse of enemies and friends. Onto-power would still target bodies,
the Foucauldian manifestation of race. We could understand the threat at level of onto-power. That is to say,
and utilize bio-politics to create decisions about who will be forced to live and who will be allowed to die, but it manifests itself
alongside the biological, in seeking out the target of race through an ontological taxonomy that decides who fits into man-as-
Muslims in being
women, like their male Muslim counterparts, are met with
hostility, suspicion, and extreme harassment because they will return to this dimension of
species, and who fits into a different, sub- species. In the case of Hayder and Bah, they joined thousands of
the targets of suspicion, harassment, and persecution. These
technology in transgressed a prevailing cultural and political regime that might be best described as Western secular liberalism.
But their crimes are not the ones for which they were detained or arrested, nor are they selected on biopolitical grounds (although
they are certainly acted up through biopower). Rather, their common infraction is their conspicuously heterogeneous comportment
openly
subscribing to a particular mode of being designated as Muslim or

Islamic culture. Similarly, all adherents of Islam, violent or non-violent, secular or pious, are
indiscriminately associated as threatening and dangerous . These conflations form the basis of
their public representation as a threat or a potential insurgence to a dominant discourse or regime. In turn, this threat prompts a
disciplinary framework that will manage, suppress, or force out the potential threat so that it does not upset or overturn the existing
regime. Biopower is at work here, through disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms. But so are other important forces: sovereign
ontological
regimes, cast in terms of procedural classifications, seem to work alongside biopower in
the casting of certain groups in racial terms. The race war, too, is alive and well, and exercised in a myriad
authority is hardly obsolete. It is alive and well in the personas of presidents, legislators, and judges. And
of ways that can no longer masquerade as biological, but rather on the level of the ontojuridical.
Link - Social Resistance

The law requires a certain degree of social instability and
resistance to preserve its functioning. The promotion of social
outburst is necessary to sustain the law as a method of
domination.
Agamben 2k5 (Giorgio - Univ. Verona Aesthetics Prof, State of Exception, Univ
Chicago Press, p. 59-60)

4.6 The stakes in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of
exception can now be defined more clearly. The dispute takes place in a zone of
anomie that, on the one hand, must be maintained in relation to the law at all costs
and, on the other, must be just as implacably released and freed from this relation.
That is to say, at issue in the anomie zone is the relation between violence
and law-in the last analysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action.
While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context,
Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it-as pure
violence-an existence outside of the law. For reasons that we must try to clarify,
this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Western politics as
the gigantomachia peri tes ausias, the "battle of giants concerning being,"
that defines Western meta-physics. Here, pure violence as the extreme political
object, as the "thing" of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure
existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which
must ensure the relation between anomic violence and law, is the
counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at capturing pure
being in the meshes of the logos. That is to say, everything happens as if
both law and logos needed an anomic (or alogical) zone of suspension in
order to ground their reference to the world of life. Law seems able to
subsist only by capturing anomie, just as language can subsist only by grasping
the nonlinguistic. In both cases, the conflict seems to concern an empty space:
on the one hand, anomie, juridical vacuum, and, on the other, pure being, devoid
of any determination or real predicate. For law, this empty space is the state of
exception as its constitutive dimension. The relation between norm and reality
involves the suspension of the norm, just as in ontology the relation between
language and world involves the suspension of denotation in the form of a fatigue.
But just as essential for the juridical order is that this zone-wherein lies a
human action without relation to the norm-coincides with an extreme and
spectral figure of the law, in which law splits into a pure being-in-force
[vigenza] without application (the form of law) and a pure application without
being in force: the force-of-law.
Impacts
Impact - Bare Life

The paradox of sovereignty is the inclusive exclusion of bare
life in a state of exception - the construction of spaces where
the exception becomes the rule, and where the sovereign
commits legitimate mass murder.
prepares a death camp for the entire West and its environs,
order today.
to be a generalized mode of rule that

as the rule.

The impact is bare life in a state of exception- the construction

of places where the law no longer applies, and where lives are
nothing more than things to be sacrificed.
Federman and Holmes 11. Cary Federman, professor of justice studies at Montclair State
University and Dave Holmes, professor of health sciences at the University of Ottawa, Guantanamo Bodies: Law,
Media, Biopower, MediaTropes eJournal Vol III, No 1 (2011): Tina
what is the structure of sovereignty

that it consists in nothing other than the suspension of the rule ? (Agamben, 1998, 17).
Agamben asks, regarding Schmitts friend/enemy distinction:
For Agamben, the state of exception is not a state of chaos. The state of exception is the situation that results
What defines chaos is not excess but its

existence within a state. With the suspension of the law, the juridical orders validity (Agamben, 1998,
18) is suspended, withdrawn, and abandoned; the outside and the inside collapse on each other. The
sovereign has now created and defined the very space in which the juridicopolitical order can have validity (Agamben, 1998, 29). But the validity of the juridical order
is, at the same time, ambiguous. What is outside and what is inside now exist in a
zone of indistinction (Agamben, 1998, 19). Under these conditions, the state of exception
moves to the forefront of politics, redefining norms along the way . And in this
process of redefinition, the meaning of life for Agamben is clarified: the status of
the enemy is one of bare life. The state of exception implicated bare life within it (Agamben,
from the suspension of the rules (Agamben, 1998, 18).
1998, 83). What is bare life? Agamben writes that in Roman law, homo sacer is the one who is both sacred and
damned. Homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to
kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred lifethat is, life that may be killed
In a
world bereft of nature, history, and a deity as a ground for ethics, life loses its
meaning as a thing-in-itself. The sovereign is the guarantor of the situation of life (Schmitt, 2005,
but not sacrificedis the life that has been captured in its sphere. (Agamben, 1998, 83; italics in original)
13). But what does Schmitt mean by life? Agamben locates two meanings for life in modernity. The Greeks had no
single term to express what we mean by the word life (Agamben, 1998, 1). They used two distinct terms for life:
zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings, and bios, which indicated the form or
way of living proper to an individual or a group (Agamben, 1998, 1). For Agamben, the central image (and
The camp is
a no mans land between coma and death (Agamben, 1998, 161). The camp comes into
existence as a political concept when the state of exception is normalized. The
camp is not a temporary camp, a displacement camp for refugees on their way to
someplace else, but a permanent feature of the modern world, modern politics, and
of modern thought (Agamben, 1998, 174). It is a place to house the zoes of the world (Agamben notes that
in Greek, zoe has no plural; 1998, 1). Because it houses the exceptional, it is a space of
exception. When Heinrich Himmler created a concentration camp for political
prisoners, Agamben writes, he placed it outside the rules of penal and prison law
producer) of life during a time shrouded in the friend/enemy distinction is the concentration camp.
(Agamben, 1998, 169).
Impact - Biopolitics
Inscription within biopolitics allows every citizen to be
devalued and eliminated in the name of sovereign
management.
It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still today, in certain countries,
occupies a substantial position in medical debates and provokes disagreement. Nor are we concerned with the radicaliry with which
Binding declares himself in favor of the general admissibility of euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that the
sovereignty of the living man (person) over his (their) own life has its immediate
counterpart in the determination of a threshold beyond which life ceases
to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the commission
of a homicide. The new juridical category of "life devoid of value " (or "life unworthy
of being lived") corresponds exactly-even if in an apparently different direction-to the bare life of homo sacer
and can easily be extended beyond the limits imagined by Binding. It is as if every valorization and every
"politicization" of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence)
necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which
life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only "sacred life," and can
as such be eliminated without punishment. Every society sets this limit; every society-even
the most modern-decides who its "sacred men"(people) will be. It is even possible that this limit, on which
the politicization and the exceptio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the
history of the West and has now-in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty-moved inside every human life
and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of
every living being.
Biopolitical control reduces civilians to bare life and leads

totalitarianism
Giroux 6
[Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department Henry A., Reading
Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, College Literature 33.3] Hebron ADN
While biopolitics in Foucault and Hardt and Negri addresses the relations between politics and death, biopolitics in their views is less
concerned with the primacy of death than with the production of life both as an individual and a social category. In Giorgio
the new biopolitics is the deadly administration of what he calls "bare

life," and its ultimate incarnation is the Holocaust with its ominous specter of the concentration camp. In this formulation, the
Nazi death camps become the primary exemplar of control, the new space of contemporary
politics in which individuals are no longer viewed as citizens but are now seen as inmates,
stripped of everything, including their right to live. The uniting of power and bare life, the reduction of
Agamben's formulation,
the individual to homo sacerthe sacred man who under certain states of exception "may be killed and yet not sacrificed"no [End
Page 179] longer represents the far end of political life (1998, 8). That is, in this updated version of the ancient category of homo
sacer is the human who stands beyond the confines of both human and divine law"a human who can be killed without fear of
punishment" (Bauman 2003, 133). According to Agamben, as modern states increasingly suspend their democratic structures, laws,
and principles, the very nature of governance changes as "the rule of law is routinely displaced by the state of exception, or
The life unfit for life,

is no longer marginal to sovereign power
but is now central to its form of governance. State violence and totalitarian power,
which, in the past, either were generally short-lived or existed on the fringe of politics and history, have now become
the rule, rather than the exception, as life is more ruthlessly regulated and placed in the hands of military and
emergency, and people are increasingly subject to extra-judicial state violence" (Bull 2004, 3).
unworthy of being lived, as the central category of homo sacer,
state power.
Impact - Democracy
The perpetual creation of the state of exception as the new
norm inevitably results in the liquidation of true democracy and
the destruction of the distinction between legislative,
executive, and judicial.
Agamben 5 [Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.] Hebron ADN
Tingstens analysis centers on an essential technical problem that profoundly marks the evolution of the modern parliamentary
regimes: the delegation contained in the full powers laws mentioned above, and the resulting extension of the executives powers
into the legislative sphere through the issuance of decrees and measures. By full powers laws we mean those laws by which an
exceptionally broad regulatory power is granted to the executive, particularly the power to modify or abrogate by decree the laws in
laws of this nature, which should be issued to cope with exceptional circumstances of
conflict with the fundamental hierarchy of law and regulation in
democratic constitutions and delegate to the executive [governo] a legislative power
that should rest exclusively with parliament , Tingsten seeks to examine the situation that arose in a series
force (Tingsten 1934, 13). Because
necessity or emergency,
of countries (France, Switzerland, Belgium, the United States, England, Italy, Austria, and Germany) from the systematic expansion
of executive [governamentali] powers during World War One, when a state of siege was declared or full powers laws issued in many
of the warring states (and even in neutral ones, like Switzerland). The book goes no further than recording a large number of case
although a temporary and controlled

use of full powers is theoretically compatible with democratic constitutions, a
systematic and regular exercise of the institution necessarily leads to the
liquidation of democracy (333). In fact, the gradual erosion of the legislative powers of
parliamentwhich today is often limited to ratifying measures that the executive issues through decrees having the force of
lawhas since then become a common practice. From this perspective, World War One (and the
years following it) appear as a laboratory for testing and honing the functional
mechanisms and apparatuses of the state of exception as a paradigm of
government. One of the essential characteristics of the state of exceptionthe provisional abolition of the
distinction among legislative, executive, and judicial powershere shows its tendency to become a lasting
practice of government.
histories; nevertheless, in the conclusion the author seems to realize that
Biopolitical control reduces civilians to bare life and leads totalitarianism

Giroux, 6 - Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies
Department
(Henry A., Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of
Disposability, College Literature 33.3, Project Muse)
While biopolitics in Foucault and Hardt and Negri addresses the relations between
politics and death, biopolitics in their views is less concerned with the primacy of
death than with the production of life both as an individual and a social category. In
Giorgio Agamben's formulation, the new biopolitics is the deadly administration of
what he calls "bare life," and its ultimate incarnation is the Holocaust with its
ominous specter of the concentration camp. In this formulation, the Nazi death
camps become the primary exemplar of control, the new space of contemporary
politics in which individuals are no longer viewed as citizens but are now seen as
inmates, stripped of everything, including their right to live. The uniting of power
and bare life, the reduction of the individual to homo sacerthe sacred man who
under certain states of exception "may be killed and yet not sacrificed"no [End
Page 179] longer represents the far end of political life (1998, 8). That is, in this
updated version of the ancient category of homo sacer is the human who stands
beyond the confines of both human and divine law"a human who can be killed
without fear of punishment" (Bauman 2003, 133). According to Agamben, as
modern states increasingly suspend their democratic structures, laws, and

principles, the very nature of governance changes as "the rule of law is routinely
displaced by the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly
subject to extra-judicial state violence" (Bull 2004, 3). The life unfit for life, unworthy
of being lived, as the central category of homo sacer, is no longer marginal to
sovereign power but is now central to its form of governance. State violence and
totalitarian power, which, in the past, either were generally short-lived or existed on
the fringe of politics and history, have now become the rule, rather than the
exception, as life is more ruthlessly regulated and placed in the hands of military
and state power.
Impact - Extinction
Biopolitics culminate in extinction.
Dillon 4 [Michael University of Lancaster Politics Prof., Correlating Sovereign and Biopower, in Sovereign
Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 41] Hebron ADN
Power is commonly associated with regimes of government and governance that

regularly claim universal, metaphysical status for the rights and cornpetences that
comprise them; regimes whose very raison d'etre, in the form of state sovereignty
and raison d'etat, for example, seek to limit and confine if not altogether rid us of
politics. Sovereign power, a form of rule gone global, has also come to
develop and deploy modes of destruction whose dissemination and use it
finds increasingly impossible to control because these have become
integral to its propagation and survival; modes of destruction that put in
question the very issue of planetary survival for the human as well as
many other species. Despite the fashion of speaking about the demise of
sovereignty, political thought and practice have to still struggle with terrains of
power throughout which the legitimating narratives, iconography and capabilities of
sovereign power remain amongst the most persistent, and powerful and threatening
globally. As it has come to dominate our understanding of rule, so sovereign
power has come to limit our imagination in relation to the possibility and
to the promise of politics.
Impact Genocide
Within biopolitics is a new paradigm in which killing to save is
justified entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of
wholesale slaughter in the name of protecting life
Foucault 78 [Foucault, M. (1978). Right of Death and Power over Life. In The history of sexuality (pp. 13637). New York: Pantheon Books.] Hebron ADN
This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to
wars were never as bloody as they have been since the

nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such
holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what
accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits - now presents itself as
the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life , that endeavors to
administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no
longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire
populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life
necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and
the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be
ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet
killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out
destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked
the power to expose a whole

population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's
continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle-that one has to be capable of
killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of
states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a
population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers , this is not because of a recent return of
question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process:
the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population.
Violence is increasing, and the aff is part and parcel with that
system. The impact is biopolitical cleansing on a global scale.
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College in New
York, For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
We live in an unprecedented time of crisis. The violence that characterized the

twentieth century, and virtually all known human history before that, seems to have entered the
twenty-first century with exceptional force and singularity . True, this century opened with the
terrible events of September 11. However, September 11 is not the beginning of history . Nor are
the histories of more forgotten places and people, the events that shape those histories, less terrible and violent
The singularity of this violence, this paradigm of

terror, does not even simply lie in its globality , for that is something that our century shares with
the whole history of capitalism and empire, of which it is a part. Rather, it must be seen in the fact
that terror as a global phenomenon has now become self-conscious . Today, the
struggle is for global dominance in a singularly new way, and war regardless of
where it happensis also always global. Moreover, in its self-awareness, terror has
become, more than it has ever been, an instrument of racism . Indeed, what is new in
the singularity of this violent struggle, this racist and terrifying war, is that in the
usual attempt to neutralize the enemy, there is a cleansing of immense
proportion going on. To use a word which has become popular since Michel Foucault, it is a
biopolitical cleansing. This is not the traditional ethnic cleansing, where one ethnic
though they may often be less spectacular.
group is targeted by a state power though that is also part of the general
paradigm of racism and violence. It is rather a global cleansing, where the sovereign
elites, the global sovereigns in the political and financial arenas (capital and the political
institutions), in all kinds of ways target those who do not belong with them on account of
their race, class, gender, and so on, but above all, on account of their way of life and
way of thinking. These are the multitudes of people who, for one reason or the
other, are liable for scrutiny and surveillance, extortion (typically, in the form of overtaxation and fines) and arrest, brutality, torture, and violent death. The sovereigns target
anyone who, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) shows with the figure of homo sacer, can be killed without
being sacrificed anyone who can be reduced to the paradoxical and ultimately impossible condition of bare
life, whose only horizon is death itself. In this sense, the biopolitical cleansing is also immediately a thanatopolitical
instrument.
The state of exception leads to the creation of the camps

genocide becomes justified in the name of the sovereign
Agamben 96
[Giorgio, PhD in philosophy and professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School,
University of Minnesota Press, Means without End: Notes on Politics, Theory out of Bounds Volume 20 p.47-55,
1996, http://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Agamben_Giorgio_Means_without_end_notes_on_politics_2000.pdf, 7/19/15]
Hebron ADN
What happened in the camps exceeds the juridical concept of crime to such an
extent that the specific political juridical structure within which those events took place has often
been left simply unexamined. The camp is the place in which the most absolute condition ln anana ever to appear on
Earth was realized: this is ultimately all that counts for the victors as well as for posterity. Here I will deliberately set out in the
opposite direction. Rather than deducing the definition of camp from the events that took place there, I will ask instead: What is a
the
camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly that-though admittedly still with usbelongs nonetheless to the past, but rather in some sense as the hidden matrix and nonos of the political space in
camp? What z:r its political-juridical structure? How could such events have taken place there? This will lead us to look at
which we still live. Historians debate whether the first appearance of camps ought to be identified with the campos de
concentraciones that were created in 1896 by the Spaniards in Cuba in order to repress the insurrection of that colony's population,
or rather with the concentration camps into which the English herded the Boers at the beginning of the twentieth century. What
matters here is that in both cases one is dealing with the extension to an entire civilian population of a state of exception linked to a
colonial war. '"the
camps, in other words, were not born out of ordinary law~ and even less were they the
they were born out of
the state of exception and martial law. This is even more evident in the case of the Nazi
Lager, whose origin and juridical regime is well documented. It is well known that the juridical foundation of
internment was not ordinary law but rather the Schutzhaft (literally, protective custody), which
was a juridical institution of Prossian derivation that Nazi jurists sometimes considered a
measure of preventive policing inasmuch as it enabled the "taking into custody" of
individuals regardless of any relevant criminal behavior and exclusively in order to
avoid threats to the security of the state. The origin of the Schutzhaft, however, resides in the Prussian law
product-as one might have believed-of a transformation and a development of prison law; rather ,
on the state of siege that was passed on June 4, 1851, and that was extended to the whole of Germany (with the exception of
on the "protection of personal freedom" (Schutz der

persiinlichen Freiheit) that was passed on February 12, 1850. Both these laws were applied widely during World War I . One
cannot overestimate the importance of this constitutive nexus between state of
exception and concentration camp for a correct understanding of the nature of the
camp. Ironically, the "protection" of freedom that is in question in the Schutzhaji: is a
protection against the suspension of the law that characterizes the state of
emergency. What is new here is that this institution is dissolved by the state of exception on
which it was founded and is allowed to continue to be in force under normal
circumstances. The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to
become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporal
suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that , as such,
remains constantly outside the normal state of law . When fIimmler decided, in March 1933, on the
Bavaria) in 1871, as well as in the earlier Prussian law
occasion of the celebrations of Hitler's election to the chancellorship of the Reich, to create a "concentration camp for political
prisoners" at Dachau, this camp was immediately entrusted to the SS and, thanks to the Schutzhaft, was placed outside the
jurisdiction of criminal law as well as prison law, with which it neither then nor later ever had anything to do. Dachau, as well as the
other camps that were soon added to it (Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Lichtenberg), remained virtually always operative: the
number of initiates varied and during certain periods (in particular, between 1935 and 1937, before the deportation of the Jews
began) it decreased to 7,500 people; the camp as such, however, had become a permanent reality in Germany. One ought to reflect
the paradoxical status of the camp as space of exception: the camp is a piece of
territory that is placed outside the normal juridical order ; for all that, however, it is not
simply an external space. According to the etymological meaning of the term exception (ex-capere), what is being
excluded in the camp is captured outside , that is, it is included by virtue of its very
exclusion. Thus, what is being captured under the rule of law is first of all the very state of
exception. In other words, if sovereign power is founded on the ability to decide on the
state of exception, the camp is the structure in which the state of exception is
permanently realized. Hannah Arendt observed once that what comes to light in the camps is the principle that supports
on
totalitarian domination and that common sense stubbornly refuses to admit to, namely, the principle according to which anything is
It is only because the camps constitute a space of exception- a space in which d1e law is
completely suspended-that everything is truly possible in them. If one does not understand this
possible.
particular political-juridical structure of the camps, whose vocation is precisely to realize permanently the exception, the incredible
events that took place in them remain entirely unintelligible. The people who entered the camp moved about in a zone of
indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which every juridical protection
had disappeared; moreover, if they were Jews, they had already been deprived of citizenship rights by the Nuremberg Laws and
as its inhabitants have been

stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is
also the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized --a space in
which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation .
were later completely denationalized at the moment of the "final solution." Inasmuch
The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer becomes
The correct question regarding the horrors comn1itted in the

camps, therefore, is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been
possible to commit such atrocious horrors against other human beings; it would be
more honest, and above all .more useful, to investigate carefully how-that is, thanks to what juridical
procedures and political devices-human beings could have been so completely deprived of their
rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no
longer appear as a crime (at this point, in fact, truly anything had become possible). If this is the
case, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception
and in the consequent creation of a space for naked life as such, we will then have to ad1nit to be
facing a camp virtually every ti1ne that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crirnes co1nmitted in it and
regardless of the denomination and specific topography it might have. The soccer stadium
in Bari in which the Italian police temporarily herded Albanian illegal immigrants in
1991 before sending them back to their countr y, the cycle-racing track in which the Vichy authorities
indistinguishable from the citizen.
rounded up the Jews before handing them over to the Germans, the refugee camp near the Spanish border where Antonio Machado
died in 1939, as well as the zones d'attente in French international airports in which foreigners requesting refugee status are
detained will all have to be considered camps. In all these cases, an apparently anodyne place (such as the flotel Arcade near the
delimits instead a space in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of law
is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not depend
on the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that act temporarily as
sovereign. This is the case, for example, during the four days foreigners may be kept in the zone d'attente before the
intervention of French judicial authorities. In this sense, even certain outskirts of the great postindustrial cities as well as the
gated communities of the United States are beginning today to look like camps, in which naked
life and political life, at least in determinate moments, enter a zone of absolute indeterminacy.
From this perspective, the birth of the camp in our time appears to be an event that marks in a decisive way the
political space itself of modernity. This birth takes place when the political system of the modern
nation-state-founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (territory) and a determinate order (the state),
which was mediated by automatic regulations for the inscription of life (birth or nation)- enters a period of
permanent crisis and the state decides to undertake the management of the
biological life of the nation directly as its own task. In other words, if the structure of the
nation-state is defined by three elements-territory, order, and birth -the rupture of the old nomos does not
Paris airport)
take place in the two aspects that, according to Carl Schmitt, used to constitute it (that is, localization, Ortung, and order, Ordnung),
but rather at the site in which naked life is inscribed in them (that is, there where inscription turns birth into nation). There is
the camp is the

sign of the system's inability to
function without transforming itself into a lethal machine . It is important to note that the
camps appeared at the same time that the new laws on citizenship and on the
denationalization of citizens were issued (not only the Nuremberg IJaws on citizenship in the Reich but
also the laws on the denationalization of citizens that were issued by almost all the
European states, including France, between 1915 and 1933). The state of exception, which used to be
essentially a temporary suspension of the order, becomes now a new and stable spatial arrangement
inhabited by that naked life that increasingly cannot be inscribed into the order. The
increasingly widening gap between birth (naked life) and nation-state is the new fact of the politics of our
time and what we are calling "camp" is this disparity . roan order without localization (that is, the
state of exception during which the law is suspended) corresponds now a localization
without order (that is, the camp as permanent space of exception ). The political system no longer orders
forms of life and juridical norms in a detenninate space; rather, it contains within itself a dislocating
localization that exceeds it and in which virtually every form of life and every norm
can be captured. The camp intended as a dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in
which we still live, and we must learn to recognize it in all of its metamorphoses. 1--he camp
something that no longer functions in the traditional mechanisms that used to regulate this inscription, and
new hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the orderor, rather, it is the
is the fourth and inseparable element that has been added to and has broken up the old trinity of nation (birth), state, and territory.
It is from this perspective that we need to see the reappearance of camps in a form that is, in a certain sense, even more extreme in
the territories of the former Yugoslavia. What is happening there is not at all, as some interested observers rushed to declare, a
redefinition of the old political system according to new ethnic and territorial arrangements, that is, a simple repetition of the
processes that culminated in the constitution of the European nation-states. Rather, we note there an irreparable rupture of the old
nomos as well as a dislocation of populations and human lives according to entirely new lines of flight. That is why the camps of
ethnic rape are so crucially important. If the Nazis never thought of carrying out the "final solution" by impregnating Jewish women,
that is because the principle of birth, which ensured the inscription of life in the order of the nationstate, was in some way still
functioning, even though it was profoundly transformed. This principle is now adrift: it has entered a process of dislocation in which
its functioning is becoming patently impossible and in which we can expect not only new camps but also always new and more
delirious norm.ative definitions of the inscription of life in the city. The camp, which is now firn1ly settled inside it, is the new
biopolitical nomos of the planet.
Impact - Immigration Control

Surveillance has become the mechanism through which the
sovereign exercises control over immigrants and the border
Kalhan 14 Associate Professor of Law, Drexel University. A.B., Brown University;
M.P.P.M., Yale School of Management; J.D., Yale Law School (Anil, IMMIGRATION
SURVEILLANCE, 74 Md. L. Rev. 1)//BB
B. Immigration Enforcement as Immigration Surveillance These four sets of migration and mobility
surveillance functions - identification, screening and authorization, mobility tracking
and control, and information sharing - play crucial but underappreciated roles in
immigration control processes across the entire spectrum of migration and travel. In the
growing number of contexts in which immigration control activities now take place, enforcement actors engage in
extensive collection, storage, analysis, and dissemination of personal information, in order to identify individuals,
screen them and authorize their activities, enable monitoring and control over their travel, and share information
with other actors who bear immigration control responsibilities. Initially deployed for traditional immigration
these surveillance
technologies and processes are qualitatively remaking the nature of
immigration governance, as a number of examples illustrate. 1. Border Control Despite
implementation challenges, Congress and DHS have placed new surveillance
technologies at the heart of border control strategies. 162 Physical barriers
along the U.S.-Mexico border have been supplemented with advanced lighting,
motion sensors, remote cameras, and mobile surveillance systems, and DHS has
deployed a fleet of unmanned aerial [42] vehicles to monitor coastal areas and land
borders. 163 To date, these drones primarily have been used to locate illegal border crossers
and individuals suspected of drug trafficking in remote areas using ultra high-resolution cameras,
thermal detection sensors, and other surveillance technologies . 164 However, drones also
have been used to patrol and monitor activities within Mexico itself. 165 In addition, government
documents indicate that DHS's drones are capable of intercepting wireless
communications and may eventually incorporate facial recognition technology
linked to the agency's identification databases. 166 According to one official, CBP's drones
can "scan large swaths of land from 20,000 feet up in the air while still being able to
zoom in so close that footprints can be seen on the ground ." 167 The DHS has plans
both to expand its fleet of drones and to increase their surveillance capabilities, and
immigration reform proposals in Congress would significantly build upon these
recent expansions. 168
enforcement purposes, and expanded largely in the name of security,
Impact - Neoliberalism
The affs endorsement of the state reproduces neoliberal statist
ideologies the affs enframing of the state as having the
ability to order and govern beings constructs them as a
standing reserve
Joronen 13 [Mikko, dept of geography and faculty of mathematics and natural sciences, genius, U of Turku,
http://www.mediafire.com/view/djj55v7gah3d9ms/Joronen.pdf] Hebron ADN
Although Foucaults discussion on the constitution of the self through the particular form of subjectivity covers a great deal of the
process of making the neoliberal state, governmentality approaches seem to leave the question concerning the new ontology of
governmentality does not merely rely on a

denotes a material process of governing and measuring natural
entities. Hence, it seems to subject both human and non-human entities to the trade of calculative
profit-making, not just by reducing capabilities of citizens to the economically rational
and productive conducts, but also by enframing all things to the assemblage of standing- reserves set available for
the market-efficient use. As David Harvey reminds us, 19 eventually neoliberalism can continue its process of
accumulation only by disposing the commons, such as clean water, through the
commodification and privatisation. The neoliberal governmentality, thus, does not lead into a
mere encouragement of the economically rational conducts, but encloses all beings in terms of a uniform
plane of existence: as a part of enframing (Gestell), through which things are revealed as a
usable and available set of standing-reserve (Bestand). 2According to Heidegger, the emergence of the apparatus
human and non-human existence relatively untouched. As Braun suggests, 18
rationality of self-control, but also
of enframing (Gestell) is fundamentally rooted in the historical process where the modern techniques originally developed for
controlling the nature became turned back to us. 21 In the process, both the modern subject and the modern nature of paralysed
objects were sucked up into standing-reserves and thus revealed as an enframed array available for the use of calculative
machinations. Apparently such ontological shift has had massive consequences: enframing can take place through an unlimited
number of guises, practices and material settings, since it works by creating certainty on the availability, usability and controllability
of things and subjects. Through the apparatus of enframing, defined by Heidegger as the gathering together of that setting-upon
which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as a standing-reserve, 22 subjects and
objects are simply made available for the power to control, calculate and order them with predictable certainty. As a number of
studies have pointed out, enframing is able to measure different sets of practices, discourses and material relations related, for
instance, to creative industries, 23 carbon economy, 24 colonialism, 25 forest conservation, 26 globalisation, 27 and science, 28
and should be understood above all as a broader political order based on metaphysical positioning of entities.
This statist ideology results in the enframing of beings where

they are reduced to their utility to the statedestroys value to
life and causes nomadic homelessness
Joronen 13 [Mikko, dept of geography and faculty of mathematics and natural sciences, genius, U of Turku,
http://www.mediafire.com/view/djj55v7gah3d9ms/Joronen.pdf - Hebron ADN
As a modality of enframing, the process of neoliberalisation has evidently created an entire array of governmental politics
actualised through the different orders, possibilities, and positions of things. First of all, as Foucault writes, neoliberalism denotes an
In neoliberalism, every action human subjects attempt

becomes assimilated to the economy of market rationality,
to the robust calculations of costs against the benefits. Hence, human existence is
solely caught up to serve the nihilist utility of maximum profit . Under such ethos, or better, under
such inversion of ethos, human existence is reduced to a nihilist framework constituted by the
arrangements efficiently implementing seemingly value neutral means. Enframing thus
represents everything that is nihilist in a contemporary world-economy: planetary
homelessness, calculative aimlessness , mischief of other forms of rationalities, and the constant
devaluation of nature and human existence as mere stocks of profits . 29 As Zizek writes,
global capitalism is a truth-without-meaning, a worldless constellation capable of
accommodating itself to any cultural and material setting. 30 In enframing, a calculative
ethical order defining the proper constitution of the self.
to recognise as an end of their actions
regulation of all domains of life becomes a fundamental goal of its own. As Heidegger prudently wrote as early as 1939, 31 the
humanity seems to be producing itself in such a manner that the absolute meaningless is valued as the one and only meaning.
The preservation of such nihilism appears not only as a human domination of the globe, but also as a mode of existence sucked
up to the process where the will to calculate fumbles its own strengthening. Hence, enframing leads into a nihilist mode of
subjectivity, where the human will is challenged to will more of the optimal calculations. Heidegger makes a great effort, in the
four-book series of Nietzsche lectures in particular, in order to show how such production of the nihilist mode of revealing was
inaugurated by Nietzsches notion of will to power. Through the will to power, beings are revealed as makeable, as something
dragged under the strengthening power of human willing and machinations. Eventually, the will wills nothing but its own
empowerment, its will to will more of itself. In the neoliberal modality of homo economicus this will to will turns into a will to profit
evidently following the same ontological logic of self-increasing calculations. As a consequence, human beings turn into technical
subjects self-controlling their conducts through the value-neutral calculation of the means for the maximum profit. In a neoliberal
common sense, we are hence not only part of the value neutral and de-politicised economic nihilism, but also enframed, positioned,
and tranquilised by the self-optimising drive of calculative arrangements
Impact - Ontology of War

Their impacts recreate an ontology of war that makes terminal
violence escalation inevitable
Burke 7
(Anthony, Senior Lecturer in International Relations @ The University of New South Wales,
Theory & Event, 10:2, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence, and Reason)
I was motivated to begin the larger project from which this essay derives by a number of concerns. I felt that the available critical, interpretive
or performative languages of war -- realist and liberal international relations theories, just war theories, and various Clausewitzian derivations of
strategy -- failed us, because they either perform or refuse to place under suspicion the
underlying political ontologies that I have sought to unmask and question here. Many realists have quite
nuanced and critical attitudes to the use of force, but ultimately affirm strategic
thought and remain embedded within the existential framework of the nationstate. Both liberal internationalist and just war doctrines seek mainly to improve
the accountability of decision-making in security affairs and to limit some of the
worst moral enormities of war, but (apart from the more radical versions of cosmopolitanism) they fail to question
the ontological claims of political community or strategic theory. 82 In the case of a theorist like Jean
Bethke Elshtain, just war doctrine is in fact allied to a softer, liberalised form of the Hegelian-Schmittian ontology. She dismisses Kant's Perpetual Peace as 'a fantasy of at-oneness...a
world in which differences have all been rubbed off' and in which 'politics, which is the way human beings have devised for dealing with their differences, gets eliminated.'83 She
remains a committed liberal democrat and espouses a moral community that stretches beyond the nation-state, which strongly contrasts with Schmitt's hostility to liberalism and his
claustrophobic distinction between friend and enemy. However her image of politics -- which at its limits, she implies, requires the resort to war as the only existentially satisfying way of
resolving deep-seated conflicts -- reflects much of Schmitt's idea of the political and Hegel's ontology of a fundamentally alienated world of nation-states, in which war is a performance
of being. She categorically states that any effort to dismantle security dilemmas 'also requires the dismantling of human beings as we know them'.84 Whilst this would not be true of all
just war advocates, I suspect that even as they are so concerned with the ought, moral theories of violence grant too much unquestioned power to the is. The problem here lies with the
confidence in being -- of 'human beings as we know them' -- which ultimately fails to escape a Schmittian architecture and thus eternally exacerbates (indeed reifies) antagonisms. Yet
exchanging an ontology of being for one of

becoming, where the boundaries and nature of the self contain new possibilities
through agonistic relation to others, provides a less destructive and violent way
of acknowledging and dealing with conflict and difference.85 My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic
to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring
historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of
policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political
action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of
history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact
dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and
have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what
Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being
itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the
we know from the work of Deleuze and especially William Connolly that
rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.' 87
What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that
the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government,

technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding
that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most
destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive
diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological
destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on
their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific
and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined
within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices
become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and
die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds
one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or
dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and
existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply
not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from
the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain
militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective,
dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite
Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media,

are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of
'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy . They are certainly
tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its
force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface
deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us.
political leaderships and national security institutions --
agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to
even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to

produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of agency and thus incur
responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth'
of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations
and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia,
appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he
was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be
immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is
somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility
and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed , but little more.
When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that
choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined
(sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security
paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more
enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political. But this cannot be
done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and
utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight and
activating a very different concept of existence, security and action . 90 This would
seem to hinge upon 'questioning' as such -- on the questions we put to the real
and our efforts to create and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material, as energy, or
Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that,
do they seek to protect and enlarge human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to replace it
with others (the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral framework
(of 'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex interplay of languages, norms, events and consequences which are
Will our
actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and violence? Will
our thought?
less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable choices available?
Impact - Ontology
Biopolitics reduces the individual to a standing reserve and
makes war a permanent condition of society in which all
individuals are implicated. Once everything is rendered
replaceable there can be no end to destruction.
MITCHELL 2005, ANDREW J., Stanford University, HEIDEGGER AND
TERRORISM, Research in Phenomenology 35, 181-218>

<<<<see above for
highlighted card^
With everything available as standing-reserve , troops included, the exhaustion of
resources is no longer possible. Resources are precisely in themselves replaceable, to the
extent that, in being given over to replacement, even the idea of an in itself is already drained of reality ahead of
There are no longer any losses that cannot be replaced . In other words, there is no
All uncertainty is lost, since it is not recognized in the first place. Everything is
monitored and controlled. The whole battle is given over to a planning that is able
to incorporate everything it encounters, since it only ever encounters what is
already planable in essence, the standingreserve. Strategys demise is the ascendancy of planning. What this
means is that war can now go on interminably, subject to no other logic or obligation
than its own. Nothing can resist it. But without resistance, war must end. Peace can now go on interminably as
time.
longer any friction.
well, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. The logic in question for both war and peace is the logic of
replacement, the obligation for each is the obligation to consume. There is no law that would supervene or subtend
consumption; there is no order outside of it that could contain it. Clausewitzs ideal is realized in a manner that
collapses the very distinctions that gave it birth. War is no longer a duel; it recognizes no authority outside of
itself. The name for this new amalgam of war and peace is terrorism. Terrorism is Clausewitzs absolute war in the
War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their

oppositional identity in the age of value and the ersatz. Without concern for resources,
consumption continues untroubled, since war is a kind of consumption of beings
no different from peace: War no longer battles against a state of peace, rather it
newly establishes the essence of peace (GA 69: 180). The essence of peace so established is a
peace that defines itself in regards to war, which binds itself inseparably to war, and which functions equivalently
to war. In either case, it is simply a matter of resource consumption and replenishment . In
Clausewitzian terms, there is perhaps too much continuity or continuation between war
and peace, War has become a distortion of the consumption of beings which is
continued in peace (GA 7: 89/EP, 104). The peace that technology brings is nothing restful; instead it is the
peace of unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when there will be peace or when the
war will end. Such a question, Heidegger specifies, cannot be answered, not because the length of the war
mirror of technology.
cannot be foreseen, but because the question itself asks for something which no longer is, since already there is no
longer a war that would be able to come to a peace (GA 7: 89/EP, 104; tm). The basic oppositions of Clausewitzian
It also
includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Since such distinctions depend
upon a difference between war and peace , they too can no longer apply. Everyone is
now a civilian-soldier, or neither a civilian nor a soldiera worker, one might say, or otherwise
put, a target. With everyone involved in the same processes of consumption and delivery, everyone is already
warfare are undone at this point, an undoing that includes the distinction between ideal and real.
enlisted in advance. There are no longer any innocent victims or bystanders in this, and the same holds true of
terrorism. Terrorism is not the use of warfare against civilians (pace Carr), for the simple reason that there no longer
are any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for this reason we go wrong to even consider it war.
Terrorism is the only conflict available and the only conflict that is in essence available and applicable. It can have
Terrorism follows from the transformation in beings indicative of

the technological age. This transformation remains important at each point of a Heideggerian thinking of
everything as its target.
terrorism and is the ultimate consequence of the abolition of war and peace; beings have become uncommon.
The alternative is an examination of the selfby finding our

own identity we can begin to divorce ourselves from power
structures. Only the alt solvesliberation fails to free us and
simply reproduces those power structures
Foucault and
political society.xlii Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination
that release a pre-existing identity from an oppressive external force. xliii Freedom
freedom.xliv It is these practices of freedom which allows the subject to practice selfconstruction and in turn, resist and rework the dispositifs that constitute them.
to oppression and domination by dispositifs of control. xlv As such it is likely to create
will reinforce those self-same dominating biopolitical dispositifs. xlvi More
him.xlvii Instead, the practice of freedom is a limit-experience: The idea of a limitexperience that wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me ...
same.xlviii Following this theme, we can read Foucault in What is Enlightenment? as
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. xlix The politics of liberation is not enough
these games of power with as little domination as possible. l This game of power is
agonistic. There is no essential freedom to be found, but a permanent
provocation between the self and the dispositifs of power relations. li The key task is
to refuse what we are, to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal
of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. lii
The creation of new forms of subjectivity involves freedom as a practice which

requires the subject to self-create themselves anew, taking into account the
dispositifs which constrain and control, and enabling the individual to discern the
types of actions and interventions that are needed to effect change and create new
subjectivities. Freedom connects the dispositif and what is always beyond, the
outside. It is here that the connection can be made to Foucaults last essay, and
his view of error as the proper domain of life. When Foucault writes that life is that
which is destined to err, we can conclude that such a life contains the possibility to
transcend dispositifs and break free of the logic of deciding who should live and who
should be left to die. Freedom is experienced at the limit of power relations through
their transgression, their erring, which is always-already a possibility, or destiny, for
individuals to enact: The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever
density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely
uncrossable and reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a
limit composed of illusions and shadows.liii The act of freedom constitutes itself
through acting at the limit of the dispositif, transgressing that limit, erring, calling
out to thought from the limit of the network of power relations, creating new
subjectivities through the very response of the dispositifs to those transgressive
acts. The dispositif thus controls life, but also is required for freedom in the form of
self-creation. Crucially for this argument, this transgressive freedom which brings
about the self-creation of the new is a transcendent possibility, which the individual
effects and which power relations and dispositifs must react to in response to these
creative acts. This is why Deleuze spoke of this kind of self-relation as the folding
of power relations back upon themselves. It is not possible to move outside of the
totalizing dispositif in terms of liberation. However, it is possible to think from the
outside, from the limit, in a manner which brings together both the inside of the
dispositif and the outside, of which the dispositif is an operation. As Deleuze
states: The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic
movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not
something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside The
inside as an operation of the outside: in all his work Foucault seems haunted by this
theme of an inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a
folding of the sea.liv In acting on the individual, dispositifs produce an inside as
an interiorisation of the outside.lv This folding allows a subject to differentiate
itself from dispositifs and no longer has an internal dependence upon them for
Deleuze reading Foucault, there will always be a relation to oneself that resists such
dispositifs.lvi The individual has the potential to distance themselves from the
dispositifs that create our identity. This folding of power relations opens a space for
the individual to transgress. The question remains as to precisely how this
bring about a historical ontology of ourselves, lvii such a questioning of current
chains.lviii This view comes close to a Marxist view of false consciousness, and
ignores the agonistic element to this reading of Foucault. lix Rather, following Aurelia
Armstrong, I draw upon comments suggesting that it is only under the pressure of
an event which makes our present identity and control problematic that we are
forced to exercise our freedom.lx Foucault suggests the following: [F]or a domain of
action, a behaviour to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number
of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have
provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These elements result from
social, economic, or political processes their role is instigation. lxi These
transgressions or errors of life, of action, and of existing, are the transcendent
experience of events which force a questioning of the current dispositifs controlling
the reality we inhabit. These errors allow the individual to interiorize the outside,
and practice freedom as a transgressive limit-experience, agonistically questioning
and forcing dispositifs to react to new subjectivities. These events do not have to be
epochal, or revolutionary.lxii As Foucault states, different processes can instigate this
process the key is that it is the individual who responds to such instigation and
practices this freedom through their actions and errors, causing the very conception
of life to be changed through an experimental mode of inquiry. lxiii
Impact - Racism
Sovereign exception guarantees racist destruction of all life.
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College in New
York, For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
It is then important to ask the question of what power can alter this racism that, as Foucault says, first develops with colonization,
or in other words, with colonizing genocide (1997: 257). From its first development, we then get to a situation where, as I noted at
racist violence becomes a global and biopolitical regime of

terror, a war between two main classes: the war of the political and financial elites
against the class of those who have been dispossessed to various degrees once again,
the violence of the 1% against the 99% . As Foucault says, this is a question of the
technique of power, more than of ideologies (as it was the case with the traditional type of racism),
because the sovereign elites, the State, are well aware of the urgency of the struggle,
the fact that, again, what is left to them is the raw use of the violence that, as Walter
Benjamin (1978) says, informs the law, domination without hegemony . Especially at the present stage of
the world, where information and knowledge make it unnecessary and thus impossible
for the General Intellect or common understanding and reason to be governed,
brutal domination and potentially genocidal methods of repression seem to be the
only instruments left to a decaying and ruthless global ruling class . Then, the old
sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and
activation, of racism (Foucault 1997: 258). Foucault makes the example of Nazi Germany,
where murderous power and sovereign power [were] unleashed throughout the
entire social body (p.259) and the entire population was exposed to death (p.260).
But this is today a common and global paradigm : The sovereign right to kill (ibid.), from
cases of police brutality in the cities to war atrocities throughout the world, has
become the most effective way to deal with a population that refuses to recognize
the false legitimacy of the sovereign, the sovereign right to govern . What Foucault
says of the Nazi State but he acknowledges it applies to the workings of all States (ibid.)
shows the terminal stage of sovereign power: a desperate will to absolute domination no longer able to count on hegemony: We
have an absolutely racist State, an absolutely murderous State, and an absolutely
suicidal State (ibid.). This certainly shows the crisis of sovereignty as State power, but more broadly, in a globalized world,
it shows the crisis of the sovereign elites, who are facing a final solution . No one can blame
them. Their unintelligent worldview is bound to that . The hope is that they will not
destroy everything before they are gone. Yet, they will not go by themselves, without
the workings of an altering power, bound to inherit the earth . This is the power of individuation,
the outset of this paper,
the dignity of individuation, whose workings are based on disobedience and care. It is the power of those who, in the age of
biopolitical terror, have nothing to sell except their own skins, (Marx 1977: 295), reversing the history of racist violence, of
conquest, enslavement, robbery, [and] murder (ibid.).
The production of bare life turns the case as bare life comes
to be the fundamental building block of modern governance
humanitarian projects are ineffective in correcting racism. A
life that can be divided into many forms facilitates the
exclusion of those lives deemed inhuman.
Levinson 2k1 (Brett- assistant professor of comparative literature at the State
University of New York at Binghamton, Nepantla: Views from South 2.1, Three Meditations
on Our MillennihilismsAccents, Racism, Anti-Semitism, p. 47-48)
<Let us articulate these two intertwined structures in another fashion: as representation
and language. The politics of representation (human life) concerns the privilege
one set of signifiers, enjoys over another, and the

possible overcoming of that injustice. It concerns offense, and the surmounting of
the offense; bias, and the correcting of bias. In the politics of language (bare life), to
the contrary, there is no offense, for only the embodiment of language not
unlike a neutral accentas the time, space, death of the master, is expelled.
one field of representation,
In the expulsion of representation, abhorrent measures are indeed taken. In that of

language, no being is expelled. The first form of depravity is awful because it is
offensive; the second is daunting precisely because it is not.
This latter violence, directed against bare life, actually inverts that of racism. If in racism
the oppressor twists the truth, and the oppressed group works to rectify this bias by
recuperating suppressed signifiers/representations, in the second model the oppressor
strives to straighten the bias (correct the twist of language, the figure, the trope, the
nonneutral accent), while the oppressed resists by restoring this very bias, this limit on the
signifiers of those who dominate.
The politics of human life seeks to erase (from the right) or liberate (from
the left) the alternative signifier/representation. The politics of bare life or
language labors to disclose (from the left) or disavow (from the right) the
alternative to the signifier (and not merely the signified), the (non)neutral accent
as the mark of language as such.
This description of two political operations could also be expressed as the distinction
between humanitarianism and its limit (a key theme in Agambens text). For Agamben
humanitarianism, in whatever variation (but above all, within discourses on
human rights), protects and often rescues not life but human life, life that
has been humanized. And herein, for [End Page 47] Agamben, lies the problem of
any humanitarianism (which is not to suggest that humanitarianism is problematic in
its entirety): that the beings whom despotic sovereign states abuse are
frequently cast outside the human prior to the defilement.

Humanitarianism defends the rights of human life; but human lives are
not, as the perpetrator of human rights abuses has posited them,
necessarily the victims. Those who embody language, or the limit of the
human, sometimes are.
State hegemony, we know, always includes and produces an outside it cannot incorporate
or control. This outside potentially represents the internal subversion or marginal human
forces that are the condition of any dominant discourse or project, and that so many recent
intellectual endeavors have worked to tap.
Yet if hegemony indeed must exclude in order to be, we cannot assume that the banished
thing is another human or group of humans. For as Agamben and Mr. Pennella show us,
albeit in distinct ways, the excluded today might also be the embodiment of language: the
inhuman, or the limit of the human.
Humanism, both in the good (humane activity) and bad sense (humanism as an
intolerance toward difference: such differences are cast as below the human), comes to a
limit when the abused, the constitutive outside, is not necessarily human or humanized
but still manages to yield abominations against all that is mortal. Stated in other terms,
notions of hegemony reach closure, yield to posthegemony, not when we realize that an
excess, an excluded Other, is the condition of the totality that, therefore, cannot account
for its constituency. Posthegemony materializes, rather, when the excluded
Other need not be human: when hegemony can exclude any living thing
without excluding anybody.>
Biopolitics, manifested through the care for life, particularly

medicine, replicates the conditions of racism and facilitates
eugenics.

The new fact, however, is that these concepts are not treated as external (if
binding) criteria of a sovereign decision: they are, rather, as such immediately
political. Thus the concept of race is defined, in accordance with the genetic
theories of the age, as "a group of human beings who manifest a certain
combination of homozygotic genes that are lacking in other groups" (Verschuer, .tat
et state, p. 88). Yet both Fischer and Verschuer know that a pure race is, according
to this definition, almost impossible to identify (in particular, neither the Jews nor
the Germans constitute a race in the strict sense-and Hitler is just as aware of this
when he writes Mein Kampf as when he decides on the Final Solution). "Racism" (if
one understands race to be a strictly biological concept) is, therefore, not the most
correct term for the biopolitics of the Third Reich. National Socialist biopolitics
moves, instead, in a horizon in which the "care of life" inherited from
eighteenth-century police science is, in now being founded on properly eugenic
concerns, absolutized. Distinguishing between politics (Potitik) and police
(Polizei), von Justi assigned the first a merely negative task, the fight against
the external and internal enemies of the State, and the second a positive one,
the care and growth of the citizens' life. National Socialist biopolitics-and
along with it, a good part of modern politics even outside the Third Reich-cannot
be grasped if it is not understood as necessarily implying the
disappearance of the difference between the two terms: the police now
becomes politics, and the care of life coincides with the fight against the
enemy. "The National Socialist revolution," one reads in the introduction to State
and Health, "wishes to appeal to forces that want to exclude factors of biological
degeneration and to maintain the people's hereditary health. It thus aims to
fortify the health of the people as a whole and to eliminate influences that
harm the biological growth of the nation. The book does not discuss problems
that concern only one people; it brings out problems of vital importance for all
European civilization." Only from this perspective is it possible to grasp the full
sense of the extermination of the Jews, in which the police and politics, eugenic
motives and ideological motives, the care of health and the fight against
the enemy become absolutely indistinguishable.
Reduced state security leads to increased racism without

physical papers, actors resort to biological markers for
identification of illegal immigrants
Gordon 10

However, this explanation fails to provide clarification on why nationality and not
some other form of social or economic difference is the determining feature that
generates hostility. Nor does it explain the racial component of xenophobia in South
Africa. According to the national surveys conducted by SAMP as well numerous
other studies, it is always the black foreigner from Africa that seems to constitute
the greatest possible threat (see Crush & Pendleton 2004; Crush 2008; and Landau
and Segatti 2009). In a disturbing replay of apartheid style tactics, this racial
component has insinuated itself into the identification of migrants by state
authorities. Since documents can be forged, the possession of identity books or
papers is no longer considered to be a definitive indication of South African
nationality. Authorities, instead, rely on biocultural markers of difference, such as
physical appearance and the ability to speak one of South Africas dominant
indigenous languages. During the mid 1990s, Minaar and Hough (1996: 166--7)
noted that members of the Internal Tracing Units have been known to give
suspected illegal migrants accent tests, demanding that the suspect pronounce
certain words such as indololwane (the Zulu for 'elbow'), or 'buttonhole' or the
name of a meerkat (for more information on the ITUs see Misago et. al. 2009).
Reports by the South African news media seem to indicate that these practices have
not been abandoned, and similar methods of identification were reportedly used by
antiimmigrant mobs during 20083.
The security reductions of the plan only promote a state of

security later increased violence serves as a justification for a
state of siege
Gordon 10
The emerging discourse evokes a scenario in which the foreigner is depicted as
illegitimate at best and criminal at worst, and in which the notion of unsanctioned
migration (whereby individuals change their economic and social status through
cross-border movement) endangers the nations sovereign control over individuals
or groups associated with economic and social development (Jensen and Buur
2007). In other words, unsanctioned migration is at odds with the predominant
nationalistic notions of how the beneficiaries of national development are defined
and becomes a threat to sovereign control over economic and social reconstruction.
Peberdy links this notion of economic sovereignty to a threatened nation state, as
follows: The focus of the state on what it sees as the parasitical relationship of nonSouth Africans to the nation's resources, and the way that the state criminalizes
them, suggests that the state sees immigrants, and particularly undocumented
migrants, as a threat to the nation and the post-1994 nation building process (1999:
296).
By envisioning South Africa as being threatened by parasitical foreigners, the
authorities are able to invoke notions of a state of siege. Such a threatened
position necessitates and justifies the suspension of aspects of the constitution to
protect against this threat.
Impact - State of Exception

The state of exception is an essential technique of all modern
states that allows for the creation of a global civil war and the
systematic elimination of bare life
Agamben 5 [Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.] Hebron ADN
One of the elements that make the state of exception so difficult to define is certainly its close relationship to civil war, insurrection,
and resistance. Because civil war is the opposite of normal conditions, it lies in a zone of undecidability with respect to the state of
exception, which is state powers immediate response to the most extreme internal conflicts. Thus, over the course of the twentieth
we have been able to witness a paradoxical phenomenon that has been

effectively defined as a legal civil war (Schnur1983). Let us take the case of the Nazi State. No sooner did
Hitler take power (or, as we should perhaps more accurately say, no sooner was power given to him) than, on February 28, he
proclaimed the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which suspended the articles of the
Weimar Constitution concerning personal liberties . The decree was never repealed, so that from a
juridical standpoint the entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that
lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the
establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for
the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of
citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the
voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical
sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including socalled democratic ones. Faced with the unstoppable progression of what has been called a global civil war, the
state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of
government in contemporary politics. This transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a
century,
technique of government threatens radically to alterin fact, has already palpably alteredthe structure and meaning of the
the state of exception appears

as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism .
traditional distinction between constitutional forms. Indeed, from this perspective,
The governments surveillance take away its citizens liberties,

the reauthorization of these programs create a permanent
state of exception. WE ARE ALL HOMO SACER.
Cardin, the editor of BORN TO FEAR: INTERVIEWS WITH THOMAS LIGOTTI and the
academic encyclopedias MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD and GHOSTS, SPIRITS, AND
PSYCHICS: THE PARANORMAL FROM ALCHEMY TO ZOMBIES. 2013. (Matt, Teeming Brain
founder and editor Matt Cardin is the author of DARK AWAKENINGS, DIVINATIONS OF THE
DEEP, A COURSE IN DEMONIC CREATIVITY: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO THE INNER GENIUS, and
the forthcoming TO ROUSE LEVIATHAN. Americas post 9/11 surveillance state: Orwell
mets Kafka in the Long Emergency, The Teeming Brain,

http://www.teemingbrain.com/2013/06/13/americas-post-911-surveillance-stateorwell-mets-kafka-in-the-long-emergency/)
Here in the midst of the still-building storm and scandal over the revelations about
PRISM referring (in case youve recently been living under a rock or sunk in a
coma) to the system the NSA uses to gain access to the private communications of
users of nine popular Internet services journalist and social media specialist
Jared Keller offers these sobering and, to my mind, utterly necessary reflections on
the equally troubling revelation that many Americans are deeply complacent about
the whole thing: Despite days of headlines about the American surveillance state
and government invasions of privacy (and a huge spike in sales of George Orwells
1984 on Amazon), Americans seem to have accepted the scope and reach of the
post-9/11 surveillance state into their lives as necessary. . . . Why are Americans so
comfortable with the surveillance state? Its likely that this acceptance goes handin-hand with an acceptance of the reality of modern terrorism. . . . The threat of
terror in our cities, immediately after 9/11, was paralyzing. Now, despite the horror
of the bombings in Boston and the attacks that have been thwarted by
counterterrorism efforts in the years since 9/11 (like Najibullah Zazis 2009 plot to
detonate explosives on the New York subway), terrorism seems to have become
more accepted as a modern geopolitical phenomenon, a fixture in the background
of our daily lives. . . . . [I]f terrorism and the resulting surveillance state have
become accepted features of American public life (which, according to the
latest polls, they have), then the apparatus the government deploys to
adjudicate and prosecute our war on terror should become normalized in
our existing legal regime. The Patriot Act and National Emergencies Acts
that provide the legal basis for the modern surveillance state were
supposed to be temporary emergencies, but with their continued reauthorization by Presidents Bush and Obama, they have become the norm.
Jared Keller, Why Dont Americans Seems to Care about Government
Surveillance? Pacific Standard, June 12, 2013 Keller goes on to point out the really
deep impact of these things on our collective circumstance here in the U.S.A.: We
are lurching from emergency to emergency, living in a permanent state of
exception. Margot Kaminski, executive director of the Information Society Project
at Yale Law School, puts it nicely in The Atlantic: Foreign intelligence is the
exception that has swallowed the Fourth Amendment whole. This, I think,
is the most significant impact of Snowdens leak: not necessarily to expose
wrongdoing in the legal sense (since the sweeping dragnet of Prism and the NSAs
monitoring of Verizons phone records are technically legal) but to take the abstract
legal concepts outlined under our emergency constitution and translate them into a
political reality in the minds of the American populace. I really want the focus to be
on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens
around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in, Snowden told The
Guardian. My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their
name and that which is done against them. The Pew/Washington Post poll may
indicate that people are comfortable with swapping liberty for security, but
that doesnt mean theyre comfortable with an unaccountable, totally
opaque, Kafka-esque security apparatus that falls in the legal gray area of
our ongoing state of exception. By way of context, I ask you to recall what our
old Teeming Brain friend James Howard Kunstler said, and said very loudly, in his
best-selling book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of
the Twenty-First Century, which was published way back in the prehistoric mists of
2005. Writing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and witnessing the craziness all
around him, Kunstler prophesied thus: It has been very hard for Americans lost in
dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive
motoring to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the
terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of
9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long
Emergency. . . . [W]e are entering a historical period of potentially great instability,
turbulence and hardship. Or actually that particular passage comes from a 2005
article by Kunstler in Rolling Stone, likewise titled The Long Emergency. Kunstlers
main focus in that article and his book was not terrorism or surveillance but the
seismic shaking of industrial civilizations foundations by the dawning of the age of

scarcity for cheap and easy fossil fuels (a development that isnt belied but
confirmed by all of the recent talk about the new oil bonanza, which is the result
of massive investments in the kind of galactically complex and far out alternative oil
extraction maneuvers that were formerly inconceivable because they were
unnecessary). But his Long Emergency characterization still clearly encompassed
terrorism and the growth of a massive surveillance state in America and elsewhere
to complement the massive geopolitical conflicts and at-home unpleasantness
stemming from oil-fueled imperial ambitions. Again, Kunstler said those things eight
years ago. And he was hardly alone. In other words, its as our transformation here
in America into an Orwellian and Kafka-esque surveillance state where the allconsuming desire to snoop and fully crucify the notion of privacy is driven by the
reality of our lurching from emergency to emergency, living in a permanent state
of exception its as if this transformation is unfolding according to a wellforeseen plan. Just like, say, the financial and economic collapse of 2008, which was
foreseen by Kunstler and others but pshawed by the talking heads who were
supposed to represent authoritative and trustworthy mainstream wisdom. These
authorities, we were told, offered a bulwark of sanity and sensibleness against the
kooks who said the entire economy of not just America but Europe and elsewhere
was all a big, crazy, scary, evanescent hallucination that was primed to pop like a
soap bubble. But pop it did. And living in the Long Emergency we are. All bets
are still off, just as they were several years ago when the meaning of common
sense shifted to something were still trying to figure out. Only now were doing it
while being tracked, recorded, and analyzed every step of the way.
Impact - Turns Case

The aff creates a self fulfilling prophesy
Tran-Creque 13
Bard College, interdisciplinary research, education and art community working to

for the Study of the Drone, The Forever War is Always Hungry, July 5, 2013, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/theforever-war-is-always-hungry/ //SRSL)
The legalistic definition of sovereignty, the

preoccupation with policy making, even the basic assumption that the
debates we have really matterall of this starts to look ideological in the
worst sense. Following the Prism revelations last week, Christian Caryl wrote a retrospective in Foreign Policy comparing
One simple imperative: Know your enemy
the NSA and the East German Stasi: So which is worse, the Stasi or the NSA? Definitely the Stasi. East German citizens had no
American citizens can still exercise control over our own

intelligence organizations, which are still bound (or so we are told) by the rule of
law. But do we really have the will to restrain them? There is admittedly some faint courage in being willing to even make the
defense whatsoever against its intrusions.
comparison, but there is something utterly more remarkable in the ideological refrain of asking if American citizens can still
exercise control over our own intelligence organizationas if the states intelligence apparatus had ever been democraticor so
we are told. But this is hardly uncommon. Dan Gettingers recent piece for the Center here frames the question in terms of
Understanding this legal debate and the evolving

strategic situation determines how this country deploys its forces abroad, the kinds
of military technologies that we invest in, and the degree of oversight that Congress
has over the use of force by the Executive Branch. While the outcome of this debate will likely result in
legislative oversight in the application of the AUMF:
some form forever war against terrorism, the question remains as to whether it will be conducted in the shadows of ambiguity or
limited by some degree of Congressional observation. And here we are back at the lesser evil. It is significant, I think, that it is
These are questions for

policy elitesand perhaps for those who imagine themselves among their ranks.
But the question is always between more killing and less killing, between more
secrecy and less secrecy, more oversight and less oversightalways witheringly
loyal to the same order of violence that produced these choices in the first place
and which never bore any of us any loyalty. As the American liberal left has foundered for years, attempting
fundamentally impossible it is to reconcile any of this with anything like actual democracy.
to articulate a challenge to the logic of permanent war and the terror state, it has failed to recognize that the War on Terror does not
Neither is it the militarycarceral response of an empire incapable of delivering prosperity for anyone beyond
its increasingly rapacious aristocracy. Nor is it even the immanent danger of
building weapons that will always one day be turned inwards. Of course, it is all these things
but at its heart, the forever war is only an unusually visible moment in the only war
theres ever been.
represent an aberration or a failure of policy. It is not an imperial venture run rampant.
Impact - Universal Violence

Biopolitics generates violence on a previously unseen scale
authorizing extermination at will.

<It is jean-Luc Nancy's achievement to have shown the ambiguity of Bataille's
theory of sacrifice, and to have strongly affirmed the concept of an "unsacrificeable
existence" against every sacrificial temptation. Yet if our analysis of homo sacer is
correct, and the Bataillian definition of sovereignty with reference to transgression is
inadequate with respect to the life in the sovereign ban that may be killed, then the
concept of the "unsacrificeable" too must be seen as insufficient to grasp the
violence at issue in modern biopolitics. Homo sacer is unsacrificeable, yet he may
nevertheless be killed by anyone. The dimension of bare life that constitutes the
immediate referent of sovereign violence is more original than the opposition of the
sacrificeable and the unsacrificeable, and gestures to-ward an idea of sacredness
that is no longer absolutely definable through the conceptual pair (which is perfectly
clear in societies familiar with sacrifice) of fitness for sacrifice and immolation according to ritual forms. In modernity, the principle of the sacredness of life is thus
completely emancipated from sacrificial ideology, and in our culture the meaning of
the term "sacred" continues the semantic history of homo sacer and not that of
sacrifice (and this is why the demystification of sacrificial ideology so common today
remain insufficient, even though they are correct). What confronts us today is a
life that as such is exposed to a violence without precedent precisely in
the most profane and banal ways. Our age is the one in which a holiday
weekend produces more victims on Europe's highways than a war
campaign, but to speak of a "sacredness of the highway railing" is obviously only
an antiphrastic definition (La Cecla, Mente locale, p. 115).
The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means of the
term "Holocaust" was, from this perspective, an irresponsible historiographical
blindness. The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of
the new biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of a homo
sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing
therefore constitutes, as we will see, neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice,
but simply the actualization of a mere "capacity to be killed" inherent in
the condition of the Jew as such. The truth-which is difficult for the victims to
face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils-is that
the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as
Hitler had announced, "as lice," which is to say, as bare life. The dimension in
which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics.
If it is true that the figure proposed by our age is that of an
unsacrificeable life that has nevertheless become capable of being killed
to an unprecedented degree, then the bare life of homo sacer concerns us in a
special way. Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics, a line
that is as such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of
ultimately coinciding with the biological life itself of citizens. If today there is no
longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all
virtually homines sacri.> < 113-115 >
Biopolitics is in the constant act of generating a new periphery

which must be eliminated. This is at the heart of all violence.
Agamben 2k
34-35]
<When seen in this light, the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany
acquires a radically new meaning. As a people that refuses integration in
the national body politic (it is assumed, in fact, that its assimilation is actually
only a feigned one), the Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost
the living symbol of the people, of that naked life that modernity
necessarily creates within itself but whose presence it is no longer able to
tolerate in any way. We ought to understand the lucid fury with which the German
Volk-representative par excellence of the people as integral body politic-tried to
eliminate the Jews forever as precisely the terminal phase of the internecine
struggle that divides People and people. With the final solution-which included
Gypsies and other unassimilable elements for a reason-Nazism tried
obscurely and in vain to free the Western political stage from this
intolerable shadow so as to produce finally the German Volk as the people
that has been able to heal the original biopolitical fracture. (And that is why
the Nazi chiefs repeated so obstinately that by eliminating Jews and Gypsies they
were actually working also for the other European peoples.) Paraphrasing the
Freudian postulate on the relation between Es and Ich, one might say that modern
biopolitics is supported by the principle according to which "where there is
naked life, there has to be a People," as long as one adds immediately that
this principle is valid also in its inverse formulation, which prescribes that
"where there is a People, there shall be naked life." The fracture that was
believed to have been healed by eliminating the people-namely, the Jews,
who are its symbol-reproduced itself anew, thereby turning the whole
German people into sacred life that is doomed to death and into a
biological body that has to be infinitely purified (by eliminating the
mentally ill and the carriers of hereditary diseases). And today, in a
different and yet analogous way, the capitalistic-democratic plan to
eliminate the poor not only reproduces inside itself the people of the
excluded but also turns all the populations of the Third World into naked
life. Only a politics that has been able to come to terms with the
fundamental biopolitical split of the 'West will be able to arrest this
oscillation and put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the
cities of the Earth.>
The pursuit of biopolitics creates dichotomies between the

foreign and the domestic, drawing boundaries that justify
killing in the name of saving life. This society of control
spreads across the globe as the domestic populace becomes
ever more isolated
Campbell 5 [Professor of Cultural and Political Geography in the Department of Geography at Durham University in the
UK (David, The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle, American Quarterly 57.3 (2005) 943-972] Hebron
ADN
the state can be seen as the effect of formalized practices and

ritualized acts that operate in its name or in the service of its ideals. This understanding,
As an imagined community,
which is enabled by shifting our theoretical commitments from a belief in pregiven subjects to a concern with the problematic of
subjectivity,
renders foreign policy as a boundary-producing political performance in which the
spatial domains of inside/outside, self/other, and domestic/foreign are constituted through

the writing of threats as externalized dangers. The narratives of primary and stable identities that continue to
govern much of the social sciences obscure such an understanding.
In international relations these concepts of
identity limit analysis to a concern with the domestic influences on foreign policy ; this perspective
allows for a consideration of the influence of the internal forces on state identity, but it assumes that the external is a fixed reality
that presents itself to the pregiven state and its agents.
In contrast, by assuming that the identity of the
state is performatively constituted, we can argue that there are no foundations of state
identity that exist prior to the problematic of identity/difference that situates the state within
the framework of inside/outside and self/other. Identity is constituted in relation to difference, and difference is
constituted in relation to identity,
which means that the "state," the "international system," and the
"dangers" to each are coeval in their construction. Over time, of course, ambiguity is disciplined, contingency is
fixed, and dominant meanings are established. In the history of U.S. foreign policy regardless of the radically different contexts in
which it has operated the formalized practices and ritualized acts of security discourse have worked to produce a conception of the
United States in which freedom, liberty, law, democracy, individualism, faith, order, prosperity, and civilization are claimed to exist
because of the constant struggle with and often violent suppression of opponents said to embody tyranny, oppression, anarchy,
totalitarianism, collectivism, atheism, and barbarism.
This record demonstrates that the boundary-producing
political performance of foreign policy does more than inscribe a geopolitical marker on a
map. This construction of social space also involves an axiological dimension in which the
delineation of an inside from an outside gives rise to a moral hierarchy that renders the
domestic superior and the foreign inferior. Foreign policy thus incorporates an ethical power
of segregation in its performance of identity/difference . While this produces a geography of
"foreign" (even "evil") others in conventional terms, it also requires a disciplining of
"domestic" elements on the inside that challenge this state identity.
This is achieved through
exclusionary practices in which resistant elements to a secure identity on the "inside" are linked through a discourse of "danger"
with threats identified and located on the "outside." Though global in scope, these effects are national in their legitimation.12 The
ONDCP drugs and terror campaign was an overt example of this sort of exclusionary practice.
However, the boundary-
producing political performances of foreign policy operate within a global context wherein
relations of sovereignty are changing. Although Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have overplayed the transition from
modern sovereignty to imperial sovereignty in Empire, there is little doubt that new relations of power and identity are present.
According to Hardt and Negri, in our current condition,
Empire establishes no territorial center of power and
does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing

apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open,
expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural
exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of
the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.13 As shall be argued here, the sense of fading national colors is
being resisted by the reassertion of national identity boundaries through foreign policy's writing of danger in a range of cultural
sites. Nonetheless, this takes place within the context of flow, flexibility, and reterritorialization summarized by Hardt and Negri.
Moreover,
these transformations are part and parcel of change in the relations of production.
Hardt and Negri declare: "In the postmodernization of the global economy,
As
the creation of wealth tends ever more
toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which
the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another ."14
While the implied periodization of the term postmodernization renders it problematic,
connecting and penetrative networks across and through all domains of life,
the notion of biopolitics, with its
opens up new possibilities for
conceptualizing the complex relationships that embrace oil, security, U.S. policy, and the
SUV. In Todd Gitlins words, "the SUV is the place where foreign policy meets the road ."15 It is also the
place where the road affects foreign policy.
Biopolitics is a key concept in understanding how those
meetings take place. Michel Foucault argues that biopolitics arrives with the historical transformation in waging war from
the defense of the sovereign to securing the existence of a population. In Foucault s argument,
this historical shift means
that decisions to fight are made in terms of collective survival, and killing is justified by the
necessity of preserving life.16 It is this centering of the life of the population rather than the safety of the sovereign or
the security of territory that is the hallmark of biopolitical power that distinguishes it from sovereign power.
Giorgio
that
Agamben has extended the notion through the concept of the administration of life and argues
the defense of life often takes place in a zone of indistinction between violence and the
law such that sovereignty can be violated in the name of life. 17 Indeed, the biopolitical privileging of life
has provided the rationale for some of the worst cases of mass death, with genocide deemed "understandable" as one group s life
is violently secured through the demise of another group.18 However, the role of biopolitical power in the administration of life is
equally obvious and ubiquitous in domains other than the extreme cases of violence or war. The difference between the sovereign
and the biopolitical can be understood in terms of the contrast between Foucault s notion of "disciplinary society" and Gilles
Deleuzes conception of "the society of control," a distinction that plays an important role in Hardt and Negri s Empire. According to
Hardt and Negri, in the disciplinary society, "social
command is constructed through a diffuse network of
dispositifi or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive
practices." In the society of control, "mechanisms of command become ever more
democratic, ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and
bodies of the citizens." This means that the society of control is "characterized by an intensification and generalization of
the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to
discipline,
this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through
flexible and fluctuating networks."19 Network is, therefore, the prevailing metaphor for social organization in the era
of biopolitical power, and it is a conception that permits us to understand how the effects of our actions, choices, and life are
propagated beyond the boundaries of our time-space location.20
It is also a conception that allows us to
appreciate how war has come to have a special prominence in producing the political order
of liberal societies. Networks, through their extensive connectivity, function in terms of their strategic interactions. This
means that "social relations become suffused with considerations of power, calculation, security and threat."21 As a result,
"global
biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated
into the very weft and warp of the socio-economic and cultural networks of biopolitical
relations."22 This theoretical concern with biopolitical relations of power in the context of networked societies is consistent with
an analytical shift to the problematic of subjectivity as central to understanding the relationship between foreign policy and identity.
That is because both are concerned with "a shift from a preoccupation with physical and isolated entities, whose relations are
described largely in terms of interactive exchange, to beings-in-relation, whose structures [are] decisively influenced by patterns of
connectivity."23 At the same time, while conceptual approaches are moving away from understandings premised on the existence of
physical and isolated entities, the social and political structures that are produced by network patterns of connectivity often appear
to be physical and isolated. As Lieven de Cauter argues, we don't live in networks;
we live in capsules. Capsules are
enclaves and envelopes that function as nodes, hubs, and termini in the various networks
and contain a multitude of spaces and scales. These enclaves can include states, gated
communities, or vehicles with the latter two manifesting the "SUV model of citizenship"
Mitchell has provocatively described.24 Nonetheless, though capsules like these appear
physical and isolated, there is "no network without capsules. The more networking, the more capsules.
Ergo: the degree of capsularisation is directly proportional to the growth of networks."25
The result is that biopolitical
relations of power produce new borderlands that transgress conventional understandings of

inside/outside and isolated/ connected. Together these shifts pose a major theoretical challenge to much of the
social sciences, which have adhered ontologically to a distinction between the ideal and the material, which privileges economistic
renderings of complex social assemblages.26 As we shall see, overcoming this challenge does not mean denying the importance of
materialism but, rather, moving beyond a simplistic consideration of objects by reconceptualizing materialism so it is understood as
interwoven with cultural, social, and political networks. This means that "paying increased attention to the material actually requires
a more expansive engagement with the immaterial."27
The sovereigns use of surveillance renders the entire

populace bare life --- this universal state of exception exposes
us all to the constant potentiality of violence
Douglas, independent scholar, 2009 (Jeremy, Disappearing Citizenship:
surveillance and the state of exception, published in Surveillance & Society Vol 6,
No 1, p. 37 http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//roetlin
Electronic and biometric surveillance are the tactics through which the government
is creating a space in which the exception is routine practice. The biopolitical
implication of surveillance is the universalization of bare life: History teaches us how
practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry (ibid). These new
not only is there no clear distinction between

private and political life, but there is no fundamental claim, or right, to a political life
as such not even for citizens from birth; thus, the originary biopolitical act that inscribes life as
political from birth is more and more a potential depoliticization and ban from the political realm. We are all
exposed to the stateless potentiality of a bare life excluded from the political realm,
but not outside the violence of the law (and therefore still included): states, which should
constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the
point that it's humanity itself that has become the dangerous class (ibid). Making
people suspects is equivalent to making people bare life it is the governmental (a
Foucauldian governmentality rather than an Agambenian sovereignty I would argue) production of a life
exposed to the pure potentiality of the state of exception: the sovereign ban, which applies
control measures have created a situation in which
to the exception in no longer applying, corresponds to the structure of potentiality, which maintains itself in relation
Surveillance is the technique

that opens up this potentiality, which allows for the normalization of the
exception. In this particular instance i.e. biometric data collection and surveillance in the US the state of
to actuality precisely through its ability not to be (Agamben 1994, 46).
exception as a permanent form of governmentality and the universalization of homines sacri has been brought into
existence though the USA Patriot Act2 and the Patriot Act II3.
Biopolitics allows killing in the name of preserving life

culminating in the most massive acts of violence.
Campbell 2k5
[David - professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University in the U.K., The Biopolitics
of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle, American Quarterly 57.3, p. 949-950]
<Michel Foucault argues that biopolitics arrives with the historical

transformation in waging war from the defense of the sovereign to
securing the existence of a population. In Foucault's argument, this historical
shift means that decisions to fight are made in terms of collective survival,
and killing is justified by the necessity of preserving life.16 It is this
centering of the life of the population rather than the safety of the sovereign or
the security of territory that is the hallmark of biopolitical power that
distinguishes it from sovereign power. Giorgio Agamben has extended the
notion through the concept of the administration of life and argues that
the defense of life often takes place in a zone of indistinction between
violence and the law such that sovereignty can be violated in the name of
life.17 Indeed, the biopolitical privileging of life has provided the rationale
for some of the worst cases of mass death, with genocide [End Page 949]
deemed "understandable" as one group's life is violently secured through
the demise of another group.18
However, the role of biopolitical power in the administration of life is equally obvious
and ubiquitous in domains other than the extreme cases of violence or war. The
difference between the sovereign and the biopolitical can be understood in terms of
the contrast between Foucault's notion of "disciplinary society" and Gilles Deleuze's
conception of "the society of control," a distinction that plays an important role in
Hardt and Negri's Empire. According to Hardt and Negri, in the disciplinary society,
"social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or
apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices."
In the society of control, "mechanisms of command become ever more democratic,
ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and
bodies of the citizens." This means that the society of control is "characterized by an
intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity
that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline,
this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through
flexible and fluctuating networks."19
Network is, therefore, the prevailing metaphor for social organization in the
era of biopolitical power, and it is a conception that permits us to understand
how the effects of our actions, choices, and life are propagated beyond the
boundaries of our time-space location.20 It is also a conception that allows us to
appreciate how war has come to have a special prominence in producing the
political order of liberal societies. Networks, through their extensive
connectivity, function in terms of their strategic interactions. This means
that "social relations become suffused with considerations of power,
calculation, security and threat."21 As a result, "global biopolitics operates
as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated into the
very weft and warp of the socio-economic and cultural networks of
biopolitical relations."22>
Impact - War
Biopolitical regulation is rooted in the logic of killing to save
the division of different forms of life into that which is valuable
and that which is disposable is is the root cause of
racialization, totalitarianism, and war.
Reid 8 [Julian, Political theorist, philosopher, and professor of International Relations Life Struggles: War,
Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Foucault on Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael
Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008, p. 89-90] Hebron ADN
It is in turn in response to this reconceptualisation of war, a war in defence of the state rather than against the state, that we see the
emergence of the discourse of population and the development of the range of biopolitical techniques that guarantee the existence
and proliferation of what George Ensor described classically in 1818 as populousness (Ensor, 1967: p. 12). If state security is,
it is also more importantly the strategic

object of war to secure the life of populations themselves. The species life of populations
becomes the battlefield on which these new forms of biopolitical war are to be waged. A
according to Foucault, the object of war by the end of the eighteenth century,
war conducted through the development of security mechanisms that act to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average,
establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population ... so as to optimise a state of life
state security is always by necessity a commitment to the

security of society which is also always a commitment to the security of a particular
form of life. The development of the range of normalising techniques, the constitution of populations
around various discourses of the normal is in turn, Foucault insists, a kind of continual race war. What in
fact is racism? he asks. It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under powers control, the
break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of
the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are
described as good and that others , in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way
of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out
the groups that exist within a population. (Foucault, 2003b: pp. 2545) The constitution of
species life itself as the referent object of the security practices of state power allows for the specification of
any and every form of life that can be held to install degenerative effects within the field of population as the enemy
upon which war must be waged. Not necessarily a war of the military type, but a war of quiet extermination,
(Foucault, 2003b: p. 246). The commitment to
carried out with the continual deployment of regulatory and normalising techniques. A war that rages at the heart of modern
societies. A war of the biological type (Foucault, 2003b: p. 255). At the same time, then, that we see wars of the military type
we see the legitimisation of new

warmaking as the right to kill becomes aligned in proximity to the new necessity to
make live (Foucault, 2003b: p. 256). In turn we see the emergence of new practices of colonisation
justified on racial grounds. Subsequently we witness the emergence of fascist states and
societies in which the power over life and death, adjudicated on explicitly racial criteria, is
disseminated widely, to the point where everyone has the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only
addressed as a moral scandal and the major political problematic of modernity, so
forms of
because of the practice of informing, which effectively means doing away with the people next door, or having them done away
with. (Foucault, 2003b: p. 259) Likewise the emergence of socialisms based on the pursuit of the elimination of class enemies within
capitalist society emit, for Foucault, an essential form of racism (Foucault, 2003b: pp. 2612). These strategies of states, as well as
counter-state, counter-hegemonic struggles, are all fundamentally tied up with this problem of the relations between war, life and
security. Once politics is construed as the continuation of war,
of possibility for life,
once war becomes conceived as a condition
for the pursuit of its security and the increase of its being, however that conception may be
life itself becomes the object for variable forms of

destruction, annihilation and quiet exterminations.
grounded, the conditions are created whereby
The sovereign is an endless state of war

Tran-Creque 13
Bard College, interdisciplinary research, education and art community working to

for the Study of the Drone, The Forever War is Always Hungry, July 5, 2013, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/theforever-war-is-always-hungry/ //SRSL)
The Raw Material of Sovereignty Weizmans question is simple. How, after the
evacuation of the ground surface of Gaza, did bodies, rather than territories, or
death, rather than space, turn into the raw material of Israeli sovereignty? In
Weizmans Thanato-tactics, sovereignty is simply the management of death. The
Israeli General Security Services assassination program, which began in 2000
before 9/11produced the sprawling surveillance and counterinsurgency apparatus
of the occupation. But it also provided the template and testing grounds for the
United States own assassination program. What Weizman is really interested in is
the logic of the lesser evil, by which economizing language produces this
environment of managed death. From this perspective, collateral damage
calculations are not a humanitarian triumph limiting the scope of violence. Rather,
they are a crucial part of the ideological apparatus by which acts of state violence
are rendered legal and legitimate, encompassed within the permissible logic of
forestalling greater violence. Weizman quotes Israeli Air Force commander Eliezer
Shkedi saying, before the 2006 invasion of Gaza, that the only alternative to aerial
attacks is a ground operation and the reoccupation. Assassination, he added, is
the most precise tool we have. So too with proportionality, balancing, efficiency,
pragmatism, the injunction to be realistic, and the entire pantheon of reasonable
constraints. All of the oppositional forces of military interests and intelligence
agencies, human rights groups and journalists, can be incorporated within the same
project: the maintenance of humanitarian violence, albeit one that bills itself as a
lesser form of violence compared to the alternatives. As Will Saletan put it in Slate
earlier this year with memorable enthusiasm: Drones kill fewer civilians, as a
percentage of total fatalities, than any other military weapon. Theyre the worst
form of warfare in the history of the world, except for all the others. civilian
casualties? Thats not an argument against drones. Its the best thing about them.
The choice presented is always between assassination and invasion, between
Hellfire missiles and imprecise bombsbetween fewer dead and more dead. It is not
a choice between war and peace. Well-trained commentators cannot even imagine
a world in which such things simply do not happen. And one never questions the
legitimacy of the system in which, as Hannah Arendt emphasized, one must choose
evil. Periodic eruptions of unchecked violenceas in the Israeli invasion of
Gaza in 2008 and the bombardment in 2012are neither accidents nor failures.
The normal practice of violence through checkpoints, annexation, resource
extraction, and assassination is maintained against the the ever present
threat of greater violence, regularly demonstrated. The greater evil kept
at bay by the lesser evil, in an endless state of war. This permanent threat
of arbitrary violence is precisely what we call sovereignty.
Rt Cause DS Impact
After 9/11 the discourse surrounding American security
switched from defense to prevention --- this produces bare life
globally --- terrorists abroad are criminalised to justify
paradoxical attempts to both utterly destroy them and act as a
humanitarian figure --- we drop bombs and food --- secondly it
has created a surveillance state domestically --- the logic of
risk management in combination with surveillance functions to
assign us all the status of enemy --- everyone is bombed with
data collection under the mantra of guilty until proven
innocent --- we are no longer reduced to bare life --- all life has
become bare life

When the Exception Becomes the Rule, Danish Institute for International Studies,
p.)//roetlin
A direct parallel, then, can be drawn between Agambens notion of the camp as a
zone of indistinction and the logic that informs the United States war on terrorism . In
addition to the physical emergence of camp-like structures such as the detainment centres for suspected terrorists,
the war on terrorism operates through the sovereign ban in the sense that
it blurs the distinction between inside/ outside, domestic politics/international
relations, order/anarchy, trust/fear police/military and friend/enemy . This section argues
it can be said that
that the blurring is brought about by a fundamental change in the United States politics of security. Contrary to the
the starting point of post-9/11 security politics is prevention rather than the
defence against an actual threat: We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to
the capabilities and objectives of todays adversaries ... To forestall or
prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if
necessary, act pre-emptively. 17 The semiotic shift from defence to prevention takes its point of
pre-9/11 period,
departure in the behavioural potentialities of states rather than their actual behaviour: [T]he United States can no
longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the
immediacy of todays threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be unleashed by our adversaries
We cannot let our enemies strike first. 18

anticipatory self-defence as it is understood in international law still operates with an
image of reactive violence, the war on terrorism replaces this picture with that of
proactive intervention: We must deter and defend against the threat before it is unleashed. 19 As such,
prevention entails a move from danger to risk . 20 The aim is no longer to confront a
concrete danger, but to intervene before threats have fully emerged . Thus, preventive
choice of weapons, do not permit that option.
Whereas
security is virtual security: it is one step further away from danger in its potentiality, but at the same time it is real,
21 The shift from defence to

prevention, re-action to pro-action, deterrence to intelligence, and events to
eventualities is to be considered mainly on an ontological level. Contrary to defence, prevention takes in
for the future increasingly determines present security choices.
security rather than security as the underlying value of security politics: We are today a nation at risk to a new and
changing threat. The terrorist threat to America takes many forms, has many places to hide, and is often invisible.
While defence implies

protection, safety and trust, prevention operates on the basis of permanent feelings
of fear, anxiety and unease. Security discourses, in other words, are increasingly
dominated by the logic of risk management, a logic which calls for the
Yet the need for homeland security is tied to our enduring vulnerability . 22
management and government of potentialities of risky populations by means of

(statistical) calculations and proactive management rather than through the
reactive management of real events and threats. The war on terrorism cannot be
pinpointed in spatiotemporal terms. The time and place of terrorism are of the terrorists choosing. The
success of terrorism lies in the provocation of fear and anxiety that result from the uncertainty regarding the time
all perceived dangers (anthrax, serial killers, illegal

immigration, etc.) can be and are linked to terrorists. Fear is the rationale of the war
on terrorism in which, in the end, everything can become suspicious. The National
Security Strategy (2002) summarises it nicely: Thousands of dangerous killers,
schooled in the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes,
are now spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off
without warning. 23 Victory is remote and to protect the local homeland, security
politics has to operate on a global level : to be safe here means that the world has to be freed from
terrorists everywhere. In terms of its effects on the contours of the global order, the prevention doctrine
lays the basis for the United States exemption from international law and other norms
that govern conduct in international society. In this sense, prevention invalidates the law without
declaring international law openly obsolete. Faced with a non-localisable and open-ended threat, the war on
terrorism effectively institutionalises a permanent state of exception in which the
United States reserves for itself the right to act unilaterally, while simultaneously
demanding compliance with the law from the other states. As Hardt and Negri argue: Here
and place of the next attack. Hence,
therefore, is born, in the name of the exceptionality of the intervention, a form of right that is really a right of the
police [that] is inscribed in the deployment of prevention, repression, and rhetorical force aimed at the reconstruction of the social equilibrium. 24 As such, the war on terrorism replaces the current order with a smooth,
infinite space of endless surveillance, detection and prevention. Prevention produces Ameri- can sovereignty ,
but
it is also produces bare life, life that is abandoned in the process of constituting global American
sovereignty. 4. THE WAR ON TERRORISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF BARE LIFE In the war on terror, the figure of
the terrorist embodies the bare life that is the bearer of the sovereign ban . While the
language of war might seem to elevate terrorism from the realm of criminal justice (low politics) to that of war and
terrorists are in fact not considered a

legitimate party in the war. Rather, they are criminalised and referred to as unlawful
combatants. The distinction between enemy combatant and unlawful combatant
has much in common with the Schmittian distinction between enemy and foe . While
the first refers to the concrete other that constitutes an existential threat to the self, the foe refers to the
criminalised and morally degraded other, who should not only be defeated but
utterly destroyed. Perhaps, it is in this sense that one should make sense of the comment by the
international security (high politics), a closer look reveals that
American Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, that the goal of the war in Afghanistan was to kill rather than
defeat as many Taleban as possible. 25 At any rate, the framing of the war on terrorism as a war on behalf of
civilisation itself denies that such values are presented in the other. 26 Thus Zizek argues that in the war on
terrorism ...we
cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organization like the Red

Cross mediating between the warring parties, organizing the exchange of prisoners,
and so on: one side of the conflict (the US-dominated global force) already
assumes the role of the Red Cross it perceives itself not as one of the warring
sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order crushing rebellions and,
simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the local populations . Perhaps the
ultimate image of the treatment of the local population as Homo sacer is that of the American war plane
flying above Afghanistan one is never sure what it will drop, bombs or food
parcels. 27 As noted earlier, a second aspect in which the transformation of life into bare life is visible in the
war on terrorism concerns the status and treatment of detained suspects of terrorism. Although many of the
detainees have been taken into American custody during the armed conflict in Afghanistan, they are not
granted the prisoner of war status in the way it is required by the Geneva
Conventions. Speaking of unlawful combatants, the United States successfully keeps their detainment outside
the realm of international regulation. In a parallel movement, the fate of the detainees is also kept
outside the jurisdiction of the national American criminal justice system as a result of the extra-
territorial location of the Guantanamo base where many detainees are held. While the
suffering of these detainees obviously is not comparable to the atrocities faced by
inhabitants of the concentration camps, it is nevertheless possible to detect the
juridico-political structure of the state of exception (the camp) in detainment centres
such as the Guantanamo base, as detainees are stripped from all legal rights, while
they remain subjected to the power exercised over them . 28 However, the biopolitical
production of bare life does not just take place in the camp or the immediate
conflict in Afghanistan. In fact, the production of homo sacer is made
possible through bureaucratic techniques of risk management, enabled by
new laws such as the Patriot Act, that apply well beyond the theatres of
military conflict. These techniques of bureaucratic surveillance subject life
to statistical methods by which norms of behaviour are identified within
the population according to the laws of probability . 29 In risk management, the
subject is not encountered as a unique person with some sort of indispensable inner singularity,
but as an aggregate of risk factors, a modulation that can be managed and tamed
through continuous monitoring. As Rose argues, risk management ... is not a question of
instituting a regime in which each person is permanently under the alien gaze of the eye of power exercising
individualizing surveillance. It is not a matter of apprehending and normalizing the offender ex post facto.
Conduct is continually monitored and reshaped by logics immanent within all

networks of practice. Surveillance is designed in to the flows of everyday
existence. 30 Turning individuals into dividuals, risk management reduces life to
the naked life of biographic profiles on the basis of which new collective identities or
risk classes are created. 31 The aim of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS) system, for
instance, is to gather data about all passengers flying to the United States. On the basis of information about name,
age, address, passport, credit card number and previous travels, CAPPS classifies the potential dangerousness of
all travellers. It constructs three different risk classes/identities: green, yellow and red, with green meaning non-
Muslim visitors from the Middle East are

automatically assigned the yellow identity. 32 However, surveillance is not just
limited to foreigners entering the United States. The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), a joint initiative of
dangerous and red meaning very dangerous.
the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the Intelligence Community, the FBI and the State
seeks to install surveillance and data collection as a routine of every-day

life within and outside the United States. As Attorney General Ashcroft argues: The Terrorist
Screening Center will provide one-stop shopping so that every federal anti-terrorist
screener is working off the same page whether its an airport screener, an
embassy official issuing visas overseas, or an FBI agent on the street . 33 The result is
that the differences between inside/outside, police/military and FBI/CIA become
increasingly blurred. On the one hand, there is an increasing internalisation of external
security in the form of domestic spying and data collection within the United States. On the
other hand, externalisation of internal security (policing beyond borders) is taking place in remote
places such as Afghanistan. Hence, Tom Ridges (Secretary of Homeland Security) remark, that
the Terrorist Screening Center will make it possible to put intelligence to immediate
use at the front lines of the battle against terrorism misses the crucial point that there are no
clear front lines in the war on terror . Rather, the front is everywhere and no one can
expect to be exempted from the network of surveillance and inspection. In a sense, everybody
is a suspect. The administration and classification of biographical risk profiles does not work as an immediate
Department,
exclusion (monitored subjects can freely move around), but as a form of inclusive exclusion. That is,
prevention does not perform its exclusive function in simple binary terms of
friend/foe, but fabricates the foe within the social order as potentially dangerous .
The aim of intervention is no longer the exclusion of dangerous elements, but to interfere on the actuarial basis of
risk factors in order to anticipate and prevent groupings from becoming dangerous. Through the inclusion of risk
classes in a system of control, the life of legal subjects is not reduced to that of homo sacer . Rather, the reverse is
happening: the
figure of homo sacer dwells in everybody in the sense that all life is bare
life until class credentials prove otherwise the elevation from homo sacer to an autonomous
subject is only a secondary move.
Rt Cause K Impact
Constant government surveillance has a normalizing function
--- we seek to fit an average created through aggregate data
analysis --- this violently destroys individualism --- when we
take away government surveillance, disciplinary power loses
its efficacy
Hall, 5/7/2007 Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, Death, Power, and the
Body: A Bio-political Analysis of Death and Dying, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University, p. 15-17)//roetlin
Foucault labeled this new type of power as disciplinary, and while he acknowledged its earlier presence in isolated
examples, his point was that, in modernity, this type of disciplinary power extended its influence from societys
Disciplinary mechanisms, he contended,

infiltrated the whole of society in the late seventeenth century when the first concerted efforts to
arrange and control specific and identifiable groups of people took place. According to Foucault, the forces that
are used to arrange and classify groups of people also render those people as
individual units. The individual, he argued, is thus a construction of power created only when
that individual is recognized as part of a larger and identifiable group a group is not created by a mass
of individuals, but vice versa. According to Foucault, it is only through discipline that modern individuals
are created out of a mass. Disciplinary power, he claimed, differs from preexisting power mechanisms in
that it is applied primarily to bodies and what they do rather than to the land and
what it produces. As a result of the propagation of disciplinary power, it at once becomes possible to
army barracks and monasteries to nearly every social institution.
extract time and labor, rather than commodities and wealth from individual bodies (2003a, 35). An important
step, Foucault points out, for the budding capitalist economies of the time. Thus, for Foucault, this new mechanism
of power was essentially one of the basic tools for the establishment of industrial capitalism and the corresponding
type of society that we now associate with capitalist economies (2003a, 36). In fact, it can be argued that the
pressing need to produce a labor force in the late seventeenth century sparked a refinement of existing disciplinary
techniquesand the invention of othersin order to shape the bodies of individuals into the exact type of laborers
benefits of disciplinary power, Foucault explained, lie in

its precise manipulation of the body so as to render bodies both useful and
docile (Foucault 16 2003c, 249). In short, [disciplinary power] dissociates power from the
body; on the one hand, it turns it into an aptitude, a capacity, which it seeks to
increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and
turns it into a relation of strict subjection (Foucault 1977, 138). All of this takes place,
Foucault maintains, through the meticulous regulation of the bodys movement and the time
that would be appreciated by capitalists. The
and space in which it moves. Specifically, there are three elements of disciplinary power that Foucault claims train
hierarchical observation, examination,

and normalizing judgment. According to Foucault, the possibility of constant observation is
crucial for disciplinary power to be effective. For capitalist factories to succeed, he maintained,
they need to be architecturally and managerially structured so as to facilitate constant observation.
Hierarchies must be established and workers must be monitored by those in positions above their
the bodies of individuals to become both useful and docile;
own, thus inducing good work habits without the threat of physical violence. Moreover, Foucault theorized that it
was not specifically constant observation that produced these results, for such observation of every worker would
be both inefficient and impossible. It was merely the possibility of being observed that shaped the behavior of
laborersthe mere possibility that someone, somewhere might be watching. According to Foucault, those that are
being observed need to be evaluated in an effective way. Thus a second element of disciplinary power is the
examination. Workers are periodically tested on their abilities and their habits, however, the results of such tests
The third element of disciplinary power is

normalizing judgmentthis element is linked to Foucaults earlier interest in the development of
statistics; the gathering of knowledge about individuals. Through compiling such
information, Foucault points out, it is possible to identify an average, a standard by
which to compare individual behavior. For Foucault, it is ultimately the desire to be
matter little without some sort of standard of comparison.
normal, that shapes individuals, their bodies and their minds. And thanks to a whole
system of surveillance, hierarchies, inspections, bookkeeping, and reportsall
technology that can be described as the disciplinary technology of labor , the power
to define what qualifies as normal is taken completely out of the hands of those to
which the standard is applied (Foucault 2003c, 242). It is no accident that this form of power appears to
be linked with another sense of the word discipline, meaning an academic field of study. In fact, for Foucault,
disciplinary power is inextricably bound to knowledge itself, particularly the fields of knowledge that make the
individual the object of studypsychiatry, criminology, sociology, psychology, and medicine. Together, the human
sciences create a regime of power that, according to Foucault, controls, describes, and monitors human behavior in
By setting out what is normal, the human sciences thus also intentionally
create the idea of abnormality or deviation. The more abnormal and excluded you are,
the more individual you become. Individuality is thus, for Foucault, not the desirable
individuality of Liberalismit is the mark of the mental patient, the convict, and
the over-comatose. It has nothing to do with taking control over one's own life and
everything to do with being controlled.
terms of norms.
Rt Cause Terror Impact

The security state bred form the war on terror has resulted in
a permanent state of exception in which massive amounts of
people are reduced to bare life

141)//roetlin
ABSTRACT. This article argues that the semiotics of the war on terrorism points at a significant
shift in United States discourses on security . This shift can best be described as a move from
defence to prevention or from danger to risk. Whereas the notion of defence is closely connected to the
state of war, this article claims that the war on terrorism instead institutionalises a
permanent state of exception. Building upon Agambens notion that the state of exception is the
non-localisable foundation of a political order, this article makes two claims. First, it argues that semiotic shifts
in United States security politics point at a general trend that , to some extent,
structures international American interventions. In a sense, the semiotic shifts in American
security discourse declare the United States as the sovereign of the global order:
they allow the United States to exempt itself from the (international) framework of law,
while demanding compliance by others. Second, it claims that this production of American
sovereignty is paralleled by reducing the life of (some) individuals to the bare life of homo
sacer (life that can be killed without punishment ). In the war on terrorism, the production of
bare life is mainly brought about by bureaucratic techniques of risk management
and surveillance, which reduce human life to biographic risk profiles.
Alternatives
Alt - Study Law

The alternative is to reject the 1AC. Voting negative is a
refusal of their practice of legalism in favor of a process of
study that unmasks legal violence
Snoek 12 [Snoek, A. (2012). PHD from Macquarie University. Strategies in Response to Law. In Agamben's
Joyful Kafka: Finding Freedom Beyond Subordination. New York: Bloomsbury.] Hebron ADN
According to Agamben,
study is an important strategy for living outside the law and making
it inoperative. In what sense can study be a strategy? Study has a long tradition in Judaism as a form of resistance. In 586
BC, Jerusalem was plundered by the Babylonian kin Nebuchadnezzar and the temple of the Jews destroyed. Many Jews died and the
rest were taken captive and brought to Babylonia. During the Babylonian exile, when they no longer had a temple and were
forbidden to practice their faith, the Jewish people focused on the study of their holy books. After the Persian king Cyrus defeated
Babylonia and issued a decree in 537 BC that the exiled Jews could return to their homelands and rebuild their holy sanctuaries,
40,000 Jews returned to rebuild the temple. But the religion of the Jews was already marked by exile and in 70 AD the temple was
again destroyed, this time by the Romans. The temple was not rebuilt and study has since then become the true temple of the Jews.
The Jewish religion is no longer focused on worship but on study. This gave the scholar a messianic significance (IP, 63). Talmud
means study; the original meaning of Torah is not law but instruction. Mishnan, the set of rabbinic laws, is derived from a root
study Agamben is aiming at does not have a predetermined

goal: getting a degree and a good position in society, or getting some valuable insight that can be used
to overthrow a political structure. Just as the strategy to close the door of the law was especially hard because
that has repetition as its basic meaning. The
the law does not prescribe anything and the task of the Messiah is paradoxical because there is no original structure of the law to
restore, so study also lacks a transcendent meaning it can aim at, a goal it can set. As far
as etymology is concerned, the word studium is closely related to a root that indicates a collision, a shock or influence. Study and
surprise are closely related in that sense. Whoever studies finds oneself shocked, amazed and is, in a certain sense, stupid (cf.
On the one hand, study is undergone and, on the other, undertaken . Here
Agamben sees a close affinity with Aristotles description of potentiality, which is passive on
the one hand and undergoing and active on the other an unstoppable drive to undertake something, to do
studium, stupefying).
something, to engage in action. Study is the place where undergoing and undertaking converge; it is a gesture (IP, 64). The rhythm
of studying is an alternation between amazement and clarity, discovery and loss, doing and undergoing. This combination of
undergoing and undertaking yields a kinds of passive activity, a radical passivity.
Something happens without seeming to happen. Agamben argues that study is pre-eminently unending. Study does not have an
appropriate end nor does it desire it. This gives the scholar a woeful air. At first glance, he students in Kafkas works seem to be of
little use or significance. Nevertheless, Benjamin contends that they have a major role to play: Among Kafkas creations, there is a
clan which reckons with the brevity of life in a peculiar way. The students who appear in the strangest places in Kafkas works are
the spokesmen for and leaders of this clan. Agamben is in complete agreement with this view: [T]he latest, most exemplary
embodiment of study in our culture is not the great philosopher nor the sainted doctor. It is rather the student, such as he appears in
It is precisely the apparent uselessness of the students and

the hopelessness of study that plays such an important role in the strategy they develop
with respect to power. Kafkas useless students without Schrift So the students operating in Kafkas stories have an
certain novels of Kafka or Walser. (IP, 65)
important characteristic: their studies seem to be useless. In Amerika, Karl sees a strange young man: He watched silently as the
man read in his book, turned the pages and occasionally checked something in another book that he always picked up something in
another book that he always picked up a lightning speed, often making entries in a notebook, is face always bent surprisingly low
over it. Could this man be a student? He did seem to be studying. Youre studying? asked Karl. Yes, yes, said the man, using the
few moments lost to his studies to rearrange his books. () And when will you be finished with your studies? asked Karl. Its slow
going, said the student. [Y]ou can be happy about having given up your studies. I myself have been studying for years, out of
pure single-mindedness. It has given me little satisfaction and even less chance of a decent future. Karl explains his problems with
Delamarche to the student. The student cannot really help him either; he does not offer Karl any insight in what he must do and
even advises him to remain with Delamarche absolutely. Karl wonders where studying had got him he had forgotten everything
again. The most extreme example of a student, in Agambens view, is Melvilles Bartleby, the scriber who stopped writing. According
to Benjamin, Kafkas students have also lost the Schrift. This can mean either that they have stopped writing or that they have lost
the Schrift in the sense of the Torah, the object of study. According to Scholem, the students have not lost the Schrift or the Torah,
but they can no longer decipher it (cited in HS, 51). Nonetheless, Benjamins genius is apparent, according to Agamben, precisely in
the fact that the students have lost the Schrift. Their commentaries on the Schrift, on the Law, are notes in the margin of a blank
page. Study does not lead to an a priori determined goal ; Kafka does not attack any promises to study
that traditionally attacked to the study of the Torah. According to Agamben, the messianic tension of study is turned around here. Or
better: it has gone beyond itself. Its gesture is that of a power that does not precede but follows its action, which it has left behind
forever, of a Talmud that has not only announced the reconstruction of the temple but has already forgotten it. At this point,
study shakes off the sadness that disfigured it and returns to its truest nature: not work,
but inspiration, the self-nourishment of the soul (IP, 65). Kafkas assistants are members of a congregation
who have lost their house of prayer. His students have forgotten how to write, have lost the Schrift. Now nothing stops them on their
the most enigmatic example of the

student in Kafkas work may be Alexander the Greats horse Bucephalus, who happens
[u]ntrammeled, happy journey. The Study of the horse Bucephalus But
to become[s] a lawyer to the surprise of his colleagues. We have a new lawyer, Dr. Bucephalus. In his outward
appearance there is little to recall the time when he was the warhorse of Alexander of Macedonia. I recently saw a quite simple
court usher with the knowing eye of a little racetrack regular marveling at the lawyer as the latter, lifting his thighs high, mounted
step by step with a stride that made the marble clang. In general the bar approves the admission of Bucephalus. Nowadays, as no
one can deny, there is no great Alexander. To be sure, many know how to commit murder and many feel that Macedonia is too
narrow but no one, no one, can lead the way to India. Even in those days Indias gates were beyond reach, but their direction was
indicated by the royal sword. Today no one shows the way; many carry swords but only wave them in the air and the gaze that
tries to follow them grows confused. Perhaps, therefore, it is really best, as Bucephalus has done, to immerse oneself in law books.
Free, his flanks unburdened by the loins of the rider, by quiet lamplight, far from the tumult of Alexanders battle, he reads and turns
the pages of our old books. In his interpretation of this story, Werner Kraft concludes that law is set over against myth in the name
of justice: instead of taking part in the mythical (pre-law) struggle, Bucephalus devotes himself to law. Benjamin sees this as a
serious misunderstanding of Kafkas story. Indeed, the goal is to unmask mythical-juridical violence and human beings, like the horse
this new
lawyer, what is new for the legal profession, is that he does not practice law but only studies it, reading
in tranquil lamplight. Bucephalus is free: his flanks are no longer squeezed by Alexander[s]
the Greats thighs and he is no longer carrying the latter on his back. The door to justice
is not to employ law but to make it inoperative not by practicing law (which would be a
repetition of the mythical forces, given that law is in force without significance ), but by
Bucephalus, must tame the mythical forces at whatever cost (SE, 63). But, according to Benjamin, what is new about
doing nothing more than studying it. The law which is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice. Bucephalus strategy
against law is thus study. Agamben remarks that it is decisive that the law that is not practiced but only studied does not itself
The study of the law has no higher purpose that is why

the law has become inoperative. That which opens the passage to justice is not the
abolishment of the law but its deactivation and inactivity that is, another use of the law (SE, 63). This
is a law that is liberated from all discipline and all relation to sovereignty. Bucephalus depicts a figure of the
law that is possible after its link with violence and power has been deposed, a law that is no
longer in force and applied (SE, 63-64), just as the study of doorkeepers by the man from the country makes it
possible to remain living outside the law. Agmben then outlines the following picture of the future: One day humanity
will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore
them to their canonical use, but to free them from it for good. (SE, 64)
become justice but only the door to it.
The affirmative allows us to enter into a practice of studying

the law for more than just ends --- it is part of a slow
unraveling of normative legality that will create a better
vocabulary to discuss sovereign violence
Agamben, 2005 professor of philosophy at the College International de
Philosophie in Paris (Giorgio, The State of Exception, pg. 63)//roetlin
In the Kafka essay, the enigmatic image of a law that is studied but no longer practiced corresponds, as a sort of
There is, therefore,

still a possible figure of law after its nexus with violence and power has been
deposed, but it is a law that no longer has force or application, like the one in
which the new attorney, leafing through our old books, buries himself
in study, or like the one that Foucault may have had in mind when he spoke
of a new law that has been freed from all discipline and all relation to
remnant, to the unmasking of mythico-juridical violence effected by pure violence.
sovereignty. What can be the meaning of a law that survives its deposition in such a way? The difficulty
Benjamin faces here corresponds to a problem that can be formulated (and it was effectively formulated for the first
time in primitive Christianity and then later in the Marxian tradition) in these terms:
What becomes of the
law after its messianic fulfillment? (This is the controversy that opposes Paul to the Jews of his
time.) And what becomes of the law in a society without classes ? (This is precisely the
debate between Vyshinsky and Pashukanis.) These are the questions that Benjamin seeks to answer with his
Obvi- ously, it is not a question here of a transitional

phase that never achieves its end, nor of a process of infinite
deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no
longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the lawno
reading of the new attorney.
longer practiced, but studied is not justice, but only the gate that leads
to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its
deactivation and inactivity [inoperosit]that is, another use of the law. This is
precisely what the force-of-law (which keeps the law working [in opera] beyond its formal suspension) seeks to
Kafkas charactersand this is why they interest ushave to do with

this spectral figure of the law in the state of exception; they seek, each one
prevent.
following his or her own strategy, to study and deactivate it, to play
with it. One day humanity will play with law just as children play with
disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to
free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper
and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born
only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be
freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And
this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of
Benjamins posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which

the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or
made juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41).
Alt - Whatever Being

Vote negative to embrace whatever being. Whatever being
is life that has no essence that can be separated from it, no
capacity for the infusion of rights and yet no need for their
illusive promises of freedom. Whatever being dissolves the
bond that attaches the subject to sovereignty through
dissolving the very basis of identity.
Caldwell 2k4 (Anne - Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Louisville, Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity, Theory & Event, 7.2)
<Agamben's alternative is therefore radical. He does not contest particular

aspects of the tradition. He does not suggest we expand the range of rights
available to life. He does not call us to deconstruct a tradition whose power lies in
its indeterminate status.21 Instead, he suggests we take leave of the tradition
and all its terms. Whatever being is a life that defies the classifications of
the tradition, and its reduction of all forms of life to homo sacer . Whatever
being therefore has no common ground, no presuppositions, and no
particular attributes. It cannot be broken into discrete parts; it has no
essence to be separated from its attributes; and it has no common
substrate of existence defining its relation to others. Whatever being
cannot then be broken down into some common element of life to which
additive series of rights would then be attached. Whatever being retains all
its properties, without any of them constituting a different valuation of life (1993:
18.9). As a result, whatever being is "reclaimed from its having this or that property,
which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the
French, the Muslims) -- and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple
generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself." (0.11.2). Indifferent to any distinction between a ground and added determinations of its
essence, whatever being cannot be grasped by a power built upon the
separation of a common natural life, and its political specification .
Whatever being dissolves the material ground of the sovereign exception
and cancels its terms. This form of life is less post-metaphysical or antisovereign, than a-metaphysical and a-sovereign. Whatever is indifferent
not because its status does not matter, but because it has no particular
attribute which gives it more value than another whatever being . As
Agamben suggests, whatever being is akin to Heidegger's Dasein. Dasein, as
Heidegger describes it, is that life which always has its own being as its concern -regardless of the way any other power might determine its status. Whatever being,
in the manner of Dasein, takes the form of an "indissoluble cohesion in which it is
impossible to isolate something like a bare life. In the state of exception become the
rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into
existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold" (Agamben 1998:
153). We should pay attention to this comparison. For what Agamben suggests is
that whatever being is not any abstract, inaccessible life, perhaps
promised to us in the future. Whatever being, should we care to see it, is all
around us, wherever we reject the criteria sovereign power would use to
classify and value life. "In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for
identity -- even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot
tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community

without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without a
representable condition of belonging" (Agamben 1993:85.6). At every point
where we refuse the distinctions sovereignty and the state would demand of us, the
possibility of a non-state world, made up of whatever life, appears.>
Alternative: Embrace whatever being-The acceptance of being in whatever
form it comes, that belongs by its simple fact of existence. This can create
a community that is not grounded in the state.
Chang, September, 1993,(Heesok, Department of English Vassar College,
Postmodern Communities: The Politics of Oscillation,
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.993/review-3.993, Date accessed: July
28, 2013)
In order to rescue community from its nostalgic (and finally Christian) assumptions
we must, Nancy thinks, return to ontology (first philosophy). A serious reflection on
community requires we answer the call to rethink--at the most mundane
level--what it means to be-in-common. [43] For Nancy this call does not arise from a utopian
or humanist appeal for a reorganization of social relations in which community is posited as the end result, the
The obscure exigency of community comes from

the existential position of our being-there, thrown into the world. This
being-there is not a punctual self-presence, a being-oneself. Community or
being-in-common is not a predicate of an essentially solitary entity.
Rather, being-there (%Dasein%) is none other than a being-with (%Mitsein%). The
very possibility of my being alone depends on my ontological potential to
share my existence.
work, of a subject labouring on itself.
Emphasizing Heidegger's differential and relational definition of Dasein in order to underline our constitutive beingin-common may be easy enough to follow. What is much more difficult to grasp is that for Nancy, our strange builtin sociality does not provide any groundwork for building a community in any identifiable sense. On the contrary,
the fact that we *are* (ontologically) only in relation to one another thwarts--or *resists* (a key word for Nancy)--in
advance any self- or communitarian identification with this or that identity trait (being red, being Italian, being
communist--to cite Agamben's examples). Our being-in-common is a limit-experience, a feeling for our finitude.
What we share at the end of ourselves, ecstatically (so to speak), is not our shared individuality, but our uncommon
*singularity*. [45] The experience of this sharing should not be understood as a selfless fusion into a group (both
Nancy and Agamben write continuously against the unsurpassed danger of our political modernity: fascism,
Nazism). Rather, our shared singularity takes the form of an *exposure*. We are exposed to the absence of any
Exposure to singularity: that means to be

scattered together, like strangers on a train, not quite face-to-face,
oscillating between the poles of communion and disaggregation.^14^ It is
this banal relation without relation that exposes our pre-identical
singularity, our being-in-common. [46] Coming now to Agamben, I believe his work
helps us to approach this renewed question of community from another angle.
Specifically, he gives positive content to what Nancy is inclined, I think, to describe negatively:
namely, the concept of singularity. [47] _The Coming Community_ opens like this: "The coming
being is whatever being. In the Scholastic enumeration of transcendentals (%quodlibet ens est unum,
verum, bonum seu perfectum%--whatever entity is one, true, good, or perfect), the
term that, remaining unthought in each, conditions the meaning of all the
others is the adjective %quodlibet%. The common translation of this term as 'whatever' in the sense of
substantial identity to which we could belong.
'it does not matter which, indifferently' is certainly correct, but in its form the Latin says exactly the opposite:
%Quodlibet ens% is not 'being, it does not matter which,' but rather 'being such that it always matters.' The Latin
always already contains, that is, a reference to the will (%libet%). Whatever being has an original relation to desire"
(1). [48] The basis of the coming community, the singular being, is whatever being--not in the sense of "I don't care
what you are," but rather, "I care for you *such as you are*." As *such* you are freed from belonging either to the
In Agamben's elaboration of
singularity, human identity is not mediated by its belonging to some set or
class (being old, being American, being gay). Nor does it consist in the
emptiness of the universal or the ineffability of the individual. [49]
simple negation of all belonging (here Agamben parts company with Bataille's notion of the
"negative community," the community of those who have no community). Rather, whatever names a
sort of radical generosity with respect to belonging. The singular being is
not the being who belongs only here or there, but nor is it the being who
belongs everywhere and nowhere (flipsides of the same empty generality). This other being
always matters to me not because I am drawn to this or that trait, nor because I identify him or her with a favoured
race, class, or gender. And certainly not because he or she belongs to a putatively universal set like humanity or
the human race. [50] The other always matters to me only when I am taken *with all of his/her traits, such as they
are*. This defining generosity of the singular means that %quodlibet ens% is not determined by this or that
The singularity of being

resides in its exposure to an unconditional belonging. [51] Such a
singularly exposed being wants to belong--which is to say, it belongs to
want, or, for lack of a less semantically burdened and empty word, to love:
"The singularity exposed as such is whatever you *want*, that is, lovable"
belonging, but by the condition of belonging itself. It belongs to belonging.
(2). [52] We must be careful here not to conflate Agamben's exposition of whatever being with a more familiar
discourse on love: "Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small,
being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal
love): The lover wants the loved one *with all of its predicates*, its being such as it is. The lover desires the *as*
only insofar as it is *such*--this is the lover's particular fetishism" (2). [53] But what could a thing with all of its
Agamben gives us the example of the human face. Every

face is singular. This does not mean a face individuates a pre-existing form
or universalizes individual features. The face as such is utterly indifferent
to what makes it different and yet similar. It is impossible to determine
from which sphere--the common or the proper--the face derives its
singular expressivity. [54] In this the face is not unlike handwriting in
which it is impossible to draw the line between what makes this signature
at the same time common and proper, legible and unique. We cannot say
for certain whether this hand and this face actualize a universal form, or
whether the universal form is engendered by these million different
scripts and faces. [55] Whatever being emerges, like handwriting, like the
face, on "a line of sparkling alternation" (20) between language and word,
form and expression, potentiality and act. "This is how we must read the
theory of those medieval philosophers," Agamben writes, "who held that the passage from
predicates look like?
potentiality to act, from common form to singularity, is not an event accomplished once and for all, but an infinite
series of modal oscillations" (19).^15^ The coming community is founded on the imperceptible oscillations of
Agamben
envisions the coming politics not as a hegemonic struggle between classes
for control of the State, but as an inexorable agon between whatever
singularity and state organization. What the State cannot digest is not the
political affirmations of identity (on the contrary), but the formation of a
community not grounded in any belonging except for the human cobelonging to whatever being. [58] "What was most striking about the demonstrations of the
whatever being. [56] But what, finally, might the *politics* of whatever belonging be? [57]
Chinese May," Agamben points out, "was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands" (85). [59]
Here Agamben surely also has in mind the singular example of May 68. I would even say _The Coming Community_
is (not unlike Vattimo's book) a belated response to the radical promise--let's say (using the wrong idiom perhaps),
the promise of human happiness--exposed in that event. [60] In these works by two important Italian thinkers,
philosophy becomes once again, perhaps, a kind of homesickness, a longing to belong. To a permanent
disorientation. To oscillation. To whatever.
Alt - Destituent Power

The alternative is to adopt a political praxis of destituent
power only by breaking completely from the law can we
expose the anarchy captured in the state of control and resist
co-option
Agamben 13 [Giorgio, a leading continental philosopher best known for his work on the concepts of the
state of exception, form-of-life and homo sacer, From the State of Control to a Praxis of Destituent Power,
http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituent-power-democracy/, omak]
But I would like to conclude or better to simply stop my lecture (in philosophy, like in art, no conclusion is
possible, you can only abandon your work) with something which, as far as I can see now, is perhaps the most
urgent political problem. If the state we have in front of us is the security state I described, we have to think anew
The security
paradigm implies that each form of dissent, each more or less violent attempt to overthrow the
order, becomes an opportunity to govern these actions into a profitable direction . This
is evident in the dialectics that tightly bind together terrorism and state in an
endless vicious spiral. Starting with French Revolution, the political tradition of modernity has conceived of
the traditional strategies of political conflicts. What shall we do, what strategy shall we follow?
radical changes in the form of a revolutionary process that acts as the pouvoir constituant, the constituent power,
I think that we have to abandon this paradigm and try to think

something as a puissance destituante, a purely destituent power, that cannot be
captured in the spiral of security. It is a destituent power of this sort that Benjamin has in mind in his
essay On the Critique of Violence, when he tries to define a pure violence which could break the
false dialectics of lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence, an example of which
of a new institutional order.
is Sorels proletarian general strike. On the breaking of this cycle, he writes at the end of the essay maintained
by mythic forms of law, on the destitution of law with all the forces on which it depends, finally therefore on the
While a constituent power destroys law

only to recreate it in a new form, destituent power insofar as it deposes once for
all the law can open a really new historical epoch . To think such a purely destituent power is
abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.
not an easy task. Benjamin wrote once that nothing is so anarchical as the bourgeois order. In the same sense,
true anarchy is the

anarchy of power. It is precisely because power constitutes itself through the
inclusion and the capture of anarchy and anomy that it is so difficult to have an
immediate access to these dimensions; it is so hard to think today of something as
a true anarchy or a true anomy. I think that a praxis which would succeed in
exposing clearly the anarchy and the anomy captured in the governmental security
technologies could act as a purely destituent power . A really new political dimension becomes
Pasolini in his last movie has one of the four Sal masters saying to their slaves:
possible only when we grasp and depose the anarchy and the anomy of power. But this is not only a theoretical
it means first of all the rediscovery of a form-of-life, the access to a new figure
of that political life whose memory the security state tries at any price to cancel.
task:
Our alternative is a display of inoperativity not a negative

cessation of labor but a display of the endless potentiality of
bodies that divorces us from the utilitarian expectations
Agamben 13 [Giorgio Agamben is an Italian continental philosopher best known for his work
investigating the concepts of the state of exception, What is a destituent power?
http://www.envplan.com/fulltext_temp/0/d3201tra.pdf, pg. 6, omak]
Inoperativity does not mean inertia, but names an operation that deactivates and renders
works (of economy, of religion, of language, etc) inoperative. It is a question, that is, of going back to the
problem that Aristotle fleetingly posed in the Nicomachean Ethics (1097b, 22 sqq), when, in the context of the
definition of the object of epistm politik, of political science, he wondered if, as for the flute player, the sculptor,
the carpenter, and every artisan there exists a proper work (ergon), there is also for man as such something like an
ergon or if he is not instead argos, without work, inoperative.
Ergon of man means in this context not
simply work, but that which defines energeia, the activity, the being-in-act proper
to man. The question concerning the work or absence of work of man therefore has
a decisive strategic importance, for on it depends not only the possibility of
assigning him a proper nature and essence, but also, as we have seen, that of
defining his happiness and his politics. The problem has a wider meaning, therefore, and involves the
very possibility of identifying energeia, the being-in-act of man as man, independently and beyond the concrete
social figures that he can assume. Aristotle quickly abandons the idea of an argia, of an essential inoperativity of
I have sought on the contrary, reprising an ancient tradition that appears in Averroes and in Dante, to
think man as the living being without work, which is to say, devoid of any
specific vocation: as a being of pure potentiality (potenza), that no identity and
man.
no work could exhaust. This essential inoperativity of man is not to be understood as the cessation of all activity,
but as an activity that consists in making human works and productions inoperative, opening them to a new
It is necessary to call into question the primacy that the leftist tradition
has attributed to production and labor and to ask whether an attempt to define the
truly human activity does not entail first of all a critique of these notions . The modern
possible use.
epoch, starting from Christianitywhose creator God defined himself from the origin in opposition to the deus
otiosus of the pagansis constitutively unable to think inoperativity except in the negative form of the suspension
of labor. Thus one of the ways in which inoperativity has been thought is the feast [la
festa], which, on the model of the Hebrew Shabbat, has been conceived essentially as a temporary suspension of
the feast is defined not only by what in it is not done, but

primarily by the fact that what is donewhich in itself is not unlike what one does every day
becomes undone, is rendered inoperative, liberated and suspended from its economy,
from the reasons and purposes that define it during the weekdays (and not doing, in this
productive activity, of melacha. But
sense, is only an extreme case of this suspension).(4) If one eats, it is not done for the sake of being fed; if one gets
dressed, it is not done for the sake of being covered up or taking shelter from the cold; if one wakes up, it is not
done for the sake of working; if one walks, it is not done for the sake of going someplace; if one speaks, it is not
done for the sake of communicating information; if one exchanges objects, it is not done for the sake of selling or
There is no feast that does not involve, in some measure, a destitutive

element, that does not begin, that is, first and foremost by rendering inoperative
the works of men. In the Sicilian feast of the dead described by Pitr, the dead (or an old woman named
buying.
Strina, from strena, the Latin name for the gifts exchanged during the festivities at the beginning of the year) steal
goods from tailors, merchants, and bakers to then bestow them on children (something similar to this happens in
In every
carnival feast, such as the Roman saturnalia, existing social relations are suspended
or inverted: not only do slaves command their masters, but sovereignty is placed in
the hands of a mock king (saturnalicius princeps) who takes the place of the
legitimate king. In this way the feast reveals itself to be above all a deactivation of
existing values and powers. There are no ancient feasts without dance, writes Lucian, but what is dance
every feast that involves gifts, like Halloween, in which the dead are impersonated by children).
other than the liberation of the body from its utilitarian movements, the exhibition of gestures in their pure
inoperativity? And what are maskswhich play a role in various ways in the feasts of many peoplesif not,
Only if it is considered in this perspective can the feast

furnish a paradigm for thinking inoperativity as a model of politics . An example will allow
essentially, a neutralization of the face?
us to clarify how one must understand this inoperative operation. What is a poem, in fact, if not an operation
taking place in language that consists in rendering inoperative, in deactivating its communicative and informative
function, in order to open it to a new possible use? What the poem accomplishes for the potentiality of speaking,
politics and philosophy must accomplish for the power of acting. Rendering inoperative the biological, economic,
and social operations, they show what the human body can do, opening it to a new possible use.
The alternative is to adopt a political praxis of destituent

power through destituent power we can destroy existing
institutions of biopower and envision radically different social
relationships
Bougsty-Marshall 14 [ Skye is an attorney based in San Francisco, California. At Accountability
Counsel, Skye works as a Pro Bono Attorney Advisor. Skye graduated summa cum laude from American University,
Washington College of Law. Following law school, Skye worked in Mumbai, India for the Human Rights Law Network
where he engaged in strategic human rights and environmental litigation before the High Court of Bombay to
enforce the rights of marginalized individuals and groups, The Coming Destituent Flood,
http://www.cnsjournal.org/the-coming-destituent-flood/, omak]
It is within this context of the prevailing security paradigm that we must evaluate and situate the mode of political struggle Flood
The modern conception of political conflict has been predominantly

understood in terms of constituent power, which is the creative energy or violence
that, ex nihilo, is capable of creating a (new) institutional ordera new constitution
and new juridical normswhereby social relations are organized (into constituted power). The peculiar and aporetic
character of constituent power is revealed when considering that if constituent power succeeds in creating
a new legal order, constituent power will, in following its essence, instantly threaten
the same constituted power it has just created . Thus, if constituent power with this excess is not to undo
Wall Street betokens.
the new legal order it has just constituted, as Raffaele Laudani writes, constituent power must then, at some indeterminate but
Benjamin, in his essay On the

identified and located the dialectic between constituent poweras lawmaking
violenceand constituted poweras law-preserving violence . The mutually constituting and
decisive threshold, begin to be neutralized and contained. It is in this dynamic that Walter
Critique of Violence,
reinforcing nature of security and resistance reflects this underlying dialectic between constituent power and constituted power. The
concept of destituent power, on the other hand, originates from the Colectivo Situaciones (poder destituyente) analysis of the
Destituent power exhibits a similar potency to

constituent power, but operates as a continual process of open-ended withdrawal
from or refusal of the juridical, institutional order. It functions completely outside the
lawextrainstitutionallyseeking to dismantle sovereign, constituted power altogether rather than to reform it or overthrow it and
then re-institute it in a different form. Destituent power is the energy immanent to law that tends
toward the latters dissipation and disordering in a relationship analogous to that
between entropy and matter. Destituent power undermines and erodes the
obedience that is fundamental to and presupposed by the constituted order for its
continued existence. However, destituent power is not a purely reactive or nihilistic force, but instead is
creativenot in the sense of producing new institutions to replace the old, but through its deactivation of
juridical norms it opens new horizons of possibilities for harmonious social and ecological
relationships far exceeding what is practicable under the current destructive political order. Constituent powers direct
uprisings in Argentina on December 19th and 20th, 2001.
confrontation with the statethrough terrorism or insurrectionsimply reinforces the security apparatus (provides more effects for it
disobedience can be conceived not as

direct clash with constituted power but instead as the withdrawal of consent to the
political order, as a direct negation of its legitimacy. Etienne de La Boetie recognized the potency of destituent power in
1548 in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude when he wrote: I do not ask that you place hands upon the
tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will
behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his
own weight and break into pieces? Benjamin also envisaged this immanent creative potential within destituent
to control) and invites greater levels of repression. As destituent power,
power as he attempted to identify a pure violence that could break the false dialectics of lawmaking violence and law-preserving
violence. Following this line of reasoning, he argues that [o]n the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythical forms of law, on
the suspension [destitution] of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition of
although a constituent power destroys law only

to re-institute it again in a new form, merely perpetuating the cycle; insofar as
destituent power dismantles and deposes the law once for all, it can function to
open onto the terrain of a new epoch characterized by radically new possibilities . In
state power, a new historical epoch is founded. Thus,
deposing the political order, as Colectivo Situaciones suggests, destituent power opens becomings, enabling for experimentation
with new practices and the development of new knowledges that will, in turn, themselves be de-instituted in the continual and openended process unfolding. Flood Wall Street arises within and partakes of the ferment of the most recent wave of global social
movementsOccupy, the Indignados, and the Arab Springthat significantly articulated a strategy of radical disobedience that
channeled a plurality of discontent into the unifying rejection and refusal of the interrelated crises wrought by capitalism through its
As we confront the current security paradigm of government, we

must understand the critical importance of the destituent power embraced by Flood Wall Street
neoliberal expression.
as its waters swell to inundate the centers of global capital to block the latters destruction of the planet and then recede in an
exodus withdrawing all support to the institutional order to open onto the wild of new possibilities. This motif expresses how Flood
Wall Street must carefully proceed to urgently bring the global machine of capital to an abrupt stop, while at the same time avoiding
recuperation in the endless dialectical spiral that binds together security and resistance through not aiming to overthrow the system
and take power by re-instituting a new one, but evacuating institutions, dissolving and dissipating them, emptying them of their
This radical disobedience, in the form of destituent power, has the

potential to escape from the dialectic of lawmaking and law-preserving violence the
support and power.
most salient expression of which is the prevailing reflexive interplay between

security and terrorism, with each inducing and strengthening the multiplication of
the other. Each day passes as we lay prostrate on the precipice watching the violent churning of the odious machine of capital.
As Hannah Arendt argued, we voluntarily give power and legitimacy to institutions to the extent that we obey the law-making
Accordingly, acting with continued submissive obedience to the global

capitalist order is to be complicit in its depravity and serves as an ongoing
legitimation and proffering of consent to the systems operation . In rushing torrents, Flood Wall
authority.
Street is determined to follow Mario Savios exhortation to throw our bodies on the gears and levers and all the apparatus of the
machine to wrench it to a halt. Given the relative lack of radical militancy characterizing the political landscape, we cannot only rely
on a gradual mass exodus as the climate change juggernaut continues until tipping points have been reached and exponential
accelerations in climatic disruptions proliferate and become irreversible. With Flood Wall Street we endeavor to bring down the
Colossus of capitalism and the illegitimate political institutionsthe state, corporations, financial institutionswhich comprise it and
act as its functional vehicles. At the same time, the flood announces the arrival of the beginning of a process of withdrawal, the
beginning of an open-ended process entailing a radical reorientation of our relationships with the biosphere through practices of
the concept of destitution

should be understood as a positive no, rather than a pure negation, that in
rejecting representation at once produces a self-changing affirmation that
engenders new practices and modes of subjectification, from which the no first
derives its force. Destituent power deactivates sovereignty, institutions, and
representation, thereby expanding the field of the thinkable as if manipulating an
aperture. This capacity of destituent power to expand the thinkable, the horizon of possibilities, finds consonance in David
food sovereignty, commoning, and radical participatory democratic practices. In this way,
Graebers analysis of the effects actualized through the neutralization of the constraints imposed by institutional bureaucracy in past
With the destitution of the apparatus that limits imaginaries, the

unequal structures of creativity will unravel and a proliferation of social, artistic, and
intellectual creativity and experimenting with new ways to see the world can
flourish. This destituent power is affinitive and not hegemonic in both of its moments. This opening act of mass disobedience
revolutionary moments.
must be situated within a diffuse, expansive project of disruption to deactivate capitalisms assault on the biosphere on its many
fronts; it belongs to the open set of a plurality of resistances based on microanalysis of concrete power operations within the
The traditional revolutionary strategy of

constituent power as a direct assault on the heart of the state and its
nerve centers does not reflect how power operatesit is diffuse,
decentralized, irreducibleand incites entanglement in the spiral of
security. This requires, as Laudani puts it, a response of a diffused
process of disintegration, a process that is open and attacks power in its
nodes, in appreciation of its dominant mode of expression and the reticular nature of its relations. As Colectivo Situaciones
network of intersecting lines of power relationships.
argue, the multiplicity of resistances cannot be thought in terms of a unity as a homogenous movement, and their transversality
must be appreciated as their echoes and resonances are felt across the rhizomatic network of experiments in practices of
disobedience and destituent power. Similarly, the exodus and flight from the system does not carry with it a hegemonic, universal
program for constructing new social and ecological relations, but will be a perpetual process of openness and experimentation with
alternatives developed through a continual (re)negotiation of common social values using participatory democratic practices.
Such a participatory social body is created and sustained through an unfolding

process of opening whose conditions are constantly undergoing a high degree of
direct and immanent transformation by the various practices, experimentations,
and people who are also transformed, to varying degrees, by its deployment.
Alt - Playing with the Law

Rather than attempting to eliminate use of the law, you should
adopt of a politics of playing with the law this means giving
the law a new use that transforms the ontology of the law from
sacred to that of a toy in the context of this debate round
that means using hypothetical implementation to deactivate
the law
Mills 8 (Catherine Mills is currently an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Bioethics in
the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University. I was previously employed at University of
Sydney, Australia, and have been Lecturer in Philosophy at University of New South Wales, and the
Australian National University. I completed a PhD in Philosophy at the Australian National University.
My main research interests lie in the areas of biopolitics and bioethics. Playing with Law: Agamben
and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice, The Agamben Effect p. 23-24)///CW
To return to my starting point more can now be said of the idea of playing with law as if it were a disused object,
It is now possible to better appreciate the perceived revolutionary

potential of play and of the toy. As, we have seen, the toy brings to light the temporality of history in
its pure differential and qualitative value. That is, in making present human temporality in itself, the pure
differential margin between the once and the no longer (IH, 72), the toy permits a
release from continuous and linear time and the realization of and return to history ,
understood as the tine homeland of humanity (IH, 104-5). In relation to law, we can now say that as a disused
object the law has lost its use value in the realm of the politico-economic and has
instead been relegated to the profane use that can be made of it by children . The
that is, a toy.
characterization of its being in force without significance appears to locate the law within the diachronic element of
the onceno longer, rather than in the synchrony of miniaturization. This is significant because it highlights the
law, which compensates for the disjuncture of past and present ,

by reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony. Play , however, transforms
synchrony into diachrony by breaking the tie between past and present . This production
ritualistic dimension of
Agamben argues,
of a differential margin in the dialectic of rite and play is the condition of history; it is that which allows for the now.
As a toy and only as a toy, as an object of play, the rite of law contributes to the revelation of the essential
Agamben
insists on the impossibility of the elimination of either diachronic or synchronic
signification: in all games and rites, the one remains a stumbling other, thereby preventing attainment of a
pure state of diachrony or synchrony. Thus, he writes, "at the end of the game," the toy the privileged
signifier of absolute diachronyturns around into its opposite and is presented as the
synchronic residue that the game can no longer eliminate (IH, 79). This implies playing
with law does not mean eliminating the law, for there is actually a sense in which the law is
rescued from its own obsolescence in play. Rather than being maintained solely in a state
of decay characterized by the simple lack of practico-economic value as
law, it is of a given a new use. But this does not take the form resacralizaion of
the law and restoration of transcendental meaning or force. Instead the new use of law takes
the form of its deactivation or deposition. Before saying more of this, it is worth
cautioning against the phrase "at the and of the game" used above, for in what sense would
historicity of the human. The ritualistic dimension of saw is important for another reason as well.
the game in which humanity plays with law have an end? To construe the game of playing with law as having an
end would in fact push Agambens conception of the messianic toward an identification with the eschatological, a
it would be
more accurate to insist on the endlessness of play . As with the acting of study with which it is
conflation that he explicitly resists in, The Time that Remains. Thus, within his own characterization,
Intimately related in the paragraph in question, play in interminable; it has no end beyond pleasure. As Agamben
writes in Idea of Prose, Not only can study have no rightful end, it does not even desire one.
The affirmative is the act of studying or playing with the law

we cannot simply erase the law but by studying while
discarding its relevance we can deactivate it and achieve
justice
Agamben 5 (Giorgio Univ. Verona Philosophy professor 2005 State of Exception p. 6364)///CW
It is from this perspective that we must read Benjamins statement in the letter to Scholem on August 11, 1934,
that the Scripture without its key is not Scripture, but life (Benjamin 1966, 618/453), as well the one found in the
essay on Kafka, according to which [t]he law which is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice
(Benjamin 1934, 437/815). The Scripture (the Torah) without its key is the cipher of the law in the state of
exception, which is in force but is not applied or is applied without being in force (and which Scholem, not at all
suspecting that he shares this thesis with Schmitt, believes is still law). According to Benjamin, this lawor, rather,
this force-of-law is no longer law but life, life as it is lived, in Kafkas novel, in the village at the foot of the hill
on which the castle is built (Benjamin 1966, 618/453). Kafkas most proper gesture consists not (as Scholem
believes) in having maintained a law that no longer has any meaning, but in having shown that it ceases to be law
the enigmatic image of a law that is studied

but no longer practiced corresponds, as a sort of remnant, to the unmasking of
mythico-juridical violence effected by pure violence. There is , therefore, still a possible
figure of law after its nexus with violence and power has been deposed, but it is a
law that no longer has force or application , like the one in which the new attorney,
leafing through our old books, buries himself in study, or like the one that Foucault may have
and blurs at all points with life. In the Kafka essay,
had in mind when he spoke of a new law that has been freed from all discipline and all relation to sovereignty.
What can be the meaning of a law that survives its deposition in such a way? The difficulty Benjamin faces here
corresponds to a problem that can be formulated (and it was effectively formulated for the first time in primitive
Christianity and then later in the Marxian tradition) in these terms: What becomes of the law after its messianic
fulfillment? (This is the controversy that opposes Paul to the Jews of his time.) And what becomes of the law in a
society without classes? (This is precisely the debate between Vyshinsky and Pashukanis.) These are the questions
that Benjamin seeks to answer with his reading of the new attorney. Obviously, it is not a question here of a
transitional phase that never achieves its end, nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the
the lawno longer

practiced, but studied is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens
a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity
[inoperosit]that is, another use of the law. This is precisely what the force-of-law (which keeps the law
law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that
working [in opera] beyond its formal suspension) seeks to prevent. Kafkas charactersand this is why they interest
ushave to do with this spectral figure of the law in the state of exception; they seek, each one following his or her
One day humanity will play with law just

as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical
use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more
proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only
after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This
liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that
allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamins posthumous fragments defines as a state of the
own strategy, to study and deactivate it, to play with it.
world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical (Benjamin
1992, 41).
Playing with the law solves

Kotsko 13 (Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago and
the translator of Giorgio Agambens Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath, The Highest
Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, and Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty. How to Read
Agamben 6/4/13 http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/how-to-read-agamben)///CW
Many critics of the War on Terror, including Judith Butler, have used Agambens terminology to mount a kind of
moral critique of American foreign policy. One might say, for instance, that the US government is wrong to create a
kind of exceptional law-free zone in Guantnamo Bay, because that results in turning the detainees into bare life
which is bad. And certainly it is; yet Agambens political work is a little too complex to fit easily into this kind of
the answer to the problem posed by sovereign power

cannot be to return to the normal conditions of the rule of law , because Western
political systems have always contained in their very structure the seeds that would
moralizing discourse. For Agamben,
grow into our universalized exception. It cant be a matter of refraining from reducing people to bare
life, because that is just what Western legal structures do. The extreme, destructive conjunction of sovereign
authority and bare life is not a catastrophe that we could have somehow avoided: for Agamben, it represents the
deepest and truest structure of the law. Now may be the time to return to that Kafka story about Alexander the
Greats horse Bucephalus, entitled The New Attorney. (The text is available here. I recommend you take a
moment to read it its very short, and quite interesting.) In this brief fragment, we learn that Bucephalus has
changed careers: he is no longer a warhorse, but a lawyer. What strikes Agamben about this story is that the steed
of the greatest sovereign conqueror in the ancient world has taken up the study of the law. For Agamben, this
provides an image of what it might look like not to go back to a previous, less
destructive form of law, but to get free of law altogether : One day humanity will play with law
just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it
for good. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to
arrive at that justice that one of Benjamins posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the
The law will not be

simply done away with, but it is used in a fundamentally different way. In place of
enforcement, we have study, and in place of solemn reverence, play. Agamben
believes that the new attorney is going the state of emergency one better: his activity not only
suspends the letter of the law, but, more importantly, suspends its force, its
dominating power. Agambens critical work always aims toward these kinds of strange, evocative
recommendations. Again and again, we find that the goal of tracking down the paradoxes and
contradictions in the law is not to fix it or provide cautionary tales of what to
avoid, but to push the paradox even further . Agamben often uses the theological term messianic
world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.
to describe his argumentative strategy, because messianic movements throughout history and here Agamben
would include certain forms of Christianity have often had an antagonistic relationship to the law (primarily, but
not solely, the Jewish law, or Torah). Accordingly, he frequently draws on messianic texts from the Jewish, Christian,
and Islamic traditions for inspiration in his attempt to find a way out of the destructive paradoxes of Western legal
thought.
Playing with the law rips the law of its force and application
and turns the ritual into a pure means that disrupts biopolitics
Morgan 7 (Benjamin Morgan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. He
has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on literature, science, and
aesthetics. Undoing Legal Violence: Walter Benjamin's and Giorgio Agamben's Aesthetics of Pure
Means March 2007 Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 34, No. 1 p. 46-64)///CW
PLAYING WITH THE LAW This philosophical effort to describe noninstrumental means is the basis for Agamben's
pure means can counteract a central

problem of the state of exception: its exacerbation of the 'nexus between violence and
law'.65 Benjamin, as we have seen, views law as inherently violent in both its creation and preservation in so far
political response to our 'global state of exception'. A theory of
as it is conceived as instrumental. Agamben argues that the state of exception extends this legal violence beyond
its own boundaries by making it possible for extra-legal actions to acquire legal status. Tracing the legal history of
the term 'force of law' (the title Derrida gave to an essay in which he analyses 'Critique of Violence'), Agamben
describes those actions that, though not legally authorized, nonetheless draw upon the violence that guarantees
law's dictates: 'decrees, provisions, and measures that are not formally laws nevertheless acquire their "force".'66
What is peculiar - and dangerous - about the state of exception is that its suspension of legal norms allows any
action to potentially acquire legal force.67 As such, in suspending the law, the state of exception does not also
suspend the violence that creates and maintains law, but rather makes it available for appropriation by
revolutionary groups, dictators, the police, and so forth: 'It is as if the suspension of law freed a force ... that both
the ruling power and its adversaries, the constituted power as well as the constituent power, seek to
appropriate.'68 Agamben terms this potential coincidence of every human action and legal force the inseparability
Given that suspending law only increases its violent activity, Agamben
proposes that 'deactivating' law, rather than erasing it, is the only way to undermine
its unleashed force.69 It is in this context that Agamben offers the apparently strange solution of
'play' with which I began: One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in
of law and life.
order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a
more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which
has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of
play.70 In proposing this playful relation
Agamben makes the move that Benjamin avoids: explicitly
describing what would remain after the violent destruction of normativity itself. 'Play'
names the unknowable end of 'divine violence' . Agamben himself may not be entirely comfortable
with this moment; in the final paragraph of State of Exception, he replaces this prediction with a question and a
possibility: only beginning from the space thus opened [that is, by law's deposition] will it be possible to pose the
question of a possible use of law after the deactivation of the device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life.71
Playfulness disappears completely in The Time That Remains, where Christian love instead designates our relation
to the fulfilled law: 'once he divides the law into a law of works and a law of faith ... and thus renders it inoperative
and unobservable ... Paul can then fulfil and recapitulate the law in the figure of love.'72 Despite Agamben's
this idea of play is instructive because of its resonance with

Agamben's own articulations of aesthetic experience. In an essay arguing that play derives from
ritual, Agamben claims that 'everything pertaining to play once pertained to the realm of
the sacred'.73 Play is the participation in a ritual whose meaning has been forgotten: it converts sacred
objects into mere toys. This is what gives it its (literally) revolutionary force: Agamben notes that play
apparent hesitation,
'overturns' the sacred 'to the point where it can plausibly be defined as "topsy-turvy sacred".'74 This mediation
Agamben would like play to perform on the law:

overturning it without destroying it. Play would do this by retaining law's form while
forgetting its meaning; Agamben writes that 'Playland is a country whose inhabitants are
busy celebrating rituals, and manipulating objects and sacred words, whose sense
and purpose they have, however forgotten .'75 This ritual with a forgotten purpose articulates a
means without end in so far as the end has become unknowable through its forgetting. This account also
between the sacred and the secular is the function that
amounts to a transposition of Benjamin's often-cited account of the relation between the sacred and the profane in
'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility': the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art
always has its basis in ritual. This ritualistic basis, however mediated it may be, is still recognizable as secularized
ritual in even the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.76 Agamben's toy is thus not opposed to, but the
counterpart of Benjamin's 'authentic' work of art. Furthermore, Agamben's claim that
law that has opened
itself to play 'no longer has force or application'77 depends upon the logic that, for Agamben,
characterizes Kantian aesthetics. This negative definition of the figure of law - as law minus force and application removes law's functionality and normativity while maintaining that something called law still exists. Defining 'pure
law' as what it is not repeats a rhetorical move for which Agamben criticizes Kant, namely that in the third critique,
'judgment identifies the determinations of beauty only in a purely negative fashion'78 and consequently 'our
appreciation of art begins necessarily with the forgetting of art'.79 Agamben thus glosses Kant's fourth definition of
the beautiful (that 'which is cognized without a concept as the object of a necessary satisfaction'80) to emphasize
its constitutive negativity: the beautiful, he says, is 'normality without a norm'.81 In State of Exception, it may not
be problematic that our appreciation of law would begin with the forgetting of law; indeed this forgetting may be
the difficult work that the book proposes. But it is not only the negative structure of the argument but also the kind
of negativity that is continuous between Agamben's analyses of aesthetic and legal judgement. In other words,
'normality without a norm', which paradoxically articulates the subtraction of normativity from the normal, is simply
another way of saying 'law without force or application'.82 To the degree that this is true, Kantian aesthetic
judgement hasn't disappeared in our experience of pure mediality; in fact, its name has barely changed. But
perhaps most interesting is the similarity between Agamben's description of the disused law and a much less
famous passage in Kant's third critique. In a footnote to his definition of the beautiful as 'an object's form of
purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose',83 Kant describes an
object much like Agamben's disused law. Anticipating a possible quarrel with his explication, Kant imagines
someone who would point out that there are all sorts of objects whose use we don't know, but which still aren't
considered beautiful: It might be adduced as a counterexample to this definition that there are things in which one
can see a purposive form without cognizing an end in them, e.g., the stone utensils often excavated from ancient
burial mounds, which are equipped with a hole, as if for a handle, which, although they clearly betray by their shape
a purposiveness the end of which one does not know, are nevertheless not declared to be beautiful on that
account.84 These stone utensils whose ends are unknown and unknowable give us an idea of what the law would
look like to the humanity that Agamben hopes will play with it. Where Agamben imagines a future in which the law
will still exist but will have lost its purpose, Kant describes a present in which we discover instrumental objects
whose purpose is unknown. These objects offer us yet another figure of 'means without end': things which 'betray
by their shape a purposiveness', but whose end has been erased by historical time. Kant argues that these objects
are not actually susceptible to aesthetic reflection on the grounds that the counter-argument assumes. But they are
significant because their obscured ends allow them to raise a question about their status as aesthetic objects. This
is the precise question raised by Agamben's figure of a law to be played with after its use value has been
superseded. To say, however, that Agamben's theory of a deactivated law returns to a theory of aesthetic
judgement is not to say that Agamben aestheticizes law - at least in the sense of this term that makes it an
accusation. In The Time That Remains, Agamben argues that a certain way of thinking about messianism runs the
risk of aestheticization: reducing 'ethics and religion to acting as if God, the kingdom, truth, and so on existed'
amounts to 'an aestheticization of the messianic in the form of the as if.s85 But I am not suggesting that the
infiltration of aesthetic experience into Agamben's messianic law amounts to a substitution of fictional for real
redemption. It is not some fictionality in our relation to the deposed law that renders our experience of it aesthetic
but, rather, its suspension of the relation between means and ends. As such, Agamben's argument against the
aestheticization of the messianic - that 'the messianic is the simultaneous abolition and realization of the as if does not address the aesthetic trace that remains in the messianic law as formulated in State of Exception. This
trace, I think, may testify more to the productive political possibilities of Kantian aesthetic judgement itself than to
some falsity of Agamben's solution. Even so, this still amounts to a reading of Agamben against Agamben's own
Agamben ends State of Exception by suggesting that our experience of the

law as a pure means is capable of reclaiming the political space that he believes has been
intention.
eclipsed: a space between [life and law] for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of 'politics'.... To a
word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself would correspond an
action as pure means, which shows only itself without any relation to an end.86 If it is as difficult to separate the
figure of pure means from aesthetic purposiveness as Benjamin's and Agamben's own writings suggest, then one
can easily see the beauty inherent in 'action as pure means, which shows only itself'.87 This leaves us with a
different answer to the question with which Agamben opens his book - 'What does it mean to act politically?'88 than Agamben gives. We might say that what it means to act politically is to act aesthetically. To enlist the figure of
pure means in a call for the return of an authentic politics is to partially ground the political on that moment in
aesthetic judgement when we appreciate something not because it is useful or because it fits with our conceptual
understanding of the world, but simply because we have a relation to it, independent of its purpose.
Framework
Ethics
The 1AC only perpetuates sovereign violence. We have an
ethical obligation to bear witness to those who are oppressed
by sovereign violence, by doing so through the wire.
Jenny Edkins, professor of international politics at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University
(in Wales) and Veronique Pin-Fat, senior lecturer in politics at Manchester
Universit, Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence,

Millennium - Journal of International Studies 20 05, PG 16)
The protest we began with, that of Abbas Amini in the UK, is not unique. Two months
later, Shahin Protofeh, a fellow Iranian, did the same in protest at being deported by
the British Home Office on refusal of his application for asylum.63 In Wales Atiquilla
Kousha gave up his similar form of protest after assurances that his case will be
dealt with fairly.64 And, in Scotland, three Kurdish refugees staged a hunger strike
and sewed their lips in response to the UK governments decision to deport them to
Iran.65 There have been cases outside the UK too: in February 2004 Mehdy Kavousi,
an asylum seeker from Iraq who had sewn his eyes and lips shut, took part in a
demonstration against mass deportations outside the Dutch parliament.66 Perhaps
the most high-profile case of refugees protesting by going on hunger strike and
sewing their lips occurred during January 2002 at the Woomera detention camp in
Australia.67Reports vary but between 60 and 100 refugees sewed their lips and
more than 200 others staged a hunger strike in protest against the slow processing
of protection visasand the mandatory imprisonment of illegal
immigrants.68Woomera was one of the three largest detention camps under the
jurisdiction of the Australian government run by a private operator, Australasian
Correctional Management.69 Since late 1989 Australia has, controversially, been
operating a policy of mandatory and nonreviewable detention of people arriving
without documentation since late 1989. The policy has enjoyed the bi-partisan
support of successive Labor and Liberal governments. On the one hand, detention is
regarded as necessary for maintaining immigration control and, on the other, it is
endorsed as a deterrent for those seeking to arrive in Australia in a similar
manner.70 Whilst it is not the aim of this article to critically discuss the immigration
policies of any particular government in detail, the cases of refugee protest in
Australia, especially, are salient in exploring whether today a life of power
is available.71 Certain, albeit limited, parallels can be drawn between detention
camps and the concentration camps, if only in the sense that both can be
identified as examples of modes of being where there are no power relations and
resistance is impossible: sites that mark a state of exception. For Agamben, the
camp is a paradigmatic example of a zone of indistinction which consists in the
materialisation of the state of exception and the creation of a space in
which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction .
. . a space in which normal order is defacto suspended and in which whether or not
atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of
the police who temporarily act as sovereign.72 Refugees fall outside what
might be called the normal law: their liberty may be suspende d for no other
reason than their having arrived within a territory which is not their own; they can
be held for what amounts to an indeterminate amount of time whilst their
applications are processed; and, depending on the state within which they are being
held, aspects of the United Nations Refugee Convention may be violated, including
access to a lawyer, review of cases, and the principle of non-refoulement.73 One
might say that the sovereign law is defined by its capacity to transgress itself with
respect to aliens.74 In short, refugees are produced in a state of exception as not
politically qualified lives but bare life . Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of
refugee protests involving hunger strikes and lip-sewing have been staged by
people held in immigration detention or reception centres, such as Woomera and
Curtin in Australia and Sangatte in France.75 Four people in Nauru, an off-shore
processing centre constructed as part of Australias Pacific Solution, also protested
in the same way. Twenty-three days into their hunger strike, they commented that
still no one felt regarding us, and no one consider regarding our problem....
Meanwhile as we are despair from DIMIA authority ... [w]e are human.76But,
equally importantly, such protests are not confined to those detained in this way.
The protest cases in the UK, for example, are of refugees waiting in the community
for their asylum applications to be processed. Asalient feature of the UK refugees
accounts of their reasons for protesting is that they also refer to being in a state
of exception the ways in which the law is suspended in their cases. Kousha,
Protofeh,Gravindi, Haydary and Haidari, for example, cite the violation of the
principle of non-refoulement: that those who fear persecution will not be returned
to the source of their persecution.77 In the case of Amini, his reasons were the
conditions and procedures of asylum more generally even though he was ultimately
successful in his asylum claim. Zones of indistinction therefore need not
necessarily be marked by razor wire. Rather, what marks them is the
production of life as bare life by sovereign power. The experiences that
emerge from these refugees own accounts of bare life include despair,
hopelessness, isolation, rightlessness, invisibility, and voicelessness. The
risk of speaking or speaking for is apparent here, and acts of charity and the tacit
demand that refugees be made to ask for fundamental protections are themselves
acts of intolerable violence.78 Speaking engages sovereign power inevitably
in its own language. It also risks reincorporation. However, it is possible
that some forms of verbal expression escape those constraints: poetry, for
example.79 One interesting example is the poem written by Mehmet Al
Assad, an asylum seeker incarcerated in Australia.80The poem begins with a
request, aimed directly at the reader: Will you please observe
through the wire/ I am sewing my feet together/ They have

walked about as far/ as they ever need to go. The second
stanza again calls on us to observe, and tells how the refugee is sewing his heart
together: It is now so full of the ashes of my days/ it will not
hold any more. The final verse reiterates: One last time/ please
observe/ I am sewing my lips together/ That which you are

denying us/ we should never have/ had to ask for. Prem
Kumar Rajaran points to the way in which Al Assads poembuilds up to a final
demand, not of a beseeching other begging to be let in as an act of charity, but a
powerful demand from the other who has a fundamental claim: that which you are
denying us we should never even have had to ask for. The subject is hostage to the
other, is fundamentally entwined with the other.81 It is a challenge to the
boundedness of territory and demonstrates the harsh violence of sovereign power
and the way in which it produces intolerable distinctions.It is interesting how the
poem calls upon us, its readers, to observe through the wire. 82We may,
indeed, be on the other side of the wire, but the poem does not let us remain
there. It asks us to look through the fence that divides us from the asylum seeker,
and to recognise our radical relationality. We are called upon to reflect on the
lines (the wire) of sovereign power, while at the same time being
summoned to move beyond them. Al Assad does not let us forget that we are
implicated in the distinctions that are made. We are denying entry to the asylum
seeker: it is with us, not with sovereign power, that the responsibility for hospitality
lies. Both citizen and refugee are their own bare life. Al Assad calls for this to
be acknowledged, and for sovereign power to be displaced. The protests we have
outlined above are examples of challenges that assume bare life and thus
transform bare life into form-of-life. The act of going on hunger strike,
sewing ones lips and, in some cases eyes and ears, viscerally reveals and
draws attention to the refugees own person as the bare life produced by
sovereign power: it is a re-enactment of sovereign powers production of
bare life on the body of the refugee.83 It illuminates the way in which
sovereign power, when it lays claim to the liberal values of fair process and
human rights, relies on violence and exclusion. When Amini said that he
sewed up his mouth to give others a voice that is, to demand that others
speak for him as one who cannot speak for himself he took on the very
bare life that sovereign power imposes on him in order to unmask the
relationship of violence in which he, and others, had been placed. The only
effective challenge to this relation of violence lies in the complete
embrace of bare life as a form-oflife, or, in Agambens words, a form of life that
is wholly exhausted inbare life and a bios that is only its own zoe-.84 Indeed we
might say that the refugees sewn muteness, deafness and blindness shows that
our bare life is, indeed, all we have left under sovereign power and illustrates the
way in which the possibility of differentiating between our biological body and our
political body between what is incommunicable and mute and what is
communicable and sayable was taken from us forever.85 This assumption of
bare life as a form-of-life in itself, is in effect, also a refusal. What is
happening is that sovereign powers drawing of lines between bare life
and politically qualified life is being refused and a politics of radical
relationality power relations put in its place. The taking on of ones bare
life offers the possibility of its transformation into form-of-life and the reintroduction
of a properly political power relation. Sovereign power may or may not choose to
engage at that level. It is more than likely that a relation of violence will be
reaffirmed, with such a protest being read not as a political action but in other ways.
In the case of protests in Australia, several routes were employed. For example, the
protest was seen as confirming the outsider status of the asylum seekers. The
Immigration Minister, Phillip Ruddock, said Lip sewing is a practice unknown in our
culture but weve seen it before amongst detainees and its something that offends
the sensitivities of Australians. They believe it will influence decisions. It cant and it
wont.86This statement refuses to engage with the protests, writing them as
culturally insensitive, alien and misguided. Ruddock makes it clear that such
protests cant and wont influence policy: the refugees are not politically qualified.
As a refusal to engage with the refugees it continues a relation of
violence. It sidesteps the issue however: as we have seen, the demand of the
asylum seeker is not an attempt to influence policy to change the rules about the
treatment of asylum seekers but rather to question the very grounds upon which
debates about policy are premised. A second response was one that countered the
challenge by accusing the refugees of violence themselves. This occurred in two
ways. First, they were accused of child abuse. Prime Minister John Howard
remarked:Do you really imagine that if an eight- or ten-year-old child begins to sew
his or her lips together that a responsible parent would do other than stop him or
her? Im not going to randomly brand people as child abusers. I dont think its
responsible of me to do that. But I do know this, that the children in the proper,
positive care of their parents dont sew their lips together, do they?87 Second, their
action was scripted as self-mutilation, or in other words, violence on their own
bodies: everything is mobilised in order to represent the violence that is inflicted
and extorted from the bodies of refugees as self-generated.88 The violence of
sovereign power is assigned to the asylum seeker in the classic gesture of denial
and transference.It seems, then, that the asylum system attempts to remove the
possibility of a properly political power relation. The refugee, fleeing persecution
elsewhere and claiming a political right to asylum, clearly appears on the face of it
as politically qualified. Once refugees enter the UK, Australia or the
Netherlands for example, they are produced in the zone of indistinction of
the camps as bare life, life that is not politically qualified. Even the
successful are no longer a political voice telling of oppression and mistreatment but
only lives to be saved. By their actions, the refugees we discuss demonstrate that
this is the case and in doing so attempt to claim back the possibility of speaking
politically. When they sew their mouths to give others a voice, that is, to demand
that others speak for them, or to insist that what they have been denied is
something they should not have had to ask for, they are assuming the very bare life
that sovereign power imposes on them in order to demonstrate the relationship of
violence in which they have been placed. Like the non-violent demonstrator who
puts his body on the line, this strategy is particularly effective in showing clearly
that sovereign power does not willingly enter into a power relation but
rather survives though relationships of violence. To what extent are actions of
the type we have elaborated likely to be effective? Are they anything more than
individual acts of protest that can have little impact on collective politics? In his
analysis of the multiple readings to which the protest of the Australian asylum
seekers gives rise, Joseph Pugliese suggests thatwhile the act of sewing ones lips
together is, in one sense, about exercising a degree of power, autonomy and control
within the most desperately disempowering of spaces, the prison, in another
seemingly contradictory sense, the act of sewing ones lips transcends the
individual subject.... This singular act of sewing the lips together is already
double: it conjoins the anguished body of the individual refugee to the larger corpus
of the nation in a complex relation of power and violence.89 The act of sewing
exposes the radical relationality of state and refugee. It demonstrates how each is
entangled within the other. Without sovereign power and its distinctions there would
be no refugee; without the refugee (the non-citizen) citizenship itself would have no
meaning. As we have seen, these acts are not carried out invisibly. They are a
demand addressed directly to those who observe through the wire, not a demand
made on the terms of sovereign power. In taking on their life as bare life, the
protestors call for a direct, unmediated, visceral response, life to life.
at: framework
a. their framework is responsible for an affective terror that
locks us into prisons of fear --- link turns political engagement
Debrix & Barder 12 (Franois Professor of Political Science at Virginia Technical
University, Director of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought
program, and Alexander Professor of Political Science at the American University
of Beirut, Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, violence, and horror in world politics,
Routledge, 2012, p. 66)
Among other things, what Dillon's thought on emergent living/being indicates is that it is
time to push Foucault's thought on the biopolitical production of fear much further,
perhaps beyond its biopolitical confines. For when we (and others) intimate the presence of a biopolitical
productivity of fear or terror today, what we are pointing to is the existence of a fear
of fear itself, or of a fear of being fearful. Docile and normalized bodies of
biopolitical and governmentality regimes are not just afraid of not being able to live
their normal life, as we hinted at above. They are also to be seen as emergent living forms
that are designed to fear being afraid of living a life that has fear/terror as its vital
impulse but also that are incapable of escaping such a terror. This is yet another
dimension of the horror that awaits emergent living things as they are fixed or
frozen by a fear of being afraid that, once again, allows them to be anticipatory and on
the qui vive, but also prevents them from moving away from such a condition (here, we
can recall Cavarero's useful distinction between terror and its capacity to put bodies in motion and horror and its paralyzing effects,
As we saw with the swine flu case, emergent humans

fear being afraid not so much of the spreading disease and its social and
physiological effects. Rather, they fear the terror that the disease (or any other danger)
comes to represent. But this fear of the terror itself is unavoidable and, in a way,
desirable or required for emergent life. By treating the pandemic (or the weather
catastrophe, or the terrorist attack, or the nuclear scare, and so on) no longer as a possible
natural or man-made disaster but as terror itself, a terror that, as Cavarero has argued,
envelops one in fear but also opens up the door for horrific violence, 78 emergent
living things deprive themselves of any possible solution or any resistant
technology of living or being human that, perhaps, could tackle the problem that is said
to be at the source of the terror (the so-called danger, although one should wonder whether such a danger
as we mentioned in the Introduction).
matters at all as any encounter or circumstance in the life of emergent beings appears to be amenable to being the next terror). 79
Instead, the only way for emergent living things to deal with the impending doom is
to fear more and more, that is to say, to produce more and more terror situations that will
end up proliferating even more self-monitoring, self-carceralizing, and selfeffacing techniques and dispositifs that, in turn, will confirm that they indeed had
good reasons to be fearful in the first place. For today's emergent humanity, there is indeed
nothing to fear but fear itself.
b. the logic of speed bypasses their deliberation standard and

internal link turns solvency
Glezos 9 (Simon Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of
Victoria, Introduction: Fear of a fast planet, in The Politics of Speed: Capitalism,
the State and War in an Accelerating World, p. 1-4)
This project started in despair and ended in hope; despair over the acceleration of the world and hope in the possibilities that speed
can bring. I would be lying if I said that this sense of fear and anxiety wasnt in some way influenced by my move to the United
States from Canada in mid-2002. Arriving in a country still reeling from the September 11th attacks, I was overwhelmed by the
The war in Afghanistan not even over, the

Bush administration had already started the push to invade Iraq, justifying the rush to
action by the imminent threat they claimed Saddam Hussein posed. We were told that
action had to be taken immediately, that we could not wait to allow inspectors to
determine if the threat was, in fact, real. We were told that we could not afford to wait
and allow the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Implicit in this
quote, and countless others like it, was an exposition of the new temporal order of the political
world: in this accelerated world, the pace with which new threats can materialize leaves no
time for hesitation. Decisions must be made quickly and efficiently by a centralized
and authoritative executive. Slow-moving processes of deliberation and debate (not to mention
investigation) are no longer viable. Indeed, they potentially threaten our survival. This claim, that the pace of
runaway pace of events (and in this, Im sure I was not alone).
events necessarily privileges the power of a unified executive and marginalizes the possibility of democratic deliberation is one of
the central charges leveled at speed, and one which I discuss in detail in chapter one. I, like many citizens of both America and the
world, was not convinced by the American Presidents claims of the imminent threat posed by Iraq to the free world, and joined the
hundreds of thousands in the streets of Washington, D.C. (and millions in cities all over the world) in protest. However, these
protests produced little to no effect, and in this I was again attuned to another worrisome aspect of speed. At the same time that
the pace of events in the world encourage the government to act in ways too fast for democratic deliberation, it also
allowed them to act so quickly as to escape democratic censure. At this point, five years
into the war, it feels as if those in power have gone from one reckless action to another ,
always moving too fast to be held accountable for their destruction, lies and
illegalities. A quote from an article in the New York Times Magazine a few years ago, profiling the character of the Bush
administration, seemed to get to the heart of this new freedom of those in political power. In it, reporter Ron Suskind interviews a
high-level aide within the Bush administrations. The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the
reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the
continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create

our own reality. And while you're studying that reality judiciously, as you will we'll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.
We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." In
world really works anymore," he
addition to informing us that, apparently, members of the Bush administration have been reading a lot of Baudrillard, this quote
political power now

oversight and accountability. And the news media
which is supposed to exercise this accountability must itself move so fast that , in moving from scandal to scandal,
those in power need only wait for the news cycle to move on . Thus, when a decision is
made, by the time we figure out what has happened, and discuss whether or not it is
a good thing, the decision makers have act[ed] again, creating other new realities.
The process of democratic deliberation and popular accountability becomes a never-ending game
of catch-up, freeing the powerful from real responsibility . This is because responsibility
and accountability are necessarily backward looking, while, in a fast paced world, we
are pressed to focus our eyes on the future (there is no time to play the blame game). I think this is what
gives insight into the new temporal order of politics. It tells us that the actions of those in positions of
move too fast for
traditional mechanisms of
is at the heart of Sheldon Wolins critique of speed which we will discuss in the next chapter.
c. The alternative is to tear down the system and replace it

with a new politics of interconnectedness and true democracy

Any viable attempt to challenge the biopolitical project that now shapes American
life and culture must do more than unearth the powerful antidemocratic forces that
now govern American economics, politics, education, media, and culture ; it must
also deepen possibilities of individual and collective struggles by fighting for the
rebuilding of civil society and the creation of a vast network of democratic public
spheres such as schools and the alternative media in order to develop new models of individual
and social agency that can expand and deepen the reality of democratic public life .
This is a call for a diverse "radical party," following Stanley Aronowitz's exhortation, a party that prioritizes
democracy as a global task, views hope as a precondition for political engagement ,
gives primacy to making the political more pedagogical, and understands the
importance of the totality of the struggle as it informs and articulates within and
across a wide range of sites and sectors of everyday lifedomestically and globally.
Democratically minded citizens and social movements must return to the crucial issue of how race, class, power,
and inequality in America contribute to the suffering and hardships experienced daily by the poor, people of color,
and working- and middle-class people. The fight for equality offers new challenges in the process of constructing a
Such a politics would

take seriously what it means to struggle pedagogically and politically over both
ideas and material relations of power as they affect diverse individuals and groups
at the level of daily life. Such struggles would combine a democratically energized
cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at offering workers a
living wage and all citizens a guaranteed standard of living, one that provides a
decent education, housing, and health care to all residents of the United States .
Biopolitics is not just about the reduction of selected elements of the population to
the necessities of bare life or worse; it is also potentially about enhancing life by
linking hope and a new vision to the struggle for reclaiming the social, providing a
language capable of translating individual issues into public considerations , and
recognizing that in the age of the new media the terrain of culture is one of the most important pedagogical
spheres through which to challenge the most basic precepts of the new
authoritarianism. The waste machine of modernity, as Bauman points out, must be challenged within a new
understanding of environmental justice, human rights, and democratic politics (2000, 15). Negative
globalization with its attachment to the mutually enforcing modalities of militarism
and racial segregation must be exposed and dismantled . And this demands new forms of
politics that directly addresses poverty, class domination, and a resurgent racism.
resistance that are both more global and differentiated. But if these struggles are going to emerge, especially in the
United States, then we need a politics and pedagogy of hope, one that takes seriously Hannah Arendt's call to use
the [End Page 189] public realm to throw light on the "dark times" that threaten to extinguish the very idea of
Against the tyranny of market fundamentalism, religious dogmatism,

unchecked militarism, and ideological claims to certainty, an emancipatory
biopolitics must enlist education as a crucial force in the struggle over democratic
identities, spaces, and ideals.
democracy.
Law Bad
The affirmatives use of the law and connection to the state
makes it impossible for us to kritik the state. Well equate the
state with goodness, and support it regardless of how
oppressive it is.
Hasnas 95
John, Hasnas Ph.D Philosophy Duke University Senior Research Fellow Georgetown University,
1995, The Myth of the Rule of Law, Wis. L. Rev. 199 Tina
This
is chiefly because the language necessary to express the idea clearly does not really
exist. Most people have been raised to identify law with the state. They cannot even
conceive of the idea of legal services apart from the government. The very notion of
a free market in legal services conjures up the image of anarchic gang warfare or
rule by organized crime. In our system, an advocate of free market law is treated
the same way Socrates was treated in Monosizea, and is confronted with the same
types of arguments. The primary reason for this is that the public has been politically indoctrinated to fail to
The problem with this suggestion is that most people are unable to understand what it could possibly mean.
recognize the distinction between order and law. Order is what people need if they are to live together in peace and
[*225] security. Law, on the other hand, is a particular method of producing order .
As it is presently
constituted, law is the production of order by requiring all members of society to
live under the same set of stategenerated rules; it is order produced by centralized
planning. Yet, from childhood, citizens are taught to invariably link the
words "law" and "order." Political discourse conditions them to hear and use the
terms as though they were synonymous and to express the desire for a safer, more
peaceful society as a desire for "law and order." The state nurtures this confusion
because it is the public's inability to distinguish order from law that generates its
fundamental support for the state. As long as the public identifies order with
law, it will believe that an orderly society is impossible without the law the
state provides. And as long as the public believes this, it will continue to
support the state almost without regard to how oppressive it may become .
The public's identification of order with law makes it impossible for the public to ask
for one without asking for the other. There is clearly a public demand for an orderly
society. One of human beings'most fundamental desires is for a peaceful existence
secure from violence. But because the public has been conditioned to express its
desire for order as one for law, all calls for a more orderly society are interpreted as
calls for more law. And since under our current political system, all law is supplied
by the state, all such calls are interpreted as calls for a more active and powerful
state. The identification of order with law eliminates from public consciousness the
very concept of the decentralized provision of order. With regard to legal services, it
renders the classical liberal idea of a market-generated, spontaneous order
incomprehensible.
Their political education to create particular skills for a

particular purpose reduce us to particular roles within the
political economy that denies ontological indeterminacy and
destroys our freedom to be
LEWIS 14 [Tyson E. Lewis is Associate professor of art education in the Department of art education and
art history, College of Visual Arts and Design, University of North Texas. THE POTENTIALITY OF STUDY: GIORGIO
AGAMBEN ON THE POLITICS OF EDUCATIONAL EXCEPTIONALITY, symploke Vol. 22, Nos. 1-2 (2014),
http://media.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/media/pq/classic/doc/3578313101/fmt/pi/rep/NONE?hl=&cit
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Potentiality of Study To begin, I will offer a brief overview of Agambens theory of potentiality. This initial
introduction will provide the necessary backdrop for understanding the ontology of study. From De Anima, Giorgio
Agamben argues that Aristotle enables us to think two kinds of potential: generic and effective. A generic
conceptualization of potentiality explains how a child is able to grow up to be a particular type of person with a
Through education, the child suffers an

alteration (a becoming other) through learning (Agamben 1999, 179) where the
passage from the act implies an exhaustion and destruction of potential (Agamben
2005, 136). It is precisely this model of potentiality that currently informs discourses of what
has been called the learning society (Masschelein and Simons 2008)a social apparatus
that emphasizes investment into potentiality in order to fully actualize
this potential in the form of performance outcomes and human capital
development. Here the ontology of the child is structured according to the
strict logic of not yet: not yet an adult, not yet a citizen, not yet a
productive member of society. Thus the child must suffer an alteration
through learning that destroys the not yet in order to fully actualize a
latent potentiality for adulthood, citizenship, or productivity (i.e., transform the
not yet into the necessity of the must be of the professional, employable adult). To fully actualize
potentiality is to destroy it, transforming a contingency into a necessity . In this schema,
potentiality becomes subordinate to actualityit is in some senses what makes the actual possible
particular role in society (a statesman for example).
but also what must be eliminated in order for the passage to the act to be complete and for the child to rightfully
take his or her place within allotted order of things (either in relation to the economic, the political, or the social).
To fulfill potentiality is to destroy it in the name of efficiency and effectiveness,

commanding and controlling the possibilities offered by potentiality . The
contingencies of potentiality are what must be sacrificed in order for the
child to learn x skills for x purposes predetermined in advance by the
social norms, traditions, and values which inform educational practices .
The result is a notion of the human as capable of only a select few
behaviors, skills, and actions easily assignable to a specific function within
the overall division of labor. In other words, the logic of education as
socialization is anchored in an ontology of generic potentiality as a not
yet that must be made manifest in measurably determinate, socially
useful, and economically manageable skillsets. Education, in this sense, concerns
deadlinesor lines that end with the death of potentiality. Tests are therefore grave
markers not markers of what has passed out of actuality but rather of what has passed into actuality. Indeed,
potentiality in this framework is more or less reduced to a series of possibilities that can either
be actualized or not actualized. The logic in such cases operates through the function of the or which
separates and divides potentiality into a series of discrete, functionally oriented, and exclusive possibilities (you
will either go to vocational school or college). 278 Opposed to the reductive notion of generic potentiality
underlying learning, Agamben argues that there is a second notion of potentiality in Aristotles work that can be
referred to as effective potentiality in that it represents a conservation of potential in the act and something like
the giving of potentiality to itself (2005, 136). This is the type of potentiality that interests Agamben the most.
Those who have knowledge are in potential, meaning that they equally have the capability to bring knowledge into
actuality and not bring knowledge into actuality. Agamben then gives the example of an architect who is in
potential insofar as he has the potential to not-build, the poet the potential to not-write poems (1999, 179). By
conserving itself, potential remains impotential (impotenza). Im-potentiality (which indicates the symbiotic relation
between potential and impotential) is not simply impotence, but is an active capability for not-doing or not-being.
Agamben summarizes: im-potentiality is the capability of the act in not realizing it (1998, 45) and thus permits
human beings to accumulate and freely master their own capacities, to transform them into faculties (2011b, 44).
Rather than a stumbling block that must be continually denied, repressed, or overcome, Joanne Faulkner argues
that Agambens theory of im-potential refers not simply to incapacity but rather to a being-able that abstains from
doing (2010, 205) that permits a new relation to ones own impotency. Rather than a simple lack or defi cit, impotentiality is a privation in the sense that im-potentiality means one has potential but prefers not to actualize it in
any specifi c form. Thus, all theories of potentiality must also and equally be theories of the impotential, for it is impotential that enables freedom to fl ourishnot the freedom of I will as a power of self-production according to
economic imperatives or socially predetermined norms so much as an ontological openness to new possibilities. In
fact, it is the giving of potentiality to itself that is the experience of freedom. Agamben writes, Here it is possible to
see how the root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be free is, in the sense we have seen, to
be capable of ones own impotentiality (1999, 183). What makes us human, according to Agamben, is precisely
the capability to not be, to remain im-potential. It is this paradoxical existence that opens history to contingency
to the potential to act otherwise or to be otherwise. Evil in this sense is derivative of a fl ight from an indetermining
im-potentiality into the logic of pure or complete actualization for a predetermined end (transforming a contingency
into a necessity). It is a denial of the constitutive link between growth and impotence. Citing Agamben, Evil is only
our inadequate reaction when faced with this demonic element [our impotential], our fearful retreat from it in order
to exercisefounding ourselves in this fl ight some power of being (1993, 31-32). Thus to enable students to
experience their potential means that they must be given the chance to experience their impotence, their capability
Education as mere socialization through learning measures what someone can do

in order to fulfill a particular role within the economy , yet for Agamben, this
obsession with assessment and verification Tyson E. Lewis The Potentiality of Study symploke 279
of actualization in the learning society is itself a form of evil that destroys our
freedom to be rather than precisely because it denies our ontological
indeterminacy. His theory of im-potentiality enables us to think potentiality against the logic of
educational socialization, which reduces potentiality to a not yet that actualizes
itself in a must be. Indeed, impotentiality does not simply separate potentiality from impotentiality (thus
not to be.
sacrifi cing contingency for necessity, possibility for impossibility), rather it recognizes that the subject emerges
precisely in the gap that separates and binds together opposite forces in the atopic space existing between
desubjectifi cation (an unnamed subject position) and subjectifi cation (recognizable within the order of things and
the partitioning of the sensible). Instead of separating potentiality into a series of mutually exclusive possibilities (to
be or not to be), potentiality holds possibilities together, returning them to a more primordially indeterminate state
Agamben draws our attention to the centrality of

im-potentiality within politics, ontology, and literary theory , he only makes a passing gesture
toward the theme of education. Yet this does not mean that education is unimportant for Agamben. Indeed, we
could think of education as the unthought potentiality of his own thinking. The
(to be and not to be simultaneously). While
unthought briefly manifests itself in the aphorism On Study from the book The Idea of Prose. Briefl y summarized,
studying is an interminable and rhythmic activity that not only loses a sense of
its own end but, more importantly, does not even desire one (Agamben 1995, 64). The studier
seems suspended in a state of oscillation between sadness and inspiration, of
moving forward and withdrawing from certain aims, subjectification and
desubjectification. Studying emerges as a kind of impotential state of educational
being that interrupts any notion of educational growth or educational realization
of latent potentialities. Indeed, Agamben points out that studying and stupefying are closely connected.
Stupidity here is not simply a lack of knowledge but rather the experience of bewilderment in the face of the
If we think of education as
oriented towards the measurability of determinate, reliable skillsets, studying
suddenly appears to be a useless activity, devoid of quantifiable significance in
the life of the student. To use Heideggerian language, study suspends any one in-in-orderinterminable or indeterminate manifestation of im-potentiality as such.
to or for-the-purpose-of which orient Dasein toward practical coping. Studying is a

paradoxical state between education for subjectifi cation and for desubjectifi cation,
between possibility and impossibility, between contingency and necessity . To study is to
undergo a certain inoperativity where we are, to appropriate a phrase from Thomas Carl Walls insightful study of
Agamben, exposed to all its[thoughts] possibilities (all its predicates) and yet are undestined to any one or any
set of them (1999, 152). Without a destiny or destination,
the studier is a precarious, risky, and
indeterminate kind of life.
Policy Simulation is fake and neglects the actual process of

policy implementation
Claude, 88 Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of
Virginia (Inis, States and the Global System, 1988, pgs. 18-20)
view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of

sovereignty, which calls up the image of the monarch, presiding over his
kingdom. Sovereignty emphasizes the singularity of the state , its monopoly of
authority, its unity of command and its capacity to speak with one voice . Thus,
France wills, Iran demands, China intends, New Zealand promises and the Soviet Union insists. One
all too easily conjures up the picture of a single-minded and purposeful state that
decides exactly what it wants to achieve, adopts coherent policies intelligently adapted to its
objectives, knows what it is doing, does what it intends and always has its act together. This view of the
state is reinforced by political scientists emphasis upon the concept of policy and
upon the thesis that governments derive policy from calculations of national
interest. We thus take it for granted that states act internationally in accordance
with rationally conceived and consciously constructed schemes of action, and we implicitly
refuse to consider the possibility that alternatives to policy -directed behaviour may have
importancealternatives such as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist behaviour. Our rationalistic
assumption that states do what they have planned to do tends to inhibit the
discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or what they
have the opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what other states
are doing, or whatever the line of least resistance would seem to
suggest. Academic preoccupation with the making of policy is accompanied
by academic neglect of the execution of policy. We seem to assume that once the
state has calculated its interest and contrived a policy to further that interest, the carrying out of policy is
the virtually automatic result of the routine functioning of the bureaucratic mechanism
of the state. I am inclined to call this the Genesis theory of public administration,
taking as my text the passage: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light . I suspect that,
in the realm of government, policy execution rarely follows so promptly and inexorably
from policy statement. Alternatively, one may dub it the Pooh-Bah/Ko-Ko theory, honouring those denizens of
This
William S. Gilberts Japan who took the position that when the Mikado ordered that something e done it was as good as done and
In the real world, that which a state decides to do is

not as good as done; it may, in fact, never be done. And what states do, they may
never have decided to do. Governments are not automatic machines, grinding out decisions
and converting decisions into actions. They are agglomerations of human beings , like the rest of us
inclined to be fallible, lazy, forgetful, indecisive, resistant to discipline and authority, and likely to fail to
get the word or to heed it. As in other large organizations, left and right governmental hands are frequently ignorant
might as well be declared to have been done.
of each others activities, official spokesmen contradict each other, ministries work at cross purposes, and the creaking machinery of
government often gives the impression that no one is really in charge. I hope that no one will attribute my jaundiced view of
government merely to the fact that I am an Americanone, that is, whose personal experience is limited to a governmental system
that is notoriously complex, disjointed, erratic, cumbersome and unpredictable. The United States does not, I suspect, have the least
Here and there, now and

governments do, of course perform prodigious feats of organization and administration: an
effective government or the most bumbling and incompetent bureaucracy in all the world.
then,
More often, states have to

make do with governments that are not notably clear about their purposes or
coordinated and disciplined in their operations. This means that, in international relations, states are
extraordinary war effort, a flight to the moon, a successful hostage-rescue operation.
sometimes less dangerous, and sometimes less reliable, than one might think. Neither their threats nor their promises are to be
Above all, it means that we students of international politics

must be cautious in attributing purposefulness and responsibility to governments.
To say the that the United States was informed about an event is not to establish
that the president acted in the light of that knowledge; he may never have heard
about it. To say that a Soviet pilot shot down an airliner is not to prove that the Kremlin has adopted the policy of destroying all
taken with absolute seriousness.
intruders into Soviet airspace; one wants to know how and by whom the decision to fire was made. To observe that the
representative of Zimbabwe voted in favour of a particular resolution in the United Nations General Assembly is not necessarily to
discover the nature of Zimbabwes policy on the affected matter; Zimbabwe may have no policy on that matter, and it may be that
no one in the national capital has ever heard of the issue. We can hardly dispense with the convenient notion that Pakistan claims,
Cuba promises, and Italy insists, and we cannot well abandon the formal position that governments speak for and act on behalf of
it is essential that we bear constantly in mind the reality that

governments are never fully in charge and never achieve the unity, purposefulness
and discipline that theory attributes to themand that they sometimes claim.
their states, but
Framework alone is a reason to vote neg their approach sidesteps decision-making and kills deliberation only a new form
of debate can reclaim the political
Ian Beier MA in Communication Studies @ UNLV 2010 Cascading Simulation: A
Critical Perspective On Barack Obamas Foreign Policy During The 2008 Presidential
Election thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of
Arts in Communication Studies Department of Communication Studies Greenspun
College of Urban Affairs Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas August
2010,
SHOUT OUT TO DR. IAN BEIER
This universal frame helps determine how the audience comes to understand their campaigns platforms because voters find valueladen claims more persuasive than pragmatic considerations.45 This exclusionary function is an important component of political
it is easiest to influence the

opinion of others when they perceive that there are no viable alternatives.
rhetoric because it reveals one of the most important traits of persuasion. That is,
Rhetorical scholar Keith Ericksons piece Presidential Spectacles: Political Illusionism and the Rhetoric of Travel is a prime
example of presidential rhetoric as spectacle. For Erickson, travel spectacle should be analyzed differently because the presentation
is what grants the speech act rhetorical power, not the content of the speech itself. Robert Schmull suggests visually absorbing
images capture the publics imagination better than lengthy speeches, making it much more likely that the audience remembers
what they saw rather than what they heard.46 Here, the travel spectacle is the text or rhetorical artifact. In this sense, Erickson
suggests that form supersedes content, as the images of the presentation function as ideological forms of pictorial power that
possess the capacity to persuade, deceive, or otherwise influence spectators . . . to justify and maintain certain forms of collective
conduct.47 Understanding spectacle as primarily presentational rhetoric is quite significant to rhetorical scholarship on presidential
then the
words used in these speeches only retain rhetorical significance when they add to
the publics collective memory of the speech. Thus, presidential addresses, even when discussing particular
policies, are largely ceremonial in nature because reliance on images, as opposed to informed dialogue,
discourse, or debate enables administrations to side-step the public forum,
avoid interactive decision making, and to address spectators
epideictically.48 The speaker is merely attempting to align themselves with the
values of the audience rather than call them to action through active deliberation , as
travel spectacles merely gratify affectively; in general, they do not resolve issues because their
reassurances are but substitutes for achievement .49 The idea that travel merely glosses over
address and presidential campaigns. If speeches are only given to heighten the rhetorical power of the image,
controversy is particularly important in the context of presidential campaigns, as it further signifies the notion that campaign
orations are a hybrid of deliberative means and epideictic ends. Obviously, the idea that spectacle creates rhetorical opportunities
for manipulation pays homage to media criticism. However, Ericksons work is important because it demonstrates how presidential
scholarship reverses the presumptive agent-object relationship between the media and the president prevalent in Baudrillards
analysis. For Erickson, the president is the agent rather than the object of manipulation. Indeed, there is quite a bit of doubt among
rhetorical critics who question whether the media truly interrogates the content of its reports, as media pundits see travel
spectacles [as] not only newsworthy but functionally convenient, cost-effective visual attention- getters that simplify complex
the travel spectacle does the leg work of constructing the story
for the media. Here, the media coverage [of the travel spectacle] . . . fails to interpret or identify nascent signs of White
political information.50 In essence,
House manipulation51 because correspondents are rarely invested in the story enough to sit around Air Force One asking why
theyre writing these stories.52 Recent scholarship on the Bush administration demonstrates this claim, arguing that the passivity
of the media allows outright manipulation. As Kellner notes, in addition to cultivating right-wing media that broadcast their
messages of the day and intimidating the mainstream corporate media, the Bush administration has created fake media and bought
conservative commentators to push their policies.53 Examples include the administrations distribution of videos that are
presented as local broadcasting54 and the administrations planting of fake reporters who asked loaded questions at White House
Press Conferences.55 Limiting the text to include only the presentation of the speaker and their attempts to frame media coverage
ignores the fact that the media does not simply replicate the event. On its own, Ericksons method does not account for the dynamic
relationship between the public, the media, and the candidate during a presidential campaign because it presumes a static media
that merely regurgitates the entirety of the event as directed by the candidate. Taken to its logical extreme, this would mean that
every media account would represent every picture and a full transcript of the entire speech. However, there is no universalized
Newspapers and reporters have political preferences that, no matter how

hard they try, appear in the way that they report the news . In effect, the idea that
the public receives the entirety of the message is bizarrely incomplete because the only part
of the public that has a pure representation of the event are those taking the pictures and writing the stories. Not only is
this a dangerously myopic way to view travel spectacle in presidential speeches, but it
becomes far less applicable in the context of campaign rhetoric where there is an active
and ongoing discursive exchange between the public and the candidate. In presidential campaigns the
media conglomerate.56
candidates attention is on persuading the public to vote for them. In this discussion, the media acts as a mediator between the two
the medias inability to

interrogate its own messages, he suggests that it is up to the rhetorical critic to
reveal the inadequacies of travel spectacle whenever they emerge in order
to limit presidential abuses of power and sustain a constructive relationship
between the public and the president.57 While I do not find Ericksons demand that critics enact their research as
social actors particularly compelling, his comments are still insightful because they highlight readily observable elements of
parties and not the primary target of rhetorical influence. As a result of what Erickson sees as
travel spectacle that critics should be able to identify. Erickson suggests there are five core elements of the travel spectacle that are
worthy of interrogation, arguing that critics should examine how spectacles: favor visual over verbal eloquence, simplify complex
political issues, narratively interpret presidential agendas, synoptically reify presidential personae, and construct political realities. In
spectacle emerges from scholarship that sees the presidency as a rhetorically powerful
position that can control public opinion through defining political reality in terms of
common beliefs and values. These appeals are largely metaphorical in nature, where the persuasive value of
all, political
presidential speech is largely determined by the speakers ability to align their position within historical narratives that denote
leadership. This is particularly important in the context of presidential campaigns, as candidates utilize these deliberative arguments
as an ingratiation strategy based on potentialities that appeal to voter perceptions. Often times, this simulation of presidential
leadership acts as a substitution for the candidates actual experience because the visual enactment resonates within the mind of
the public. Within this interaction between the candidate and the public, the media acts as a passive transmitter of messages that
the candidate can manipulate in order to maximize their appeal. Thus, the sound-byte culture creates an rhetorical environment
where the candidates framing of the issue invites criticism and interpretation. The next section outlines a rhetorical hybrid between
media and political spectacle grounded in the idea that both have significant roles in creating meaning in contemporary political
culture.
Our approach is key to understanding the state of exception.

The aff is a blind acceptance of the law, but our Framework is
key to generating public knowledge about sovereign brutality.
Kamalnath 13. Anthea J. Kamalnath, JD from the University College London, the first Advocacy Chair for
the United States National Committee for United Nations Women, first Choate Rosemary Hall Fellow of Rhetoric,
tutor for the Los Angeles Public Librarys Adult Literacy Program, shares awards for her public speaking with former
President Bill Clinton, [this may be on a blog, but our author is so qualified] United States of Exception,
http://antheakamalnath.wordpress.com/tag/agamben/ Tina
The only explanation for the sheer lack of discourse, let alone intelligent discourse,
in relation to the topic of the Obama administrations gross expansion of executive
powers and its support of unconstitutional provisions of the National Defense
Authorization Act 2012 (NDAA) is that we are in a state of exception, characterized by
anomie at best and idiocy at worst. Cicero said, There can be war without tumult, but no tumult without war.
President Obama signed the NDAA into law Dec 2011. The NDAA is not a simple extension of the Patriot Act. The
NDAA allows for indefinite detention of any person suspected of terrorism or posing a threat to the executive, both
American citizen and foreign national, without probable cause and with zero promise of due process.
Although
the NDAA secures the end of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center, it allows the
executive to literally sign off on death warrants shoot-to kill lists of suspected
terrorists, some American, some under 18. In the 1920s, German legal theorist Carl Schmitt coined
the term state of exception, a moment in government when there is a suspesion of the entire existing judicial
order. Following the September 11th attacks, the subsequent Patriot Act of 2001 and Guantanamo Bay , Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben elaborated on this historical phenomenon with his books Homo Sacer and The
State of Exception. I read the latter in college and it changed the way I saw the world. For Agamben (and the
tradition that produced him Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida ),
a state of exception is
neither internal nor external to the juridicial order, and the problem of defining it
concerns a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not
exclude each other but rather blur with each other. It introduces a zone of anomie
into the law in order to make the effective regulation of the real possible. Agamben
argues that this state of exception was already codified in Roman law; the Roman iustitium, literally the
suspension of the law, was an archetypal state of exception. Iustititium gave the Roman Senate expansive
powers in the face of threats to the Republic. Iustitium was declared following the death of the sovereign, a legal
a
state of exception is the reversal of the human to the non-human, the fate of enemy
combatants captured and detained in Guantanamo Bay with no legal identity and
no legal rights. The National Defense Authorization Act is the final act of the state of exception: the no
manifestation of grief through suspension of the order: Durkheims anomie. Grief is arguably dehumanizing;
mans land of Guantanamao Bay has been done away with, only to be brought home. The NDAA FY 2012 allowed
the executive to kill an American citizen without due process, without charging him with a crime, and to hide behind
At any previous time in American history, a

summary execution by the executive without due process would have been
considered cold-blooded murder and an act of tyranny. Yet no one blinked an eye.
This indifference is not a normal condition for society; it is a pathological
psychological state, a social state of exception. I will never understand the vocal enthusiasm of
the shield of executive powers. And he did.
those who claim they are proud of our President, the NDAA undoes every decent thing President Obama has
The politcians will pontificate, the lawyers will legislate, but

the people should always pay attention.
achieved in office.
Their framework is an attempt to put our movement in a camp.

The sovereign despises our mobility and uncontrollability
Parker 12. Simon Parker, professor in the centre for Urban Research (CURB) at the University of York,
Between Between the Reservation and the Camp: Neoliberal Governmentalities of Exceptional Urban Space,
http://academia.edu/3750825/Between_the_Reservation_and_the_Camp_Neoliberal_Governmentalities_of_Exception
al_Urban_Space, Paper originally presented to the University of Manchester, Urban Rights GroupSeminar, 29 May
2012, Tina
it is important to understand why the state has

always been the enemy of people who move around. Nomads and
pastoralists...hunter gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants,
runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states, and to
this list one should certainly add enemy combatants affiliated to non-state terror
organisations, refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants . Efforts to
permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedenterization), Scott continues, seemed to be a
perennial state projectperennial in part because it so seldom succeeded (Scott
As James Scott argues in Seeing Like a State,
1998, 1). While this is true of certain counter-publics who needed to be contained because they could not be
expelled (for example indigenous peoples in the colonised territories of the New World), for those with weak or
a biopolitics of repulsion and expulsion has come to

structure the exceptional spatiality of an increasingly supra-national state security
apparatus (Graham et al. 2007). As Foucault reminds us, policed bodies have always been the
subject of physical separation and removal from the healthy body politica
process that gave rise to the physical, permanent institution of the prison, the clinic
repudiable claims to territorial residence
and the asylum (Foucault 1977, 2001). In these heterotopic spaces, the suspension of civic rights
gave rise to a disciplinary order in which the state enjoyed qualitative and
quantitative control over the abject which had as its end the intensification and
extension of bare life (Agamben, 1998) and where law and moral order, these most
essential and fundamental aspects of the civic community, are indefinitely
suspended (Parker 2010). The camp therefore represents a controlled space of the
social dead the deferment of whose physical death is merely a question of expediency or technicaladministrative exigency (Goldhagen 1996). But its manifestation and recombination extends
beyond annihilationist regimes of biopolitical extinction and 'ethnic
cleansing' into the banal spaces of the everyday urban world where the twin space
of controlled exceptionality and exclusion--'the reservation'--also features strongly within more
familiar landscapes of abjection.
We need analysis from the extremes to produce radical selfcritique of the American security state.
The Ends of Ends, Anthropological Quarterly Volume 85, Number 4, Fall 2012Tina
An anthropology of extremes requires a non-normative reading of culture and

history, an effort to push past consensus logics to interrogate what alternative
visions, projects, and futures are left unexplored at a given historical moment . The
rapidly evolving historical archive provides one opportunity for this kind of critique: our understanding of
the 20th century American security state is changing with each newly declassified
program and document, dramatically reshaping what we know about US policy,
military science, and threat assessments since World War II . The corona photographs are a
compelling illustration of the power of the evolving national security archive. As the enormous military
state apparatus that constitutes the core of the American political and economic
machine is grudgingly opened to new kinds of conceptual interrogation, Americans
should seize the opportunity to learn about their own commitments, political
processes, and security imaginaries. Indeed, the national security archive is one
place where we can formally consider how the 20th century balance of terror has
been remade in the 21st century as a war on terrorfollowing the affective
politics, technological fetishisms, and geopolitical ambitions that have come to
structure US security culture. The declassified cold War archive allows us to pursue an extreme
reading of US security culture, one committed to pushing past official policy logics
at moments of heightened emergency to consider how threat, historical
contingency, technological revolution, propaganda, and geopolitical ambition
combine in a specific moment of extreme risk. The first corona images, for example, constitute a
moment when administrators of the national security state had their own logics and fears negated in the form of
direct photographic evidence, opening a potential conceptual space for radical reassessment of their own
We might well
ask why the corona imagery (and any number of similar moments when existential threat has
objectively dissolved into mere projectionmost recently, the missing weapons of mass
destruction used to justify the Us invasion of Iraq in 2003) did not produce a radical selfcritique in the US.
ambitions, perceptions, and drives, powerfully revealed in black and white photos as fantasy.
Util Bad
Consequentialism fails, especially in the context of the
surveillance/terrorism dilemma
Moscoso 11. Leopoldo A. Moscoso is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Madrid,
Citizens, Aliens and Suspects in an Age of the War on Terror: The Question of Emergency Powers in Western PostDemocracies, ITALIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC LAW - VOL. 3 ISSUE 2/2011 Tina
the study of the new manifestations of political violence

requires, on the one hand, reconsidering the problem of the rationality of action . Observers
are well aware that suicide-bombers attempts are not tactic they therefore cannot be accounted
for in terms of the calculation of any utility function . The balance account of costs
and benefits for the martyr is estimated, so to speak, sub specie aeternitatis
hence the enormous difficulties experts on violence face to predict (not to say
prevent) this type of episodes. On the other hand, terrorist violence brings the observer back to the
normative problem concerning the explanation/justification of political action through its consequences. If some
political actions may find a warrant in their consequences, then the same principle
might be applied when the time comes for the validation of counter-terrorist
measures. Provided that its effects turned out to be as expected, would it be
legitimate to vindicate the war on terror exclusively on the grounds of its effects ?
The answer is clearly negative as soon as other considerations are introduced,
besides the governments responsibilities with the physical security of its citizens .
Even under the threat of terror, societies have responsibilities with the humanity of
the single activist, with the humanity of the activists organizations, and with the
humanity of their original communities. The use of beneficial effects/legitimate goals
as an alibi to warrant the choice for immoral or illegitimate means eliminates
whatever restrictions might remain for the party of violence to resort to the same
scheme.
Concerning the effects now,
Random shit
Heidegger 1nc
Struggles for rights and liberties only situate the individual
more deeply within the folds of sovereign powerThis allows
the sovereign to use bodies as a standing reserve and manage
them at will

<1.2. Karl Lowith was the first to define the fundamental character of totalitarian
states as a "politicization of life" and, at the same time, to note the curious
contiguity between democracy and totalitarianism: Since the emancipation of the
third estate, the formation of bourgeois democracy and its transformation into mass
industrial democracy, the neutralization of politically relevant differences and
postponement of a decision about them has developed to the point of turning into
its opposite: a total politicization [totale Politisierung] of everything, even of
seemingly neutral domains of life. Thus in Marxist Russia there emerged a workerstate that was "more intensively state-oriented than any absolute monarchy"; in
fascist Italy, a corporate state normatively regulating not only national work, but
also "after-work" [Dopolavoro] and all spiritual life; and, in National Socialist
Germany, a wholly integrated state, which, by means of racial laws and so forth,
politicizes even the life that had until then been private. (Der okkasionelle
Dezianismus, p. 33) The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian
states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden transformation (as Lowith,
here following in Schmitt's footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously
coming to light in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer
his (their) life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It is
almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were
double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals
in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a
tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order,
thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign
power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. "The `right' to life,"
writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, "to
one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the
oppressions or `alienation,' the `right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can
be, this 'right'-which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of
comprehending-was the political response to all these new procedures of power" (La
volonte, p. 191). The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads,
in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of
individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in
totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm
of sovereign decisions. And only because biological life and its needs had
become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the
otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century
parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and
with which this century's totalitarian states were able to be converted,
almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both cases,
these transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some
time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real
question to be decided was which form of organization would be best
suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once
their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political
distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and
totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and
enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling classes' unexpected
fall into the most extreme racism (as in the Serbian program of "ethnic cleansing")
and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here. Along
with the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a displacement and gradual
expansion beyond the limits of the decision on bare life, in the state of exception, in
which sovereignty consisted. If there is a line in every modern state marking the
point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can
turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border
dividing two clearly distinct zones. This line is now in motion and gradually
moving into areas other than that of political life, areas in which the
sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with
the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest.
In the pages that follow, we shall try to show that certain events that are
fundamental for the political history of modernity (such as the declaration
of rights), as well as others that seem instead to represent an incomprehensible
intrusion of biologico-scientific principles into the political order (such as National
Socialist eugenics and its elimination of "life that is unworthy of being lived," or the
contemporary debate on the normative determination of death criteria), acquire
their true sense only if they are brought back to the common biopolitica l
(or thanatopolitical) context to which they belong. From this perspective, the
camp-as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is
founded solely on the state of exception)-will appear as the hidden paradigm of
the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will
have to learn to recognize.> <120-123>
Biopolitics reduces the individual to a standing reserve and

makes war a permanent condition of society in which all
individuals are implicated. Once everything is rendered
replaceable there can be no end to destruction.
MITCHELL 2005, ANDREW J., Stanford University, HEIDEGGER AND
TERRORISM, Research in Phenomenology 35, 181-218>

<<<<see above for
highlighted card^
With everything available as standing-reserve , troops included, the exhaustion of
resources is no longer possible. Resources are precisely in themselves replaceable, to the
extent that, in being given over to replacement, even the idea of an in itself is already drained of reality ahead of
There are no longer any losses that cannot be replaced . In other words, there is no
All uncertainty is lost, since it is not recognized in the first place. Everything is
monitored and controlled. The whole battle is given over to a planning that is able
to incorporate everything it encounters, since it only ever encounters what is
already planable in essence, the standingreserve. Strategys demise is the ascendancy of planning. What this
means is that war can now go on interminably, subject to no other logic or obligation
than its own. Nothing can resist it. But without resistance, war must end. Peace can now go on interminably as
time.
longer any friction.
well, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. The logic in question for both war and peace is the logic of
replacement, the obligation for each is the obligation to consume. There is no law that would supervene or subtend
consumption; there is no order outside of it that could contain it. Clausewitzs ideal is realized in a manner that
collapses the very distinctions that gave it birth. War is no longer a duel; it recognizes no authority outside of
itself. The name for this new amalgam of war and peace is terrorism. Terrorism is Clausewitzs absolute war in the
War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their

oppositional identity in the age of value and the ersatz. Without concern for resources,
consumption continues untroubled, since war is a kind of consumption of beings
no different from peace: War no longer battles against a state of peace, rather it
newly establishes the essence of peace (GA 69: 180). The essence of peace so established is a
peace that defines itself in regards to war, which binds itself inseparably to war, and which functions equivalently
to war. In either case, it is simply a matter of resource consumption and replenishment . In
Clausewitzian terms, there is perhaps too much continuity or continuation between war
and peace, War has become a distortion of the consumption of beings which is
continued in peace (GA 7: 89/EP, 104). The peace that technology brings is nothing restful; instead it is the
peace of unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when there will be peace or when the
war will end. Such a question, Heidegger specifies, cannot be answered, not because the length of the war
mirror of technology.
cannot be foreseen, but because the question itself asks for something which no longer is, since already there is no
longer a war that would be able to come to a peace (GA 7: 89/EP, 104; tm). The basic oppositions of Clausewitzian
It also
includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Since such distinctions depend
upon a difference between war and peace , they too can no longer apply. Everyone is
now a civilian-soldier, or neither a civilian nor a soldiera worker, one might say, or otherwise
put, a target. With everyone involved in the same processes of consumption and delivery, everyone is already
warfare are undone at this point, an undoing that includes the distinction between ideal and real.
enlisted in advance. There are no longer any innocent victims or bystanders in this, and the same holds true of
terrorism. Terrorism is not the use of warfare against civilians (pace Carr), for the simple reason that there no longer
are any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for this reason we go wrong to even consider it war.
Terrorism is the only conflict available and the only conflict that is in essence available and applicable. It can have
Terrorism follows from the transformation in beings indicative of

the technological age. This transformation remains important at each point of a Heideggerian thinking of
everything as its target.
terrorism and is the ultimate consequence of the abolition of war and peace; beings have become uncommon.
The alternative is an examination of the selfby finding our

own identity we can begin to divorce ourselves from power
structures. Only the alt solvesliberation fails to free us and
simply reproduces those power structures
Foucault and
political society.lxiv Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination
that release a pre-existing identity from an oppressive external force. lxv Freedom
freedom.lxvi It is these practices of freedom which allows the subject to practice selfconstruction and in turn, resist and rework the dispositifs that constitute them.
to oppression and domination by dispositifs of control. lxvii As such it is likely to create
will reinforce those self-same dominating biopolitical dispositifs. lxviii More
him.lxix Instead, the practice of freedom is a limit-experience: The idea of a limitexperience that wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me ...
same.lxx Following this theme, we can read Foucault in What is Enlightenment? as
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. lxxi The politics of liberation is not enough
these games of power with as little domination as possible. lxxii This game of power is
provocation between the self and the dispositifs of power relations. lxxiii The key task
centuries.lxxiv The creation of new forms of subjectivity involves freedom as a
merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. lxxv The act of freedom
response to these creative acts. This is why Deleuze spoke of this kind of self-
relation as the folding of power relations back upon themselves. It is not possible
ship were a folding of the sea.lxxvi In acting on the individual, dispositifs produce an
inside as an interiorisation of the outside. lxxvii This folding allows a subject to
resists such dispositifs.lxxviii The individual has the potential to distance themselves
bring about a historical ontology of ourselves, lxxix such a questioning of current
chains.lxxx This view comes close to a Marxist view of false consciousness, and
ignores the agonistic element to this reading of Foucault. lxxxi Rather, following
Aurelia Armstrong, I draw upon comments suggesting that it is only under the
pressure of an event which makes our present identity and control problematic that
we are forced to exercise our freedom. lxxxii Foucault suggests the following: [F]or a
domain of action, a behaviour to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a
certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its
familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These
elements result from social, economic, or political processes their role is
instigation.lxxxiii These transgressions or errors of life, of action, and of existing, are
the transcendent experience of events which force a questioning of the current
dispositifs controlling the reality we inhabit. These errors allow the individual to
interiorize the outside, and practice freedom as a transgressive limit-experience,
agonistically questioning and forcing dispositifs to react to new subjectivities. These
events do not have to be epochal, or revolutionary. lxxxiv As Foucault states, different
processes can instigate this process the key is that it is the individual who
responds to such instigation and practices this freedom through their actions and
errors, causing the very conception of life to be changed through an experimental
mode of inquiry.lxxxv
Heidegger 1ncK Affs

The 1AC fails to solve their harms with only mere resistance--their one stop shop liberation only serves to reinvigorate
oppressive structures of identity politics- they start from the
identity of a group and not that of an individual which means
they will never be able to solve
Foucault and
political society.lxxxvi Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination
that release a pre-existing identity from an oppressive external force. lxxxvii Freedom
freedom.lxxxviii It is these practices of freedom which allows the subject to practice
self-construction and in turn, resist and rework the dispositifs that constitute them.
to oppression and domination by dispositifs of control. lxxxix As such it is likely to
create an attachment to an identity which is formed through that oppression, and
therefore will reinforce those self-same dominating biopolitical dispositifs. xc More
him.xci Instead, the practice of freedom is a limit-experience: The idea of a limitexperience that wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me ...
same.xcii Following this theme, we can read Foucault in What is Enlightenment? as
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. xciii The politics of liberation is not enough
these games of power with as little domination as possible. xciv This game of power is

provocation between the self and the dispositifs of power relations. xcv The key task
centuries.xcvi The creation of new forms of subjectivity involves freedom as a
merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. xcvii The act of freedom
response to these creative acts. This is why Deleuze spoke of this kind of selfrelation as the folding of power relations back upon themselves. It is not possible
ship were a folding of the sea.xcviii In acting on the individual, dispositifs produce
an inside as an interiorisation of the outside. xcix This folding allows a subject to
resists such dispositifs.c The individual has the potential to distance themselves
bring about a historical ontology of ourselves, ci such a questioning of current
chains.cii This view comes close to a Marxist view of false consciousness, and
ignores the agonistic element to this reading of Foucault. ciii Rather, following Aurelia
Armstrong, I draw upon comments suggesting that it is only under the pressure of
an event which makes our present identity and control problematic that we are
forced to exercise our freedom.civ Foucault suggests the following: [F]or a domain of
action, a behaviour to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number
of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have
provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These elements result from
social, economic, or political processes their role is instigation. cv These
transgressions or errors of life, of action, and of existing, are the transcendent
experience of events which force a questioning of the current dispositifs controlling
the reality we inhabit. These errors allow the individual to interiorize the outside,
and practice freedom as a transgressive limit-experience, agonistically questioning
and forcing dispositifs to react to new subjectivities. These events do not have to be
epochal, or revolutionary.cvi As Foucault states, different processes can instigate this
process the key is that it is the individual who responds to such instigation and
practices this freedom through their actions and errors, causing the very conception
of life to be changed through an experimental mode of inquiry. cvii
That project of liberal subject building is a nihilistic violent

enterprise that destroys value to life and causes endless
warfare
Evans and Reid 13
[Brad, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Bristole, and Julian, Dangerously exposed: the
life and death of the resilient subject, Resilience, 2013, Vol. 1 (2), pp. 83-98]
Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or
but instead adapt to their enabling
conditions. This renders them fully compliant to the logics of complexity with its
concomitant adaptive and emergent qualities. Resistance here is transformed from being a
political capacity aimed at the achievement of freedom from that which threatens
and endangers to a purely reactionary impulse aimed at increasing the
capacities of the subject to adapt to its dangers and simply reduce the degree to
which it suffers. This conflation of resistance with resilience is not incidental but indicative
of the nihilism of the underlying ontology of vulnerability at work in
contemporary policies concerned with climate change and other supposedly catastrophic processes.
What is nihilism, after all, if it is not a will to nothingness drawn from a willing
reactive enslavement to forces deemed to be beyond our control as one merely
lives out the catastrophic moment? It also alerts us to the fundamentally liberal nature of
such policies and framings of the phenomenon of climate change defined, as
liberalism has been since its origins, by a fundamental mistrust in the abilities of
the human subject to secure itself in the world.10 Liberalism, as we have both explored
extensively elsewhere, is a security project.11 From its outset, it has been concerned with
seeking answers to the problem of how to secure itself as a regime of governance
through the provision of security to the life of populations subject to it.12 It will, however, always
be an incomplete project because its biopolitical foundations are flawed; life is not
securable. It is a multiplicity of antagonisms and for some life to be made to
live, some other life has to be made to die.13 That is a fundamental law of life which is
biologically understood. This is the deep paradox that undercuts the entire liberal
project while inciting it to govern ever more and ever better, becoming more inclusive and more assiduous at
secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with
the provision of security to life, while learning how better to take life and make die that which falls outside and
Liberal regimes, in essence and from the outset, thrive on the

insecurities of life which their capacity to provide security to provides the source of
their legitimacy, becoming ever more adept at the taking of life which the provision
threatens the boundaries of its territories.
of security to life requires.14 It is no accident that the most advanced liberal

democracy in the world today, the United States of America, is also the most heavily armed
state in the world. And not just the most heavily armed state today, but also the most heavily armed in
human history. Liberal regimes do not and cannot accept the realities of this
paradox. Which is why, far from being exhausted, the liberal project remains and has to be, in order
for it to be true to its mission, distinctly transformative. Not only of the world in general and hence its
endless resorts to war and violence to weed out those unruly lives that are the
source of insecurity to the life that is the font of its security, but also, and yet
more fundamentally, of the human subject itself; for this is a paradox which plays out, not just territorially, socially
The
liberal subject is divided and has to be in order to fulfil its mission, critically astute at
discerning the distinctions within its own life between that which accords with the
demands made of it in order to accord with liberal ways of living and those which do not comply with
its biopolitical ambitions.15 Being divided means the liberal subject will always be
incomplete, needing work, critical, insecure and mistrustful of itself for the purpose of its own selfimprovement. The liberal subject is a project; one that renders life itself a project,
subject to an endless task of critique and self-becoming, from cradle to grave . Sadly,
or between individuals, but within the diffuse and ultimately unknowable domain of human subjectivity itself.
many still find the concept of life appealing and even utopian. We are taught to think that we ought to choose life
Liberalism
is the greatest of all nihilisms. In giving us over to
life, it gives us no ends to live for but the endless work on the self that
contemporarily permeate our ways of living devoid of any meaning as such.
over emptiness or negation, Rentons law.16 In fact, it is the source of the worlds greatest nihilisms.
too is and has always been a nihilism. Perhaps it
The alt is existential resistanceonly by affirming life from an

ontological standpoint can we reveal our true individuality
Joronen 13 (Mikko, dept of geography and faculty of mathematics and natural
sciences, genius, U of Turku,

http://www.mediafire.com/view/djj55v7gah3d9ms/Joronen.pdf>
As Giorgio Agamben has argued, by being self-consciously Heideggerian, Foucaults
understanding of the historical regimes of power is grounded on a more original
relation between the constituted (or actualised) forms of power and the constituting
power of potentiality. While the constituting power works as a condition of possibility
for the constituted modes of power to emerge, all historical actualisations of power
intrinsically depend on the suspension of the potentialities of constituting power, on
their concealment. 44 In this sense, constituting power has a similar ontological
structure with Aristotles notion of potentiality: it maintains itself without ever fully
passing into actuality, without being exhausted into actualisations. 45 It is not my
intention here to go into details of Agambens complex and nuanced argument in
Homo Sacer, but instead to emphasise, as Agambens re-reading of the distinction
between potentiality and actuality indicates, how the coalescence of state power
with neoliberal governmentality constitutes politics at the domain of ontology. The
constituting power does not merely refer to the ontological possibility for the
constituted modes of constituted power, but also to the fundamental possibility for
the political action as such. Accordingly, also the question of resistance needs to be
explored and confronted at this proper level of ontology: as a question of existential
resistance. In order to scrutinise the ontological implications Agambens distinction
has for the question of existential resistance, it is essential to pay attention to
what Agamben calls in Homo Sacer the life of possibility. It is life that opposes the
operations of constituted power: it constitutes an inex- haustible possibility, which
can be never entirely corralled into constituted forms of political power. The power
of potentiality in life, thus, denotes a power to constitute, a possibility to ground
new modes of life, to be otherwise. Governmentalities of neoliberal enframing
evidently close this possibility, or to use Rancires words in Disagreement, 46
follow the logic of the police, the logic of designating ontological positions and
divisions of power rather than opening them up for the power of potential life. The
ontological resistance, hence, does not only liberate life from the grasp of
ontological monopolisations, such as neoliberal enframing, but from all coded and
corralled forms of belonging, including the state. Agambens thinking evidently
resolves the question of politics by moving it from the sphere of actualised forms
of political power to the realm of ontology. Agambens ontological discussion
concerning the power of life can be thus subordinated to what Heidegger defines as
the fundamental condition of possibility for the constitution of all ontologies: the
appropriation of revealing from the abyssal source (Ab-Grund) of open being. 47
Supported by the fact that Agamben was heavily influenced by Heideggers
seminars he participated in during the 1960s, 48 the eclectic position of Agamben
with one foot in the realm of biopolitics, the politics over life, and the other in the
realm of ontology can be re-thought from an explicitly Heideggerian perspective.
Agamben, however, accuses Heidegger precisely of ignoring what he thinks is the
fundamental origin of all revealing: the pure fact of living things. 49 Heidegger
evidently goes through a great effort, at least in his early major contribution Being
and Time (1927), to separate his existential-ontological analysis of Dasein from the
analyses of life formulated, in particular, by the key representatives of the German
life-philosophy movement (Lebensphilosophie), Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg
Simmel. 50 For Heidegger, the fundamental flaw of the Lebensphilosophie was that
it never came to properly treat life in ontological terms, that is, as a mode of
being/revealing. Heideggers separation, however, remained quite ambiguous: it is
not clear whether Heidegger was able to truly recede his existential-ontological
analysis of being from the strains of life-philosophy, or whether Heideggers own
thinking would have evolved into its shape without the significant influence of lifephilosophy in the early phase of his thinking. 51 Moreover, the compulsive
distancing of life from being may, in the end, afford nothing by a cul-de-sac. First of
all, by locating the potential, even necessary, linkages between questions of life and
being, we may find more proper ways to grasp some of the crucial contemporary
forms of power and government, such as the biopolitical techniques, which have
taken life itself as the target of ontological politics. Second, in order to grasp the
ontological politics behind neoliberalism, and further, to enable alternatives that
have the potential to widen the scope of ontological imagination, we need to take
into account how constituted forms of life and power are framed through the
different ontological monopolisations of revealing.
A/T: PermReject Divisons of Life

Only a complete refusal to draw lines between forms of life can
escape the dilemma of sovereign power.
Edkins & Pin-Fat 04 (Jenny University of Wales Aberystwyth international
politics professor, Veronique University of Manchester IR lecturer, Sovereign Lives:
Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 13)
One potential form of resistance to sovereign power consists of a refusal

to draw any lines between zoe_and bios, inside and outside, human and
inhuman. As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power relation
in Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a
form of governance or technique of administration through relationships
of violence that reduce political subjects to mere bare or naked life. As
Michael Dillon puts it, "Sovereign power [is] a form of rule gone global [that] has
come to develop and deploy modes of destruction whose dissemination it finds
increasingly impossible to control because these have become integral to its
propagation and survival."
In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of resistance, then, we
are not asking for the elimination of power relations and, consequently, we are
not asking for the erasure of the possibility of a mode of political being that
is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks: quite the opposite.
Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to
draw any lines at all (and, indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign
power (as a form of violence) can be contested and a properly political power
relation can be reinstated.
We could call this escaping the logic of sovereign power. Our overall argument is
that we can escape sovereign power and reinstate a form of power relation
by contesting its assumption of the right to draw lines, that is, by contesting
the sovereign ban. Any other resistance always inevitably remains within
this relationship of violence. To move outside it (and return to a power relation),
we need not only contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also resist
the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands.
A/T: Perm - Top

The perm fails the belief that you can come to political
consensus or compromise fails to understand how deeply
entrenched the state is in the ideologies of the status quo
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University
Press, Deleuze and New Technology edited by Mark Poster
and David Savat, 2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb , mmv)
These developments in the control society signify, I would suggest, a more
fundamental transformation in contemporary politics. What passes for democracy in
developed capitalist countries today is nothing but a gaudy mediatised spectacle of
spin-doctoring and endless opinion polls - a banal reality show which masks the
almost total ideological convergence between the major parties and the lack of
genuine political alternatives. Modern politics is characterised by a kind of stifling
ideological consensus: the dominant political discourse today is that which
announces the eclipse of ideological conflicts between left and right, claiming to be
'post-ideological' and to be about solving society's problems in a rational, 'commonsense' way without the constraints of ideology. The idea of the social-democratic
'Third Way', which claims to seek a 'middle road' between socialism and capitalism,
and which purports to represent the 'radical centre' of political opinion, would be
paradigmatic of the 'post-ideological' consensus. Of course we should recognise that
this so-called era of 'post-ideological' consensus simply means that the ideology of
the neo-liberal market has become so entrenched, so sedimented, so accepted as
economic orthodoxy on both sides, that we no longer recognise it as ideology as
such. The 'post-ideological' consensus is simply a neo-liberal ideological consensus,
and the so called 'Third Way' was never really a third way at all, but simply a way of
disguising the formal Left's capitulation to neo-liberalism by providing it with some
flimsy social democratic window dressing (Mouffe 2000: 93).
So far from this new consensus style of politics being a sign of the maturity of
modern democratic politics, it is a sign of its degradation and imminent collapse. We
are dealing here with a new mutation of politics, in which the triumph of 'democratic
consensus' coincides with, and is symptomatic of, the complete eclipse of real
politics. Indeed, Ranciere has suggested that the very term 'consensus democracy'
is a contradiction - one can either have consensus or democracy - and has proposed
instead to call it postdemocracy (Ranciere 1999: 95). According to Ranciere, the
global triumph of democracy during the 1990s, which came with the collapse of the
Communist regimes, coincided with a kind of shrinking of the political space:
democracy has not only given up on the people - on the idea of popular sovereignty
- but this has also led, paradoxically, to an erosion of the power of even the formal
parliamentary mechanisms of representation. Power in modern postdemocracies
increasingly rests with unelected and unaccountable experts, technocrats and
committees.
Policy apparatus fails

Rosenzweig, 12 Copyright (c) 2012 I/S: A Journal of Law & Policy for the Information Society I/S: A
Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society Fall, 2012 I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information
Society 8 ISJLP 393 LENGTH: 7722 words NAME: Paul * BIO: * Principal, Red Branch Consulting PLLC; Carnegie Fellow
in National Security Journalism, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University (2011); Professorial Lecturer in
Law, George Washington University. The author served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department
of Homeland Security from 2005-09. Portions of this article will appear in the forthcoming book Cyberwarfare: How
Conflicts in Cyberspace are Challenging American and Changing the World Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012, Tina
If the question about cyberspace is: "What is our policy making apparatus
most likely to misunderstand or get wrong?" the answer, I fear, is quite a lot. Not
because policy makers in Washington are ill-meaning, or venal, or even unintelligent. But rather, I fear,
because they are confronting a new reality to which they have yet to adapt. The
sausage making process of policy development inside sovereign governments is
slow and encrusted with hierarchical restrictions. It lacks the pace and capacity to
keep up with the ever-changing environment of the Internet. Worse, policy makers
continue to think of the Internet as just another tool-sort of like a telephone, but
quicker. But the things that "everybody knows" are changing every day. Until we
come to grips with the ubiquity and rapidity of the Internet and the fundamental
way in which the Internet creates asymmetries that empower the individual to the
disadvantage of the nation-state, we won't really build good cyber policy. It's a daunting
IV. Conclusion
task-but no easier for putting off to the future.
Separating our actions from the political sphere are key to

stopping the exceptional construction of bare life that
authorizes genocide in the name of the sovereign.
Agamben 05. Giorgio Agamben is the professor of Aesthetics at the University of Verona and author of
ten previous books. Chicago University Press 2005 State of Exception Tina
If it is true that the articulation between life and law, between anomie and nomos, that is produced by the state of
exception is effective though fictional, one can still not conclude from this that somewhere either beyond or before
juridical apparatuses there is an immediate access to something whose fracture and impossible unification are
represented by these apparatuses. There are not first life as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of
nature, and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary ,
the very possibility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation
in the biopolitical machine. Bare life is a product of the machine and not
something that preexists it, just as law has no court in nature or in the divine mind. Life and law,
anomie and nomos, auctoritas and potestas, result from the fracture of something to which we
have no other access than through the fiction of their articulation and the patient
work that, by unmasking this fiction, separates what it had claimed to unite. But
disenchantment does not restore the enchanted thing to its original state: According to the principle that purity
To show law in
its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space
between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of
politics. Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated
by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power (that is, violence that makes
law), when it is not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with the law. The only
truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence
and law. And only beginning from the space thus opened will it be possible to pose
the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation of the device that, in
the state of exception, tied it to life. We will then have before us a pure law, in the sense in which
Benjamin speaks of a pure language and a pure violence. To a word that does not bind, that
neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an
action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end. And,
never lies at the origin, disenchantment gives it only the possibility of reaching a new condition.
between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that
the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception.
A/T: PermutationTop
Negotiating with sovereign power is a question of where to
draw lines between forms of life and a submission to the
source of sovereign power. Only a refusal to distinguish
between forms of life can evade biopolitics.
Edkins & Pin-Fat 04 (Jenny University of Wales Aberystwyth international
politics professor, Veronique University of Manchester IR lecturer, Sovereign Lives:

Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 18)
What this tells us is that to contest sovereign power we need something
different. In challenging sovereign power, we are not facing a power relation
but a relationship of violence, one that denies a political voice to the formof-life it has produced. Resistance such as would be possible from within a
power relation, and indeed as an inherent part of it, cannot take place. Other
forms of opposition must be found, forms that seek to reinstate a properly
political relationship by producing sovereign power as a form of power
relation. Two strategies of contestation were suggested: a refusal and an
acceptance. First, the refusal. The abstract drawing of lines is the way in
which sovereign power produces bare life. This drawing of lines must be
refused, wherever the lines are drawn. Negotiating the precise location of the
power is constituted. It insists instead on the politics of decisioning and particular
distinctions and demands that specifics of time, place, and circumstance be
attended to in each instance. Second, the acceptance. When life is produced
as bare life, it is not helpful for that life to demand its reinstatement as
politically qualified life. To do so would be to validate the very drawing of
lines upon which sovereignty depends and which produces life as bare life
in the first place. An alternative strategy is the acceptance or what we have
called the assumption of bare life. Through this strategy, the subject at one and
the same time both acknowledges its status as nothing but life and demands
recognition as such. It refuses the distinction between bare life and
politically qualified life and demands that all life as such is worthy of
recognition.
As is apparent, the two strategies are the same at heart. Both seek to
overturn the denial of politics that has taken place under biopolitics and
to reinstate properly political power relations, with their accompanying
freedoms and potentialities. We have discussed examples of what such contestation
of sovereign power might look like. Practices that contest sovereign power are
apparent in many places: whether in hunger strikes, grassroots communitas, or
street demonstrations, creative ways of provoking sovereign power and embroiling
it into a political or power relation have been and are being found.
We must not falter in our call for subjectivity, the permutation

is an attempt to negotiate the rights of the populace back into
the sovereigns control
Means without End: Notes on Politics; conference; Pg. 113; DOA: 7/16/15 || NDW)
violence and right, nature and language, from coming to light. We have to fix our
gaze, instead, precisely on what the statue of Justice (which, as Montesquieu reminds us, was to be
state of exception) was not supposed to see, namely, what nowadays is apparent to
everybody: that the state of exception is the rule, that naked life is immediately the
carrier of the sovereign nexus, and that, as such, it is today abandoned to a kind of
violence that is all the more effective for being anonymous and quotidian. If there is
today a social power [potenza], it must see its own impotence [impotenza] through to the
end, it must decline any will to either posit or preserve right, it must break
everywhere the nexus between violence and right, between the living and language
that constitutes sovereignty.
The affirmatives defense of sovereignty makes liberation

impossible their lesser evil logic culminates in absolute
evil.
Prozorov, 2009 - Professor of Political Science at the University of Helenski
(Sergie; The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of

Nature and the Political; Article;
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313215_index.html; DOA: 7/16/15 || NDW)
In order to understand this claim let us consider Agambens criticism of Schmitts
use of the notion of the katechon in his defense of state sovereignty. In Schmitts
political theology, sovereign power is analogous to the figure of the katechon in the
Catholic tradition, the force that delays the advent of the Antichrist, which in turn would eventually lead to the messianic
redemption (Schmitt 2003, 59-60). It is as this delaying force, as opposed to a direct agent of the Good, that the state must be
Agambens interpretation of the famous passage in St. Pauls

Second Letter to the Thessalonians on the katechon asserts that rather than
grounding something like a Christian doctrine of State power (Agamben 2005b, 109), this
passage harbours no positive valuation of the katechon whatsoever. Instead , the
katechon (every form of constituted power) merely conceals the absence of law that
already characterizes the messianic present and thus does nothing other than defer
or hold back the moment of the messianic suspension of the law (see ibid., 95-107).
Instead, in the Pauline messianic logic the semblance of the law, maintained by the katechon, must be stripped
off and all power revealed as the absolute outlaw (Agamben 2005b, 111). As Agamben (2005b,
110) claims, every theory of the State, including Hobbess which thinks of it as a
power to block or delay catastrophe can be taken as a secularization of this
[traditional] interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2. Indeed, in the Schmittian reading, which characterizes most contemporary
appreciated. In contrast,
political theories, including those extremely hostile to Schmitt, the secularized katechon is legitimized as the only force that wards
off the Antichrist [the anomie of the state of nature] and thus the end of the social order as we know it. On the contrary,
Agambens reading of Paul posits the katechon as an obstacle to the advent of the
messianic kingdom and thus accuses the proponents of the Christian doctrine of
state power of a thinly disguised nihilism . [T]he katechon is the force the Roman Empire as
well as every constituted authority that clashes with and hides katargesis, the
state of tendential lawlessness that characterizes the messianic, and in this sense
delays unveiling the mystery of lawlessness . (Agamben 2005b, 111) It is as if the erstwhile champions of
a Christian doctrine of power have forgotten their creed and embraced the imperfection of humanity as all there is. Their
valorization of the katechon obscures a simple question: if we longed for parousia, should we not be impatient with the interference
This, as Agamben shows, is precisely Pauls attitude, which is

diametrically opposed to the attitude of the philosophers of the political, for whom
the katechon has assumed an autonomous value : What if, after two thousand years and untold
of the katechon? (Rasch 2007, 106)
promises, we have lost our faith in the parousia and grown weary of waiting for the arrival of divine violence? Then would not
delaying the Antichrist be what we should hope for? [...] The katechon, as a figure for the political, rejects the promise of the
parousia and protects the community from the dangerous illusions of both ultimate perfection and absolute evil. (Rasch 2007, 107)
In Raschs view, what the defenders of the katechon fear is not so much the Antichrist but the Messiah himself, who, moreover,
both are figures who promise us perfection,

figures who offer us redemption and bestow upon us the guilt of failing perfection or
rejecting their offer. (Ibid., 107) There is certainly a certain irony in the Christian
doctrine of state power ultimately coming down to the apostasy of any
recognizable Christianity in vision of an exhausted humanity that can no longer
distinguish between the Antichrist and the Messiah. However, Agambens reading of
Paul leads us to a different case of indistinction. If the katechon conceals that all
power is absolute outlaw and thereby defers the reappropriation of this anomie by
the messianic community, then would it be too much to suggest that the katechon
is the Antichrist, who perpetuates its reign by concealing the fact of its long having
arrived? Absolute Evil would thus attain domination precisely by pretending, as a lesser evil, to ward off its own advent. By
might well appear to them indistinct from the Antichrist:
converting the seekers of redemption into the guardians of its perpetual inaccessibility, the katechon ensures the survival of greater
evil in the guise of the lesser one. Thus, Agamben argues that [it] is possible to conceive of katechon and anomos [Antichrist] not as
two separate figures, but as one single power before and after the final unveiling. Profane power is the semblance that covers up the
As Rasch sums up Agambens claim about the

insidious manner of the self-perpetuation of sovereign power, embracing the
political is equivalent to building concentration camps while awaiting the Antichrist
(Rasch 2007, 106). The relation to the katechon indicates nothing less than ones stand on
the possibility of the transcendence of the political. While for the Schmittian
orientation the political is all there is and its disappearance is only thinkable as the
self-destruction of humanity (cf. Laclau 2007, 20-22), Agambens messianic approach welcomes the demise of the
substantial lawlessness of messianic time. (2005b, 111)
katechon as the condition of possibility of life beyond sovereignty that remains concealed only until the person now holding it back
this
demise of the sovereign takes the form of divine violence that is neither lawpreserving nor law-making and transforms the fictive state of exception, inscribed
within the legal order, into a real state of exception that has severed all links to the
law and the state form. Agambens work from his earliest writings onwards may be viewed as an
engagement with this admittedly arcane and disconcerting idea of divine violence:
Only if it is possible to think the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of the
law (even that of the empty form of laws being in force without significance) will we have moved out of the
paradox of sovereignty towards a politics freed from every ban. (Agamben 1998, 59. See also
Mills 2004; Kaufman 2008) Prior to addressing the specific features of Agambens postsovereign politics, let us consider this idea of a politics freed from every ban in
relation to the figure of state of nature.
gets out of the way (2 Thessalonians 2, 7; cited in Agamben 2005b, 110). In Walter Benjamins messianic politics (1986),
AT: Perm
The Perm cannot avoid codifying the exception of bare life

Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 11)
In contrasting the beautiful day (euemeria) of simple life with the great difficulty of
political bios in the passage cited above, Aristotle may well have given the most
beautiful formulation to the aporia that lies at the foundation of Western politics. The 24
centuries that have since gone by have brought only provisional and ineffective solutions. In carrying out
the metaphysical task that has led it more and more to assume the form of a
biopolitics, Western politics has not succeeded in constructing the link between zoe
and bios, between voice and language, that would have healed the fracture. Bare life
remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is
included solely through an exclusion. How is it possible to politicize the natural
sweetness of zoe? And first of all, does zoe really need to be politicized, or is politics
not already contained in zoe as its most precious center? The biopolitics of both
modern totalitarianism and the society of mass hedonism and consumerism certainly
constitute answers to these questions. Nevertheless, until a com pletely new politics
that is, a politics no longer founded on the exception of bare lifeis at hand, every
theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the beautiful day
of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect
senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.
The permutation damns the attempts to conceive of a new politics

because it refuses to extend the happy life to everyone.
Agamben 2K (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, Means
Without End: Notes on Politics, p. 113-115)
While the state in decline lets its empty shell survive everywhere as a pure structure
of sovereignty and domination, society as a whole is instead irrevocably delivered to
the form of consumer society, that is, a society in which the sole goal of production is
comfortable living. The theorists of political sovereignty, such as Schmitt, see in all this
the surest sign of the end of politics. And the planetary masses of consumers, in fact, do not seem
to foreshadow any new figure of the polis (even when they do not simply relapse into the old ethnic and
religious ideals). However, the problem that the new politics is facing is precisely this: is it
possible to have a political community that is ordered exclusively for the full enjoyment of wordly life? But, if we look closer, isnt this precisely the goal of philosophy? And when
modern political thought was born with Marsilius of Padua, wasnt it defined precisely by the recovery to
political ends of the Averroist concepts of sufficient life and well-living? Once again Walter Benjamin, in
the TheologicoPolitical Fragment, leaves no doubts regarding the fact that The order of the profane should
be erected on the idea of happiness. The definition of the concept of happy life remains one
of the essential tasks of the coming thought (and this should be achieved in such a way that this
concept is not kept separate from ontology, because: being: we have no experience of it other than living
itself). The happy life on which political philosophy should be founded thus cannot be
either the naked life that sovereignty posits as a presupposition so as to turn it into its
own subject or the impenetrable extraneity of science and of modern biopolitics that
everybody today tries in vain to sacralize. This happy life should be, rather, an absolutely
profane sufficient life that has reached the perfection of its own power and of its own communicability a
life over which sovereignty and right no longer have any hold.
The perm is a normalization of resistance that links to the K and

justifies extinction
Dumm 96 (Thomas, Professor of Political Science at Amherst College, Michel Foucault and the Politics of
Freedom. P. 116-117)
Here I am slightly ahead of myself. The problem of the normalization of norms is perhaps better discussed
under the rubric bio-power. The emergence of this more complete normalizing discourse is itself not neatly
or completely separate from its own genealogy within disciplinary society. However, in working to
normalize even that which resists normalization, in normalizing the forms of resistance
as they emerge from delinquency, those who engage in contemporary exercises of
power may have been able to put at risk more than just a mode of freedom but the
very possibility of free existence itself. Normalizing the normis there a more succinct
definition of cybernetics than that? Normalizing the norm---is this not the great (unannounced) end of
the various strategies aimed at human extinction? A question that emerges for us at the end of
the twentieth century is whether the style of freedom that has accompanied disciplinary
society and that has been nurtured by itand for the sake of brevity let us call that freedom
liberal freedom---has itself been the reason leading humankind to this moment of
terminal risk. But even if it has, this does not mean that liberal freedom has not been a way of being
free. Instead, what it may suggest is that the freedom that has been so long associated with a particular
organization under the banner of sovereign right may need to be rethought so that we may better
understand and give shape to a politics of freedom more commensurate with the conditions of late
modernity. I believe that this is what Foucault may be thinking when he urges us to rethink the form that
the idea of right might take as sovereignty and normalization vitiate the very possibility of repression in a
disciplinary age.
The liberal philosophy of the permutation guarantees perm failure

Norris 5 (Andrew, assistant professor of political science at the university of Pennsylvania, Politics,
Metaphysics, and Death: Essays On Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer, pg. 14-15)
the liberal strategy reveals its limitations when we recognize that the notion of
the threshold is in fact expanding into areas where we will not have the luxury of
refusing to consider the inner logic of phenomena we should like to reject as evil and
incomprehensible. What, for instance, are we to do when we are dealing with agents or things that have
Finally,
not already been recognized as the bearers of rights? Here the reassertion of rights is simply not an option.
We must decide whether a neomorta body whose only signs of life are that it is
warm, pulsating, and urinatingis in fact a human being at all, an agent or a thing.
In such cases, life and death [cease to be] properly scientific concepts [and become]
political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a
decision (164). Ironically, such decisions are increasingly made by scientists, and not
by politicians: In the biopolitical horizon that characterizes modernity, the physician and
the scientist move into the no-mans-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate
(159). These are still marginal figures in our current political life. But if Agamben is right, the concept of
the margin is itself being swept away. It is this that leads him to conclude that the camp is the as yet
unrecognized paradigm of the modern. As the logic of the sovereign exception comes unraveled (or is
realizedthis paradox being a necessary function of that logic), and the impossibility of categorically
distinguishing between exception and rule is made manifest, the distinction between bare life and political
life is hopelessly confused. When life and politicsoriginally divided, and linked together by
means of the no-mans-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life
begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception
(I48)~~ In the end, the attempt to resist this through the assertion of human rights ignores the connection
between the humanism that undergirds the concept of rights and the events that seem to conflict with it.
Agambens argument is not that Aristotles or Lockes reflections on politics carry with them
an implicit commitment to the substantive racist policies of National Socialism; nor does he claim
What he does argue is that

there is a deep affinity between such contemporary horrors and the tradition of
political philosophy to which we might turn in an effort to understand and combat such
phenomena. The practical implication would be not that there is no difference between
Aristotle or Hitler, but that Aristotle will not provide a stable point from which to
critique those who follow after him, or from which to construct an alternative.~~
There is no Archimedean point outside biopolitics. Politics is always a matter of the
body, and the body is always already a biopolitical body (187).
that they caused the Holocaust (a term to which he objects [114]).
The perm maintains human rights are ontologically correlated with

the state of exceptiononly the alternative alone can solve
Rancire 4 (Jacques, professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol.
103, no. 2/3, p. 301-02)
the correlation of sovereign power and bare life takes place where political
conflicts can be located. The camp is the space of the "absolute impossibility of
deciding between fact and law, rule and application, exception and rule."10 In this space,
the executioner and the victim, the German body and the Jewish body, appear as two parts of
the same "biopolitical" body. Any kind of claim to rights or any struggle enacting rights
is thus trapped from the very outset in the mere polarity of bare life and state of
exception. That polarity appears as a sort of ontological destiny: each of us would be
in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint between
democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared
in the biopolitical trap. Agamben's view of the camp as the "nomos of modernity" may seem very far
In such a way,
from Arendt's view of political action. Nevertheless, I would assume that the radical suspension of politics in
the exception of bare life is the ultimate consequence of Arendt's archipolitical position, of her attempt to
preserve the political from the contamination of private, social, apolitical life. This attempt depopulates the
political stage by sweeping aside its always-ambiguous actors. As a result, the political exception is
ultimately incorporated in state power, standing in front of bare lifean opposition that the next step
forward turns into a complementarity. The will to preserve the realm of pure politics ultimately
makes it vanish in the sheer relation of state power and individual life. Politics thus is
equated with power, a power that is increasingly taken as an overwhelming historico-ontological destiny
from which only a God is likely to save us. If we want to get out of this ontological trap, we
have to reset the question of the Rights of Manmore precisely, the question of their
subjectwhich is the subject of politics as well. This means setting the question of
what politics is on a different footing. In order to do this, let us have a closer look at the Arendtian
argument about the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, an argument that Agamben basically endorses. She
makes them a quandary, which can be put as follows: either the rights of the citizen are the rights of man
but the rights of man are the rights of the unpoliticized person; they are the rights of those who have no
rights, which amounts to nothingor the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, the rights attached to
the fact of being a citizen of such or such constitutional state. This means that they are the rights of those
who have rights, which amounts to a tautology.11
at: perm
either it doesnt solve or it severs --- thats bad because it
makes rejoinder impossible and hampers argumentative
responsibility --- links are DAs to the permutation
1. it does not refuse the sovereign ethos of endless linedrawing on which biopolitical control is founded
2. it does not begin from the position of bare life which ensure
its cooption under national/social movements
3. the perm does not ensure that the state of exception ends
which means its single-issue legal solution will be
circumvented
*2pt font for long passages with no relevance
Zevnik 9 (Andreja Lecturer in International Politics at Manchester University,
Sovereign-less Subject and the Possibility of Resistance, in Millennium: Journal of
International Studies, Volume 38, Number 1, p. 2-9,
http://mil.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/07/09/0305829809336255.full.pdf)
Edkins and Pin-Fat draw upon Giorgio Agamben's understanding of sovereign power further. They argue that sovereign
power has the means and authority to draw lines or to distinguish between different
types of subjectivities. It has power to determine and allocate someone a place
inside or outside of community and, therefore, to grant or deprive that person of their
political rights. As Agamben writes in Means without Ends, since the 1789 Declaration of Human Rights, human rights are
'attributed to the human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immedi ately vanishing presupposition of the citizen'. In
human rights or any kind of rights belong to a subject in a

community and not to the subject or to the being as such. Exclusion from the
community not only deprives that individual of citizenship but also of (human)
rights. Therefore, as Edkins and Pin-Fat argue, sovereign line-drawing strategies, a politics of
inclusion and exclusion, condition to some extent the existence of a community and
of each and every human being. Sovereign power, as a power which makes the decision
as to who counts as a subject and who does not , is precisely this line-drawing
politics that includes, excludes or places beings in-between, in the zone of indis
tinction. Following the argument in Agamben's Homo Sacer, we can say that the current biopolitical imaginary, where sovereign
other words, Agamben is saying that
power imposes human/non-human distinctions on every 'being' subjected to sovereign power, is exactly the imaginary in which
The rise of
unjust, exclusionary and de-privileging political practices through which this power is
manifest, may provide an occasion for sub jects to resist the sovereign politics of
drawing lines.
subjects are constantly faced with the threat of being deprived of their rights, subjectivity or 'human ity'.
This article explores and aims to theorise the possibility of resistance to sovereign power that entails the emergence of a new kind of 'being' - a 'whatever being' - whose identity and sense of belonging to a com munity are altered. It follows Edkins and Pin-Fat's theoretical lead and adopts the theory of Giorgio Agamben, in particular his understanding of bare life and 'whatever being', in
order to explore forms of resistance. Yet, I would like to suggest, Agamben's theory is insufficient for think ing resistance, for he left unexplored the transformation from bare life to 'whatever being'. To fill this gap I introduce the theory of Jacques Lacan. The main purpose of looking at Agamben's and Lacan's explorations of resistance to sovereign power is to find grounds for a challenge to sovereign power which do not fall back into sovereign discourse. An
alternative mode of resistance cannot derive from revolution - all revolu tions, as Lacan argues, result in the re-instalment of another sovereign and the revolution continues - but must proceed from the subject's posi tion, which withers away sovereign power as we know it, and brings to the forefront a 'subject' or a kind of 'being' whose existence no longer requires the intervention or recognition of sovereign power. This article searches for an alternative to the
exclusionary practices of contemporary politics and a form of resistance through a challenge to Edkins and Pin-Fat's argument in the article 'Through the Wire'. The article argues that when suggesting a refusal to draw lines and the assumption of bare life as a potential form of resistance, Edkins and Pin-Fat overlooked an important aspect in Agamben's thought and thereby their proposal of resistance falls short of their goal, which is a successful challenge to
sovereign power and the forms of life that it produces. The article first elaborates on Agamben's theorisation of bare life as a potential form of resistance; second, it introduces Edkins and, Pin-Fat's alternative forms of resistance and further engages with and critiques their understanding of bare life and 'the politics of drawing lines' presented as the 'refusal' and the 'assumption of bare life'; and, third, it develops an alternative challenge to sovereign power by
referring to the theory of Jacques Lacan and the concepts of passage a I'acte and a demand of being. By exploring the events at Tiananmen in 1989, which, as argued in the article, represent an innovative way of thinking resistance and lead to the emergence of a new form of being, the article searches for the embodiment of a product ive challenge to sovereign power. Unlike Edkins and Pin-Fat's example of the asylum seekers, the article argues that the events
at Tiananmen can be understood as the embodiment of a particular political form of being distinct from bare life. The Bare Life of Giorgio Agamben Agamben has recently become a leading philosopher in the theorisation of resistance. His theory offers two ways of thinking resistance: bare life and whatever being. Both concepts theorise a particular form of existence. While the latter represents an alternative form of being, the former - bare life - can be read in
two ways. It can signify a closed form of exis tence where no resistance can be thinkable, or, in a more Marxist way, it can be seen as a necessary yet destructive by-product of sovereign power. These readings correspond to Slavoj Zizek's observations of the relation ship between Foucault's and Agamben's theorisation. Agamben's dis tinctive way of engaging with the political, as Zizek argues, defines him as a philosopher whose theoretical conceptualisation is
biopolitical, but the notion of biopolitics is picked up from where Foucault left off. While Foucault's understanding of biopolitics, according to Zizek, leaves space for resistance, Agamben's, with a distinctive conceptualisation of life, does not. Although I agree with Zizek's observation on the status of bare life, my reading of Agamben's theory contradicts Zizek's. I argue that Agamben's theory has space for resistance; however, this space is narrow, underdeveloped
and has remained largely unaddressed by Agamben himself. Here I explore this space of resistance. In the Introduction to Homo Sacer Agamben discusses two concepts from Greek philosophy: zoe and bios. Aristotle associated them with two forms of life: 'natural life' and 'good life'. Agamben elaborates on Aris totle's two forms of life by understanding zoe as a form of life common to all living beings and bios as a form of life distinctive of a group or politi cal
community. This reading of zoe and bios is not new. It originates, as Foucault wrote in History of Sexuality, in the transformation of politics to biopolitics - biopolitics then being a result of the entry of zoe into bios. In other words, the emergence of biopolitics, where zoe and bios are equally present, does away with the ancient Aristotelian separation between public/political and private sphere. As a consequence of zoe's relocation in the centre of biopolitical
mechanisms and practices, both private and public sphere become political. Thus, as Agamben argues, zoe enters the 'political' as a biopolitical body and a product of sovereign power. The relationship between zoe and the political embodies the manner in which law refers to life - inclusive exclusion, where the exception remains included in relation to the rule through its very suspension. As such though, zoe is never fully part of bios, but always already included
by its exclusion through the distinctively sovereign nexus of law and life. The practice of such 'inclu sive exclusion' in the Western sovereign biopolitical imaginary blurs the distinctions between zoe and bios, in a way which makes them inseparable or indistinct. Agamben's sphere of in-between-ness or indistinction opens with the proclamation of a sovereign exception. The exception is ontologically indefinable space, where inclusion and exclusion are nonexistent and dividing lines cannot be drawn. It is a place, as argued by Agamben, where 'the exception is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already excluded'. The topological structure of the state of exception then takes the form of 'being outside and yet belonging'. It resem bles at least two specific relationships, the one between sovereign and law, and the other between law
and life. For as long as the former prob- lematises the indistinct place of the sovereign, neither inside nor outside the law but in a position to declare the exception, the latter resembles the spatial problematic of the camp, where sovereign violence takes place under the exception of law and, in biopolitical terms, produces lives with no political power - bare lives of survival. However, for Agamben, the camp is not a random product of the state of exception, but a
symptom of the Western political system and its juridical order, whose task is to strengthen security by dividing, excluding and generalising. For Agamben though, the decisive force in the reconceptualisation of Western political imaginaries is not merely the inclusion of zoe into bios, but the emergence of a space of indistinction where zoe cannot be sepa rated from bios and of which the product is bare life. Once, bare life used to be situated at the margins of the
political, now it gradually coincides with the centre of the political. Bare life, then, 'is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoe of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life. [But] the bare life of homo sacer ... [is] a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between men and beast, nature and culture'. It is a creation of sovereign power for sover eign power in the zone of indistinction which always already produces us as bare lives or homines sacri in
becoming. In this way Agamben unties bare life from zoe and bios and illustrates the way in which the subjectivities of bare life are stripped of legal and political protection. Bare life is a product of sovereign power par excellence: it is both included and excluded from the political. It is excluded because zoe to which bare life partly relates is an apolitical form of life, but it is included because it belongs or is a product of that very same order of sovereign power. As
However, there is another side to bare life . As a byproduct of sov ereign power, bare life can also be a form of life that is out of reach of
sovereign power. In the biopolitical, where bare life gets created, the sovereign power
exercised all its power for the creation of bare life , and is therefore left without any
control over its own 'by-products'. Thus sovereign power becomes power-less in
relation to bare life. Once bare life is understood in such a way, 'the sovereign' can no longer
such, bare life then does not possess power; in fact it is stripped of any legal and political protection and unable to redefine political power rela tion or have an impact on sovereign power.
exercise its powers. In this context, bare life, instead of being disabled and separated from sovereign power,
becomes its primary enemy and a destructible force . The form of life associated with bare life is in this
context onto logically different from bare life that is stripped of any legal and political protection. Such form of bare life can no
longer be seen as apolitical, but it rather constitutes a form of being that inhibits a space where
sover eign power cannot draw lines or further exclusions . In fact, bare life now
becomes explicitly and immediately political . It attacks sovereign power 'from the
outside' where the categories of acceptance , inclusion or exclu sion no longer hold .
Equally, in the discourse of this 'new form of being' notions like state order or human rights become obsolete. Such a form of life
then, although it remains 'deprived' of all the attributes of humanity, can embody a singular and sovereign-less form of being. In my
such being has political power; which enables it to enter and alter
political power games and to resist . Therefore, this new political form of life can no longer be understood as 'bare life' in its original sense.
reading of Agamben,
What is proposed here is rather the understanding of life that exists by itself, life as such, or in 'medieval terms', life in quodlibet. It is a life that has no other conditions of existence but
itself or, as Agamben writes, life that is its own potentiality. In fact, in The Coming Community Agamben describes this form of being as 'whatever being'. He writes that 'whatever being'
is a form of being that is included in political realms through its exclusion while at the same time deprived of all attributes of humanity. The 'whatever- ness' of this being implies its break
with the Enlightenment's under standing of the subject. This being is 'that which is neither particular nor general, individual nor generic'. It is a being such as it is, with all its properties.
However, as Agamben writes, it is also a being that is immate rial and indefinably human or inhuman, politically qualified or excluded. Whatever being is outside the binary logics of the
universal and the par ticular, inclusion or exclusion; it is free from the question of belonging to a class or a set of common identities. Instead, whatever being is a being that is inherently
hidden in the condition of belonging. It refers, belongs and relates to other 'whatever beings' through the condition of belonging as such, and not through the possession of common
identities, race, class, religion, language, culture or any other form of belonging to a commu nity. Thus, 'whatever beings' relate to one another through means which do not fall under
the logic of sovereign power. 'Whatever being' is 'a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging ... nor by the simple absence of conditions ... but by belonging
itself.' As such, the communities of whatever being are defined by negativity and not by present characteristics - rather than being a community of similar ities, it is a community of
'Whatever beings', as Agamben argues, cannot form social or national

movements that would demand recognition of their identities or nation alities as
there is no identity or nationality upon which such a move ment could emerge there are no common identities that would seek recognition , as well as no particular
demands to fight for. While sub jects of sovereign power form political communities
or social movements based on their identity in order to voice demands and to seek
recognition, the togetherness of 'whatever beings' has no grounds in identity or in
demands that arise from such commonalities. Instead, 'whatever beings' voice their demands
regardless of the sovereign power. These demands are intolerable or make no sense in the
existing sovereign order, and are as such hostile to sovereign power.
Sovereign power, as Agamben writes, in fact cannot tolerate 'that humans cobelong without any representable condition of belonging ... [or] that singularities
form a community with out affirming an identity'. What is more, demands voiced by
groups of 'whatever beings' are perceived as a threat to the system, because sover
eign power does not know the direction from which they are coming, nor does it
know how to address them. I argue that 'bare life in itself' is apolitical and has no
capabilities of resistance; however, that changes when and if bare life is understood
as a form-of-life?4 Only in circumstances that lead towards the emergence of
'whatever being' can bare life be perceived as a potential path towards resistance.
However, while there seems to be a continuing line of thought that leads from bare
life to 'whatever being', the gap of how this trans formation could appear, I argue, is
left largely unaddressed. In the next section I will look at how Jenny Edkins and
Veronique Pin-Fat try to adopt Agamben's theory to further their conceptualisation
of resistance. Refusal of Bare Life, Assumption of Bare Life and Whatever Politics
Drawing on Agamben's idea of bare life, Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat pushed
forward alternative paths of resistance and challenges to sovereign power. Here, it
should be acknowledged that they are not argu ing for 'a challenge to a particular
sovereign order, but to sovereignty, or sovereign power, in general, as a form of
order that entails specific forms of life'. As such, they are not searching for a new
political order with another, different sovereign, but a form of sovereign-less
political commu nity. Although Edkins and Pin-Fat declare their opposition to
sovereign power as a form of order, they do not deny the general possibility of order
or political life. In their view, both political life and order can exist outside sovereign
imaginaries, though such order would be a very different one. Edkins and Pin-Fat
propose two forms of resistance in this context: refusal and the assumption of bare
difference, a community of 'non-community'.
life. In the former, the subject refuses the line-drawing policies of sovereign power
and the ability to make dis tinctions between forms of life upon which the sovereign
power relies; and in the latter, the subject takes on the form of life that sovereign
power seeks to impose. Refusal to draw lines between zoe and bios or
inside/outside, as both authors believe, could potentially contest the violence of sovereign
power. Edkins and Pin-Fat, by following Agamben, suggest that 'it is only through a refusal to draw any
lines at all between forms of life ... that sovereign power as a form of violence can
be contested and a prop erly political power relation reinstated' . This, according to the authors,
implies that a refusal to draw some lines will not suffice , because if some lines are
accepted then the right of a sovereign to draw lines remains uncontested. As such then,
a refusal has to refer to the line-drawing poli tics which prevents the drawing of any
lines of the sort that the sovereign power demands .
4. the perm devolves into political conservativism, which

inherently falls short
Bryant 11 (Levi Professor of Philosophy at Colin College and Ph.D. from Loyola
University, Lacan and the Closure of Political Realism, in Larval Subjects, 8-1-11,
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/lacan-and-the-closure-of-politicalrealism/)
Returning to my critique of political realism from a few days ago, political realism is always an attempt to
instantiate a closure of reality. What it aims for is a politics of reality against a politics of the real. This
closure consists in a restriction of being to reality, to the system of appearance defining places and
positions of the beings involved in a system, that strives to erase the anarchic and contingent
ground of this order, thereby hoping to eradicate the eruption of the real. Its fiction is that all those
entities involved in the situation have clearly defined and counted identities and
positions that can be smoothly calculated and managed in a governmental
decision process. Yet to establish this, political realism must perpetually have
recourse to the logic Lacan outlines in the masculine side of the graph of sexuation, pointing to a supplementary
sovereign, God, natural order, king, charismatic leader, transcendent authority, etc.,
that covers or veils the absence of foundation, the excess, upon which reality is
contingently founded, fixing this order. Political realisms thesis is always that 1) all
entities involved are counted and accounted for, and 2) that no other order is possible. Of
course, this order also disguises the fact that the interests it claims to be in everyones
interests are really the interests of a few. In repressing this anarchic and contingent ground of the reality
system, political realism thereby promotes the lie that such and such a course of action
is the only possible course of action, the only thing that can be done. As Naomi Klein
showed so nicely in The Shock Doctrine, political realism manufactures crisis as a way of forcing
the demos to accept their exploitation as the only way to avoid catastrophe. If
politics must be placed in square quotes when discussing political realism, then this is because political realism is not
really a politics at all, but is rather mere administration (in all the terms literal and connotative senses).
Insofar as political realism treats all elements as counted and accounted for, insofar as it treats all
possibilities as pre-delineated in the anticipatory system of reality , politics becomes
mere administration in determining which vectors should be pursued in these pre-delineated systems of anticipation
(usually constructed around what Lacan calls a forced vel or disjunction, where the people are forced to choose, as in the muggers
scenario, between their money or their life). Genuine politics, by contrast, is a politics not of reality, but of the real. Following
politics that contests the very system of counting and

distributing positions, that refuses the closure of reality that would claim that all is
counted, accounted for, and with a proper place, and that orients its praxis with
respect to the contingent appearance of the inapparent . Yet above all, a politics of the real is a
Ranciere, a politics of the real is that
politics that refuses the very system of counting, both at the level of the entities populating the social order and at the level of
predelineated possibilities, refusing the system of predelineation governing appearances.
A politics of the real gives
birth to new possibilities, possibilities with no place or count within the reigning
system of possibility. Where political realism says this is all that is possible and
therefore we must do x, a politics of the real contests this very system of ordering
the world and invents new possibilities inimical to this gamed system of counting .
Thus, for example, with Civil Rights the reality was that there was no place for
African-Americans as equal citizens. The system of reality said that AfricanAmericans are counted in this way such that they go to these schools, use these
fountains, go to these restaurants, sit on these seats on the bus, etc . Any other way
of participating and relating, said political realism, was impossible insofar as people were
not ready for it, it would ruin re-election chances of various politicians sympathetic
to equality, thereby undermining efforts of equality, etc. Thereby, we were told, only
incremental steps were possible. Anything else would produce catastrophe. Yet
the civil rights movement founded itself not on political realism , but on a politics of
the real. Everywhere in civil rights struggles we saw the appearing of the inapparent. We see the appearing of
the impossible, of the strange spectre of that which is simultaneously counted (in a particular way by the oligarchic order)
and the uncounted when Rosa Parks refuses to go to the back of the bus . We see it when
people refuse to go to their assigned seats in restaurants or to go to assigned
restaurants. We see it in the speeches that evoke the oligarchic orders claim to be equal (separate but equal) demanding
the truth of the principle of equality while denouncing the inequality its reality function practices. We see it in people
being attacked by dogs and fire hoses without fighting back . In this way the inequity
beneath the reality claiming to be revealed is simultaneously revealed and the
excess of the real, of that which is not counted within this reality, is also revealed
challenging the closure of this order. Above all, in refusing to go to the back of the bus or eat at the counter,
the contingency of the so-called natural order (blacks naturally want their places and to be among
their kind just as whites do) is disclosed, revealing the possibility of a different order . From
the standpoint of political realism and incrementalism , these eruptions are
understood to be both ontologically impossible (as everything has a proper place) and to be
avoided at all costs. The reality-order becomes a massive regulatory mechanism, a defense formation, designed to
forestall any eruption of the real within the social order. Yet in defending the position of incrementalism
and political realism what one really defends is the reign of oligarchs
claiming to act on behalf of the interests of everyone. And, of course, here it goes without
saying that politics is generally what takes place outside government. Government is
always a political realism that attempts to reduce the social order to the system of
the count. Politics is what contests that system of counting, revealing its anarchic and contingent nature. Politics is not
what presidents, congressmen, etc., do; nor is it what takes place in the voting
booth. All of these things belong to the order of reality that effaces and erases the real. Politics can, of course, address
governance, but always in a polemical mode that contests its symbolico-imaginary sorting.
AT: PERM
The affirmatives defense of sovereignty makes liberation impossible
their lesser evil logic culminates in absolute evil.
In order to understand this claim let us consider Agambens criticism of Schmitts
use of the notion of the katechon in his defense of state sovereignty. In Schmitts
political theology, sovereign power is analogous to the figure of the katechon in the
Catholic tradition, the force that delays the advent of the Antichrist, which in turn
would eventually lead to the messianic redemption (Schmitt 2003, 59-60). It is as
this delaying force, as opposed to a direct agent of the Good, that the state must be
appreciated. In contrast, Agambens interpretation of the famous passage in St.
Pauls Second Letter to the Thessalonians on the katechon asserts that rather than
grounding something like a Christian doctrine of State power (Agamben 2005b,
109), this passage harbours no positive valuation of the katechon whatsoever.
Instead, the katechon (every form of constituted power) merely conceals the
absence of law that already characterizes the messianic present and thus does
nothing other than defer or hold back the moment of the messianic suspension of
the law (see ibid., 95-107). Instead, in the Pauline messianic logic the semblance of the law, maintained
by the katechon, must be stripped off and all power revealed as the absolute outlaw (Agamben 2005b, 111). As
Agamben (2005b, 110) claims, every theory of the State, including Hobbess which thinks of it as a power to
block or delay catastrophe can be taken as a secularization of this [traditional] interpretation of 2 Thessalonians
2. Indeed, in the Schmittian reading, which characterizes most contemporary political theories, including those
extremely hostile to Schmitt, the secularized katechon is legitimized as the only force that wards off the Antichrist
[the anomie of the state of nature] and thus the end of the social order as we know it. On the contrary,
Agambens reading of Paul posits the katechon as an obstacle to the advent of the
messianic kingdom and thus accuses the proponents of the Christian doctrine of
state power of a thinly disguised nihilism. [T]he katechon is the force the Roman
Empire as well as every constituted authority that clashes with and hides
katargesis, the state of tendential lawlessness that characterizes the messianic, and
in this sense delays unveiling the mystery of lawlessness. (Agamben 2005b, 111)
It is as if the erstwhile champions of a Christian doctrine of power have forgotten
their creed and embraced the imperfection of humanity as all there is. Their valorization
of the katechon obscures a simple question: if we longed for parousia, should we not be impatient with the
interference of the katechon? (Rasch 2007, 106) This, as Agamben shows, is precisely Pauls attitude, which is
diametrically opposed to the attitude of the philosophers of the political, for whom the katechon has assumed an
autonomous value:
What if, after two thousand years and untold promises, we have lost our faith in the parousia and grown weary of
waiting for the arrival of divine violence? Then would not delaying the Antichrist be what we should hope for? [...]
The katechon, as a figure for the political, rejects the promise of the parousia and protects the community from the
dangerous illusions of both ultimate perfection and absolute evil. (Rasch 2007, 107)
what the defenders of the katechon fear is not so much the Antichrist
but the Messiah himself, who, moreover, might well appear to them indistinct from
the Antichrist: both are figures who promise us perfection, figures who offer us
redemption and bestow upon us the guilt of failing perfection or rejecting their
offer. (Ibid., 107) There is certainly a certain irony in the Christian doctrine of state power ultimately
In Raschs view,
coming down to the apostasy of any recognizable Christianity in vision of an exhausted humanity that can no longer
distinguish between the Antichrist and the Messiah. However, Agambens reading of Paul leads us to a different
case of indistinction. If the katechon conceals that all power is absolute outlaw and thereby defers the
reappropriation of this anomie by the messianic community, then would it be too much to suggest that the
katechon is the Antichrist, who perpetuates its reign by concealing the fact of its long having arrived?
Absolute
Evil would thus attain domination precisely by pretending, as a lesser evil, to ward
off its own advent. By converting the seekers of redemption into the guardians of its
perpetual inaccessibility, the katechon ensures the survival of greater evil in the
guise of the lesser one. Thus, Agamben argues that [it] is possible to conceive of
katechon and anomos [Antichrist] not as two separate figures, but as one single
power before and after the final unveiling. Profane power is the semblance that
covers up the substantial lawlessness of messianic time. (2005b, 111) As Rasch
sums up Agambens claim about the insidious manner of the self-perpetuation of
sovereign power, embracing the political is equivalent to building concentration
camps while awaiting the Antichrist (Rasch 2007, 106).
The relation to the katechon indicates nothing less than ones stand on the
possibility of the transcendence of the political. While for the Schmittian orientation
the political is all there is and its disappearance is only thinkable as the selfdestruction of humanity (cf. Laclau 2007, 20-22), Agambens messianic approach
welcomes the demise of the katechon as the condition of possibility of life beyond
sovereignty that remains concealed only until the person now holding it back gets
out of the way (2 Thessalonians 2, 7; cited in Agamben 2005b, 110). In Walter Benjamins messianic politics
(1986), this demise of the sovereign takes the form of divine violence that is neither law-preserving nor lawmaking and transforms the fictive state of exception, inscribed within the legal order, into a real state of
exception that has severed all links to the law and the state form. Agambens work from his earliest writings
onwards may be viewed as an engagement with this admittedly arcane and disconcerting idea of divine violence:
Only if it is possible to think the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of the
law (even that of the empty form of laws being in force without significance) will we
have moved out of the paradox of sovereignty towards a politics freed from every
ban. (Agamben 1998, 59. See also Mills 2004; Kaufman 2008) Prior to addressing
the specific features of Agambens post-sovereign politics, let us consider this idea
of a politics freed from every ban in relation to the figure of state of nature.
Negative actions by the state do not resolve the state of exceptiontheir
attempt to solve bare life by reigning in government only reentrenches
sovereign power.
(Sergie, The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of
On the other hand, neither is it a question of returning to a pre-political state of
nature, not yet contaminated by the sovereign exception. If the state of nature were
temporally antecedent to sovereignty, then it could at least be envisioned, in a
naturalist or essentialist gesture, as a site of possible redemption. However, there is
no passage back from bios to zoe and any attempt at such passage only throws us
back into the state of exception and the production of bare life, which, contrary to
numerous misreadings, is not identical to zoe but is rather a destroyed or degraded
bios, from which all positive determinations have been subtracted (see Ziarek 2008;
Ojakangas 2008; Mills 2004, 2005). There are not first life as a natural biological
given and anomie as the state of nature and then their implication in law through
the state of exception. On the contrary, the very possibility of distinguishing life and
law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical
machine. (Agamben 2005a, 88) Bare life has nothing natural about it; instead it is
nothing but a degraded life, a life reduced to survival (Agamben 1999b, 132-35). If
bare life were identical to zoe qua natural life, then Agambens critical project would
be reduced to a banal affirmation of bios over zoe, political life vs. animal existence,
which would simply reproduce the constitutive opposition of the Western
ontopolitical tradition rather than transcend it as Agamben certainly attempts to do.
In contrast to such simplifications, Agamben asserts that the human being is
constitutively separated from its natural or animal existence by virtue of its
subjectification in language. In his early book Infancy and History (2007a, 50-70), he
argues, following Benveniste, that the entrance of the human being into language
necessarily traverses the stage of the expropriation of all its pre-linguistic
experience as a living being so that any subjectification in language always
correlates with a correlate desubjectification (see also 1999b, 115-123). Similarly,
Agambens inquiry into the event of language in Language and Death (1991),
which, as Mika Ojakangas (2008) aptly demonstrates, is structurally homologous to
the theory of the state of exception in Homo Sacer, treats human speech as
conditioned by the removal of natural or animal voice (phone) that makes
possible the passage to logos. In exactly the same manner, the political existence of
humanity is from the outset accompanied by the removal or crossing out of zoe,
whose inclusive exclusion as a negative foundation of the political order makes
impossible any return to nature, other than in the obscene and degrading manner
practiced in the concentration camps and other loci of the state of exception.
One invocation of the state of exception leads to an endless cycle of
intervention
Ibur, 9 Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center
(Aaron M. Humanitarian Intervention, the Responsibility to Protect, and Abuse of
the Law: The Internationalization of States of Exception, February 15-18, All
Academic)
Theoretically, the invocation of the state of exception may have been justified for
the actual continued existence of the state. Yet, because the executive can decide
when and where to claim the exception, it may often be enacted in cases short of
emergency. Thus, the exceptional becomes increasingly permanent and normal as
there is no legal way to overturn it; the emergency becomes the perpetual state of
affairs. The decree, issued by a body of the constitutional order, the executive, thus
is law even though law was created by its own suspension. With this power to
decide on the state of exception, the executive becomes dictatorial, or according to
Schmitt's conception, the sovereign itself. However, Agambens work on this subject
differs from some earlier statements on the exception. Whereas Rossiter (2002) and
Schmitt (2006) describe the suspension of the legal order as an act of
constitutional dictatorship or as a temporary deviance from the normal operation
of the juridical apparatus to ensure the long term survival of this very order,
Agamben argues that the exception itself, in its very nature, prevents a return to
the old normal and thus, ushers in a new one. If this is the case, any hope of
restoring the constitution, as previously understood, is lost. Therefore, the power to
suspend the law permanently threatens all legal norms deeply held or otherwise,
making any legal system with an executive body inherently unstable.
Particularized approaches to resistance fails the universal contestation
of the alternative is key.

What ensues is a form of the boomerang effect: the constituting power of justice,
which was once fictitiously held by the state, lies not in the states juridical order
but in the universalized externality represented in the act of dissent itself. This
stands to undo, at least partially, the paradox of sovereignty by placing the limiting
and limited version of state sovereignty alongside and in opposition to a form of
sovereignty that lies extra-juridically, and therefore, outside state. In that case,
state sovereignty cannot claim that there is nothing outside the law because, as this
article has come to demonstrate, justice itself is outside the law and it thereby
presides as the constituting force that substantiates the sovereign power of the
(lawless) universalized standpoint. The references to colonialism have helped to
demonstrate (a) the degree to which the state of exception gets normalized at the
expense of life and justice, and (b) the importance of challenging the state of
exception from outside the juridical order so as to expose the fictional quality of the
relations between law and life from a universalized standpoint. In the capitalist
colonial sense, acts of dissent against the state of exception can be similarly
conceptualized as having to emerge from the universal externality that upholds
lawlessness. There are numerous distinctive experiences of the state of exception
as the limit-figure on life, which is a mode of governance that is highlyconducive to
reckless capitalist growth (hence the term capitalistcolonialism), and has deep
affinities with the ever-expanding war on terror. Whether these universalizable
distinctions are experienced at the level of class, gender, race and/or ethnicity, they
nonetheless stand to represent a shared externality that can never truly be
included in the juridical order of any given sovereign power. The compromised
form of consent that characterizes these externalities in relation to the state of
exception makes it such that the excluded, despite short-term attempts at inclusion,
will always find their footing in the constituting power of universal justice. If the
sovereign power of state lies in indistinction, meaning in the power of inclusive
exclusion, then challenges to the state of exception must appeal to universalized
distinctions, to that which is always external and must always be external to state
insofar as universality itself can never be included in the juridico-political
operations of any given state. The state will always choose the state; it exists for
itself, and the state of exception is an extreme example of the truth of this fate.
Transcending the state of exception through better laws and policies is
impossibleonly a fundamental reconsideration of politics can solve.
Agambens understanding of the state of nature as a product of sovereign power
rather than the precondition of its institution entails a reconsideration of its
ontological status. While for Hobbes the state of nature is an ideologem, a fiction
deployed to gain adherence to the sovereign, for both Schmitt and Agamben, the
state of nature, insofar as it is present within the sovereign order in the mode of the
state of exception, is no longer a fiction but a reality. Both Schmitt and Agamben
affirm precisely that which Hobbes, according to Foucault, attempted to efface: the
historical reality of (civil) war as the origin of all constituted authority. While Schmitt
affirms this reality in his exaltation of the political and indeed valorizes it as the
instance of reality that ruptures the simulacra of normative systems, Agamben
clearly abhors it. However, his own analysis makes it remarkably difficult to see how
it can be escaped. On the one hand, it is obvious that the state of exception cannot
be transcended by perfecting the legal system in order to banish every trace of
exception from it. The legal positivist argument that characterizes the liberalism of
Schmitts time as well as many of its contemporary descendants is clearly refuted
by Agambens radicalization of Schmitts decisionism, which demonstrates the
dependence of the rule on the exception, whereby every positive right is
conditioned by the sovereigns preservation of the right to punish. The state of
exception and its product, the bare life of homo sacer, are not a political problem
to be resolved within the normative system, but rather a problem of the political
itself (Rasch 2007, 102). Any search for a more effective, exception-proof legal
system is entirely in vain, especially in todays condition of nihilism, in which the
vacuity of historical forms of life has brought the sovereign ban to the foreground as
the sole substance of politics. We cannot hope to evade the state of nature by a
denaturalizing gesture of the closure of the normative system into self-immanence,
if only because the state of nature is always already immanent to it (Agamben
2005a, 87).
The permutation fails The plan is inevitably tapped in the logic of the
state
Hussain, 2000 Professor in History at the University of California Berkeley
(Nasser, Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred, Law and Society Association,
University of Massachusetts, JSTOR.)
In a significant passage in The Concept of Law, Hart attempts to show how the
notion of sovereign orders virtually disappears in the rule-bound format of a modern
electoral democracy. Framing the explanation in the vocabulary of a historical
Bildung, a developmental schema that unself-consciously subtends much of the
text, Hart argues that in the case in which the sovereign is identifiable with a single
person, it may be possible to concede that the rules of governance (for instance,
the requirement that orders must be declared and signed by the monarch) exist in a
descriptive mode. But in the more disseminated form of the electorate-indeed, in
the case of procedures that members of a society must follow in order to function as
an electorate in the first place-rules "cannot themselves have the status of orders
issued by the sovereign, for nothing can count as orders issued by the sovereign
unless the rules already exist and have been followed" (pp. 74-75). Such a
circularity of logic and process effectively occludes the possibility of action outside
the circle.
The permutation fails Soft dissent from within the state is ineffective at
challenging the sovereign.
Unlike Agamben, Arendts account of tacit consent strives to appreciate the varied
manner of laws application through an understanding of the degree to which valid
law presumes equal representation and consent. In her description of the tacit
agreement or consensus universalis that underpins the American Constitution,
Arendt (1969) explains that the civil rights movements of the 1960s were to be
expected because of the simple and frightening fact that [Negroes and Indians] had
never been included in the original consensus universalisof the American republic
(p.90). This insight precisely reflects that nuance that forms the foundation of laws
applicability or even its non-applicability. The force-of-law/ law is differentiated by
the degree to which the state itself can claim legitimate authority, which is dictated
in part by the extent to which it is seen to be representative of the community unto
which it exacts its power. In all instances where the law that is in place is the result
of a colonial imposition, the realm of externality not only threatens the legitimacy of
that states authority, but also become essentialized through mechanisms of
governance inherent to the state of exception. The distinguishing feature of the
type of dissent that is being conceptualized in this article is that it is representative
of a standpoint that is always and already external to the juridico-political order of
the sovereign; in an important sense, it is always outside state and state control.
That this standpoint is already external to the sovereign suggests an immediate
nullification of the suspension mechanism that the sovereign employs as a strategy
of rendering the exception for the purposes of juridical order. Correspondingly, that
this standpoint is always external to the sovereign means that the failed attempts
to exclude the standpoint also ensures that it cannot be included in the juridical
order through non-application. As such, those acts of dissent that imply consent by
virtue of their originary position within the order itself stand a weaker chance of
constituting legitimate, and therefore effective, challenges to the state of exception.
Acts of dissent which originate from a proximal relation that is always external to
the state, despite sovereign attempts at the taking of the outside, represent a
standpoint that is necessarily always already universalized, as the remainder of the
article explains.
Its impossible to combine individualized action and that of the sovereign

The only form of consent that can be presupposed by acts of dissent which originate
from this universalized standpoint is one wherein it is a mutual consent in the form
of a compromise, which holds that one party remains external to the juridicopolitical order. In the colonial context, this notion of consent as compromise is by no
means a happy or easy compromise from the perspective of either adversary. As
Fanons chronological account in Wretched(1961/2004) illustrates, in the process of
the sovereigns initial attempts to include the colonized in its order for the purposes
of expanding the scope of its jurisdiction, such a compromise is everywhere implied
and concretized, but at the same time, such a compromise is everywhere violently
under threat from the colonizer. Insofar as the colonized and colonizers are always
external to each other, the hostile compromise is implied in the colonizers constant
underlining, by means of exception, the externality of the colonized as a substratum
of humanity. The colonized agree to this externalized standpoint, certainly not
because they view themselves as lesser, but rather on the grounds of their
conceptualization of the colonizer as the outsider, which expresses itself in the
way that the colonized externalize the universal values of the colonizer, as
evidenced by Fanons (1961/2004: 9) commentary on the concept of human
dignity. At the apex of the dehumanization of the colonized, the extent to which
both parties have entrenched their positions of externality in relation to the other
comes to be represented by a reversal of roles, wherein the colonizer comes to be
the target of dehumanization tactics. Csaire (1955/2000: 36) refers to this reversal
as the boomerang effect, when the sovereign-colonizer is one day surprised to
have its own dehumanizing tactics, which are generally reserved for use against
what it views as the substratum of humanity, used against it by those it thought
were lesser. This concept of the boomerang effect represents, at least in part, the
foundation of the inversion of power that results from the act of dissent that upholds
a universalized justice claim, and it involves a reconstituting of sovereign power
from a position of lawlessness that is external to the state of exception.
A/T: Solves Labeling

The government cannot be includedthe people and the
sovereign perpetually create each other
Tran-Creque 13 [Bard College, interdisciplinary research, education and art community working to
for the Study of the Drone, The Forever War is Always Hungry, July 5, 2013, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/theforever-war-is-always-hungry/] Hebron ADN
The Only War there Is Beginning with his observation that states are at the same
time forms of institutionalized raiding or extortion, and utopian projects , David
Graebers definition of sovereignty is simple enough: the right to exercise
violence with impunity. Graeber offers the example of the Ganda kingship to the south of the Shilluk. In the late
19th century, European visitors to the court of King Mutesa offered a gift of firearms. Mutesa responded by firing the rifle in the
street and killing his subjects at random. When David Livingstone asked why the Ganda king killed so many people, he was told that
if [the king] didnt, everyone would assume that he was dead. However, the notoriety of the Ganda kings for arbitrary,
random violence towards their own people did not prevent Mutesa from also being
accepted as supreme judge and guardian of the states system of justice. Indeed, it
was the very foundation for it. Specifically, Graeber is interested in the transcendent
quality of violence: the violence and transgression of the king makes him a
creature beyond morality. Paradoxically, the sovereign may be arbitrarily violent
the etymology here is tellingand nevertheless seen as the supreme
source of justice and law. Graeber calls this transcendent aspect of violence divine. It isnt just that kings act
like gods; its that they do so and get away with it. This remains the case in the modern state. Walter
Benjamins famous distinction between law-making and law-maintaining violence refers to the same phenomenon. We
often say that no one is above the law, but if this were true, there would be no one
to bring the legal order into being in the first place: the signers of the Declaration of
Independence or the American Constitution were all traitors by the legal order
under which they were born. There really is no resolution to this paradox. The solution of the left is that the people
may rise up periodically and overthrow the existing legal regime in a revolution. The solution of the right is Carl Schmitts exception:
that sovereignty is exercised by the head of state in putting aside the legal order. But
whichever solution one prefers, this really just defers the dilemma: all sovereignty is built on a
foundation of illegal acts of violence, and it always carries the immanent potential
for arbitrary violence. In 19th-century accounts of rainmakers in Southern Sudan, the function of violence is even
clearer. With rainmakers, as with Shilluk kings, the health of the land is tied to the health of the king. If the rains fail to fall, first
people will bring petitions, then gifts. But after a certain point, if the rains still dont come, the rainmaker must either flee or face a
community united to kill him. It isnt hard to see why rainmakers would want something like the states monopoly on violence or a
retinue of loyal, armed followers. But the crucial point is that insofar as the people could be said to exist, they were essentially
seen as the collective enemy of the king. European explorers in the region often found kings raiding enemy villages only to find that
the villages contained the kings own subjects. They were delivering arbitrary violence to the people they were supposed to protect.
So Graeber reminds us, predatory violence was and would always remain the essence of sovereignty. Such is the hidden logic of
sovereignty. Above all, it depends on the transcendent quality of violence that allows the sovereign to become, as Hobbes put it, a
But this is also means that arbitrary violence is the constitutive principle of
sovereignty, defining the relationship between the sovereign and everything else:
What we call the social peace is really just a truce in a constitutive war between
sovereign power and the people, or nationboth of whom come into existence,
as political entities, in their struggle against each other. There is no inside or outside here. Contra
mortal god.
Schmitt and his friend-enemy distinction, this constitutive war precedes wars between nations and peoples. From the perspective of
sovereign power, there
is no fundamental difference in the relation between a

sovereign and his people, and a sovereign and his enemies , explains Graeber. This
constitutive war is a war the sovereign can never wina forever war that
can never end.
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Shit you really need to fix

1NC Legal Reform

biopolitics, far from complimenting the disciplines, or existing in a tensional

Every interpretative act thus becomes an

the creation of bare life in the exception can

Any legal attempt to subsume or contain the

It is through the law acting as a restraint to disciplinary power that

the law masks the

The alternative is to embrace whatever-being to create the

is referring to something mattering whatever it is, always mattering regardless of what it is

does not depend on any standard of conformity or

biopolitics, far from complimenting the disciplines, or existing in a tensional

Every interpretative act thus becomes an

the creation of bare life in the exception can

Any legal attempt to subsume or contain the

It is through the law acting as a restraint to disciplinary power that

the law masks the

The paradox of sovereignty is the inclusive exclusion of bare

the exception becomes

racialized populations that

the Wests own patterns and habits

The alternative is to embrace whatever-being to create the

is referring to something mattering whatever it is, always mattering regardless of what it is

does not depend on any standard of conformity or

the US government can fling its military might against ghostly

imperial violencethe very

Can we fully understand the proliferating

Every modern empire faces a crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its

Where were the enemies now to justify the continuing escalation of

The 1ACs instance of legal reform fails and legitimizes a

biopolitics, far from complimenting the disciplines, or existing in a tensional

Every interpretative act thus becomes an

law nor fact, and in doing so legitimizing

the creation of bare life in the exception can

Any legal attempt to subsume or contain the

It is through the law acting as a restraint to disciplinary power that

the law masks the

The alternative is to embrace whatever-being to create the

is referring to something mattering whatever it is, always mattering regardless of what it is

does not depend on any standard of conformity or

The 1ACs legitimizes sovereignty and normalizes a permanent

biopolitics, far from complimenting the disciplines, or existing in a tensional

Every interpretative act thus becomes an

law nor fact, and in doing so legitimizing

the creation of bare life in the exception can

Any legal attempt to subsume or contain the

It is through the law acting as a restraint to disciplinary power that

the law masks the

The alternative is to embrace whatever-being to create the

is referring to something mattering whatever it is, always mattering regardless of what it is

does not depend on any standard of conformity or

the The Dilemma

The 1ACs legitimizes sovereignty and normalizes a permanent

biopolitics, far from complimenting the disciplines, or existing in a tensional

act thus becomes an

the creation of bare life in the exception can

Any legal attempt to subsume or contain the

It is through the law acting as a restraint to disciplinary power that

the law masks the

The alternative is to embrace whatever-being to create the

is referring to something mattering whatever it is, always mattering regardless of what it is

does not depend on any standard of conformity or

1NC - Foucauldian Biopower

to us to characterize the juridicopolitical foundation of classical politics.