Agamben KBEFJR

Explanation
The rough version of the argument is that rights and liberties
are proscriptive of identity, bringing individuals into the folds
of goverenance rather than liberating them from a central
power. Think of the gay marriage decision it didnt just
remove a barrier, it enacted a legal regime constructed
around a new subject entitled with particular rights, a rights
bearer.
Fundamental in all rights is either a particularized identity or a
universal description of human nature that constructs the
body or life to be lived. The production of identity is a
biopolitical act in which a bare life is made through the
functioning of sovereign power, the power to decide and define
forms of life.
How do you deal with negative state action? That
description of the aff is fundamentally at odds with
assumptions of liberalism in the aff that portray rights as
protections against the exercise of power. This method of
management facilitates hierarchies between forms of life that
are at the heart of all violence.
Instead, we should accept whatever being, a form of life that is
indivisible, meaning it lacks the ability to be made into an
identity and is always in a state of potentiality never
culminating in a final and determinate form. This allows it to
refuse the imposition of a particular end and opens up a space
for politics that are not confined to the management of forms
of life. **note this is just one of many alternatives
It calls into question the tradition of Western politics rather
than reconfiguring the same power structures that foreclose
liberation.

File Construction
There are a variety of link, impact and alternative arguments
to construct a variety of
1NCs.
Knowledge is power (the good kind of power)

Link SectionTop

Neg State Axn L

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.

--A2 Aff x State

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, 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)
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
On the other hand,

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

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.
makes possible the passage to logos.

Rights L
Struggles for rights and liberties only situate the individual
more deeply within the folds of sovereign powerthis
dominance of biopower makes options within the biopolitical
horizon increasingly meaningless as power comes to operate
through all forms of management.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford UP, p. 120-123)
<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>

Resistance/K L
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.i Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination
that release a pre-existing identity from an oppressive external force. ii 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.iii 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. iv 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. v 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.vi 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.vii 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. viii 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. ix 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. x 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. xi
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.xii 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.xiii In acting on the individual, dispositifs produce an inside as an
interiorisation of the outside.xiv 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.xv 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, xvi 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.xvii This view comes close to a Marxist view of false consciousness, and
ignores the agonistic element to this reading of Foucault. xviii 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.xix 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. xx 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.xxi 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. xxii

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
secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with 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
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
over emptiness or negation, Rentons law.16 In fact, it is the source of the worlds greatest nihilisms.

Liberalism

is the greatest of all nihilisms. In giving us over to

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.
too is and has always been a nihilism. Perhaps it
life,

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

understand- ing 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 histori- cal 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 con- stitutes politics at the domain of ontology. The
constituting power does not merely refer to the ontological possibility for the
constituted modes of con- stituted 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 atten- tion 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 mov- ing 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 con- dition 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 liv- ing 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 formu- lated, 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 ambigu- ous: 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
onto- logical 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.

Death Link
The affs catastrophic impacts are just another tool used by
the government to create a permanent state of exception
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]
One possible way to sketch such a genealogy would be to inscribe its origin and history in the paradigm of the state
of exception. In this perspective, we could trace it back to the Roman principle Salus publica suprema lex public
safety is the highest law and connect it with Roman dictatorship, with the canonistic principle that necessity does
not acknowledge any law, with the comits de salut publique during French revolution and finally with article 48 of
the Weimar republic, which was the juridical ground for the Nazi regime. Such a genealogy is certainly correct, but I
do not think that it could really explain the functioning of the security apparatuses and measures which are familiar

the state of exception was originally conceived as a provisional measure ,

which was meant to cope with an immediate danger in order to restore the normal situation, the security
reasons constitute today a permanent technology of government. When in 2003 I
to us. While

published a book in which I tried to show precisely how the state of exception was becoming in Western
democracies a normal system of government, I could not imagine that my diagnosis would prove so accurate. The
only clear precedent was the Nazi regime. When Hitler took power in February 1933, he immediately proclaimed a
decree suspending the articles of the Weimar constitution concerning personal liberties. The decree was never
revoked, so that the entire Third Reich can be considered as a state of exception which lasted twelve years. What is
happening today is still different.

A formal state of exception is not declared and we see

instead that vague non-juridical notions like the security reasons are used to
install a stable state of creeping and fictitious emergency without any clearly
identifiable danger. An example of such non-juridical notions which are used as
emergency producing factors is the concept of crisis. Besides the juridical meaning of judgment
in a trial, two semantic traditions converge in the history of this term which, as is
evident for you, comes from the Greek verb crino; a medical and a theological one .
In the medical tradition, crisis means the moment in which the doctor has to judge, to
decide if the patient will die or survive. The day or the days in which this decision is
taken are called crisimoi, the decisive days. In theology, crisis is the Last Judgment pronounced by
Christ in the end of times. As you can see, what is essential in both traditions is the
connection with a certain moment in time. In the present usage of the
term, it is precisely this connection which is abolished. The crisis, the judgement,
is split from its temporal index and coincides now with the chronological course of
time, so that not only in economics and politics but in every aspect of social
life, the crisis coincides with normality and becomes, in this way, just a tool of
government. Consequently, the capability to decide once for all disappears and the continuous decision-making
process decides nothing. To state it in paradoxical terms, we could say that , having to face a continuous
state of exception, the government tends to take the form of a perpetual coup
dtat. By the way, this paradox would be an accurate description of what happens here in Greece as well as in
Italy, where to govern means to make a continuous series of small coups dtat.

Society has become thanatopolitical --- death is shamed and prevented at

all costs --- the motivation behind this is fundamentally biopolitical
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. 5)//roetlin

Agamben, on the other hand, addresses the intertwinement of medicine, death, and power through his analysis of

Western culture has become

thanatopolitical, which means that it is dominated by a politics of death that leaves us
more and more exposed to both death and operations of power . For Agamben, death
has become indistinct. It is both meaningful and meaningless, both individual and
anonymous, both visible and invisible. Moreover, because modern society increasingly
exposes individuals to death, liberal democracy becomes increasingly
indistinguishable from totalitarian regimes , an issue I will explore in more detail in Chapter Three.
While the issues that I am addressing life sustaining technologies are merely one symptom of the greater problem
that Agamben is himself concerned with, I hope that shedding more light on this particular space
of power can allow us to think about and eventually challenge the greater politics of
death operating in modern society. In this study I will focus specifically on reconsidering the relations
the modern individuals exposure to death. According to Agamben,

of power surrounding the decision to stop preserving life in the particular space of the hospital room. According to

terminating life is nearly unthinkable in a bio- political society . Thus, as

Benjamin Noys elaborates, we try so hard to preserve life, even at the cost of terrible
suffering, because death is the limit to [bio-political] power (2005, 54). For Foucault,
death has become shameful, it is paramount to giving up, to letting go, or to admitting
defeat (all things given a negative connotation in Western society) (2003c, 247). In this study I would
like to reconsider these claims through Giorgio Agambens argument that death has
become more political as the boundary between life and death has become blurred .
Such a state of being, he claims, exposes the body to death , and yet as I am primarily
Foucaults view,

concerned with saturates the body with power (Agamben 1995, 164).

Death functions as the end of biopolitical control --- allow yourself the
right to die
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. 7)//roetlin
I have paid particular attention to the way that different
mechanisms of power work upon bodies. By making the body the focus of my
examination of power more broadly, I intend to establish a basis for my impending
analysis of bio-power and its relationship to individuals and their right to die. This
Throughout this chapter,

chapter then concludes with a brief synopsis of Giorgio Agambens application and reinvention of Foucaults
concept of bio-power. As I shall describe in this chapter, Foucault and Agamben both share similar concerns with
modern power (though they view sovereignty somewhat differently), however, they come to different conclusions
with regards to an individuals experience of death in modernity. Though I have used Foucault as the primary
framework for this analysis, I will again return to Agamben in subsequent chapters in order to further rethink
Foucaults conclusion that

death is the limit to modern power.

Fear of decreased longevity provides the basis for sovereign power

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. 13)//roetlin

The jurists of the seventeenth century, Foucault contended, were already asking questions about this right of life

what are individuals doing at the level of

the social contract, when they come together to constitute a sovereign, to delegate absolute
power over them to a sovereign, what do they give up, what do they receive (Foucault
and death. The jurists ask: When we enter into a contract,

2003c, 241)? Thus, as Foucault claims, the essential function of the technique and discourse of right was to
dissolve the element of domination in power and to replace that domination, which has to be reduced or masked,
with two things: the legitimate rights of the sovereign on the one hand, and the legal obligation to obey on the

Social contract theory assumes that as individuals we are all

endowed with natural rights. However, as most manifestations of this theory argue, in order to
enter into society individuals must give up certain rights to a sovereign power. While Foucault
other (2003a, 26).

ultimately critiques the view that individuals make this choice for rational reasons (or that they make a choice at
all), he recognized that the articulation of this theory was significant for the genealogy of power that he was
attempting to piece together. Thomas Hobbes was the first modern philosopher to clearly formulate a view of

For Hobbes, humans are essentially self

interested, and being that they are self interested, their highest priority is self
preservation. Though, according to Foucault, Hobbes laments the fact that life prior to society is nasty and
brutish, it is ultimately the prospect of leading a short life that, in Hobbes mind,
frightens individuals enough for them to enter into a social contract at all (2003b,
95-6). It is the will to prefer life to death that ultimately serves as the foundation for
sovereignty. Thus for sovereignty to exist, there must beand this is all there must be,
Foucault reasons, a certain radical will that makes us want to live, even though we cannot
do so unless the other is willing to let us live (2003b, 95-6).
human nature that implied the necessity of a social contract.

Link SectionPolicy

Environment Link
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, 2004 - 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; DOA: 7/16/15 || NDW)
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
Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say

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
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
imposition of one category as opposed to another. 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. .

Courts Link
The courts refusal to look behind the states use of sovereign
violence makes a democracy into a totalitarian state
Rogers, 2008 - PhD, a Lecturer in law at the School of Law and Justice at
Southern Cross University (Nicole; Terrorist v Sovereign: Legal performances in a
state of exception; Law Text; DOA: 7/16/15; Lexis || NDW)
The existence of legal black holes is apparent in two legal performances in which
political activists argued that the decision on the part of the United States and its
allies to wage war on Iraq lacked legitimacy. The courts made it clear that such
decisions could not be reviewed by the judiciary. One of these cases resulted in a statement of reasons
as to [*165] why a law student could not bring a common informer suit against the Prime Minister of Australia in relation to his role
in the Iraq war; the other case was a House of Lords decision on whether the alleged illegitimacy of Britain's act of aggression in Iraq
provided a defence for activists accused of various criminal acts carried out at military and air bases in England. / In 2004,

Eric

Bateman, a law student, attempted to bring a common informer suit against the
Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, under the Common Informers (Parliamentary Disqualifications) Act 1975 (Cth).
In a statement of claim, which the High Court of Australia Registry ultimately rejected, Bateman argued
that Howard's actions, including, most importantly, his decision to follow the United
States into war in Iraq, amounted to an acknowledgment of allegiance to a foreign
power. This, according to Bateman, disqualifed the Prime Minister from continuing to sit as a member of the Australian
Parliament under section 44 of the Australian Constitution. / In his statement of reasons for refusing Eric's application to have a writ

The question which the Constitution would present is

not whether the Prime Minister has conducted himself in a particular way but
whether, as a matter of law, he is 'under' any acknowledgment of 'allegiance,
obedience or adherence to a foreign power' within the meaning of s 44(i) (In the matter of an
application by Eric Bateman: 2-3). / Of course, the Constitution does not 'present' a question so
clearly. The High Court of Australia was expressing, rather, a clear reluctance to judge the legal consequences of the political
of summons issued, Gummow J stated that: /

decision-making of the executive arm of government, a reluctance which is mirrored in the next case study. The 2006 House of Lords
decision in R v Jones also suggests that the courts are not prepared to support attempts by activists to challenge the decision of
their government to engage in war. / In February and March 2003 the appellants carried out various criminal acts on English military
air bases including damaging fuel tankers and bomb trailers, damaging a runway and aircraft, destroying a fence, trespassing and

Although such acts involved force and the

perpetrators had political motives, they were not prosecuted for terrorist offences or
labelled 'terrorists'. The appellants argued that their actions were lawful 'because
they were aimed at preventing a greater evil, namely the war in Iraq and its
probable consequences' (R v Jones: 43). The House of Lords dismissed this argument. Lord Hoffman expressed the
chaining themselves to tanks and vehicles. [*166]

strongest sentiments in response to the defendants' arguments. / Lord Hoffman acknowledged the 'theoretical difficulty in the

holding that the State has acted unlawfully' (R v Jones: 65).

Furthermore, 'the decision to go to war, whether one thinks it was right or wrong,
fell squarely within the discretionary powers of the Crown to defend the realm and
conduct its foreign affairs' (R v Jones: 66). / Lord Hoffman commented that one of the defendants had portrayed
herself as 'a lonely individual resisting the acts of a hostile and alien State to which she owes no loyalty' (R v Jones: 75). He
found this puzzling given that the state in question had 'protected and sustained
her' and 'the legal system which had to judge the reasonableness of her actions was
that of the United Kingdom itself' (R v Jones: 75). Here the judge drew a distinction
between the British state, which he perceived as benevolent, and oppressive
regimes such as the Nazi regime in World War II. This distinction, according to
Agamben, is illusory; he argues that in the age of biopolitics there is an 'inner
solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism' (1998: 10) and, in fact, democracies and
Courts, as part of the State,

totalitarian regimes are indistinguishable and interchangeable (1998: 122). Given the
judge's partial view of the state, it is unsurprising that he and the other judges
condemned the use of force by citizens in an attempt 'to see the law enforced in the
interests of the community at large' and stated that 'the law will not tolerate
vigilantes' (R v Jones: 83). / Lord Hoffman concluded his judgment with strong criticism of
the strategy of activists to use the courts as a forum for challenging the legitimacy
of state acts, including acts of war; he called this 'litigation as the continuation of
protest by other means' (R v Jones: 90). The [*167] court's refusal to look behind the
state's use of force and interrogate the legitimacy of the decision to go to war
delineates a classic legal black hole: an area into which the rule of law does not
extend.

Immigration L
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
with the authorities.

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)

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
(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)
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.

Human Rights L
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
the French Revolution they acquire a new and decisive importance.

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,
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 Nation-State 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 other-namely, 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.>

Terror L
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
per- verse 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 se- curity 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 in- ternational festival was about to
begin and small snippets of film were repeat- edly 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 fa- miliarity 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

pub- lic 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 sce- nario 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 materi- alized

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 de- manding
Osama bin Laden's body "dead or alive." The attack was immediate- ly 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 val- ues, 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.

Democracy Link
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.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford UP, p. 9-11)
<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.
Agamben, 1998 - Professor of philosophy at the University of Verona (Giorgio;
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.>

Deterrence Link
>>Insert specific explanation from lecture exercise<<
The ordering of society carried out through the sovereign force
of law gives license to unchecked anonymous violence in the
name of preserving right.
Agamben 99
[Giorgio prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ. Minnesota Press, p. 112113]

<The concepts of sovereignty and of constituent power, which are at the core
of our political tradition, have to be abandoned or, at least, to be thought all over
again. They mark, in fact, the point of indifference between right and
violence, nature and logos, proper and improper, and as such they do not
designate an attribute or an organ of the juridical system or of the state; they
designate, rather, their own original structure. Sovereignty is the idea of an
undecidable nexus between violence and right, between the living and language-a nexus
that necessarily takes the paradoxical form of a decision regarding the state
of exception (Schmitt) or ban (Nancy) in which the law (language) relates to the
living by withdrawing from it, by a-bandoning it to its own violence and its
own irrelatedness. Sacred life-the life that is presupposed and abandoned
by the law in the state of exception-is the mute carrier of sovereignty; the real
sovereign subject. 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 veiled at the very moment of
the proclamation of the 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.>

Mexico Link
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)
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
According to major U.S. newspapers and policy makers,

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
especially the United States to close down schools and heavily populated areas in order to avert the spread of the flu.

The

association of a disease named after swine with Mexico reinforced the dirty,
unkempt, and uncivilized representations that Gonzalez discusses . Lost on the majority
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
crime, safety, security, and health issues (U.S. Department of State, 2011). It currently advises citizens to delay
unnecessary travel to Mexico because of the drug war. One may expect this type of warning from an
factory farm (Morales, 2009).

agency concerned with its citizens welfare, but it is disturbing when the negative narrative becomes common knowledge and is
included in government military strategic reports. In 2008 the U.S. Department of Defense published a report entitled

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
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
behind, closer to chaos. While proportionally more people are victims of homicide in Mexico than in the United States,

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
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
Mexico, in the United States they are also victims of drug, gang, or random violence and more recently of mass shootings.

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
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
of operations in and exporting from Mexico. In effect this means continuing Mexicos long history as a U.S.
Mexico and how it continues to misdevelop and tear apart the socioeconomic integrity of that society.

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
economic performance, youd have to conclude something is wrong. . . .

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
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
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
Conclusion

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
between Mexico and the United States.

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 drugrelated 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.

Legal Protections Link

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>

Security Link
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 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>

Link SectionK affs

Race/Identity L
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]
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
As such, race, or

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.

Islamophobia L
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]
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
Foucaults

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?
Foucaults framework does not appear to account for other, fundamentally existential (or ontological),

vehicles by which

race is expressed.68 These vehicles may draw on bio-power,69 or they may not, but they can still account
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.

Deleuze Link
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
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
Yet what emerges is, on the one hand, a theory of the

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.

Capitalism Link
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
[Giorgio prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ. Minnesota Press, p. 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.>

Gender/Sex/Race Link
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]

Social Resistance Link

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.

1nc Impact

Biopower Impact1nc
This inscription within biopolitics is at the heart of violence
allowing every citizen to be devalued and eliminated in the
name of sovereign management.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford UP, p. 139-140)
**we dont not agree with the authors use of gendered language
<3.3. 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 lifeof 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.> <139-140>

Individualizing and identity forming methods of governance

are the new predominant forms of power. The production and
administration of life lead to the maneuvering of subjects in
ways that culminate in violence, war, and genocide.
Foucault 78 (Michel late philosopher, History of Sexuality An Introduction Vol.
1, Vintage Books, p. 135-137) **We do not agree with this authors use of gendered
language
For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right
to decide life and death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient
patria potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the right to "dispose" of
the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given them life, so he could

take it away. By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classical
theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form. It was no longer
considered that this power of the sovereign over his (their) subjects could
be exercised in an absolute and unconditional way, but only in cases
where the sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of
rejoinder. If he were threatened by external enemies who sought to over-throw him
or contest his rights, he could then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects
to take part in the defense of the state; without "directly proposing their death," he
was empowered to "expose their life": in this sense, he wielded an "indirect" power
over them of life and death.' But if someone dared to rise up against him and
transgress his laws, then he could exercise a direct power over the offender's life: as
punishment, the latter would be put to death. Viewed in this way, the power of life
and death was not an absolute privilege: it was conditioned by the defense of the
sovereign, and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer
to the prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defend his life
even if this meant the death of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right
that was manifested with the formation of that new juridical being, the sovereign?'
In any case, in its modern form-relative and limited-as in its ancient and absolute
form, the right of life and death is a dissymmetrical one. The sovereign exercised
his (their) right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining
from killing; he (they)evidenced his power over life only through the death
he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the
"power of life and death" was in reality the right to take life or let live. Its
symbol, after all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be referred to a
historical type of society in which power was exercised mainly as a means of
deduction (prelevement), a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion
of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on the
subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time,
bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated, in the privilege to seize hold of life in
order to suppress it. Since the classical age the West has undergone a very
profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" has
tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among
others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and
organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making
them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding
them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel
shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the
exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. 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 ensure, maintain, or
develop its life. Yet 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 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 question of
survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: 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 battlethat 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 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.

Immigration impact1nc
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
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
B. Immigration Enforcement as Immigration Surveillance These four sets of

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,

Ontology Impact1nc
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>
highlighted card^

<<<<see above for

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
everything as its target.

Terrorism follows from the transformation in beings indicative of

the technological age. This transformation remains important at each point of a Heideggerian thinking of
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
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.xxiii Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination
that release a pre-existing identity from an oppressive external force. xxiv 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.xxv 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. xxvi 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. xxvii 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.xxviii 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.xxix 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. xxx 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. xxxi 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. xxxii 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.xxxiii 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. xxxiv 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.xxxv In acting on the individual, dispositifs produce an
inside as an interiorisation of the outside. xxxvi 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.xxxvii 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, xxxviii 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.xxxix This view comes close to a Marxist view of false consciousness, and
ignores the agonistic element to this reading of Foucault. xl 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.xli 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. xlii 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.xliii 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. xliv

Racism Impact1nc
Reduced state security leads to increased racism without
physical papers, actors resort to biological markers for
identification of illegal immigrants
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)
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
(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 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.

Neolib Impact1nc
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
(or just read a cap link IDC)
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>
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 human and non-human existence relatively untouched. As Braun
suggests, 18 governmentality does not merely rely on a rationality of self-control,
but also denotes a material process of govern- ing 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
commodi- fication 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 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 for- est 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>

As a modality of enframing, the process of neoliberalisation has evi- dently 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 ethical order defining the proper constitu- tion of the self. In
neoliberalism, every action human subjects attempt to recognise as an end of their
actions becomes assimilated to the economy of market rationality, to the robust
calculations of costs against the bene- fits. 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 cap- italism is a truth-withoutmeaning, a worldless constellation capable of accommodating itself to any cultural
and material setting. 30 In enframing, a calculative 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 preser- vation
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 chal- lenged 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 inaugu- rated by Nietzsches notion of will to power. Through the will to power,
beings are revealed as makeable, as something dragged under the strength- ening
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

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

understand- ing 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 histori- cal 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 con- stitutes politics at the domain of ontology. The
constituting power does not merely refer to the ontological possibility for the
constituted modes of con- stituted 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 atten- tion 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 mov- ing 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 con- dition 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 liv- ing 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 formu- lated, 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 ambigu- ous: 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
onto- logical 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.

Biopower = Extinction
Biopolitics culminate in extinction.
Dillon 04 (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)
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.

Biopower = War
The sovereign is an endless state of war
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/ //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.

Biopower = All Violence

Biopolitics generates violence on a previously unseen scale
authorizing extermination at will.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford UP, p. 113-115)
<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
[Giorgio prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means Without End, Univ. Minnesota Press, p. 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 Volkrepresentative 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 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>

Biopower = Racism
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 field of

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.
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,

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
in whatever variation (but above all,

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 humanizedbut 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.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford UP, p. 146-147)
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.

Biopower = Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The aff creates a self fulfilling prophesy
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/ //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.

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
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.)//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 adver- saries

We cannot let our enemies strike first. 18

Whereas 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.

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.
Yet the need for homeland security is tied to our enduring vulnerability . 22

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
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 extraterritorial 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, pass- port, 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
Department,

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 reverse is

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
happening: the

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
matter little without some sort of standard of comparison.

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
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
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.
141)//roetlin
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.
ABSTRACT. This article argues that

1nc Alt

AltDestituent 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 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
ergon or if he is not instead argos, without work, inoperative.

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
state power, a new historical epoch is founded. Thus,

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
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
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.
support and power.

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.

AltPlaying with the Law1nc

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 ,

Agamben argues, by reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony. Play , however, transforms
synchrony into diachrony by breaking the tie between past and present . This production
ritualistic dimension of

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
The ritualistic dimension of saw is important for another reason as well. 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 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

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
to be law and blurs at all points with life. In the Kafka essay,

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 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 law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive

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
point here is that

precisely what the force-of-law (which keeps the law 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 own strategy, to study and deactivate it, to play

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
with it.

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).

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
grow into our universalized exception. It cant be a matter of refraining from reducing people to bare
moralizing discourse. For Agamben,

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

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
inseparability of law and life.

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

Agamben makes the move that Benjamin

explicitly describing what would remain after the violent destruction of
normativity itself. 'Play' names the unknowable end of 'divine violence' . Agamben himself
is the task of study, or of play.70 In proposing this playful relation
avoids:

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

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
the law in the figure of love.'72 Despite Agamben's apparent hesitation,

gives it its (literally) revolutionary force: Agamben notes that play 'overturns' the sacred 'to the point where it can
plausibly be defined as "topsy-turvy sacred".'74 This mediation between the sacred and the secular is the function

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
that

as the end has become unknowable through its forgetting. This account also 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

law that has opened itself to play 'no

longer has force or application'77 depends upon the logic that, for Agamben, characterizes Kantian
'authentic' work of art. Furthermore, Agamben's claim that

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.

AltResistance
Individual resistance and analysis is the only way out --death bad misses the point, death has been politicized
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. 7)//roetlin
death is not
a natural or biological moment but a political decision . In order to tackle the nature of this
decision I look at the work of Peter Singer who compares two seemingly contradictory ethics, the ethics of the
sanctity of life and the quality of life ethic. An Agambenean analysis of these ethics however,
suggest some problems that Singer may have not been able to articulate because he fails to take
into account the political nature of death. One of the criticisms that has been lodged against
Singer is that his ethics closely parallels Nazi eugenics programs in which the medical
establishment made decisions on whose life was worth living . This criticism bridges the gap
between Singers work and the point I have been making through this piece bio- power is intimately
enmeshed with sovereignty. Foucault saw this combination at work primarily in totalitarian regimes.
In the third and final chapter of this study I examine how death is politicized. As Agamben argues,

However, as Agamben argues, the distinctions between totalitarian regimes and democracies are crumbling. I argue

modern power is increasingly an amalgamation between the biopolitical and the thanatopolitical. For power can both manage life and expose us to
death. What is crucial to take from this analysis is that we must formulate some sort of
individual resistance to this power, even though techniques of modern bio-power (bureaucratic
in my Conclusion that

planning, statistical analysis, population control) may expose us to death as a population rather than as individuals.

This resistance must be something greater than simply a call for physician assisted suicide or an appeal for
individual ownership of our bodies, it must first center on an engagement with what about life is
really worth preserving.

AltStudy Law
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
de- bate 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 maintain- ing the law in a spectral life, can no
longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that 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
reading of the new attorney.

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).

AltReps?
Challenging representations and hegemonic narratives allows
us to challenge current power structures
Agamben, 2000 professor of philosophy at the College International de
Philosophie in Paris (Giorgio, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, p. 93-95)
Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps
because animals are always already in the open and do not try to take possession of
their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it. That is why they
are not interested in mirrors, in the image as image. Human beings, on the other

hand, separate images from things and give them a name precisely because
they want to recognize themselves, that is, they want to take possession of
their own very appearance. Human beings thus transform the open into a
world, that is, into the battlefield of a political struggle without quarter. This
struggle, whose object is truth, goes by the name of History. It is happening more
and more often that in pornographic photographs the portrayed subjects, by a
calculated stratagem, look into the camera, thereby exhibiting the awareness of
being exposed to the gaze. This unexpected gesture violently belies the fiction that
is implicit in the consumption of such images, according to which the one who looks
surprises the actors while remaining unseen by them: the latter, rather, knowingly
challenge the voyeurs gaze and force him to look them in the eyes. In that precise
moment, the insubstantial nature of the human face suddenly comes to light. The
fact that the actors look into the camera means that they show that they are
simulating; nevertheless, they paradoxically appear more real precisely to the
extent to which they exhibit this falsification. The same procedure is used today in
advertising: the image appears more convincing if it shows openly its own artifice.
In both cases, the one who looks is confronted with something that concerns
unequivocally the essence of the face, the very structure of truth. We may call
tragicomedy of appearance the fact that the face uncovers only and precisely
inasmuch as it hides, and hides to the extent to which it uncovers. In this way, the
appearance that ought to have manifested human beings becomes for them instead
a resemblance that betrays them and in which they can no longer recognize
themselves. Precisely because the face is solely the location of truth, it is also and
immediately the location of simulation and of an irreducible impropriety. This does
not mean, however, that appearance dissimulares what it uncovers by making it
look like what in reality it is not: rather, what human beings truly are is nothing
other than this dissimulation and this disquietude within the appearance. Because

human beings neither are nor have to be any essence, any nature, or any
specific destiny, their condition is the most empty and the most insubstantial
of all: it is the truth. What remains hidden from them is not something behind
appearance, but rather appearing itself, that is, their being nothing other than a
face. The task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to

cause appearance itself to appear. The face, truth, and exposition are today
the objects of a global civil war, whose battlefield is social life in its entirety,
whose storm troopers are the media, whose victims are all the peoples of the

Earth. Politicians, the media establishment, and the advertising industry have
understood the insubstantial character of the face and of the community it opens
up, and thus they transform it into a miserable secret that they must make sure to
control at all costs. State power today is no longer founded on the monopoly of

the legitimate use of violence a monopoly that states share increasingly

willingly with other nonsovereign organizations such as the United Nations
and terrorist organizations; rather, it is founded above all on the control of
appearance (of doxa). The fact that politics constitutes itself as an
autonomous sphere goes hand in hand with the separation of the face in the
world of spectacle a world in which human communication is being
separated from itself. Exposition thus transforms itself into a value that is
accumulated in images and in the media, while a new class of bureaucrats
jealously watches over its management.

AltWhatever Being1nc
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.>

Heidegger Versions

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
Agamben 98 (Giorgio Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford UP, p. 120-123)
<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>
highlighted card^

<<<<see above for

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
time.

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

longer any friction.

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
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
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.xlv Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination

that release a pre-existing identity from an oppressive external force. xlvi 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.xlvii 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. xlviii 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. xlix 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. l
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.li 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. lii 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. liii 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. liv 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. lv
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.lvi 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.lvii In acting on the individual, dispositifs produce an inside as an
interiorisation of the outside.lviii 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.lix 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, lx 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.lxi This view comes close to a Marxist view of false consciousness, and
ignores the agonistic element to this reading of Foucault. lxii 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.lxiii 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. lxiv 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.lxv 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. lxvi

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
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.lxvii Liberation is used to refer to forms of resistance to domination
that release a pre-existing identity from an oppressive external force. lxviii 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.lxix 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. lxx 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. lxxi 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.lxxii 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.lxxiii 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. lxxiv 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. lxxv 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. lxxvi 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.lxxvii 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. lxxviii 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.lxxix In acting on the individual, dispositifs produce an
inside as an interiorisation of the outside. lxxx 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.lxxxi 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, lxxxii 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.lxxxiii This view comes close to a Marxist view of false consciousness, and
ignores the agonistic element to this reading of Foucault. lxxxiv 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. lxxxv 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.lxxxvi 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. lxxxvii 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.lxxxviii

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
secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with 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
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
over emptiness or negation, Rentons law.16 In fact, it is the source of the worlds greatest nihilisms.

Liberalism

is the greatest of all nihilisms. In giving us over to

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.
too is and has always been a nihilism. Perhaps it
life,

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
understand- ing 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 histori- cal 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 con- stitutes politics at the domain of ontology. The
constituting power does not merely refer to the ontological possibility for the
constituted modes of con- stituted 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 atten- tion 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 mov- ing 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 con- dition 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 liv- ing 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 formu- lated, 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 ambigu- ous: 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
onto- logical 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.

Perm Answers

A2: 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
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 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
Agamben, 2000 - Professor of philosophy at the University of Verona (Giorgio;
Means without End: Notes on Politics; conference; Pg. 113; DOA: 7/16/15 || NDW)
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 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),

A2: 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.

Co-Option DA
Pure alt framing is keythe state coops individual action
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/ //SRSL)

No War but the Forever War What exactly is one supposed to make of John
Brennans admission that the war against Al Qaeda will continue for another
decade? How did the AUMF and the Patriot Act together come to constitute
something like Americas Article 48, creating a permanent state of
exception in which something like the NSAs giant automated Stasi is
simply accepted as the new normal? How did drones become an inevitable part of the near future in New
York City? After all, the War on Terror really isnt anything like a war at all at least, not in
the conventional imaginary of nation states commanding disciplined military forces
on established fields of battle. The United States commands a degree of military
power and comparative dominance simply unprecedented in human historywhat
is elegantly referred to, in the anodyne language of military planners, as
asymmetry. There are no strictly defined battlefields, and the formal enemies in
the War on Terror have rarely amounted to more than the insurgent army of a
deposed dictator (funded and armed by the U.S., albeit long ago) and a few hundred
religious students in the mountains of Central Asia . It is in fact genuinely strange how resiliently this
conventional image seems to persist in both popular and intellectual imagination. Even scholarly responses to the War on Terror
begin from the assumption that something new and strange is happening when battlefields and opponents alike are no longer
delimited but rather always and everywhere. If one limits oneself to legal documents, this is pretty much the only possible
conclusion.

The conventional imagery really seems to be most useful in obscuring the

more fundamental realities of what war really is. In part, war consists of the far
more common practice of civil wars, guerrilla wars, genocide and internal repression
but also, in a larger sense, the fundamental state of war between the sovereign
and his people that is the originary, constitutive state for sovereign power itself . The
forever war, then, has effectively allowed the United States to claim sovereignty to farthest reaches of the earth. Certainly, this is
not a question purely of drones: the apparatus also consists of a deep surveillance
state, total international digital surveillance, a military larger than the combined
militaries of the rest of the world, and extralegal rendition and detention programs.
But at the edges of this arrangement, one finds Agambens homo sacer, Fiskesjs
barbarians: those excluded from the legal order, stripped of rights, subject to death
at any timethe point at which an empire converts those beyond its reach into
obedient subjects or corpses. This is the logic of sovereign violence taken to its
most extremeand not insignificantly, this has been accomplished in part by
euphemizing that violence, whether in the sanitized parlance of the military
focused obstruction, targeted killing, kinetic actionor the more artful,
ideological euphemization by which assassination programs become complex and
debatable moral issues in the liberal press. It should come as no surprise that this has been accompanied
by the infinite expansion of an apparatus of domestic surveillance and control unprecedented in human history. One should

never forget that the instruments of sovereigntydrones, militarized police, mass

surveillance apparatuswere always directed inwards as much as outwards,
because the security state secures one thing: the safety of the sovereign above all.
From the perspective of sovereign power, there is no inside and there is no outside. There is only the violence to
which we are all subject.

A2: Krishna
The aligment of progressive projects with the established
political order makes systemic change impossible and
guarantees the preservation of the status quo.
Agamben 2k [Giorgio prof. philosophy European Graduate School, Means
Without End, Univ. Minnesota Press, p. 136-138]

<Today, the political parties that define themselves as "progressive" and

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 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

It is important to be able to distinguish between defeat and dishonor. The victory of

the right in the 1994 political elections was a defeat for the left, which does not
imply that because of this it was also a dishonor. If, as is certainly the case, this
defeat also involved dishonor, that is because it marked the conclusive moment of a
process of involution that had already begun many years ago. There was dishonor
because the defeat did not conclude a struggle over opposite positions, but rather
decided only whose turn it was to put into practice the same ideology of the
spectacle, of the market, and of enterprise. One might see in this nothing other than
a necessary consequence of a betrayal that had already begun in the years of
Stalinism. Perhaps so. What concerns us here, however, is only the evolution that
has taken place be-ginning with the end of the 1970s. It is since then, in fact, that
the complete corruption of minds has taken that hypocritical form and that voice of
reason and common sense that today goes under the name of progressivism.

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 to power slowly took shape: 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 in the same way that the working class was spiritually and physically
disarmed by German social democracy before being handed over to Nazism. And
while the citizens of goodwill are being called on to keep watch and to
wait for phantasmatic frontal attacks, the right has already crossed the
lines through the breach that the left itself had opened up.>

A2: Pragmatism
Overcoming sovereign power is impossible as long as political
options are confined to the application of praxis to sovereign
goals. The very relationship between liberatory potential and
sovereignty must be abandoned in order to achieve a politics
of pure means where life is not reduced to a specific form to be
judged and regulated.
Agamben 98 (Giorgio Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford UP, p. 43-44)
<The strength of Negri's book lies instead in the final perspective it opens insofar as
it shows how 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
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 political philosophy to first philosophy (or, if one likes, politics is returned to its
ontological position). 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.> <43-44>

A2: Reform
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, omak]

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.)

A2: 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 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/ //SRSL)
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
mortal god.

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
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.

A2: Inevitability Claims

TURN: The dominance of biopolitics is what has made these
institutions inevitable. Extend our 1NC Caldwell evidence.
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.
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 resisted.
Barry, Osborne, & 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)

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 post-fordism,
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

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
marked in Foucaults thought.

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.

Framework Answers

Alt = Pre-Req
Were a pre-req to a productive politics
Agamben, 1998 professor of philosophy at the College International de
Philosophie in Paris (Giorgio, Homo Sacer, Stanford University Press, p. 10)//roetlin
Foucaults death kept him from showing how he would have developed the concept and study of biopolitics. In any

the politicization of bare life as such

constitutes 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 terrain biopolitics on which they were
formed. Only within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decide whether the
categories 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.
case, however, the entry of zo into the sphere of the polis

Alternative

Whatever Being k2 Ptx

-- 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. 12)

<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.

A2 Ks of Agamben

AT: 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
state of exception still holds a relation to law, so too does homo sacer.

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, 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

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
precedes either of them.

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-of-agamben/)///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.

AT: Foucault Wrong

Agambens theory of Biopower si fundamentally different than
Foucoults analysis
Kendrick 2012 Victoria University of Wellington (Foucault, Biopower & IR)
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 dehistoricises 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.

AT: 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).

AT: Holocaust Trivialization

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
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.
Supra fn. 4, at p. 181, passim ,

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
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.
144-146)//roetlin
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
Taking his cue from Michel Foucault, Agamben maintains that

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
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
naked life of homo sacer .

AT: 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)
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
To draw out this relationship between biopolitics, capitalism and resistance I begin with the zombie's mythic origins in Haiti.

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
increasingly problematic. On the one hand, no doubt remains that

Schmitt held deeply entrenched

antisemitic views throughout his life. As such, Gross's study serves as a warning against the uncritical
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.

i Michel Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, in:
Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Robert
Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.282-283.
ii Aurelia Armstrong, Beyond Resistance: A Response to ieks Critique of Foucaults
Subject of Freedom, Parrhesia 5 (2008), pp.19-31, 22.
iii Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, pp.283-284.
iv Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.22-23.
v Wendy Brown, States of Injury: power and freedom in late modernity, (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1995), p.27.
vi Foucault, The Subject and Power, p.212.
vii Michel Foucault, Interview with Michel Foucault, in: Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, vol. 3: Power, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 2002), pp.241-242.
viii Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984,
vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.)
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.315-316.
ix Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, p.298.
x Foucault, The Subject and Power, p.221-222.
xi Op. cit., p.216.
xii Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression, in: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, vol 2: Aesthetics, Ethics and Epistemology, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.)
(London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.73.
xiii Deleuze, Foucault, pp.96-97.
xiv Deleuze, Foucault, p.103; Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.26-27.
xv Deleuze, Foucault, p.101, 103.
xvi Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, p.315.
xvii Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.28-29.

xviii See Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
Rodney Livingstone (tr.), (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
xix Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.28-29.
xx Michel Foucault, Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations, In: The Foucault Reader,
Lydia Davis (tr.), Paul Rabinow (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p.388.
xxi Michel Foucault, Useless to Revolt?, In: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984:
Power, J. D.Faubion (ed.) (London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.449-453.
xxii Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
p.174.

xxiii Michel Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, in:
Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Robert
Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.282-283.
xxiv Aurelia Armstrong, Beyond Resistance: A Response to ieks Critique of Foucaults
Subject of Freedom, Parrhesia 5 (2008), pp.19-31, 22.
xxv Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, pp.283-284.
xxvi Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.22-23.
xxvii Wendy Brown, States of Injury: power and freedom in late modernity, (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1995), p.27.
xxviii Foucault, The Subject and Power, p.212.
xxix Michel Foucault, Interview with Michel Foucault, in: Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, vol. 3: Power, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 2002), pp.241-242.
xxx Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.)
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.315-316.
xxxi Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, p.298.
xxxii Foucault, The Subject and Power, p.221-222.
xxxiii Op. cit., p.216.
xxxiv Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression, in: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, vol 2: Aesthetics, Ethics and Epistemology, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.)

(London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.73.

xxxv Deleuze, Foucault, pp.96-97.
xxxvi Deleuze, Foucault, p.103; Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.26-27.
xxxvii Deleuze, Foucault, p.101, 103.
xxxviii Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, p.315.
xxxix Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.28-29.
xl See Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
Rodney Livingstone (tr.), (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
xli Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.28-29.
xlii Michel Foucault, Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations, In: The Foucault Reader,
Lydia Davis (tr.), Paul Rabinow (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p.388.
xliii Michel Foucault, Useless to Revolt?, In: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984:
Power, J. D.Faubion (ed.) (London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.449-453.
xliv Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
p.174.

xlv Michel Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, in:
Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Robert
Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.282-283.
xlvi Aurelia Armstrong, Beyond Resistance: A Response to ieks Critique of Foucaults
Subject of Freedom, Parrhesia 5 (2008), pp.19-31, 22.
xlvii Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, pp.283-284.
xlviii Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.22-23.
xlix Wendy Brown, States of Injury: power and freedom in late modernity, (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1995), p.27.
l Foucault, The Subject and Power, p.212.
li Michel Foucault, Interview with Michel Foucault, in: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, vol. 3: Power, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 2002), pp.241-242.

lii Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984,
vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.)
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.315-316.
liii Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, p.298.
liv Foucault, The Subject and Power, p.221-222.
lv Op. cit., p.216.
lvi Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression, in: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, vol 2: Aesthetics, Ethics and Epistemology, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.)
(London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.73.
lvii Deleuze, Foucault, pp.96-97.
lviii Deleuze, Foucault, p.103; Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.26-27.
lix Deleuze, Foucault, p.101, 103.
lx Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, p.315.
lxi Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.28-29.
lxii See Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
Rodney Livingstone (tr.), (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
lxiii Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.28-29.
lxiv Michel Foucault, Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations, In: The Foucault Reader,
Lydia Davis (tr.), Paul Rabinow (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p.388.
lxv Michel Foucault, Useless to Revolt?, In: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984:
Power, J. D.Faubion (ed.) (London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.449-453.
lxvi Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
p.174.

lxvii Michel Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, in:
Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Robert
Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.282-283.
lxviii Aurelia Armstrong, Beyond Resistance: A Response to ieks Critique of Foucaults
Subject of Freedom, Parrhesia 5 (2008), pp.19-31, 22.
lxix Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, pp.283-284.

lxx Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.22-23.

lxxi Wendy Brown, States of Injury: power and freedom in late modernity, (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1995), p.27.
lxxii Foucault, The Subject and Power, p.212.
lxxiii Michel Foucault, Interview with Michel Foucault, in: Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, vol. 3: Power, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 2002), pp.241-242.
lxxiv Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.)
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.315-316.
lxxv Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, p.298.
lxxvi Foucault, The Subject and Power, p.221-222.
lxxvii Op. cit., p.216.
lxxviii Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression, in: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, vol 2: Aesthetics, Ethics and Epistemology, Robert Hurley and Paul Rabinow (eds.)
(London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.73.
lxxix Deleuze, Foucault, pp.96-97.
lxxx Deleuze, Foucault, p.103; Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.26-27.
lxxxi Deleuze, Foucault, p.101, 103.
lxxxii Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, p.315.
lxxxiii Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.28-29.
lxxxiv See Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
Rodney Livingstone (tr.), (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
lxxxv Armstrong, Beyond Resistance, pp.28-29.
lxxxvi Michel Foucault, Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations, In: The Foucault
Reader, Lydia Davis (tr.), Paul Rabinow (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p.388.
lxxxvii Michel Foucault, Useless to Revolt?, In: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984:
Power, J. D.Faubion (ed.) (London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp.449-453.

lxxxviii Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), p.174.