Rasch K

BLACK KNIGHTS 07/08 team biopower aka soft power aka martin luther king, JR
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INDEX
SHELL (1/3).............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................2
SHELL (2/3).............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................4
SHELL (3/3).............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................5
DOTY SHELL (1/4).................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................8
DOTY SHELL (2/4)................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................11
DOTY SHELL (3/4)...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................12
DOTY SHELL (4/4)...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................15
DIPLOMACY SHELL (1/5)...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................16
DIPLOMACY SHELL (2/5)...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................18
DIPLOMACY SHELL (3/5)...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................19
DIPLOMACY SHELL (4/5)...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................21
DIPLOMACY SHELL (5/5)...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................22
LINK: Terrorism = Uniquely Bad...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................23
LINK: Depoliticization of Enemies........................................................................................................................................................................................................................25
LINK: “War on <insert abstract idea here>”..........................................................................................................................................................................................................26
LINK: Peace Process..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................28
LINK: Prevention of War........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................29
LINK: Environment/Nature....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................30
Overviews (use sparingly)......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................31
2NC Overview....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................31
2NR Overview....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................31
Links Overview...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................32
Framework..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................35
Generic................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................35
Representations (Doty).......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................36
Violence Is Inevitable (sorry).................................................................................................................................................................................................................................38
IMPX: Trust Me It’s Bad........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................42
AT: Schmitt Indicts.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................43
Schmitt’s alt impossible/outdated.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................43
Schmitt’s a Nazi..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................45
You demonize Liberal Cosmopolitanism............................................................................................................................................................................................................46
Enmity = totalitarianism/violence/fascism..........................................................................................................................................................................................................47
Nietzsche Add-on....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................50
AT Perm: Block (1/2)..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................55
AT Perm: Block (2/2)..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................56
AT Perm: Reps Come First.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................57
AT Perm: Critical Advocacy...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................58
Generic................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................59
War......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................61
Nuclear Weapons.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................64
Extinction............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................66
Oh, you’re a king you say? Well you will not believe what I have in store for you!
It is to your exact specifications!
Rasch K 2/67
SHELL (1/3)
SUPPRESSING REGIONAL VIOLENCE THROUGH CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT CREATES THE UNITED STATES AS
AN ARBITER OF PEACE, PUSHES HARMS UNDERGROUND, AND JUSTIFIES ALL VIOLENCE
NOORANI 05 [Yaseen, Professor of Near East Studies at University of Arizona, Tucson “The Rhetoric of Security,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 5.1]
The U.S. government's rhetoric of global security draws its power from simultaneously instantiating Schmitt's vision of the political as non-
normative national self-preservation and the liberal vision of the political as normative civil relations. The consequence is not that this rhetoric disavows political
antagonism within the nation, as Schmitt would have it (though there is an element of this), but that it disavows political antagonism on the global
level. I argued above that the positing of a non-normative situation of national self-preservation, the same as that of a person being murdered, is insupportable due to the
inescapable presence of a moral ideal in defining the nation's self and deciding what threatens it. This applies to all justifications of action grounded in national security.
The U.S. rhetoric of security, however, lifts the paradox to a global level, and illustrates it more forcefully, by designating the
global order's moral ideal, its "way of life" that is under threat, as civil relations, freedom and peace, but then
making the fulcrum of this way of life an independent entity upon whose survival the world's way of life
depends—the United States. Just as an aggressor puts himself outside of normativity by initiating violence, so is the victim not bound by any norms in
defending his life. As the location of the self of the world order that must be preserved, the United States remains unobligated by the norms
of this order as long as it is threatened by terrorism. So long as it struggles for the life of the world order, therefore, the United States remains external
to this order, just as terrorism remains external to the world order so long as it threatens a universal state of war.
Without the United States everyone is dead. Why should this be? The reason is that the United States fully embodies the values underlying world peace—"freedom,
democracy, and free enterprise" (National Security 2002, i)—and is the key to their realization in the global domain. These values are [End Page 30] universal, desired by all
and the standard for all. "[T]he United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere" (National Security 2002,
3). The fact that the United States "possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world" (1) cannot therefore be fortuitous. It cannot but derive
from the very founding of the United States in universal principles of peace and its absolute instantiation of these principles. This results in "unparalleled responsibilities,
obligations, and opportunity" (1). In other words, the United States as a nation stands, by virtue of its internal constitution, at the forefront of world history in advancing
human freedom. It is the subject of history. Its own principle of organization is the ultimate desire of humanity, and the development of this principle is always at its highest
stage in and through the United States. For this reason, the values of the United States and its interests always coincide, and these in turn coincide with the interests of world
peace and progress. The requirements of American security reflect "the union of our values and our national interests," and their effect is to "make the world not just safer
but better" (1).
The United States therefore is uniquely charged by history to maintain and advance world peace and universal freedom.
America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic
peace—a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman. America acts in this cause with friends and allies at our side, yet we understand our special
calling: This great republic will lead the cause of freedom. (Bush 2004a)
America can lead the cause of freedom because it is the cause of freedom. "American values and American interests lead in the same direction: We stand for human liberty"
(Bush 2003b). For this reason, it has no "ambitions," no private national interests or aspirations that would run contrary to the interests of the world as a whole. It undertakes
actions, like the invasion of Iraq, that further no motive but the cause of humanity as a whole. "We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of
[End Page 31] that country to its own people" (Bush 2003a). In this way, the United States is distinct from all other nations, even though all of humanity espouses the same
values. Only the United States can be depended upon for ensuring the endurance of these values because they are the sole basis of its existence. "Others might flag in the
face of the inevitable ebb and flow of the campaign against terrorism. But the American people will not" (NSCT 2003, 29).
Any threat to the existence of the United States is therefore a threat to the existence of the world order, which is to say, the values that make this order possible. It is not
merely that the United States, as the most powerful nation of the free world, is the most capable of defending it. It is rather that the United States is the supreme agency
advancing the underlying principle of the free order. The United States is the world order's fulcrum, and therefore the key to its existence and perpetuation. Without the
United States, freedom, peace, civil relations among nations, and the possibility of civil society are all under threat of extinction. This is why the most abominable terrorists
and tyrants single out the United States for their schemes and attacks. They know that the United States is the guardian of liberal values. In the rhetoric of security, therefore,
the survival of the United States, its sheer existence, becomes the content of liberal values. In other words, what does it mean to espouse liberal values in the context of the
present state of world affairs? It means to desire fervently and promote energetically the survival of the United States of America. When the world order struggles to
preserve its "self," the self that it seeks to preserve, the primary location of its being, is the United States.
Conferring this status upon the United States allows the rhetoric of security to insist upon a threat to the existence of the world order as a whole while confining the non-
normative status that arises from this threat to the United States alone. The United States—as the self under threat—remains external to the normative relations by which the
rest of the world continues to be bound. The United States is both a specific national existence struggling for its life and normativity itself, which makes it coextensive with
the world order as a whole. For this reason, any challenge to U.S. world dominance would be a challenge to world peace and is thus impermissible. We read in The National
Security Strategy that the United States [End Page 32] will "promote a balance of power that favors freedom" (National Security 2002, 1). And later, we find out what is
meant by such a balance of power.
The United States must and will maintain the capability to defeat any attempt by an enemy—whether a state or non-state actor—to impose its will on the United States, our
allies, or our friends. . . . Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power
of the United States. (National Security 2002, 30)
The relationship between the United States and the world order, then, is similar to the relationship in Hobbes between the Leviathan and the civil society that it embodies
and represents. The individual members of this civil society are collectively the author of all of the acts of the Leviathan. Yet they have no authority to influence or oppose
the actions of the Leviathan, because they have contracted with each other to give over all of their powers to it. The Leviathan itself remains outside their social contract.
Similarly, insofar as the United States embodies the normativity of the world order and ensures its existence, the members of this order have implicitly agreed to its
protection of their civil existence, since this is the only rational thing to do. Therefore, when America's own existence is at stake, they cannot question the decisions it takes
to preserve itself, even when these decisions impinge on their own autonomy.15
The externality of the United States to the world order, its national status as the agent of freedom, means that it must both enhance its independence and autonomy, and
reshape the world in its own image. "We are protected from attack only by vigorous action abroad, and increased vigilance at home" (Bush 2002a). Enhancing its own
agency means making itself more free, but what this requires is increased self-discipline. The United States must become more impervious to fear and external coercion by
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eliminating its internal vulnerabilities to them. The effect of this imperative is to provide justification for bringing an ever greater number of domains of national life within
the purview of national security. At the same time, the United States must make the world more like itself by [End Page 33] spreading freedom abroad. "We know that free
peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies" (Bush 2004b). This requires the strengthening of American military power
and the use of this power against enemies. "We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness"
(Bush 2003c). The
primary field for the exercise of U.S. power in reshaping the world is the Middle East, because
this is the region most engulfed in the state of war. The Middle East thereby remains outside of the world
order and threatens its dissolution.
The Middle East will either become a place of progress and peace, or it will be an exporter of violence and terror that takes more lives in America and in other free
nations. The triumph of democracy and tolerance in Iraq, in Afghanistan and beyond would be a grave setback for international terrorism.... Everywhere that freedom takes
hold, terror will retreat. (Bush 2003c)
In other words, the Middle East can either become a reflection of the United States or remain its polar
opposite. In the latter mode, however, it mirrors the United States more fully, though inversely. As a state of war outside the world order, it
has the capacity to transform the world just as the United States does. Just as the United States exports
peace and freedom, in the form of military conquests and economic goods, the Middle East exports violence
and terror. Whereas the United States is free of "ambitions" in its actions, the terrorists of the Middle East are driven by "hateful ambitions." The Middle East, in
effect, signifies the absence of all the values embodied by the United States, and herein lies its supreme danger. Yet it is in no way irredeemable. Once the Middle East is
reshaped into a lesser replica of the United States, it will take its humble position in the world order. The
taming of the Middle East, therefore,
requires intensive military action there, but also requires preventing the Middle East and its state of war
from penetrating the borders of the United States.
Reshaping the world order goes beyond this as well: it entails the disciplining of the members of this order,
whose tendencies toward laxity and fragmentation provide openings for terrorism. The United States must
[End Page 34] bring the world into ever greater conformity with the values that will preserve and advance the
world. This means not only securing cooperation for U.S. military and police actions by "convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities"
(National Security 2002, 6), but reorganizing the world according to the principles of free enterprise and free trade. Political antagonism can be
eliminated through its transformation into economic competition. "We have our best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the
seventeenth century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war" (Bush 2002b). A world order based on economic competition
instead of military competition enables the reign of the politics of civil relations, leading to peace and prosperity for all. In this order, no nation will need any longer to
worry about the politics of self-preservation—that is, no nation but the United States.
Reshaping the world order means above all the exertion of greater control and surveillance over individuals worldwide. For the rhetoric of security is at bottom a discourse
of our own redemption from the irrational tendencies that threaten collective existence, which is the whole purpose of creating civil authority in the first place. Now that
individuals who have succumbed to irrationality are capable of destroying civilization, national existence must be organized not just to fend off the threat of other nations
but the threat of any individual. This means that the internal moral struggle of all individuals all over the world comes under the purview of U.S. national security. As we
have seen, the ultimate threat "lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology" (National Security 2002, ii). "Radicalism" here simply means the irrational desire for
violence, and "technology" is the dangerous power that can free us or enslave us. The United States has superior technology. This technology enables the United States to
wage wars against tyranny with minimal injury to the innocent and to its own forces, and to neutralize the desire for violence and the fear that inhabit everyone. So long as
morally disordered individuals may possess inordinate power, we all come under their thrall due to the fear that we feel. But the
world authority that we
have erected has the capacity to remove violence and irrationality from the political realm and restore to us
our agency, without which we are as good as dead.
Rasch K 4/67
SHELL (2/3)
WAR IS NOT WAGED ON BEHALF OF FRIEND/ENEMY DISTINCTIONS; IT IS WAGED ON BEHALF OF THE ABSENCE OF
THEM. HUMANITARIAN WARFARE CANNOT HAVE HUMAN ENEMIES SO A CATEGORY OF INUMANITY MUST BE
CREATED OUTSIDE OF ITSELF. POLITICAL ACTIONS BASED CONCRETELY ON IDEALS OF PEACE HAVE
CONTINUALLY PRODUCED ONLY MORE WAR. THIS DRIVE TO END WAR WILL INEVITABLY PRODUCE INCREASINGLY
VIOLENT FORMS OF CONFLICT AS WARS OF ANNIHILATION ESCALATE IN INTENSITY TO APOCALYPSE.
ODYSSEOS, 2004. (Louiza, Department of Politics and International Studies, Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University of London. “Carl Schmitt and
Martin Heidegger on the Line(s) of Cosmopolitanism and the War on Terror.” Conference on the International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt. September 9-11. P.PDF)
This section examines the claim that the war on terror does not indicate a crisis in cosmopolitanism but rather is the quintessential liberal cosmopolitan war; but it pursues
this claim in a different way than the critiques noted above.79 It suggests that, despite the prominent sense in which the war on terror is portrayed as the antithesis of
cosmopolitan orientations and achievements, there are strong relationships between cosmopolitanism and the pursuit of the war on terror. This section examines these in
turn. The first relationship arises from their joint location in a long line of thought and policy aiming to articulate an outlook and a political programme of the modern world
in which violence and war dissipate, in which war is gradually replaced by rules and principled behaviour.80 This, Hans Joas has eloquently called, ‘the dream of a
modernity without violence’.81 That cosmopolitanism seeks ‘perpetual’ peace, is often acknowledged through the debts that
cosmopolitan thinking owes to Immanuel Kant’s understanding of cosmopolitan law.82 That the war on terror is located in this
understanding of modernity is less apparent, but nevertheless becomes obvious in the apocalyptic-sounding
framing of the Bush Administration’s understanding of the fight on terrorism as a fight that will not be
abandoned until terrorism is rooted out. The occurrence of September 11th in the seat of this dream, the United States of America, was an
unforgivable affront to this liberal modernist vision of perpetual peace. Therefore, both the war on terror and liberal cosmopolitanism are located within a modernist vision
of the end of war. At the same time, however, the war on terror is central to the very paradox of liberal modernity
and war which that has preoccupied realist, Marxist and poststructuralist thought. A recent articulation of this paradox is offered by Julian Reid who notes this
disturbing paradox: [a] political project based concretely upon an ideal of ‘peace’ has continually produced its
nemesis, war. Not only does the recurrence of war throughout modernity serve to underline its paradoxical
character. But the very forms of war that recur are of such increasing violence and intensity as to threaten
the very sustainability of the project of modernity understood in terms of the pursuit of perpetual peace.83
Schmitt’s own assessment of prior liberal attempts to abolish war, as those undertaken by the League of Nations, is similar: ‘any abolition of war without
true bracketing [has historically] resulted only in new, perhaps even worse types of war, such as reversions
to civil war and other types of wars of annihilation’ (NE 246). And, how else can we understand the war on terror if not in a sequence of
changing types of war, yet another evolution after the one noted by Mary Kaldor in the late 1990s?84 A new type of war also requires a new type
of enemy: ‘it is an apparent fact’, Rasch argues, ‘that the liberal and humanitarian attempt to construct a world of universal
friendship produces, as if by internal necessity, ever new enemies’.85 As we discussed above, the discourse of
humanity enables the creation of ‘a category of political non-persons, since those who fall outside of these
delineations become…subject to a demonization which permits not simply their defeat, but their
elimination’.86 In the case of the war on terror, the ‘freedom-hating’ recalcitrant others, those subjects of other ‘modernities’ entangled with
the liberal one,87 become those to be excised from the global liberal order. The notion of enemy used by the war on terror is problematic
because it denies any rationality or justice to its opponents. As Schmitt argued in the Nomos, the notion of justus hostis which the interstate order had developed, alongside
the notion of non-discriminatory war, was what allowed war to be limited in nature but also peace to be made with enemies. When enemies are denied this procedural kind
of ‘justness’, then peace cannot be made with them, nor are they allowed a right of resistance and self-defence. The
notion of an unjust enemy in the
war on terror relies on the introduction of the notion of just cause for one’s own side and points to an ‘other’
who has to be fought until there is no more resistance.
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SHELL (3/3)
THE ALTERNATIVE: THE AFFIRMATIVE’S CALL TO ERASE ENMITY AND CONFLICT IN LIEU OF A
UNIVERSAL HUMANITY MERELY RENDERS EXCLUSIONS INVISIBLE AND VIOLENCE AND WARFARE BECOME
UNLIMITED. IN A “UNIVERSAL LIBERAL UTOPIA” ENMITY DOESN’T DISAPPEAR BUT JUST BECOMES “SUB-
HUMAN” AGAINST THE “UNIVERSAL” ORDER, JUSTIFYING THE CRUELEST OF REPRISALS. THE ALTERNATIVE IS
TO REJECT THIS UNIVERSAL CALL AND RECOGNIZE AND ADMIT THAT “I HAVE AN ENEMY AND I CAN RESPECT
THAT ANTAGONISM OF INTERESTS.”
RASCH, 2005 (William, Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at India University. 'Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle', South
Atlantic Quarterly, 104:2, 253-262.)
Schmitt, then, starts from the premise of imperfection and acknowledges an ontological priority of violence.
If, he reasons, one starts with the rather biblical notions of sin and guilt, not natural innocence, then homogeneity, being contingent, historical, and not the least natural, must
be predicated on heterogeneity. That is, citizenship or participation or community must be constructed, not assumed, and can only be local, circumscribed, not global. One
recognizes one’s own in the face of the other and knows the comfort of inclusion only as the necessary result of exclusion—though in modern, functionally differentiated
society, those inclusions and exclusions may be multiple, contradictory, and not necessarily tied to place. ‘‘An absolute human equality,’’ Schmitt writes in his Crisis of
Parliamentary Democracy, ‘‘would be an equality without the necessary correlate of inequality and as a result conceptually and practically meaningless, an indifferent
equality. . . . Substantive inequalities would in no way disappear from the world and the state; they would shift into another sphere, perhaps separated from the political and
concentrated in the economic, leaving this area to take on a new, disproportionately decisive importance.’’ 6
This, Schmitt’s, is not a popular sentiment, even if it echoes somewhat the Marxist distinction between a political and a social democracy, between a
formal and substantial equality. But if one acknowledges that at least within modernity all inclusion requires exclusion,
that inclusions and exclusions in addition to being unavoidable are also contingent and malleable, then rather than react with dismay, one might
see in this ‘‘logical fact,’’ if fact it is, both the condition for the possibility of dissent and the condition for the possibility
of recognizing in the one who resists and disagrees a fellow human being and thus legitimate political
opponent, not a Lyon or Tyger or other Savage Beast. For it is not that exclusions are miraculously made absent once
distinctions are not formally drawn. On the contrary, unacknowledged distinctions, and those who are
distinguished by them, simply go underground, become invisible, and grow stronger, more absolute, in their
violent and explosive force. When the retrograde and condemned distinction between the ‘‘Greek’’ and the ‘‘barbarian’’ becomes a simple, sanguine
affirmation of humanity, this ideal affirmation actually turns out to be nothing other than a distinction drawn between all those who, by their right behavior, show themselves
to be truly ‘‘human’’ and those who, alas, by their perverse dissent, have revealed themselves to be evildoers, to be ‘‘inhuman.’’ Deliberate, visible, ‘‘external’’ distinctions
that demarcate a space in which a ‘‘we’’ can recognize its difference from a ‘‘they,’’ preferably without marking that difference in a necessarily asymmetrical manner, are to
be preferred, in Schmitt’s world, to the invisible and unacknowledged distinctions that mark those who are exemplary humans from those who, by their political dissent,
show themselves to be gratuitously perverse. For reasons, then, of making difference visible, Schmitt favors lines drawn in
the sand, or, in the ‘‘mythical language’’ used in The Nomos of the Earth, ‘‘firm lines’’ in the ‘‘soil,’’ ‘‘whereby definite divisions become apparent,’’ and, above them,
on the ‘‘solid ground of the earth,’’ ‘‘fences, enclosures, boundaries, walls, houses, and other constructs,’’ so that the ‘‘orders and orientations of
human social life become apparent’’ and the ‘‘forms of power and domination become visible.’’ In Nomos, Schmitt
describes the now much maligned and seldom mourned European nation-state systems ‘‘the highest form of order within the scope of human power’’ (187). Historically, the
territorial state developed as a response to the religious civil wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Once thought of as a unity called Christendom, Europe
became fractured by the events of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The old asymmetrical distinction between believers and nonbelievers that governed the
relationship not only between Christians and non-Christians, but also between Christian orthodoxy and heresy, now threatened to regulate the distinction between Catholics
and Protestants. Yet, miraculously (one might be tempted to say), with the conclusion of religious warfare in 1648, a symmetrical relationship among the European nation-
states prevailed—in theory, if not always in fact. It is this symmetrical ordering of internally differentiated Europe that Schmitt highlights. In
effect—and
Hobbes had already described it in these terms—the war of all individuals against all individuals in the state
of nature, which perennially threatens to resurface within the state as civil discord, is elevated into a war of
all states against all states in a second-order state of nature. In theory and practice, then, the individual is protected from arbitrary and
irrational, because incalculable, violence by states acting as moral persons living in an unregulated but serendipitously achieved balance of power. We might best update
Schmitt’s description of this order as an ideally anarchic, self-regulating coexistence of antagonistic powers, an emergent, horizontal self-organization of sovereign systems
with no one system serving as sovereign over all the others—a plurality of states that refused to coalesce into one single state but rather achieved relative security without
relinquishing autonomy. The ‘‘medium’’ of this self-organization was violence (war); yet, by virtue of mechanisms of reciprocity, by virtue, that is, of a similarly emergent
self-regulation of violence called international law (the jus publicum Europaeum of which Schmitt sings his praises), the conduct of warfare among European states was
restrained and controlled. Thus, the nation-state way of organizing early modern Europe served as the katechon, the political as restrainer, establishing relative stability and
peace to stave off chaos and civil war. How is this possible? Despite its internal self-differentiation, Europe still saw itself as a unity because of a second major distinction,
the one between Europe and the New World, where New World denotes the entire non-European world, but especially the newly ‘‘discovered’’ regions of the globe
following Columbus’s three voyages. This distinction was asymmetrical; on the one side we find Christianity and culture, on the other only pagan ‘‘barbarians.’’ How did
Europeans mark this difference between a self-differentiated ‘‘us’’ and a homogenous ‘‘them’’? Through violence. Only now, violence was regulated hierarchically by the
traditional ‘‘just war’’ doctrine. Schmitt clearly marks the difference between symmetrical and asymmetrical modes of warfare (thus the difference between warfare ‘‘this
side’’
versus the ‘‘other side’’ of so-called amity lines that separated Old Europe from the New World) as the difference between wars fought against ‘‘just enemies’’ and those
Rasch K 6/67
fought for a ‘‘just cause.’’ The former recognize a commonality among combatants that allows for reciprocity; the latter does not. Wars
fought against
enemies one respects as occupiers of the same cultural ‘‘space,’’ no matter how subdivided, allows for the
desirable constraints on the conduct of war. Wars fought against infidels, pagans, and barbarians, whether these barbarians deny the one God, the
laws of nature, the truth of reason, or the higher morality of liberalism, are wars fought against those who are not to be respected or accorded the rights granted equals.8 To
be in possession of truth, no matter how much that truth is debated internally, allows one to stand over against the other as a conglomerated unity. This self-differentiated
unity can assume the restrained and restraining order of civilization because it has inoculated itself against outbreaks of ‘‘natural’’ and lawless violence by displacing them
in the New World. America, as Hobbes and others imagined it, was the preeminent site of the feared state of nature; thus Europe was spared any recurrence of the civil wars
that had previously ravaged it. What Schmitt describes as an enviable achievement—that is, the balanced order of restrained violence within Europe—presupposed the
consignment of unrestrained violence to the rest of the world. That is, desired restraint was founded upon sanctioned lack of restraint. If Schmitt, by concentrating on the
development of European international law after the religious civil wars, highlights an admirable local result of a disagreeable global process, this can be attributed to his
explicit Eurocentrism. But even non- Eurocentrics may be dismayed by the twentieth-century reintroduction of
unrestricted violence within Europe itself. The epitome of this return of the repressed may be the midcentury death camp, as Giorgio Agamben maintains, 9 but its initial
breakthrough is the Great War of the century’s second decade. For
how else can one explain that a traditional European power
struggle that started in 1914 as a war fought for state interest should end in 1918–19 as a war fought by
‘‘civilization’’ against its ‘‘barbarian’’ other? And how else can one explain that we have been so eager to
replicate this distinction in every war we have fought ever since? If, in other words, we are rightly horrified by the
distinction between civilized and uncivilized when it is used to describe the relationship of Old Europe and its colonial subjects, and if we are rightly horrified by the
why do
distinction between the human and the in- or subhuman when it is used to discriminate against blacks, Jews, Gypsies, and other so-called undesirables, then
we persist today in using these very distinctions when combating our latest enemies? Is it merely ironic or in
fact profoundly symptomatic that those who most vehemently affirm universal symmetry (equality, democracy) are
also more often than not the ones who opt for the most asymmetrical means of locating enemies and
conducting war—that is, just wars fought for a just cause? But how are we to respond? For those who say there is no war
and who yet find themselves witnessing daily bloodshed, Adornoian asceticism (refraining from participating in the nihilism of the
political) or Benjaminian weak, quasi, or other messianism (waiting for the next incarnation of the historical subject [the multitudes?] or the next proletarian
general strike [the event?]) would seem to be the answer. To this, however, those who say there is a war can respond only with bewilderment.
Waiting for a ‘‘completely new politics’’ 10 and completely new political agents, waiting for the event and the
right moment to name it, or waiting for universal ontological redemption feels much like waiting for the
Second Coming, or, more accurately, for Godot. And have we not all grown weary of waiting? The war we
call ‘‘the political,’’ whether nihilist or not, happily goes on while we watch Rome burn. As Schmitt wrote of the
relationship of early Christianity to the Roman Empire, ‘‘The belief that a restrainer holds back the end of the world provides the only bridge between the notion of an
eschatological paralysis of all human events and a tremendous historical monolith like that of the Christian empire of the Germanic kings’’ (60).One does not need to believe
in the virtues of that particular ‘‘historical monolith’’ to understand the dangers of eschatological paralysis. But as Max Weber observed firsthand, ascetic
quietude
leads so often, so quickly, and so effortlessly to the chiliastic violence that knows no bounds; and as we have
lately observed anew, the millennial messianism of imperial rulers and nomadic partisans alike dominates
the contemporary political landscape. The true goal of those who say there is no war is to eliminate the war
that actually exists by eliminating those Lyons and Tygers and other Savage Beasts who say there is a war.
This war is the truly savage war. It is the war we witness today. No amount of democratization, pacification,
or Americanization will mollify its effects, because democratization, pacification, and Americanization are
among the weapons used by those who say there is no war to wage their war to end all war. What is to be
done? If you are one who says there is a war, and if you say it not because you glory in it but because you
fear it and hate it, then your goal is to limit it and its effects, not eliminate it, which merely intensifies it, but
limit it by drawing clear lines within which it can be fought, and clear lines between those who fight it and
those who don’t, lines between friends, enemies, and neutrals, lines between combatants and
noncombatants. There are, of course, legitimate doubts about whether those ideal lines could ever be drawn
again; nevertheless, the question that we should ask is not how can we establish perpetual peace, but rather
a more modest one: Can symmetrical relationships be guaranteed only by asymmetrical ones? According to
Schmitt, historically this has been the case. ‘‘The traditional Eurocentric order of international law is foundering today, as is the old nomos of the earth. This order
arose from a legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world, from an unrepeatable historical event. Only in fantastic parallels can one imagine a modern recurrence, such as men on their way to
the moon discovering a new and hitherto unknown planet that could be exploited freely and utilized effectively to relieve their struggles on earth’’ (39). We have since gone to the moon and have
found nothing on the way there to exploit. We may soon go to Mars, if current leaders have their way, but the likelihood of finding exploitable populations seems equally slim. Salvation through
spatially delimited asymmetry, even were it to be desired, is just not on the horizon. And salvation through globalization, that is, through global unity and equality, is equally impossible, because
today’s asymmetry is not so much a localization of the exception as it is an invisible generation of the exception from within that formal ideal of unity, a generation of the exception as the difference
We are, therefore, thrown back upon
between the human and the inhuman outlaw, the ‘‘Savage Beast, with whom Men can have no Society nor Security.’’
ourselves, which is to say, upon those artificial ‘‘moral persons’’ who act as our collective political identities.
They used to be called states. What they will be called in the future remains to be seen. But, if we think to
Rasch K 7/67
establish a differentiated unity of discrete political entities that once represented for Schmitt ‘‘the highest
form of order within the scope of human power,’’ then we must symmetrically manage the necessary pairing
of inclusion and exclusion without denying the ‘‘forms of power and domination’’ that inescapably
accompany human ordering. We must think the possibility of roughly equivalent power relations rather
than fantasize the elimination of power from the political universe. This, conceivably, was also Schmitt’s solution. Whether his idea
of the plurality of Großräume could ever be carried out under contemporary circumstances is, to be sure, more than a little doubtful, given that the United States enjoys a
monopoly on guns, goods, and the Good, in the form of a supremely effective ideology of universal ‘‘democratization.’’ Still, we
would do well to devise
vocabularies that do not just emphatically repeat philosophically more sophisticated versions of the liberal
ideology of painless, effortless, universal equality. The space of the political will never be created by a
bloodless, Benjaminian divine violence. Nor is it to be confused with the space of the simply human. To
dream the dreams of universal inclusion may satisfy an irrepressible human desire, but it may also always
produce recurring, asphyxiating political nightmares of absolute exclusion.
Rasch K 8/67
DOTY SHELL (1/4)
U.S. ENGAGEMENT OF THE MIDDLE EAST IS FUELED BY A DESIRE TO SECURE AND NEUTRALIZE POLITICAL
ANTAGONISM ON THE GLOBAL LEVEL. THIS RHETORIC OF SECURITY CONSTRUCTS THE UNITED STATES AS THE
LOCATION OF THE WORLD’S SELF, MAKING ALL ATTACKS ON THE U.S. ATTACKS AGAINST THE WORLD ORDER
AND JUSTIFYING ALL ACTIONS BY THE U.S. IN RESPONSE AS NECESSARY FOR THE PRESERVATION OF HUMANITY.
THE MIDDLE EAST HAS THE POWER TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD THROUGH ITS EXPRESSION OF ENMITY IN
VIOLENCE, AND CALLS FOR CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT EXPRESS A DESIRE TO ELIMINATE THAT POWER
THROUGH DISCIPLINE AND WESTERN RATIONALITY. POLICIES OF CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT TOWARD THE
MIDDLE EAST FORCE OUR ENEMIES TO DECIDE BETWEEN CONFORMING TO THE VALUES AND NORMS
ESTABLISHED BY THE UNITED STATES FOR HUMANITY OR BE OUTCAST AS AN EXCEPTION FROM HUMANITY
ALTOGETHER.
The U.S. government's rhetoric of global security draws its power from simultaneously instantiating
Schmitt's vision of the political as non-normative national self-preservation and the liberal vision of the
political as normative civil relations. The consequence is not that this rhetoric disavows political antagonism within the nation,
as Schmitt would have it (though there is an element of this), but that it disavows political antagonism on the global level. I argued above that
the positing of a non-normative situation of national self-preservation, the same as that of a person being murdered, is insupportable due to the inescapable presence of a
moral ideal in defining the nation's self and deciding what threatens it. This applies to all justifications of action grounded in national security. The
U.S. rhetoric
of security, however, lifts the paradox to a global level, and illustrates it more forcefully, by designating the
global order's moral ideal, its "way of life" that is under threat, as civil relations, freedom and peace, but
then making the fulcrum of this way of life an independent entity upon whose survival the world's way of
life depends—the United States. Just as an aggressor puts himself outside of normativity by initiating
violence, so is the victim not bound by any norms in defending his life. As the location of the self of the world
order that must be preserved, the United States remains unobligated by the norms of this order as long as it
is threatened by terrorism. So long as it struggles for the life of the world order, therefore, the United States
remains external to this order, just as terrorism remains external to the world order so long as it threatens a
universal state of war.
but better" (1).
America can lead the cause of freedom because it is the cause of freedom. "American values and American interests lead in the
same direction: We stand for human liberty" (Bush 2003b). For this reason, it has no "ambitions," no private national interests or
aspirations that would run contrary to the interests of the world as a whole. It undertakes actions, like the
invasion of Iraq, that further no motive but the cause of humanity as a whole. "We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove
a threat and restore control of [End Page 31] that country to its own people" (Bush 2003a). In this way, the United States is distinct from all other nations, even though all of
humanity espouses the same values. Only the United States can be depended upon for ensuring the endurance of these values because they are the sole basis of its existence.
"Others might flag in the face of the inevitable ebb and flow of the campaign against terrorism. But the American people will not" (NSCT 2003, 29).
Rasch K 9/67
meant by such a balance of power.
The United States must and will maintain the capability to defeat any attempt by an enemy—whether a state or non-state actor—to impose its will on the United States, our
allies, or our friends. . . . Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power
of the United States. (National Security 2002, 30)
The relationship between the United States and the world order, then, is similar to the relationship in Hobbes between the Leviathan and the civil society that it embodies
and represents. The individual members of this civil society are collectively the author of all of the acts of the Leviathan. Yet they have no authority to influence or oppose
the actions of the Leviathan, because they have contracted with each other to give over all of their powers to it. The Leviathan itself remains outside their social contract.
Similarly, insofar as the United States embodies the normativity of the world order and ensures its existence, the members of this order have implicitly agreed to its
protection of their civil existence, since this is the only rational thing to do. Therefore, when America's own existence is at stake, they cannot question the decisions it takes
to preserve itself, even when these decisions impinge on their own autonomy.15
The externality of the United States to the world order, its national status as the agent of freedom, means
that it must both enhance its independence and autonomy, and reshape the world in its own image. "We are
protected from attack only by vigorous action abroad, and increased vigilance at home" (Bush 2002a). Enhancing its
own agency means making itself more free, but what this requires is increased self-discipline. The United States must become more impervious to fear and external coercion
by eliminating its internal vulnerabilities to them. The effect of this imperative is to provide justification for bringing an ever greater number of domains of national life
within the purview of national security. At the same time, the United States must make the world more like itself by [End Page 33] spreading freedom abroad. "We know
that free peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies" (Bush 2004b). This requires the strengthening of American military
power and the use of this power against enemies. "We
have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength;
they are invited by the perception of weakness" (Bush 2003c). The primary field for the exercise of U.S. power in
reshaping the world is the Middle East, because this is the region most engulfed in the state of war. The
Middle East thereby remains outside of the world order and threatens its dissolution.
reshaped into a lesser replica of the United States, it will take its humble position in the world order. The
taming of the Middle East, therefore,
worry about the politics of self-preservation—that is, no nation but the United States.
Reshaping the world order means above all the exertion of greater control and surveillance over individuals worldwide. For the rhetoric of security is at bottom a discourse
of our own redemption from the irrational tendencies that threaten collective existence, which is the whole purpose of creating civil authority in the first place. Now that
individuals who have succumbed to irrationality are capable of destroying civilization, national existence must be organized not just to fend off the threat of other nations
but the threat of any individual. This means that the internal moral struggle of all individuals all over the world comes under the purview of U.S. national security. As we
have seen, the ultimate threat "lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology" (National Security 2002, ii). "Radicalism" here simply means the irrational desire for
violence, and "technology" is the dangerous power that can free us or enslave us. The United States has superior technology. This technology enables the United States to
wage wars against tyranny with minimal injury to the innocent and to its own forces, and to neutralize the desire for violence and the fear that inhabit everyone. So long as
Rasch K 10/67
morally disordered individuals may possess inordinate power, we all come under their thrall due to the fear that we feel. But the
world authority that we
have erected has the capacity to remove violence and irrationality from the political realm and restore to us
our agency, without which we are as good as dead.
Rasch K 11/67
DOTY SHELL (2/4)
WAR IS NOT WAGED ON BEHALF OF FRIEND/ENEMY DISTINCTIONS; IT IS WAGED ON BEHALF OF THE ABSENCE OF
THEM. HUMANITARIAN WARFARE CANNOT HAVE HUMAN ENEMIES SO A CATEGORY OF INUMANITY MUST BE
CREATED OUTSIDE OF ITSELF. POLITICAL ACTIONS BASED CONCRETELY ON IDEALS OF PEACE HAVE
CONTINUALLY PRODUCED ONLY MORE WAR. THIS DRIVE TO END WAR WILL INEVITABLY PRODUCE INCREASINGLY
VIOLENT FORMS OF CONFLICT AS WARS OF ANNIHILATION ESCALATE IN INTENSITY TO APOCALYPSE.
Martin Heidegger on the Line(s) of Cosmopolitanism and the War on Terror.” Conference on the International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt. September 9-11. P.PDF)
This section examines the claim that the war on terror does not indicate a crisis in cosmopolitanism but rather is the quintessential liberal cosmopolitan war; but it pursues
this claim in a different way than the critiques noted above.79 It suggests that, despite the prominent sense in which the war on terror is portrayed as the antithesis of
cosmopolitan orientations and achievements, there are strong relationships between cosmopolitanism and the pursuit of the war on terror. This section examines these in
turn. The first relationship arises from their joint location in a long line of thought and policy aiming to articulate an outlook and a political programme of the modern world
in which violence and war dissipate, in which war is gradually replaced by rules and principled behaviour.80 This, Hans Joas has eloquently called, ‘the dream of a
modernity without violence’.81 That
cosmopolitanism seeks ‘perpetual’ peace, is often acknowledged through the debts that
cosmopolitan thinking owes to Immanuel Kant’s understanding of cosmopolitan law.82 That
the war on terror is located in this
understanding of modernity is less apparent, but nevertheless becomes obvious in the apocalyptic-sounding
framing of the Bush Administration’s understanding of the fight on terrorism as a fight that will not be
abandoned until terrorism is rooted out. The occurrence of September 11th in the seat of this dream, the United States of America, was an
unforgivable affront to this liberal modernist vision of perpetual peace. Therefore, both the war on terror and liberal cosmopolitanism are located within a modernist vision
of the end of war. At the same time, however, the war on terror is central to the very paradox of liberal modernity
and war which that has preoccupied realist, Marxist and poststructuralist thought. A recent articulation of this paradox is offered by Julian Reid who notes this
disturbing paradox: [a] political project based concretely upon an ideal of ‘peace’ has continually produced its
nemesis, war. Not only does the recurrence of war throughout modernity serve to underline its paradoxical
character. But the very forms of war that recur are of such increasing violence and intensity as to threaten
the very sustainability of the project of modernity understood in terms of the pursuit of perpetual peace.83
Schmitt’s own assessment of prior liberal attempts to abolish war, as those undertaken by the League of Nations, is similar: ‘any abolition of war without
true bracketing [has historically] resulted only in new, perhaps even worse types of war, such as reversions
to civil war and other types of wars of annihilation’ (NE 246). And, how else can we understand the war on terror if not in a sequence of
changing types of war, yet another evolution after the one noted by Mary Kaldor in the late 1990s?84 A new type of war also requires a new type
of enemy: ‘it is an apparent fact’, Rasch argues, ‘that the liberal and humanitarian attempt to construct a world of universal
friendship produces, as if by internal necessity, ever new enemies’.85 As we discussed above, the discourse of
humanity enables the creation of ‘a category of political non-persons, since those who fall outside of these
delineations become…subject to a demonization which permits not simply their defeat, but their
elimination’.86 In the case of the war on terror, the ‘freedom-hating’ recalcitrant others, those subjects of other ‘modernities’ entangled with
the liberal one,87 become those to be excised from the global liberal order. The notion of enemy used by the war on terror is problematic
because it denies any rationality or justice to its opponents. As Schmitt argued in the Nomos, the notion of justus hostis which the interstate order had developed, alongside
the notion of non-discriminatory war, was what allowed war to be limited in nature but also peace to be made with enemies. When enemies are denied this procedural kind
of ‘justness’, then peace cannot be made with them, nor are they allowed a right of resistance and self-defence. The
notion of an unjust enemy in the
war on terror relies on the introduction of the notion of just cause for one’s own side and points to an ‘other’
who has to be fought until there is no more resistance.
Rasch K 12/67
DOTY SHELL (3/4)
THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO DO THE PLAN NOT BASED ON THE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE AFFIRMATIVE BUT
BECAUSE WE HAVE AN ENEMY WHOSE INTERESTS CONFLICT VIOLENTLY WITH OUR OWN AND RATHER THAN
SUPPRESS THAT VIOLENCE WE CHOOSE TO EMBRACE IT. THE AFFIRMATIVE’S CALL TO ERASE ENMITY AND
CONFLICT IN LIEU OF A UNIVERSAL HUMANITY MERELY RENDERS EXCLUSIONS INVISIBLE AND VIOLENCE AND
WARFARE BECOME UNLIMITED.IN A “UNIVERSAL LIBERAL UTOPIA” ENMITY DOESN’T DISAPPEAR BUT JUST
BECOMES “SUB-HUMAN” AGAINST THE “UNIVERSAL” ORDER, JUSTIFYING THE CRUELEST OF REPRISALS.
RASCH, 2005 (William, Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at India University. 'Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle', South
Atlantic Quarterly, 104:2, 253-262.)
Schmitt, then, starts from the premise of imperfection and acknowledges an ontological priority of violence.
If, he reasons, one starts with the rather biblical notions of sin and guilt, not natural innocence, then homogeneity, being contingent, historical, and not the least natural, must
be predicated on heterogeneity. That is, citizenship or participation or community must be constructed, not assumed, and can only be local, circumscribed, not global. One
recognizes one’s own in the face of the other and knows the comfort of inclusion only as the necessary result of exclusion—though in modern, functionally differentiated
society, those inclusions and exclusions may be multiple, contradictory, and not necessarily tied to place. ‘‘An absolute human equality,’’ Schmitt writes in his Crisis of
Parliamentary Democracy, ‘‘would be an equality without the necessary correlate of inequality and as a result conceptually and practically meaningless, an indifferent
equality. . . . Substantive inequalities would in no way disappear from the world and the state; they would shift into another sphere, perhaps separated from the political and
concentrated in the economic, leaving this area to take on a new, disproportionately decisive importance.’’ 6
This, Schmitt’s, is not a popular sentiment, even if it echoes somewhat the Marxist distinction between a political and a social democracy, between a
formal and substantial equality. But if one acknowledges that at least within modernity all inclusion requires exclusion,
that inclusions and exclusions in addition to being unavoidable are also contingent and malleable, then rather than react with dismay, one might
see in this ‘‘logical fact,’’ if fact it is, both the condition for the possibility of dissent and the condition for the possibility
of recognizing in the one who resists and disagrees a fellow human being and thus legitimate political
opponent, not a Lyon or Tyger or other Savage Beast. For it is not that exclusions are miraculously made absent once
distinctions are not formally drawn. On the contrary, unacknowledged distinctions, and those who are
distinguished by them, simply go underground, become invisible, and grow stronger, more absolute, in their
violent and explosive force. When the retrograde and condemned distinction between the ‘‘Greek’’ and the ‘‘barbarian’’ becomes a simple, sanguine
affirmation of humanity, this ideal affirmation actually turns out to be nothing other than a distinction drawn between all those who, by their right behavior, show themselves
to be truly ‘‘human’’ and those who, alas, by their perverse dissent, have revealed themselves to be evildoers, to be ‘‘inhuman.’’ Deliberate, visible, ‘‘external’’ distinctions
that demarcate a space in which a ‘‘we’’ can recognize its difference from a ‘‘they,’’ preferably without marking that difference in a necessarily asymmetrical manner, are to
be preferred, in Schmitt’s world, to the invisible and unacknowledged distinctions that mark those who are exemplary humans from those who, by their political dissent,
show themselves to be gratuitously perverse. For reasons, then, of making difference visible, Schmitt favors lines drawn in
the sand, or, in the ‘‘mythical language’’ used in The Nomos of the Earth, ‘‘firm lines’’ in the ‘‘soil,’’ ‘‘whereby definite divisions become apparent,’’ and, above them,
on the ‘‘solid ground of the earth,’’ ‘‘fences, enclosures, boundaries, walls, houses, and other constructs,’’ so that the ‘‘orders and orientations of
human social life become apparent’’ and the ‘‘forms of power and domination become visible.’’ In Nomos, Schmitt
describes the now much maligned and seldom mourned European nation-state systems ‘‘the highest form of order within the scope of human power’’ (187). Historically, the
territorial state developed as a response to the religious civil wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Once thought of as a unity called Christendom, Europe
became fractured by the events of the Reformation and Counter- Reformation. The old asymmetrical distinction between believers and nonbelievers that governed the
relationship not only between Christians and non-Christians, but also between Christian orthodoxy and heresy, now threatened to regulate the distinction between Catholics
and Protestants. Yet, miraculously (one might be tempted to say), with the conclusion of religious warfare in 1648, a symmetrical relationship among the European nation-
states prevailed—in theory, if not always in fact. It is this symmetrical ordering of internally differentiated Europe that Schmitt highlights. In
effect—and
Hobbes had already described it in these terms—the war of all individuals against all individuals in the state
of nature, which perennially threatens to resurface within the state as civil discord, is elevated into a war of
all states against all states in a second-order state of nature. In theory and practice, then, the individual is protected from arbitrary and
irrational, because incalculable, violence by states acting as moral persons living in an unregulated but serendipitously achieved balance of power. We might best update
Schmitt’s description of this order as an ideally anarchic, self-regulating coexistence of antagonistic powers, an emergent, horizontal self-organization of sovereign systems
with no one system serving as sovereign over all the others—a plurality of states that refused to coalesce into one single state but rather achieved relative security without
relinquishing autonomy. The ‘‘medium’’ of this self-organization was violence (war); yet, by virtue of mechanisms of reciprocity, by virtue, that is, of a similarly emergent
self-regulation of violence called international law (the jus publicum Europaeum of which Schmitt sings his praises), the conduct of warfare among European states was
restrained and controlled. Thus, the nation-state way of organizing early modern Europe served as the katechon, the political as restrainer, establishing relative stability and
peace to stave off chaos and civil war. How is this possible? Despite its internal self-differentiation, Europe still saw itself as a unity because of a second major distinction,
the one between Europe and the New World, where New World denotes the entire non-European world, but especially the newly ‘‘discovered’’ regions of the globe
following Columbus’s three voyages. This distinction was asymmetrical; on the one side we find Christianity and culture, on the other only pagan ‘‘barbarians.’’ How did
Europeans mark this difference between a self-differentiated ‘‘us’’ and a homogenous ‘‘them’’? Through violence. Only now, violence was regulated hierarchically by the
traditional ‘‘just war’’ doctrine. Schmitt clearly marks the difference between symmetrical and asymmetrical modes of warfare (thus the difference between warfare ‘‘this
side’’
Rasch K 13/67
versus the ‘‘other side’’ of so-called amity lines that separated Old Europe from the New World) as the difference between wars fought against ‘‘just enemies’’ and those
fought for a ‘‘just cause.’’ The former recognize a commonality among combatants that allows for reciprocity; the latter does not. Wars
fought against
enemies one respects as occupiers of the same cultural ‘‘space,’’ no matter how subdivided, allows for the
desirable constraints on the conduct of war. Wars fought against infidels, pagans, and barbarians, whether these barbarians deny the one God, the
laws of nature, the truth of reason, or the higher morality of liberalism, are wars fought against those who are not to be respected or accorded the rights granted equals.8 To
be in possession of truth, no matter how much that truth is debated internally, allows one to stand over against the other as a conglomerated unity. This self-differentiated
unity can assume the restrained and restraining order of civilization because it has inoculated itself against outbreaks of ‘‘natural’’ and lawless violence by displacing them
in the New World. America, as Hobbes and others imagined it, was the preeminent site of the feared state of nature; thus Europe was spared any recurrence of the civil wars
that had previously ravaged it. What Schmitt describes as an enviable achievement—that is, the balanced order of restrained violence within Europe—presupposed the
consignment of unrestrained violence to the rest of the world. That is, desired restraint was founded upon sanctioned lack of restraint. If Schmitt, by concentrating on the
development of European international law after the religious civil wars, highlights an admirable local result of a disagreeable global process, this can be attributed to his
explicit Eurocentrism. But even non- Eurocentrics may be dismayed by the twentieth-century reintroduction of
unrestricted violence within Europe itself. The epitome of this return of the repressed may be the midcentury death camp, as Giorgio Agamben maintains, 9 but its initial
breakthrough is the Great War of the century’s second decade. For
how else can one explain that a traditional European power
struggle that started in 1914 as a war fought for state interest should end in 1918–19 as a war fought by
‘‘civilization’’ against its ‘‘barbarian’’ other? And how else can one explain that we have been so eager to
replicate this distinction in every war we have fought ever since? If, in other words, we are rightly horrified by the
distinction between civilized and uncivilized when it is used to describe the relationship of Old Europe and its colonial subjects, and if we are rightly horrified by the
why do
distinction between the human and the in- or subhuman when it is used to discriminate against blacks, Jews, Gypsies, and other so-called undesirables, then
we persist today in using these very distinctions when combating our latest enemies? Is it merely ironic or in
fact profoundly symptomatic that those who most vehemently affirm universal symmetry (equality, democracy) are
also more often than not the ones who opt for the most asymmetrical means of locating enemies and
conducting war—that is, just wars fought for a just cause? But how are we to respond? For those who say there is no war
and who yet find themselves witnessing daily bloodshed, Adornoian asceticism (refraining from participating in the nihilism of the
political) or Benjaminian weak, quasi, or other messianism (waiting for the next incarnation of the historical subject [the multitudes?] or the next proletarian
general strike [the event?]) would seem to be the answer. To this, however, those who say there is a war can respond only with bewilderment.
Waiting for a ‘‘completely new politics’’ 10 and completely new political agents, waiting for the event and the
right moment to name it, or waiting for universal ontological redemption feels much like waiting for the
Second Coming, or, more accurately, for Godot. And have we not all grown weary of waiting? The war we
call ‘‘the political,’’ whether nihilist or not, happily goes on while we watch Rome burn. As Schmitt wrote of the
relationship of early Christianity to the Roman Empire, ‘‘The belief that a restrainer holds back the end of the world provides the only bridge between the notion of an
eschatological paralysis of all human events and a tremendous historical monolith like that of the Christian empire of the Germanic kings’’ (60).One does not need to believe
in the virtues of that particular ‘‘historical monolith’’ to understand the dangers of eschatological paralysis. But as Max Weber observed firsthand, ascetic
quietude
leads so often, so quickly, and so effortlessly to the chiliastic violence that knows no bounds; and as we have
lately observed anew, the millennial messianism of imperial rulers and nomadic partisans alike dominates
the contemporary political landscape. The true goal of those who say there is no war is to eliminate the war
that actually exists by eliminating those Lyons and Tygers and other Savage Beasts who say there is a war.
This war is the truly savage war. It is the war we witness today. No amount of democratization, pacification,
or Americanization will mollify its effects, because democratization, pacification, and Americanization are
among the weapons used by those who say there is no war to wage their war to end all war. What is to be
done? If you are one who says there is a war, and if you say it not because you glory in it but because you
fear it and hate it, then your goal is to limit it and its effects, not eliminate it, which merely intensifies it, but
limit it by drawing clear lines within which it can be fought, and clear lines between those who fight it and
those who don’t, lines between friends, enemies, and neutrals, lines between combatants and
noncombatants. There are, of course, legitimate doubts about whether those ideal lines could ever be drawn
again; nevertheless, the question that we should ask is not how can we establish perpetual peace, but rather
a more modest one: Can symmetrical relationships be guaranteed only by asymmetrical ones? According to
Schmitt, historically this has been the case. ‘‘The traditional Eurocentric order of international law is foundering today, as is the old nomos of the earth. This order
arose from a legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world, from an unrepeatable historical event. Only in fantastic parallels can one imagine a modern recurrence, such as men on their way to
the moon discovering a new and hitherto unknown planet that could be exploited freely and utilized effectively to relieve their struggles on earth’’ (39). We have since gone to the moon and have
found nothing on the way there to exploit. We may soon go to Mars, if current leaders have their way, but the likelihood of finding exploitable populations seems equally slim. Salvation through
spatially delimited asymmetry, even were it to be desired, is just not on the horizon. And salvation through globalization, that is, through global unity and equality, is equally impossible, because
today’s asymmetry is not so much a localization of the exception as it is an invisible generation of the exception from within that formal ideal of unity, a generation of the exception as the difference
We are, therefore, thrown back upon
between the human and the inhuman outlaw, the ‘‘Savage Beast, with whom Men can have no Society nor Security.’’
ourselves, which is to say, upon those artificial ‘‘moral persons’’ who act as our collective political identities.
They used to be called states. What they will be called in the future remains to be seen. But, if we think to
Rasch K 14/67
establish a differentiated unity of discrete political entities that once represented for Schmitt ‘‘the highest
form of order within the scope of human power,’’ then we must symmetrically manage the necessary pairing
of inclusion and exclusion without denying the ‘‘forms of power and domination’’ that inescapably
accompany human ordering. We must think the possibility of roughly equivalent power relations rather
than fantasize the elimination of power from the political universe. This, conceivably, was also Schmitt’s solution. Whether his idea
of the plurality of Großräume could ever be carried out under contemporary circumstances is, to be sure, more than a little doubtful, given that the United States enjoys a
monopoly on guns, goods, and the Good, in the form of a supremely effective ideology of universal ‘‘democratization.’’ Still, we
would do well to devise
vocabularies that do not just emphatically repeat philosophically more sophisticated versions of the liberal
ideology of painless, effortless, universal equality. The space of the political will never be created by a
bloodless, Benjaminian divine violence. Nor is it to be confused with the space of the simply human. To
dream the dreams of universal inclusion may satisfy an irrepressible human desire, but it may also always
produce recurring, asphyxiating political nightmares of absolute exclusion.
Rasch K 15/67
DOTY SHELL (4/4)
BEFORE WE CAN EVEN ATTEMPT TO ANSWER POLICY QUESTIONS, WE MUST FIRST ADDRESS THE ETHICAL
IMPERATIVE OF THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION
DOTY 1996 [Roxane Lynn, Asst. Prof. Poli Sci at ASU, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations, pages 170-71]
North-South relations have been constituted as a structure of deferral. The center of the structure (alternatively white man, modern man, the United States, the West, real
states) has never been absolutely present outside a system of differences. It has itself been constituted as trace-the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces
Because the center is not a fixed locus but a function in which an infinite number of sign
itself, refers itself (ibid.).
substitutions come into play, the domain and play of signification is extended indefinitely. This both opens
up and limits possibilities, generates alternative sites of meanings and political resistances that give rise to
practices of reinscription that seek to reaffirm identities and relationships: The inherently incomplete and
open nature of discourse makes this reaffirmation an ongoing and never finally completed project. In this study I
have sought, through an engagement with various discourses in which claims to truth have been staked, to challenge the validity of the structures of meaning and to make
visible their complicity with practices of power and domination. By examining the ways in which structures of meaning have been associated with imperial practices, I have
suggested that the construction
of meaning and the construction of social, political, and economic power are
inextricably linked. This suggests an ethical dimension to making meaning and an ethical imperative that is
incumbent upon those who toil in the construction of structures of meaning. This is especially urgent in North-South relations
today: one does not have to search very far to find a continuing complicity with colonial representations that
ranges from a politics of silence and neglect to constructions of terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism,
international drug trafficking, and Southern immigration to the North as new threats to global stability and
peace.
The political stakes raised by this analysis revolve around the question of being able to “get beyond” the representations or speak outside of the discourse that historically
have constructed the North and the South. I do not believe that there are any pure alternatives by which we can escape the infinity of traces
to which Gramsci refers. Nor do I wish to suggest that we are always hopelessly imprisoned in a dominant and all-pervasive discourse. Before this question can be
answered – indeed,
before we can even proceed to attempt to answer – attention must be given to the politics of
representation. The price that international relations scholarship pays for its inattention to the issue of
representation is perpetuation of the dominant modes of making meaning and deferral of its responsibility
and complicity in dominant representations.
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DIPLOMACY SHELL (1/5)
U.S. ENGAGEMENT OF THE MIDDLE EAST IS FUELED BY A DESIRE TO SECURE AND NEUTRALIZE POLITICAL
ANTAGONISM ON THE GLOBAL LEVEL. THIS RHETORIC OF SECURITY CONSTRUCTS THE UNITED STATES AS THE
LOCATION OF THE WORLD’S SELF, MAKING ALL ATTACKS ON THE U.S. ATTACKS AGAINST THE WORLD ORDER
AND JUSTIFYING ALL ACTIONS BY THE U.S. IN RESPONSE AS NECESSARY FOR THE PRESERVATION OF HUMANITY.
THE MIDDLE EAST HAS THE POWER TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD THROUGH ITS EXPRESSION OF ENMITY IN
VIOLENCE, AND CALLS FOR CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT EXPRESS A DESIRE TO ELIMINATE THAT POWER
THROUGH DISCIPLINE AND WESTERN RATIONALITY. POLICIES OF CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT TOWARD THE
MIDDLE EAST FORCE OUR ENEMIES TO DECIDE BETWEEN CONFORMING TO THE VALUES AND NORMS
ESTABLISHED BY THE UNITED STATES FOR HUMANITY OR BE OUTCAST AS AN EXCEPTION FROM HUMANITY
ALTOGETHER.
The U.S. government's rhetoric of global security draws its power from simultaneously instantiating
Schmitt's vision of the political as non-normative national self-preservation and the liberal vision of the
political as normative civil relations. The consequence is not that this rhetoric disavows political antagonism within the nation,
as Schmitt would have it (though there is an element of this), but that it disavows political antagonism on the global level. I argued above that
the positing of a non-normative situation of national self-preservation, the same as that of a person being murdered, is insupportable due to the inescapable presence of a
moral ideal in defining the nation's self and deciding what threatens it. This applies to all justifications of action grounded in national security. The
U.S. rhetoric
of security, however, lifts the paradox to a global level, and illustrates it more forcefully, by designating the
global order's moral ideal, its "way of life" that is under threat, as civil relations, freedom and peace, but
then making the fulcrum of this way of life an independent entity upon whose survival the world's way of
life depends—the United States. Just as an aggressor puts himself outside of normativity by initiating
violence, so is the victim not bound by any norms in defending his life. As the location of the self of the world
order that must be preserved, the United States remains unobligated by the norms of this order as long as it
is threatened by terrorism. So long as it struggles for the life of the world order, therefore, the United States
remains external to this order, just as terrorism remains external to the world order so long as it threatens a
universal state of war.
but better" (1).
America can lead the cause of freedom because it is the cause of freedom. "American values and American interests lead in the
same direction: We stand for human liberty" (Bush 2003b). For this reason, it has no "ambitions," no private national interests or
aspirations that would run contrary to the interests of the world as a whole. It undertakes actions, like the
invasion of Iraq, that further no motive but the cause of humanity as a whole. "We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove
a threat and restore control of [End Page 31] that country to its own people" (Bush 2003a). In this way, the United States is distinct from all other nations, even though all of
humanity espouses the same values. Only the United States can be depended upon for ensuring the endurance of these values because they are the sole basis of its existence.
"Others might flag in the face of the inevitable ebb and flow of the campaign against terrorism. But the American people will not" (NSCT 2003, 29).
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meant by such a balance of power. The United States must and will maintain the capability to defeat any attempt by an enemy—whether a state or non-state actor—to
impose its will on the United States, our allies, or our friends. . . . Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in
hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States. (National Security 2002, 30) The relationship between the United States and the world order, then, is
similar to the relationship in Hobbes between the Leviathan and the civil society that it embodies and represents. The individual members of this civil society are
collectively the author of all of the acts of the Leviathan. Yet they have no authority to influence or oppose the actions of the Leviathan, because they have contracted with
each other to give over all of their powers to it. The Leviathan itself remains outside their social contract. Similarly, insofar as the United States embodies the normativity of
the world order and ensures its existence, the members of this order have implicitly agreed to its protection of their civil existence, since this is the only rational thing to do.
Therefore, when America's own existence is at stake, they cannot question the decisions it takes to preserve itself, even when these decisions impinge on their own
autonomy.15
The externality of the United States to the world order, its national status as the agent of freedom, means
that it must both enhance its independence and autonomy, and reshape the world in its own image. "We are
protected from attack only by vigorous action abroad, and increased vigilance at home" (Bush 2002a). Enhancing its
own agency means making itself more free, but what this requires is increased self-discipline. The United States must become more impervious to fear and external coercion
by eliminating its internal vulnerabilities to them. The effect of this imperative is to provide justification for bringing an ever greater number of domains of national life
within the purview of national security. At the same time, the United States must make the world more like itself by [End Page 33] spreading freedom abroad. "We know
that free peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies" (Bush 2004b). This requires the strengthening of American military
power and the use of this power against enemies. "We
have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength;
they are invited by the perception of weakness" (Bush 2003c). The primary field for the exercise of U.S. power in
reshaping the world is the Middle East, because this is the region most engulfed in the state of war. The
Middle East thereby remains outside of the world order and threatens its dissolution.
reshaped into a lesser replica of the United States, it will take its humble position in the world order. The taming of the Middle East, therefore,
worry about the politics of self-preservation—that is, no nation but the United States. Reshaping the world order means above all the exertion of greater control and
surveillance over individuals worldwide. For the rhetoric of security is at bottom a discourse of our own redemption from the irrational tendencies that threaten collective
existence, which is the whole purpose of creating civil authority in the first place. Now that individuals who have succumbed to irrationality are capable of destroying
civilization, national existence must be organized not just to fend off the threat of other nations but the threat of any individual. This means that the internal moral struggle
of all individuals all over the world comes under the purview of U.S. national security. As we have seen, the ultimate threat "lies at the crossroads of radicalism and
technology" (National Security 2002, ii). "Radicalism" here simply means the irrational desire for violence, and "technology" is the dangerous power that can free us or
enslave us. The United States has superior technology. This technology enables the United States to wage wars against tyranny with minimal injury to the innocent and to its
own forces, and to neutralize the desire for violence and the fear that inhabit everyone. So long as morally disordered individuals may possess inordinate power, we all come
under their thrall due to the fear that we feel. But the
world authority that we have erected has the capacity to remove violence
and irrationality from the political realm and restore to us our agency, without which we are as good as
dead.
Rasch K 18/67
WHEN THE US CLAIMED “YOU’RE WITH US OR THE TERRORISTS” IT DID NOT ESTABLISH THE PERMANENT
BINARY THAT MOST PEOPLE ASSUMED—RATHER, THE PROJECT OF DIVIDING THE GLOBE INTO STATES WHO
COMPLY WITH THE US LED GLOBAL ORDER AND THOSE WHO DON’T IS AN ACTIVE AND MOBILE ONE. US
DIPLOMATIC ENGAGEMENT WITH STATES IN THE ME IS PURSUED UNDER THE RUBRIC OF SIMULTANEOUSLY
CEMENTING OUR DOMINATION OF THE GLOBE AND CLEARLY ESTABLISHING THOSE WHO REJCT OUR
ENGAGEMENT AS TARGETS FOR LEGITIMATE ANNIHILATION
CAMPBELL 07 [David Campbell et all, 2007, Political Geography, VOl. 26, pg 415-416
As we argue throughout this paper, the distinctive thing about recent National Security Strategies is their deployment of integration as the principal foreign policy and
security strategy. Itis telling that Bush's claim of “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Bush, 2001)
relies not on a straightforward binary, as is sometimes suggested, but a process of incorporation. It is not
simply us versus them, but with us, a mode of operating alongside, or, in the words of one of Bush's most enthusiastic supporters,
“shoulder to shoulder” (Blair, 2001; see White & Wintour, 2001). This works more widely through a combination of threats and
promises, as in this statement about the Palestinians: “If Palestinians embrace democracy and the rule of
law, confront corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count on American support for the creation of a
Palestinian state” (The White House, 2002b: 9). Likewise, it can be found in some of remarks of the British Prime Minister Blair (2004)
about the significance of democracy in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq. Equally Bush's notorious ‘axis of evil’ speech did not simply name
North Korea, Iran and Iraq as its members, but suggested that “states like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”
(Bush, 2002a, emphasis added). A comparison of the like, alongside the “with the terrorists” is actually a more complicated approach to the choosing of sides and the
drawing of lines than is generally credited. Simple
binary oppositions are less useful to an understanding here than the
process of incorporation and the policy of integration.
These examples indicate the policy of integration or exclusion being adopted by the US and followed by
certain allies. It warns those failing to adopt US values (principally liberal ‘representative’ democracy and
market capitalism), that they will be excluded from an American-centric world. The place of US allies in these
representations is not unimportant. Indeed, the strength of the US discourse relies also on its reflection and reiteration by other key allies, especially in Europe. Above and
beyond the dismissive pronouncements of Rumsfeld about Europe's “Old” and “New” – a conception that was inchoately articulated as early as the 1992 DPG – the dissent
of (even some) Europeans is a problem for the US in its world-making endeavours (see Bialasiewicz & Minca, 2005). It is not surprising, then, that following his re-election,
George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice embarked almost immediately on a “bridge-building” tour across Europe, noting not trans-Atlantic differences but “the great alliance
of freedom” that unites the United States and Europe
Rasch K 19/67
STATES WHO FACE THE PROSPECT OF US ENGAGEMENT HAVE TWO CHOICES—ASSIMILATE TO THE GLOBAL
LIBERAL ORDER OR FACE ANNIHILATION—DOESN’T MATTER THAT THE PLAN WARMS RELATIONS OR PROVIDES
CONCESSIONS—BRINGING THEM INTO THE FOLD TODAY PAVES THE WAY FOR WAR AGAINST “OUR” REMAINING
ENEMIES TOMORROW, THE IMPACT IS PERPETUAL WAR ON A GLOBAL SCALE
PEASE 02 [Aron Pease 2002, Politics and Culture, Issue 3, http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/pag.cfm?key=176

“Joxe works out the spatial logic of historical…the US is primarily a predatory empire”
Joxe analyzes a double disjointure in Empire of Disorder: first, the separation of economic, political, and military goals from their traditional site of coordination, the
geopolitical state, and the resultant second rupture, the disjointure between political goals and military-strategic goals. This second rupture is of great significance to Joxe as
a theorist of strategy, because it signifies a corruption in the philosophy of strategy and politics. According to Clausewitzian theories of war, in order for war to maintain its
connection to politics, military goals must be in line with political goals. This is the same as saying that military goals must be in line with diplomacy, because politics for
Clausewitz refers to the relations and interconnections between political states, each of whose primary task is survival, not only of the state, but of the people as well. In this
manner, war threatens the lives of people in each of the warring states, and it is only through the resolution of war that survival is ensured. The resolution occurs through a
peace pact or the conquering of one state by another, in which case the conqueror assumes the role of protector for the conquered peoples. At the root of war, Joxe says, is
always the imagination of peace.
Historically, empires dominate by extending the space of their rule. Yet, unwilling to conquer geographically,
the U.S. attempts to manage the world imperially through repression of symptoms of a global disorder it
perpetuates in order to keep economic fluxes flowing. Joxe shows that the disappearance of traditional military
strategy and the diachronic relationship between war and peace places us in a perpetual war, which by
Clausewitzian definition is war without politics and necessarily leads in globalization to an empire that threatens its own
subjects with death. In such a world, we have "frozen peace," defined by escalating violence combined with
"accelerated" peace negotiations and "indefinitely postponed implementation" of peace processes or nation-
building (32, 92-93). Primarily through the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and Clausewitzian strategy, Joxe develops a problematic of empire, as he analyzes
the economic and military power of the U.S., and the way the American Empire applies this power divorced from their connection to politics and diplomacy. Through
Hobbes and Clausewitz, Joxe posits the figure of the naturally strategic individual agent who becomes his or her own sovereign in periods of civil crises as a way to re-
attach politics and strategy at a different scale and make possible the formation of a new governance. Joxe's project thus makes possible a multitude of scales for new
political formations that could emerge through strategic action and resist empire, whether the American Empire or the global capitalist axiomatic.
EMPIRE-STRATEGY
Our situation, in which we must resist the Empire of Disorder that threatens us with death, is partly the result of the U.S unwillingness to use its military power to conquer
and thus assume protection of the population. Refusing the diachronic relationship of invasion followed by protection, U.S.-organized military interventions violate
Clausewitzian strategic rationality because "the common military objective of the outside participants, with no common political goal, cannot be defined except as a desire
to exercise military control over the war" (94). Politics is divorced from war, and in its place appears economics. Political sovereignty has become subservient to corporate
sovereignty, and there can be no politics without political sovereignty. Thus the Clausewitzian equation breaks down. The American
strategy for ruling
this Empire instead is to use its military power not to conquer, in which case it would have to assume a
protective role, but to use that power to repress symptoms of despair. It succeeds because it is able to
establish behavioral and economic norms, not because of any ability to conquer and rule, which would
require diplomatic skill. Indeed the American empire is not an empire in the traditional sense, but "merely a
system for regulating disorder" (14).
There appears to be no strategy to the American brand of perpetual war. War is not diplomacy by other means because there is no diplomacy when one superpower acts
unilaterally. Furthermore, there are no clear roles of aggression or defense, but rather only interventionism. Thus, the
American Empire violates Clausewitz's emphasis on the passage between war and peace, as well as his favoring of the role of defense as the preferred strategic and
democratic role in war. Instead,
the U.S. operates by creating disorder and repressing symptoms, which in turn cause
disorder, and so on. War as feedback loop replaces war as part of a diachronic relationship with peace.
The "war on terror" provides an excellent illustration. Terrorism, Joxe reminds us, is not a political sovereignty; it's a form of violence. Thus a war on terror cannot be a
strategic goal, because one cannot defeat terrorism, as it is not a sovereign with which one could make a peace pact or interact diplomatically, and it is not a geopolitical
space one could conquer. The meaning of such a declaration, then, is obvious: "the entire military apparatus will be used to attack the weak" (64).
If on a global level we have what appears to be chaos, or non-Clausewitzian war, Joxe shows how at smaller scales war reveals itself as Clausewitzian after all. Approached
at their individual scale, inter-ethnic wars and barbaric violence appear for what they really are-political civil wars. Often in these cases, the "cruel little wars" are wars of
balkanization, in which emerging forms of political cooperation are squashed by the U.S., or-what amounts to the same thing-NATO, as in the case of Kosovo. There is both
a deployment of military force to destroy the emerging political sovereignty and a replacement with new group formations more politically inept or malleable. The new
ruling classes of global economic power skillfully divert political civil wars into inter-community conflicts between ethnic or religious groups. These conflicts eliminate
through bloodshed the common interests of diverse social classes. Destruction as Balkanization leads to the set-up of violent mini-systems run by small warlords and mafia
networks connected to transnational finance. Empire reveals itself in these places not as a super-state, but as a fractal logic that "imposes itself at any level." As Joxe says,
"tell me what your core-fortress is, your social wasteland, your genocide . . . and I will tell you who you are. Emperor, king, mafia boss, respected citizen . . ." (104).
EMPIRE-SPACE
Spatial analysis figures prominently in Empire of Disorder, as Joxe outlines a "dynamic morphology" of empire-space, in which various spaces and spatial scales are
connected by this fractal logic. These spaces include fixed geographical zones that differ both spatially and temporally. For instance, zones of genocide appear at a certain
Rasch K 20/67
geographic distance from an "overdeveloped core" and at different scales. These genocide zones also differ by the relative speed or slowness of their genocide, for example
military massacre in Rwanda versus the targeting and assassination of leftist "types" in Latin America. In addition to various genocide zones, social wastelands, and other
locales, Joxe accounts for their relationship to the various military, economic, and institutional "membranes" that work as flexible borders partitioning the spaces but leaving
them open to re-organization. Fixed stockpiles and moving military bases populate the zones as well. Lastly, the electromagnetic space of information, finance and
surveillance of course interconnects with and at all scales.
Joxe works out the spatial logic of historical imperial projects in relation to the Empire of Disorder. Traditionally, empires have solved potential crises through spatial
strategies. Logistical empires, such as the maritime empires that figure heavily in Fernand Braudel's and Manuel DeLanda's writings, spread out by connecting to new
markets, increasing the flow of their goods and the strength of their reserves. Predatory empires have solved crises through violent conquest, acquiring new territories and
organizing the newly accumulated surplus of goods and labor. In either case, there is a relationship between an inside and outside demarcated by a geographic frontier. Just
as marxist writings focus on the use of an outside to solve capitalist crises, Joxe shows that civil crises (in other words, class struggle) can be siphoned off through the
creation of an outside enemy. On the surface at least the American presidency in recent years has provided a number of such examples, as in the most recent resurrection of
Saddam Hussein.
Yet, Joxe asks, what happens to this political strategy when inside and outside is no longer strictly a matter of geography? In
the Empire of Disorder, the
exterior is no longer peasant fields or unencountered "barbarians," but co-inhabitants, diplomatically and
economically interconnected in the same post-Cold War globality. The American Empire appears to have competing strategic
tendencies. On one hand, it works toward a global smoothing-over of political identities, extending neoliberal democracy and free-market economy across the entire globe.
Technological advances make it increasingly possible to coordinate violent and economic means of domination through the delocalized real time of financial markets, global
surveillance, and precision targeting for the massacre of localized uprisings. On the other hand, because these strategies tend toward a smoothing over, a competing strategic
tendency becomes necessary in order to recreate an outside. These strategies include the disruption of constructions of political formations and their subsequent replacement
with religious or ethnic sub-group representations, of which Joxe lists numerous examples, including the destruction of nation-building processes in the post-Soviet Union
bloc. In these cases, we see the organization of violence by a fractal logic in which each scale has the same hierarchization. Violent mini-systems made up of violent mini-
dictators and/or mafias plug into the transnational corporate system to form a sub-state/global-state interconnection. These mini-systems make possible the continuous
parasiting of local biopower and resources by a global corporate order through the re-establishing of an "outside" on the "inside," a process that includes creation of global
Souths, gentrification, and ghettoization. Finally, war
as siphon of disorder finds its necessary outside through the recreation
of enemies on the inside or the redefinition of peace in order to make war. We see this outside-making in the
War on Terror, with the Bush Jr. administration's infamous creation of the "Axis of Evil," or the making of peace into
a "with us or against us, with you or without you" binary logic of global diplomacy.
These spatial strategies represent the military and economic imperial projects of the American Empire. They form part of what appears today as the corruption of
Clausewitzian war on the global scale, a corruption caused by the replacement of political sovereignty with corporate sovereignty. When military action does not seek
political ends, but rather merely keeps economic fluxes flowing, we can say that corporate sovereignty has replaced political sovereignty. If we retain Clausewitz's equation,
as Joxe surely seems to prefer, then we have to exchange these terms. Instead of politics by other means, war is economics by other means if the U.S. is primarily a logistical
empire, or economics is war by other means if the U.S. is primarily a predatory empire.
Rasch K 21/67
DON’T BE FOOLED BY THE ATTEMPT TO REJECT THE POLITICS OF CONTAINMENT—THE MORE INSIDIOUS
STRATEGY OF GLOBAL CONTROL IS THE ONE PURSUED VIA DIPLOMATIC INTEGRATION—THE PLAN IS A TROJAN
HORSE DESIGNED TO LOCK IN US SUPREMACY OVER THE GLOBE AND TO CREAT A NEW MANICHEAN DIVIDE
BETWEEN COMPLIANT STATES WHO WE “ENGAGE” AND A NEW GLOBAL CLASS OF OUTLAWS
CAMPBELL 07 [David Campbell et all, 2007, Political Geography, VOl. 26, pg 415-416
The concept of integration, invoked in different ways and in different measures by both Kagan and Barnett, is similarly at the heart of the
current administration's foreign and domestic policies. The former Director of Policy at the US State Department, Richard Haass,
articulated the central tenets of the concept when he wondered:
Is there a successor idea to containment? I think there is. It is the idea of integration. The goal of US foreign policy
should be to persuade the other major powers to sign on to certain key ideas as to how the world should
operate: opposition to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, support for free trade, democracy,
markets. Integration is about locking them into these policies and then building institutions that lock them
in even more (Haass in Lemann, 1 April 2002, emphasis added).
That the US is no longer prepared to tolerate regimes that do not mirror its own democratic values and
practices, and that it will seek to persuade such major powers to change their policies and behaviours to fit
the American modus operandi, is not without historical precedent (Ambrosius, 2006). Nor does the differently
imagined geography of integration replace completely previous Manichean conceptions of the world so
familiar to Cold War politics. Rather, the proliferation of new terms of antipathy such as ‘axis of evil’, ‘rogue
states’, and ‘terror cities’ demonstrate how integration goes hand in hand with – and is mutually constitutive
of – new forms of division. Barnett's divide between the globalised world and the non-integrating gap is reflected and complemented by Kagan's divide in
ways of dealing with this state of affairs. Much of this imagined geography pivots on the idea of ‘the homeland’. Indeed, in the imaginations of the security analysts we
highlight here, there is a direct relationship and tension between securing the homeland's borders and challenging the sanctity of borders elsewhere
Rasch K 22/67
THE LIBERAL-INTERNATIONALIST PROJECT OF BRINING OUR NEWFOUND ‘FRIENDS’ WITHIN THE FOLD OF US
DIPLOMATIC COMMITMENTS CORRESPONDS TO THE EVER-INTENSIFYING PROJECT OF PURGING THE GLOBAL
ORDER OF THE MIRROR IMAGE OF ENLIGHTENED LIBERAL STATES—EVERY VALUE ESTABLISHED BY LIBERAL
INTERNATIONALISM RELIES ON ITS CORRESPONDING OPPOSITE NON-VALUE THAT MUST BE ERADICATED
RASCH 03 [William Rasch Spring 2003, Cultural Critique, Vol. 54

Yes, this passage attests to the antiliberal prejudices of an unregenerate Eurocentric conservative with a pronounced affect for the counterrevolutionary and Catholic South
of Europe. It seems to resonate with the apologetic mid-twentieth-century Spanish reception of Vitoria that wishes to justify the Spanish civilizing mission in the Americas.
8 But the contrast between Christianity and humanism is not just prejudice; it is also instructive, because with it, Schmitt tries to grasp something both disturbing and
elusive about the modern world—namely, the apparent fact that the
liberal and humanitarian attempt to construct a world of
universal friendship produces, as if by internal necessity, ever new enemies.
For Schmitt, the Christianity of Vitoria, of Salamanca, Spain, 1539, represents a concrete, spatially imaginable order, centered (still) in Rome and, ultimately, Jerusalem.
This, with its divine revelations, its Greek philosophy, and its Roman language and institutions, is the polis. This
is civilization, and outside its walls
lie the barbarians. The humanism that Schmitt opposes is, in his words, a philosophy of absolute humanity.
By virtue of its universality and abstract normativity, it has no localizable polis, no clear distinction between what
is inside and what is outside. Does humanity embrace all humans? Are there no gates to the city and thus no
barbarians outside? If not, against whom or what does it wage its wars? We can understand Schmitt's concerns in the following
way: Christianity distinguishes between believers and nonbelievers. Since nonbelievers can become believers, they must be of the same category of being. To be human,
[End Page 135] then, is the horizon within which the distinction between believers and nonbelievers is made. That is, humanity per se is not part of the distinction, but is that
which makes the distinction possible. However, once the term used to describe the horizon of a distinction also becomes that distinction's positive pole, it needs its negative
opposite. If humanity is both the horizon and the positive pole of the distinction that that horizon enables, then the negative pole can only be something that lies beyond that
horizon, can only be something completely antithetical to horizon and positive pole alike—can only, in other words, be inhuman. As Schmitt says:
Only with the concept of the human in the sense of absolute humanity does there appear as the other side of
this concept a specifically new enemy, the inhuman. In the history of the nineteenth century, setting off the inhuman from
the human is followed by an even deeper split, the one between the superhuman and the subhuman. In the
same way that the human creates the inhuman, so in the history of humanity the superhuman brings about
with a dialectical necessity the subhuman as its enemy twin.9
This "two-sided aspect of the ideal of humanity" (Schmitt 1988, Der Nomos der Erde, 72) is a theme Schmitt had already developed in his The Concept of the Political
liberal pluralism is in fact not in
(1976) and his critiques of liberal pluralism (e.g., 1988, Positionen und Begriffe, 151-65). His complaint there is that
the least pluralist but reveals itself to be an overriding monism, the monism of humanity. Thus, despite the claims that
pluralism allows for the individual's freedom from illegitimate constraint, Schmitt presses the point home that political opposition to liberalism is itself deemed illegitimate.
Indeed, liberal pluralism, in Schmitt's eyes, reduces the political to the social and economic and thereby nullifies all truly political opposition by simply excommunicating its
opponents from the High Church of Humanity. After all, only an unregenerate barbarian could fail to recognize the irrefutable benefits of the liberal order.
Rasch K 23/67
LINK: Terrorism = Uniquely Bad
IF A WAR IS WAGED ON BEHALF OF “US” WE CAN ISOLATE A “THEM,” BUT WHEN IT IS WAGED ON BEHALF OF
EVERYONE IT RAISES A HOST OF QUESTIONS. THE NAZIS, THE COMMUNISTS, AND NOW THE TERRORISTS ARE
NOT OUR ENEMIES, THEY ARE NOT HUMAN BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS AGREED THAT EVERYONE DOES NOT
INCLUDE THEM. OF COURSE WE CAN SAY THEIR CRIMES MERIT AN EXCEPTION BUT THIS THINKING IS
DANGEROUS. SO LONG AS HUMANITY IS EVALUATIVE OUR INCLUSIVITY WILL HAVE LIMITS AND ALL OPPOSITION
TO THE LIBERAL ORDER IS EXPOSED TO THE CAPACITY TO “MERIT THAT EXCEPTION.” THIS DANGER IS WITHOUT
PRECEDENT. RESISTANCE TO THIS ORDER CANNOT MERELY BE FOUGHT – IT MUST BE CONSUMED WITHOUT
REMAINDER MAKING POSSIBLE NEW AND UNIMAGINABLE MODES OF ABSOLUTE ANNIHILATION.
Martin Heidegger on the Line(s) of Cosmopolitanism and the War on Terror.” Conference on the International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt. September 9-11. P.18-21)
The second criticism has to do with the imposition of a particular kind of monism: despite the lip-service to plurality, ‘liberal pluralism is in fact not in the least pluralist but
reveals itself to be an overriding monism, the monism of humanity.’49 Similarly, Timothy Brennan traces the same tendency in current cosmopolitan perspectives in that
they show ‘an enthusiasm for customary differences, but as ethical or aesthetic material for a unified polychromatic culture – a new singularity born of a blending and
merging of multiple local constituents’.50 There are two ways in which the discourse of a ‘universal humanity’ has a strong
disciplining effect on peoples and polities. The first, noted by a number of commentators, involves the political refutation of the tolerance witnessed
in the cultural or private sphere; in other words, politically, cosmopolitanism shows little tolerance for what it designates as
‘intolerant’ politics, which is any politics that moves in opposition to its ideals, rendering political opposition
to it illegitimate.51 Cosmopolitan discourses are also defined by a claim to their own exception and superiority. They naturalise the historical origins
of liberal societies which are no longer regarded as ‘contingently established and historically conditioned forms of organization’; rather, they become the
universal standard against which other societies are judged. Those found wanting are banished, as outlaws,
from the civilized world. Ironically, one of the signs of their outlaw status is their insistence on autonomy, on
sovereignty.52 The second disciplining effect of the discourse of humanity is seen in the tendency to normalize diverse
peoples through ‘individualization’. The paramount emphasis placed on legal instruments such as human rights transforms diverse subjectivities into
‘rights-holders’.53 As Rasch argues ‘the other is stripped of his otherness and made to conform to the universal ideal of
what it means to be human’.54 The international human rights regime, which cosmopolitanism champions as a pure expression of the centrality of the
individual and to which it is theoretically and ontologically committed, is the exportation of modern subjectivity around the globe. The discourse of
humanity expressed through human rights involves a transformation of the human into the rights-holder:
‘[o]nce again we see that the term “human” is not descriptive, but evaluative. To be truly human, one needs to be corrected.’5
Thirdly, ‘humanity is not a political concept, and no political entity corresponds to it. The eighteenth century humanitarian concept of humanity was a polemical denial of
the then existing aristocratic feudal system and the privileges accompanying it.’56 Outside of this historical location, where does it find concrete expression? The
discourse of humanity finds expression in an abstract politics of neutrality, usually in the name of an
international community which acts, we are assured, in the interest of humanity. James Brown Scot, a jurist and prominent
political figure in the United States at the beginning of the 20th Century, wrote in the interwar years of the right of this international community to impose its neutral will:
The “international community,” Scot writes, “is coextensive with humanity—no longer merely with Christianity;” it has become “the representative of the common
humanity rather than of the common religion binding the States.” Therefore, the international community “posses the inherent right to impose its will . . . and to punish its
violation, not because of a treaty, or a pact or a covenant, but because of an international need” (283). If in the sixteenth century it was the Christian Church that determined
the content of this international need, in the twentieth century and beyond it must be the secularized “church” of “common humanity” that performs this all important
service.57 Finally, and most importantly, there is the relation of the concept of humanity to the other, and to war and violence. In its historical location, the humanity
concept had critical purchase against aristocratic prerogatives, but its utilization by liberal discourses in the individualist tradition, Schmitt feared, could bring about new and
unimaginable modes of exclusion. Rasch explains: The humanism that Schmitt opposes is, in his words, a philosophy of absolute humanity. By virtue of its universality and
abstract normativity, it has no localizable polis, no clear distinction between what is inside and what is outside. Does
humanity embrace all humans?
Are there no gates to the city and thus no barbarians outside? If not, against whom or what does it wage its
wars? ‘Humanity as such’ Schmitt noted ‘cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet’.59
As Elen Kennedy notes, humanity ‘is a polemical word that negates its opposite.’60 In The Concept of the Political Schmitt argued that
humanity ‘excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being’.61 In the Nomos, however, it becomes apparent that,
historically examined, the concept of humanity could not allow the notion of justus hostis, of a ‘just enemy’, who is
recognised as someone with whom one can make war but also negotiate peace. Schmitt noted how only when ‘man
appeared to be the embodiment of absolute humanity, did the other side of this concept appear in the form
Rasch K 24/67
of a new enemy: the inhuman’ (NE 104). It is worth quoting Rasch’s account at length: We can understand Schmitt’s concerns in the following way:
Christianity distinguishes between believers and nonbelievers. Since nonbelievers can become believers, they must be of the same category of being. To be human, then, is
the horizon within which the distinction between believers and nonbelievers is made. That is, humanity per se is not part of the distinction, but is that which makes the
distinction possible. However, once the term used to describe the horizon of a distinction also becomes that distinction’s positive pole, it needs its negative opposite. If
humanity is both the horizon and the positive pole of the distinction that that horizon enables, then the negative pole can only be something that lies beyond that horizon, can
only be something completely antithetical to horizon and positive pole alike—can only, in other words, be inhuman.62 Withoutthe concept of the just
enemy associated with the notion of non-discriminatory war, the enemy had no value and could be
exterminated. The concept of humanity, furthermore, reintroduces substantive causes of war because it shutters the formal concept of justus hostis, now designated
substantively as an enemy of humanity as such. In Schmitt’s account of the League of Nations in the Nomos, he highlights that compared to the kinds of wars that can be
waged on behalf of humanity, the interstate European wars from 1815 to 1914 in reality were regulated; they were bracketed by the neutral Great Powers and were
completely legal procedures in comparison with the modern and gratuitous police actions against violators of peace, which can be dreadful acts of annihilation(NE 186).
Enemies of humanity cannot be considered ‘just and equal’ enemies. Moreover, they cannot claim
neutrality: one cannot remain neutral in the call to be for or against humanity or its freedom; one cannot,
similarly, claim a right to resist or defend oneself in the sense we understand this right to have existed in the jus publicum Europeaum. As will
examine below in the context of the war on terror, this denial of the self-defence and resistance ‘can presage a
dreadful nihilistic destruction of all law’ (NE 187). When the enemy is not accorded a formal equality, the notion that peace can be made with him is
unacceptable, as Schmitt detailed through his study of the League of Nations, which had declared the abolition of war, but in rescinding the concept of neutrality only
succeeded in the ‘dissolution of “peace”‘ (NE 246). It
is with the dissolution of peace that total wars of annihilation and
destruction become possible, where the other cannot be assimilated, or accommodated, let alone tolerated:
the friend/enemy distinction is not longer taking place with a justus hostis but rather between good and evil,
human and inhuman, where ‘the negative pole of the distinction is to be fully and finally consumed without
remainder.’63 With this in mind, I turn in the next section to the war on terror and its relation to the discourse of humanity and cosmopolitanism.
Rasch K 25/67
LINK: Depoliticization of Enemies
THE LANGUAGE OF THE 1AC HAS A DIRECT POLITICAL CONSEQUENCE, RHETORICALLY DISQUALIFYING
TERRORISTS FROM CONVENTIONAL ENMITY AND DENYING THE EXISTENCE OF THE TERRORIST AS A POLITICAL
ENEMY. THIS DENIAL OF ENMITY ANNIHILATES THE REMAINDER ON BEHALF OF UNIVERSALITY, TURNING STATES
INTO KILLING MACHINES.
THORUP 2006 (MIKKEL, A LECTURER IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT AT AARHUS UNIVERSITY. IN DEFENSE OF ENMITY – CRITIQUES OF LIBERAL GLOBALISM.
PH.D – DISSERTATION. INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, UNIVERSITY OF AARHUS, DENMARK.
The critique of depoliticization reminds us to pay close attention to the use of words, to legitimization
strategies and discourses in politics – as evidenced in Schmitt’s discussion of the very political difference between the word ‘tribute’ and ‘reparations’ in
the German debate on its payments to France after WW1 (1996a: 31, note 12). Words are politically charged even when, or rather especially when, they present themselves
as non-political. And they have direct political consequences. It’s all-important what one is called in the world of politics. Naming
is the first game of
politics. It determines if you’re taken seriously as an equal, opponent or friend or disregarded, acted upon,
exterminated even. As James Aho says:
… defamatory words rarely, if ever, simply describe things; they also rhetorically ‘accomplish’ them. And
what they accomplish is a victim, an evil-doer, ready for violation. In short, the child’s ditty– ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but words will never hurt me’ – is patently untrue. Defamatory language prepares audiences cognitively and emotionally to
take up sticks and stones. (1990:20)
My aim is to discuss the use of depoliticization as a ‘defamatory practice’ in the field of international politics. I want to argue an apparently contradictory claim: That
depoliticization can be a revolutionary instrument – although it consistently presents itself as the opposite. Depoliticization is not reducible to a reaction against
politicizations. Depoliticization revolutionized the pre-liberal world through seemingly anti-revolutionary means. What I aim to show is that contemporary liberal globalist
depoliticization is in the midst of parallel revolutionary depoliticization. What liberal globalist depoliticization aims at is the global
denial of an outside. There is no longer to be any legitimate position outside the liberal order. The denial of
the enemy is the denial of the legitimate outside and other. I want to trace the re-appearance of the enemy in its ‘non-political’ forms and
to trace the return of the political in anti-politics. The ‘barbarian’ in its various forms is the non-political enemy, the enemy not
recognized as being within the same horizon as us. This opens for a wholly different arsenal of engagement.
Depoliticization is basically about denying the existence of the political enemy. That, however, does not make a world of
friends. Denying political enmity tend to make enemies appear in other ‘perverted’ forms. The same goes for
the political and sovereignty. Once denied, they re-appear in other guises. What happens once the political enemy is
depoliticized, that is, brought from a political to a non-political register? The thesis is, that the denial of political enmity tends to turn states,
even liberal states, into what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘killing machines’
Rasch K 26/67
LINK: “War on <insert abstract idea here>”
THE AFFIRMATIVE CONTINUES IN THE LIBERALIST TRADITION, SPURNING CONVENTIONAL ENMITY AND POLITICAL
LANGUAGE FOR HUMANITARIAN DISCOURSE AND HOPING TO ELIMINATE SOME ABSTRACT EVIL, BUT IN THE
ABSTRACT ENMITY OF OUR WARS ON DRUGS, POVERTY, AND ESPECIALLY TERRORISM, WE SEE ONLY THE
DISAPPEARANCE OF THE ENEMY. WHEN WE GO TO WAR AGAINST SYMBOLS, WAR BECOMES UNENDING AND
METAPHORICAL, BUT NOT LESS DESTRUCTIVE. INSTEAD, THE INSATIABLE DESIRE TO ELIMINATE THE ABSTRACT
ENEMY MAKES VIOLENCE, WAR, AND EXTERMINATION A PERMANENT CONDITION OF LIFE AND POTENTIAL
ENEMIES OF EVERYONE.
THORUP, 2006 (Mikkel, a lecturer in the History of Philosophy Department at Aarhus University. In Defense of Enmity – Critiques of Liberal Globalism.
Ph.D – Dissertation. Institute of Philosophy and the History of Ideas, University of Aarhus, Denmark. p.300-301)
Schmit saw political enmity as limited and feared the consequences of its degeneration, once transferred to other registers. The argument is that enmity
does not
disappear, when we leave the political vocabulary. It re-emerges in new and possibly worse versions. In this
section, we’ll examine four different categories of enmity to illustrate, what is here interpreted as the return of the political – this time in distorted forms.131 The four
categories are moral, abstract, biopolitical and individual enmity. What characterizes political or conventional enmity is that the
enemy is considered an equal; it’s a symmetrical relation of enmity. There is a sense of equality, which is the
precondition for rules of war (Walzer 2000: 128). The goal is to defeat, not annihilate the enemy. Once the conflict is
over, one can sign a peace treaty, reassume diplomatic and commercial relations etc. The interaction, even in
war, is codified and hence limited. In the interstate war, no one can claim a ‘just cause’, and none is needed, because states have the right to engage in
war. No one can ideally claim moral superiority. The political enmity is therefore ‘clean’, contained and limited. The enemy is ‘the other’, but
recognizable and familiar even in war and enmity. The important characteristic of the political enmity is the
horizontal relationship between enemies. This is seriously challenged in its other forms. One example could
be the shift from Reagan’s ‘empire of evil’ to Bush Jr.’s ‘axis of evil’. The first denotes a loathed but still
recognizable political form (and Reagan did negotiate with this ‘evilness’), whereas the second loses all political content and
form. It’s pure evil. Evil comes in many shapes, some of them we can live with because they are, at bottom, recognized as an opponent and not as evil as such
(Dean 2005). I want to briefly mention the moral enmity before moving on to other three categories, only to later return to the moral register. The most important expression
of the moral enmity is the idea of ‘just war’, which gives one the moral superiority. The enemy is degraded, deemed inferior and criminalized. In the moral vocabulary, the
equal relationship between enemies is being altered to an unequal relationship between the good and the bad. Enmity goes from a non-discriminatory to a discriminatory
modus operandi: “Today the enemy, just like the war itself, comes to be at once banalized (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (as the Enemy,
an absolute threat to the ethical order)” (Hardt & Negri 2000: 13). Actually there area number of similarities between the political and the moral enmity. Both operate under
the assumption that the enemy is external, visible and identifiable. The relation between friend and enemy is thought as a relation between well-defined and demarcated
entities. This changes, as we move to the other categories of enmity, where the obvious in/out, friend/enemy differentiation dissolve and new attempts at their reinstatement
emerge. This chapter continues the exploration of the forms of enmity started in chapter 3 on Schmitt’s concepts of the enemy: Conventional, real, absolute, unconventional,
internal and depoliticized. It attempts to update Schmitt’s list and zoom in on contemporary expressions of enmity emerging from liberal post-politic societies.
Abstract Enmity
In the abstract enmity, as we find it for instance in ‘the war on drugs’, ‘the war on poverty’ and most
prominently ‘the war on terror’ (which lies somewhere between the abstract and the moral enmity), we see a blurring of front lines
and the disappearance of the enemy. It is highly symbolic that Osama Bin Laden has not been caught and that both his whereabouts and physical
condition (dead or alive?) are unknown. This illustrates nicely the invisibility of the abstract enemy. When the first George Bush was president, he said after an US-Soviet
summit in 1990 that the enemy was no longer the USSR but rather ‘instability and unpredictability’ (Barash 1994: 44). This enemy is a total abstraction and it quickly
gave way to various representations of ‘instability and unpredictability’, such as warlords (Somalia), old-fashioned dictators (Iraq war 1), terrorism (first attack on
WTC), international crime (Russia) etc. This total abstraction cannot last and desperate attempts at re-enmification was made by what James Deer Derian (2001) calls the
MIME-NET, that is, the military-industrial-media-entertainment network and by segments of academia (e.g. Samuel Huntington). Putting names and faces on ‘instability
and unpredictability’ is, of course, also one way to avoid questions of a system that produces such features but mostly it serves to re-direct energies and anxieties but also
One is, of course, always tempted to put a face on this invisible enemy: The inner city
funding, policies and wars.
crackhead in the war on drugs, single-parent, teenage-mothers in the war on poverty, Osama Bin Laden and
Al- Zarkawi in the war on terror. But these are just symbols; their ‘elimination’ will not win the fight. In
actuality, one of the characteristics of the abstract enmity is that the war cannot be won. War becomes
unending and metaphorical. When America named its war on Al-Qaeda ‘Infinite Justice’ (they quickly abandoned the name) it is not only justice that’s
infinite. It’s the war itself.132 We see the blurring of war/peace as the war on poverty and drugs become part of daily administration or as the terror alerts become routine.
When the ‘war’ is daily life and the emergency measures become law – as in the Patriot act – we see a blurring of
classical differences. When the Department for Homeland Security tells you to be alert at all times, then there are
Rasch K 27/67
no difference between peace and war. The same goes for the differentiation between friend and enemy; now,
the enemy is potentially everyone. Drug tests in schools or the labeling of al Arab Muslims (and Western converts) as possible terrorists makes the
distinction between friend and enemy impossible. As Michael Howard says, the declaration of war makes action necessary: “To declare
that one is at war is immediately to create a war psychosis that may be totally counter-productive for the
objective being sought. It arouses an immediate expectation, and demand, for spectacular military action
against some easily identifiable adversary, preferably hostile state – action leading to decisive results” (2002: 9). But, here is no decisive battle, no
front line or any destructible enemy in the abstract war. This doesn’t make the abstract war any less
destructive. Actually quite the opposite. Because victory keeps eluding, there is a certain eliminist tendency
in the abstract enmity. In the war on poverty it can be harsh welfare cuts, disciplinary regimes and even
racist ‘science’ (The Bell Curve); in the war on drugs it can be militant police measures and actual wars in Third
World countries (Columbia, Panama), and in the war on terror it is shadow warriors, executions without
trial, rendition of suspects to countries who routinely torture prisoners or to CIA-controlled ‘black holes’.
Rasch K 28/67
LINK: Peace Process
VIOLENCE IS NOT THE RESULT OF CONFLICT, IT IS THE RESULT OF THE DRIVE TO ABOLISH IT. SOCIETY NEED
NOT BE CONFINED TO IDEAS OF PEACE OR HARMONY, BUT SHOULD INSTEAD EMBRACE AGONISTIC
RELATIONSHIPS IN WHICH ONE RECOGNIZES THE POWER OF THE OTHER IN ONE’S OWN POSTURE.
HATAB 2002 (LAWRENCE J. PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY 2002 PROSPECTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC AGON WHY WE CAN STILL BE NIETZSCHEANS: THE
JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE P.MUSE)
How can we begin to apply the notion of agonistics to politics in general and democracy in particular? First of all, contestation and competition can be seen as fundamental
to self-development and as an intrinsically social phenomenon. Agonistics helps us articulate the social and political ramifications of Nietzsche's concept of will to power.
As Nietzsche put it in an 1887 note, "will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; it seeks that which resists it" (KSA 12, p.424). Power, therefore, is not simply
an individual possession or a goal of action; it is more a global, interactive conception. For Nietzsche, every
advance in life is an overcoming of
some obstacle or counterforce, so that conflict is a mutual co-constitution of contending forces. [End Page 134] Opposition generates
development. The human self is not formed in some internal sphere and then secondarily exposed to
external relations and conflicts. The self is constituted in and through what it opposes and what opposes it;
in other words, the self is formed through agonistic relations. Therefore, any annulment of one's Other would be an annulment of one's
self in this sense. Competition can be understood as a shared activity for the sake of fostering high achievement and self-development, and therefore as an intrinsically social
activity. In the light of Nietzsche's appropriation of the two forms of Eris,
it is necessary to distinguish between agonistic conflict and
sheer violence. A radical agonistics rules out violence, because violence is actually an impulse to eliminate
conflict by annihilating or incapacitating an opponent, bringing the agon to an end. 11 In a later work Nietzsche discusses
the "spiritualization of hostility (Feindschaft)," wherein one must affirm both the presence and the power of one's opponents as
implicated in one's own posture (TI "Morality as Antinature," 3). And in this passage Nietzsche specifically applies such a notion to the political realm.
What this implies is that the category of the social need not be confined to something like peace or harmony. Agonistic
relations, therefore, do not connote a deterioration of a social disposition and can thus be extended to political
relations.
How can democracy in general terms be understood as an agonistic activity? Allow me to quote from my previous work. Political judgments are not preordained or dictated;
outcomes depend upon a contest of speeches where one view wins and other views lose in a tabulation of votes; since the results are binding and backed by the coercive
power of the government, democratic elections and procedures establish temporary control and subordination—which, however, can always be altered or reversed because
of the succession of periodic political contests. . . . Democratic elections allow for, and depend upon, peaceful exchanges and transitions of power. . . . [L]anguage is the
weapon in democratic contests. The binding results, however, produce tangible effects of gain and loss that make political exchanges more than just talk or a game. . . . The
urgency of such political contests is that losers must yield to, and live under, the policies of the winner; we notice, therefore, specific configurations of power, of domination
and submission in democratic politics.
Rasch K 29/67
LINK: Prevention of War
WAR IS THE ULTIMATE THREAT TO SECURITY – THE PREVENTION OF WAR BECOMES THE IMPETUS FOR VIOLENCE
IN THE NAME OF A LIBERAL-DEMOCRATIC HUMANITY
ZHANG 04 [Xudong, Cultural Critique, “Multiplicity or Heterogeneity? The Cultural-Political Paradox in the Age of Globalization.”
One of the more convincing points one can find in Empire is this new political animal's interest not in waging war but in maintaining peace. But this, too, can be understood
more forcefully in light of the Schmittian observation that any
totalistic construction of a homogeneous concept of "us" is based,
unwittingly or not, upon a false, apolitical, and unattainable illusion of the "total security" of our way of life,
our being. The peace-seeking drive indeed touches on a fun-damental feature of all civilizational-imperial orders of "our way of life." From the Great Wall of China to
the U.S. national missile [End Page 48] defense system, we witness the fantasy about total security. The Great Wall of China, which had already been penetrated time and
again by hordes of nomads even before it gets symbolically "battered down" by the "cheap commodities of the bourgeoisie," in that splendid passage from The Communist
Manifesto, stands to be rebuilt again and again, symbolically or otherwise. Total
security, as Schmitt tells us, is itself built upon the notion of
the enemy as the negated Other; the Wall denies their existence as human beings while secretly
acknowledging the real threat this negated, dehumanized enemy poses to our wellbeing both from outside
and within. The "gap" of the Manhattan skyline left by the destruction of the Twin Towers of World Trade Center is so profoundly disturbing, a daily reminder for
New Yorkers, because it indicates both the increasing impossibility and the increasing necessity of the Wall: The Wall of modernization and modernity, of classical notions
of security and protection, of a sheltered and protected life requires not only the apathy, indifference, and self-indulgence of wealth and power, but also, and more crucially,
the work of the state that maintains the physical distance, separation, and destruction of the enemy. The political homogeneity required by the age of homeland security may
prove alarming and ominous to those who cherish civil liberty and civil rights, but there is no denying that it is intrinsic to the very notion of freedom and wellbeing
assumed by globalization and postmodernism as conventionally understood. In this particular sense one may concede that globalization and postmodernism as ideological
discourses represent one more attempt to form a homogenous and exclusive self-identity by which to manage human conditions in the name of freedom, diversity, and
multiplicity, by forming and producing subjectivity and the concept of human nature as such. In this sense, the Deleuzian philosophy of affirmativity, internal differentiation,
and the multiplicity of sameness—all argued against the classical Hegelian notions of binary opposite and dialectic contradiction—is likely to become a new philosophical
ground of ideological and cultural-political contention (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Deleuze 1994). This concept offers opportunities for the culturalist concept of the
liberal-democratic selfhood and sovereignty to deterritorialize and reterritorialize, to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, to exist as the "body without organs," and
to function as the ultimate machine of becoming [End Page 49]political in the battle of defining the universal in terms of the particular. With increased communication and
interaction between different human groups at a certain level (that is to say, within certain class strata across the world), the exclusion upon which the necessary, though
If
disguised, political cohesiveness and homogeneity has been constructed must be defined in terms of the radical otherness of civilization and humanity as such.
terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism did not exist, they would have been invented; the Iraqis, the Serbs,
and to some degree the Chinese have been there, as has the African continent, in a less visible but, by virtue
of its being kept out of sight, more frightening way. In this respect, too, there is little new. And Schmitt, too, has something ready
to offer: At the end of The Concept of the Political, he observes (and this was 1932):
War is condemned but executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties,
international police, and measures to assure peace remain. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy
but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity. A war waged to protect or
expand economic power must, with the aid of propaganda, turn into a crusade and into the last war of
humanity. This is implicit in the polarity of ethics and economics, a polarity astonishingly systematic and
consistent. But this allegedly non-political and apparently even antipolitical system serves existing or newly
emerging friend-and-enemy groupings and cannot escape the logic of the political.
Rasch K 30/67
LINK: Environment/Nature
THE PRESERVATION OF NATURE IS HOSTILE TO THE WORLD – IT ESTABLISHES AN EMPTY TRANSCENDENT THAT
WORSHIPS ALL THINGS DETINED TO PERISH. THIS DRIVE TO AVERT DESTRUCTION TURNS THE WORLD INTO A
MUSEUM
BENJAMIN, 98 [Marina, Living at the End of the World, p. 230-231]

Rasch K 31/67
Overviews (use sparingly)
2NC OVERVIEW
AS HEARTBREAKING AS REALITY MAY BE, IF WE JUST ACCEPT THE INEVITABILITY OF CONFLICT WE CAN THEN
MOVE ON TO DEVELOP EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES FOR EXISTING IN THIS WORLD. THROUGH THIS ACCEPTANCE WE
ARE ABLE TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE, AND REALIZE THAT IT IS NOT CONFLICT THAT
CAUSES VIOLENCE, BUT THE SUPPRESSION OF CONFLICT. THE AFFIRMATIVE OFFERS YOU A FALSE CHOICE –
EITHER YOU ALLOW VIOLENCE OR PREVENT IT, YOU STOP THE WAR OR YOU EMBRACE IT, LIKE VOTING NEG
MEANS WE MUST LOOOOVE NUCLEAR WAR. BUT THIS FALSE CHOICE IS THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM – IF WE
CONDEMN BOTH CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE WE FIND OURSELVES PLAYING THE WHACK-A-MOLE GAME FROM
HELL AND IT NEVER ENDS UNTIL WE CAN ACCEPT THAT CONFLICT BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS IS LEGITIMATE AND
NECESSARY. THE MIDDLE EAST IS OUR ENEMY, NOT THE WORLD’S ENEMY AND NOT HUMANITY’S ENEMY,
AND ONLY BY BOLDLY AND OPENLY DECLARING OUR ENEMIES CAN WE FOSTER AN AGONISTIC POLITICS THAT
RULES OUT VIOLENCE AND THE NEED FOR A STATE OF EXCEPTION.
2NR OVERVIEW
“DO WE DEFINE OURSELVES BY THE ENEMIES WE MAKE? CARL SCHMITT THOUGHT SO, AND THOSE WHO
DISAGREED MADE AN ENEMY OF HIM. SO MAYBE HE WAS RIGHT.”
THIS ROUND MORE THAN ANYTHING IS ABOUT HOW WE DEFINE OURSELVES, HOW WE DEFINE OUR
RELATIONSHIP TO CONFLICT AND ENMITY, AND OF COURSE HOW WE DEFINE THE ROUND ITSELF. TWO CRUCIAL
FRAMEWORK OBSERVATIONS BEGIN TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS. THE FIRST COMES FROM THE DOTY
EVIDENCE WHICH COMPELS YOU TO EVALUATE THE ACTIONS ADVOCATED IN THIS ROUND NOT IN VACUUM BUT
WITH EXPLICIT CONSIDERATION OF THE REPRESENTATIONS ATTENDANT TO THEIR ADVOCACY. SECONDLY, WE
MUST TAKE ACTION THAT SEEKS TO LEGITIMIZE RATHER THAN SUPPRESS CONFLICT AT THE MOST BASIC LEVEL.
OUR ACTIONS MUST REPRESENT THE UNDERSTANDING THAT VIOLENCE IS ONLY A BACKLASH AGAINST THE
SUPPRESSION OF CONFLICT – A FEEDBACK LOOP THAT CAN ONLY BE EXITED AT ITS SOURCE. THUS THE
QUESTION OF THE BALLOT REPRESENTS NOT SOME 25 WORDS IN A PLAN TEXT BUT THE ENTIRE FORCE, WEIGHT,
AND REASON BEHIND THE PRESENTATION OF THOSE WORDS, AND A NEGATIVE BALLOT INDICATES AN
UNDERSTANDING OF THE FUNDAMENTAL REALITY THAT CONFLICT DEFINES THE POLITICAL NATURE OF THE
HUMAN BEING.
Rasch K 32/67
LINKS OVERVIEW
WE’LL ISOLATE SEVERAL LINKS:
FIRST IS THE NOORANI EVIDENCE THAT SAYS ATTEMPTING TO MODERATE VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST,
ESPECIALLY VIOLENCE THAT WE CAUSED IN THE FIRST PLACE, IS BASED ON AN OVERWHELMING DESIRE TO
NEUTRALIZE AND DELEGITIMIZE THE POWER OF THE MIDDLE EAST TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD THROUGH
EXPRESSION OF ENMITY AND VIOLENCE, COUNTER TO OUR AIMS OF GLOBAL HEGEMONY.
SECOND IS THE CAMPBELL AND PEASE EVIDENCE WHICH PUTS THE U.S. STRATEGY OF ENGAGEMENT INTO
HISTORICAL CONTEXT – BY FORCING OUR ENEMIES TO RESPOND TO OUR OFFER OF ENGAGEMENT, WE OFFER
THEM AN IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE BETWEEN GIVING UP THEIR ABILITY TO RESIST, AND THUS SUBMITTING FULLY TO
AMERICAN AUTHORITY, OR REJECTING THE OFFER AND SECEDING FROM HUMANITY, EXPOSING THEMSELVES TO
ABSOLUTE ANNIHILATION. THE AMERICAN STRATEGY OF ENGAGEMENT IS A PROCESS OF CREATING DISORDER
AND REPRESSING THE SYMPTOMS OF THAT DISORDER, CREATING FUNDAMENTAL DEPENDENCIES THAT FURTHER
CONSTRAIN THE POLITICAL AGENCY OF OUR LUCKY TARGET FOR ENGAGEMENT.
THIRD IS THE ZIZEK EVIDENCE WHICH IS INDICATIVE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS OF THE
AFFIRMATIVE THAT CONSTRUCT THE MIDDLE EAST AS HOMO SACER – ABLE TO RECEIVE THE VIOLENT
INTERVENTION OF AMERICA BUT UNABLE TO EXPRESS CONFLICT OF ITS OWN – VIOLENCE BETWEEN STATES
BECOMES REGIONAL INSTABILITY THAT MUST BE QUELLED, AND ANY OTHER EXPRESSION OF DISSENT BECOMES
VIOLENCE AGAINST THE WHOLE OF HUMANITY. THE PATRONIZING ACTION OF ENGAGEMENT IS THE ULTIMATE
LINK WITH ITS IMPLICIT ASSUMPTION THAT OUR ENEMIES WILL SIMPLY LAY DOWN THEIR ONLY MEANS OF
RESISTANCE AGAINST OUR UNIVERSALIZING IDEOLOGY AND JOIN OUR VERSION OF HUMANITY, AS IF WE AREN’T
THE ONLY ONES STILL CONVINCED WE’RE PLAYING THE RED CROSS.
Rasch K 33/67
INDIVIDUAL CARD DESCRIPTIONS
[NOORANI]
THE U.S. HAS AN INHERENT FEAR OF POLITICAL ANTAGONISM BECAUSE IT HAS DEFINED ITSELF AS THE SELF
OF HUMANITY AND THUS ANY DISSENT AGAINST THE GLOBAL ORDER IS DISSENT AGAINST AMERICA. THE
BIGGEST THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES IS THE MIDDLE EAST BECAUSE JUST AS THE UNITED STATES IS ABLE
TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD BY MAKING ITSELF THE SOURCE OF PEACE AND FREEDOM, THE MIDDLE EAST HAS
A SIMILAR TRANSFORMATIVE POWER AS THE SOURCE OF VIOLENCE AND ANTAGONISM FOR THE WORLD. IN
ORDER TO NEUTRALIZE THIS POWER, THE U.S. MUST FORCE THE MIDDLE EAST TO CONFORM TO ITS
UNIVERSAL NORMS. IN ORDER TO DISEMPOWER THOSE THAT RESIST, CONFORMITY IS CONSTRUCTED AS A
REQUIREMENT FOR ACCEPTANCE INTO HUMANITY, THE REST BECOME THE EXCEPTION THAT WE ARE SO WELL
AWARE OF – THE TERRORIST, THE ANARCHIST, THE NAMELESS, FACELESS DISSENTER THAT CAN BE ANNIHILATED
WITHOUT REMORSE.
[ODYSSEUS]
THE ODYSSEUS EVIDENCE OUTLINES THE IMPACTS OF CONTINUING DOWN THIS ROAD TO RUIN. HAVING
DECLARED THE EXISTENCE OF A UNIVERSAL HUMANITY FOR WHICH WE MUST FIGHT, WE FIND OURSELVES
MISSING A KEY COMPONENT – AN ENEMY WITH WHICH TO ENGAGE IN CONFLICT. UNABLE TO DEFINE AN
ENEMY WITHIN HUMANITY DUE TO OUR UNIVERSALIZING DISCOURSE, WE FOCUS ON THE POLITICAL ELEMENTS
WITHIN HUMANITY THAT RESIST THE OVERARCHING LIBERAL IDEOLOGY, AND DECLARE THEIR OPPOSITION
ILLEGITIMATE. BY CONSTRUCTING THESE DISSENTERS AS BARBARIANS OUTSIDE THE GATES OF HUMANITY, THE
UNIVERSAL HUMAN CAUSE FINDS A NEW, ABSOLUTE ENEMY: THE INHUMAN.
IN THE CONTEXT OF PALESTINE, WE EXCISE THE “PEACE-HATING” HAMAS FROM THE GLOBAL LIBERAL
ORDER, DENYING THEM ANY RATIONALITY, JUSTICE, OR RIGHT TO SELF DEFENSE. THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN
UNJUST ENEMY EXCLUDES THE POTENTIAL FOR PEACE AND FUELS BRUTAL WARS OF ANNIHILATION AS
APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC DRIVES US TO FIGHT THE INHUMAN ENEMY UNTIL THERE IS NO MORE RESISTANCE.
Rasch K 34/67
[RASCH]
YOU MUST EVALUATE THIS ROUND IN THE CONTEXT OF THE REALITY THAT VIOLENCE, CONFLICT, AND HUMAN
AGGRESSION ARE INEVITABLE. THIS IS THE MOST BASIC REALITY OF THE WORLD WE LIVE IN, AND IN A WORLD
WHERE REALITY IS TOO OFTEN REJECTED IN FAVOR OF WHAT MAKES US FEEL BETTER ABOUT OURSELVES, THIS
IS ONE WHERE WE MUST DRAW THE LINE.
THE CURRENT LIBERAL ORDER HAS BECOME EXTREMELY EFFICIENT IN ITS EXCLUSION OF POTENTIAL
POLITICAL RESISTANCE AND SUPPRESSION OF ENMITY IN FAVOR OF SUPPORTING THE FORLORN FANTASIES OF
PERPETUAL PEACE AND UNIVERSAL FRIENDSHIP, BUT WE MUSTN’T LET THIS TEMPT US INTO BELIEVING WHAT
WE KNOW TO BE FALSE. IN FACT, IT MAKES THE POTENTIAL IMPACTS EVEN MORE DANGEROUS AND PLACES
GREATER IMPETUS ON YOU, THE JUDGE, TO CHOOSE THE AFFIRMATIVE.
ONCE WE ACCEPT THE INEVITABILITY OF CONFLICT, SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF THE STATE OF EXCEPTION IS
SIMPLE. THE ONLY REASON WE CREATE EXCEPTIONS FOR DISSENTERS LIKE HAMAS IS TO KEEP THE DREAM OF
PERPETUAL PEACE AFLOAT – ONCE WE’VE PIERCED THAT HOT AIR BALLOON AND ACCEPTED OUR FUNDAMENTAL
NATURE WE NO LONGER NEED TO MAKE EXCEPTIONS BECAUSE THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO JUSTIFY. IF WE
WILL BOLDLY DRAW THE LINES IN THE SAND WE WILL HAVE NO REASON TO HIDE THE TRUTH OF NATURE, AND IT
IS ACT OF HIDING THAT IS THE ULTIMATE CAUSE OF THE TRULY APOCALYPTIC VIOLENCE WE CAN AVOID.
FOR THE TRUE GOAL OF THOSE WHO SAY THERE IS NO WAR IS NOT TO PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF PEACE BUT TO
ELIMINATE THE WAR THAT ACTUALLY EXISTS BY ELIMINATING THOSE WHO DARE TO SAY THERE IS A WAR. THIS
WAR IS THE TRULY SAVAGE WAR WE WITNESS TODAY, WHOSE EFFECTS CANNOT BE LIMITED OR MOLLIFIED. WE
DON’T SAY THERE IS A WAR BECAUSE WE REVEL IN IT OR BECAUSE WE LOVE VIOLENCE, BUT BECAUSE WE FEAR
IT AND HATE IT, AND IT IS BECAUSE WE KNOW THE INEVITABILITY OF VIOLENCE THAT WE WANT TO LIMIT AND
CONTAIN WAR RATHER THAN ELIMINATE IT, WHICH MERELY INTENSIFIES IT.
WE SHOULD NEVER AGAIN ASK HOW WE CAN ESTABLISH PERPETUAL PEACE, BUT INSTEAD ASK HOW WE CAN
ESCAPE FROM THE HOLE WE’VE DUG FOR OURSELVES? ABOVE ALL ELSE, WE MUST THINK OF THE POSSIBILITY
OF ROUGHLY EQUIVALENT POWER RELATIONS RATHER THAN FANTASIZE ABOUT ELIMINATING POWER
ALTOGETHER. AND WHETHER WE CAN TRULY SOLVE OR NOT, WE MUST AT LEAST DEVISE VOCABULARIES THAT
DO NOT REPEAT THE SAME LIES WE LOVE TO HEAR, THE SIREN’S SONG OF PAINLESS, EFFORTLESS, UNIVERSAL
EQUALITY. FOR THE DREAMS MAY BE SWEET, BUT WILL ALWAYS PRODUCE THE UNACCEPTABLE NIGHTMARES
OF ABSOLUTE EXCLUSION.
Rasch K 35/67
Framework
GENERIC
1. You must evaluate this round in the context of the reality that violence,
conflict, and human aggression are inevitable. This is the most basic reality of
the world we live in, and in a world where reality is too often rejected in favor of
what makes us feel better about ourselves, this is one where we must draw the
line. In this framework the impacts to the case are not only inevitable but
distract our focus from the ramifications of the overall politics to specific,
particularized instances of unsolvable violence.
2. This framework is more than saying “sure, violence is inevitable” – the 1NC is
a performative demonstration of representations and our advocacy of the
alternative carries within it the radical re-evaluation of assumptions our authors
call for. The reasons for advocating an action cannot be divorced from the action
itself.
3. All the apocalyptic impacts from the affirmative stem from the state of
“exception from humanity” perpetrated by the dominant ideology of the status
quo. Forget the evidence for a second – if their impacts are true, some actor has
to perpetrate some act of violence. How else could something like preemptive
nuclear war be justified by the aggressor? The Odysseus evidence indicates that
the only way this type of violence can be perpetrated in the status quo is by
creating exceptions that place our enemies outside of humanity where their
political resistance is considered illegitimate and they can be safely
exterminated.
4. You should view the affirmative with the eyes of a skeptic – we have heard
these same claims of impending wars and violence, terrible, illegitimate
violence, again and again and again, all to justify a variety of policies – some
engagement, some pressure. Rather than accept the claims of their authors on
face you should prefer the historical analysis of our Pease 02 evidence which
describes the insidious manner in which the U.S. strategy of global engagement
uses a cycle of disorder and intervention to maintain its dominance over the
world.
Rasch K 36/67
REPRESENTATIONS (DOTY)
BEFORE WE CAN EVEN ATTEMPT TO ANSWER POLICY QUESTIONS, WE MUST FIRST ADDRESS THE ETHICAL
IMPERATIVE OF THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION
North-South relations have been constituted as a structure of deferral. The center of the structure (alternatively white man, modern man, the United States, the West, real
states) has never been absolutely present outside a system of differences. It has itself been constituted as trace-the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces
Because the center is not a fixed locus but a function in which an infinite number of sign
itself, refers itself (ibid.).
substitutions come into play, the domain and play of signification is extended indefinitely. This both opens
up and limits possibilities, generates alternative sites of meanings and political resistances that give rise to
practices of reinscription that seek to reaffirm identities and relationships: The inherently incomplete and
open nature of discourse makes this reaffirmation an ongoing and never finally completed project. In this study I
have sought, through an engagement with various discourses in which claims to truth have been staked, to challenge the validity of the structures of meaning and to make
visible their complicity with practices of power and domination. By examining the ways in which structures of meaning have been associated with imperial practices, I have
suggested that the construction
of meaning and the construction of social, political, and economic power are
inextricably linked. This suggests an ethical dimension to making meaning and an ethical imperative that is
incumbent upon those who toil in the construction of structures of meaning. This is especially urgent in North-South relations
today: one does not have to search very far to find a continuing complicity with colonial representations that
ranges from a politics of silence and neglect to constructions of terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism,
international drug trafficking, and Southern immigration to the North as new threats to global stability and
peace.
The political stakes raised by this analysis revolve around the question of being able to “get beyond” the representations or speak outside of the discourse that historically
have constructed the North and the South. I do not believe that there are any pure alternatives by which we can escape the infinity of traces
to which Gramsci refers. Nor do I wish to suggest that we are always hopelessly imprisoned in a dominant and all-pervasive discourse. Before this question can be
answered – indeed,
before we can even proceed to attempt to answer – attention must be given to the politics of
representation. The price that international relations scholarship pays for its inattention to the issue of
representation is perpetuation of the dominant modes of making meaning and deferral of its responsibility
and complicity in dominant representations.
Rasch K 37/67
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS MUST BE UNDERSTOOD THROUGH THE REPRESENTATIONS THAT CONSTITUTE IT, AND
IMPERIALISM MUST BE ADDRESSED AT THIS LEVEL
Foucault refers here to the questioning, begun at the close of the colonial era, that challenged the entitlement of Western c ulture, Western science, and Western rationality
itself to claim universal validity. As Said notes, however, there
has been relatively little attention to the imperial experience in
challenging this priority of the West. Nowhere has this lack of critical attention been more evident than in
the discipline of international relations, which has systematically built a wall of silence around challenges to
Western expertise and knowledge, especially regarding the non-Western “other.” International relations
has claimed for itself the exclusive representational authority to define and analyze the “essential” agents,
structures, and processes of global life and to relegate to the margins the nonessentials. This authority and the knowledge
it facilitates has been based upon the experiences and the power of the relatively small portion of the world referred to as the West and the even smaller portion within that
realm referred to as the major powers. In the process, international
relations has taken as a given the identity of the West and its
subjects/agents, ignoring the historical experiences and encounters with “others” against which the
identities of these subjects/agents have been constituted.
This study aims to be a corrective to this silence. As such, it can be located within the general concern with interrogating the relationship between various claims drawing
upon Enlightenment and humanist values and the economic and political domination of European and American colonialism (see Young 1990). It constitutes an effort to
contribute to our understanding and questioning of how various forms of Western power and knowledge have been mutually implicated in practices of domination and
hegemony and how, in the course of these practices, international identities have been constructed.
Colonialism(s) represents this collusion between power and knowledge and Enlightenment and humanist values at its extreme. This is not to suggest that these values have
What is important is not so much the
been used in a simplistically instrumental fashion to enable the expansion of Western power and control.
intentions and calculations of the individuals who bear some of the responsibility for the advance of Western
power. Rather, it is the taken-for-granted assumptions and the naturalized categories of knowledge
embedded in and produced within the context of the promotion of Western values that are of primary
concern here.
Humanist values can be found in all of the discourses examined in this study. Sometimes they are quite explicitly expressed, while at the other times they are more implicit.
What remains constant is their presence alongside practices that would seem to be in direct contradiction to these values. As the Bible has often accompanied the flag and
the rifle, Enlightenment values have often accompanied practices of domination and exploitation. In the two encounters I examine in chapters 3 and 4, humanist values
explicitly animate and inform the narratives and debates – and domination and exploitation are obvious. Understanding how this uneasy coexistence has been made possible
and understanding its consequences require an analysis of the representational practices and the accompanying forms of knowledge that have made specific historical
happenings possible.
It should be clear from my discussion of discourse in chapter 1 that I am not implying a simple relationship of causality between discursive practices and the various
behaviors that have been part of colonialism. To reiterate, behavior
has no meaning at all outside of discourse. The issue then
becomes not determining the cause(s) of behavior but rather deconstructing the meanings that have been
given to, and by virtue of being so given, have made possible the various practices that have been present in
imperial encounters.
Rasch K 38/67
Violence Is Inevitable (sorry)
1. OUR RASCH EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT THE TRUE GOAL OF THOSE WHO SAY THERE IS NO WAR IS NOT TO
PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF PEACE BUT TO ELIMINATE THE WAR THAT ACTUALLY EXISTS BY ELIMINATING THOSE
WHO DARE TO SAY THERE IS A WAR. THIS WAR IS THE TRULY SAVAGE WAR WE WITNESS TODAY, WHOSE
EFFECTS CANNOT BE LIMITED OR MOLLIFIED. WE DON’T SAY THERE IS A WAR BECAUSE WE REVEL IN IT OR
BECAUSE WE LOVE VIOLENCE, BUT BECAUSE WE FEAR IT AND HATE IT, AND IT IS BECAUSE WE KNOW THE
INEVITABILITY OF VIOLENCE THAT WE WANT TO LIMIT AND CONTAIN IT RATHER THAN ELIMINATE IT, WHICH
MERELY INTENSIFIES IT.
2. WE DON’T DENY THAT THE WORLD MIGHT BE A LOT BETTER IF EVERYONE WERE TRULY PEACEFUL, BUT WE
ALSO DON’T DENY THE TRUTH THAT THE WORLD IS VIOLENT. OUR RASCH EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT THIS
ISN’T WHAT WE WANT TO HEAR, BUT WE CAN’T CONTINUE TO IGNORE IT SIMPLY BECAUSE WE ARE PRIVILEGED
ENOUGH TO DO SO. WE SHOULD NEVER AGAIN ASK HOW WE CAN ESTABLISH PERPETUAL PEACE, AND INSTEAD
ASK HOW WE CAN ESCAPE FROM THE HOLE WE’VE DUG FOR OURSELVES? WE MUST THINK OF THE POSSIBILITY
OF ROUGHLY EQUIVALENT POWER RELATIONS RATHER THAN FANTASIZE ABOUT ELIMINATING POWER
ALTOGETHER. AND WHETHER WE CAN TRULY SOLVE OR NOT, WE MUST AT LEAST DEVISE VOCABULARIES THAT
DO NOT REPEAT THE SAME LIES WE LOVE TO HEAR, THE SIREN’S SONG OF PAINLESS, EFFORTLESS, UNIVERSAL
EQUALITY THAT WILL ALWAYS PRODUCE THE NIGHTMARES OF ABSOLUTE EXCLUSION.
A. THE NEGATIVE’S CALL FOR AN ETHICS OF DENIAL IS AN INDEPENDENT REASON TO REJECT THE
NEGATIVE TEAM
3. VIOLENCE IS FUNDAMENTAL TO HUMAN EXISTENCE – IT DETERMINES THE VERY STRUCTURE OF EXISTENCE

AND ALL OF OUR THINKING ABOUT THE UNIVERSE, RELIGION, ETHICS. CRITICAL PHILOSOPHERS AND
THEOLOGIANS CONTINUE TO NEGLECT THE PRIMACY OF WAR IN THE HIERARCHY OF THEMES WHEN THE ONLY
WAY TO UNDERSTAND ENMITY IS TO EMBRACE IT.
HILLMAN 04 [James, psychologist, scholar, international lecturer, professor Yale University Terrible love of war, Penguin Press: New York 2004. p. 1-9]
War is also a psychological task because philosophy and theology, the fields supposed to do the heavy thinking for our
species, have neglected war’s overriding importance. “War is the father of all,” said Heraclitus at the beginnings of Western
thought, which Emmanual Levinas restates in Western thought as “being reveals itself as war.” If it is a primordial component of
being then it war fathers the very structure of existence and our thinking about it: our ideas of the universe
of religion, of ethics; war determines the thought patterns of Artistotle’s logic of opposites, Kant’s
antinomies, Darwin’s natural selection, Marx’s struggle of classes, and even Freud’s repression of the id by
the ego and superego. We think in warlike terms, feel ourselves at war with ourselves, and unknowingly
believe predation, territorial defense, conquest, and the interminable battle of opposing forces are the
ground rules of existence.
Yet, for all this, has ever a major Western philosopher –with the great exception of Thomas Hobbes, whose
Leviathan was published three and a half centuries ago-delivered a full-scale assault on the topic, or given it the primary importance war
deserves in the hierarchy of themes?
Rasch K 39/67
4. VIOLENCE IS NOT THE RESULT OF CONFLICT, IT IS THE RESULT OF THE DRIVE TO ABOLISH IT. SOCIETY
NEED NOT BE CONFINED TO IDEAS OF PEACE OR HARMONY, BUT SHOULD INSTEAD EMBRACE AGONISTIC
RELATIONSHIPS IN WHICH ONE RECOGNIZES THE POWER OF THE OTHER IN ONE’S OWN POSTURE.
HATAB 2002 (LAWRENCE J. PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY 2002 PROSPECTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC AGON WHY WE CAN STILL BE NIETZSCHEANS: THE
JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE P.MUSE)
How can we begin to apply the notion of agonistics to politics in general and democracy in particular? First of all, contestation and competition can be seen as fundamental
to self-development and as an intrinsically social phenomenon. Agonistics helps us articulate the social and political ramifications of Nietzsche's concept of will to power.
As Nietzsche put it in an 1887 note, "will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; it seeks that which resists it" (KSA 12, p.424). Power, therefore, is not simply
an individual possession or a goal of action; it is more a global, interactive conception. For Nietzsche, every
advance in life is an overcoming of
some obstacle or counterforce, so that conflict is a mutual co-constitution of contending forces. [End Page 134] Opposition generates
development. The human self is not formed in some internal sphere and then secondarily exposed to
external relations and conflicts. The self is constituted in and through what it opposes and what opposes it;
in other words, the self is formed through agonistic relations. Therefore, any annulment of one's Other
would be an annulment of one's self in this sense. Competition can be understood as a shared activity for the
sake of fostering high achievement and self-development, and therefore as an intrinsically social activity. In the
light of Nietzsche's appropriation of the two forms of Eris, it is necessary to distinguish between agonistic conflict and sheer
violence. A radical agonistics rules out violence, because violence is actually an impulse to eliminate conflict
by annihilating or incapacitating an opponent, bringing the agon to an end. 11 In a later work Nietzsche discusses the
"spiritualization of hostility (Feindschaft)," wherein one must affirm both the presence and the power of one's opponents as
implicated in one's own posture (TI "Morality as Antinature," 3). And in this passage Nietzsche specifically applies such a notion to the political realm.
What this implies is that the category of the social need not be confined to something like peace or harmony. Agonistic
relations, therefore, do not connote a deterioration of a social disposition and can thus be extended to political
relations.
How can democracy in general terms be understood as an agonistic activity? Allow me to quote from my previous work. Political judgments are not
preordained or dictated; outcomes depend upon a contest of speeches where one view wins and other views
lose in a tabulation of votes; since the results are binding and backed by the coercive power of the
government, democratic elections and procedures establish temporary control and subordination—which,
however, can always be altered or reversed because of the succession of periodic political contests. . . .
Democratic elections allow for, and depend upon, peaceful exchanges and transitions of power. . . . [L]anguage is the
weapon in democratic contests. The binding results, however, produce tangible effects of gain and loss that make political exchanges more than just talk or a game. . . . The
urgency of such political contests is that losers must yield to, and live under, the policies of the winner; we notice, therefore, specific configurations of power, of domination
and submission in democratic politics.
Rasch K 40/67
5. THE DRIVE TO RATIONALLY SUPPRESS VIOLENCE THROUGH ORDER AND REASON HAS BROUGHT US TO THE
EDGE OF EXTINCTION THROUGH MILITARISTIC, ECOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL MEANS.
DILLON & CAMPBELL 92 (Michael, Lancaster and David, Newcastle, The Political Subject of Violence, p. 163-164)
This interpretation of violence as constitutive of identity might, paradoxically, offer the only hope of some
amelioration of the worst excesses of violence exhibited by the formation of (political) identity. The orthodox
rendering of such violence as pre-modern abdicates its responsibility to a predetermined historical fatalism.
For if these ethnic and nationalist conflicts are understood as no more than settled history rearing its ugly head, then there is nothing that can be done in the present to
resolve the tension except to repress them again. In this view, the historical drama has to be enacted according to its script, with human agency in suspension while nature
The only alternative is for nature to be overcome as the result of an idealistic
violently plays itself out.
transformation at the hands of reason. Either way, this fatalistic interpretation of the relationship between violence and the political is rooted in a
hypostatised conception of man/nature as determinative of the social <164> political: the latter is made possible only once the former runs its course, or if it is overturned.
It might have once been the case that the prospect of a transformation of nature by reason seemed both likely and
hopeful; indeed, many of the most venerable of the debates in the political theory of international relations revolved around this very point.8 But, having reached
what Foucault has called society's 'threshold of modernity', 'we' now face a prospect that radically re-figures the parameters of
politics: the real prospect of extinction. As Foucault argues, we have reached this threshold because
the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity of a
political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics place his existence as a living being in question.9
How the prospect of extinction might materialise itself is an open question. That increasingly it can be
materialised, militarily, ecologically and politically, is not.
modernity's alternative of transformation through reason is not only untenable, it

The double bind of this prospect is that
is deeply complicit in the form of (inter)national life that has been responsible for bringing about the real
prospect of extinction in the first place. The capacity of violence to eradicate being was engendered by
reason's success; not merely, or perhaps even most importantly, by furnishing the technological means, but
more insidiously in setting the parameters of the political (le politique, to use the useful terms of debate in which Simon Critchley
engages) while fuelling the violent practices of politics (la politique). The reliance on reason as that which could
contain violence and reduce the real prospect of extinction may prove nothing less than a fatal
misapprehension. In support of this proposition, consider the interpretive bases of the Holocaust.
For all that politics in the last fifty years has sought to exceptionalise the Nazis' genocide as an aberrant
moment induced by evil personalities, there is no escaping the recognition that modern political life lies
heavily implicated in the instigation and conduct of this horror. In so far as modernity can be characterised as the promotion of
rationality and efficiency to the exclusion of alternative criteria for action, the Holocaust is one outcome of the 'civilising process'. With its plan rationally to order Europe
through the elimination of an internal other, its bureaucratised administration of death, and its employment of the technology of a modern state, the
Holocaust
'was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residence of pre-modern barbarity. It was a
legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at home in any other house'.
Rasch K 41/67
Alt Solvency – Try or Die
THE ALTERNATIVE IS TRY OR DIE: WHILE THE AMERICAN ZEALOTS ARE PERFECTLY SATISFIED WITH THE
STATUS QUO, THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN EXCISED FROM THE CATEGORY OF HUMANITY, THE “BARBARIANS”
OUTSIDE THE GATES, CANNOT SIT AND WAIT ANY LONGER FOR A “NEW POLITICS” TO ARRIVE LIKE THE SECOND
COMING OF CHRIST. EVEN IF THE ALTERNATIVE HAS FLAWS THERE IS ONE ACTION THAT IS ABSOLUTELY
NECESSARY, AND THAT IS ENSURING THAT HUMANITY BECOME A CONCRETE FACT OF LIFE AND NOT A VALUE TO
BE GAINED AND LOST – COMPROMISE ON THIS POINT IS UNACCEPTABLE.
RASCH, 2003 (William, Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at India University. ‘Human Rights and Geopolitics’, Cultural Critique, No. 54
(Spring 2003), 143-44.)
But while affirmative theorists like Habermas and Rawls are busy constructing the ideological scaffolding
that supports the structure of the status quo, what role is there for the "critical" theorist to play? Despite
the sanguine hopes of Hardt and Negri (2000) that "Empire" will all but spontaneously combust as a result of the irrepressible
desire of the multitude, can we seriously place our faith in some utopian grand alternative anymore, or in some
revolutionary or therapeutic result based on the truth of critique that would allow us all, in the end, to sing
in the sunshine and laugh everyday? Do, in fact, such utopian fantasies not lead to the moralizing hubris of
a Rawls or a Habermas? In short, it is one thing to recognize the concealed, particular interests that govern
the discourse and politics of human rights and quite another to think seriously about how things could be
different, to imagine an international system that respected both the equality and the difference of states
and/or peoples. Is it possible-and this is Todorov's question-to value Vitoria's principle of the "free circulation of men, ideas, and goods" and still also "cherish
another principle, that of self-determination and noninterference" (Todorov 1984,177)? The entire "Vitorian" tradition, from Scott to Habermas and Rawls, thinks not.
Habermas, for instance, emphatically endorses the fact that "the erosion of the principle of nonintervention in recent decades has been due primarily to the politics of human
rights" (1998, 147), a "normative" achievement that is not so incidentally correlated with a positive, economic fact: "In view of the subversive forces and imperatives of the
world market and of the increasing density of worldwide networks of communication and commerce, the external sovereignty of states, however it may be grounded, is by
for those who
now in any case an anachronism" (150). And opposition to this development is not merely anachronistic; it is illegitimate, not to be tolerated. So,
sincerely believe in American institutional, cultural, and moral superiority, the times could not be rosier.
After all, when push comes to shove, "we" decide-not only about which societies are decent and which ones
are not, but also about which acts of violence are "terrorist" and which compose the "gentle compulsion" of
a "just war." What, however, are those "barbarians" who disagree with the new world order supposed to
do? With Agamben, they could wait for a "completely new politics" to come, but the contours of such a
politics are unknown and will remain unknown until the time of its arrival. And that time, much like the
second coming of Christ, seems infinitely deferrable. While they wait for the Benjaminian "divine violence" to
sweep away the residual effects of the demonic rule of law (Benjamin 1996,248-52), the barbarians might be tempted
to entertain Schmitt's rather forlorn fantasy of an egalitarian balance of power. Yet if the old, inner-European
balance of power rested on an asymmetrical exclusion of the non-European world, it must be asked: what
new exclusion will be necessary for a new balance, and is that new exclusion tolerable? At the moment, there
is no answer to this question, only a precondition to an answer. If one wishes to entertain Todorov's challenge of
thinking both equality and difference, universal commerce of people and ideas as well as self-determination and
nonintervention, then the concept of humanity must once again become the invisible and unsurpassable
horizon of discourse, not its positive pole. The word "human," to evoke one final distinction, must once
again become descriptive of a "fact" and not a "value." Otherwise, whatever else it may be, the search for
"human" rights will always also be the negative image of the relentless search for the "inhuman" other.
Rasch K 42/67
IMPX: Trust Me It’s Bad
YOU SHOULD FRAME OTHERS AS ENEMIES – THE IMPACT TO OUR TURN IS THE DESTRUCTION OF THE POLITICAL
AND UNSURPASSED VIOLENCE ON A GLOBAL SCALE
RIENHARD 2006 [Kenneth, “Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. University of Chicago Press:
Chicago, 2006.]
If the concept of the political is defined, as Carl Schmitt does, in terms of the Enemy/Friend opposition, the
world we find ourselves in today is one from which the political may have already disappeared, or at least
has mutated into some strange new shape. A world not anchored by the “us” and “them” binarisms that flourished as recently as the Cold War is
one subject to radical instability, both subjectively and politically, as Jacques Derrida points out in The Politics of Friendship: The effects of this
destructuration would be countless: the ‘subject’ in question would be looking for new reconstitutive
enmities; it would multiply ‘little wars’ between nation-states; it would sustain at any price so-called ethnic
or genocidal struggles; it would seek to pose itself, to find repose, through opposing still identifiable
adversaries – China, Islam? Enemies without which … it would lose its political being … without an enemy,
and therefore without friends, where does one then find oneself, qua a self? (PF 77) If one accepts Schmitt’s account of the political,
the disappearance of the enemy results in something like global psychosis: since the mirroring relationship
between Us and Them provides a form of stability, albeit one based on projective identifications and
repudiations, the loss of the enemy threatens to destroy what Lacan calls the “imaginary tripod” that props
up the psychotic with a sort of pseudo-subjectivity, until something causes it to collapse, resulting in full-
blown delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia. Hence, for Schmitt, a world without enemies is much more
dangerous than one where one is surrounded by enemies; as Derrida writes, the disappearance of the enemy opens
the door for “an unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an
unleashing incommensurable in its unprecedented – therefore monstrous – forms; a violence in the face of
which what is called hostility, war, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and
ultimately appeasing contours, because they would be identifiable."
Rasch K 43/67
AT: Schmitt Indicts
SCHMITT’S ALT IMPOSSIBLE/OUTDATED
THE FACT THAT SCHMITT LOST HIS BATTLE AGAINST LIBERALISM IS EVEN MORE REASON FOR US TO CONFRONT
THE NATURE OF POLITICS TODAY AS THE NEGATIVE DOES. I’M PRETTY SURE WE’VE ALL NOTICED THAT PEOPLE
DON’T FIGHT WARS ON HORSEBACK ANY MORE, AND RELIANCE ON LIBERAL INSTITUTIONS LIKE THE U.N. IS
NOW CONSIDERED THE NORM, AND THAT’S EXACTLY THE PROBLEM. DESPITE ITS EMERGENCE AS THE
DOMINANT GLOBAL IDEOLOGY, LIBERALISM HAS FAILED TO MAKE GOOD ON ANY OF ITS PROMISES. WAR STILL
RAGES AROUND THE WORLD, AND MORALITY HAS DONE NOTHING TO LIMIT THE TOTALITY AND VIOLENCE OF
WARFARE. THE DANGER LIES IN BELIEVING THAT BECAUSE ONE IDEOLOGY SUPPLANTED ANOTHER IT MUST BE
IN SOME WAY SUPERIOR, FURTHER HIGHLIGHTING THE NEED FOR A POLITICS THAT RESPECTS ANTAGONISM.
RASCH 04 [William, Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University Sovereignty and Its Discontents: On the primary of conflict and the structure of the political,
Birkbeck Law Press 2004, pp. 21-48]
This vision of the ‘sovereignty’ of conflict, as chilling as it may seem, is quite the opposite of a Sorelian glorification of violence. Such a regularization of
conflict is thought of by Schmitt as a sophisticated means of limiting the effects of conflict. It is viewed as a
supreme European achievement, a stage of complex order, briefly reached, then lost again.
The picture painted here is quixotic at best, wholly unimaginable with regard to contemporary international relations. Not only has the issue of
national sovereignty become more or less moot – it only ever held for a minority of European states – but the nature of 20th-century warfare
deviates irrevocably from the limits Schmitt desires, not least of all, as Schmitt himself recognized, because of the development of
technologically overwhelming means of destruction. And finally, the types of quasi-legal, collective, international organizations
Schmitt railed against have become the norm. Whether they have been the bane of human civilization as Schmitt contended is certainly open to
debate. However, one thing is clear. They have not succeeded in outlawing or banishing war, nor, as recent
history amply shows, have their moral exhortations managed to limit the violence exercised on civilian
populations. Religious civil wars, wars of ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘terrorism’, and the ‘surgical strikes’ that
inevitably cut away healthy tissue, so to speak, with the diseased seems to have carried the day. Indeed, even those
states that blithely see themselves as the carriers of the universal principle have certainly not been innocent of the types of violence they habitually condemn. Perhaps
the structure that Schmitt favored is irretrievable, but this does not necessarily mean that what has replaced
it is inevitably superior.
The value of Schmitt today lies more with the structure of conflict that he outlines than with any attempt to
rehabilitate his particular carriers of the structure. We saw that for Schmitt, sovereignty is the linchpin that holds the structure in place.
The unity of the state, which is guaranteed by a supra-legal and personified notion of sovereignty, enables the plurality of the world, and
thus enables politics. The irony is not lost on us. If politics is marked by the friend/enemy distinction, then within the state, politics is not possible. Internal
conflict can only be seen as civil war, that is, war designed to undermine sovereignty and thus designed to undermine the structure of politics t hat the ‘pillar’ of the state
supports. Schmitt’s logic starts with a simple presupposition: what is to be avoided is the hegemony of a single system. As he puts it, ‘As long as a state exists, there will
thus always be in the world more than just one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist. World, then, must be the horizon that
enables a plurality of systems, not the unity of that plurality. World is not world-system. But his state is no microcosm of the world; there is no self-similarity, no internal
From a perspective that represents itself as liberal and
replication of the differentiation required on the international scene.
democratic, this homogenization and pacification of the state is the great flaw of Schmitt’s grand design. He
postulates the necessity of two levels, one domestic (or internal to the state) and the other foreign (or between states), and assumes that politics can only exist on the higher
level, that a uniformity and suppression of politics must exist within the state for politics to exist anywhere at all. Schmitt could not see a structure of differentiation carried
This, then, becomes our challenge. If we accept conflict as the basic
by a unity that itself was structured by differentiation.
definition of politics, and if we take seriously the claim that the old European system of delimited warfare
represents ‘the highest form of order of which humans are capable’ – if, in other worlds, emergent order
trumps planning – then it becomes necessary to extend his ‘logic’ of conflict, to ‘re-enter’ his friend/enemy
distinction within the state, without thereby collapsing the grander structure he outlines.
Rasch K 44/67
2. THE OBSERVATION THAT NON-LIBERAL STATES HAVE ENGAGED IN TOTAL WARFARE, OR THAT SCHMITT
GLOSSES OVER SOME OF THE MORE GRUESOME ASPECTS OF THE REALITY OF HIS FABLED JUS PUBLICUM
EUROPEANUM IS NOT A “TURN” TO OUR ARGUMENT. THESE ARGUMENTS ARE NOT SO MUCH “OFFENSE” AS
THEY ARE “NON-RESPONSIVE.” THE POINT RASCH IS TRYING TO MAKE ISN’T THAT WE SHOULD TURN BACK
THE CLOCK ON LIBERALISM AND BRING BACK THE GOOD OLD DAYS, IT’S THAT WE SHOULD CRITICALLY
EXAMINE THE ROLE OF LIBERALISM IN THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE IN THE STATUS QUO AND ADDRESS ITS HARMS
IN ORDER TO GET AT THE HEART OF VIOLENCE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO CONFLICT AND ENMITY.
Rasch K 45/67
SCHMITT’S A NAZI
1. THERE’S A REASON WE DON’T READ A SINGLE “SCHMITT” CARD IN THE ENTIRE K. OUR FRAMEWORK IS
BASED ON WILLIAM RASCH’S INTERPRETATION OF AND EXTRAPOLATION ON SCHMITT’S THEORIES.
OBVIOUSLY IF THERE IS THIS LARGE A BODY OF LITERATURE DEVOTED TO ANALYSIS OF SCHMITT, HIS WORK IS
STILL VALUABLE AND HAS NOT BEEN “DEBUNKED.” THIS IS ADEQUATE FOR OUR ADVOCACY OF THE 1NC.
2. NAZISM MAY MAKE SCHMITT A TERRIBLE PERSON, BUT IT DOES NOT MAKE HIS ARGUMENTS IRRELEVANT.
CONSIDER THAT SCHMITT’S ARGUMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE AGAIN AND AGAIN BY AUTHORS ACROSS THE
SPECTRUM FROM FAR LEFT TO FAR RIGHT – PEOPLE WHO WEREN’T NAZIS, BY THE WAY. THE QUESTIONS
THESE THINKERS ASK ARE THE SAME AS THOSE BY SCHMITT – HOW CAN UNIVERSAL NORMS BE DECLARED BY A
SINGULAR REPRESENTATIVE? WHAT PLACE, IN THIS WORLD WHERE CONFLICT IS OUTLAWED, FOR ANTAGONISM
AND OPPOSITION? LOOK NO FURTHER – THIS IS THE FACE OF TOTALITARIANISM.
That Schmitt’s most zealous apologists, on both the right and the left, may fairly be accused of minimizing his most egregious and shameful failings – eg his anti-Semitism
and his open attempts to legitimize Hitler’s regime in the mid-1930s – is not to be denied. A defensiveness about Schmitt, born of a frustration with inept or deliberate
misreadings, can easily turn into polemical aggression. Nevertheless,
as tainted as Schmitt’s arguments may be, tainted by interest
and tainted by affiliation, neither their structure nor their continued relevance can be so simply dismissed.
The point, or points, he makes against progressive, universalist doctrines have been made, in various registers,
by conservative and leftist critics alike, most recently by French thinkers like Jean-Francois Lyotard. Schmitt’s quarrel with
America’s post-1917 role as ‘arbiter of the world’ centers on the presumptuous and deceptive nature inherent in
any particular instance that designates itself to be the carrier of the universal principle. In Lyotard’s view, the particular
application of the universal, the particular enunciation of the rights of man, say, or the universal proletariat, always carried with it the potential for terror. Noting the ‘aporia
of authorization’ in the fact that a particular people – his example: the French in 1789 – assumed the position of declaring a universal right, Lyotard asks:
Why would the affirmation of a universal normative instance have universal value if a singular instance
makes the declaration? How can one tell, afterward, whether the wars conducted by the singular instance
in the name of the universal instance are wars of liberation or wars of conquest?
Schmitt would recognize these as the right questions to ask; would recognize them, in fact, as his own
questions. They go to the heart of the nature and possibility of conflict (which is to say – of politics), for wars
conducted in the name of the universal normative instance are wars fought to end all wars, conflicts conducted in the
name of the self-transcendence of all conflict. But what if, afterward, we find out that the heaven of consensus and
reconciliation turns out to be a realm in which conflict has been outlawed in the name of the Good, the Efficient,
the Comfortable? In a world where conflict has been outlawed, how is opposition to be staged? As uncoerced agreement? It is
precisely against this type of outlawry of opposition in the service of the status quo – more accurately, in the
service of the unfolding and global expansion of a new type of moral and economic imperialism – that
Schmitt launches his counterattack.
Rasch K 46/67
YOU DEMONIZE LIBERAL COSMOPOLITANISM
1. THE AFFIRMATIVE MISCHARACTERIZES OUR ADVOCACY OF ENMITY – WE AREN’T DEMONIZING THE STATUS
QUO, OR LIBERAL COSMOPOLITANISM, OR ANYTHING ELSE. IN FACT WE’D AGREE THAT MANY OF THE NEGATIVE
AUTHORS HAVE IDENTIFIED REAL PROBLEMS AND, IN SOME CASES, POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS. WHAT THEY ALL
REFUSE TO ACCEPT, HOWEVER, IS THE FUNDAMENTAL CAUSE OF ALL THESE PROBLEMS, AND EXCUSE US IF WE
GET A LITTLE FRUSTRATED THAT EVERYONE KEEPS TAKING THE EASY WAY OUT AND PUTTING CONFLICT OFF
UNTIL THE FUTURE BUT THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION IN THE STATUS QUO HAS REAL CONSEQUENCES FOR PEOPLE
AND THERE IS JUST NO REASON TO CONTINUE BELIEVING IN THE ILLUSION OF PEACE.
2. IF SCHMITT DEMONIZED LIBERALISM, IT WAS PROBABLY OUT OF FRUSTRATION FOR THE DEMISE OF THE
NAZIS. RASCH CERTAINLY DOES NOT MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE, AND NEITHER DO WE. RASCH’S THEORY OF
THE POLITICAL IS THE ANTITHESIS OF “BLACK AND WHITE” - RATHER THAN ACCEPTING A DICHOTOMY
BETWEEN EMBRACING OR SUPPRESSING THE WAR OF NATURE, RASCH’S DIALECTIC DEFINES POLITICS AS A
REFINEMENT OF THE NATURAL WAR THAT CREATES THE POSSIBILITY FOR DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN WAR AND
PEACE, VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE, FRIENDSHIP AND ENMITY. ABSENT THIS NUANCED INTERPRETATION OF
CONFLICT, ONLY ONE VIOLENT EXTREME OR THE OTHER IS POSSIBLE.
Do we define ourselves by the enemies we make? Carl Schmitt thought so, and those who disagreed made
an enemy of him. So maybe he was right. Maybe our ability to distinguish with a fine temporal and spatial sense between friend and enemy is the
mark of our political existence, and thus we can say: Conflict is our vocation. There is, nonetheless, a caveat. The antagonism that
determines the political is not the antagonism of the war of all against all in the state of nature. That war and that
state, Derrida would say, is discourse itself, ‘the emergence of speech and appearing’. He would also say that no ‘messianic triumph’ could abolish this originary violence
that is our condition except by way of a greater and fiercer violence, a total violence. But, as Kant’s joke ought to have told us all along, the war to end all wars can lead to
So, which conflict is the conflict that is politics? Is it war, but it is not the
perpetual peace only if it is the peace of the graveyard.
war of nature, nor is it the violent suppression of the war of nature. On the contrary, politics is the
refinement of war; it is war’s double, a force that matches, but channels and gives particular form to, the
violence of nature. The form preserves difference, but not indifferently. IT takes shape as the differentiation of autonomous
unities that serve as the carriers of difference. Operating as a homogeneity and heterogeneity – politics preserves the ability
to initiate and the ability to put a halt to conflict, the ability to recognize and determine the difference
between conflict and peace. Political antagonism, in the final analysis, is a discrete and fragile structure that
limits conflict by legitimizing it. Such bounded discretion, according to Carl Schmitt, is the apogee of
civilization.
Rasch K 47/67
ENMITY = TOTALITARIANISM/VIOLENCE/FASCISM
1. THIS IS A TERRIBLE MISREADING OF HANNAH ARENDT – SHE SAYS IN PROMISE OF POLITICS THAT
POLITICS CANNOT BE CONSIDERED A MEANS TO AN END, IT INSTEAD HAS NO END AT ALL, IT IS A NEVER-
ENDING DRIVE TOWARD HUMAN PLURALITY. SOUND FAMILIAR? RASCH ALSO CONSIDERS POLITICS TO
BE AN IRREVOCABLE FACT OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, BUT FINDS THAT THE VIOLENCE THAT RESULTS FROM
POLITICAL CONFLICT CAN BE LIMITED IF THE UNDERLYING CONFLICT IS LEGITIMIZED RATHER THAN
SUPPRESSED.
2. WE DEFINE OURSELVES BY ENMITY, BUT THIS DOES NOT MEAN POLITICAL ENMITY CONSIGNS US ALL TO THE
HOBBESIAN VIOLENT STATE OF NATURE. IN FACT, IT’S COMPLETELY THE OPPOSITE. RATHER THAN EMBRACE
OR SUPPRESS THE WAR OF NATURE, POLITICS ALLOWS FOR A REFINEMENT OF THAT WAR THAT CREATES THE
POSSIBILITY FOR DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN WAR AND PEACE, VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE, FRIENDSHIP AND
ENMITY. ABSENT THIS NUANCED INTERPRETATION OF CONFLICT, ONLY ONE VIOLENT EXTREME OR THE OTHER
IS POSSIBLE.
Do we define ourselves by the enemies we make? Carl Schmitt thought so, and those who disagreed made
an enemy of him. So maybe he was right. Maybe our ability to distinguish with a fine temporal and spatial sense between friend and enemy is the
mark of our political existence, and thus we can say: Conflict is our vocation. There is, nonetheless, a caveat. The antagonism that
determines the political is not the antagonism of the war of all against all in the state of nature. That war and that
state, Derrida would say, is discourse itself, ‘the emergence of speech and appearing’. He would also say that no ‘messianic triumph’ could abolish this originary violence
that is our condition except by way of a greater and fiercer violence, a total violence. But, as Kant’s joke ought to have told us all along, the war to end all wars can lead to
So, which conflict is the conflict that is politics? Is it war, but it is not the
perpetual peace only if it is the peace of the graveyard.
war of nature, nor is it the violent suppression of the war of nature. On the contrary, politics is the
refinement of war; it is war’s double, a force that matches, but channels and gives particular form to, the
violence of nature. The form preserves difference, but not indifferently. IT takes shape as the differentiation of autonomous
unities that serve as the carriers of difference. Operating as a homogeneity and heterogeneity – politics preserves the ability
to initiate and the ability to put a halt to conflict, the ability to recognize and determine the difference
between conflict and peace. Political antagonism, in the final analysis, is a discrete and fragile structure that
limits conflict by legitimizing it. Such bounded discretion, according to Carl Schmitt, is the apogee of
civilization.
3. CHANTAL MOUFFE WOULD TOTALLY AGREE WITH OUR CRITICISM–THE ALT NOT ONLY DOESN’T RULE OUT
DEMOCRATIC POLITICS, IT RECOGNIZES THAT CONFLICT IS THE ONLY WAY TO ACHIEVE DEMOCRATIC
POLITICS. OUR ADVOCACY IS AT THE CORE AN EMBRACE OF POLITICAL ANTAGONISM, WHICH IS THE ENTIRE
POINT OF MOUFFE AND LACLAU’S PROJECT.
Rasch K 48/67
4. MOUFFE AND HIRST’S CRITICISM OF SCHMITT IS FOCUSED ON THE MOST NARROW AND LEAST ORIGINAL
COMPONENT OF HIS THEORY, AND INTENTIONALLY REFUSE TO ENGAGE THE NATURE OF ANTAGONISM AND
CONFLICT IN ORDER TO AVOID NOT ONLY THE CHALLENGE OF CARL SCHMITT BUT THE CHALLENGE OF
POLITICS ALTOGETHER. THESE INDICTS ONLY PROVE THE NECESSITY OF USING SCHMITT’S THEORY TO
EVALUATE THE WORLD.
WILEY 00 [James, PhD Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, Theory and Event 3:4 “Chantal Mouffe and ‘The Challenge of Carl Schmitt’”]
Suddenly, it seems, we are in the middle of a Carl Schmitt revival. Previously under taboo, the controversial jurist and former Nazi has already been rehabilitated in
Germany. Derrida's Politics of Friendship (which devotes several chapters to Schmitt) furthers his rehabilitation in France. It is well underway in North America and the
U.K. in the pages of Telos, new English translations of Schmitt's works, the University of Chicago Press's reprinting of The Concept of the Political, and in
Mouffe's previous The Return of the Political. Her new anthology, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, makes available to Anglophone readers
perspectives on Schmitt from German, French, Italian, Greek and Argentine writers, as well as a translation of one of Schmitt's essays on pluralism and the state. Those are
its strengths. The weaknesses of the collection are that it assumes that readers already know a lot about Schmitt and it is
too narrowly focused on
Schmitt's "challenge" to liberalism--which I think overlooks the real source of interest in Schmitt.
The essays by Jean-Francois Kervegan on Schmitt's conception of international relations and by Grigoris Ananiadis on Schmitt's view of the relationships between
sovereignty, dictatorship, democracy and the political are the most informative and insightful ones about Schmitt. Other essays on Schmitt in relation to Marx, Weber and
European juridical science are suggestive, if somewhat tedious. Schmitt's 1930 essay, "Ethic of State and Pluralist State," is instructive because it reveals that his concept of
"the political" originally developed in opposition to French syndicalism and British pluralism, rather than against liberalism.
The ubiquitous Slavoj Zizek contributes the most interesting essay to the collection. It begins with a dense psychoanalytic interpretation of post-Kierkegaardian theology,
but in the second half Zizek develops an explicitly left-wing conception of the political as an "inherent antagonism" involving "the paradox of a singular which appears as a
stand-in for the Universal." From this perspective, Schmitt's friend- enemy conception of the political appears as a reactionary attempt to suppress or depoliticize this
inherent antagonism.
The anthology could have used a longer introduction explaining who Schmitt was, why he is controversial, and the main lines of interpretation of his work (e.g., Schmitt
as fascist, as realist, as Catholic "political theologian"). Instead, Mouffe
insists on narrowing the focus to Schmitt's critique of
liberalism. This critique was the least original aspect of Schmitt's thought. (The opposition of democracy to liberalism described
in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, for example, is quite old and Schmitt drew explicitly from Weber, Ostrogorski, Michels, and Mosca.) The
opportunistic effort to find a "hook" for the anthology in liberalism is unfortunate because it limits the appeal of the collection.
Readers who are interested in Laclau and Mouffe's radical democracy project will be left wondering if
Mouffe has retreated to liberalism pure and simple.
I think the fascination with Schmitt (as with Machiavelli) lies in his explicit engagement with political crises and in
the wide scope of his political interests. Schmitt writes about sovereignty, emergencies, dictatorship, the
relationship of politics and the state to law and constitutions, spatial order, the conflict between land and sea powers, the relationship of
politics to theology, and the differences and conflicts between democracy, liberalism and pluralism. As the social
democratic contributions to the collection by Paul Hirst, David Dryzenhaus, Ulrich Preuss (and for that matter Mouffe
herself) make clear, these are not topics that liberals, socialists or radical democrats want to take seriously.
This means avoiding not only "the Challenge of Carl Schmitt," but the challenge of politics.
5. IT’S NOT LIKE YOUR AUTHOR IS THE ONLY PERSON WHO EVER NOTICED THESE PROBLEMS WITH SCHMITT’S
THEORY. I CAN THINK OF ANOTHER ONE RIGHT OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD – HIS NAME IS WILLIAM RASCH.
IN FACT, HE’S PROBABLY MORE CRITICAL OF SCHMITT THAN YOUR INDICT AUTHOR, HE EVEN CALLS
SCHMITT’S ALTERNATIVE “FORLORN.” BUT RASCH MAKES A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS, SAYING THAT
SCHMITT’S ANALYSIS IS STILL BETTER THAN OTHER CRITICAL LITERATURE ON THE SUBJECT, AND THEN
PROPOSES HIS OWN ALTERNATIVE WHICH WE FIND TO BE SUPERIOR. YOU SHOULD CHECK IT OUT, IT’S THAT 4
PAGE CARD IN OUR 1AC.
Rasch K 49/67
6. EVEN IF THE UNDERLYING ANALYSIS HAS FLAWS, THE ALTERNATIVE IS STILL TRY OR DIE:
WHILE THE AMERICAN ZEALOTS ARE PERFECTLY SATISFIED WITH THE STATUS QUO, THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN
EXCISED FROM THE CATEGORY OF HUMANITY, THE “BARBARIANS” OUTSIDE THE GATES, CANNOT SIT AND WAIT
ANY LONGER FOR A “NEW POLITICS” TO ARRIVE LIKE THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST. EVEN IF THE
ALTERNATIVE HAS FLAWS THERE IS ONE ACTION THAT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, AND THAT IS ENSURING THAT
HUMANITY BECOME A CONCRETE FACT OF LIFE AND NOT A VALUE TO BE GAINED AND LOST – COMPROMISE ON
THIS POINT IS UNACCEPTABLE.
(Spring 2003), 143-44.)
for those who
Rasch K 50/67
Nietzsche Add-on
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S APPEAL TO THE GOOD IS AN EMPTY ONE - VALUES UNHINGED FROM A SOURCE OF
ULTIMATE SIGNIFICANCE ARE GROUNDLESS MAKING THEM INFINITELY EXCHANGEABLE AND RENDERING THE 2
AC MEANINGLESS. THEIR SECULAR HUMANISM IS A CRUEL HOAX: THE THINLY VEILED ATTEMPT TO
RESURRECT THE DECAYING CORPSE OF THE CHRISTIAN GOD SIMULTANEOUSLY KILLS HIM
NIETZSCHE, 82 (the gay science, nietzche channel)

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place
and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"— As many of those who did not believe in God were
standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a
child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?— Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman
jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We
have killed him—you and I! All of us are his murderers! But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave
us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it
moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? And
backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as
through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not
night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who
are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?—Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we
have killed him! How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all
that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives,—who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?
What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must
we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed,—and whoever is born after us, for the sake of this deed he will belong to
a higher history than all history hitherto!"— Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners: they, too, were
silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke into pieces
and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its
way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time;
deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—
and yet they have done it themselves!"
Rasch K 51/67
THEIR IMAGINATION OF A BETTER WORLD IS A CONTINUATION OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL. THIS ASSOCIATION OF
ALL THAT IS GOOD AT NOT OF THIS WORLD EXPRESSES A HATRED FOR THE ONLY ONE WE’VE GOT—TURNS
CASE. FANTASIZING ABOUT A WORLD WITHOUT SUFFERING PRODUCES CREATIVE IMPOTENCE, ONLY OUR
RELATIONSHIP TO LIFE CAN ESCAPE THIS PARADOX OF RESENTMENT
TURANLI 2003 “journal of nietzche studies 26 (2003) 55-63 p.muse

The craving for absolutely general specifications results in doing metaphysics. Unlike Wittgenstein, Nietzsche provides an account of how this craving arises. The creation
of the two worlds such as apparent and real world, conditioned and unconditioned world, being and becoming is the creation of the ressentiment of metaphysicians.
Nietzsche says, "to
imagine another, more valuable world is an expression of hatred for a world that makes one
suffer: the ressentiment of metaphysicians against actuality is here creative" (WP III 579). Escaping from this
world because there is grief in it results in asceticism. [End Page 61] Paying respect to the ascetic ideal is longing
for the world that is pure and denaturalized. Craving for frictionless surfaces, for a transcendental, pure,
true, ideal, perfect world, is the result of the ressentiment of metaphysicans who suffer in this world.
Metaphysicians do not affirm this world as it is, and this paves the way for many explanatory theories in philosophy. In criticizing a philosopher who pays homage to the
ascetic ideal, Nietzsche says, "he wants to escape from torture" (GM III 6). The traditional philosopher or the ascetic priest
continues to repeat, "'My kingdom is not of this world'" (GM III 10). This is a longing for another world in
which one does not suffer. It is to escape from this world; to create another illusory, fictitious, false world.
This longing for "the truth" of a world in which one does not suffer is the desire for a world of constancy. It
is supposed that contradiction, change, and deception are the causes of suffering; in other words, the senses
deceive; it is from the senses that all misfortunes come; reason corrects the errors; therefore reason is the
road to the constant. In sum, this world is an error; the world as it ought to be exists. This will to truth, this
quest for another world, this desire for the world as it ought to be, is the result of unproductive thinking. It
is unproductive because it is the result of avoiding the creation of the world as it ought to be. According to Nietzsche,
the will to truth is "the impotence of the will to create" (WP III 585). Metaphysicians end up with the creation of the "true" world in
contrast to the actual, changeable, deceptive, self-contradictory world. They try to discover the true,
transcendental world that is already there rather than creating a world for themselves. For Nietzsche, on the other hand,
the transcendental world is the "denaturalized world" (WP III 586).
The way out of the circle created by the ressentiment of metaphysicians is the will to life rather than the will
to truth. The will to truth can be overcome only through a Dionysian relationship to existence. This is the way to a new philosophy, which in Wittgenstein's terms aims
"to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle"
Rasch K 52/67
THEIR HUMANITY TOWARDS THE OPPRESSED IS A THINLY VEILED ATTEMPT TO EXERCISE POWER OVER THE
SUBJUGATED
NIETZSCHE 82 (the gay science p 38-39)

On the doctrine of the feeling of power.— Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one's power upon others—
that is all one desires in such cases! One hurts those whom one wants to feel one's power; for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than
pleasure:—pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show
benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we
want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how
advantageous it is to be in our power—that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and
more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power. Whether benefiting or hurting others
involves sacrifices for us does not affect the ultimate value of our actions; even if we offer our lives, as martyrs do
for their church, this is a sacrifice that is offered for our desire for power or for the purpose of preserving our
feeling of power. Those who feel "I possess Truth"—how many possessions would they not abandon in order
to save this feeling! What would they not throw overboard to stay "on top"—which means, above the others
who lack "the Truth"! Certainly the state in which we hurt others is rarely as agreeable, in an unadulterated way, as that in which we benefit others,—it is a
sign that we are still lacking power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of this poverty; it is accompanied by new dangers and uncertainties for what power we do
possess, and clouds our horizon with the prospect of revenge, scorn, punishment, and failure. It is only for the most irritable and covetous devotees of the feeling of power
that it is perhaps more pleasurable to imprint the seal of power on a recalcitrant brow—those for whom the sight of those who are already subjected (the objects of
benevolence) is a burden and boredom. What is decisive is how one is accustomed to spice one's life; it is a matter of taste whether one prefers the slow or the sudden, the
assured or the dangerous and audacious increase of power,—one seeks this or that spice depending on one's temperament. An easy prey is something contemptible for proud
natures. They feel good only at the sight of unbroken men who might become their enemies and at the sight of all possessions that are hard to come by. Against one who is
suffering they are often hard because he is not worthy of their aspirations and pride,—but they are doubly obliging toward their peers whom it would be honorable to fight if
the occasion should ever arise. Spurred by the good feeling of this perspective, the members of the knightly caste became accustomed to treating each other with exquisite
courtesy.— Pity
is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great
conquests: for them easy prey—and that is what all who suffer are—is enchanting. Pity is praised as the
virtue of prostitutes.
Rasch K 53/67
SUFFERING IS INEVITABLE-THE DRIVE TO ABOLISH IT HOLDS LIFE IN CONTEMPT. THE TENSION OF THE SHOULD
IN MISFORTUNE IS WHAT CULTIVATES HUMAN GREATNESS
NIETZCHE 86 (beyond good and evil, p153-4)

Whether hedonism, or pessimism, or utilitarianism, or eudaimonianism (6)—all these ways of thinking, which
measure the value of things according to pleasure and pain, that is, according to contingent circumstances
and secondary issues, are ways of thinking in the foreground and naïveté, which everyone who knows about
creative forces and an artistic conscience will look down on, not without ridicule and not without
compassion. Compassion for yourself—that is, of course, not compassion the way you mean the term: it's
not pity for social "needs," for "society" and its sick and unlucky people, with those depraved and broken
down from the start, and with the way they lie on the ground all around us—even less is it compassion for
the grumbling oppressed, the rebellious slave classes, who strive for mastery—they call it "Freedom."
Our compassion is a higher compassion which sees further—we see how man is making himself smaller, how you make him smaller—and there are moments when we look
at your compassion with an indescribable anxiety, where we defend ourselves against this compassion—where we find your seriousness more dangerous than any
carelessness. You
want, if possible—and there is no wilder "if possible"—to do away with suffering. What about us? It
does seem that we would prefer it to be higher and worse than it ever was! Well being, the way you understand it, that's no goal. To
us that looks like an end,
a condition which immediately makes human beings laughable and contemptible, something which makes
their destruction desirable!
The culture of suffering, of great suffering, don't you realize that up to this point it is only this suffering
which has created all the things which raise man up? That tension of a soul in misery which develops its
strength, its trembling when confronted with the great destruction, its inventiveness and courage in bearing,
holding out against, interpreting, and using unhappiness, and whatever has been conferred upon it by way
of profundity, secrecy, masks, spirit, cunning, and greatness—has that not been given to it through suffering,
through the cultivation of great suffering?
In man, creature and creator are united. In man is material stuff, fragments, excess, clay, mud, nonsense, chaos, but in man there is also creator, artist, hammer hardness, the
divinity of the spectator and the seventh day—do you understand this contrast? And do you understand that your compassion for the "creature in man" is for what must be
formed, broken, forged, torn apart, burned, glow, purified—for what must necessarily suffer and should suffer? And our pity—don't you understand for whom our reverse
pity matters, when it protects itself against your pity as against the most serious of all mollycoddling and weakness? And thus pity for pity! But, to say the point again,
there are higher problems than all those of enjoyment, suffering, and compassion, and every philosophy that
leads only to these is something naïve.—
Rasch K 54/67
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S EMBRACING OF HUMANITY DESIGNATES AN UNHUMAN ENEMY—ENDLESS WARS AND
VIOLENCE HAVE BEEN CARRIED OUT IN THE NAME OF THEIR UNIVERSAL APPEAL TO THE HUMAN
RASCH 03 (human rights as geopolitics, cultured critique-54, spring 2003 p 135-6)

Yes, this passage attests to the antiliberal prejudices of an unregenerate Eurocentric conservative with a pronounced affect for the counterrevolutionary and Catholic South
of Europe. It seems to resonate with the apologetic mid-twentieth-century Spanish reception of Vitoria that wishes to justify the Spanish civilizing mission in the Americas.
8 But the contrast between Christianity and humanism is not just prejudice; it is also instructive, because with it, Schmitt tries to grasp something both disturbing and
elusive about the modern world—namely, the apparent fact that the
liberal and humanitarian attempt to construct a world of
universal friendship produces, as if by internal necessity, ever new enemies.
For Schmitt, the Christianity of Vitoria, of Salamanca, Spain, 1539, represents a concrete, spatially imaginable order, centered (still) in Rome and, ultimately, Jerusalem.
This, with its divine revelations, its Greek philosophy, and its Roman language and institutions, is the polis. This
is civilization, and outside its walls
lie the barbarians. The humanism that Schmitt opposes is, in his words, a philosophy of absolute humanity.
By virtue of its universality and abstract normativity, it has no localizable polis, no clear distinction between what
is inside and what is outside. Does humanity embrace all humans? Are there no gates to the city and thus no
barbarians outside? If not, against whom or what does it wage its wars? We can understand Schmitt's concerns in the following
way: Christianity distinguishes between believers and nonbelievers. Since nonbelievers can become believers, they must be of the same category of being. To be human,
[End Page 135] then, is the horizon within which the distinction between believers and nonbelievers is made. That is, humanity per se is not part of the distinction, but is that
which makes the distinction possible. However, once the term used to describe the horizon of a distinction also becomes that distinction's positive pole, it needs its negative
opposite. If humanity is both the horizon and the positive pole of the distinction that that horizon enables, then the negative pole can only be something that lies beyond that
horizon, can only be something completely antithetical to horizon and positive pole alike—can only, in other words, be inhuman. As Schmitt says:
Only with the concept of the human in the sense of absolute humanity does there appear as the other side of
this concept a specifically new enemy, the inhuman. In the history of the nineteenth century, setting off the inhuman from
the human is followed by an even deeper split, the one between the superhuman and the subhuman. In the
same way that the human creates the inhuman, so in the history of humanity the superhuman brings about
with a dialectical necessity the subhuman as its enemy twin.9
This "two-sided aspect of the ideal of humanity" (Schmitt 1988, Der Nomos der Erde, 72) is a theme Schmitt had already developed in his
The Concept of the Political (1976) and his critiques of liberal pluralism (e.g., 1988, Positionen und Begriffe, 151-65). His complaint
there is that liberal pluralism is in fact not in the least pluralist but reveals itself to be an overriding monism,
the monism of humanity. Thus, despite the claims that pluralism allows for the individual's freedom from illegitimate constraint,
Schmitt presses the point home that political opposition to liberalism is itself deemed illegitimate. Indeed, liberal pluralism, in Schmitt's
eyes, reduces the political to the social and economic and thereby nullifies all truly political opposition by simply excommunicating its
opponents from the High Church of Humanity. After all, only an unregenerate barbarian could fail to recognize the irrefutable benefits of
the liberal order.
Rasch K 55/67
AT Perm: Block (1/2)
1. THE PLAN AND THE ALT ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE – A POLICY OF “CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT” IS
CLEARLY NOT COMPATIBLE WITH A BOLD DECLARATION OF FUNDAMENTAL ENMITY. THE AFF WILL
PREDICTABLY CLAIM THAT THE NECESSITY OF DOING THE PLAN (DUE TO SOME IMPENDING DANGER TO THE
PEACEFUL WORLD ORDER, NO DOUBT) MERITS AN EXCEPTION TO THE CRITICISM, WHICH IS EXACTLY THE KIND
OF LOGIC WE’RE CRITICIZING TO BEGIN WITH.
2. THE PERMUTATION IS AN ATTEMPT TO INCLUDE OUR PERSPECTIVE UNDER THE UMBRELLA OF THE
AFFIRMATIVE’S COSMOPOLITAN WORLDVIEW, WHICH SIMULTANEOUSLY EXCLUDES THE NEGATIVE’S POTENTIAL
FOR DISSENT. THE AFFIRMATIVE’S ACTIONS SIMPLY EXEMPLIFY THE ARGUMENT PRESENTED IN THE RASCH 05
EVIDENCE. THE PERMUTATION DOES NOT ELIMINATE THE ENMITY OR COMPETITION BETWEEN OUR TWO
POSITIONS, IT SIMPLY REMOVES THE LINES OF DEMARCATION AND DRIVES VIOLENCE UNDERGROUND WHERE IT
WILL INEVITABLY RESURFACE.
3. VOTING ON THE PERMUTATION MASKS THE DANGER INHERENT IN THE AFFIRMATIVE’S COSMOPOLITAN
ASSUMPTIONS. IT IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE PERPETRATED BY THOSE WHO WANT TO PROVE THAT THERE IS NO
WAR AND THAT THERE ARE NO FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS PERMEATING THE FOUNDATION OF SOCIETY BY
ELIMINATING AND EXCLUDING THE VOICES OF THOSE LYONS, TYGERS, AND SAVAGE BEASTS WHO SAY THERE IS
A WAR, AS THE RASCH EVIDENCE INDICATES.
4. INCORPORATION IS A REPLAN – BY ALLOWING THE AFF TO “REFORMULATE” THE REPRESENTATIONS OF
THEIR POLICY WHEN WE KRITIK THOSE FLAWS CRUSHES OUR GROUND IN THE SAME WAY AS IF THEY HAD
REPLANNED AFTER WE RAN A DISAD. THIS IS A VOTING ISSUE FOR FAIRNESS AND LINK GROUND.
5. THE PERM IS ILLEGITIMATE – THE AFF IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE TOTALITY OF THE CLAIMS, ADVANCES, AND
UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS OF THE 1AC. SEVERING TO PERM FAILS TO ESCAPE THE AFF’S ENDORSEMENT OF
THE USFG AND ITS IDEALS OF PERPETUAL PEACE AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY.
6. LINKS FUNCTION AS REASONS TO REJECT THE PERMUTATION UNLESS THEY SEVER PART OF THE 1AC.
MAKE THE AFFIRMATIVE PROVE THAT THE PERM SOLVES EACH OF OUR SPECIFIC LINKS OR THEIR PERM IS
SEVERANCE AND YOU SHOULD VOTE NEG BECAUSE:
A. SEVERANCE MAKES THE AFFIRMATIVE A MOVING TARGET
B. IT PROMOTES IRRESPONSIBLE ARGUMENTS IF THEY CAN JUST SEVER OUT OF ANY PART OF THEIR
ADVOCACY, THIS KILLS GROUND FOR DISCOURSE AND LANGUAGE KRITIKS
C. CREATES DISINGENOUS ADVOCACY, IF THE AFF CAN JUST TAKE OUR ARGS AS SUGGESTIONS FOR
MINOR REPAIRS THEY WOULD NEVER HAVE TO DEFEND THE 1AC WHICH UNDERMINES EDUCATION IN
ROUND
D. SEVERANCE IS A VOTER FOR FAIRNESS AND GROUND
Rasch K 56/67
AT Perm: Block (2/2)
7. THE ALTERNATIVE IS TRY OR DIE: WHILE THE AMERICAN ZEALOTS ARE PERFECTLY SATISFIED WITH THE
STATUS QUO, THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN EXCISED FROM THE CATEGORY OF HUMANITY, THE “BARBARIANS”
OUTSIDE THE GATES, CANNOT SIT AND WAIT ANY LONGER FOR A “NEW POLITICS” TO ARRIVE LIKE THE SECOND
COMING OF CHRIST. EVEN IF THE ALTERNATIVE HAS FLAWS THERE IS ONE ACTION THAT IS ABSOLUTELY
NECESSARY, AND THAT IS ENSURING THAT HUMANITY BECOME A CONCRETE FACT OF LIFE AND NOT A VALUE TO
BE GAINED AND LOST – COMPROMISE ON THIS POINT IS UNACCEPTABLE.
(Spring 2003), 143-44.)
for those who
Rasch K 57/67
AT Perm: Reps Come First
ONTOLOGY COMES FIRST. WE MUST EVALUATE REPRESENTATIONS AND
UNDERLYING ONTOLOGICAL QUESTIONS BEFORE CONSIDERING POLITICAL
MEANS. SOVEREIGN POWER IS DEPENDENT UPON THE CONTROL OF
APPEARANCES
Giorgio AGAMBEN, professor of philosophy at the University of Verena, 2000 (Means Without End: Notes on Politics. pp.
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 0 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 voyeur's
gaze and force him to look them in the eyes. In that precise moment, the insubstantial nature ofthe 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 conftonted 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
dissimulates 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.
Rasch K 58/67
AT Perm: Critical Advocacy
THE PERM CAN’T CAPTURE OUR ADVOCACY:
1. THEIR DISCURSIVE FRAMING IS EXACTLY THE TYPE OF DISCOURSE WE KRITIK IN THE 1NC. IF WE WIN ANY
RISK OF A SOLVENCY DEFICIT ON THE PERM, VOTE NEG. IT IS EXACTLY THESE TYPES OF SCENARIOS THAT
THE GLOBAL ORDER CONSTRUCTS TO JUSTIFY STATUS QUO EXCEPTIONALISM. THEIR PRIVILEGING OF THE
IMPACTS OF THE CASE ALLOWS THE DOMINANT IDEOLOGY TO JUSTIFY THEIR CONTROL OVER DISSENT AND
POLITICAL AGENCY.
2. THIS FRAMING IS ARTIFICIAL, EVERY ROUND DEBATERS CLAIM SOME EXTINCTION SCENARIO, BUT IT NEVER
HAPPENS. DEBATERS AND JUDGES SUSPEND THEIR DISBELIEF IN THE FACE OF THESE CONSTRUCTED INTERNAL
LINKS, BUT OUR ARGUMENT IS THAT THIS PRECLUDES EVER LOOKING AT THE SYSTEMIC HARMS OF THE STATUS
QUO, POLICY-WISE AND IN-ROUND. THEIR TOTALIZING OVERSIMPLIFICATION MEANS THE PERM CAN’T
ACCESS THE ADVOCACY OF OUR RASCH EVIDENCE AND YOU DEFER NEGATIVE.
Rasch K 59/67
IMPACT TURNS (POLICY)
GENERIC
THE ENTIRE FRAME OF THE CASE IS WRONG: WARS ARE PRODUCED BY THE DEEP CURRENTS OF HISTORY, BY
THE ROLES THAT ORDINARY PEOPLE HAVE PLAYED AND THE MUNDANE CULTURAL PRACTICES THAT MARK THE
“OTHER” AS THE TARGET OF ABSOLUTE VIOLENCE. THESE ADVANTAGES COULD BE FOUND IN THE WINDOW OF
A COUPLE OF WEEKS: UNLESS WE COMBAT THE AMNESIAC TEMPORALITY OF THE SCENARIO OBSESSION WE
DOOM OURSELVES TO THE VERY IMPACTS THE NEGATIVE SPEAKS OF, THE CASE’S CAUSAL UNDERSTANDING
PREVENTS THE RECOGNITION OF THE BANALITY OF GLOBAL VIOLENCE AND MAINTAINS OUR IGNORANCE OF THE
TRUE NATURE OF WAR.
GREGORY 04 [Derek, Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver The Colonial Present
Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, Blackwell Publishing: Oxford 2004 pp 9-16]
On the one side, we too readily forget the ways in which metropolitan cultures constructed other cultures as other.
By this, I mean not only how metropolitan cultures represented other cultures as exotic, bizarre, alien – like
Borges’s “Chinese encyclopaedia” – but also how they acted as though “the meaning they dispensed was purely the result
of their own activity” and so suppressed their predatory appropriations of other cultures. This is surely what was lost
in Foucault’s laughter. We are also inclined to gloss over the terrible violence of colonialism. We forget the
exactions, suppressions, and complicities that colonialism forced upon the peoples it subjugated, and the way in
which it withdrew from them the right to make their own history, ensuring that they did so emphatically not under conditions of their own choosing. These erasures
are not only delusions; they are also dangers. We forget that it is often ordinary people who do such awful,
extraordinary things, and so foreclose the possibility that in similar circumstances most of us would, in all
likelihood, have done that in similar circumstances most of us would, in all likelihood, have done much the
same. To acknowledge this is not to protect our predecessors from criticism: it is to recall the part we are called to play – and continue to play – in the performance of
the colonial present. We need to remind our rulers that “even the best-run empires are cruel and violent,” Maria Misra argues, and that “overwhelming power, combined
with a sense of boundless superiority, will produce atrocities – even among the well-intentioned.” In other words, we still do much the same. Like Seumas Milne, I believe
that “the roots of the global crisis which erupted on September 11 lie in precisely those colonial experiences and the informal quasi-imperial system that succeeded them.”
And if we do not successfully contest these amnesiac histories – in particular, if we do not recover the
histories of Britain and the United States in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq – then, in Misra’s agonizing phrase, the Heart of
Smugness will be substituted for the Heart of Darkness.
On the other side, there is often nostalgia for the cultures that colonial modernity has destroyed. Art, design, fashion, film, literature, music, travel: all are marked by
mourning the passing of “the traditional,” “the unspoiled,” “the authentic,” and by a romanticized and thoroughly commodified longing for their revival as what Graham
Huggan calls “the post-colonial exotic.” This is not a harmless, still less a trivial pursuit, because its nostalgia works as a sort of cultural cryonics. Other cultures are fixed
and frozen, often as a series of fetishes, and then brought back to life through metropolitan circuits of consumption. Commodity fetishism and cannibalism are repatriated to
the metropolis. But there is a still more violent side to colonial nostalgia. Contemporary metropolitan cultures are also characterized by nostalgia for the aggrandizing
swagger of colonialism itself, for its privileges and powers. Its exercise may have been shot through with anxiety, even guilt; its codes may on occasion have been
transgressed, even set aside. But the triumphal show of colonialism – its elaborate “ornamentalism,” as David Cannadine calls it – and its effortless, ethnocentric
assumption of Might and Right are visibly and aggressively abroad in our own present. For what else is the war on terror other than the violent return of the colonial past,
with its split geographies of “us” and “then,” “civilization” and “barbarism,” “Good” and “Evil”?
As Frances Yates and Walter Benjamin showed, in strikingly different ways, the arts of memory have always turned on space and geography as much as on time and history.
We know that amnesia can be counteracted by the production of what Pierre Nora calls (not without misgivings) lieux de memoire, while Jean Starobinski reminds us that
nostalgia was originally a sort of homesickness, a pathology of distance. The late modern desire for memory-work – the need to secure the connective impmerative between
“then” and “now” – is itself the product of contemporary constructions of time and space that have also reconfigured the affiliations between “us” and “them.” Hence
Huyssen suggests that the “turn towards memory” has been brought about “by the desire to anchor ourselves in a world characterized by an increasing instability of time
and the fracturing of lived space.” The kind of memory-work I have in mind is less therapeutic than Huyssen’s gesture implies, but its insistence on the importance of
productions of space is axiomatic for a colonialism that was always as much about making other people’s geographies as it was about making other people’s histories.
Fredric Jameson has offered a radically different gloss on claims like these. In his view, the delineation of what Said once called contrapuntal geographies was vital in a
colonial world where “the epistemological separation of colony from metropolis” ensures that “the truth of metropolitan experience is not visible in the daily life of the
metropolis itself; it lies outside the immediate space of Europe.” In such circumstances, Said had proposed, “as we look back on the cultural archive,” we need to read it
“with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominant discourse
acts.” In passing “from imperialism to globalization,” however, Jameson claims that
What could not be mapped cognitively in the world of modernism now brightens into the very circuits of the new transnational cybernetic. Instant information transfers
suddenly suppress the space that held the colony apart from the metropolis in the modern period. Meanwhile, the economic interdependence of the world system today
means that wherever one may find oneself on the globe, the position can henceforth always be coordinated with its other spaces. This kind of epistemological
transparency...goes hand in hand with standardization and has often been characterized as the Americanization of the world...
Rasch K 60/67
I admire much of Jameson’s work, but I think this argument – in its way, a belated version of Conrad’s “Geography Triumphant” – is wholly mistaken. The middle passage
from imperialism to globalization is not as smooth as he implies, still less complete, and the “new transnational cybernetic” imposes its own unequal and uneven
geographies. The claim to “transparency” is one of the most powerful God-tricks of the late modern world, and Jameson’s faith in transcendent power of a politico-
intellectual Global Positioning System seems to me fanciful. As Donna Haraway has shown with great perspicacity, vision
is always partial and
provisional, culturally produced and performed, and it depends on spaces of constructed visibility that –
even as they claim to render the opacities of “other spaces” transparent – are always also spaces of
constructed invisibility. The production of the colonial present has not diminished the need for contrapuntal geographies. On the contray. In a novel
that has at its center the terrorist bombing of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, Giles
Foden writes about the “endless etcetera of events which lead from dead Russians in Afghanistna, via this,
that, and the other, through dead Africans and Americans in Nairobi and Dar, to the bombardment of a c
ountry with some of the highest levels of malnutrition ever recorded.”
Those connections are not transparent, as subsequent chapters will show, and the routes “via this, that and
the other” cannot be made so by narratives in which moments clip together like magnets or by maps in
which our unruly world is fixed within a conventional Cartesian grid. We need other ways of mapping the
turbulent times and spaces in which and through we live.
I have organized this book in the following way. I begin by clarifying what I mean by imaginative geographies, and illustrating their force through a discussion of the
rhetorical response by politicians and commentators to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001.
Others have described the consequences of those attacks for metropolitan America, but my own focus is different. The central sections of the book provide a triptych of
studies that narrate the war on terror as a series of spatial stories that take place in other parts of the world: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. Each of these stories pivots
around September 11, not to privilege that horrifying event (I don’t think it marked an epochal rupture in human history) but to show that it had a complex genealogy that
reached back into the colonial past and ,equally, to show how it was used by regimes in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv to advance a grisly colonial present ( and future).
The first story opens with the ragged formation of the modern state of Afghanistan, and traces the curve of American’s involvement in its affairs from the Second World War
through the Soviety occupation and the guerrilla wars of the 1980s and 1990s to the rise of the Taliban and its awkward accommodations with Osama bin Laden and al-
Qaeda at the close of the twentieth century (chapter 3). Then I track forward from September 11 to the opening of the Afghan front in America’s “war on terror,” and its
continuing campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban as they regroup on the Pakistan border.
The second story begins with European designs on the Middle East and from this brittle template I trace the ways in which the formation and violent expansion of the state
of Israel in the course of the twentieth century proceeded in lockstep with America’s self-interest in its security to license successive partitionings of Palestine. Then I track
forward from September 11 to show how the Israeli government took advantage of the “war on terror” in order to legitimize and radicalize its dispossession of the
Palestinian people.
The third story describes British and American investments in Iraq from the First World War, when Iraq was formed out of three provinces of the Otooman Empire, through
the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-8, to the first Gulf War in 1990-1 and the international regime of sanctions and inspections that succeeded it. Then I track forward from
September 11 to show how America and Britain resumed their war against Iraq in the spring of 2003 as yet another front in the ndless and seemingly boundless war on
terror.
Finally, I use these narratives and the performances of space that they disclose to bring the colonial present into sharper focus. It will be apparent hat I regard the global war
on terror – those scare-quotes are doubly necessary – as one of the central modalities through which the colonial present is articulated. Its production involves more than
political maneuverings, military deployments, and capital flows, the meat and drink of critical social analysis, and it is for this reason that I have also summoned the
humanities – including history, human geography, and literary studies – to my side. For the war on terror is an attempt to establish a new global narrative in which the
power to narrate is vested in a particular constellation of power and knowledge within the United States of America. I want to show how ordinary people have been caught
up in its violence: the thousands murdered in New York City and Washington on September 11, but also the thousands more killed and maimed in Afghanistan, Palestine,
and Iraq under its bloody banners.
The colonial present is not produced through geopolitics and geoeconomics alone,
through foreign and economic policy set in motion by presidents, prime ministers and chief executives, the
state, the military apparatus and transnational corporations. It is also set in motion through mundane
cultural forms and cultural practices that mark other people as irredeemably “Other” and that license the
unleashing of exemplary violence against them. This does not exempt the actions of presidents, prime
minister, and chief executives from scrutiny (and, I hope, censure); but these imaginative geographies lodge many
more of us in the same architectures of enmity. It is important not to allow the spectacular violence of
September 11, or the wars in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, to blind us to the banality of the colonial
present and to our complicity in its horrors.
Rasch K 61/67
WAR
1. WAR IS THE ULTIMATE THREAT TO SECURITY – THE PREVENTION OF WAR BECOMES THE IMPETUS FOR
VIOLENCE IN THE NAME OF A LIBERAL-DEMOCRATIC HUMANITY
ZHANG 04 [Xudong, Cultural Critique, “Multiplicity or Heterogeneity? The Cultural-Political Paradox in the Age of Globalization.”
One of the more convincing points one can find in Empire is this new political animal's interest not in
waging war but in maintaining peace. But this, too, can be understood more forcefully in light of the
Schmittian observation that any totalistic construction of a homogeneous concept of "us" is based,
unwittingly or not, upon a false, apolitical, and unattainable illusion of the "total security" of our way of life,
our being. The peace-seeking drive indeed touches on a fun-damental feature of all civilizational-imperial
orders of "our way of life." From the Great Wall of China to the U.S. national missile [End Page 48] defense
system, we witness the fantasy about total security. The Great Wall of China, which had already been penetrated time and again by hordes of
nomads even before it gets symbolically "battered down" by the "cheap commodities of the bourgeoisie," in that splendid passage from The Communist Manifesto, stands to
be rebuilt again and again, symbolically or otherwise. Total
security, as Schmitt tells us, is itself built upon the notion of the
enemy as the negated Other; the Wall denies their existence as human beings while secretly acknowledging
the real threat this negated, dehumanized enemy poses to our wellbeing both from outside and within. The
"gap" of the Manhattan skyline left by the destruction of the Twin Towers of World Trade Center is so profoundly disturbing, a daily reminder for New Yorkers, because it
indicates both the increasing impossibility and the increasing necessity of the Wall: The Wall of modernization and modernity, of classical notions of security and protection,
of a sheltered and protected life requires not only the apathy, indifference, and self-indulgence of wealth and power, but also, and more crucially, the work of the state that
maintains the physical distance, separation, and destruction of the enemy. The political homogeneity required by the age of homeland security may prove alarming and
ominous to those who cherish civil liberty and civil rights, but there is no denying that it is intrinsic to the very notion of freedom and wellbeing assumed by globalization
and postmodernism as conventionally understood. In this particular sense one may concede that globalization and postmodernism as ideological discourses represent one
more attempt to form a homogenous and exclusive self-identity by which to manage human conditions in the name of freedom, diversity, and multiplicity, by forming and
producing subjectivity and the concept of human nature as such. In this sense, the Deleuzian philosophy of affirmativity, internal differentiation, and the multiplicity of
sameness—all argued against the classical Hegelian notions of binary opposite and dialectic contradiction—is likely to become a new philosophical ground of ideological
and cultural-political contention (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Deleuze 1994). This concept offers opportunities for the culturalist concept of the liberal-democratic selfhood
and sovereignty to deterritorialize and reterritorialize, to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, to exist as the "body without organs," and to function as the ultimate
machine of becoming [End Page 49]political in the battle of defining the universal in terms of the particular. With
increased communication and
interaction between different human groups at a certain level (that is to say, within certain class strata across the world), the
exclusion upon which the necessary, though disguised, political cohesiveness and homogeneity has been
constructed must be defined in terms of the radical otherness of civilization and humanity as such. If
terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism did not exist, they would have been invented; the Iraqis, the Serbs,
and to some degree the Chinese have been there, as has the African continent, in a less visible but, by virtue
of its being kept out of sight, more frightening way. In this respect, too, there is little new. And Schmitt, too, has something ready
to offer: At the end of The Concept of the Political, he observes (and this was 1932):
War is condemned but executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties,
international police, and measures to assure peace remain. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy
but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity. A war waged to protect or
expand economic power must, with the aid of propaganda, turn into a crusade and into the last war of
humanity. This is implicit in the polarity of ethics and economics, a polarity astonishingly systematic and
consistent. But this allegedly non-political and apparently even antipolitical system serves existing or newly
emerging friend-and-enemy groupings and cannot escape the logic of the political.
Rasch K 62/67
2. WAR IS A TIMELESS THEME OF HUMAN EXISTENCE: IT IS NOT A ‘SCENARIO’ AND IT CAN’T BE ‘SOLVED’.
THE WAY THE AFFIRMATIVE APPROACHES CONFLICT GUARANTEES ITS CONTINUITY AND DEVASTATES THE
POTENTIAL FOR UNDERSTANDING, TO RENDER WAR COHERENT IT MUST BE EMBRACED
HILLMAN 04 [James, psychologist, scholar, international lecturer, professor Yale University Terrible love of war, Penguin Press: New York 2004. p. 1-9]
One sentence in one scene from one film, Patton, sums up what this book tries to understand. The general walks the field after a battle. Churned earth, burnt tanks, dead
We can never
men . He takes up a dying officer, kisses him, surveys the havoc, and says: “I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life.”
prevent war or speak sensible of peace and disarmament unless we enter this love of war unless we move our
imaginations into the martial state of soul we cannot comprehend its pull. This means “going to war,” and
this book aims to induct our minds into military service. We are not going to war “in the name of peace” as deceitful rhetoric so often
declares, but rather for war’s own sake: to understand the madness of its love.
Our civilian disdain and pacifist horror-all the legitimate and deep-felt aversion to everything to do with the military and the warrior-must be set aside.
This is because the first principle of psychological method holds that any phenomenon to be understood must be
sympathetically imagined. No syndrome can be truly dislodged from its cursed condition unless we first move imagination into its heart.
War is first of all a psychological task, perhaps first of all psychological tasks because it threatens your life and mine directly, and the existence of all living beings. The bell
tolls for thee, and all. Nothing can escape thermonuclear rage, and if the burning and its aftermath are unimaginable, their cause, war, is not.
War is also a psychological task because philosophy and theology, the fields supposed to do the heavy thinking for our species, have neglected war’s overriding importance.
“War is the father of all,” said Heraclitus at the beginnings of Western thought, which Emmanual Levinas restates in Western thought as “being
reveals itself as
war.” If it is a primordial component of being then it war fathers the very structure of existence and our thinking about it: our
ideas of the universe of religion, of ethics; war determines the thought patterns of Artistotle’s logic of opposites, Kant’s antinomies, Darwin’s natural
selection, Marx’s struggle of classes, and even Freud’s repression of the id by the ego and superego. We think in warlike terms, feel ourselves at war with ourselves, and
unknowingly believe predation, territorial defense, conquest, and the interminable battle of opposing forces are the ground rules of existence.
Yet, for all this, has ever a major Western philosopher –with the great exception of Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan was published three and a half centuries ago-delivered
a full-scale assault on the topic, or give nit the primary importance war deserves in the hierarchy of themes? Immanuel Kant came to it late with a brief essay written when
he was past seventy and after he had published his main works. He states the theme of this chapter in a few words much like Hobbes: “The state of peace among men living
side by side is not the natural state; the natural state is one of war.” Though war is the primary human condition, his focus is upon “perpetual peace” which is the title of his
essay. About peace philosophers and theologians have much to say, and we shall take up peace in our stride.
Fallen from the higher minds, central contemplation, war tends to be examined piecemeal by specialists, or set aside
as “history” where it then becomes a subchapter called “military history” in the hands of scholars and reporters dedicated to the record of facts. Or its study is placed
outside the mainstream, isolated in policy institutions (often at war themselves with rival institutions). The magic of their thinking transmutes
killing into “taking out,” bloodshed into “body counts,” and the chaos of battle into “scenarios,” “game theory,”
“cost benefits,” as weapons beyond “toys” and bombs “smart.” Especially needed is not more specialist inquiry into past wars and
future wars, but rather an archetypal psychology-the myths, philosophy, and theology of war’s deepest
mind. That is the purpose of this book.
There are, of course, many excellent studies of aggression, predation, genetic competition, and violence; works on pack, mob, and crowd behavior; on conflict resolution; on
class struggle, revolution, and tyranny; on genocide and war crimes; on sacrifice, warrior cults, opposing tribal moieties; on geopolitical strategies, the technology of
weaponry, and texts detailing the practice and the theory of waging wars in general and the analysis by find minds of particular wars; and lastly, always lastly, on the terrible
effect of war on its remnants.
Military historians, war reporters long in the field, and major commanders in their memoirs of wars from whom I have learned and respectfully cite in the pages that follow
have offered their heartfelt knowledge. Individual intellectuals and excellent modern writers, among them Freud, Einstein, Simone Weil, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt,
Robert J. Lifton, Susan Griffin, Jonathon Schell, Barbara Tuchman, and Paul Fussell have brought their intelligence to the nature of war, as have great artists from Goya,
say, to Brecht. Nonetheless, Ropp’s wide-ranging survey of the idea of war concludes: “The voluminous works of the contemporary military intellectuals contain no new
ideas of the origins of war... In this situation a ‘satisfactory’ scientific view of war is as remote as ever.” From another more psychological perspective, Susan Sontag
concludes similarly: “We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is-and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t
imagine. That’s what every soldier and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that
struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.” But, here, she is wrong.
“Can’t understand, can’t imagine” is unacceptable. It gets us off the hook, admitting defeat before we have even begun. Lifton has said the task in our times is to “imagine
the real.” Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during much of the Vietnam War, looking back, writes: “we can now understand these catastrophes for what they were:
essentially the products of a failure of imagination.” Surprise and its consequents, panic and terror, are due to “the poverty of expectations-the failure of imagination,”
according to another secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. When comparing the surprise at Pearl Harbor with that of the Twin Towers, the director of the National
Security Agency, Michael Hayden, said, “perhaps it was more a failure of imagination this time than last.”
Failure of imagination is another way of describing “persistence in error,” which Barbara Tuchman says leads
nations and their leaders down the road to disaster on “the march of folly,” as she calls her study of wars from Troy to Vietnam.
The origin of these disasters lies in the unminaginative mind-set of “political and bureaucratic life that
subdues the functioning intellect in favor of “working the levels.” Working the levers of duty, following the
hierarchy of command without imagining anything beyond the narrowness of facts reduced to yet narrower
numbers, precisely describes Franz Stangl, who ran the Treblinka death camp, and also describes what Hannah Arendt defines as evil,
drawing her paradigmatic example from the failure of intellect and imagination in Adolf Eichmann.
Rasch K 63/67
If we want war’s horror to be abated so that life may go on, it is necessary to understand and imagine. We
humans are the species privileged in regard to understanding. Only we have the faculty and the scope for comprehending the planet’s quandaries. Perhaps this is what we
are here for: to bring appreciative understanding to the phenomena that have no need to understand themselves. It may even be a moral obligation to try and comprehend
war. That famous phrase of William James, “the moral equivalent of war,” with which he meant the mobilization of moral effort, today means the effort of imagination
proposed by Lifton and ducked by Sontag.
The failure to understand may be because our imaginations our impaired and our modes of comprehension need a paradigm shift. If the ponderous object war does not yield
to our tool, then we have to put down that tool and search for another. The frustration may not lie simply in the obduracy of war-that it is essentially un-understandable,
why can’t our method of
unimaginable. Is it war’s fault that we have not grasped its meanings? We have to investigate the faultiness of our tool:
understanding understand war? Answer: according to Einstein, problems cannot be solved at the same
level of thinking that created them.
Rasch K 64/67
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
1. SCENARIOS OF MUTUALLY ASSURED NUCLEAR DESTRUCTION ARE A TEMPTING MISCONCEPTION BUT THEY
MISS THE FUNDAMENTAL POINT THAT IT IS NOT THE NUKES THAT ANNIHILATE, BUT HUMANS WHO KILL OTHER
HUMANS BY THESE MEANS.
SCHMITT 62 (C , “T ARL ”T N C R 4:3)
HE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN HE EW ENTENNIAL EVIEW
The partisan has then a real, but not an absolute enemy. That proceeds from his political character. Another boundary of enmity follows
from the telluric character of the partisan. He defends a patch of earth to which he has an autochthonic relation. His basic position remains defensive despite his increasing
mobility. He comports himself just as St. Joan of Arc did before her ecclesiastical court of judgment. She was not a partisan; she fought the English in a regular way. When
asked a theological trick question by the judge—whether she claimed God hated the English—she responded: “Whether God loved or hated the English, I do not know, I
only know that they must be driven out of France.” This is the answer that every normal partisan of the defense of the national soil would have given. This
fundamentally defensive attitude characterizes the fundamental restriction of enmity as well. The real
enemy is not declared the absolute enemy, and also not the ultimate enemy of mankind as such. Lenin established
the main conceptual shift from war to politics, i.e., to the distinction of friend and enemy. It was a reasonable and a consequential extension of Clausewitz’s idea of war as
the continuation of politics. But Lenin, the professional revolutionary of the world-wide civil war [Weltbürgerkrieges], went even farther and made an absolute enemy out of
the real enemy. Clausewitz had spoken of absolute war, but always premised on the regularity of a subsistent state sphere [Staatlichkeit]. He could not yet imagine the state
as an instrument of a party, nor a party that commanded the state. With the ascension of the party to absolute status, the partisan too became absolute, elevated to the status
of the bearer of absolute enmity. Today it is not hard to see through the conceptual trick that produced this alteration in the concept of enmity. Another
sort of
elevation of the enemy to absolute status, by contrast, is much more difficult to refute, because it appears to
be immanent to the present reality of the nuclear age. Technical-industrial development has made human
weapons into pure means of destruction. A tempting misconception of protection and obedience is produced
in this way: one half of mankind is taken hostage by the other half, armed with weapons of absolute
annihilation. These require an absolute enemy lest they should be absolutely inhuman. Indeed, it is not in
fact the means of destruction that annihilate, but men who kill other men by these means. The English philosopher
Thomas Hobbes grasped the heart of the process in the seventeenth century already (De Homine IX, 3) and formulated it in full
precision, though at that time (1659) weapons were still comparatively harmless. Hobbes says: the man who believes himself endangered by others is as much more
dangerous than any animal, as his weapons are much more dangerous than the so-called natural weapons of animals, such as teeth, claws, horns, or poison. And the German
philosopher Hegel adds: weapons are the very being of fighters. This means concretely that the supra-conventional weapon supposes the supra-conventional man. It
presupposes him not merely as a postulate of some remote future; it intimates his existence as an already existent reality. The ultimate danger lies then not so much in the
living presence of the means of destruction and a premeditated meanness in man. It consists in the inevitability of a moral compulsion. Men who turn these
means against others see themselves obliged/forced to annihilate their victims and objects, even morally. They
have to consider the other side as entirely criminal and inhuman, as totally worthless. Otherwise they are
themselves criminal and inhuman. The logic of value and its obverse, worthlessness, unfolds its annihilating consequence, compelling ever new, ever
deeper discriminations, criminalizations, and devaluations to the point of annihilating all of unworthy life [lebensunwerten Lebens]. In a world in which the
partners push each other in this way into the abyss of total devaluation before they annihilate one another
physically, new kinds of absolute enmity must come into being. Enmity will be so terrifying that one perhaps mustn’t even speak any
longer of the enemy or of enmity, and both words will have to be outlawed and damned fully before the work of annihilation can begin. Annihilation thus
becomes entirely abstract and entirely absolute. It is no longer directed against an enemy, but serves only
another, ostensibly objective attainment of highest values, for which no price is too high to pay. It is the
renunciation of real enmity that opens the door for the work of annihilation of an absolute enmity.
Rasch K 65/67
2. THE THOUGHT OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS BECOMES ADDICTING--BY PLAYING WITH SCENARIOS, WE BECOME
INTOXICATED BY THE POWER OF THE WEAPONS AND DEVELOP A SUBCONSCIOUS DEPENDENCE UPON THEM, EVEN
WHEN WE DON’T WANT TO SEE THEIR USE
LIFTON & MARKUSEN 90 (Robert J. and Eric, The Genocidal Mentality, p. 134-5)
That kind of socialization in general was greatly enhanced by two widespread attitudes among pro-bomb
physicists. One was the strong conviction, shared with their fellow Americans, that their nation is good, very special, even blessed.
These physicists could readily extend that American mythology to questions of technology, making it
possible to believe that America could build a bad machine-the kind of image that Jeff Smith, an observer of American popular culture,
sees as animating Ronald Reagan’s and many Americans’ SDI obsession. The other attitude was that they had an absolute right to do any scientific and technological work
since they were essentially probing natural phenomena. The physicists’ socialization to military production of an ultimate weapon could, then, be experienced as
socialization to nature itself.
Many physicists have made a point of distancing themselves from the military,
The socialization is in no way monolithic.
and those who work or consult on weapons designs have passionately disagreed. But with much of the profession steadily
engaged with weapons, large numbers of physicists have come to associate work with the military as simply a part of their professional self. Whether working in groups or,
And here it is well to
at moments, by themselves, they can actively engage in weapons work while feeling, as one scientist put it, “alone with their physics.”
consider a mordant observation by Muller-Hill concerning Nazi scientists: “The more you understand of science, the less you
want to understand of the rest of the world” This socialization as a scientist readily creates a sense of
routine-indeed, inevitability-until continuing participation in the genocidal project becomes, as a Nazi
doctor in Auschwitz put it, “like the weather.”
There is a darker personal side to this weapons socialization which Theodore Taylor described as “fascination
with a sense of power, of extraordinary power, personal power, over global events.” He spoke of personally
experiencing that power “in the brute way, by just contemplating the numbers that had to do with the
destructive capacity of these things, and occasionally seeing one go off.” And he said, “One gets very possessive about these
things,” experiencing unspoken feelings such as “Yeah, that’s my bomb that destroyed this island.” Taylor associated that special
sense of power with an addiction he developed to weapons making, becoming dependent on doing it, the equivalent
of drinking alcohol.” This addiction may be to the “high states” Taylor spoke of, having to do with extraordinary
power and influence-as was evident in Nazi doctors and scientists, especially in relation to the “heroic” early
days of experiencing and disseminating the visionary biomedical project. Physicists collectively experienced elements of this
transcendence: first, during the Manhattan Project: and then, on the return to Los Alamos for hydrogen-bomb work, which many experienced (as one of them put it) “as
another great time of the lab.”
Rasch K 66/67
EXTINCTION
THE DRIVE TO RATIONALLY SUPPRESS VIOLENCE THROUGH ORDER AND REASON HAS BROUGHT US TO THE EDGE
OF EXTINCTION THROUGH MILITARISTIC, ECOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL MEANS.
DILLON & CAMPBELL 92 (Michael, Lancaster and David, Newcastle, The Political Subject of Violence, p. 163-164)
This interpretation of violence as constitutive of identity might, paradoxically, offer the only hope of some
amelioration of the worst excesses of violence exhibited by the formation of (political) identity. The orthodox
rendering of such violence as pre-modern abdicates its responsibility to a predetermined historical fatalism.
For if these ethnic and nationalist conflicts are understood as no more than settled history rearing its ugly head, then there is nothing that can be done in the present to
resolve the tension except to repress them again. In this view, the historical drama has to be enacted according to its script, with human agency in suspension while nature
The only alternative is for nature to be overcome as the result of an idealistic
violently plays itself out.
transformation at the hands of reason. Either way, this fatalistic interpretation of the relationship between violence and the political is rooted in a
hypostatised conception of man/nature as determinative of the social <164> political: the latter is made possible only once the former runs its course, or if it is overturned.
It might have once been the case that the prospect of a transformation of nature by reason seemed both likely and
hopeful; indeed, many of the most venerable of the debates in the political theory of international relations revolved around this very point.8 But, having reached
what Foucault has called society's 'threshold of modernity', 'we' now face a prospect that radically re-figures the parameters of
politics: the real prospect of extinction. As Foucault argues, we have reached this threshold because
the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity of a
political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics place his existence as a living being in question.9
How the prospect of extinction might materialise itself is an open question. That increasingly it can be
materialised, militarily, ecologically and politically, is not.
modernity's alternative of transformation through reason is not only untenable, it

The double bind of this prospect is that
is deeply complicit in the form of (inter)national life that has been responsible for bringing about the real
prospect of extinction in the first place. The capacity of violence to eradicate being was engendered by
reason's success; not merely, or perhaps even most importantly, by furnishing the technological means, but
more insidiously in setting the parameters of the political (le politique, to use the useful terms of debate in which Simon Critchley
engages) while fuelling the violent practices of politics (la politique). The reliance on reason as that which could
contain violence and reduce the real prospect of extinction may prove nothing less than a fatal
misapprehension. In support of this proposition, consider the interpretive bases of the Holocaust.
For all that politics in the last fifty years has sought to exceptionalise the Nazis' genocide as an aberrant
moment induced by evil personalities, there is no escaping the recognition that modern political life lies
heavily implicated in the instigation and conduct of this horror. In so far as modernity can be characterised as the promotion of
rationality and efficiency to the exclusion of alternative criteria for action, the Holocaust is one outcome of the 'civilising process'. With its plan rationally to order Europe
through the elimination of an internal other, its bureaucratised administration of death, and its employment of the technology of a modern state, the
Holocaust
'was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residence of pre-modern barbarity. It was a
legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at home in any other house'.
Rasch K 67/67
THE AFF’S FIXATION ON SURVIVAL MAKES THE EXCLUSION OF ALL LIFE POSSIBLE, THIS INTERNAL LINK TURNS
THEIR AFF
Anne CALDWELL, Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity, Theory and Event7:2, 04, project muse
A sovereign power that acts in the name of and for a life defined solely by its belonging to humanity is a
power that has become global. To take these emerging global dimensions of sovereignty and life as
straightforward indications of an all-inclusive humanity would be a mistake. New forms of global sovereignty and global
human life remain defined by the categories of natural life, political life and homo sacer defining the Western tradition. In the classical world and the modern world, natural
and political life once included and excluded one another to constitute local or national forms of being. Today, those same patterns reappear in global relationships between
national life and international life, which constitute and exclude one another as the ground of the sovereign exception.
In an international world, the
ground of the sovereign decision is humanity as such. And what sovereignty decides is the status of that
humanity. The equivocal status of a humanity dependent on the sovereign decision increases as national
sovereignty breaks down without wholly disappearing, and without being clearly integrated into a new form
of supranational sovereignty. As the boundaries of the nation state become more porous, sovereignty as the
power to determine boundaries becomes more pervasive. The status of life, in a parallel manner, becomes
increasingly precarious. More and more, life across the globe exists in a state of crisis, caught within and
subject to a sovereign power itself indeterminate. This indeterminate sovereignty increasingly ranges over
all territories and all peoples: over humanity as such.

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BLACK KNIGHTS 07/08 team biopower aka soft power aka martin luther king, JR

PEASE 02 [Aron Pease 2002, Politics and Culture, Issue 3, http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/pag.cfm?key=176

RASCH 03 [William Rasch Spring 2003, Cultural Critique, Vol. 54

BENJAMIN, 98 [Marina, Living at the End of the World, p. 230-231]

WE’LL ISOLATE SEVERAL LINKS:

3. VIOLENCE IS FUNDAMENTAL TO HUMAN EXISTENCE – IT DETERMINES THE VERY STRUCTURE OF EXISTENCE

modernity's alternative of transformation through reason is not only untenable, it

NIETZSCHE, 82 (the gay science, nietzche channel)

TURANLI 2003 “journal of nietzche studies 26 (2003) 55-63 p.muse

NIETZSCHE 82 (the gay science p 38-39)

NIETZCHE 86 (beyond good and evil, p153-4)

RASCH 03 (human rights as geopolitics, cultured critique-54, spring 2003 p 135-6)

modernity's alternative of transformation through reason is not only untenable, it

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