1AC

Contention 1 is Anxiety
First, the surveillance method of counter-terrorism in the
status quo fails to recognize the impossibility of complete
security our desire for infinite pleasure means that the war
on terror becomes infinitely sustained. We have come to enjoy
the war because it symbolizes the retaking of the American
Identity and a satiation of the anxiety we experience as a
result of loss. This makes the war and conflict a self-fulfilling
prophecy
McGowan, 2013
Todd McGowan, Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont; Enjoying What
We Dont Have: A Psychoanalytic Politics, University of Nebraska, 2013, pg. 160-163

Nowhere is the retreat from enjoyment to pleasure more evident than in

the American response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The attacks
immediately reinvigorated the social bond for a majority of Americans. The loss that they occasioned
brought subjects back to the shared sacrifice that defines their
membership in American society. Even as they were horrified by the image
of the towers burning and then falling, most Americans, in the strict
psychoanalytic sense of the term, enjoyed the attacks insofar as the
attacks allowed them to experience once again their social bond with
great intensity. This is a bond that one suffers, just as one suffers from a terrorist attack. Even though it followed from an
attack, this bond was not one formed through the male logic of friend/enemy, which is why the headline in Le Monde on September
12,2001, could proclaim, Nous sommes tous Americains.27 The bond formed around the September 11 attacks was not initially a
bond of exclusivity with a clear outside and inside. Any subject willing to accede to the experience of loss could become apart of
American society at that moment. The not-all of the social bond occurs through the experience of loss, but the recognition of this

One enjoys it without deriving any pleasure from it. It is, in

fact, painful. Not only is it painful, but it also entails complete humiliation .
The society experiences the shame of being a victim and enduring trauma the shame of enjoyment itself. In order to
disguise this shameful enjoyment, the United States quickly turned to an
assertion of power that would carry with it the promise of a restored
wholeness the recovery of an imaginary perfect security. The attack on
Afghanistan brought pleasure to most members of American society. This
pleasure had the function of rendering the enjoyment that emerged
through traumatic loss bearable, but it could not fulfill its inherent
promise. Enjoyment satisfies, and pleasure always disappoints. The
disappointing nature of the attack on Afghanistan paved the way to the
subsequent attack on Iraq in a further attempt to find an actual pleasure
equal to what we anticipated. In terms of American society, these foreign
wars serve as alibis for the enjoyment of the traumatic attacks
themselves. Because we seek respite from the loss that binds us, we flee from the social bond despite our purported desire
type of bond is unbearable.

for it. The authentic social bond exists only in the shared experience of loss that is, only according to the female logic of nothaving. But the attack on Iraq also illustrates the inescapability of the enjoyment attached to loss. The Iraq War clearly follows from
the male logic of having and aims at producing the pleasure resulting from possession: the United States would conquer a
recalcitrant dictator and obtain a firm ally in a globally significant region. This is both the stated justification for the war and the
explanation offered by critics who see it as an exercise in American imperialism. For both the perpetuators of the war and its critics,
the war concerns having, despite the different inflections they give this idea. But the result of the war is the failure of having and the
renewed experience of loss. The pursuit of the pleasure involved in having returns American society to the traumatic loss involved in
the September 11 attacks. Of course, no one fights wars with the express intention of losing them, but every war brings with it
sacrifice and loss, which is ultimately the substance of the social bond and the source of our ability to enjoy that bond. The pursuit of

the pleasure of having leads to the loss that inevitably accompanies this pursuit. Imperial powers do not attempt to stretch their
military and economic reach to the point that it breaks because of an inescapable will to power or a biological urge for infinite
expansion. The conquering drive of empires has its roots in the search for what no amount of imperial possession can provide the
enjoyment of the experience of loss. Empires conquer increasing quantities of territory in order to discover a territory that they cant
conquer. In this same way, the Afghanistan War disappointed the American leadership because it didnt provide even the possibility
for loss. Donald Rumsfelds lament that the country didnt have any targets to bomb points in this direction. Iraq, in contrast,
promised a possible defeat, and if it hadnt, Syria or Iran would surely have come within the sights of the Bush administration.
Whatever the proffered justification or hidden motivation, powerful societies ultimately go to war in order to reenact a constitutive
loss and facilitate the enjoyment that this loss entails.28 This is the case not just with war but with any positive project that a social
order takes up. Building a monument like the Eiffel Tower provided French society with a possession that allows for collective
identification. But the work involved with the building involved a great sacrifice in time and in money. When we think of the Eiffel
Tower, we rarely think of the sacrifice required for its construction; instead, we think of the sense of identity that it offers. It provides
a positive point of identification for France itself as a nation, and French subjects can find pleasure through this identification.
Nonetheless, the enjoyment of the Eiffel Tower, in contrast to the pleasure that it offers, stems from the sacrifice required to

Every finished societal product such as victory in Iraq, the beauty of

the Eiffel Tower, smooth roads on which to drive promises pleasure, but
this pleasure primarily supplies an alibi for the enjoyment that the
sacrifices on the way to the product produce. These sacrifices allow us to
experience the social bond by repeating the act of sacrifice through which
each subject became a member of the social order. It is not so much that
the pursuit of pleasure backfires (though it does) but that it is never done simply
for its own sake. We embark on social projects not in spite of what they
will cost us but because of what they will cost us.29 The dialectic of pleasure and enjoyment
construct it.

also plays itself out in the relationship that subjects in society have to their leader. According to Freud, all group members install the
leader in the position of an ego ideal, and this ego ideal held in common furthers the bond among members of society. But the
identification with the leader has two sides to it: on the one hand, subjects identify with the leaders symbolic position as a non
castrated ideal existing beyond the world of lack; but on the other hand, subjects identify with the leaders weaknesses, which exist
in spite of the powerful image.30 Both modes of identification work together in order to give subjects a sense of being a member of
society, but they work in radically different ways. The identification with the leaders power provides the subject with a sense of
symbolic identity and recognition, whereas the identification with the leaders weaknesses allows the subject to enjoy being a part of
the community. The identification with the leaders strength provides the pleasure that obscures the enjoyment deriving from the
identification with the leaders weaknesses. The weaknesses indicate that the leader is a subject of loss, that she/he enjoys rather
than being entirely devoted to ruling as a neutral embodiment of the people. The weaknesses are evidence of the leaders
enjoyment, points at which a private enjoyment stains the public image. By identifying with these points, subjects in a community
affirm the association of enjoyment with loss rather than with presence. But at the same time, the leaders weaknesses cannot
completely eclipse the evidence for the leaders strength. The strength allows subjects who identify with the leader in her/his
weakness to disavow this would-be traumatic identification and to associate themselves consciously with strength rather than
weakness. The trajectory of Bill Clintons popularity during his presidency illustrates precisely how identification with the leader
unfolds. When accusations of sexual impropriety with Monica Lewinsky first appeared, Clintons public approval rating reached its
highest levels. Most thought that Clinton was probably guilty of some private wrongdoing, but they also felt that his sexual
peccadilloes should remain private. Though they infuriated his Republican accusers, his sexual weaknesses had the effect of
enhancing his overall popularity. This trend continued until it became undeniably clear that Clinton really was guilty, when it became
impossible to disavow his weakness. At this point, identifying with Clinton became inescapably apparent as identifying with Clinton
in his weakness, which rendered it more difficult to sustain. The American populace could enjoy Clintons weakness and form a social
bond through this weakness only as long as it remained partially obscured. The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an

We use the pleasure that

accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared
enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss. But
this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that
someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to
experience. This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror,
authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond.

no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security, no end to the number of terrorist
leaders executed.31 Complete security, like complete pleasure, is mythical . It attempts to
bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed the foundational experience of loss and it is this experience that holds the
key to an authentic social bond.

The paranoid anxiety of the status quo results in the projection

of threats onto the other in an effort to suture the Lack this
type of politics mobilizes the population toward fascism
McGowan, 2013
Todd McGowan, Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont; Enjoying What
We Dont Have: A Psychoanalytic Politics, University of Nebraska, 2013, pg. 44-49
While nostalgia locates the ultimate enjoyment in the subjects own past, paranoia locates it in the other. Paranoia
thus offers the subject not just the image of the ultimate enjoyment (like nostalgia) but also an explanation for its
absence. Nostalgia and paranoia usually operate side by side in order to provide the subject a way of figuring its
missing enjoyment. On its own, nostalgia as a mode of subjectivity seems to have limited political consequences.
Groups may use nostalgia as a political weapon, but its political weight is diffused to some extent because it
involves the subject's relation to itself rather than to an other. The same cannot be said for paranoia, which is why
finding a way to counter paranoia represents an urgent political task. Paranoia is political in its very structure. It
views the other as a threat and produces hostility toward the other. The paranoid subject usually adopts one of two
possible attitudes toward the other. According to the first, paranoia serves to explain the loss of the privileged
object. If I take up a paranoid attitude toward the other, I see her/ his enjoyment coming at the expense of mine.
The other enjoys the lost object that is rightfully mine. The other, having stolen my enjoyment, bears responsibility

paranoia removes the burden of loss from

the subject and places it onto the other, and in addition it functions, like nostalgia, to
convince the subject that having the object is a possibility . According to the second
for my existence as a subject of loss. This type of

attitude, however, paranoia represents an attempt to convince ourselves that we have not lost the privileged

We are paranoid not that the other has stolen the privileged object
but that it plans to do so. The imagined threat that the other poses reassures us that we have the
object.

ultimate enjoyment and that this is what the other targets. By imagining a threat, we fantasize the privileged object
back into existence despite its status as constitutively lost. At first glance, it is difficult to see how paranoia might
function as an attractive attitude for subjects to take up. The paranoid subject must endure a constant menace that

Everyone that this subject meets is a potential

enemy in disguise threatening to steal or already having stolen the
subject's privileged object. In terms of the subject's own identity, paranoia does not provide security
has no tangible or definitive presence.

or stability. In fact, it uproots all sense of security that the subject has concerning its identity. But its appeal does
not lie in how it transforms subjectivity; its appeal stems from its ability to close the gap in the social field of
meaning, its ability to be a guarantor that authorizes our social interaction. Paranoia develops in response to the
inherent inconsistency of social authority. There are authorities but no Authority, and a decisive Authority would be
necessary to provide subjects a sense of foundation, a sense that there is solid ground underneath their feet. Social
proclamations and regulations place the subject in an impossible position: one simply cannot believe and obey
every edict emanating from social authorities without being torn apart in the effort. These contradictions occur on
all levels of social pronouncements. One hears, for instance, about the dangers of eating too much fat, and then
one hears about the cancer-preventing power of chocolate. Parents tell their children not to fight and at the same
time tell them to stand up for themselves. George W. Bush claimed that the Iraq War was waged to prevent the
spread of weapons of mass destruction and later claimed that its purpose was to liberate the country from a cruel
dictator. Such inconsistencies are not merely contingent developments within our particular society but necessarily
follow from the ultimate groundlessness of the social order itself. There is no final authority that calls all the shots in
society and guarantees the consistency of the social order. It is instead a structure in charge, and this structure
functions through its very misfiring. The inconsistency of social authority- the gap in the social field of meaning provides it with an openness to difference. If social authority was a closed circuit that operated without a hitch, it
would have no way of incorporating the subject into its fold. The subject invests itself in social authority precisely
because this authority gives the subject contradictory demands. Faced with these incongruous imperatives, the
subject cannot readily decipher what the social authority wants from it. Beneath the inconsistency, the desire of the
authority remains a mystery. The subject begins to desire in response to this unknown desire of the social Other:
the inconsistency of the social authority has the effect of attracting the subject and constituting the desire of the
subject as the desire of the Other. A thoroughly consistent social authority, while logically unthinkable, would not
draw the desire of the subject in this way. It might force individuals into obedience, but it would not create the
investment in the social order that the inconsistent social authority creates. Confronting the inconsistency of social
authority is not an easy task for the subject. Many try to sustain a belief in its consistency through an imaginary
construction that represses contradictory ideas. The problem with this solution is that these ideas become more
powerful through their repression, and the result is some form of neurosis. Another possibility is the paranoid
reaction. Rather than trying to wrestle with the problem of the gap in authority, the paranoid subject eliminates it
by positing an other existing in this gap, an other behind the scenes pulling the strings. As Slavoj Zizek explains it,

"Paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an 'Other of the Other; into an Other who, hidden behind the Other
of the explicit social texture, programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and thus
guarantees its consistency: beneath the chaos of market, the degradation of morals, and so on, there is the
purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot." The comfort that paranoia provides for the subject derives solely from this
guarantee. For the paranoid subject, the surface inconsistency of social authority hides an underlying consistency
authorized by a real authority whom most subjects never notice. Paranoia simultaneously allows the subject to
sense its own superiority in recognizing the conspiracy and to avoid confronting the horror of an inconsistent social
authority. As with nostalgia, paranoia is primarily aligned with a right-wing political agenda. Its suspicion of the

nationalistic politics and energizes the call for a return to traditional social
arrangements. Just as much of the investment in the Cold War struggle derived from paranoia, it fuels the
contemporary war on terror. The exemplary right-wing political formation, Fascism, has its
basis in paranoia, seeing the Jew or some equivalent as secretly controlling the social order to the
detriment of all law-abiding citizens. The idea of an other operating behind the scenes
serves to justify restrictions on civil liberties, racism, police violence, and
so on. A paranoid populace is a populace ready to embrace a Fascist
regime. Despite the inherent link between paranoia and conservatism, leftists employ paranoia to a vast extent,
other nourishes a

far more than they do nostalgia. Paranoid theories about the secret brokers of power who decide the fate of the
capitalist world are widespread on the Left. It is common sense among leftists that big oil companies have
suppressed the development of alternative energies, that the CIA assassinated Kennedy, and that major drug
companies control the Food and Drug Administration, just to name a few of the more well known conspiracy
theories. The truth or falsity of these theories has nothing to do with their function for the subject who accepts
them. The paranoid subject is often correct in its various speculations, but paranoia nonetheless provides a way for
the subject to avoid confronting the inconsistency of social authority. For the paranoid subject, conspiracy theories
don't simply explain a single event; they solve the problem of the social order as such. According to this thought
process, all loss stems from the conspiracy, which has derailed the social order and upset its balance. The paranoid
subject cannot accept the necessity of loss, and the conspiracy theory works to render loss empirical rather than
ontological. This is evident in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), a film in which Stone posits a vast conspiracy that resulted
in the death of Kennedy. Of course, Stone is probably correct that this conspiracy existed, but the film goes astray
primarily through its apotheosis of Kennedy, an apotheosis that reveals what's at stake in all paranoia. According to
the film, had he remained in power, Kennedy would have prevented the horror of the Vietnam War and thus spared
the United States the psychic wound that this war created. With Kennedy, one can imagine an American social order
existing without strife and loss. The conspiracy theory allows Stone this image, which testifies to the avoidability of
loss." But Stone is not the only leftist to turn to paranoia. Many do so in order to confront forces that they otherwise
couldn't identify. Among those who suffer from political oppression, paranoia and conspiracy theory serve as
vehicles for thinking through systems of control and even mobilizing action against those systems. As Peter Knight
points out, "Conspiracy thinking has played an important role in constituting various forms of African American
political and cultural activism."38 When it directly produces activism, the political valence of paranoia seems to tilt
more clearly to the left than it does in the case of Stone's film. In Marxist Fredric Jameson focuses on a related
aspect of paranoia as he analyzes the paranoid film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic. In this work, Jameson aligns
conspiracy theory with what he calls cognitive mapping- the attempt to think the global capitalist system in its
totality. The diffuseness of global capitalism prevents the kind of cognitive mapping that was possible in earlier
epochs. Today, in order to think the totality at all, subjects must resort to the idea of a conspiracy. As Jameson
points out in his analysis of All the Presidents Men, "The map of conspiracy itself .. . suggests the possibility of
cognitive mapping as a whole and stands as its substitute and yet its allegory all at once."40 Jameson's statement
reflects his ambivalence about conspiracy theory and paranoia - even though it allegorizes cognitive mapping, it
also substitutes for it - but he nonetheless sees its usefulness as a strategy for the Left, especially when facing the
global capitalist leviathan. The problem is that even when it works to mobilize subjects to fight against an
oppressive system, paranoia has the effect of depriving subjects of their agency. By eliminating
the gap in social authority and filling in this gap with a real authority who effectively runs the show, paranoia
deprives subjects of the space in which they exist as subjects. The subject occupies the position of the gap in social
authority; it emerges through and because of internal inconsistency in the social field of meaning. The extent to
which paranoia allows the subject to experience social authority as a consistent field is the extent to which it works
against the subject itself. Even if it manages tangible political victories, emancipatory politics that relies on paranoia
undermines itself by increasing the power of authority in the thinking of subjects and decreasing their freedom.

What's more, it doesn't actually work. Like nostalgia, paranoia can never
constitute a successful strategy for the subject dealing with its
fundamental condition. It will never provide the enjoyment that it
promises the subject. Uncovering and eliminating the hidden real authority will bring not the ultimate
enjoyment but horrible disappointment. This is why the paranoid mindset cannot admit to itself that the hidden

The enjoyment that paranoia does provide requires the

continuing existence of the threat, even though it imagines an enjoyment
that would come with the threat's disappearance. Paranoia runs aground due to its
other has been vanquished.

failure to admit the connection between enjoyment and loss. It allows the subject to imagine that loss is the
contingent result of a secret malevolent force that we might conquer. By implicitly positing the avoidability of loss,
paranoia leaves subjects unable to locate and recognize the nature of their own enjoyment.

This anxiety is the core problem of the psyche. Our inability to

come to terms with this void is a fate worse than death. Our
anxiety functions as the condition for the possibility of
Hiroshima and Auschwitz. In attempts to master this
emptiness we project our weakness through conflict. This
projection provides us the unrestrained power to bombard the
other with pure suffering and destruction in an attempt to
control the contingencies that constitute existence.
Davis, 2001
Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the
Tragic Imperative, Pg. 103-108

Catastrophic
anxiety is that fear that haunts us from within, the fear that one has
already been annihilated; that, like Beckett, one has "never been born properly"
and never will be because inner paralysis is the psyche's defining
conditiona truth attested each time when, lining to cohere as a subject, one collapses before the tidal wave of an
Regression against oneself that rises up from within. An unspeakable dread weds the psyche to terror. All other forms
of anxiety are pale after-thoughts. There is a threat worse than extinction.
The deepest self-knowledge we harbor, the knowledge that haunts us as
perhaps our deepest self-reference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force
opposed to our being. Death is the icy wind that blows through all we do. This is the anxiety from which other
We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experiencethe one most deeply denied.

anxieties derive as displacements, delays, and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror before a dread that is nameless and

In catastrophic anxiety the destruction of

one's power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to
surmount this condition is experienced as an event that has already
happened. That event forms the first self-reference: the negative judgment of an Other on one's beinginternalized as selfmust remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us.

undoing. Postmodern posturing before the phrase "I am an other" here receives the concretization that shatters "free play." There is
a wound at the heart of subjectivity, a self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world. The issue of the wound is a
soul caked in ice, in a despair that apparently cannot be mediated: the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake, alone and

We ceaselessly flee this

experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an even more
terrifying process begins: an implosion in which one's subjective being is
resolved into fragments of pure anxiety that leave one incapable of
existing as subject except in the howl to which each suffered state
descends in a final, chilling recognitionthat everything one has done and
suffered is but sound and fury, signifying nothing . One has become a corpse with insomnia.
arrested, all exits barred, facing inner paralysis as the truth of one's life.

Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void. This is the hour of the wolf, where one is arrested before the
primary fact: at the deepest register of the psyche one finds a voice of terror. Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of
our being as subjects. Subjectivity is founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror,
fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us, resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution. At
the heart of inwardness a malevolent spirit presides. To put it in nuclear metaphors: catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion
into the other's unlimited destructiveness. To complete the picture we need only add Winnicott's point: people live in dread of this
situation, projecting fear of a breakdown into the future, because the breakdown has already occurred. B. Exorcism through

And so a crypt is built to contain this anguish and repress the

experience that is its cause. We organize a "life" of identities and
stabilities to give ourselves the illusion of escape. Unable to reverse our
condition we take up the only alternative. We try to evacuate the whole
thing: to blow it out into the world and invest it in objects that are fitted
to receive the full brunt of one's discontent and powerless to reply . Projection,
Evacuation

the ego's priest, is founded in identification with an internal aggressor. That is the complex that informs the effort to lodge our

disorders and forbidden desires in others so that we can wage an attack on our inner conflicts then watch the ensuing spectacle
from a safe distance. Evacuation thus finds in projection a prime agent of human perception and the secure base for the perpetual,
mutual defeat that Sartre finds in all "concrete relations with others." We're always on the lookout for a chance to make someone
else bear our discontents. But it's never enough. Satisfaction eludes us. We keep erupting,
bleeding from within, in a leukemia of soul that rages whenever we see those who have in "their daily lives" "a beauty that makes us
ugly."For then the projections return with the force of the furies. Envy and resentment erupt as the assault within our inner world of
the truth of our "character"a truth we deny by reinvesting it externally. This grows apace over the years and then we long for a
listing deliverance, a final solution in the dim recognition that when projection proceeds from the register of catastrophe it requires
and longs for a grand exorcism. What we seek incessantly is a total evacuation of all inner discord, a complete and lasting
externalization in an ideal victim, one in whom all that haunts us will stay outside, lodged in the world in what Hegel calls a
"standing negation"9. Our need is for a subject who is destroyed and lives on, proof of a sublime aggression sculpted in time. The

The criteria required to exorcize catastrophic anxiety

finds in it the conditions for expelling the most primitive anxieties in the
perfect objective correlative. The subject voids itself of its core anxiety
the inability to reverse inner destructivenessby becoming the power to
destroy, unbound, raining judgment down on a mass of subjects who are
indifferently bound together as fragments of pure suffering unable, after
that action, to ever form any identity except as walking corpses, hibakusha,
Bomb provides such an opportunity.

deadened affect delivered over to the condition of death-in-life.10 Projection here succeeds because in that shattered mirror one
sees oneself reflected as the equal of the power within that originally proclaimed one's utter worthlessness. Malign "reversal" has

All inner anxiety about one's power to be resolves itself in the

power to act free of restraint. We have become the thing we feared. Its
destructiveness is now ours and nothing else has being. The Contradiction: The Sublime
grown to the event.

From the Crypt The mediation traced above is driven by a contradiction about which it circles endlessly. That is what the sublime
object of the ego-ratio reveals when read from its crypt. Sublime action seeks an absolute reversal of catastrophic anxiety in the
absolute affirmation of unshakable guarantees. Catastrophe must be reversed because it is that experience of contingency that
underlies the horror of contingency in all its forms, the lone driving the search for the guarantees needed to contain it. In
catastrophe contingency is the other's will as unbounded, unlimited destructiveness.

The threat of extinction is

the "restraint" here placed on subject. This restraint is prior to the dialectic of "desire restrained and
checked" on which Hegel grounds his phenomenology. Desire here isn't restrained and checkedit
is turned back against itself in torment. The other requires my destruction
for their pleasure and assures that end by colonizing the psyche with an
aggression that renders impotent every effort to make a beginning, a
tentative move toward independence or self-cohesion. There is no exit but one apparently:
identification with the aggressor. I become a self by turning someone or something else into an object delivered over to the true
golden rule: do onto others what was once done onto you. This logic maintains because catastrophic anxiety internalized is death-

The only way out, the only way to

finalize this process, is evacuation through a lasting exorcism. It alone confers on
work as the self-mediation whereby we enact the command of the Other.

the psyche a certitude beyond all cogitos. It is also the mediation that finds it, in flight forward, already, in its primitive imaginary,
one with the Bomb. In its inner world, the catastrophic subject experiences itself as full of death, disease, corruption. The Bomb
alone has the power to cast all "nuclear waste" outside and beneath oneself in a way that indefinitely extends the temporality of
that act. Radiation disease is a death that works inwardinvisibly, yet inexorably. Death thereby breeds itself forth into an indefinite
future, omnipresent in a working, a differance that begets delayed effects as further insurance against Nachtraglichkeit. The
extension of death's dominion attained in the Bomb serves one grand function: to prevent the return of projections by extending the
temporality of the deed into a future that is lived, by its victims, as a judgment that is inevitable, irreversible, the antithesis of
Benjamin's messianic time, tickinga plea to delay death that can only be answered by death. The Bomb thus serves as felix culpa

To do its job a sublime event must exorcize everything within

the subject that makes it an object of its own contempt . What better way than Orwell's
to an inner necessity.

boot brought down in an act of splitting that magnifies the distance between the terror on the ground and the view from above.

Catastrophe is now fully outside oneself located in an other who has

become nothing but matter, body become spectacle of pain frozen forever in charred sculptures strewn across
a devastated landscape, Laocoon Munched; but with the Howl silenced and deferred until it erupts later from within the survivors in
a semiosis that can only be read by the scientists who planted it there and have now come (as biopower/knowledge) to study their
handiwork as it blooms and bursts from deep within the body of the hibakusha as further testimony of one's power/jouissance.
Evacuation is complete. Death-work has been lodged securely in the Other. In the hibakusha one gets to see one's Thanatos as a
narrative principle, a force in history. One gets to see, over time, what it is like to live death. Soul-murder as the innermost reality of
the crypt, produces and finds in the hibakusha its dialectical image. As the expressive figura of death incarnate, a terrifying
verveilledoch here attains its objective correlative. To purge oneself of catastrophic anxiety, an utterly dehumanized object is not
enough. Neither the Sartrean look nor the Nazi act suffice. The disorder of the psyche is deeper, prior to desire (Sartre) and demand
(Nazism). The projection of death-work can never rest by simply investing one's self-contempt in another. For evacuation to work,

Catastrophic anxiety is
the a proiri that gives Auschwitz and Hiroshima their necessity in the
genocidal imagination. The Bomb constitutes an Event because the psyche reverses its core conditionits cardiac
arrest in inner self-loathingthrough a projection that is total and irreversible. If the evacuation of trauma is
the abiding motive atop the crypt, there is nothing abstract or Lacanian
about the Real that results from its projection. Evacuation is that
malevolent reversal that condemns one to endless repetition . One blows one's selfthe object must become something one can study, inspect, perform operations upon.

hatred and one's rage over that state fully out into the world but is thereby rendered powerless to do anything but gape in rapt
amazement at one's creation. That is perhaps why, for over fifty years now, whenever given the opportunity, Paul Tibbets has
proudly repeated the declaration that he has not had a moment's remorse or regret. Death-work externalized leaves one a spent
and reified subject, lacking any power other than the endless repetition of one's deed. The wheel thus comes full circle in the only
justice granted such subjects. When catastrophic anxiety is only mediated by death-work, the affects that compose subjectivity are
rent assunder and scattered in pockets of pure persecution. With each attempt to compose an inner self-cohesion, death-work, as
internal saboteur, rises up in a renewed attack on the effort to be. Using the Bomb to reverse this disorder produces as its result a
perfect, attic justice. Guilt and remorse are denied the doers of the deed because to feel such things is to renew a process of self-

With the call of

conscience rendered impossible, the subject becomes overtly psychotic
and must cling ever more desperately to an untroubled memory of the
sublime event. The subject thereby pronounces, without being able to comprehend or mediate it, the truth about itself: in
unraveling. What the Bomb was meant to deliver one from has become the guardian of untroubled sleep.

the ravaged landscape of Hiroshima the founding inner world of the psychotic-a world of utter fragmentation and the obliteration of
every term of reference-has finally found a home to which it must say "stay thou art so fair," a home in which nothing inhuman is
unheimlich.

The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability

confront evil. To displace this anxiety, we make ourselves
good to protect ourselves from danger. Failure to confront
this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes
the destruction of the self meaningless.
Davis, 2001
Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the
Tragic Imperative, Pg 86-87
No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama. This time, however, Kant
cant shift everything onto a plane of conceptual defenses and controls. Affect weighs too heavily. Intermediate
moves immanent within that register are required. Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line
of defense. For the first time in Kant, rationalistic mediation gives way to dramatic self-mediation. Kant will finally
attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect. To resist psychic unraveling he must establish a

affective self-mediation is
equivalent to bending everything in a moral direction. In doing so the author of the
ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals. That dubious ascent begins once the
force threatening destruction is characterized as evil. Anxiety is thereby
transformed into a moralizing fear: that we lack the power to resist evil.
Moralizing then structures the subsequent discourse, but without
exorcizing the psychological subtext that will undercut it. This
contradiction is, in fact, what ethics will here reveal about itself.
In making ourselves good subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy
of destruction. That transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric, since we must persuade a
tough audience. The true goal in remaking ourselves is to tame the power that
threatens us by tapping its conscience. To do so we create, within
ourselves, a new agency, one that, recognizing our virtue, promises protection. We
thereby create the illusion that the threatening force has been softened
and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports the good
intentions of the nascent ego. The superego as ego-ideal has been created. So ends the founding
countervailing force within the order of affect itself. For Kant, however,

self-mediation in the genealogy of an ethical ration. By staging this internal drama, the psyche has taken the action
within required to create the space needed to assert control over affect. The necessary act follows the attempt to
affect a complete reversal of the psyches initial condition. Kant asserts repeatedly that we can only judge the
sublime, and experience its proper pleasure, if we view things from a safe place. But in the psyche, as opposed
to mind, the safe place doesnt exist a priori. It has to be invented, and with it the most revealing picture of the
genesis of what we now call the ego. It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function. The problem of the
ego is one of generating a transformation from impotence to power within affect itself, through an agon immanent
to that register. But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon. We get instead a displacement toward concepts through
a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting. Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable rift, thus
establishing this condition as the true identity of the ego. The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the
psyche from which it derives. But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle, the egos work is far
from done. The continuing pressure of inner conflicts requires a further battle. In that struggle moralizing
interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psyches original trauma into a longed-for reificationthe
opposition of the ego to the drives.

We have become creatures full of instincts. The crucial task of

the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to
provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American
identity.
Sucharov, 2005
Mira M. Sucharov, assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the
Search for Israeli Palestinian Peace, Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious,

I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious)
narrative, but an unconscious counternarrative as well, which the former has in part
arisen to conceal. As the counternarrative represents the role that society most
fears adopting, it resides in the unconscious, where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment
of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles. For instance, a "defensive" state's
counternarrative would encapsulate the view that 'we are not only
defensive, but sometimes we can be aggressive.'35 Narratives and
counternarratives can coexist in two ways either with the
counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear, or with the
counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside
the dominant role-identity. Thus, while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors
(e.g., the "good student" who avoids cheating on exams), the unconscious reminds us that the "cheater" is latent in the "selfportfolio" of the good student. In the event that this student cheats, radical change can only come about once the self has been

Actors will not become aware of the divergence

from their dominant identity without the aid of a "mirror," however. Only
with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the
two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating
a realignment between actions and role-identity. One of the most salient
transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective
memory. Memoryactive or latent recall of things occurring in the past
has begun to be understood as not solely a private activity, but as
representing a group phenomenon as well.36 On the collective level, memory can be either
reconciled with its unconscious opposite.

experience-near-active, one-step removed, or distantly removed. Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in
Israel and the Diaspora, for instance; One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with
them,37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the
Exodus from Egypt as if "they were there." While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor

Just as traumatic
events in a person's life may be repressed in memory but still shape that
person's identity, the international observer needs to account for actual
experiences, yet view these as embedded within a narrative context. Similarly,
of the way those experiences arc remembered, both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity.

some historical events undergo a process of memory revision; in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the
new discourse has on the society's perception of these events, whether or not these stories accord with fact. The clinical parallel in
psychoanalysis is that while the analysand's relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her
psychology, the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand: rather, the patient's recounting of these
experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigation and hence transformation. Since we are talking about
collections of individuals, memory needs to be actively transmitted to the society's members in order for it to influence the
citizens' sense of collective identity. One of the ways this can be done is through ritual. Being repetitive while symbolically imbued,
ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group, and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a
series of past events for which they may not have been physically present. Moreover, private rituals that are collectively prescribed,
such as prayer, serve to bind the individual to the collective, particularly when there is a formalized liturgy. Most collective rituals
occur according to the calendar, and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individual's
personal time cycle.38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured, with citizens
contemplating new facts about their country's past. Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of
new facts. When history is reinterpreted, the society can either shun the dissenting voices, or else gradually reevaluate the original
narratives. When this reevaluation occurs, society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives, a discovery

that can lead to the realization that the state's behavior might be contradicting the state's role-identity. In other words, revisionist
historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the "mirror" referred to later.

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees only holding yourself completely open in the face of the
promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for selfovercoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxis
Davis, 2006
Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deaths Dream Kingdom, Pg. 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest
and most fundamental of the guarantees. The principle of Hope. To appropriate Eliot:
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation I've
described. But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering? Is
despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees? Or are we finally like the drunks in O'Neill's The Iceman
Cometh, knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and
reject everything he revealed to them about their lives as a product of that madness ?

Perhaps it's time

to admit what the need for Hope really signifies. Denial of responsibility
for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly
would lead to despair. Raising that specter is, of course, the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely
terminate inquiry lest it impinge on emotional and psychological needs. Despair thus remains an empty concept.

We don't know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for
hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure. Whether despair is
what we will find on the other side of hope is something we can't know.
For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears.
Perhaps we are called to something beyond it. What Shakespeare called tragic readiness. For in opening
ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the
possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that
lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created
by the guarantees. We can't know "what is to be done?" as long as we continue to respond to our
situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory
of human nature.

Plan
The United States federal government should substantially
curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic
surveillance.

Contention 2 is Framing
An ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which
we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can
open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome
these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to
our lives
Davis, 2006
Walter A.Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.238-240)

there is a loss
deeper than one's life. The loss of one's reason for living. The apostle of duty offers
In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that

a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss. What I'm suggesting here is that ethics actually begins
on the other side of it. With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated
or fatally compromised one's reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of

The traumatic event that brings one to this

recognition is the origin of ethics. This is the ethical task it establishes: to
see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the
full burden of the situation one has thereby created.
The ethical situation, accordingly, confronts the subject with the necessity
to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside. Nothing less is demanded than a
one's life are thoroughly at odds.

totally new way of relating to oneself, for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing. One is
guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself, for having so thoroughly lied to
oneself about one's life. As Hamlet learns, it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic
responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper
discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible. That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in.
What one does will reveal the truth of who one is. Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of
displacement and denial. Fail now and one dies within. Most people will, of course, do just about anything to avoid
guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible. That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them,
shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility, the one defining our humanity.

An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which

everything we've tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us. One
then knows that one's prior life has been a flight. And all one's brave ideas
and bright ethical claims airy nothingthe indulgence in comforting and
self-alienating lies. But now one is finally, like Hamlet, in the situation from which there is no exit. An
ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one
performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no
longer be denied. This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider, which is why he
constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible. In serving Duty one is delivered from the
repressed thought that now can never arise: that one's whole life and all its choices, especially the ethical ones,
may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to

An existentializing
ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event.
For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the
truth of one's life, the depth of one's inauthenticity. The trauma that will
measure one's humanity has arrived. Nothing else now exists but the
lonely struggle of the psyche with itself. Suicide (including the primary form of suicide, inner
face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death. Destruction within.

death) is one term of that situation. Ethics is the other. An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally
finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself. There is one lesson in this, a lesson that
probably can't be learned. Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it, since it is only through

To
activate that possibility all that's needed perhaps is to drown out the noise
and chatter one keeps running in one's head. Perhaps the truth is that the truth about
it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth.

ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown. It's closer than we think, available to introspection if we but dared.

It exemplifies
everything we know and don't want to know about ourselves.18 Here is an
But that's what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying.

attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility
of ethics derives. In George Orwell's 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the
thing he loves. To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning. He capitulates before an inner torment that
reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety. (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they
will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche. What
is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear?) What I want to suggest here is that

Such a
subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves,
the thing that could give one's life meaning. But one saves it only if one is
willing to sacrifice everything to the acceptance of the suffering and inner
torment that service to it entails. This is the ethical act whereby a subject
attains tragic agency. Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the
Winston Smith's phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself.

disorders of one's psyche in the effort of active reversal. The wish to escape that effort, to soften it, or to insist that
suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal. If one gives in to it one loses, with
Winston, the thing one has finally found, the thing one can love more than one's life but only by suffering all that it
demands. That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can
have.

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts
our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we
create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open
ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is
to fully confront contingency
Davis, 2006
Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental

principles. I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the reader's psyche and emotions at
precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves. That's the only "self" that
matters. The others are selfreifying defenses. The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the reader's
freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom, to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging
defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul. (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is

The possibility of freedom depends, however, on an in-depth

analysis of one's psyche. Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring
not free it's not moral.

about a complete reversal in one's relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other. Thinking is ethical
insofar as it engages one thing: the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being. (2) There is no

way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe
outcome. To sustain the psychoanalytic turn, the psyche must continually throw
itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies. An

ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability: the ability to be in
"uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Rather than

resolving doubts, the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them. An act is
ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself. (3) One acts
ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed. Only
then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue
and at risk. The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where
one must create values, yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of one's engagement in the
situation. By the same token, such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later
contingencies. Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely
what calls up ethical responsibility. The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty, but
where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to
rubble. (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values, even perhaps the
need for a re-valuation of all values. For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis. The
values were known, immutable, and generally agreed upon. The only question was what kind of principle they
would be grounded in; which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung, how could they be grounded in Reason. For us, in
contrast, the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical. Every ethical value must
be willing to historicize itself. That recognition entails the following considerations. The desert grows. Under the
guise of fundamentalist crusades, herd moralities dominate. The extent of inhumanity is appalling. So
many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked. The possibility of ethics now begins
with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies, all the ethical ideologies that societies

use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those

same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance.
An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs, radically disruptive of the desires of the normal
subject. Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports, it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the
source of value. (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity. It begins in the most extreme actthe act of

radical individuation in which one opens one's psyche to an interrogation that

must be sustained in its extremity. Ethics is about a choice in which a subject
risks the value and meaning of its existence, not about those choices that assure
it of that meaning. Moreover, it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the terror
implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement "existence precedes essence." (6) Ethics must engage and
derive from the dread that defines choice. Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting
Hamlet's choice with the situation in Styron's Sophie's Choice. The horrifying choice Sophie facesto choose which
of her children will be sent to the gas chamberis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that
deprives it of the possibility of being normative.17 Hamlet's choice, in contrast, is a free one that issues from
nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails. Sophie is

tortured from without by the madness of the other; and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know
itself. (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a "genius" of the Reich.) Hamlet is tortured from
within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process. We are fortunate if
we never face a situation like Sophie's; nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices. But insofar as
we have a psyche Hamlet's situation is the general one that defines us. Or to put it in properly ethical terms,
engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us. The choice
that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty
and Sophie's forced choice. All three refer to extreme choices and situations. In only one, however, is guilt toward
oneself both the origin of the choice and its result. That is, only one of the three choices is the ground of its own
possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of
our situatedness.

2AC

A2 Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts. The

psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal
investigation of the ways in which the subjects subconscious
desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest. This
means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens
of psychoanalysis.
Sucharov, 2005
(Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, The International Self: Psychoanalysis and
the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the
1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionhow individuals thinkto a wider
appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action, one of many factors that were
long dismissed as unscientific. Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the
long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative
lenses, such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated
into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted. A central
example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism, which
fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before. Neorealism, a
theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical
state system with no overarching authority, in turn spawned the constructivist turn in
international relationsthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in
determining international outcomesand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet
other social and psychological precepts all of which agree that there is such a thing as an
international systemthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently. Introducing
psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a
relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way
they do. While all psychoanalysts draw on Freud's unique contribution, subsequent
approaches have altered many of his assumptions. This trend has kept pace with the
embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social
scientific fields, such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since
influenced other disciplines. The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the
contemporary relational strand, one that analysts have alternately termed "relational-model
theorizing," a "dyadic systems perspective," and "intersubjectivity theory." This approach
shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations: the psychology
(identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit, but develops in part from the
actions of other actors in the social environment (the family; the therapeutic setting; the
international system), and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that
system. As an approach centered on the individual mind, contemporary psychoanalysis
takes into account the broader social context within which actors act. Psychoanalysis also
provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been
invisible in international relations theory, but that provide a fuller understanding of how
states and nonstate actors interact: emotion, the unconscious, and the possibility for actors'
own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change. In drawing on these
principles, perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to
international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity, which in turn
illuminate questions about international action. Within international relations, constructivism
has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is, in fact, created. Cognitive
psychologywhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallyin part helps to fill
this gap. Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal

relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior, psychoanalysis

offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive
theorists. Recognizing these explanatory benefits, contructivists have recently called for
exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics.
Thus, unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsnamely,
psychohistories of individual leaders, and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict
resolution, the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside
other streams of systemic theory in international relations.

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of

national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates
the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the
initial policies of surveillance, which changes future policy.
Sucharov, 2005
(Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, The International Self: Psychoanalysis and
the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, pg 32-)

Like most individuals, states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that

are not all palatable to the polity's sense of selfnot least of which is due to
the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society. Yet the dominant self
that overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single
(sub)voiceimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors.
Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the state's roleidentity, we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise, leading
to a radical realignment between actions and identity. Just as a man who
once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I don't know what got into
me!," it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression
that has, evidently, been very much inside of him all along. The policy shift
therefore results from the force of the "role-identity" prodding the "self"
back into behavioral consistency. However, acting in contradiction to one's
role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift. The dissonance
between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and
experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result. If the
dissonance remained at a cognitive level, it is likely that the subject would employ
one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy.42 The
dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the
dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical
action to realign actions with identity.43 This hypothesis of "cognitiveemotional realization" is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory
that suggest that, under certain conditions, actors may become consciously aware
of previously unconscious processes.44 The classic understanding of cognitive
dissonanceas articulated by Leon Festingeris that inconsistency between
behavior and belief results in "psychological discomfort" that leads to "activity
oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented
toward hunger reduction."45 In line with psychoanalysis, the actual cognitiveemotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in
the unconscious areas of the state's subjective world. In actuality, the
assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic
challenges) causes elites to "reflect" on the state's role-identity. Moreover,
my use of "cognitive-emotional realization" imbues the concept with a distinctively
emotional component as well. Whereas pure "cognitive dissonance" refers to the
challenging of an individual's worldview (i.e., the revelation of new "facts"),46 I am
introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self.47
When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the state's
raison d'etat, the dissonance is particularly acute. Catalysts for Realization.
Once decision-makers come to realize that the state's foreign-policy
actions have contradicted the state's role-identity, a policy shift may

result. The important question that remains is: what contributes to this
realization? Numerous sources may act as the "mirror" necessary for the
state to reflect on its behavior. For clarity, I have divided them into three
categories: domestic elements (including the military, the peace movement,
revisionist historians, artists and the domestic media), other states (including allies
and adversaries, as well as those state's news media), and international structures
(including international organizations, norms, and regimes). Domestic Elements:
The Military. If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as
contradicting the state's self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out
governmental policies), society can experience a corresponding cognitive
dissonance. In a democracy, the military takes its directives from the
government; however, military culture is instrumental in shaping the
broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisionsand roleidentitymore generally. Most of the time, the relationship between the civilian
and military spheres resembles a symbiosis: commands are given by civilians and
implemented by the military, which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent
policies. In some cases, ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on
being discharged. However, it is possible for the military to experience a
sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense
doctrine, or ethic. Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular
mission, or the number of conscientious objectors may rise. In a country in which
conscientious objection is previously unheard of, the founding of such a movement
will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and
institutional role-identity. In examining foreign-policy shifts, the role of the military is
crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity
and foreign policy. In states where the military has particular salience for
establishing national identitythose states with mandatory and universal
conscription, for instancethat institution will be particularly salient.

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal

link chains and counter psychological methods creates the
worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become
incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology this
makes ethics impossible.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.47-48)

But it's always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives
behind actions to stick with the empirical. With stated intentions and official
rationales. Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble. Despite official
denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful, a series of explanations
are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons. DU is
cost-effective, militarily efficient, and turns to productive use a waste product we'd
otherwise have to dispose of at great cost. In a variety of ways for the past two
days: "We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her
in joy." My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief,
but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to
deprive death of its finality. And the terror that prospect entails. The function of
guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would
otherwise be too traumatic. There is much that we can face apparently only by
denying. Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human
being, to remain a child of one's needs and desires disguising that fact in the form
of beliefs and ideas. The primary purpose of religion, philosophy, and culture has
been to provide conceptual, psychological, and emotional guarantees so I hat
traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of
our hopes and dreams. Without such supports, most people supposedly would find
life unlivable. Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and
feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning, plunging us into
despair. Experience, accordingly, becomes the movement from and to the
affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events. The main line of
Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a
ground for the guarantees. That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who
defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent. As father of
the philosophy of history, he offered that new discipline a single goal: to
demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational; that history is the story of
progress, liberty, the realization of a universal humanity Or, to put it in vulgar terms,
democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle
East. In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencedoubt about oneself,
one's place in the world, and one's final endmany guarantees are needed.
Moreover, they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee
is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach. Thereby the function of
the system as a whole is assured. Within the system of guarantees one guarantee,
however, is superordinate. The belief that human nature is basically good. As animal
rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost. Evil is an
aberration. Consequently, I here's always reason for hope and the belief that no

matter how bad things get we'll always find a way to recover everything that I lie
guarantees assure. Psyche. It's all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little
capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure. There's only one thing wrong
with this explanation. It leaves out the basis for the calculus. There's every reason
to use DU and no reason not to use it if, and only if, one rationale informs all
decisions. How to maximize death, regardless of consequences or alternatives.
Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes
questionable. Conscious, stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of
something else that has been conveniently rendered unconscious. What looks like a
purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite:
the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed
to it "goes without saying." Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a "form
of life,"7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically, habitually,
and of necessity. It has become a collective unconscious. And as such it is no longer
accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it. The reason for sticking
with the empirical is now clear. There is something insane in the empirical. That is
what the historian must uncover. Before we ask ourselves how this situation came
to pass we need to ask another question. For it's easy to claim we don't know about
such things because the media refuses to tell us about them. There's another
reason for our ignorance, however, and it's the one we need to confront. I refer to
the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise we'd lose the
system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of
history. As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesn't watch the
news: "Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day
it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's
not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"8 It
would be easy to deride Mrs. Bush, to congratulate oneself on not sharing her
attitude. What I hope to show, however, is that on an essential level, one
determinative in the last instance, we are in full agreement with her and delude
ourselves as long as we think otherwise.

IR SPECIFIC The method of the affirmative best supplements

our understanding of international relations by including
elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of
international relations.
Sucharov, 2005
(Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, The International Self: Psychoanalysis and
the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches,
the nature of a decision-maker's preferences cannot be assumed a priori, and
indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to
personality to the selective use of historical analogies. Emotion, in short, can be
considered the sine qua non of social life, a realization that has recently begun to
permeate international relations theory. Moreover, the concept of the unconscious
that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual
experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity;
the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become
unbearable; and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two. The
unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet
potentially the most satisfying determinant of action, coming, as it does, early in the
causal chain. At its most basic, the unconscious is simply the repository for those
characteristics that an actor fears adopting; in other words, "action fantasies" that
the actor despises but can plausibly entertain. This fundamental tension between
the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check, and
is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool. And
while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept, scholars from various
fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration, and convincing deductive and
empirical research certainly justify its consideration. One theoretical perspective
that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociology's symbolic
interactionism, an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations.
Part of the reason for the tension between sociology, including symbolic
interactionism, and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of
psychology: the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach,
one must ignore the impact that one's social environment has on one's personality,
self-image, and behavior. However, contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of
the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested. A
psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise
emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings
that define the social environment. Admitting an explanatory role for the
unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity, mutualconstitution, or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and
constructivism. Rather, it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as
one filter through which actors interpret social interaction. The unconscious,
therefore, may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings
to interpreting his social script, or as itself the product of social forces that interpret
and constrain action. The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be
conscious to be meaningful; agency at its most basic can simply imply action, and

intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component. The second

view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired
component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior; rather it can be viewed as an
emergent and mediating phenomenon. We can therefore understand cognition as
being inherently situated within social processes. This is consistent with a relational
view of social life, and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing
wisdom in international relations about how social understandings ultimately shape
behavior. A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of
international relationsand conflict resolution in particularis its assumption that
entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional
insight. In addition to challenging the static conception of "human nature" that
underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations)
and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs, this assumption is a
valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing
theories of actionmaterial power in the case of states, polarity in the case of state
systemsare difficult, if not impossible to manipulate. As a result, many of the most
prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy
implications. Conversely, psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating
some of the most pressing global problems, including protracted conflict and war.
While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focusgroup format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting, this book
demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into one's role deviationa
prerequisite for policy changecan come about through real-life international
interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of
elites to participate in such an exercise. Rather, under certain conditions, role
conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a "mirror" to the
face of elites, resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy
change. This mirror can take a number of formsacts of protest by domestic
groups, media coverage, and actions by allies, adversaries or international
structures. These sources will be discussed further.

IR SPECIFIC What their internal links consider to be selfinterest for a state doesnt actually exist. States are not
sentient. Instead, they are composed by a collection of minds
that act in self-interest, which means that psychoanalytic
evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the
interests of the state.
Sucharov, 2005
(Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, The International Self: Psychoanalysis and
the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple

states- as some constructivist theorists of "collective identity" would maintainthe
title of this book, "the international self," is meant to suggest not only that each
state possesses a distinctive identity, but that this identity develops out of the
state's relationship with other international actors. This concept also implies that
decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum
of the state's "parts." Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can
accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior, we still
need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state, a practice
that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that
cut across the social sciences: methodological individualism and holism.
While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken
by individuals, holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself.
Yet, to an extent, the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed. While
the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitwe tend to
anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (e.g.,
"Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda")methodological
individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice, and more
prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human
characteristics to things, including groups. Groups do not have "minds" any
more than do other social facts, and group behavior is, after all, the
product of individuals acting on the group's behalf. Finally, given the
presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society,
it can be misleading to attribute a single group "consciousness" to a
political entity. In a foreign-policy context, accordingly, adherents of this
view would focus on elite attitudes, bureaucratic politics, and/or interest
group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions
and outcomes. Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties
of states and their policy processes: something happens between the point
at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are
translated into policies. Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the
opinion of the majority, there remains some degree of independent agency
that may very well accrue to the state as a whole. Under this reasoning, it
would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self, as
Alexander Wendt does when he claims that "states are people too." In addition to

the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not

necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be
psychoanalyzed), the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the
social sciencesinternational relations included. This includes neorealism's
assumption that the state is a unitary actor, the Collective self hood implied by
social identity theory, the concept of "political culture," early psychoanalytic
assumptions about the group, as well as studies on obedience, group-think, and the
"crowd" phenomenon. There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a
unit of analysiswitness anthropologists' concern with tribes and civilizations,
sociologists' focus on street gangs and societies, and political scientists' emphasis
on states and transnational actors. Group behavior and individual behavior are not
necessarily identical. Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in
the context of a group as he or she would alone. Moreover, constructivism goes so
far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states, a claim that has
enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist
research. It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective
identity within a state, the boundaries of which contain degrees of
centralized media, language, and other discursive channels for cultural
dissemination, and which prescribe the roles that the group's members are
expected to perform within the context of that group. And if different
subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives, we can assume that
the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of
ethnicity, class, or gender) has custody over a single, consequential 'dominant'
narrative. Finally, even if we choose to ascribe a state's national ethos to its
elites, we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the
society in which they were reared. This view would effectively mitigate the
tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international
relations, since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching
structure of the collective.

A2 Disadvantages
The internal links dependence on rationality only serves to
protect us from the unknown that the future holds. This
ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that
can be calculated, which ensures violence. The only way to
reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and
the unknown.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.51-52)

Emotional: The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves.
Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised. Health, normalcy, and
productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings. Hope and optimism aren't just
healthy attitudes; they are requirements of our nature. Biologically wired. We
cannot remain for long in trauma. Recovery , moreover, must restore our faith in
the guarantees and our hopes for the future . The need for hope is, In fact, the
capstone of the entire system of guarantees. Yet it too apparently has a history.
Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression
and anxiety. Informed of this fact by Bill Maher, the French actress Julie Delphy
spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture: "Don't they know that
depression is a good thing; that it's something you have to go through in order to
grow?" Not anymore.
The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears
that they exorcise. Thanks to religion, death, suffering, and evil are deprived of
their power. Through the attainment of reason, all other forms of consciousness
and what they might reveal are put in their place. Poetic knowing is deprived both

of its legitimacy and its terror. Science, as fulfillment of reason, assures us of

domination over nature. What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality
becomes the measure of what is real. Belief in historical progress banishes the
recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or, even worse, move to the
darkest of ends. The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to
experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever
actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees . It is in

the personal order, however, that the guarantees do their deepest work.
Psychologically, belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening
contingency: that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic
anxiety and its corollary, compulsive consumption, the expression of a desperate
non-identity. That specter brings us before the greatest fear: that our psyche, not

our conscious, deliberative intentions, is the author of our actions, an author who
will do anything in order to feel safe, secure, and righteous. All of our emotional
needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity: the need to feel good
about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that
would trouble us. Resolution, catharsis (i.e., the discharge of painful tensions or
awareness), and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity
to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know. It is easy to

deprecate Dubya and, apparently, to hold onto the idea that he's a temporary
aberration. But the problem goes deeper. To revive a battle cry from the 1960s,
insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem

and not the solution. For the grandest function of the system of guarantees, as a
whole and in each one of its parts, is to blind us to history.

And so to take up again the question stated previously, how did the situation now
being created in Iraq come about? The next three sections constitute an attempt to
answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history.

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and

psychology. This only creates a hard understanding of our
inner psyche, which is a loss of the self that outweighs every
other impact.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question. What is the nature and extent of the
ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition? To what extent can
evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a
freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility? Traditionally ethical
responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and
with full knowledge of the consequences: actions where choice is a
function of our ability to reason; where the moral law is known; and where
one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a
self-interest that overrides all other motives and considerations. Mitigate any of
these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility. Ethical responsibility is
compromised or eliminated, for example, if one's action is determined by forces
outside one's control: if one acts without premeditation, under duress, in blind
obedience to customs or authorities, as the result of a pathology, because of some
limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of one's action,
or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong. However
deplorable their deeds the mad, for example, are not evil. Evil requires
consciousness, choice, freedom. If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with
the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order
of freedom. The trouble with the traditional understanding of these
conditions, however, is the effort to confine them within the limits of
rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind. Rationality is noble
but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche
undetected. Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of
mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality. To sustain and deny
that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are
and do. But the dream of reason is precisely that. A dream: a desireto
bring one's being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate
everything else, especially in determining the questions of ethics. No one
brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel
Kant. That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought. But experiencing oneself in
terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost. Life becomes a process in
which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because we've
cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions. Our psyche
becomes a stranger to us. We fixate on giving rational accounts of
ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else.
Emotions become irrationalities, breaks with reason, things we must
overcome; or, worse, things we can only acknowledge when they are good,
proper, and in tune with reason. The rest of our being becomes brute
inclinations, frailties of our nature, desires that disrupt an otherwise
rational identity. As a result, in terms of ethics, whether we know it or not, under the
guise of reason we've made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse. Claiming not to
consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse. Traditional definitions of

the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive. Restricting intention,
motive, and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human
mendacity. For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of
the consequences, evil, as I've described it, is not chosen. If along the same lines we restrict
motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of
our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing
and why, evil, as thus far described, does not exist within the order of human motivation.
One can identify self-interest, careerism, and happiness as motives, but to say that many
agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom. Unless, that is, we expand the
category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent
conflictedness. But once posit such a possibility, choice becomes a concept that must be
rethought in a radically new way.

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive

to maintain. This logic becomes used to justify atrocity. The
affirmatives rejection of attempting to control the future
allows alternate practices to emerge. Vote affirmative to
traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains. Even if you
dont think we can solve, the 1AC is a more productive through
experiment than their disad.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.63-65)

"Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes
into buildings?" One hears this rhetorical question often today. Getting it firmly
implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the
media. A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that
underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up.
The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images.
Killing for it, like everything else, occurs at a distance. In the inaugural moment:
Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as
a human act. "It was all impersonal."12 And today: in the silent, secret, midnight
ways that radiation poisoning works from within, like a deed without a doer,
separated in space and time from its absent cause. Perhaps killing at a distance is
the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection
between slayer and slain. If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is
immediate to my embodied consciousness. To kill that way you have to feel hate,
fear, anguish, remorse, etc. whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible
contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal. With the desired result: the
ability, for example, of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, incinerating
600,000 people in a second and condemning another 300,000 to the condition of
hibakusha, the walking dead, to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a
moment of regret or remorse. Tibbets' lack of moral imagination is one with his
representative status as precursor. For now it's easy to litter a landscape with DU
while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects.13
The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal. Protected from the
image, all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal
calculus. (An aside: if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for
them a new Bill of Rights. No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without
being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental
consequences of those weapons. To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the
choice that makes them human.) The powers that be learned one lesson from
Vietnam. No more images. The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every
night on TV. The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where
genuine change begins. Where horror is felt, free of the tyranny of the concept and
the hypnotic power of the guarantees. Desert Storm was the corrective: the
Nintendo war, a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games we'd been
programmed to love. Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith.
No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II. (Michael Moore's real crime

was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe.) Abolition of
the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide. Everything must be rendered
abstract, invisible, unreal. No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep, to lacerate
our soul. For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse
than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings. To move us
toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden, which I must here attempt to
convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since I've not yet gained
permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago. It's the picture of an Iraqi
baby, a victim of DU, who was born with no nose, mouth, eyes, anus or genitals and
with flipper limbs, a common result of radiation exposure in utero. That child's body,
full of red open ulcers, is twisted in knots, its ulcerated face contorted in a look of
unspeakable suffering. An authentic image of the sacredness of human life. Of the
preciousness of every breath. To look at that child is to realize one's duty to mourn
it, to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those
who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what they've reduced
life to. Luke, 17:1-2. The image of that child must become the force in our minds
that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that
child's situation. Or to put it another way: every time one demands catharsis,
resolution, and renewal that child is born again, condemned to its writhing. That is
why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees,
the one I've refrained from discussing until now. In the face of such evil what is to
be done? Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence? No, we are told,
because "if we do so we become just like them." This ethical principle supposedly
applies universally and atemporally. It does so, however, because it assures t he
guarantee that no matter what happens we'll never get our hands dirty. History
can't intrude on the categorical imperative. Whatever action one takes one must
maintain one's ethical purity. Even if that means there is nothing one can do and
after it's been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the
situation. Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic.
Bush did the moral imagination one favor. His pre-emptive unilateralism made
official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications. There is
no body to which we can turn for Justice: not the U.N., the World Court, or any other
framework of international law. The U.S. will flaunt its contempt for such bodies
whenever it suits its purpose. And thus another mode of peaceful, non-violent praxis
is deprived of its guarantee.

A2 Counterplans
Their counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of
guarantee for the future. Their obsession with security and
the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the
unknown - this means that only the aff can solve. Anything
else results in a return to the ideology of security.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that
stands in the way. I have termed it the guarantees. By that term I refer to all those
assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical
trauma. The significance of eventsthe Shoah, Hiroshima, 9-11 is their power to
call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of
darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways, considering things
about the human being that we've persistently denied or marginalized. One
dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of
thinking. That's why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt
to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to
contain and interpret it. The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby
demonstrated. A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it
as an aberration, a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be
recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about "
human nature." Something trans-historical. History may disrupt our essence but it
cannot destroy it. The concept of human naturein all t h e variants constituting
the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle
through American self psychologyis the primary way in which we endeavor to
deny history. An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs
beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions
that have nothing to do with "human nature" or the cherished beliefs and values we
derive from that concept. Events put us as subjectsand as thinkers into a
traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world. The anxiety at the center of
thought is revealed. Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees.
Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility
implicit in an event . That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and
thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking. To put it concretely, a
trauma cannot be resolved until it's been constituted. The Western Logos is a
monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task; indeed, to render it impossible a priori.
To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire
and demand for resolution. The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n
existentializing imperative: to constitute and work within trauma in a way that
addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating
images, symbolic actions, and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in
an antithetical directiontoward the inner transformation needed to purge
ourselves of Thanatos. Such an effort, however, cannot itself be yet another variant

of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values.
If anything, the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death
because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us. The
following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an
effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be
evident. The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise. It must be
the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama.

Any risk of solvency for the counterplan is a reason to vote

aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by preemptive action. Even claims of a net-benefit are a link to the
affirmative criticism. Only the aff forcibly confronts the
unknown.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.51-52)

Emotional: The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves.
Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised. Health, normalcy, and
productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings. Hope and optimism aren't just
healthy attitudes; they are requirements of our nature. Biologically wired. We
cannot remain for long in trauma. Recovery , moreover, must restore our faith in
the guarantees and our hopes for the future . The need for hope is, In fact, the
capstone of the entire system of guarantees. Yet it too apparently has a history.
Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression
and anxiety. Informed of this fact by Bill Maher, the French actress Julie Delphy
spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture: "Don't they know that
depression is a good thing; that it's something you have to go through in order to
grow?" Not anymore. The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to
understand the fears that they exorcise. Thanks to religion, death, suffering, and
evil are deprived of their power. Through the attainment of reason, all other forms
of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place. Poetic knowing

is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror. Science, as fulfillment of reason,
assures us of domination over nature. What Heidegger termed technoscientific
rationality becomes the measure of what is real. Belief in historical progress
banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or, even worse,
move to the darkest of ends. The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible
for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take
whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our
guarantees. It is in the personal order, however, that the guarantees do their
deepest work. Psychologically, belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most
frightening contingency: that there is a void at the center of the American psyche
with panic anxiety and its corollary, compulsive consumption, the expression of a
desperate non-identity. That specter brings us before the greatest fear: that our

psyche, not our conscious, deliberative intentions, is the author of our actions, an
author who will do anything in order to feel safe, secure, and righteous. All of our
emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity: the need to
feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything
that would trouble us. Resolution, catharsis (i.e., the discharge of painful tensions or
awareness), and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity
to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know. It is easy to

deprecate Dubya and, apparently, to hold onto the idea that he's a temporary
aberration. But the problem goes deeper. To revive a battle cry from the 1960s,

insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of

the problem and not the solution. For the grandest function of the
system of guarantees, as a whole and in each one of its parts, is to
blind us to history. And so to take up again the question stated previously, how did
the situation now being created in Iraq come about? The next three sections constitute an
attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history.

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the

affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve
the affirmative. We must confront the unknown to solve.
Davis, 2001
Watler A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and
the Tragic Imperative, Pg. 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way
of thinking about history. In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4, part 2), I
only present the basic lines of this idea here. The depth-charge sounded by an
Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal
but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible
extinction of one of the terms. This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a
dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories. The alternative is an immanent
dialectic, one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible
change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with
the power to bring about that closure to the "eternal" dialectic. Traumatic events
constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the "eternal" dialectic because in them
we fund Eros deprived of all assurances. Contra Freud, there is nothing universal,
biological, or ahistorical about "the eternal battle." Both terms are fully implicated in
history, caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations.
Forces in the psyche opposed to life, which we have persistently marginalized in
proclaiming our humanism, rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about
"human nature" and history. Rather than a world grounded in love, the primacy of
goodness in "human nature," the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative
virtues of the social process, the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk
life, seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the
antagonist. After such knowledge we can never begin again, cleansed of history,
restored, through its narration, to some essential humanistic identity, with all our
fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed, Eros again pristine and
empowered. Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us
becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history. The
Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance.
Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature, revealing
historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing "the reality
principle." There is nothing in "human nature" that protects us from this eventuality.
Positing an essential, and always recoverable, nature outside history is not the
solution but part of the problem, the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation.

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can

force us to confront trauma. The counterplans insistence that
there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved
for is a link.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that
stands in the way. I have termed it the guarantees. By that term I refer to all those
assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical
trauma. The significance of eventsthe Shoah, Hiroshima, 9-11 is their power to
call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of
darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways, considering things
about the human being that we've persistently denied or marginalized. One
dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of
thinking. That's why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt
to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to
contain and interpret it. The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby
demonstrated. A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it
as an aberration, a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be
recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about "
human nature." Something trans-historical. History may disrupt our essence but it
cannot destroy it. The concept of human naturein all t h e variants constituting
the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle
through American self psychologyis the primary way in which we endeavor to
deny history. An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs
beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions
that have nothing to do with "human nature" or the cherished beliefs and values we
derive from that concept. Events put us as subjectsand as thinkers into a
traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world. The anxiety at the center of
thought is revealed. Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees.
Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility
implicit in an event . That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and
thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking. To put it concretely, a
trauma cannot be resolved until it's been constituted. The Western Logos is a
monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task; indeed, to render it impossible a priori.
To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire
and demand for resolution. The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n
existentializing imperative: to constitute and work within trauma in a way that
addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating
images, symbolic actions, and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in
an antithetical directiontoward the inner transformation needed to purge
ourselves of Thanatos. Such an effort, however, cannot itself be yet another variant
of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values.
If anything, the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death
because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us. The
following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an
effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be
evident. The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise. It must be
the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama.

A2 Kritiks
Our ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial
to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our
framework opens space for agency and recognition of our
choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical
contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for
change
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious. He discovered our responsibility

for it; for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our
duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an
ethically responsible agent. In terms of ethics there's a quick way to summarize the

significance of the Unconscious. What we don't know about ourselves is what we do

to the other. In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a
new way to reflect, one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of
conscious deliberations and intentions. Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the
sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially. Every time one understands a
dream, a paraphraxis, an aesthetic experience, a fantasy, one suffers in principle a
revolution in one's life. For such experiences put one in touch with the deep
conflicts that define the psyche. A dream, for example, does not tell us about

something outside the realm of our conscious grasp, though this view of repression
typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis. A
good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life. It thereby opens
our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration. Listen to a dream rightly and one finds
that one must confront something one has been avoiding or doing. Such is what
it would mean to assume responsibility for one's dreams. One would start to live
from an awareness of one's psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape
that awareness.
Freud doesn't abolish intention, he expands it by showing how often
consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the
actual motives on which we act; and how often accordingly insistence on conscious

intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility. The seductive or
prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child, for example, may
carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their
sexuality. This is why it's so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to
deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention. And yet our
actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions.
Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings,
desires, and conflicts. And they are what the other invariably receives, as a
message that is often sharply different from what we say, especially when through
the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good, loving human
beings we are. The psyche is a lonely hunter, avid in the pursuit of purposes it
carefully conceals from itself. The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he
introduced into that practice. Rather than getting us off the hook, psychoanalysis
sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic. Intentionality is convenient
because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilityresponsibility for who we

are. Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative, discursive, quasi-

judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or, to turn
the screw a peg further, as if when we aren't relating to ourselves this way we
aren't fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions. But once let responsibility
expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden: to
know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in
virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become
responsible for one's psyche. Indeed, deliberation is itself transformed by l he

psychoanalytic turn. Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the
inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself, since they are
where the truth of one's conduct may lie.
In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication. Our
primary responsibility, which we continually shirk, is to find the evil in ourselves.
Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery: the desire
to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good, with evil an
aberration, a fall, a break with the natural order of things, an exception to the
rule of human decency. Psychoanalysis, like history, renders such sentiments
questionable at best. And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginwith

psychological conflict, the primary fact that defines us. To be human is to live
denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare)
that result in a moral character that can be termed good. Goodness is not
something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature; it's an achievement that comes
through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before
some human beings take up the effort to reverse them.
Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic. It is
humanistic in the deepest way, seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it
by demonstrating what that achievement requires. Psychoanalysis doesn't point to
ethical relativism. It points instead to an order of rank among human beings
based on the degree to which a knowledge of one's psyche has become the basis
of one's actions. Ethically, to know one's psyche is of necessity to engage in an
effort to transform it, since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of
what otherwise does harm to others. Psychological change is the primary task;
ethics the result.

Their alternative misses the point. In lieu of a criticism of the

affirmative, it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety
and explore the effects within the psyche. This allows us an
uncastrated interaction with reality.
Davis, 2001
Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic
Imperative, pg. xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that "in or about December 1910 human nature changed." She
would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945. The change Woolf witnessed
has now, of course, been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a
name: modernism. The second change also has a namepostmodernismbut the
ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first
moment of an arrested dialectic.12 Irony and aporia dominate the "postmodern
sensibility" because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the
Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousthe
referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference. Reference must

be continually deferred, then rendered impossible, because anxiety and flight from
that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to
weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and
move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy
consciousness. Einstein said "the Bomb changed everythingexcept the ways we
think." As such, it is the inwardness of our inwardness, never more so perhaps than
when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the
burden of a historically situated subjectivity or, at that opposite extreme that
amounts to the same thing, when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed
and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of
history and its contingencies. What if we broke with both strategiesand rather
than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then
trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche? Such an effort would
take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that
provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingand existingin the present.
Such a humanism, however, confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of
the system of guarantees on which previous "humanisms" have depended. For the
function of that system, with respect to history, has been to establish, as canons of
research and explanation, a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning, logic, and
human nature that function to insulate historians and their audiences so that horror
can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always, of
necessity, recover. The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion
for deployingand thereby reinforcingthe central beliefs and Values of the
humanistic tradition. That tradition thus provides the ego, or identity-principle, that
"we" (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with
events that challenge our certainties.13 We love to read and write histories because
such stories tell us who we already know we are, while conveniently exorcizing the
threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature. History
is, indeed, a "fiction," the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise
cleansed, catharted, the system of needs, beliefs, and guarantees restoredwith
existence the self-reference perpetually deferred. What if, instead, we approached
history as a realityand a discipline in which we must risk ourselves utterly? One
in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in one's beliefs, values, and even in
one's "identity," with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that
possibility? The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end, the principle of
hope a category we'd risk, not one we'd need to renew at whatever cost. Could such
an engagement constitute the true "force and signification" of Hiroshima16 and
thereby evidence that events in history are the true "Absolute" that abide with us
the gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less
than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human
condition?

The permutation solves psychoanalytical evaluation of our

anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior
questions to the alternative and the framework of the
criticism. The alternative is still castrated by desire, which
means that it does not access proper historical context.
Davis, 2006
Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic
Imperative, pg. 1-3
In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal: "A tormenting thought; as of a certain point, history
was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was
supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn't notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we
didn't have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction."1 What Canetti can't see is that the point he
refers to is the one he inhabits. He can't see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the

The proliferation of new theories of

history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situation that
defined by the Bomb. That connection is also what these theories cannot know
about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways
we can know and write about the past. What they do know is that the
assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied
in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering
us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer
adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity.2 To cite the major
inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world.

developments (though in no necessary order of importance):3 1. Foucault's concept of genealogical history and the
archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen
Greenblatt and his circle. 2. The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer,
Habermas, and Ricoeur, with special note given to Ricoeur's development of a complex theory of time and
narrative. 3. Derrida's recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian
assumptions about history, progress, and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who
know little or nothing of Hegel. 4. Althusser, Sartre, Gramsci, and the many often sharply opposed approaches to
history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson, G. A. Cohen, Perry Anderson, and
Stuart Hall. 5. The recovery of Kant's speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotard's theory of the
differend. 6. The attempts by Slavoj Zizek, Joan Copjec, and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history
implicit in Lacan. 7. The massive significance of Walter Benjamin's speculations, the continued vitality of Adorno
and the Frankfurt school, and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke. 8. The work of Louis O. Mink,
Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Roy Schafer, and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape
the writing of history. To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeon's earlier theorizing about history, the work of
Braudel, Baudrillard, deCerteau, Calinescu, and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical
investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and Natalie Zemon Davis. The list
is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of greater significance and

the number of alternative histories

that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist, multicultural, postcolonial, subaltern, and
queer studies. Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our
understanding of the past. They have broken with the logic, the procedures, and the ruling
that complicate the issue of the historical. I refer, first, to

assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the
exclusion (or marginalization) of "voices" that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations.

They entail a theoretical crisis: the

recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as
true, rational, objective, and universal are cultural, conventional,
ideological, and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required
for its maintenance. Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant
Such studies are not merely of local interest.

culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of
certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and "objective" and the rejection of other experiences and

The true bite of the multicultural seldom

the idea that none of us are locked into
privileging our own culture and "subject position(s)." We can gain distance
ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded.
honored because it cuts in every directionis

from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking.

We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our
culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about
themselves. The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable, since historical explanation is
perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief, mind, and feeling on which it

Thanks to the explosion of the

multicultural, we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from
such beliefs and practices, even perhaps, following Nietzsche, to touch all that "goes without saying"
depends in giving an "identity" to its members.4

with the hammer as with a tuning fork.

Case Stuff

War on Terror Bad

The myth of effective security fosters a violent project that
necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the
altar of society
McGowan, 2013
Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Dont Have, Project Muse)
The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic

We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan

to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience
of loss. But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that
someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience . This is
why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror, no end to the list of
countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security, no
end to the number of terrorist leaders executed.31 Complete security, like
complete pleasure, is mythical. It attempts to bypass the one experience that
cannot be bypassed the foundational experience of loss and it is this
experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond. The structure of
society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the
possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it. No matter how often
nature of that bond.

children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness, they will
inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly.

Loss of the Self

Surveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our
informaticized bodies the total knowledge it provides
deprives one of the ability to function as a subject, eradicating
ones identity this results in complete annihilation
Friesen et al, 2012
Dr. Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University. His academic
credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta. Andrew Feenberg, School of Communication,
Simon Fraser University. Grace Smith, Arapiki Solutions, Inc. (Norm Friesen, Andrew Feenberg, Grace Smith, and
Shannon Lowe, 2012, Experiencing Surveillance, pp. 82-83, (Re)Inventing The Internet,
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-6091-734-9_4)
Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they
animate it as though it were an actual person. Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than
with actual presence. Thus, van der Ploeg writes of the inability to distinguish between the body itself and body

the surveillance
assemblage standardizes the capture of flesh/information flows of the human body.
It is not so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this
may be an ultimate consequence), but with transforming the body into pure information, such
that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable. (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000, p. 613) There
information (van der Ploeg, 2003, p. 69). Haggerty and Ericson similarly write,

is something right about this turn in surveillance theory, and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the
real person from the traces that person leaves behind. The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal
signs of various sorts, so we do not quite leave it behind after all. And yet we do not want to drag along every trace
of our passage through life. We count on the erasure of most traces. It is this erasure that enables us to face the
world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we construct at least partially anew for each new situation in

privacy and secrecy are centrally

constitutive of self and selfhood. Holding something private or secret emphasizes
the difference between self and other, and confirms the autonomy of ones
interiority and individuality. Secrecy secures, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside of
the obvious world, as Simmel (1906, p. 462) puts it. In contemporary conditions of surveillance
and dataveillance, subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between
our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies. It would be intolerable for
everyone to have full access to our salary, the details of our relations to our family,
our medical histories, sexual proclivities, and so on. Such knowledge would
completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of
ourselves implied in this knowledge. Like Sartres spy at the keyhole, himself espied, we
would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed
within us, frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other, and essentially
deprived of our ability to function as a subject. We could no longer choose to
project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having
to do with our identity would have been pre-empted. Truly, to be completely
outed is to be annihilated.
which we find ourselves. In existentialphenomenological terms,

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically,

rendering one enslaved
Vaz, 1995
(Angelina, Fall 1995, Dalhousie French Studies Vol. 32, Mises en scne du regard (Fall 1995), pp. 37-38, Who's Got
the Look? Sartre's Gaze and Foucault's Panopticism, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of

As Sartre says, being-seen constitutes me as a

defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom []. I am a slave to the
degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and
which is the very condition of my being (Being, p. 358). In this sense, the gaze does not
just create and invade physical spaces; there is a sense in which the gaze invades
and traps me psychologically. As a temporal-spatial object in the world, being locked at
forces me to apprehend myself as the object of the Others unknowable
appraisals-of value judgments. And these value judgments affect me. Thus, as the
object of values which come to qualify me without my being able to act on this
qualification, or even to know it, I am enslaved (p. 358).
subjection by exposure is dominant.

AT: Psych not falsifiable/Psych Bad

Psychoanalysis is both falsifiable and accurate
Grant and Harari, 2005
(Don and Edwin, psychiatrists, Psychoanalysis, science and the seductive theory of Karl Popper, Australian and
New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 39)
Attacks on psychoanalysis and the long-term therapies derived from it, have enjoyed a long history and much
publicity [1-4]. Yet, the justification for such attacks has been challenged on many grounds, including their
methodology [5] and the empirically demonstrable va- lidity of core psychoanalytic concepts [6,7]. Also,

bur-

geoning neuroscience research, some of which is sum- marized below, indicates likely
neurological correlates for many key clinically derived psychoanalytic concepts such
as self-coherence [8], repression [9] and projective identification [10].
the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and its derivative therapies has been
supported by empiri- cal research [11,12], particularly for patients with DSM axis II pathology. Despite
Furthermore,

this evidence, the attacks on psychoanalysis continue unabated, not only from some psychiatrists [13,14] but also
from the highest levels of politics and health bureaucrats [15], although what ex- actly is being attacked is often
unclear.

Experimental data and empirical evidence prove the validity of

psychoanalysis
Petocz, 2015
PhD in Psychology, currently teaches history, psychology, and critical thinking at the University of Western Sydney.
Visiting researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Kings College, London University in 2000 (Agnes, 1/12/2015,
The scientific status of psychoananalysis revisited, Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting)

A reservoir of experimental data pertinent to Freuds work currently exists

and, as we have shown in detail, offers support for a respectable number of his major ideas
and theories However, a sizeable proportion of those observers who are
presumably concerned with evaluating the standing of psychoanalysis have simply
refused to acknowledge the existence, or accept the credibility, of such
findings. (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996, pp. 284-285) After a hundred years of controversy, we can now put
to rest the criticism of psychoanalysis that its most fundamental assertion- the
importance of unconscious processesis mistaken or without empirical foundation.
The data are incontrovertible: consciousness is the tip of the psychic iceberg that Freud imagined it
to be. (Western, 1999, p. 1097) There is a cornucopia of empirical evidence in the cognitive
neurosciences, attachment field, infant-observation research, develop- mental
psychology, clinical psychopathology, and the therapeutic process that are
corroborations, validations, extensions, revisions and emendations of Freud:
contributions. (Mills, ZIIJ7, p. 540)

Falsifiability is a bad standardit incorporates unexamined

materialism which undermines the basis of the theory and also
turns their framework arguments by undercutting
metaphysical debate and argumentative clash. Theres no
offense because metaphysical belief is inevitable but
falsifiability drives us to hold them without debate
Castellano, 2012
(Daniel, The Insufficiency of Empiricism, http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/philtheo/empiricism2.htm)

Since falsifiability really means being empirically falsifiable, and the empirical is
restricted to physical observation, Poppers theory furtively incorporates
philosophical materialism into his theory of science, which is then misused as a
general theory of knowledge. With one stroke, any sort of metaphysical, religious, or
spiritual speculation is dismissed as not meriting credibility. Rather than be forced to
honestly engage metaphysical arguments with counterarguments, we are excused
from debating them altogether, as if they were beyond reason. Clearly, this position
is unwarranted, and it arises from the error of equating non-empiricism with
irrationality. The scientific method is an excellent way to arrive at near-certain knowledge
in areas that are susceptible to both physical observation and controlled experiment. Many
ordinary types of knowledge are not susceptible to controlled experiment, as is the
case with the study of history or any other aspect of the past, which can never be
replicated. Such sciences must use different rules of evidence , and the basis of
certitude in their results is of a different quality than that of the natural sciences. Other
types of knowledge are not susceptible to physical observation, such as our
conscious experiences (as opposed to their neural correlates), or abstract reasoning
about mathematical or metaphysical entities. This non-physical knowledge is not
inferior to that of the empirical sciences, but on the contrary is considered the most
certain knowledge of all, as we directly comprehend the truth of a tautology and
directly experience our own consciousness. The knowledge of empirical sciences, on
the other hand, is mediated indirectly through the exercise of our consciousness
and abstract reasoning. From this, the foolishness of philosophical materialism is
evident: we only know matter through the mind, so it is absurd to doubt the
existence of the mind or soul without doubting the existence of matter . Similarly,
physics is only intelligible against a background of logical, metaphysical, and mathematical
assumptions. The natural sciences are still epistemologically subordinate to
philosophy, in fact if not in culture. Our cultural rejection of abstract philosophy in

favor of hard science has not eliminated the need for philosophy, but has simply
removed it from conscious discourse, reducing it to a set of unconsciously held and
poorly understood assumptions. Popper himself recognized this in his study of quantum
mechanics, which he called the great quantum muddle, in reference to how physicists
incoherently invoked contradictory philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Even the most radically anti-philosophical man has a philosophy, but if he
consciously rejects the study of philosophy, he is doomed to hold his philosophy

unconsciously and incoherently.

Scientific analysis creates a psychic split and solves subjective

value
Kalaidjian, 2012
Walter, professor at Johns Hopkins. Traversing Psychosis: Lacan, Topology, and The Jet-Propelled
Couch. Pgs. 190-191. American Imago, Vol. 69, No. 2, 185213. 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press.

the subject of scientific

knowledge as the latter forgets a dimension of truth that psychoanalysis seriously
puts to work (p. 738). Psychoanalysis asserts the subjects determination by the
unconscious andas the topology of the Mbius strip demonstratesthat psychic truth, as an
interior void, marks the impasse of sciences deadlocked endeavor to suture the
subject within the regime of its logic and formal procedures. As lacan puts it in On the
Thus, the Mbius strip gives topological representation to the division that splits

Subject Who is Finally in Question, truth effects its detour [biais] in knowledge (1953a, p. 194) or, in alexandre
leupins blunt translation, Truth

makes a hole in science (leupin, 2004, p. 56). Insofar as this

hole bears on the real, its traumatic detour in knowledge befalls science as a kind
of psychotic break. Indeed, a successful paranoia, lacan asserts, might just as well seem
to constitute the closure of science insofar as the latter does not-want-to-knowanything about the truth as cause (196566, p. 742) but instead sustains its regime of
knowledge through the foreclosure (Verwerfung) of incompleteness. Sciences divide
between reason and epistemological crisis reaches back to its enlightenment origins
in the Cartesian cogito, split as it is between, on the one hand, an insistence on
clarity and certainty driven by, on the other hand, a passionate self-doubt . While the
latters truth as cause is ultimately foreclosed in the modern regime of sciences objectified axiomatics,

psychoanalysis holds its own rational methodology in productive tension with the
fading of the subject. Thus, psychoanalysis brings a rational, scientific rigor to bear
on its analysis of the unconscious structured as a language without, however,
suturing the gap between its disciplinary knowledge and the particular psychic
disposition of the subject rooted in an unconscious truth as cause . This qualified and
paradoxical identification of the subject of science with the psychoanalytic subject turns on the understanding that,
as Jean-Claude Milner (1991) has it, Just because there is an ideal of science, there is no ideal science (p. 33).
Perhaps, however, the loss of its own status as an ideal science is most traumatic for psychoanalysis precisely in
its encounter with the ideal of science not just as it sutures the subject of science but as it likewise drives the
systematic rigor of the psychotic subject.

Neg Stuff

Psychoanalysis bad for IR

Psychoanalysis cant explain international relations --- the
move from the clinic to the macro-sphere is too great obviously not everyone shares the exact same fantasies and
theres no mechanism to actualize change
Boucher 2010
literary and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University (Geoff M., Zizek and Politics: A Critical Introduction,
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_hmrBgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%C5%BDi
%C5%BEek+and+Politics:
+An+Introduction&ots=3uqgdGUwxC&sig=MNP7oMG7JXgWMj49yz2DHRTs6BI#v=onepage&q&f=false)//trepka

Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remark- able that, for all the criticisms of
Zizek's political Romanticism, no one has argued that the ultra-extremism of Zizek's political
position might reflect his untenable attempt to shape his model for political action
on the curative final moment in clinical psychoanalysis . The differences between
these two realms, listed in Figure 5.1, are nearly too many and too great to restate - which
has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The key thing is this. Lacan's notion of travers- ing the
fantasy involves the radical transformation of people's sub- jective structure : a
refounding of their most elementary beliefs about themselves, the world, and sexual difference. This is
undertaken in the security of the clinic, on the basis of the analysands' volun- tary
desire to overcome their inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties . As a clinical and
existential process, it has its own independent importance and authenticity . The analysands,
in transforming their subjective world, change the way they regard the objective, shared social
reality outside the clinic. But they do not transform the world. The political
relevance of the clinic can only be (a) as a support- ing moment in ideology critique
or (b) as a fully-fledged model of politics, provided that the political subject and its social object are
ultimately identical. Option ((7), Zizek's option, rests on the idea, not only of a subject who becomes who he is only
through his (mis) recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but whose 'traversal of the fantasy' is immediately

according to Zizek, we can

analyse the institutional embodiments of this Other using psy- choanalytic
categories. In Chapter 4, we saw Zi2ek's resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective) Ego Ideal
and the (objec- tive) Symbolic Order. This leads him to analyse our entire culture as a single
subject-object, whose perverse (or perhaps even psychotic) structure is expressed in every
manifestation of contemporary life. Zizek's decisive political-theoretic errors, one substantive and the
other methodological, are different (see Figure 5.1) The substantive problem is to equate any political change
worth the name with the total change of the subject-object that is, today, global capitalism. This is a type of
change that can only mean equat- ing politics with violent regime change, and
ultimately embrac- ing dictatorial govermnent, as Zizek now frankly avows (IDLC 41219). We have seen that the ultra-political form of Zizek's criti- cism of everyone else,
the theoretical Left and the wider politics, is that no one is sufficiently radical for
him - even, we will discover, Chairman Mao. We now see that this is because Zizek's model of politics
identical with his transformation of the socio-political system or Other. I-Ience,

proper is modelled on a pre-critical analogy with the total transformation of a subiect's entire subjective structure,

We have
seen that Zizek equates the individual fantasy with the collective identity of an
entire people. The social fantasy, he says, structures the regime's 'inherent
transgressions': at once subjects' habitual ways of living the letter of the law, and the regime's myths of origin
and of identity. If political action is modelled on the Lacanian cure, it must involve the
at the end of the talking cure. For what could the concrete consequences of this governing analogy be?

complete 'traversal' - in Hegel's terms, the abstract versus the determinate negation - of all these lived
myths, practices and habits. Politics must involve the periodic founding of of entire new subjectobjects. Providing
the model for this set of ideas, the first iekian political subject was Schellings divided God, who gave birth to the

can the political theorist

reasonably hope or expect that subjects will simply give up on all their inherited
ways, myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating moment? And can they be
legitimately asked or expected to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy
they will only retrospectively see, after they have acceded to the Great Leap
Forward? And if they do not for iek laments that today subjects are politically
disengaged in unprecedented ways what means can the theorist and his allies use to
move them to do so?
entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 1448). But

Psychoanalysis Bad
Psychoanalysis is rooted in the logic of calculable subjects,
assimilating ethics into an economy of knowledge that does
not allow for alterity. This culminates in the obliteration of the
Other
Derrida, 2002
[Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic
analysis known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern
philosophy, Without Alibi,
Asking your forgiveness in turn for having disappointed you and tried your patience, I hasten to my conclusion in a
dryly programmatic-telegraphic- fashion. And algebraic-that is, hyperformalized. I do not even know if what I am
preparing to expedite in this way defines a task or a horizon for psychoanalysis, at the end of its States General. It
is for me a question, rather, of what remains to be thought, done, lived, suffered, with or without bliss, but without
alibi, beyond even what could be called a horizon and a task, thus beyond what remains not only necessary but
possible. For what I am going to name at top speed punctures the horizon of a task, that is, exceeds the anticipation
of what must come about as possible. As possible duty. Beyond any theoretical knowledge, and thus any constative,
but also beyond any power, in particular the power of any performative institution.

What I am going to

name defies the economy of the possible and of power, of the "I can," "I may." It is in fact a
matter of economy in all senses of the term, that of the law of the proper [oikonomia] and of
familial domesticity, that of the sovereign state, of the right of property, of the market,
capital, modes of appropriation in general, and, more broadly, of all that Freud calls
"psychic economy." Here I am calling on a beyond of economy, thus of the
appropriable and the possible. One may well believe that economy is already defied by the so-called
mythological speculation on the death drive and the drive for power, thus on cruelty as well as sovereignty. One
may well recognize in the death drive, namely, the beyond of the pleasure and
reality principles, an aneconomic appearance. And what is more aneconomic, you may say, than
destruction? And cruelty? In truth, Freud works constantly to reintegrate this aneconomy ,
thus to take it into account, to bring reason to bear on it, in a calculable fashion, in an
economy of the possible. And one cannot blame him for that. He always reduces both
knowledge and ethics, even law and politics, to this economy of the possible. Even if
one reckons with the detour through the indirect, and even if the indirect supposes a hiatus, according to the most
visible tendency of Freud's interpretation of Freud,

it is a question of a strategy of the possible

and thus of economic conditionality: appropriation, the possible as power of the "I can," "I may,"
the mastery of the performative that still dominate and thus neutralizes [symbolically,
in the order of the "symbolic," precisely] the event it produces, the alterity of the event , the very
arriving of the arrivant. Well, I will affirm that there is, it is indeed necessary that
there be refer- ence to some unconditionality, an unconditional without
sovereignty, and thus without cruelty, which is no doubt a very difficult thing to mink It is necessary
for this economic and symbolic conditionality to constitute it- self. The affirmation I am advancing advances itself, in

beyond which
the death drive and the power, cruelty, and sovereignty drives determine
themselves as "beyond" the principles. The originaty affirmation, which advances itself in
advance, lends rather than gives itself. It is not a principle, a princedom, a sovereignty . It
comes then from a be- vond the beyond, and thus from beyond the economy of the possible . It
is attached to a life, certainly, but to a life other than that of the economy of the
possible, an im-possible life no doubt, a survival, not symbolizable but the only one that is
advance, already, without me, without alibi, as the origmary affirmation from which, and thus

worthy of being lived, without alibi, once and for all, the only one from which to depart (notice I say from which to
depart) for a possible thinking of life. Of a life that is still worthy of being lived, once and for all. One cannot justify a

pacifism, for example, and the right to life, in a radical fashion, by setting out from an economy of life, or from .
what Freud alleges, as we saw, under the names ofa biological constitution - ot an idiosyncrasy. This can only be

This,
originary affirmation of beyond the beyond offers itself on the basis of
numerous figures of the impossible. I have studied a few of these elsewhere; hospitality, gift,
forgivenessand above all the unpredictability, the "perhaps," the "what if" of the
event, the coming, and the coming of the other in general, his or her or its arriving. Their
possibility is ways announced as the experience of a non-negative impossible. The hospitable
exposure to the event, to the coming, to the visitation of the unpredictable arrivant cannot, be
made into the horizon of a task not even for psychoanalysis, although it
claims some privilege in the experiencc of the unpredictable coming of the
other, at the arrival of the anrivant. But what may, perhaps, become a task, tomorrow, for psychoanalysis, for a
done on the basis of a sur-vival that owes nothing to the alibi of some mytho-thcological beyond.

new psychoanalytic reason, for a new psychoanalytic Enlightenment, is a revolution that, like all revolutions, will
come to terms with the impossible, negotiate with the non-negotiable that has re- mained non-negotiable, calculate
with the unconditional as such, with the inflexible unconditionality of the unconditional.

The absolute openness to the Other as incalculability exceeds

the structures of psychoanalytic knowledge
Derrida, 2002
[Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic
analysis known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern
philosophy, Without Alibi,
However, without even recalling Freuds lack of sympathy for French revolutions, we may say that

nothing, on

has been more foreign to psychoanalysis, up until now, mote disturbing for it,
than the public space of these States General here, than this decor, these protocols, the
the other hand,

duration and the technical apparatus that, for almost three years, have been setting the conditions for your
meeting. Another, still invisible scene, therefore, continues to escape you. The signs
you've received from this hidden scene remain indecipherable behind a whole staging [mist en seine] organized in
view of deliberations in common, authorized by decisions and performative declarations of the organizers or even

what happens, comes about, comes to pass, or, as we say in French, ce qui
arrive, the event of the other as arrivant (the one 'who or' which arrives'), is the
impossible that exceeds and puts to rout, sometimes cruelly, that which the
economy of a performative act is supposed to produce in a sovereign
manner, when an already legitimated speech takes advantage of some convention. If things happen
the participants. Now

[arrivent], if there are those' of us and those others who arrive, the others especially, the arrivarits, it is always as
the impossible beyond of all the instituting utterances, beyond all convention, beyond mastery, beyond the "I can,"
"I may," beyond the economy of appropriation of a "that is in my power," an "it is possible for me," the "this power
belongs to me," the "this possible is conferred on me," all of which presumptions are always implied by

If at least others arrive, from close by or far away, from the family or from the most
distant strangeness, they do it, like everything that happens, like every event worthy of the name, like
everything that is coming, in the form of the impossible, beyond all convention and all scenic
control, all pleasure or reality principle, beyond all drive for power and
perhaps all death drive. It is a hospitality of visitation and not of
invitation, when what arrives from the other exceeds the rules of
hospitality and remains unpredictable for the hosts. I do not know whether, behind
performative acts.

their statutory authorities and behind the official signatories of the Call and the 1 convocation, behind the masters
of ceremony, the historical States; General up until 1789 ever had a veritable and sovereign stage director:; What is
certain is that no stage director has ever been able to foresee and program anything whatsoever beyond the first
act opening the proceedings. And even that is doubtful.

Psychoanalysis's relationship to the outside community

replicates the logic of sovereignty, which is the foundation of
modern violence. Instead, we must resist the resistance
created by psychoanalysis, as such, and open ourselves to
revolution.
Derrida, 2002
[Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic
analysis known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern
philosophy, Without Alibi,
That it is not alone, far from if, in not having thought through this Revolution and its aftermaths, is paltry
consolation, especially for those who, like myself, believe that psychoanalysis, having announced as much at its
birth, 'should have something indispensable and essential not just to say but also to do on this subject. Without
alibi. The decisive thing that there would be to say and to do on this subject should register the shock wave of one
or more psychoanalytic revolutions. Notably on the subject of what is called, therefore, sovereignty and cruelty. But

the mondialisation (worldwide-ization) of the world that we are told is underway

resists psychoanalysis in multiple ways, not authorizing it to touch that world's
fundamental axioms of ethics, law, and politics , if, inversely, psychoanalysis resists
in multiple ways and in an autoimmune fashion, thus failing to think through and
to change these axioms, is not then this concept of resistance , even where a is as
stratified and complicated as I tried to show, just as problematic as those of sovereignty
and cruelty? Even in its enigmatic multiplicity (I counted 5 + or -1 concepts or places of "resistance,
according to Freud), does not this concept of resistance still imply border lines
front lines or theaters of war whose model is precisely what is becoming
outdated today? If there is still war, and for a long time yet, or in any case war's
cruelty, warlike, torturing, "massively or subtlety cruel "aggression, it is
no longer certain that the figure of war, and especially the difference between individual wars,
civil wars," and national wars, still corresponds to concepts whose rigor is assured. A
new discourse on war is necessary. We await today new "Thoughts for the Times on War t and
if

Death" (I am citing some titles of Freud; "Zeitgemasses fiber Krieg und Tod," 191J) and a new "Why War?" ("Warum

Thus it is not certain that the con-t cept of front, the

it
is not certain that all this can furnish a model of something like a
resistanceeither I internal or external. As much as the concepts of sovereignty or cruelty, it is perhaps the
concept of resistance that awaits another revolution, its own, after the French
Krieg?" 1932), or at, least new readings of texts of this sort.

figure of a front line or of an indivisible trench, of a beachhead, of a capital front indissodable from that of war,

Revolution of two hundred years ago and the political revolutions that followed, likewise after the psychoanalytic
revolution and those that perhaps followed it. For there is always more than one revolution possible in the
revolution. And what one might also call the technical or techno-scientific revolution (whether it touches on micro-

there is a
dimension of tele-technical virtuality, of the tele-technical revolution of the possible that
psychoanalysis, in its dominant axis, has failed-still fails no doubt and this is
another resistanceto take rigorously into account, and that, moreover, will have "played an essential
electronics, telc-virtualization, or genetics) is never simply external to the others* For example,

role in the principle of convocation as in the implementation, the preparation, and the type of exchange of these
very States General, in their space, then spacing, their becoming-time of worldwide space, in their horizontal
networking, thus in their potential though limited dehierarchization over the networks of the World Wide Web. In a
word, what is the revolutionary? And the postrevoiutionary? And what is world war and postwar for psychoanalysis
today? These ate perhaps other forms of the same question.

Psychoanalysis is silent in the face of the call of the Other. We

must not ground politics in psychoanalysis if we are to keep
open the possibility for an ethical responsibility for alterity
Derrida, 2002
Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis
known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern
philosophy, Without Alibi,
First of all, this difficult concept of indirection, of a certain irrecritude, of an oblique, angular, or mediating
nonstraightness. This concept, to which I think I must devote much attention without abusing Freud's text, does not
signify only detour, strategic ruse, continuous transaction with an inflexible force, for example, with the cruelty or

this concept of the

indirect seems to me to take into account, in the mediation of the detour, a radical
discontinuity, a heterogeneity, a leap into the ethical (thus also into the
juridical and political) that no psychoanalytic knowledge as such could
propel or authorize. On the subject of the polarity love/hatred (which out of politeness toward Einstein he
sovereign-power drive. Even though Freud does not say it, certainly not in this way,

compares to the polarity attraction/repulsion), Freud says clearly in fact that, like the polarity preservation/cruel

It is not
for the psychoanalyst as such to evaluate or devaluate, to discredit
cruelty or sovereignty from an ethical point of view . First of all, because he knows that
there is no life without the competition between the forces of two antagonistic drives. Whether one is
talking about the cruelty or the sovereignty drive, psychoanalytic
knowledge as such has neither the means nor the right to condemn it . In this
regard, it is and must remain, as knowledge, within the neutrality of the undecidable. Whence what I call
the "etats d'ame," that is, the hesitation, the confused mental state, or the soul-searching of
psychoanalysis. To cross the line of decision, a leap that expels one
outside psychoanalytic knowledge as such is necessary. In this hiatus , I would
say, the chance or risk of responsible decisions is opened up, beyond all
knowledge concerning the possible. Is that to say that there is "no relation between
destruction, it must not be hastily submitted to ethical judgments evaluating "good and evil" (209).

psychoanalysis and ethics, law, ot politics? No, there is, there must be an indirect and discontinuous consequence:

psychoanalysis as such does not produce or procure any ethics,

any law, any politics, but it belongs to responsibility, in these three domains, to take account of
to be sure,

psychoanalytic knowledge. The task, which is immense and remains entirely to be done, both for psychoanalysts
and for whomever, citizen, citizen of the world, or mega-citizen, concerned with responsibility (in ethics, law,
politics), is to organize this taking account of psychoanalytic reason without reducing the heterogeneity, the leap
into the undecidable, the beyond of the possible, which is the object of psychoanalytic knowledge and economy,
in particular, of its mythological discourse on the death drive and beyond the principles. It is in this place that is
difficult to delimit, the space of undecidability and thus of decision opened up by the discontinuity of the indirect,
that the transformation to come of ethics, law, and politics should take into account psychoanalytic knowledge
(which does not mean seeking a program there) and that, reciprocally, the analytic community should take into
account history, notably the history of law, whose recent or ongoing performative mutations have not, with only few
exceptions, interested it or called upon its contribu-tions. Everything here, it seems to me, remains to be done, on
both sides.

Even if their critique has validity, the world-wide resistance to

psychoanalysis makes it irrelevant when it comes to questions
of ethics and politics
Derrida, 2002
Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis
known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern
philosophy, Without Alibi,

I have already expressed some doubts about the homogeneous structure of this multiple concept of resistance

the world, the process of

worldwide-ization of the world, as it goes along, with ail its consequences
political, social, economic, juridical, techno-scienitific, and so forth
resists psychoanalysis today. It does so in new ways that you are doubtless in the process of
interrogating. It resists in an unequal fashion that is difficult to analyze. It
opposes psychoanalysis not only with a model of positive science, or even
positivistic, cognitvistic, physicalistic, psycho-pharmacologcal, genetistic
science, but notably also sometimes the academicism of a spiritualist,
religious, or flat-out philosophical hermeneutic or even (because none of these are
mutually exclusive) archaic tnstitutions, concepts, and practices of the ethical,
the juridical, and the political that seem to be still domlnated by a certain
logic, that is, by a certain onto-theological metaphysics of sovereignty
(autonomy and omnipotence of the subjectindividual or statefreedom, egological will,
conscious intentionality, or if you will, the ego, the ego ideal, and the superego, etc). The first gesture of
psychoanalysis will have been to explain this sovereignty , to give an account of its
(Wtderstand) in Fteud. I will do so differently today. No doubt

ineluctability while aiming to deconstruct its genealogy which passes also by way of cruel murder. As for the
physical, neuronal, or generic sciences, Freud was the first not to reject, but to expect a lot from themprovided
that one knows how to wait expectantly, precisely, and to articulate without confusing, without precipitously
homogenizing, without crushing the different agencies, structures, and laws, while respecting the relays, the delays,
and, do I dare say, the deferred of difference. In fact, both in the world and in the analytic communities, these

metaphysical axioms of ethics, law, and politics,

have not even had their surfaces scratched, much less been "deconstructed'' by the
psychoanalytic revolution. They will resist it for a long time yet ; in truth, they are
posirivist or spiritualist models, these

made to resist it. And one may, a "act, call this a fundamental "resistance." When faced with this resistance,
psychoanalysis, no doubt, in the statutory forms of its community, in the greatest authority of its discourse, in its
most visible institutions, resists Oouilywhaz remains archaic in this woridwide-ization. It doesn't like what it sees,
but it doesn't tackle it, doesn't analyze it. And this resistance is also ; a self-resistance. There is something wrong, in
any case an autoimmune function in psychoanalysis as everywhere else, a rejection of self, a resistance to self, to
its own principality, its own principle of protection.

Psychoanalysis has not thought through politics, ethics, and

sovereignty, and thus offers no real hope for the future.
Derrida, 2002
Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria, Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis
known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern
philosophy, Without Alibi,

psychoanalysis has not yet undertaken and thus still will succeeded to
thinking, penetrating, and changing the axioms of the ethical, the
juridical, and the political, notably in those seismic places where theoloeical
phantasm of sovereignty quakes and where the must traumatic , let us say in a
still confused manner the most cruel events of our day are being produced. This
quaking of the human earth gives rise to a new scene, which since the Second
World War has been structured by unprecedented juridical performatives (and all the
As I see it,

"mythologies" that Freud speaks of, in particular the psychoanalytic mythology of the drives, are tied to
conventional fictions, that is, to the authorized authority of performative acts),

such as the new

Declaration of Human Rightsthe rights not just of manias we say in French, but of woman as well
the condemnation of genocide the concept of crime against humanity
(imprescriptible in France), the creation under way of new international penal authorities, not to mention the
growing struggle against the vestiges of forms of punishment called "cruel," which remain the best emblem of the
sovereign power of the state over the life and death of the citizen, namely, besides war, the death penalty, which is
massively enforced in China, in the United States, and in a number of Arab Muslim countries. It is especially here

that the concept of cruelty, this obscure and enigmatic concept, this site of obscurantism both within and without

These are all things

about which, if I am not mistaken, psychoanalysis as such, in its statutory and authorized discourse,
or even in the quasi f totality of its productions, has so far said next to nothing, has had
next to nothing original to say. In the very place where one expects the most specific response
from psychoanalysisin truth, the only appropriate response. I mean once again: without alibi. All this,
produces a mutation that I venture to call revolutionary, in particular, a mutation on the subject
of the subject and of the citizen subject, that is the relations among democracy, citizenship,
and noncitizenship, in other words, the state and the beyond of the state. If psychoanalysis does not
take this mutation into account, if it does not engage with it, if it does not transform itself at this
rhythm, it will itself as it alreadyis in large measure, deported, overwhelmed, left on the side
of the road, exposed to all the drifts of the currents, to all appropriations,
to all abduction, or else inversely, it will remain rooted in the conditions of
a period that saw its birth, still aphasic in the Central European cradle of its birth: a certain
psychoanalysis, calls for indispensable analyses, to which we will have to return.

equivocal aftermath of a French Revolution, whose event, it seems to me, psychoanalysis has not yet thought
through. In particular as regards that which, in the said French Revolution and its legacy, will have concerned the
obscure concepts of sovereignty and cruelty.

Pyschoanalysis is non-falsifiable hindsight thinking

Samuels, 1993
Training Analyst Society of Analytical Psychology and Science Associate American Academy of Psychoanalysis
(Andrew, Free Associations, The mirror and the hammer: depth psychology and political transformation, Vol. 3D,
Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing)
The paper is about the depth psychology of political processes, focusing on processes of political change. It is a contribution to the
longstanding ambition of depth psychology to develop a form of political and cultural analysis that will, in Freud's words, 'understand the riddles of the world'. It has to be admitted that there is an equally longstanding reluctance in the non-psychological
community to accept the many and varied ideas and suggestions concerning political matters that have been offered by analysts

There is something offensive above

reductive interpretations of complex socio-political problems in exclusively
psychological terms. The tendency to panpsychism on the part of some depth psychologists has led
me to wonder if an adequate methodology and ethos actually exists with which to make an
engagement of depth psychology with the public sphere possible . By 'politics' I mean
the arrangements within a culture for the organization and distribution of power, especially
of all persuasions. I do not believe this can all be put down to resistance.

economic power, and the way in which power is deployed to maintain the survival and enhance the quality of human life. Economic
and political power includes control of processes of information and representation as well as the use of physical force and
possession of vital resources such as land, food and water. On a more personal level, political power reflects the ability to choose

'Politics' refers to the interplay between

the personal and public dimensions of power. That is, there is an articulation between public, economic
freely whether to act and what action to take in a given situation.

power and power as expressed on the personal, private level. This articulation is demonstrated in family organization, gender and
race relations, and in religious and artistic assumptions as they affect the life of individuals. (I have also tried to be consistent in my
use of the terms 'culture', 'society' and 'collective'.)' Here is an example of the difficulty with psychological rcduc-tionism to which I
am referring. At a conference 1 attended in London in 1990, a distinguished psychoanalyst referred to the revolutionary students in
Paris in 1968 as 'functioning as a regressive group'. Now, for a large group of students to be said to regress, there must be, in the
speaker's mind, some sort of normative developmental starting point for them to regress to. The social group is supposed to have a
babyhood, as it were. Similarly, the speaker must have had in mind the possibility of a healthier, progressive group process what

complex social and political

phenomena do not conform to the individualistic, chronological, moralistic,
pathologizing framework that is often imported. The problem stems from treating
the entire culture, or large chunks of it, as if it were an individual or, worse, as if it were a
baby. Psychoanalysts project a version of personality development couched in
judgemental terms onto a collective cultural and political process. If we look in this
manner for pathology in the culture, we will surely find it . As we are looking with a
psychological theory in mind, then, lo and behold, the theory will explain the
a more mature group of revolutionary students would have looked like. But

pathology, but this is a retrospective prophecy (to use a phrase of Freud's), twenty-twenty
hindsight. In this psychoanalytic tautologizing there is really nothing much to get excited
about. Too much psychological writing on the culture, my own included, has suffered from this kind of smug 'correctness' when the
'material' proves the theoretical point. Of course it does! If we are interested in envy or greed, then we will find envy or greed in
capitalistic organization. If we set out to demonstrate the presence of archetypal patterns, such as projection of the shadow, in
geopolitical relations, then, without a doubt, they will seem to leap out at us. We influence what we analyse and so psychological
reflection on culture and politics needs to be muted- there is not so much 'aha!' as one hoped.

Psychoanalysis is not verifiable continual contradictions and

no base criteria
Tuck, 2014
B.S. from University of Michigan, (Andrew, Why Did American Psychiatry Abandon Psychoanalysis?,
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/107788/antuck.pdf?sequence=1)
To say that psychoanalysis has grown stagnant as a scientific field may at first seem a sweeping and completely
unwarranted claim. After all, in terms of producing new branches of thought, psychoanalytic theory has
undoubtedly proven an expansive and fruitful domain; to argue that psychoanalytic progress suddenly stopped
after Freud would require answering to object relations theory, ego psychology, self psychology, and Lacanian
psychoanalysis, to name but a few. Furthermore, rather than dying with Freud in 1939, psychoanalysis produced
these subfields through a variety of different thinkersthe role of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Heinz Kohut, and
Jacques Lacan in their respective theories above seem to demonstrate that psychoanalysis was not a one-man show
after all. In fact, it was during the decades immediately following Freuds death that dynamic psychiatry was at the

Given the proliferation of new models and

theories of psychoanalytic thought under an equally diverse group of
psychoanalysts, on what grounds could the argument that psychoanalysis failed to
produce visible and useful knowledge possibly possess any merit? The answer is in
the question: it was precisely the sheer amount and diversity of psychoanalytic
subfields that delegitimized psychoanalysis as a whole: the presence of such
diversity of opinion within the same field undermined the authority of any one
subfield. Rather than adding to a collective fund of psychoanalytic knowledge, each
of these different subfields took a different approach to psychoanalytic theory and
practice. Former American Psychiatric Association president Alan Stone said: Today, at least in my opinion, and I
am not entirely alone in thinking this, neither Anna Freud's Ego Psychology nor Melanie Klein's
Object Relations Theory seem like systematic advances on Freud's ideas. Rather
they seem like divergent schools of thought, no closer to Freud than Karen Horney
who rebelled against Freudian orthodoxy. 13 The frequent emergence of these
competing divergent schools of thought and their dissenting followers, then,
made any developments in psychoanalysis seem to other scientists less like
legitimate scientific discoveries and more like competing hypotheses. In contrast with
more established fields like biology, innovations in psychoanalysis often seemed to contradict
earlier psychoanalytic ideas as well as one another, frequently forming branches
and sub-branches without regard to maintaining any sort of continuity or internal
consistency in psychoanalysis as a whole. 14,15 In fact, many of these developments were
peak of its influence in the United States. 11,12

reactionary in nature, responding to other trends in psychoanalysis rather than to new clinical data. This is the case
of Heinz Kohuts development of self psychology, which was a reaction against the subfields of ego psychology and
classical drive theory. The revival of American interest in the work of Melanie Klein in the second half of the

never did
one of these new theories thoroughly abrogate and replace a previous one in the
way that, for example, Einsteins theory of general relativity transformed Newtonian
physics. This is not to say that a new idea in psychoanalysis would not have been
met with resistance upon its introduction; however, it soon proved that
twentieth century has also been described as a reaction against ego psychology. 16 Furthermore,

psychoanalysis on the whole lacked the tools that other disciplines had to debunk or
prove new theories. By what criteria could psychoanalysts reject or accept a new hypothesis? In physics, a
new model was expected to be compatible with currently available data, as well as able to make predictions to be
confirmed by observation17; similarly, a new pharmaceutical drug was expected to prove itself by beating a control

But such criteria, even if psychoanalysts wanted to use them, were

not as conveniently applied to unconscious phenomena proposed by
psychoanalysis. Even the gathering of data from clinical psychotherapy was
typically unable to resolve the conflict between two competing subfields;
problematically, any clinical data that could potentially prove the efficacy of one
psychoanalytic school could be interpreted to support others as well. 18 In an article for
in a double-blind trial.

Psychoanalytic Psychology, psychologist Robert Holt, even as he argued for the validity of psychoanalysis as a
testable scientific theory,19 admitted the difficulty of producing data that could settle disputes between
psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic theories, let alone between schools within psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis cannot be the basis for political change

Sharpe, 2010
Lecturer, philosophy and psychoanalytic studies, and Goucher, senior lecturer, literary and psychoanalytic studies
Deakin University, 2010 (Matthew and Geoff, iek and Politics: An Introduction, p. 182 185, Figure 1.5 included)
Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remarkable that, for all the criticisms of ieks political Romanticism, no one

ieks political position might reflect his untenable

attempt to shape his model for political action on the curative final moment in clinical
psychoanalysis. The differences between these two realms, listed in Figure 5.1, are nearly too
many and too great to restate which has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The
key thing is this. Lacans notion of traversing the fantasy involves the radical transformation of
peoples subjective structure: a refounding of their most elementary beliefs about themselves,
the world, and sexual difference. This is undertaken in the security of the clinic, on the basis of the analysands
has argued that the ultra- extremism of

voluntary desire to overcome their inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties. As a clinical and existential process, it has its own
independent importance and authenticity.

The analysands, in transforming their subjective world, change the way

they regard the objective, shared social reality outside the clinic. But they do not transform the
world. The political relevance of the clinic can only be (a) as a supporting moment in ideology critique or (b)
as a fully- fl edged model of politics, provided that the political subject and its social object are ultimately identical. Option (b),

rests on the idea, not only of a subject who becomes who he is only through his (mis) recognition of
whose traversal of the fantasy is immediately identical with his
transformation of the socio- political system or Other. Hence, according to iek, we can analyse the
ieks option,

the objective sociopolitical order, but

institutional embodiments of this Other using psychoanalytic categories. In Chapter 4, we saw ieks resulting elision of the

This leads him to analyse our

entire culture as a single subjectobject, whose perverse (or perhaps even psychotic) structure is expressed
distinction between the (subjective) Ego Ideal and the (objective) Symbolic Order.

in every manifestation of contemporary life. ieks decisive political- theoretic errors, one substantive and the other

The substantive problem is to equate any political

change worth the name with the total change of the subjectobject that is, today, global capitalism. This
methodological, are different (see Figure 5.1)

is a type of change that can only mean equating politics with violent regime change, and ultimately embracing dictatorial
government, as iek now frankly avows (IDLC 41219). We have seen that the ultra- political form of ieks criticism of everyone

the theoretical Left and the wider politics, is that no one is sufficiently radical for him
this is because ieks model of politics proper is
modelled on a pre- critical analogy with the total transformation of a subjects entire subjective
else,

even, we will discover, Chairman Mao. We now see that

structure, at the end of the talking cure. For what could the concrete consequences of this governing

iek equates the individual fantasy with the collective identity of an

entire people. The social fantasy, he says, structures the regimes inherent transgressions: at once subjects habitual ways
of living the letter of the law, and the regimes myths of origin and of identity. If political action is modelled on
the Lacanian cure, it must involve the complete traversal in Hegels terms, the abstract versus
the determinate negation of all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must involve the periodic founding of entire
analogy be? We have seen that

new subjectobjects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the fi rst iekian political subject was Schellings divided God, who

can the political

theorist reasonably hope or expect that subjects will simply give up on all their inherited
ways, myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating moment? And can they be legitimately asked or expected
gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 1448). But

to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only retrospectively see, after they have acceded to the Great Leap

if they do not for iek laments that today subjects are politically disengaged in unprecedented ways
what means can the theorist and his allies use to move them to do so?
Forward? And

Psychoanalytic critique causes passivity and destroys political

struggle
Gordon, 2001
Paul Gordon, psychotherapist living and working in London, Race & Class, 2001, v. 42, n. 4, p. 30-1

All the tragedies of the

political project of emancipation -- the evils of Stalinism in particular -- are seen as the
inevitable product of men and women trying to create a better society. But,
rather than engage in a critical assessment of how, for instance, radical
political movements go wrong, they discard the emancipatory project and
impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity for having failed them:
`the intellectuals and academics have fled into discourse and deconstruction and
representation -- as though to interpret the world is more important than to
change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing world'.58 To justify their
flight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change through self-activity, the disappointed
intellectuals find abundant intellectual alibis for themselves in the very work they
champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis. What Marshall Berman says of Foucault seems true
also of psychoanalysis; that it offers `a world-historical alibi' for the passivity and
helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and that it has nothing but contempt for those naive enough to
imagine that it might be possible for modern human- kind to be free. At every turn for such
theorists, as Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are nothing but
prisoners: there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far
The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with disappointment.

more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break . . . There is no point in trying to
resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our
chains; however, once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax.59 Cohen's political defeatism and his

faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be

contemptuous and dismissive of any attempt at political solidarity or
collective action. For him, `communities' are always `imagined', which, in his view, means based on
conviction in the explanatory power of his new

fantasy, while different forms of working-class organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group, are

the idea that people might

come together, think together, analyse together and act together as rational
beings is impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure fantasy, a `symbolic
dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufficient combination'.60 In this scenario,

retrieval' of something that never existed in the first place: `Community is a magical device for conjuring
something apparently solidary out of the thin air of modern times, a mechanism of re-enchantment.' As for history,

this is not only nonsense, but

dangerous nonsense at that. Is history `always false'? Did the Judeocide happen or did it not? And did
not some people even try to resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not people
resist that too and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always `imagined'?
Or, as Sivanandan states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle? Furthermore,
it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.'61 Now,

all attempts to legislate against ideology are bound to fail because they
have to adopt `technologies of surveillance and control identical to those
used by the state'. Note here the Foucauldian language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is bad.
But is it? No society can function without surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that
there should be a public conversation about such moves and that those responsible for implementing them be at all
times accountable. To equate, as Cohen does, a council poster about `Stamping out racism' with Orwell's
horrendous prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's image was
intensely personal and destructive; the other is about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.)
Cohen reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about punitive action against racists, as though punishment or
other firm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or legal norms) precluded
`understanding' or even help through psychotherapy. It is indeed a strange kind of `anti-racism' that portrays
active racists as the `victims', those who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In

postmodernists may have

simply exchanged one grand narrative, historical materialism, for another,
psychoanalysis.62 For psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence. It is a
theory that seeks to account for the world and which recognises few limits on its explanatory potential. And the
claimed radicalism of psychoanalysis, in the hands of the postmodernists at
least, is not a radicalism at all but a prescription for a politics of quietism,
fatalism and defeat. Those wanting to change the world, not just to interpret it, need to look elsewhere.
their move from politics to the academy and the world of `discourse', the

Psychoanalysis is bad science - its untestable, produces

contradictory analyses, and cant make predictions
Beystehner, 2013
J.D. from University of Georgia (Kristen M, Psychoanalysis: Freud's Revolutionary Approach to Human Personality,
http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/beystehner.html)
Storr (1981) insists, "Only

a few fundamentalist psychoanalysts of an old-fashioned kind think that

Freud was a scientist or that psychoanalysis was or could be a scientific enterprise," and that,
"...to understand persons cannot be a scientific enterprise" (p. 260). Although many psychoanalysts themselves
would undoubtedly consider psychoanalysis to be a science, many critics would disagree. Popper, by far one of
psychoanalysis' most well-known critics and a strong critic of Grnbaum, insists that psychoanalysis cannot be

psychoanalysis' "so-called predictions

are not predictions of overt behavior but of hidden psychological states. This is why
they are so untestable" (Popper, 1986, p. 254). Popper (1986) claims that only when individuals are not
considered a science because it is not falsifiable. He claims that

neurotic is it possible to empirically determine if prospective patients are currently neurotic (p. 254). Popper (1986)

psychoanalysis has often maintained that every individual is neurotic to

some degree due to the fact that everyone has suffered and repressed a trauma at one point or another in his
or her life (p. 255). However, this concept of ubiquitous repression is impossible to test
because there is no overt behavioral method of doing so (p. 254). Other critics claim that
psychoanalysis cannot be considered a science due to its lack of predictions .
Psychoanalysts, critics maintain, state that certain childhood experiences, such as abuse or
molestation, produce certain outcomes or states of neurosis. To take this idea one step
further, one should be able to predict that if children experience abuse, for instance,
they will become characterized by certain personality traits . In addition, this concept would
asserts that

theoretically work in reverse. For instance, if individuals are observed in a particular neurotic state, one should be

neither of these predictions

can be made with any accuracy (Colby, 1960, p. 55). Additional critics insist that psychoanalysis is not a
able to predict that they had this or that childhood experience. However,

science because of the lack of interpretive rules or regulations. Colby (1960) contends that critics of psychoanalysis
have difficulties with the idea that "there are no clear, intersubjectively shared lines of reasoning between theories

one psychoanalyst will observe one phenomenon and

interpret it one way, whereas another psychoanalyst will observe the same
and observations" (p. 54). For instance,

phenomenon and interpret it in a completely different way that is contradictory to

the first psychoanalyst's interpretation (Colby, 1960, p. 54). Colby (1960) concludes that if
analysts themselves cannot concur that a certain observation is an example of a
certain theory, then the regulations that govern psychoanalytic interpretation are
undependable (p. 55). Eysenck (1986) maintains:Zizhave always taken it for granted that the obvious failure
of Freudian therapy to significantly improve on spontaneous remission or placebo treatment is the
clearest proof we have of the inadequacy of Freudian theory, closely followed by the
success of alternative methods of treatment, such as behavior therapy. (p. 236) Whereas critics,
such as Popper (1986), insist that Freud's theories cannot be falsified and therefore are not scientific, Eysenck

Grnbaum (1986) concurs with

that Freud's theory is falsifiable and therefore scientific, but he goes one step
further and claims that Freud's theory of psychoanalysis has been proven wrong
and is simply bad science.
claims that because Freud's theories can be falsified, they are scientific.
Eysenck

No Endless War
No risk of endless warfare
Gray, 2007
[Colin, Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies and Professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at
the University of Reading, graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Oxford, Founder and Senior Associate to
the National Institute for Public Policy, formerly with the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Hudson
Institute, July 2007, The Implications of Preemptive and Preventive War Doctrines: A
Reconsideration, http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/ssi10561/ssi10561.pdf]

7. A policy that favors preventive warfare expresses a futile quest for absolute security. It could do so. Most

In the hands of a paranoid or

political leader, prevention could be a policy for endless warfare.
However, the American political system, with its checks and balances, was designed
explicitly for the purpose of constraining the executive from excessive folly. Both the
Vietnam and the contemporary Iraqi experiences reveal clearly that although the
conduct of war is an executive prerogative, in practice that authority is disciplined by public
attitudes. Clausewitz made this point superbly with his designation of the passion, the sentiments, of the people
controversial policies contain within them the possibility of misuse.
boundlessly ambitious

as a vital component of his trinitarian theory of war. 51 It is true to claim that power can be, and indeed is often,
abused, both personally and nationally. It is possible that a state could acquire a taste for the apparent swift
decisiveness of preventive warfare and overuse the option. One might argue that the easy success achieved
against Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, provided fuel for the urge to seek a similarly rapid success against Saddam
Husseins Iraq. In other words, the delights of military success can be habit forming. On balance, claim seven is not
persuasive, though it certainly contains a germ of truth. A country with unmatched wealth and power, unused to
physical insecurity at homenotwithstanding 42 years of nuclear danger, and a high level of gun crimeis

we ought not to endorse the

argument that the United States should eschew the preventive war option because it
could lead to a futile, endless search for absolute security. One might as well argue
that the United States should adopt a defense policy and develop capabilities shaped strictly for homeland
security approached in a narrowly geographical sense. Since a president might misuse a military
instrument that had a global reach, why not deny the White House even the
possibility of such misuse? In other words, constrain policy ends by limiting policys
military means. This argument has circulated for many decades and, it must be admitted, it does have a
certain elementary logic. It is the opinion of this enquiry, however, that the claim that a policy which
includes the preventive option might lead to a search for total security is not at all
convincing. Of course, folly in high places is always possible, which is one of the many reasons why popular
democracy is the superior form of government . It would be absurd to permit the fear of a futile
and dangerous quest for absolute security to preclude prevention as a policy option.
Despite its absurdity, this rhetorical charge against prevention is a stock favorite
among preventions critics. It should be recognized and dismissed for what it is, a
debating point with little pragmatic merit. And strategy , though not always policy, must be
nothing if not pragmatic.
vulnerable to demands for policies that supposedly can restore security. But

AT: Loss of the Self

No value to life doesnt outweigh - prioritize existence
because value is subjective and could improve in the future
Tnnsj, 2011
[Torbjrn, the Kristian Clason Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, 2011, Shalt Thou
Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of Killing, online: http://people.su.se/~jolso/HS-texter/shaltthou.pdf]

if Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living, then

according to utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an end to humanity.
But this does not mean that, each of us should commit suicide . I commented on this in
chapter two when I presented the idea that utilitarianism should be applied , not only to individual
actions, but to collective actions as well. It is a well-known fact that people rarely commit suicide. Some
I suppose it is correct to say that,

even claim that no one who is mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as evidence for the claim that
people live lives worth living? That would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may avoid suicide because

It is also a possibility that, even if people lead

lives not worth living, they believe they do. And even if some may believe that their
lives, up to now, have not been worth living , their future lives will be better. They may
they believe that it is morally wrong to kill oneself.

be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about the future. From the point of view of evolutionary
biology, it is natural to assume that people should rarely commit suicide. If we set old age to one side, it has poor
survival value (of ones genes) to kill oneself. So it should be expected that it is difficult for ordinary people to kill
themselves. But then theories about cognitive dissonance, known from psychology, should warn us that we may
come to believe that we live better lives than we do. My

strong belief is that most of us live lives

worth living. However, I do believe that our lives are close to the point where they stop being worth living. But
then it is at least not very far-fetched to think that they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be

for the sake of the argument assume that our lives are not worth
living, and let us accept that, if this is so, we should all kill ourselves . As I noted above,
this does not answer the question what we should do, each one of us . My conjecture is
that we should not commit suicide . The explanation is simple. If I kill myself, many people
will suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this will happen: ... suicide survivors confront a complex array
too optimistic. Let us just

of feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to
the suicidal person's anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal

Suicide also leads to rage, loneliness, and awareness of vulnerability in those

left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates many popular perceptions of
suicide. The fact that all our lives lack meaning , if they do, does not mean that others
will follow my example. They will go on with their lives and their false expectations at least for a while
act itself.

devastated because of my suicide. But then I have an obligation, for their sake, to go on with my life. It is highly
likely that, by committing suicide, I create more suffering (in their lives) than I avoid (in my life).