Fear of Death K

EVAZON FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK
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**Overviews..................................................................................................................................15
2NC Overview...............................................................................................................................16
2NC Pure War Overview...............................................................................................................17
2NR Overview...............................................................................................................................18
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**Links..........................................................................................................................................19
Link- Nuclear War.........................................................................................................................20
Link- Obsession.............................................................................................................................21
Link- Nuclear Death/Extinction....................................................................................................22
Link- Hegemony............................................................................................................................23
LinkOpposition to Death...........................................................................................................24
LinkPanic...................................................................................................................................25
LinkBukimi................................................................................................................................26
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**Link Blocks................................................................................................................................27
AT: We Have Other Justifications..................................................................................................28
AT: Death Bad/Life Good..............................................................................................................29
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**Impacts.......................................................................................................................................30
ImpactDignity............................................................................................................................31
ImpactDestroys All Resistance..................................................................................................32
ImpactNumbing.........................................................................................................................33
ImpactConsumerism..................................................................................................................34
ImpactExtermination.................................................................................................................35
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**Impact Blocks............................................................................................................................36
AT: Nuclear/War/Death Imagery Good 1/2...................................................................................37
AT: Nuclear/War/Death Imagery Good 2/2...................................................................................38
AT: FoD Makes Life Meaningful..................................................................................................39
AT: Cold War Proves FoD Good...................................................................................................40
AT: Violence Good.........................................................................................................................41
AT: Ketels......................................................................................................................................42
AT: Fear Key to Prevent Nuke War (Futterman)...........................................................................43
AT: Stopping Nuclear War Key 2 Solve FOD...............................................................................44
AT: FoD Key 2 Treat AIDS...........................................................................................................45
AT: FoD Fuel Peace Movements...................................................................................................46
AT: Denies Reality.........................................................................................................................47
AT: You Defend Extinction............................................................................................................48
AT: How Does the Alt Change the World?....................................................................................49
AT: How Does the Alt Change the World?....................................................................................50
AT: You Ignore Suffering...............................................................................................................51
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**Alternative.................................................................................................................................52
Alternative- Transpersonal Solvency.............................................................................................53
Alternative- Nuclear War Solvency...............................................................................................54
Alternative- Mortality Solvency....................................................................................................55
AlternativeMove Beyond Nuclear War.....................................................................................56
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**Alternative Blocks.....................................................................................................................57
AT: No Alternative/Causes Nihilism 1/2.......................................................................................58
AT: No Alternative/Causes Nihilism 2/2.......................................................................................59
AT: Alternative Doesnt Solve Case..............................................................................................60
AT: Radical Alternative Destroys the Movement..........................................................................61
AT: Permutation 1/2.......................................................................................................................62
AT: Permutation 2/2.......................................................................................................................63
AT: Permutation 2NR....................................................................................................................64
AT: Permutation Coalitions.........................................................................................................65
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AT: Fiat Good 2NC 1/2..................................................................................................................68
AT: Fiat Good 2NC 2/2..................................................................................................................69
AT: Fiat Good 2NR........................................................................................................................70
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**Realism Blocks..........................................................................................................................71
AT: Realism Good 2NC 1/2...........................................................................................................72
AT: Realism Good 2NC 2/2...........................................................................................................73
AT: Realism Good 2NR.................................................................................................................74
AT: Threats Are Real......................................................................................................................75
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**Theory Blocks............................................................................................................................76
AT: Performative Contradiction Other Positions........................................................................77
AT: Performative Contradiction Kritiks Impact is Death..........................................................78
AT: PIKs Bad.................................................................................................................................79
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Death K 1NC
Contention One: Thanataphobia
Our society is held in the grip of intense thanatophobia. Our fear of dying is so prevalent
in every aspect of our lives that it is constantly repressed into the subconscious. Americans
are fighting a new war on the western front, one against death itself.
Steven I. Friedland, Professor of Law at Nova Souteastern University, Shepard Broad Law Center, Cleveland
State University Journal of Law and Health, 10 J.L. & Health 95, 1995/1996
The demise of the belief in the good death has prompted the adoption of a new form of heroism, one that involves beating death, not
accepting it with dignity. As a result, medicine has become side-tracked. n64 As society strives for a health care system that works, it is
distracted by the need to prolong and delay dying, which is in part fueled by our obsession with health and our
fear of death. This obsession has two parts: one moral, the other medical. The moral part is the belief that we have an unlimited obligation
to combat death and lethal disease. That is essentially the mission of biomedical research, which, with enormous public support, conducts
unrelenting wars against death. The medical part is the potent assumption that death is essentially an accident, correctable with enough
money, will and scientific ingenuity: if smallpox could be conquered, then so can heart disease. If typhoid fever was eliminated, someday
Alzheimer's disease will be beaten as well. n65 [*109] Rather than constructing a dialogue of death, society hopes that
death will be conquered through a massive research effort. n66 Instead of recognizing the futility of this mission,
Americans choose to wage war against death. The fight against aging shows up in many different ways in our society.
From infomercials hawking return-to-youth products to antibiotics, transplants, chemotherapy, and the rise of cryogenics,
considerable energy and passion is dedicated to avoiding death and its creeping, inexorable grip. Fighting it at all costs -
never giving up - has become a rallying cry of the new heroism, n67 which, if nothing else, has served to
obfuscate and distort the narrative of death. n68 <CONTINUES>A narrative of avoidance characterizes modern
American society's view of death. This narrative has become dominant for several reasons. The promise of
extended longevity through the miracles of medicine, Americans' desire for immortality that is propelled by
continuous scientific discoveries, and the removal of death from the personal realm have enhanced a fear of
death that underlies much, if not all, of life's experiences . This fear of death, in turn, has spurred its avoidance.
The affirmative replicates this evangelism of fear through its constructions of violence, war
and destruction, perpetuating the drive towards immortality.
Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law at Purdue, Self-Determination, International Law and
Survival on Planet Earth, Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Spring 19 94
Humankind is different. Of course, the
spectacle of catastrophe and annihilation has been with us from the beginning, and
the seeming insignificance of individual life appears to be confirmed by every earthquake or typhoon, by every
pestilence or epidemic, by every war or holocaust. Yet, each of us is unwilling to accept a fate that points not only to
extinction, but also to extinction with insignificance. Where do we turn? It is to promises of immortality. And from
where do we hear such promises? From religion, to be sure, but also from States that have deigned to represent God in his planetary political
duties, 46 and that cry out for "self-determination." How do these States sustain the promise of immortality? One way is
through the legitimization of the killing of other human beings. And why is such killing the ostensible protection of one's own
life? An answer is offered by Eugene Ionesco as follows: I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him
from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death. My enemy's death cannot
be held against me, it is no longer a source of anguish, if I killed him with the approval of society: that is the purpose of war. Killing is a way of
relieving one's feelings, of warding off one's own death. 47 There are two separate but interdependent ideas here. The first is the rather pragmatic
and mundane observation that killing someone who would otherwise kill you is a life-supporting action. Why assume that
your intended victim would otherwise be your assassin? Because, of course, your own government has [*17]
clarified precisely who is friend and who is foe. The second, far more complex idea, is that killing in general confers
immunity from mortality. This idea, of death as a zero-sum commodity, is captured by Ernest Becker's paraphrase of Elias Canetti: "Each
organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good." 48 Or, according to Otto Rank, "The death fear of
the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other one buys oneself free
from the penalty of dying, of being killed." 49
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Subpoint A- Kill to Save
In a paradoxical attempt to rebel against death, humans turn to promises of immortality

through absolute loyalty to political ideology. We demand the slaughter of our enemies as
part of an impossible quest to destroy death itself. War itself is not the issue but rather the
death drive behind it.
Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law at Purdue, International Journal on World Peace, No. 3, Volume
16, September 1st, 1999
Behind the play of nations and their wars lies the wish of individual citizens, acting like a herd in denying their own
finitude, to achieve immortality. States have become gods and must be desacralized if our terrible wars are to end.
Individuals, not states, should be viewed as sacred. They should find their true identity in personal virtue, not in a
blind loyalty to a state which promises immortality but leads them down the path to extinction.
The world is full of noise, but if we listen carefully we can hear the real music that will transform ourselves into
purposeful beings and our states into purposeful communities. Why is an entire planet now in jeopardy? The usual
answers are cast in terms of the language of world politics. The nations of the world continue to defer to the primacy
of Realpolitik. Insufficient resources and hopes are committed to arms control. The post-War polarity of East and
West has been transformed into an era of exceedingly cruel ethnic conflicts. And without the assurances of authentic
world authority structures, each state's uncertainty about the intentions of adversary states encourages growing
membership in the nuclear club.
Although these answers are certainly correct, they are also trivial. The struggle for world power is always
epiphenomenal. It is what underlies this struggle, what animates competition between states, that represents the
authentic source of unconventional war and terrorism. I refer to the individual human being's all-consuming fear of
death and to the corollary drive of individuals for immortality.
This calls forth a terrible irony. Dreading, more than anything else, animality decomposition and decay, humankind
sees salvation in an endless display of holy wars disguised as the natural expression of global competition. But as
these wars could require millions to pass through fire, they can only ensure the very evil they have been invented to
dispel. While these excursions into organized barbarism are designed to reveal potency and overcome earthly
limitations, they inevitably make life impossible.
It is not enough to have God on our side. The whole world contradicts not only eternal life, but even a short,
temporal one. As for states, which are always an expression of faith and which have always (even long before
Hegel) regarded themselves as the "march of God in the world," their ceaseless search for power is spawned by the
primal terror of individuals, but it is their fate to create necropolis.
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The process of securing life and developing means to destroy in order to save is part of a broader
system of neoliberal violence. The current death drive is not new as the gulag, holocaust and
genocide are all past examples of the lesson the United States federal government has apparently
missed; humanity cant be saved by destroying itself.
Boaventura de Santos, Prof at Univ of Coimbra, April 2003, Collective Suicide?, Bad Subjects, Issue # 63
According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save
humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need
to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed
to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African
slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars
and many other colonial wars. This is how it was under Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the
Holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even
the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a
new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new
illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the Western illusion: destroying all of
humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion manifested in the belief
that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality, and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise
from failing to take its logic of development to ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death
in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of market laws not having been
fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to
the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This
political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of
alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to reproduce infinitely the status quo. Inherent to it is the
notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic,
and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the
plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the
market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy,
disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the state and international
institutions in their favor. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social
fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion,
worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly
democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a
looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the
broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide
becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism
and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable
populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to
the concept of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The
last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental
Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three
months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough
to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years.
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Subpoint B- Materialism
The Affs discourse of apocalyptic scenarios absent plan action motivates a desire for
frenetic action, white noise, and material acquisition, forming the philosophical foundation
for consumerism.
Marc Weeks, and Frederic Maurel, Voyages Across the Web of Time; Angkarn, Nietzsche and Temporal
Colonization, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, September 1st, 1999
It becomes particularly significant when we realize that the fear of death (thanatophobia), though it pushes death
into the margins of cultural consciousness, is absolutely critical in determining the prodigious hyperactivity of
postmodemity. As Norman O. Brown suggested some four decades ago in the United States in a book entitled
Life Against Death, the exaggerated and apparently limitless desire for more material wealth, more noise and
more activity is an unconscious phobic overreaction to the absence, silence and passivity of death which lurks
within the uniquely temporal human psyche. [33] Appearances to the contrary, it is Thanatos, not Eros, which
primarily drives the hyperactive consumer culture. So when Angkarn's "The Eye of Time" alludes to the
seduction of humans by precious objects towards which they "rush to their deaths", we should remember that,
ironically, it may be the individualized person's knowledge and fear of death, and the vain desire to defeat
mortality through material self-aggrandis ement (or through mindnumbing, time-destroying freneticism), that
actually render the human so vulnerable to that seduction. There is an important sense, then, in which Angkarn's
aesthetic temporal philosophy, though not immune to nostalgia, presents a more profound alterity to the
increasingly pervasive market and productivity-centred global culture than does Nietzsche. The German writer is
clearly at odds with the culture of unlimited consumption that was gestating in Europe in the latter part of the
nineteenth century. His philosophy of the will represents, among other things, a response to the will-less,
unrestrained desire of a human conceived principally as producer-consumer. Yet Nietzsche's promotion of the
superhuman individual who relentlessly pursues the mastery of time, the domination of death, epitomizes that
culture in which the individual is at war with time, with mortality. As we have attempted to demonstrate here,
that same psychological war plays a significant role in driving the irrational and exponential growth of a
globalizing free market.
This drive to constantly acquire and consume transforms the world into a materialist
wasteland, devoid of meaning. The greatest threat is not nuclear war it is avoiding
nuclear war only to fall prey to an eternity of counterfeit existence.
Michael E. Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy at Tulane, Contesting Earths Future: Radical Ecology and
Postmodernity, 1994
Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation between
being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a nuclear war that might bring
about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth. This controversial claim is
comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose ones soul by losing ones
relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might
once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur an ontological clearing through which
such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernitys one-dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies
them any being at all, the loss of humanitys openness for being is already occurring. Modernitys background
mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material happiness for
everyone by reducing nature to pure energy. The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in nuclear war would be
equivalent to modernitys slow-motion destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would equal limitless
consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed we
would exist in a state of ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise.
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Subpoint C- Biopolitics
The attempts to control, manage, and ensure safety of the population is based on the power
of death and its underside, the power to warn and strike fear. This form of control is the
root of all 20th century atrocities as the sovereign sword has diminished in favor of the
violence of the population.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume One, 1978
Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never
before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death and this is
perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits now
presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, subjecting it to precise controls
and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they
are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale
slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies
and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many to be killed. And
through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out
destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the
naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole
population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individuals continued existence . The principle
underlying the tactics of battle that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living has become the
principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of
sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers,
this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the
level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.
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Contention Two: Hope
The repression of mortality is sustained in political reality by a series of linguistic

prohibitions and taboos concerning the subject of death. While the Affirmative builds the
walls of fear ever higher, the negative offers a different approach:
Text: Vote negative to shatter the silence surrounding death through an absolute rejection
of the Affirmatives fantasies of immortality in order to embrace hope in the uncertain
present.
The duty of those who judge is to relentlessly tear down the taboo surrounding death at
every turn a Negative ballot signifies an important political stance, and begins the
deconstruction of the deathwatch.
Louise Harmon, Professor of Law and Medical Ethics at the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center at Touro College, 77
Minnesota Law Review 1, November 1992, gender paraphrased
There is also a direct relationship between our attitude toward death and its status as a taboo subject . A taboo
is something forbidden, and taboos come in many different forms. They may be proscriptions against certain
behaviors, n194 or against eating certain foods, n195 or touching certain sacred or [*108] profane objects or
persons. n196 But taboos can also be what Levi-Strauss called "linguistic prohibitions." n197 In a given
culture, certain words or subjects may be forbidden to be spoken of in public discourse. Someone with
Victorian sensibilities, for example, may consider the mention of sexual activity or birth to violate a taboo.
n198 Geoffrey Gorer has theorized that there has been a shift in prudery during the last century, with the
subject of death replacing the subject of sex as the forbidden topic on life's agenda. n199 His explanation for
the linguistic prohibition on the subject of death is the same as mine: People no longer have a system of belief
that includes spiritual immortality.
The reasoning goes something like this: If the predominant attitude toward death in a culture is one of fear,
then death becomes the subject of a linguistic prohibition -- a taboo. n200 There are risks in violating a taboo.
Much like a formal legal system, our informal, traditional codes of conduct often [*110] carry sanctions for
the breaking of unwritten rules. n201 By referring to the subject of death, and in particular to one's own death,
one runs the risk of conjuring up death's appearance. n202 In breaking the taboo, the speaker endangers
himself [themselves] by making himself [them self] vulnerable to the evil that prompted the taboo. If that risk
is of no threat to the speaker, then the subject can be openly spoken of. In this instance, if the appearance of
death does not rattle our bones, then there is no reason for silence on the subject . Simply put, the less fear we
have about something, the more likely we are to talk about it. The converse is true as well: the more fear we
have about something, the less likely we are to talk about it. Once again, this is not a very ambitious claim.
[Continues] If we could shatter the silence that surrounds the subject of death, we might be able to confront the
taboo. Confronting the taboo would make for better deaths, and making for better deaths would help alleviate the
horrors of the late twentieth-century-deathwatch. It would be an improvement in the human condition; a benefit for
us all, and something to aspire to. But for the people in power, confronting the taboo must be more than just an
aspiration. Those people who orchestrate the deaths of others -- who have jurisdiction over the human body, [*115]
who judge death talk, who design death spaces -- have a duty to confront the taboo. This duty runs not only to the
dying person, but also to those who gather around him.
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We must separate hope from solvency claims and calculability. We are asking you to seek
hope in an uncertain present rather than try to avoid impending disaster.
Brian Massumi, Associate Professor of Communications at the Universit de Montral, and Mary Zournazi,
Philosopher and Ph.D in Cultural Theory, 2002, Hope: New Philosophies for Change; New York: Routledge; p. 211-
212
Yes - the idea of hope in the present is vital . Otherwise we endlessly look to the future or toward some
utopian dream of a better society or life, which can only leave us disappointed, and if we see pessimism as the
natural flow from this, we can only be paralysed as you suggest. Yes, because in every situation there are any
number of levels of organisation and tendencies in play, in cooperation with each other or at cross-purposes. The
way all the elements interrelate is so complex that it isn't necessarily comprehensible in one go. There's always a
sort of vagueness surrounding the situation, an uncertainty about where you might be able to go, and what
you might be able to do once you exit that particular context. This uncertainty can actually be empowering -
once you realise that it gives you a margin of manoeuvrability and you focus on that, rather than on projecting
success or failure. It gives you the feeling that there is always an opening to experiment, to try and see. This brings
a sense of potential to the situation. The present's `boundary condition', to borrow a phrase from science, is never
a closed door. It is an open threshold - a threshold of potential. You are only ever in the present in passing. If
you look at it that way you dont have to feel boxed in by it, no matter what its horrors, and no matter what,
rationally, you expect will come. You may not reach the end of the trail but at least there's a next step. The question
of which next step to take is a lot less intimidating than how to reach a far-off goal in a distant future where all our
problems will finally be solved. It's utopian thinking, for me, that's `hopeless'.
The best political stance is to reject calculations of probability and policy outcomes, and
instead embrace a personal stance of hope. Predictability and the uncertainty of hope are
mutually exclusive, so choose wisely.
Isabelle Stengers, Professor of Philosophy at the Universit Libre de Bruxelles, and Mary Zournazi, a
Philosopher and Ph.D in Cultural Theory; Hope: New Philosophies for Change; New York: Routledge; 2002; p.
245-247
I think probability is often associated with the idea of chance - so do you mean something else here, not simply an encounter with chance? The word
`chance' has many meanings. You may speak of chance when you calculate the chance for something to happen, and then it is probability. For instance, you
Probability is very
can throw the dice and have a succession of nine and six - and you can calculate the probability of this particular succession.
interesting for all the people who spend time describing systems they can define, but the behaviour of which
they are unable to predict. But it implies a closed definition, through a set of variables which will remain
invariant. It is thus a static notion. I call possibility what cannot be calculated a priori, because it implies the
fact that the very description of the system itself can change. And you cannot calculate that. Possibility is connected to what I
call èvents'. Again, the term èvent' may have many meanings - the one I retain emphasises the difference an event makes between the past, which made it possible but
which cannot explain it, and the future which, one way or another, takes it into account. Such a future may, and often will, include telling the past in such a way
this creates
that it seems to explain the event. The philosopher Henri Bergson is the one who best described this `retroactive power' of what happens. So
the possibility of hope and the creativity to think and feel in life? You have written about the importance of the capacity to feel
in critical practices, and that there needs to be a certain tenderness in understanding different traditions of thought (for instance, in revisiting thinkers
like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud). / am wondering about that - the capacity to feel and what that capacity enables, I mean it does enable a
kind of hope, I think... For me, feeling and thinking are closely connected, but their connection refers to experience as something which is not first `my'
experience, but which is forced by encounters which make me think and feel. It may be encounters with things or with people, or with ideas. When I
read Whitehead I do not just examine his ideas; they oblige me to feel and think in a new way. They induce èvents'. Whitehead himself made the
distinction between dead ideas and ideas which are alive - at school many ideas we try to transmit are dead. In the best case, students will learn them
You cannot have true thinking
and then forget about them. They are devoid of any importance because they do not force you to think and feel.
without feeling - and what that means is that true thinking is about transforming yourself. But the very fact
that we can be transformed by what we encounter, or what we participate in, is a matter of hope. It does not
promise anything, but no-one has the right to say Ì know how things are, they are hopeless' . This hope is an
unknown quality, right, because you cant predict the outcome? Yes. I think so. And you cannot tell someone else that he or she
should ~ have this experience, to think and feel. As a teacher I can only celebrate with a student the fact that I `felt' it was happening for him or her, and hope the one
for whom what I produced were dead ideas will encounter other opportunities. Again, the only thing which can be understood, explained and amply justified is
despair. I think hope is itself an event, and you must just be grateful as long as you are able to hope or to think.
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Death K 1NC
Embrace the current world, the status quo, for all its faults, to find the joy in it. DO NOT
link this joy of the present to a solution for future based on our fear of death or all hope is
lost.
Brian Massumi, Associate Professor of Communications at the Universit de Montral, and Mary Zournazi,
Philosopher and Ph.D in Cultural Theory, 2002, Hope: New Philosophies for Change; New York: Routledge; p. 241-
242
Yes, and there is a relation between this ethics, hope and the idea of joy. If we take Spinoza and Nietzsche seriously, an ethic of joy
and the cultivation of joy is an affirmation of life . In the sense of what you are saying, even a small thing can become
amplified and can have a global effect which is life-affirming . What are your thoughts on this ethical relationship in everyday
existence? And in intellectual practice - which is where we are coming from - what are the affirmations of joy and hope? Well, I think that joy is
not the same thing as happiness . Just like good for Nietzsche is not the opposite of evil, joy for Spinoza (or `gaiety' in Nietzsche's
vocabulary) is not the opposite of unhappy. It's on a different axis. Joy can be very disruptive , it can even be very painful. What I
think Spinoza and Nietzsche are getting at is joy as affirmation, an assuming by the body of its potentials, its assuming of a
posture that intensifies its powers of existence . The moment of joy is the co-presence of those potentials, in the context of a bodily
becoming. That can be an experience that overcomes you. Take Antonin Artaud, for example. His artistic practice was all about intensifying bodily
potential, trying to get outside or underneath the categories of language and affective containment by those categories, trying to pack vast potentials for
movement and meaning in a single gesture, or in words that burst apart and lose their conventional meaning, becoming likea scream of possibility,
a babble of becoming, the body bursting out through an opening in expression. It's liberating, but at the same time the charge of that potential can
become unbearable and can actually destroy. Artaud himself was destroyed by it; he ended up mad, and so did Nietzsche. So it is not just simple opposition
between happy and unhappy or pleasant or unpleasant. I do think, though, that the practice of joy does imply some form of belief. It can't
be a total scepticism or nihilism or cynicism, which are all mechanisms for holding oneself separate and being in a position to
judge or deride. But, on the other hand, it's not a belief in the sense of a set of propositions to adhere to or a set of
principles or moral dictates . There is a phrase of Deleuze's that I like very much, where he says that what we need is to be able to
find a way to `believe in the world' again . It's not at all a theological statement - or an anti-theological statement, for that matter.
It's an ethical statement . What it is saying is that we have to live our immersion in the world, really experience our
belonging to this world, which is the same thing as our belonging to each other, and live that so intensely together that there is no room to
doubt the reality of it. The idea is that lived intensity is self-affirming. It doesn't need a god or judge or head of state to tell it that it has
value. What it means, I think, is accept the embeddedness, go with it, live it out, and that's your reality, it's the only reality you have, and it's your
participation that makes it real. That's what Deleuze is saying belief is about, a belief in the world. It's not a belief that's
àbout' being in the world; it is a being in the world. Because it's all about being in this world, warts and all, and not
some perfect world beyond, or a better world of the future, it's an empirical kind of belief. Ethical, empirical - and creative, because your
participation in this world is part of a global becoming. So it's about taking joy in that process, wherever it leads,
and I guess it's about having a kind of faith in the world which is simply the hope that it continue... But again, it is
not a hope that has a particular content or end point - it's a desire for more life, or for more to life.
The criticism calls into question the ideology that forms a basis for their action. Their
thought process not only constitutes reality, but is more important than the action itself.
Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, The Post-Development Reader, 1997, p. 340
Yes, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar
providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence. As this aspect grows in importance, and as it
gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself albeit a
reality altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may have even
greater weight than reality as such. Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality
hidden behind it. The significance of phenomena no longer derives from the phenomena themselves, but from their
locus as concepts in the ideological context. Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse . Thus power
gradually draws closer to ideology than it does to reality: it draws its strength from theory and becomes entirely
dependent on it. This inevitable leads, of course, to a paradoxical result; rather than theory, or rather ideology,
serving power, power begins to serve ideology. It is as though ideology has appropriated power from power, as
though it had become dictator itself. It then appears that theory itself, ritual itself, ideology itself, makes decisions
that affect people, and not the other way around.
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Pure War 1NC

The 1AC is a fantasy of pure war universal destruction that threatens us at every turn
this turns us into pure warriors who endlessly rehearse our own deaths ultimately this
leaves us unable to confront cruelty in our everyday lives
Mark B. Borg Jr., practicing psychoanalyst and community/organizational consultant working in New York City,
03 Psychoanalytic Pure War: interactions with the post-apocalyptic unconscious, Journal of Psychoanalysis,
questia
Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer's concept of "pure war"refers to the potential of a culture to destroy itself
completely (12). 2 We as psychoanalysts canand increasingly mustexplore the impact of this concept on our
practice, and on the growing number of patients who live with the inability to repress or dissociate their experience
and awareness of the pure war condition. The realization of a patient's worst fears in actual catastrophic events has
always been a profound enough psychotherapeutic challenge. These days, however, catastrophic events not only
threaten friends, family, and neighbors; they also become the stuff of endless repetitions and dramatizations on
radio, television, and Internet. 3 Such continual reminders of death and destruction affect us all. What is the role of
the analyst treating patients who live with an ever-threatening sense of the pure war lying just below the surface of
our cultural veneer?
At the end of the First World War, the first "total war," Walter Benjamin observed that "nothing [after the war]
remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and
explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body"(84). Julia Kristeva makes a similar note about our contemporary
situation, "The recourse to atomic weapons seems to prove that horror...can rage absolutely" (232). And, as if he too
were acknowledging this same fragility and uncontainability, the French politician Georges Clemenceau commented
in the context of World War I that "war is too serious to be confined to the military" (qtd. in Virilio and Lotringer
15).
Virilio and Lotringer gave the name "pure war"to the psychological condition that results when people know that
they live in a world where the possibility for absolute destruction (e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As Virilio and
Lotringer see it, it is not the technological capacity for destruction (that is, for example, the existence of nuclear
armaments) that imposes the dread characteristic of a pure war psychology but the belief systems that this capacity
sets up. Psychological survival requires that a way be found (at least unconsciously) to escape inevitable destruction
it requires a way outbut this enforces an irresolvable paradox, because the definition of pure war culture is that
there is no escape. Once people believe in the external possibilityat least those people whose defenses cannot
handle the weight of the dread that pure war imposespure war becomes an internal condition, a perpetual state of
preparation for absolute destruction and for personal, social, and cultural death.
The tragedy at the World Trade Center in New York City has given us a bitter but important opportunity to study the
effects of the pure war condition on individuals. It allows us to look at how this all-encompassing state appears in
psychoanalytic treatment and to observe its influence through the analysis of transference/countertransference
dynamics. The pure war condition has been brought grimly to consciousness. In this paper, I will explore how it
manifests itself in society, in character, and most specifically in the psychoanalytic treatment of one patient whose
dynamics highlight significant aspects of the pure war state.
How does treatment happen when, at some level, we perceive ourselves as already dead? Whatever our individual
differences, our visions of the psychoanalytic endeavor arise out of the social defense of the culture within which we
live and work (I have referred to this as "community character," cf. Borg 350). And whatever our individual
differences, in a pure war situation the primary task is simply to sustain the dream of psychic survival. The case of
Joyce, who saw the first explosion at the World Trade Center as she rode down Fifth Avenue in a bus after her
session with me, exemplifies this task. [End Page 57]
Continues
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Pure War 1NC

Continued
The Pure Warrior
The philosophy (or practice) of "pure warriors," that is, of people who are preoccupied with the pure war condition
of their society, is based on the perpetual failure within them of the dissociation and repression that allow others to
function in a situation that is otherwise completely overwhelming. Joyce was one of those who lived on the border
of life and death; she could not escape awareness of that dread dichotomy that most of us are at great pains to
dissociate. She manifested the state of perpetual preparation that is the hallmark of pure war culture and of the
insufficiently defended pure warrior, and also a constant awareness of the nearness of death in all its various forms.
She understood quite well, for instance, that when people are institutionalized (as she had been on numerous
occasions), "society is defining them as socially dead, [and that at that point] the essential task to be carried out is to
help inmates to make their transition from social death to physical death" (Miller and Gwynne 74). Against this
backdrop, Joyce sought psychoanalysis as a "new world," the place where she would break free from the deathly
institutionalized aspects of her self, and begin her life anew. Her search for a "new world" included the possibility of
a world that was not a pure war worlda prelapsarian Eden.
Virilio and Lotringer state that "war exists in its preparation" (53). And Sun Tsu, who wrote over 2400 years ago and
yet is often considered the originator of modern warfare, said in The Art of War, "Preparation everywhere means
lack everywhere" (44). This means that when the members of a culture must be on guard on all fronts, the resources
of that culture are necessarily scattered and taxed. The more defenses are induced and enacted, the more
psychologically impoverished a culture (or a person) will be. In war-torn nations, resources like food, clothing, and
materials for shelter may be scarce in the general population because they are shunted off to the military. Similarly,
the hoarding of psychological resources and the constant alert status of the defense system are outcomes of existence
in a pure war culture. We can see this scattering and scarcity of resources occurring already in the United States as
billions of dollars are shunted from social services to war efforts and homeland security.
In pure war culturesthat is, in cultures that enact a perpetual preparation for warthe notion of peace is itself a
defensive fantasy, although to survive psychically we distract ourselves from such frightening stimuli as widespread
terrorist activities and other events that demonstrate our pure war status. Pure war obliterates the distinction between
soldier and citizen. We have all been drafted. According to Virilio and Lotringer, "All of us are already civilian
soldiers, without knowing it...War happens everywhere, but we no longer have the means of recognizing it" (42).
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____________
**Overviews
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2NC Overview
The 1AC represents the status quo as doomed to widespread death absent plan action. Our
Friedland and Beres evidence indicate that the motivation for their desire to preserve life is
a fantasy of immortality sustained by the repression of deaths inevitability. The need to
talk about saving lives to cover up the silence and passivity of death that lurks beyond their
conscious thought contributes to the repression of death in society.
3 Impacts:
1. Kill to Save- Within both the framework of fiat and discursive performance, fear of
death drives individuals to absolute obedience to the State they see as capable of
protecting them. They demand continuous destruction of the Other, in an
externalization of the weakness they perceive in themselves and to cover up death,
ensuring destruction of all life on Earth.
2. Negates the Value to Life- In an attempt to create permanent meaning in a

temporary world, individuals try to define themselves though material acquisition.
The repression of death goes hand in hand with the senseless drive to constantly
accumulate and self-preserve. This mentality dooms us to an eternity of counterfeit
existence which outweighs extinction.
3. Bioplitical Control- The panopticon is most applicable in this situation- just as

guards maintain control of their subjects through fear of punishment, so does the
affirmative keep actual change at bay and promote violence on the subjects of their
affirmative. The implication of this form of biopower is constant comparison and
subjugation through all means of violence and extermination.
Our alternative offers a different approach- rather than utilize discourses based on the
repression of death, we must confront that repression with hope through a rejection of the
Affs fantasies of immortality. This rejection not only avoids all the links it also presents
the only way possible to solve the Affirmative.
Additionally, extend our Havel evidence - the judges duty is to decide between competing
frameworks, and adopt whichever framework best exposes the repressed fantasmatic
constructions.
Yannis Stavrakakis, Research Fellow at the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham, Lacan and the
Political, 1999
If there is a duty for critical intellectuals today it is to occupy all the time the space of this hole, especially when a
new order (a new reoccupation of traditional politics) is stabilized and attempts to make invisible this lack in the
Other (Zizek, 1993: 1-2). As far a political praxis is concerned our ethical duty can only be to attempt the
institutionalization of this lack within political reality. This duty is a truly and radically democratic one. It is also an
ethical duty that marks the philosophical dimensions of democracy. As Bernasconi and Critchley point out, if democracy is an ethically
grounded form of political life which does not cease to call itself into question by asking of its legitimacy, if legitimate communities are those that call themselves into
question, then these communities are philosophical (Critchley, 1992: 239).
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2NC Pure War Overview

Extend our original piece of Borg evidence from the 1nc- the affirmatives depiction of war,
war planning and destruction is not benign but rather a psychological defense mechanism.
These representations are part of the pure war culture Virilio coined- a world in which
constant images of violence and war force entire social bodies to live in constant fear and
trepidation knowing that with the flick of a switch or turn of a button, the frame of peace
could be shattered. However, this internal conditions paradox is quite evident- the same
fear of death that is sought to give security is the same condition that necessitates violence
as there is no escape from danger in a pure war culture as defenses eg. Nuclear bombs and
arms are constantly built up to kill to save
AND- Even if the affirmatives representations are well intentioned, the constant process,
especially in debate, of image after image in constant loops and repetitions is an attempt to
avoid the ultimate end of our fear of death- one of annihilation- we must move away from
these obsessive pleas
Mark B. Borg Jr., practicing psychoanalyst and community/organizational consultant working in New York City,
03 Psychoanalytic pure war: interactions with the post-apocalyptic unconscious, Journal of Psychoanalysis,
questia
From their individual viewpoints, therefore, Freud, Winnicott, and Sullivan each described facets of the pure war
condition. They outlined the processes by which it may be translated into patterns of interaction with the
environment (individuals, institutions, etc.), and they examined the repetition/enactment of these processes in the
transference. A person's attitude toward his or her environment (of which one representation is the analyst) is
inevitably made up of transferential appraisals, which are formed initially and maintained afterward in cultural as
well as familial contexts. Of course, to the degree that pure war is an internal condition, reaction to it may be
observed in all forms of psychological defense: sublimation, dissociation, repression, splitting, obsessive-
compulsive behaviors, and so on. Each one of these processes addresses the underlying terror of the pure war
perception by communicating the message, "See? Everything's really OK after all."
Patients like Joyce end up in our offices when such reassurance becomes impossible. The specters with whom we
share our (internal) lives perpetually threaten to retaliate, the harbingers of pure war. As we share our lives with
them, they share their deaths with us, pulling away the covers under which we keep our own internalized and
dissociated personal visions of total annihilation.
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2NR Overview
Well do our impact analysis here-
The conceded Foucault evidence means their case impact cant make any sense. EVEN IF
THEY WIN THEIR ARGUMENTS ABOUT REPRESENTATIONS BEING GOOD, they
cant assign an objective value to human life within their ethical system based on
survivability. That calculation makes humans an object, a necessary step to genocide and
nuclear annihilation, which turns case.
Also, they conceded our consumerism implication- this is impacted by our Zimmerman
evidence, which is comparative. Even if they win the result of our alternative is nuclear war
and extinction, it is preferable to a world devoid of meaning.
Additionally, they conceded our Havel and Stavrakakis evidence- Ideology creates the
reality we live in and is more important than the action itself. The duty of the judge is a
constant criticism of attempts to cover up the lack in the symbolic order. This means
questions of desirability of the plans implementation take a backseat to concerns of
justification.
This is the only evidence that speaks to the relative importance of action and theory, which
makes it like a conceded topicality interpretation. No matter how much offense they win,
they dont have a credible counter-interpretation. This also takes out any risk of their
permutation.
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______
**Links
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Link- Nuclear War

The avoidance of nuclear catastrophes represents the ultimate fear of death, ones
collectivity, shattering the strive for immortality
Michael C. Kearl; Social Forces, Vol. 61, 1983, questia
Historically, the ultimate death fear has undoubtedly been the death of one's collectivity, whether by pogrom
or plague. The contemporary manifestation of this megadeath fear is a nuclear holocaust,[sic] a phenomenon
not only manmade [sic] but accomplished by the highest level of social structure, the state. All modes of
immortality, whether they be of induction into some professional hall of fame, one's genetic continuity, or
religious genealogical files, are now at the mercy of the state. As Lifton observed: "For, if we anticipate the
possibility of nuclear weapons being used, and I believe everyone from about the age of six or seven in some
measure does, we are faced with the prospect of being severed from virtually an of our symbolic paths to
immortality" (b, 23-4).
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Link- Obsession
The 1ac is obsessed with preserving life, avoiding death and emphasizing destruction. This
fear of death comes to encompass the entire politics of the viewer, encompassing all
thoughts within a frame of how to avoid their own, individual, and our, collective,
annihilation.
Robert Jay Lifton, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School University Center, 1979,
Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life
All this takes us to an evolving concept of obsessional states that relates them to intolerance for and therefore
preoccupation with "death, decay, destruction, violence, anything dealing with unaccountable elements of
human existence." 35 I would emphasize in obsessive states the lifelong inner terror of disintegration.
Freud's patient as much as told him so when he remarked to his analyst, in the midst of an exchange concerning
conscious and unconscious aspects of his obsessive ideas: "Such an occurrence, he continued, was thus only possible
where a disintegration of the personality was already present" (and it was Freud himself who underlined that phrase)." 36
Moreover, this case, along with other writings of Freud, did much to develop the image-triad of obsession-fecesdeath,
remarked upon by a number of writers. That trinity has much to do, of course, with the tendency for bowel training to
become an arena of parent-child struggle. Keeping in mind the association of feces and disintegration, we understand
both the imagery and the struggle to have to do with elements of life-power and "falling apart."
Freud dealt more with death imagery in this case than in most of his writings, and seemed to be on the brink of elevating
that imagery to some conceptual significance. But at a key point, he drew back. In an important two-page sequence
toward the end of the theoretical section he notes the patient's "quite peculiar attitude towards the question of death,"
mentions his nickname and its significance, and emphasizes (in passages we have already quoted) the importance for the
patient of the early death of his older sister and longstanding thoughts about his father's death. 38 He recognizes that other
obsessional neurotics behave similarly: "Their thoughts are unceasingly occupied with other people's length
of life and possibility of death." These others need not have experienced family death at an early age as the
source of that death imagery. Instead, "these neurotics need the help of the possibility of death chiefly in
order that it may act as a solution of conflict they have left unsolved." For Freud, death imagery must always
be secondary--in this case to the obsessive's inability to come to decisions, "especially in matters of love."
Causation is brought back to instinct: "For we must remember that in every neurosis we come upon the same
suppressed instincts behind the symptoms."
The primary significance of annihilation for obsessional neurosis becomes clear when we turn to our third
principle, that of meaning. Actual death imagery and death equivalents come together around a troubled
relationship with time. Fenichel writes:
"Orientation in time" is a typical reassuring measure. Many a fear of death means a fear of a state where the
usual conceptions of time are invalid. States in which the orientation in time becomes more difficult--dusk or
long evenings in winter or even long days in summer--are feared by many compulsion neurotics. . . . 39
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Link- Nuclear Death/Extinction

Representations of death are the most cynical form of voyeurism- they serve to influence
the masses on taboo subjects, all the time, everyday through renditions in various forms i.e.
new advantages, cases, etc. Unfortunately, they are all merely a product of the same
pornographic dealings with the fear factor that make the impacts possible.
Robert Jay Lifton, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School University Center, 1979, Broken
Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life
Geoffrey Gorer was groping toward that distortion when he spoke of the "pornography of death." 18 He was
referring to what he took to be the twentieth century replacement of sex by death as an underground sphere of
conflict; and the eruption of previously taboo lurid private fantasy into public discourse in the form of
extravagant mass media rendition of death and violence. Gorer stresses a shift in prudery--the
unmentionability of sex giving way to the unmentionability of natural death. But the source of the
pornography--of our shared fantasies of runaway violence--may reside in the state of mind we have been
discussing. Our public depictions of violent death can be exploitative and repulsive in the extreme. But they
are no more excessive than, perhaps appropriate to, the ultimate nuclear pornography: the equation in
our minds of death with extinction.
We have been discussing various forms of dislocation in connection with impaired symbolic immortality, the
identity of the meaninglessly doomed, and the equation of death with extinction. As we move further along
the aberrant sequence we find that specific nuclear relationships to totalism and victimization can be
understood around imagery of "security" and "secrecy." We can consider these in their collective significance
and then turn to individual psychological counterparts.
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Link- Hegemony
Hegemony IS the drive towards immortality- the 1acs presentation and sustenance of a
strong, forward deployment and coherent national security presents a move towards
totalism in which fear is conquered, paving the way for a transcendence of mortality
And since the development of nuclear weapons, we may speak of a pervasive sense of vulnerability to
annihilation. This vulnerability was recognized very early by some of those originally closely associated with
making the first atomic bomb. Even as he in effect rejected scientists' petitions against the dropping of the first
atomic bomb without warning on a populated city, Secretary of War Henry Stimson not only suggested that the
weapon brought about a new relationship of man to the universe but said: "It must be controlled if possible to
make it an assurance of future peace rather than a menace to civilization." 21
The most constructive approach to that vulnerability would be to acknowledge it and work universally to
overcome it. But the more frequent national response resembles that of an individual who fends off his imagery
of threatened annihilation by means of more aggressive and more total measures to assert his power ,
measures which may in turn enable him to believe his illusion of invulnerability. Thus nations, perhaps
especially bomb-possessors, are likely to move toward totalism in both foreign and domestic policies. Hans J.
Morgenthau, for instance, describes a dangerous American tendency toward globalism," which he sees as
isolationism "turned inside out":
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LinkOpposition to Death
By contrast, the Affirmative defines and defends life in opposition to death death is the
absence of life, it is subtracted from the value of those who remain living this way of
understanding death as the end of consumptive utility underlies the value system of
postmodern capital.
Butterfield Department of English University of Wisconsin 2002, Postmodern Culture 13.1
The primitives, Baudrillard maintains, responded to this challenge collectively through symbolic exchanges with
their dead and deities. Their belief in the sign's transparency, its symbolic singularity, can be seen in animistic
practices such as voodoo, where the enemy's hair is thought to contain his or her spirit. If the dead are only humans
of a different nature, and if the sign is what it stands for, then a symbolic sacrifice to a dead person is every bit as
binding as a gift to a living person. The obligation to return is placed upon the dead, and they reciprocate by
somehow honoring or benefiting the living. Most Christians believe in and employ this same mechanism when they
pray to the resurrected Christ, but even they do not believe that their symbolic gestures are anything but metaphors.
We no longer believe in the one to one correspondence of signifier and signified, and we know the loved one is not
really contained in the lock of hair. Americans will doubtless commemorate the deaths of those killed on 9/11 as
long as our nation exists, but we know that our gifts to the dead are only symbolic, which for us means imaginary.
Baudrillard's postmodern-primitive symbolic, on the other hand, aimed to obliterate the difference in value between
the imaginary and the real, the signifier and the signified, and to expose the metaphysical prejudice at the heart of all
such valuations. His wager was that this would be done through aesthetic violence and not real violence, but having
erased the difference between the two, there was never any guarantee that others wouldn't take such theoretical
"violence" to its literal ends. Graffiti art, scarification and tattooing are just the benign counterparts of true terrorism,
which takes ritual sacrifice and initiation to their extremes. Literalists and extremists, fundamentalists of all sorts,
find their logic foretold in Baudrillard's references to the primitives. What the terrorists enacted on 9/11 was what
Baudrillard would call a symbolic event of the first order, and they were undeniably primitive in their belief that
God, the dead, and the living would somehow honor and benefit them in the afterlife. Unable to defeat the U.S. in
economic or military terms, they employ the rule of prestation in symbolic exchange with the gift of their own
deaths. But Americans are not "primitives"--we do not value death symbolically, but rather only as a subtraction
from life. Capitalism's implicit promise, in every ad campaign and marketing strategy, is that to consume is to live.
We score up life against death as gain against loss, as if through accumulation we achieve mastery over the
qualitative presence of death that haunts life. Our official holidays honoring the dead serve no other function than to
encourage consumption.
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LinkPanic
The Affirmative is the society of panic WMD are everywhere and coming to get us this
is the mode of symbolic exchange by which the government creates a simulatenously
passive docile citizenry to facilitate violence
CAROLLO Assistant Professor of English 2003
Bad Subjects, Issue # 64, September 2003
Panic is our national pastime. In February 2003, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon gave a lecture about how
childhood adventuring has been radically curtailed by the lack of "wilderness" to explore. People feel uncomfortable
leaving their children alone to explore their surroundings. Chabon spoke of his daughter learning to ride a bicycle,
followed by his realization that there's no place he feels comfortable having her ride it. In the course of one
generation, the wilderness of childhood has been planned, mapped, and regulated by the fears of adults. Paul Feig's
memoir, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence, describes how high school in America is defined by the possibility of
panic attacks lurking around every corner. Much of life centers on making sure we avoid being attacked. The
collective dimensions of panic disorder, an illness generally treated on an individual basis, is the subject of this
essay. Americans are strangely united by their isolation from one another.
The much-heralded individualist spirit of American society relies on nurturing a fear of other people. Fear of public
spaces where anyone can hang out in turn supports the proliferation of private property and restricted access
locations. Fear of public transportation means more and more privately owned cars on the road. The rhetorical
necessity of slogans such as "United We Stand" are countered by the ongoing national zeitgeist of "Leave Me and
My Family Alone." The implication embodied in "United We Stand" is that we have some (un-American) Other to
be united against. A suggestive correlation between the isolation of mental illness and political isolationism can be
found in the rhetoric of "going it alone." The individualization of panic disorder corresponds to the media-savvy
militarization of American politics. Panic inspires pre-emptive attacks on whatever violates the sanctity of private
life.
As we regulate childhood, so we map out the appropriate parameters of adulthood. Television often plays on the
prevalent anxieties of adolescence, treating its viewers like children in need of constant rules and warnings. Local
Fox News promises the viewer "Stories that Affect You," but the news itself offers such in-depth detritus as exposs
on the dangers of car airbags and "that Duluth prostitution ring we've been keeping you informed about." I'm not
suggesting that danger doesn't exist, but local television news has largely become a venue that creates a catalogue of
fears for citizens everywhere. In addition, local formats adhere to a national formula for what constitutes
newsworthiness, and what should affect local populations.
We locate panic at the extreme end of the anxiety spectrum, as the awful truth of a phobia, the end result of what
psychiatrist Robert L. DuPont refers to as the "what if?" of horrific possibility. The possibility of panic, however,
covers a much broader band of the spectrum. The news media may not want panic attacks to actually occur, but they
like us to routinely consider the possibility that something awful might happen if we do not maintain a healthy level
of anxiety and keep watching the news for updates. Witness coverage of the scare of African killer bees a few
years ago, recently featured in Bowling for Columbine. Be alert. Get scared. This anxiety constitutes a sort of pre-
emptive strike, if you will, on the panic state. Awful things often do happen. A smoking gun does not need to be
fired; the suggestion of a gun's potential is enough. The very possibility of weapons of mass destruction, for
example, can inspire a state of panic. The weapons don't need to be there.
Panic has dominion over the future. The past may inspire panic attacks, but only as the harbinger of what may
perhaps come again. As we get further away from cataclysmic events, their ability to inspire terror becomes
attenuated. This means government, the entertainment industry, or news media need to regularly create new things
to fear. Whether the hand that rocks the cradle is the government wishing to sell a new military solution to the
world's problems, or an entertainment industry that wants us to believe that "a nation lost its innocence" after Pearl
HarborTM, we find ourselves in the business of selling and consuming panic of one sort or another.
Though post-9/11 panic no longer governs America in the same way it did in late 2001, the government still uses the
Trade Center bombings as a way to gain support for future military initiatives. Hence the pandemic of global
terrorism, a phenomenon that sees 9/11 as a significant event in a never-ending continuum of potential danger. Just
as we ritually lose our innocence, so we must honor our worst fears. The current government encourages us to
believe that no historical precursors exist to muddy the squeaky-clean innocence of America, but it also must instill
in us the sense that America's illusory innocence could be our undoing. If we don't act now, then our worst fears may
well be realized.
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LinkBukimi
The Affirmative enacts bukimi the performance of an uncanny certainty that one has
been targeted for nuclear destruction this process creates an unassimilable trauma that
ultimately anesthetizes the subject, forcing us to constanty reenact our trauma on others
SAINT-AMOUR Assistant Professor of English Pomona College 2000
Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 59-82
The people of Hiroshima who experienced bukimi had detected the opening up of the conditional space of
catastropheconditional because, despite the signs that informed its citizens' sense of uncanniness, Hiroshima
might finally have been spared rather than razed if conditions had been different on the day of the drop. 2 In certain
respects, the kind of conditional traumatic space that registered as bukimi was unique to human-made devastation,
and particularly to early nuclear weapons. The careful sparing of atomic bomb target cities from conventional
bombing bespoke American military commanders' confidence in the destructive potential of the bomb and their
desire to demonstrate that destructive power in the theater of relatively undamaged cities. Having noticed the
passing-over of Hiroshima, its citizens strove to read the intention of the enemy in the signs that constituted that
passing-over. Those signs, in a sense, had been returned from one of two futures: one culminating in the nonevent of preservation, the other in the limit event of
catastrophe. When that limit event occurred, its survivors underwent a historically specific, unique traumatization. But
in the period of eerie suspension before the explosion, those who registered the nuclear uncanny in Hiroshima were
also the first to experience a condition that, in a far more explicit incarnation, would become familiar to everyone
living in a targeted city during the Cold War: the sense that the present survival and flourishing of the city were
simultaneously underwritten and radically threatened by its identity as a nuclear target. To link the real devastation
of Hiroshima to the potential devastation of Cold War [End Page 60] target cities may seem to do a violence to the
specificity of the former, to its status as event rather than eventuality, and to the real suffering and annihilation of its
victims. My claim, however, is not that the inhabitants of Cold War cities exhibited post-traumatic symptoms akin to
those of the atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha, but that they became accustomed to a more overt and permanent
variant of the uncanny frisson felt in Hiroshima before the bombing, as a structuring condition of everyday life . In
other words, what I have called the conditional space of catastrophe that gave rise to feelings of bukimi in Hiroshima became a general characteristic of Cold War
urban experience. In her 1965 essay "The Imagination of Disaster," Susan Sontag wrote suggestively that "Science fiction films are not
about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art." In the course of discussing the
"aesthetics of destruction" in Cold War science fiction films, Sontag ventures a traumatic referent for that aesthetics:
"One gets the feeling, particularly in Japanese films but not only there, that a mass trauma exists over the use of
nuclear weapons and the possibility of future nuclear wars. Most of the science fiction films bear witness to this
trauma, and, in a way, attempt to exorcise it" [461-63]. Sontag's formulation does not adequately distinguish among the intense trauma of
hibakusha, the more attenuated national trauma experienced by non-hibakusha Japanese, and the worldwide response to the looming specter of nuclear war. One
might also object that by compulsively repeating a particular scene of traumatic violence, the filmic spectacles of
monster-suited men wrecking model cities likely did more to act out than to work through the trauma engendered by the past
nuclear bombing of cities, or that induced by the possibility of a future nuclear war. Nonetheless, Sontag's observation allows that certain traumatic
responses to the use of nuclear weapons might not have been limited to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but rather shared by all who knew of nuclear
In this, Sontag seems to have been among the first to posit
weapons, their devastating effects, and the escalating likelihood of their use.
what we might call the hysteron proteron of the nuclear condition: the literally preposterous phenomenon of
traumatic symptomsdenial, dissociation, fragmentation, repression, the compulsive repetition of extreme violence
that exist not in the wake of a past event, but in the shadow of a future one. But one might want to stop short of claiming that the
bukimi experienced by inhabitants of Hiroshima constituted a symptom in advance of its originary traumatic event. Such a feeling of weird anticipation
or uncanniness may have been allied to the symptom as return-of-the-repressed insofar as it arose from an
experience not of singularity but of repetitionthe repetition, say, that inheres in awaiting an expected catastrophe
others have experienced (for example, conventional aerial bombardment) while also repeating what must once have been their hopes to be exempted
through some special dispensation. But the traumatic cause of repression, the explosion of the bomb, with its immediate effects, had not yet occurred. Surely if
something repressed were returning in bukimi, it must have been something anterior to the feeling of uncanniness, a different trauma; certainly, it was not the future
nuclear catastrophe that anachronistically "returned" to a moment before its occurrence. Similarly, if a mass traumatization existed, or exists, in relation to nuclear
weapons, its inaugural event might not be a future conditional nuclear holocaust but the completed events of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such a
suggestion may accord a secondary witness status to most of the Cold War world and thus erode distinctions between different degrees of witnessing and indeed
between the survivor-witnesses and bystanders of a traumatic event. But at least it does not posit the seeming temporal impossibility of a pretraumatic stress
syndrome. 60
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**Link Blocks
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AT: We Have Other Justifications

1. Our link arguments indicate that valuing life as death deferred undermines other means
of living life since it requires the annihilation of ALL that does not fit within the simulation
of immortal life. Even if this argument is true, well win that the fear of death makes all
your other implications fall short.
2. Additionally, our criticism is a reason to reject the affirmative. If they had said racism
good and something else, they should still lose regardless of other justifications of the plan.
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AT: Death Bad/Life Good

Thats interesting, but irrelevant. We dont think that death is a good thing that would be
asinine. In the presentation of the 1AC, the Affirmative felt compelled to speak out about
the necessity of preserving life. Our Friedland and Beres evidence indicates that this desire
occurs due to a phobic overreaction to deaths passivity. The negative, on the other hand,
accepts deaths inevitability and confronts the repression. Our Harmon evidence indicates
that this allows us to engage in a rational discourse about death, where we can act to avoid
nuclear war without repressing deaths inevitability.
Our claim is not that we deserve to die but rather that we need to lay claim to the logic of
death and terror so that we can respond to it
Embedded in Jean Baudrillard's almost incomprehensible prose is the shocking assertion that terrorism is justifiable,
that the threat of globalization, as visualized by Baudrillard, justified the World Trade Center attack. (Kelly et al. 4)
Average Harper's readers may be spared blame for not comprehending Baudrillard's theoretical prose, but the point
of "L'Esprit" is not that 9/11 was justifiable in any moral sense, but that, as Nietzsche held, true justice must end in
its "self-overcoming" (Genealogy 73). Baudrillard explicitly states that "if we hope to understand anything we will
need to get beyond Good and Evil" ("L'Esprit" 15). In light of his past writings, I suggest that his unspoken stand on
the issue of justice concerning 9/11 would have to be what Nietzsche's would have been: that there is no justice, only
forgiveness, and only the strong can forgive. But Baudrillard does not explicitly state this claim, which I see as an
implicit conclusion to his thought. Instead he plays the provocateur by laying claim to the terrorists' logic, which
was their greatest weapon. If, as Kellner would have it, Baudrillard wants to seduce us into following his script, we
must be sure to understand the script well so we can decide how to act on it. The fact that 9/11 was arguably the most potent symbolic
event since the crucifixion of Christ has inspired Baudrillard to dress up his old ideas about the symbolic and symbolic exchange. To understand what he means by
"symbolic dimension" and "strategic symbolism" in the quotation from "L'Esprit" above, let us consult the origins and uses of the concept of the symbolic in his
earlier work.
Baudrillard's Symbolic and Death
All
Baudrillard's theory of the symbolic serves as a response to what he saw as the metaphysical underpinnings of the Marxist, Freudian and structuralist traditions.
three, he claims, uphold the fetishization of the "law of value," a bifurcating, metaphysical projection of the mind
which allows us to measure the worth of things. The law of value effectively produces "reality" in each system as
both its effect and its alibi. For Marx this reality, this metaphysical claim, was found in the concept of use value, for
Freud it was the unconscious, and for Saussure it was the signified (and ultimately the referent). According to
Baudrillard, any critical theory in the name of such projected "real" values ultimately reinforces the fetishized
relations it criticizes. He therefore relocates the law of value within his own Nietzsche-styled history of the
"image"--a term used as a stand-in for all that the words representation, reproduction, and simulation have in
common. In "How the 'True' World Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error," Nietzsche outlines in six concise steps the decline of western metaphysics
and its belief in a "True world" of essences, beyond the Imaginary world of appearances (Portable 485). Baudrillard's four-part history of the image (commonly
referred to as his four orders of simulation) closely mirrors Nietzsche's history of the "'True' World":
it [the image] is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. (Simulacra 6)
Marx, Freud and Saussure were stuck in the second order, where the critique of appearances was thought to yield a
glimpse of a deeper reality. We have since turned from the critique of appearances to the critique of meaning and of
reality itself (the third order), and from here can only enter into the fourth order, the hyperreal. This is because we
live in profoundly mediated environments, wherein coded images are produced and exchanged far more than
material goods, and the more these codes are exchanged throughout the culture, the more erratically their values
fluctuate, until at last they can no longer be traced to their origins. Hyperreality thus describes the extreme limit of
fetishization, wherein re-presentation eclipses reality. Here the spectacle continues to fascinate, but indifference is the attitude du jour
(indifference having long been associated with the postmodern). But Baudrillard's history, it seems, has one more step to take before it completes its circle. Baudrillard
imagines that from within the fourth order, where all metaphysical distinctions of value have disappeared, there will emerge a type of postmodern primitivism (I
propose to call it), which he outlines in his conceptions of the symbolic and symbolic exchange.
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________
**Impacts
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ImpactDignity
As long as the Affirmative works within a framework that subscribes to the fear of death,
gross violations of human rights and dignity are inevitable. The alternative alone is
capable of placing an absolute value on human rights.
Edward Callahan, Director of the Institute for Society, Ethics, and Life Sciences, The Tyranny of Survival, 1973
The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In
the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals,
including the right to life. The purported threat of communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive
of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II,
native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, into detention camps. This policy was later
upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national
security can justify acts othwerwise blatantly unconstitutional. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the
official legitimations of nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless
apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the
many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them.
For all these reasons, it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a tyranny of survival. There
seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for the sake of survival, no
rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy of course to recognize the danger when
survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need
to defend the fatherland, to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that.
It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which
would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny of survival as a
value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and
a disease, provoking a destructive single-mindedness that will stop at nothing.
We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is
basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make
much sense without the right to life-then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without,
in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival? To put it more
strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to
ensure that survival. It would be a Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.
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ImpactDestroys All Resistance

As long as the Affirmative works within a framework that subscribes to the fear of death,
resistance to racism, patriarchy, biopower, colonialism, and capitalism will all be co-opted
and will continue to form the basis for our actions. The constant fear of death is what
justifies some of the worst acts of violence in history.
Arturo J. Aldama, Prof @ A.S.U. & fellow @ UCSB, Do You Fear Fear?: Docile Bodies and Fear of the Other,
Bad Subjects Issue 50, June 2000
When bodies feel sudden fear, the adrenaline curve in the nervous system spikes in the first milliseconds,
provoking a fight or flight response with varying intensities in the physiology of the individual. Unlike the
spontaneity of an individual lashing out, pushing off and running away fast, or the collective adrenaline surges of
crowds in protests (e.g. the WTO demonstrations), the sustained proliferation and normalization of fear in the
"nervous system" of the body politic has different effects. The propagation and internalization of fear in the
social body attempts to keep people docile, numb, silent, and afraid to challenge the status quo of racist, sexist
and global capitalist orders in the United States and other Euro-western nation-states. Fear of non-conformity,
fear of race, fear of disease, fear of touch, fear of blood, fear of non-straight sex, fear of workers, fear of women,
fear of subaltern rage, fear of color, fear of desire, fear of crime, fear of "illegals", fear of uprising. Fear is both
the justification that drives the disciplinary apparatus of the nation-state (police, INS, military, schools) and the
intended effects on the body politic. Fear drives the repression, containment, co-optation, torture, and
annihilation of "unruly" subjects whose class, race, sex, ideological and religious differences, for example, are
threats to bourgeois, capitalist, patriarchal and neocolonial orders. Fear drives the militarization of borders, anti-
gay violence, abortion clinic bombers, the CIA, NSA, xenophobia, the denial of imperial guilt, enslavement,
lynching, police, the Christian right, Bush's presidential campaign, anti-affirmative action policies, California's
Proposition 187, and migra shootings, to name a few.
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ImpactNumbing
As the desire to represent death increases, so does awareness, right? Not really- constant
representations of death becomes piecemeal building blocks in a larger construction of
internal and external psychic numbing to death
From this unitary perspective there are a number of ways of symbolizing death. 3
The first and most fundamental is the perception of death as the end of life, as a form of organic and
psychological destiny, part of the "natural history" of each of us. However that basic perception is resisted,
denied, distanced by means of psychic numbing, it continues to underlie whatever additional constructs or gaps
we call forth in our symbolizing activity.
A second perception of death is mimetic, that of life imitating death: the idea of "death in life," or loss of vitality,
or being frozen in some form of death terror as mentioned earlier. The reversal is perceived as "unnatural"--life
becomes deathlike precisely because of the numbed negation of death, and only the dead possess "vitality." But
this seemingly unnatural reversal is, in fact, a continuous (and therefore "natural") potential of the organism,
both necessary and highly dangerous.
A third meaning of death, that of challenge and even muse, equates (with Bll) the artist's relationship to death
with the priest's to his breviary. That symbolization depends upon a heightened awareness of the natural function
of death as a counterpoint to life, and as an ever-present limitation that gives shape to existence and grounding to
wisdom.
Death is rendered formative by its very naturalness. In real psychological ways one must "know death" in
order to live with free imagination.
A fourth meaning is that of death as inseparable from disaster, holocaust, absurdity. One's individual death
cannot be separated from the sense that (as Hiroshima survivors put it) "the whole world is dying." This
perception is truly unnatural. It is partly a product of our holocaust-dominated age, discussed later in connection
with imagery of extinction that haunts contemporary man. It is also connected with early exposure to specific
forms of the kind of imagery (school children subjected to drills as preparation for nuclear war) that brings about
the equation of death and holocaust. But even in the absence of holocaust, people can equate the end of the self
with the end of everything. Where this latter tendency is present, one's own death is anticipated, irrespective of
age and circumstances, as premature, absurd, unacceptable. Much of this book will concern this relationship
between holocaust and individual-psychological struggles.
All four meanings, and others as well, are probably present in much of our death imagery. The relative
importance of each of these meanings varies greatly, of course, especially around the issue of death as natural or
unnatural. But death, for the human imagination, never ceases to be a many-sided, seemingly contradictory yet
ultimately unitary psychological form.
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ImpactConsumerism
The quest for immortality and the conquest of death is inescapable from the drive
towards material acquisition. While the suffering and dying sit on the periphery of
cultural integrity, the white noise offered up by the affirmatives advs serve to overcome
the emptiness associated with mortality.
David Wendell Moller, Professor of sociology at School of Liberal Arts, 2000 Fear and Denial of Death,
ww.baywood.com
According to Becker, greed, power, and wealth have become the modern response to vulnerability and insecurity
inherent in the human condition. They provide for a base of honor in our materialistic society, and generate an
illusion of omnipotence and immorality. Becker takes this argument to its logical extreme, and asserts that the
dread of death and emptiness of life in the twentieth century have been responsible for cultivating
unprecedented evil through the pursuit of greed, power, and the associated development of destructive
capabilities.
Thus, for Becker, the stupidity and inhumanity of humanity lies in the nature of our social arrangements. In the
modern context, new patterns of death denial have emerged and have become dangerous and dehumanizing. Up
to a point, traditional cultures creatively designed rituals to "deny" death, and these rituals enriched the life of
the community. In the absence of meaning systems and rituals, modern society has exploded onto a dangerous
and irrational course; shallowness and emptiness have created a crisis of legitimacy.
In this regard, the argument of Becker is remarkably similar to Moore and others who have made the case that
one of the great afflictions of modern life is spiritual emptiness and soullessness. Narcissism, self-seeking
materialism, and heroic use of science and technology have become prominent forces that shape daily life. In this
environment of self-glorification, material gratification, and extraordinary technological achievement, suffering,
dying, and death are pushed to the periphery of cultural experience. Individuals are seduced into believing the
illusion that, in this cultural context of denial, the facts of death and suffering are inconsequential to their daily,
personal lives.
Materialism is a prominent value in American life. Becker makes the argument that the evolution of capitalism
as an economic and social system is a modern form of death denial. That is to say, in capitalism it is through the
thrill of acquisition and the pursuit of wealth that human frailty is overcome. Power accrues as wealth and
possessions amass, and wealth endows immortality as it is passed on to one's heirs. Narcissism, another
prominent fact of American cultural life, is also related to the denial of death. In an age of individualism, we
become hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. Although we know that death is an unavoidable reality, narcissism
facilitates the self-delusion that practically everyone else is expendable, except ourselves. In this era of
individualism, the death of oneself becomes increasingly inconceivable. When one matters more than anything
or anyone else, self-absorption does not allow for the possibility that one will no longer exist. In this way, the
deeper we plunge into narcissistic, self-admiration and idolization, the more we become oblivious to our
inevitable fate. As a culture, the more oblivious we become, the more unable we are to face up to the facts of
death in our daily activities. Death is accordingly hidden and denied.
Thus, the social organization of modern life precipitates widespread oblivion and denial:
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping (or admiring and
entertaining himself), which is the same thing. As awareness (of our common human condition) calls for types of
heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society continues to help him forget [E. Becker/
Escape From Evil, The Free Press, New York, 1975, pp. 81-82].
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ImpactExtermination
The devaluation and rejection of the dead and death are merely the flipside of the fear of
our OWN deaths in devaluing the dead, we are devaluing ourselves. We become
fascinated with death and because our society cannot integrate the rupture and violence of
death by accepting the link between life and death, we must endlessly simulate death. This
is the role played by images of death they feed our covert need to give and receive death.
When it comes to actually dealing with death and the dead, even in public, we do so in private. As Baudrillard points out, "This
entails a considerable difference in enjoyment: we trade with our dead in a kind of melancholy, while the primitives live with
their dead under the auspices of the ritual and the feast" (134-35). Because we devalue death and thereby the dead, we view them
only as a dreaded caste of unfortunates, and not as continuing partners in exchange. Ultimately, however, it is not so much the
dead but our own deaths, our negative doubles, that we insult by denying their value. When we posit death as the negation of life,
we bifurcate our identities and begin a process of mourning over our own eventual deaths, a process which lasts our whole lives.
The more we devalue our death-imagoes, that is, the greater they become, until they haunt our every moment, as in Don DeLillo's
darkest comedy, White Noise. This leads us, according to Baudrillard, to an obsession with death that can be felt in the media
fascination with catastrophes like 9/11. Death "becomes the object of a perverse desire. Desire invests the very separation of life
and death" (147). Political economy's inability to absorb the rupturing energy of death is thus compensated by the symbolic yield
of the media catastrophe. In these events we experience an artificial death which fascinates us, bored as we are by the routine
order of the system and the "natural" death it prescribes for us. Natural death represents an unnegotiable negation of life and the
tedious certainty of an unwanted end. It therefore inspires insurrection, until "reason itself is pursued by the hope of a universal
revolt against its own norms and privileges" (162). The terrorist spectacle is an example of such a revolt, in which death gains
symbolic distinction and becomes more than simply "natural." We may not think we identify with the terrorists' superstitions
about honor in the next life, but in events like 9/11, Baudrillard would suggest, we nevertheless identify despite ourselves with
both with the terrorists and their victims:
We are all hostages, and that's the secret of hostage-taking, and we are all dreaming, instead of dying stupidly working oneself to
the ground, of receiving death and of giving death. Giving and receiving constitute one symbolic act (the symbolic act par
excellence), which rids death of all the indifferent negativity it holds for us in the "natural" order of capital. (166)
Violent, artificial death is a symbolic event witnessed collectively. "Technical, non natural and therefore willed (ultimately by the
victim him- or herself), death becomes interesting once again since willed death has a meaning" (165). Was 9/11 willed by the
victims? Obviously not, and yet, Baudrillard would suggest, in our identification with both the killers and those who died, we
ourselves are not so innocent.
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**Impact Blocks
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AT: Nuclear/War/Death Imagery Good 1/2

First, extend our Friedland, Beres, and Santos evidencethey have conceded a few
arguments which circumvents most of their offense-
A) The attempt to breed apathy and concern through death imagery is a blunder in
and of itself. In an attempt to rebel against death, humans turn to immortality and
promises of salvation through demands on the state. These demands are not only
funneled into the same system of violence the 1acs harms are rooted in but generate
new imperial controls as this fear of death grants legitimacy to all state solutions, be
it holy or nuclear wars.
B) Representations of destruction and death must exist to pacify the masses. Nuclear
weapons are the ultimate form of this as they are the only weapons capable of
bringing the fear of collective annihilation to the everyone, everywhere. They
conceded this forms the basis for collective suicide with the only answer to problems
is the massive destruction of the other. The logic of this globalized system of state-
sanctioned cruelty negates the value to life and justifies universal destruction and
the worst acts of violence in history.
Second, the threat of extinction does not exist as such but rather is a distortion of the
methods one represents with- it instills notions of powerlessness and outrage at the Bomb
itself, rather then the bureaucratic apparatus responsible for its production
Marilyn S. Jacobs and M. Brewster Smith, 1989, American Psychology in the Quest for Nuclear Peace,
questia
Segal ( 1986) regards the nuclear threat as an impetus for the distortion of language. In an effort to hide the threatening reality posed
by nuclear weapons, the most primitive layers of unconscious fantasy are mobilized, producing terror of a different kind
than the normal fear of death. It is a terror of annihilation without symbolic survival. Primitive psychotic defenses
(i.e., denial, massive projections, fragmentation of ego functions) serve to render oblique the actual meanings of communication,
leading to profound anxiety and other disturbances in psychological function. An analogue to this is the regressive
dedifferentiation of structures within the human psyche which the threat of nuclear weapons , and their threat of extinction of
the human species, pose (see Wangh, 1986). One of the areas most intensively investigated in the last several years concerns the impact of living with nuclear
weapons on the minds of young people (e.g., Beardslee and Mack, 1982; Escalona, 1982; Schwebel, 1982; Boone, 1985). Investigators have concluded that the
threat of nuclear war has created in the minds of young people a sense of fear, powerlessness, anger, and outrage,
doubt about the future, and a sense of technology rushing out of control ( Mack and Snow, 1986). Also, concern has been
directed toward the relationship between the imminence of nuclear death and a "live for now" attitude among
children and adolescents. However, it is not entirely clear exactly what the nuclear threat actually means to children and adolescents; there have not been
enough reliable data to make definitive conclusions ( Mack and Snow, 1986).
Third, the problem with nuclear imagery is not so much death but the meaningless
rendered by a weapon without personality and a death without valor
Robert Jay Lifton, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School University Center, and Eric
Olsen, Prof of Politics and Sociology, 1974, Living and Dying, questia
The ultimate threat posed by nuclear weapons is not only death but meaninglessness: an unknown death by an
unimaginable weapon. War with such weapons is no longer heroic; death from such weapons is without valor.
Meaninglessness has become almost a stereotyped characterization of twentieth-century life, a central theme in modern art, theater, and politics. The roots of this
meaninglessness are many. But crucial, we believe, is
the anxiety deriving from the sense that all forms of human associations are
perhaps pointless because subject to sudden irrational ends. Cultural life thus becomes still more formless. No one form, no single
meaning or style, appears to have any ultimate claim. The psychological implications of this formlessness are not fully clear; while there seem to be
more life choices available, fewer are inwardly compelling.
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AT: Nuclear/War/Death Imagery Good 2/2
Finally, extend our Foucault evidence from the C subpoint- 2 arguments
A) The problem with war and death is not so much the actions themselves but the
ideologies behind them. Through extending the fear of death to grander and larger
schemes ie. New advantages, cases, etc., the affirmative seeks to replicate the logic of
the Herd mentality in which crises are viewed solely in terms of populations rather
then individuality, crushing the possibility for death to be viewed in its mortality.
B) This proves our argument that they are the constant mobilization for war. The
idea that we should threaten death is the underside of the attempt to ensure
continued survival. Foucault and Santos say this thinking produces a kill to save
mentality which destroys all humanity in the illusion of saving it.
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AT: FoD Makes Life Meaningful

1. Our argument is not that life has no meaning but that the motivation for surviving
should not be to prevent our extinction. This fear of death serves as the ultimate
conservative one, deepening ideology and suppressing criticism. The justifications you use
for the action you think you are partaking in are like we shouldnt jump off the bridge
because I wanted to get a new cell phone. Rather than recognize the beauty of life, our
ideological motivation for survival is built around the walls of consumerism.
2. The fear of death makes us docile bodies, a field of premature corpses.

Fear of death, to summarize, not only cripples life, it also creates entire fields of premature corpses. But how
can we be reminded of our mortality in a productive way, a way that would point to a new and dignified
polity of private selves and, significantly, to fewer untimely deaths? One answer lies in the ethics of
Epicurus, an enlightened creed whose prescriptions for disciplined will are essential for international
stability.
3. Fearing death destroys all meaning to life, forcing us to constantly look over our
shoulder fearing anything that could be a potential threat.
Nora Connor, The Abyss and You: A Brief Anatomy of Fear, Bad Subjects Issue #50, June 20 00
About three years ago I spent the entirety of a three-hour flight convinced it was up to me to prevent the
plane from plummeting down out of the sky and sending all its passengers to a noisy and fiery death. The
boarding and takeoff found me only slightly out of sorts; an irritating whining noise near the gate was troubling me. As the plane climbed, I
descended. An absolutely devouring sense of certainty and hysteria surged within and around me; my eyes alternately bulged and
screwed themselves shut and I was compelled to remain utterly still except for the sweat and tears flying off
me. I think I might once have managed to convince the flight attendant that I did not require attention. Somehow I was responsible for the fate
of the vehicle and I felt it as a test; we were all going down the second I decided I didn't mind living or
dying. The grip of my fingernails, several of which were torn by the end of the trip, indicated how hard I was
trying not to want to die. A momentary lapse in my conviction of the wish not to die would prove fatal. I
have never felt more intensely, viscerally afraid. There was surely a conversation taking place within my head; I can't now say for sure
if it was a conversation between myself and some other, or between myself and myself. I remember a deep sense of having been found out, caught in some
sense, and challenged to really choose to make my innermost will a reality. I knew the 'right' answer to the only question on the test; but was it my answer?
Apparently by whatever standard not wanting to die can be measured, I was successful because nothing happened to the airplane. I have always enjoyed
flying and was fine on another flight two weeks later, as well as on subsequent flights.
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AT: Cold War Proves FoD Good

Not true
Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law at Purdue, International Journal on World Peace, No. 3, Volume
16, September 1st, 1999
Consider the desolate metaphysics of our time. Living in what Camus called an "unsacrosanct moment in
history," we have nonetheless finalized the transfer of sanctity to governments. It follows that ideology in most
states has become theology, and that opposition to particular policies-- even in the most democratic of societies--
represents not dissent but "blasphemy."
Why, then, did America hate the Soviet Union? Because that country was a despotism? This is hardly likely,
inasmuch as the US has had no difficulty including in the "free world" several dozen other states whose respect
for human dignity was always substantially worse than that of the former USSR.
The answer lies elsewhere. More precisely, it can be discovered in a population that saw such hatred as the
sacred obligation of a properly God-fearing population to oppose the forces of darkness. Although superpower
competition had always been explained in learned journals and popular magazines as a purely secular expression
of the struggle for power, its real origins must be found in an entirely different region--a region defined by myth,
mysticism and desperation.
The problem is always one of individuals. Our leaders could sustain an anti-Soviet theology only because it
satisfied the particular cravings of people. By treating the Soviet Union as a pernicious society, Americans
affirmed that they belonged to an elite, one that was based on goodness. There were no special requirements
for membership in this elite, no standards of excellence that had to be met, only citizenship in the United
States.
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AT: Violence Good

This links to our criticism. Their assertion that violence is critical to prevent further
violence is EXACTLY the type of logic that justifies wholesale slaughter of entire
populations. This is answered on the overview- we have 3 different disads to this argument.
Violence can never constitute an effective act of resistance to violence. Rather, acts of
violence, however well-meaning, reaffirm the principle of violence and make us directly
complicit with the violence we seek to prevent.
Susanne Kappeler, Associate Prof @ Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal
Behavior, 1995, pg. 258
Resistance to violence however cannot consist of violence. Violence may change the direction of violence, invert
the roles of violator and victim, but it necessarily affirms the principle of violence, whatever else it may achieve.
And it adds new victims to the world victims of our own making, not to mention more violent perpetrators, whose
ranks we have decided to join. While in extremity and under the threat of our lives we may not have any means
other than violence to secure our survival, most of us most of the time are not in such situations, though we glibly
speak of survival. Instead, we would have ample opportunity in situations of no such threat to challenge the
legitimacy of violence and to practise alternatives above all by deciding not to use violence ourselves.
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AT: Ketels
1. Not responsive- this evidence isnt offense against our criticism. The kritik does not
preclude plan action- were criticizing certain justifications for action presented in the 1AC
do NOT let the affirmative paint our kritik as a generic statism or capitalism argument.
Under the framework of the alternative, the plan could still be advocated or passed, as long
as the justification didnt utilize the survivalist framework we critique.
2. Also KETTELS IS DUMB and possibly a nazi. I dare you to find me ONE warrant in
that article for any of the ridiculous claims she makes. Our alternative is in no way the
French philosophical nihilism that she criticizes. We dont preclude action.
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AT: Fear Key to Prevent Nuke War (Futterman)

1. This argument is cyclical. The moment we begin to believe that the only way to prevent
nuclear war is to constantly fear it, nuclear war becomes inevitable. Our link evidence is on
point saying that thought process is what justifies nuclear policy and redemptive violence in
order to prevent the threat of nuclear war.
2. The aff criminalizes the symptoms while they spread the disease- the fear of nuclear war
is what CAUSES nuclear war. Even if we prevent a nuclear war now, that constant fear will
only replicate when the next threat arises, and the next after that. Our alternative is the
only option for any long term solvency and to give life meaning.
3. Nuclear annihilation has already occurred the bomb is merely a metaphor now. Vote
negative to stop fearing and start living.
Jean Baudrillard, some weird French guy, The Anorexic Ruins, Looking Back on the End of the World, 1989,
34-5
Look at the two great events: [the advent of] nuclear power and revolution. It is utterly pointless to hope for the one or fear the other since both have already
occurred. Everything has already been liberated, changed, undermined; what more do you want? It is useless to hope: things are there; born or stillborn, they
are there, done. Imagination reigns; enlightenment and intelligence reign. We are already experiencing or soon will experience the perfection of the societal.
Everything is there. The heavens have come down to earth .
We sense the fatal taste of material paradise . It drives one to
despair, but what should one do? No future. Nevertheless, do not panic. Everything has already become
nuclear, faraway, vaporized. The explosion has already occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now. What
more do you want? Everything has already been wiped off the map. It is useless to dream: the clash has gently taken
place everywhere. The last bomb, the one no one speaks about, is the bomb that is not content to strew things in space but
would strew them in time. The temporal bomb. Where it explodes, everything is suddenly blown into the past; and the
greater the bombs capacity, the further into the past they go. Look around: this explosion has already occurred. In an
amnesic world like ours, everything living is projected into the past as though things had been over-hastily
plunged into a dimension in which the only meaning they acquire is that wrested from time by a final
revolution. That is the real bomb, the bomb that immobilizes things in eerie retrogression .
(IF THEY READ FUTTERMAN)

Their Futterman evidence says only catastrophe forces people to take the wider view.
Well win that constant fear of annihilation makes life not worth living. This evidence is
also mistagged, the argument Futterman is making is that nothing is worth starting a
nuclear war over because the horror outweighs.
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AT: Stopping Nuclear War Key 2 Solve FOD

1. History disproves this argument. Weve done MULTIPLE things in the past to prevent
nuclear war and weve still been on the brink for the last 50 years. If this argument was
true, post cold war there should never have been a threat of nuclear war.
2. This argument assumes fear of death in terms of the fear of death from nuclear war, not
our fear of death rooted in our subconscious. Functionally this argument is that we should
stop nuclear war so we arent afraid of dying from nuclear war. Dont let them spin this as
stopping nuclear war solves the entirety of our fear of death. Fear of death cant stop fear of
death, which makes no sense.
3. They cant solve this argument. The affirmative can never completely eliminate the
possibility of war. Theres only a chance our alternative can solve.
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AT: FoD Key 2 Treat AIDS

This argument is a joke. Our alternative wouldnt reject any sort of AIDS research or
treatment. Our alternative, however, WOULD reject the idea that AIDS should be treated
to prevent terrorism and for national security purposes. Our argument is that AIDS victims
should get treatment, but still not live their lives in constant fear of death. They cant win
our ethic of hope and joy would prevent people from treating aids.
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AT: FoD Fuel Peace Movements

1. This is empirically denied and non unique- the fear of death is prevalent in the status
quo. If your argument is true, then social peace movements would have and should be
propping up countlessly. It also takes out the solvency to this argument; your
representations prove these peace movements arent working.
2. We internal link turn this argument- even if social peace movements would occur, they
would be trumped by the destruction that follows. Our Beres and Santos evidence indicate
that the fear of death drives individuals to absolute obedience to the state in demand for
immortality. That act has been use to justify the worst acts of violence in history and
destruction of the Other in order to prevent the threat of war. Its on the overview.
3. The Nuclear Freeze proves your movements will fail.
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AT: Denies Reality

Our argument doesnt deny the possibility of dealing with reality it merely refuses to
contest the war on its own terms and instead engages the question of how images of
violence are politically constituted
CHESTERMAN Oxford 1998
Postmodern Culture
But Baudrillard goes much further than this. He argues that more than simply questioning the nature of this war and
the media's complicity in its exposition, there is a need to interrogate the very notion of truth qua simulacrum itself.
Assuming a position for or against the war denies inquiry into "the very probability of the war, its credibility or
degree of reality" (The Gulf War 67). Rather, it is necessary to resist the probability of the image (26-7, 66).
It is this argument that provoked a book-length response from Christopher Norris.16 He argues that Baudrillard's
essays constitute a definitive exposure of the political bankruptcy of postmodern scholarship and "the depth of
ideological complicity that exists between such forms of extreme anti-realist or irrationalist doctrine and the crisis of
moral and political nerve" that presently afflicts Western intellectuals (27). Attacking the "frivolous" exercise of
making the Gulf War into a pretext for arcane disputes about the "politics of theory," he links such theoretical
exercises to a prevailing mood of "cynical acquiescence" that fails to contest the official version of events (29).
Norris's warnings as to the dangers of dissociating theory from praxis are, of course, important. But his reading of
Baudrillard's scepticism as demonstrative of moral and political nihilism (194) assumes an opponent of straw. For
the challenge that Baudrillard presents is not the rejection of political purchase, but a rigorous resistance to the
acceptance of the virtual as or in place of the real:
Resist the probability of any image or information whatever. Be more virtual than events themselves, do not seek to
re-establish the truth, we do not have the means, but do not be duped, and to that end re-immerse the war and all
information in the virtuality from whence they come. Turn deterrence back against itself. Be meteorologically
sensitive to stupidity. (Baudrillard, The Gulf War 66-67)
Norris reads this reference to "stupidity" as denying any "operative difference between truth and falsehood, veridical
knowledge and its semblance" (12), and precluding any form of ethico-political accountability that depends upon a
notion of the "real" (194). Nevertheless, Baudrillard's position is more properly seen as denoting a profound and
abiding suspicion of a "reality" whose primary referent is the simulations of American war games.
Moreover, the tone of Baudrillard's essays is far from equivocal. At times his writing exhibits a very black reductio
ad absurdum humour: So you say this was a clean, minimalist war with little "collateral damage"? Why stop there--
war? what war? (Patton 7). The prevailing tone is ironic, however. The logic of deterrence (the sustained denial of
the possibility of war) has come to supplant the actuality of war; violence can only take place as a sterilised
simulation of itself.18 In an extended sexual metaphor, the military--which thrives on particular forms of male
sexuality--is emasculated by its dependence on virtual pornography.19
Baudrillard also appears to be aware of these criticisms. In stating, as he did just a few weeks before the UN
deadline expired, that the proposed war would not take place, he acknowledged the dangers of such an approach in a
postscriptum:
To demonstrate the impossibility of war just at the moment when it must take place, when the signs of its occurrence
are accumulating, is a stupid gamble. But it would have been even more stupid not to seize the opportunity.
(Baudrillard, The Gulf War 28)
In pursuing such a "fatal strategy," Baudrillard plays upon his own belief that writing should be less a representation
of reality than its transfiguration (Patton 6). He has subsequently suggested that in time and with a little imagination,
it may be possible to read The Gulf War Did Not Take Place as if it were a science fiction novel (qtd. in Gane 203).
James Der Derian, by contrast, argues that such an approach may be more effective than that presented by the
modernist school of criticism. Der Derian states that theorists who attempted to construct a critical and universal
counter-memory were easily isolated as anti-American and dismissed as utopian (177). Adopting a poststructuralist
approach to such political encounters may well bring with it the danger that no new pragmatic basis for justice and
truth will emerge. Nevertheless, he argues,
...better strategically to play with apt critiques of the powerful new forces unleashed by cyberwar than to hold
positions with antiquated tactics and nostalgic unities. (178)
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AT: You Defend Extinction

Our argument isnt a defense of terrorism or a defense of the SQ it comes to understand
the symbolic order that gives the spectacle of suffering its power this theoretical critque
enables an effective praxis
From Princess Diana to 9/11, Jean Baudrillard has been the prophet of the postmodern media spectacle, the
hyperreal event. In the 1970s and 80s, our collective fascination with things like car crashes, dead celebrities,
terrorists and hostages was a major theme in Baudrillard's work on the symbolic and symbolic exchange, and in his
post-9/11 "L'Esprit du Terrorisme," he has taken it upon himself to decipher terrorism's symbolic message. He does
so in the wake of such scathing critiques as Douglas Kellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism
and Beyond (1989), which attacked Baudrillard's theory as "an imaginary construct which tries to seduce the world
to become as theory wants it to be, to follow the scenario scripted in the theory" (178). Did Baudrillard seduce 9/11
into being--is he terrorism's theoretical guru?--or did he merely anticipate and describe in advance the event's
profound seductiveness?
To Kellner and other critics, Baudrillard's theory of postmodernity is a political as well as an intellectual failure:
Losing critical energy and growing apathetic himself, he ascribes apathy and inertia to the universe. Imploding into
entropy, Baudrillard attributes implosion and entropy to the experience of (post) modernity. (180)
To be sure, Baudrillard's scripts and scenarios have always been concerned with the implosion of the global
capitalist system. But while Baudrillard's tone at the end of "L'Esprit du Terrorisme" can certainly be called
apathetic--"there is no solution to this extreme situation--certainly not war"--he does not suggest that there are no
forces in the universe capable of mounting at least a challenge to the system and its sponsors (18).
As in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) and Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard again suggests
that terrorism is one such force, and that it functions according to the rule of symbolic exchange. Terrorism can be
carried out in theoretical/aesthetic terms, the terms Baudrillard would obviously prefer, or in real terms, that is,
involving the real deaths of real people, a misfortune Baudrillard warns against.2 Though he states clearly "I am a
terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons," he is characteristically ambivalent in relation to
"real" terrorism, since the real is always in question, and perhaps also because ambivalence is Baudrillard's own
brand of theoretical terrorism (Simulacra 163). One moment of his thought is the utopian dream of radicality and
reversal, a revolution of symbolic exchange against the system, and the other moment is one of profound pessimism:
"The system...has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference."
In Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard wrote that systemic nihilism and the mass media are to blame
for the postmodern human condition, which he describes as a combination of "fascination," "melancholy," and
"indifference." Against the system and its passive nihilism, Baudrillard proffers his own brand of what might be
termed active nihilism, a praxis that includes theoretical and aesthetic "terrorism," but not, in the end, the bloody
acts of actual violence his theory accounts for. The terrorist acts of 9/11, as his theory predicted, were destined to be
absorbed by the system's own narrative, neutralized by the very mass media they sought to exploit.
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AT: How Does the Alt Change the World?

We dont know what a world without spectacle would look like but thats the point
BANASH University of Iowa 2002, Activist Desire, Cultural Criticism, and the Situationist International
http://www.reconstruction.ws/021/Activist.htm
<20> At best, the events of 1968 provided the S.I. an opportunity to reach a larger audience at a volatile point, but they didn't
fundamentally alter its role. In essence, the S.I. merely intensified its efforts to present an alternative that, given the social
upheaval, had a slightly better chance to to find an audience that could hear what they had been advocating all along.
<20> That the Situationists failed in 1968 is not surprising. Consider that the Situationists were not simply in favor of a
revolution that would shift power into the hands of the disenfranchised. Rather, they hoped for a revolution that would not only
actualize a shift in power, but transform the processes of power itself. The S.I. was advocating a revolution that operated totally
outside the alienated forms of the spectacle. Certainly the S.I.'s endorsement of the worker's occupation of the factories would
seem to align their theory with a practical politics. However, for the revolution to have succeeded in the S.I.'s terms, individuals
would have had to actualize a complete transformation. Just as in the pre-1968 days, the S.I. was still calling for the development
of alternative forms of subjectivity and social organization that would transform the very roots of how individuals constituted
themselves as subjects within and against the spectacular society that had produced them. As if this were not enough, members of
the S.I. had no clear conception of how to effect such a change, and they could give no more than hints of what such a change
might look like. It would be a constructed situation, which only select members of the S.I. had experienced in any form that could
be articulated. It would be something like the maps of psychogeography, or the dtourned pages of the S.I. journal. It would be
something that no one had ever seen before.
Criticizing the production of the spectacle is good necessary prerequisite to

reconstructing society
BANASH University of Iowa 2002, Activist Desire, Cultural Criticism, and the Situationist International
http://www.reconstruction.ws/021/Activist.htm
However, what is most interesting in the text is not its ostensible content, a literal, intelligible history, or its status as a founding text, but the way in which this
organizational principal is undercut, even thwarted, by the fragments that are brought together presumably to tell that very story. Ostensibly a history, it becomes a
work that questions the immediate possibility of that project by presenting that history from the perspective of an unrealized Situationist future. In Lipstick Traces
Marcus explains that as a memoir, Debord's
book was also a prophesy. To follow its story one needed information Debord
withheld -- even the words "L'Internationale Lettriste," which never appeared. But one also needed the ability to
imagine a reinvented world...a new, "situationist" civilization, shared by millions, finally covering the globe (164).
Without the realization of that world, Memoires remains for us something that "would be experienced not as things
at all, but as possibilities" (166). <25> To understand Memoires, and to argue for its absolute relevance to our own
moment, I want to begin by invoking Debord's concept of the spectacle. As anyone who has read The Society of the
Spectacle will remember, Debord states that "the spectacle is NOT a collection of images; rather it is a social
relationship between people that is mediated by images" (12). Debord isn't so much taking on the prevalence of the
image itself as he is the particular form of mediation images constitute. For Debord, the spectacle is akin to Adorno's
concept of the culture industry or Jameson's culturalized horizon. The images (TV, film, advertisements, etc.) are
one-way identic communications that provide no possibility for a dialectical engagement or response. Each
individual subject is silenced, forced to absorb the instrumental meanings of this totalizing system. As Debord puts
this, "by means of the spectacle, the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of
self-praise" (19). <26> If Debord had not so clearly formulated these concepts during the creation of Memoires,
they nonetheless animate the book, which is composed of fragments of the spectacle itself. As early as the Letterist
International, Debord was negatively gesturing at the spectacle in the concept of dtournement. The critique that
animates this concept is one of cooption. To produce new works of art within the traditional categories means
playing by the rules, being subsumed under those spectacular discourses. On the other hand, to conduct terrorist
raids on the particulars of those discourses and liberate the particulars of those works holds the potential of creating
revolutionary sense and desire. The images that perfected separation and political impotence could now assume
nonidentic meanings, meanings that allowed one to both construct a critique and imagine a reinvented world.
<27> To take Debord's project in terms of Adorno, Memoires is the creation of an autonomous artwork. The use of dtournement shifts the emphasis to the nonidentic possibilities of the given collage elements. As a history it must, as
Adorno would approve, fail, since the collaged particulars are always outstripping their function, never content to carry on a single, intelligible meaning. And yet, in Adorno's sense, it is also a unique example of enigmatic political
commitment within the horizon of postmodernism, for Memoires is a profoundly political work, though not in any readily instrumentalizable register. Though I don't have the space to execute a cover to cover reading of Memoires, I
would like to look closely at both its first and final pages. These pages are far more spar than many of the collages in the book, but they both highlight the tense relationships of form that animate the entire work.
<28> The first line of Memoires (reading right to left, top to bottom, a convention the book doesn't impose) is a fragment of two sentences: "A memory of you? Yes, I want." Though the reader knows, from the title page, that this
sentence has been ripped out of its original context, there is no indication of its original source. Thus it is not identical with any subject. Instead, this fragment invokes the concepts of memory and desire without specific objects. One
of Jorn's lines carries the eyes from this fragment to another, in the middle of the page, which reads "it is a subject profoundly soaked in alcohol." Jorn's line spreads out into a blob just above this fragment, creating a block that puts
the emphasis on this second fragment. Whatever the subject or object of this memory or desire, it is to be taken in terms intoxication, both literally and metaphorically.
Continues
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AT: How Does the Alt Change the World?

Continued
<29> The second line of Memoires, "of lights, of shadows, of figures," underscores the indeterminacy of the elements of the text. Literally, it invokes a play of the identic and nonidentic. It suggests that each fragment could be read in
terms of its original context or colloquial meaning, but that these will shift into shadow or light, constitute different figures depending on how they are read. Though the fragments may constitute recognizable figures at points, they
will do so only transiently. Again, another line of Jorn's descends from this fragment, crossing others, and trailing off at the page's final deceleration: "Listen well, I will, all the same, represent these events and explain the
considerations." This line gestures at the totality of the work as the literal history that Marcus reduces it to, but the emphasis is not with this line. At best, it is an ironic gesture at the failed totality of the work, a marker of the
traditional desire for wholeness and understanding that the book undercuts. It isn't that history is not present, but it has become a figure that slips in and out in the play of light and shadow. In short Memoires does not present a
totalizing climax, a point where the reader could make sense in the mode this fragment suggests. Rather, Jorn's line takes this desire and holds it in tension with other fragments and their gestures towards the nonidentic.
<30> The emphasis on the right side of the page rests in the middle, at the crossings of lines that accumulate into another shape. Here, two fragments exist close to one another: "it is for you" over "full of discord and dread." The "you"
of this first fragment is wonderfully ambiguous. In its original context no doubt it referred to a specific individual. However, it now enters into the play of light and shadow, suggesting the reader of Memoires, the speaker or addressee
of the first fragment, the mysterious Barbra of the fragment further up the page, or even the speaker of the final line of the page. Resonating with this very play, the fragment below, "full of discord and dread," associates the
asubjective, nonidentic confusion of the speaker and referent of this ambiguous "you." Mirroring these three middle fragments, the left side of the page contains two other fragments: "people observe the thresholds of silence" and "this
curious system of narrative," which also gesture at the construction of the work itself, calling into question the very possibility of it speaking to anyone intelligibly, but the emphasis is not on these fragments, as Jorn's lines begin at
them as almost nothing and move toward the right half of the page. This curious narrative is not something just different, but something that leads to the discord and dread of nonidentic becomings.
<31> I would not say that this is the only possible, or even the best, reading of the page -- the play of the fragments and lines invites multiple readings, and these pages are transformed by the pages that follow, by the resonances the
book creates as it is read. However, I would resist the temptation to reduce these fragments to an intelligible history. Looked at closely, that history slips in and out, and the fragments themselves always destabilize or overreach their
identic roles in such a narration. As the fragments enter into becomings with one another, such a total organizing structure can only fail. However, at the level of the aesthetic, it is this failure that constitutes Memoires as a political
moment. To reduce Memoires to an intelligible history as the founding moment of the S.I. separates it from its active powers, reinscribing it within the spectacle. Such representations of it are less than attentive to the literal force field
of antagonisms it creates.
<32> In Adorno's sense, Memoires is political to the extent that it breaks up the monolithic discourse of the
spectacle and its powers of identic thought. However, this is not politics in the activist sense we have come to value
through our fear of anything that might be labeled, however speciously, quietist. As Adorno explains in his essay
"Commitment,"
it is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which
permanently puts a pistol to men's heads. In fact, as soon as committed works of art do instigate decisions at their
own level, the decisions themselves become interchangeable . . . the work of art becomes an appeal to subjects,
because it is itself nothing other than a deceleration by a subject of his own choice or failure to choose (304).
Like Adorno's committed work of art, Memoires resists an easy translation into a practical choice. Rather, its form
gestures at an alternative engagement with the materials of the spectacle. In this it does rupture the discourse of the
spectacle, but it does so by creating the sense of a future that has not been realized, that, as Marcus points out, forces
one to think from the perspective of a Situationist world that does not exist. In short, this is a project that exists only
as theory. How, exactly, would one translate this sense into an activist practice? Neither Memoires nor later
Situationist writings or practices answer this question. However, this fact should not tempt us to label this a quietist
work. To push Adorno's metaphor, the space created by a book like Memoires allows us to take the gun from our
heads, if only for a moment. Yet, within that moment, there is the chance to imagine a world otherwise, and that
possibility surely plays a role in developing the desire necessary to someday realize such a world, or, at the least, it
creates a critical difference which questions the one-dimensional sense that coordinates our spectacular lives. The
relative neglect of Memoires underscores the difficulty cultural critics have when the concepts of a work cannot be
readily aligned with a political project. If critics invoke the Debord of 1968 as an example of heroic activism, they
all but suppress the moment of Memoires where theory is the only expression possible.
<33> The final page of Memoires is composed of one fragment and a simple series of Jorn's painted lines. The
fragment reads "I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my century." This fragment, rife with irony, marks an
alterian desire. The beautiful language of traditional art, the endless discourse of the spectacle, all that is certainly
invoked in this statement. But, more than that, to make it beautiful in Debord's sense requires that this statement
shudder at the spectacle. Underneath this fragment, in red, the color associated with the most intense collages of the
text, the curving lines invoke motions culminating in an amorphous shape, perhaps the desires of the text itself
centrifugally creating a kind of critical mass. If Memoires is more than a history, it is less than a political program,
and this is precisely its success. What is a practical political program, even an oppositional program, but an
intelligible choice already available to the extent that it is articulate? Memoires lives on because it is inarticulate, its
power and potential indexed by the silence of the critics.
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AT: You Ignore Suffering

Commodifying suffering distorts is social meaning
KLEINMAN AND KLEINMAN Professor and Research Associate - Medical Anthropology and Psychiatry
at Harvard Medical School 1996, Daedalus, Wntr 1996 v125 n1 p1(23)
SUFFERING IS ONE OF THE EXISTENTIAL GROUNDS of human experience; it is a defining quality, a limiting experience
in human conditions.(1) It is also a master subject of our mediatized times. Images of victims of natural disasters, political
conflict, forced migration, famine, substance abuse, the HIV pandemic, chronic illnesses of dozens of kinds, crime, domestic
abuse, and the deep privations of destitution are everywhere. Video cameras take us into the intimate details of pain and
misfortune.
Images of suffering are appropriated to appeal emotionally and morally both to global audiences and to local populations. Indeed,
those images have become an important part of the media. As "infotainment" on the nightly news, images of victims are
commercialized; they are taken up into processes of global marketing and business competition. The existential appeal of human
experiences, their potential to mobilize popular sentiment and collective action, and even their capability to witness or offer
testimony are now available for gaining market share. Suffering, "though at a distance," as the French sociologist Luc Boltanski
tellingly expresses it, is routinely appropriated in American popular culture, which is a leading edge of global popular culture.(2)
This globalization of suffering is one of the more troubling signs of the cultural transformations of the current era: troubling
because experience is being used as a commodity, and through this cultural representation of suffering, experience is being
remade, thinned out, and distorted.
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___________
**Alternative
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Alternative- Transpersonal Solvency

Our alternative of reconnecting with the individual of politics seeks to transcend
psychological predispositions, constituting a reconnection with everything, and ensuring
survival
Stanislav Grof, International Journal of Humanities and Peace, Vol. 17, 2001 Consciousness evolution and
planetary survival: psychological roots of human violence and greed: paper presented at the Thirteenth International
Transpersonal Conference entitled Spirituality, Ecology, and Native Wisdom in Killarney, Ireland
These changes deepen and extend even farther when the process of experiential self-exploration reaches the
transpersonal level. What began as psychological probing of the unconscious psyche now automatically
becomes a philosophical quest for the meaning of life and a journey of spiritual discovery. People who
connect to the transpersonal domain of their psyche tend to develop a new appreciation for existence and
reverence for all life. One of the most striking consequences of various forms of transpersonal experiences is
spontaneous emergence and development of deep humanitarian and ecological concerns. It is based on an
almost cellular awareness that the boundaries in the universe are arbitrary and that each of us is identical with
the entire web of being. It is suddenly clear that we cannot do anything to nature without
simultaneously doing it to ourselves. Differences among people now appear to be interesting and
enriching rather than threatening, whether they are related to sex, race, color, language, political
conviction, or religious belief. It is obvious that a transformation of this kind would increase our chances
for survival if it could occur on a sufficiently large scale.
Our form of interpersonal and transpersonal connection is the only method for self
actualization of violence and destruction
Stanislav Grof, International Journal of Humanities and Peace, Vol. 17, 2001 Consciousness evolution and
planetary survival: psychological roots of human violence and greed: paper presented at the Thirteenth International
Transpersonal Conference entitled Spirituality, Ecology, and Native Wisdom in Killarney, Ireland
We seem to be involved in a dramatic race for time that has no precedent in the entire history of humanity.
What is at stake is nothing less than the future of life on this planet. If we continue the old strategies which
in their consequences are clearly extremely destructive and self-destructive, it is unlikely that the human
species will survive. However, if a sufficient number of people undergoes a process of deep inner
transformation, we might reach a level of consciousness evolution that will bring us to the point of deserving
the name given to our species--homo sapiens.
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Alternative- Nuclear War Solvency

Only by breaking down taboos and representations of death imagery can the chances of
nuclear war be lessened- our public participation seeks to educate and influence
Marilyn S. Jacobs and M. Brewster Smith, 1989, American Psychology in the Quest for Nuclear Peace,
questia
Also related to psychology's role in public interest and advocacy is the attitude of citizens toward nuclear war as
reflected in public opinion polls; this area has gained importance as a means of gauging advocacy based
interventions. The substantial increase in public concern, involvement, and commitment over the issue of nuclear
war that occurred in the late seventies and early eighties was considered by many psychologists to hold promise
for the only realistic role they could play in the prevention of nuclear war; i.e., influencing public opinion
through persuasive communication. The dramatic change in opinion of the American electorate regarding the
arms race from a strong anti-Communist sentiment to the belief that it is time to negotiate with the Soviets
( Yankelovich and Doble, 1984) has been interpreted as being a psychological one (e.g., Markey, 1985;
Klineberg, 1984, 1985). The task for psychology was seen as empowering the public and opinion leaders ( M. B.
Smith, 1984).
Klineberg ( 1984, 1985) asserts that psychology should become involved in organizing public opinion through
work with peace organizations, the public directly, and politicians. He regards the following areas of psychology
as potentially useful in influencing public opinion: the role of perception in international relations; the role of
mutual ignorance; the dehumanization of the enemy; the role of national Stereotypes; the effect on mental health
of living with the nuclear threat; the psychological aspects of the "window of vulnerability" theory; and the idea
of self-fulfilling prophecy. He favors the international community of psychologists working together. Thus, using
public opinion, an educational effort must be devised that is connected to people's lives; the question of the
USSR must be coped with; a more effective political coalition must be built; and realistic alternatives to current
policy must be formulated ( McFadden, 1984). Other writers recommend the transformation of the Democratic
party to achieve political ends related to peace ( Burns, 1984).
Similarly, Schofield and Pavelchak ( 1985) have suggested ways in which psychology can contribute toward the
prevention of nuclear war through persuasive communication research, which might inform advocacy
organizations that direct public information campaigns. Such research also has implications for fundamental
decisions related to whether public information campaigns are useful interventions. These authors also suggest
that psychology might find a role in the development of materials concerning nuclear war to be used by
educators.
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Alternative- Mortality Solvency
The time has come to embrace our own mortality and break down the drive for
immortality- this itself changes the prospect of war
It is time, in the Spanish philosopher Unamuno's words, "to consider our mortal destiny without flinching." 50 This,
lamentably, is easier said than done because the human instinct that clings to life flees from death as the very
prototype of evil, and because each singular individual is able to counter the observed fact of mortality with entire
categories of exceptions. Such solipsistic boasts have been identified by George Santayana as follows:
Continues
[*18] How, then, do we end these terrible wars? Most important, we must first understand them as manifestations
of humankind's unwillingness to accept personal death. Death defines world politics because individuals wish to
escape death. The ironies are staggering, but the connections persist and remain unexamined.
We must move past fantasies of immortality by accepting the meaningless of our own
demise, shattering the frame sustaining immortality
But we are back at the beginning. How may we be instructed to accept our own personal mortality? Epicurus had an
answer. In his Letter to Menoeceus, he counsels:
Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death
is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life
enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality.
53
More than two thousand years later, Santayana settled upon similar conclusions:
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation . . .
the truth of mortality. . . . The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and
penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and
experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality. 54
As it is memory that makes mortality an incontestable truth, says Santayana, so it is also memory that opens to us all
an ideal immortality, an [*19] "immortality in representation," an opportunity to accept the knowledge of natural
death as an occasion to "live in the spirit."
Through the acceptance of death, then, each moment of life may become vastly more rich in joy, meaning and
potentiality. Detached from the falsehood that existence can conquer temporality, each individual may experience an
authentic notion of immortality, one that "quickens his or her numbered moments with a vision of what never dies,
the truth of those moments and their inalienable values." 55
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AlternativeMove Beyond Nuclear War

Only moving beyond the fear of nuclear destruction can create the grounds for ethical
action the unassimilable and repetitive trauma of our own future deaths eliminates the
possibility for responsibility
SAINT-AMOUR Assistant Professor of English Pomona College 2000
Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 59-82
The notion of a proleptic traumatic symptom, of a repressed that returns from the future, would appear to make
nonsense, too, of the temporal and causal assumptions [End Page 61] basic to current understandings of historical
trauma. Working largely from the Freudian lexicon of repression, repetition, remembering, and working through, the field of trauma studies has oriented itself around memory work that
restores a conventional temporal sequence and hierarchy by seeking to reduce the domination of the present by the past . Traumatic neuroses, according to Freud, are
inaugurated by experiences of shock or violence so extreme as to be unassimilable in their present tense. The traumatic
event, as Geoffrey Hartman puts it, is "registered rather than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls directly into the psyche,"
where its "exceptional presence" is bound up with the fact that it has not been fully or conventionally experienced [537]. As a result, the impact of the traumatic event
is felt belatedly, after a period of latency, through symptoms that often include the return of repressed memories and the compulsive repetition of behavior, gestures,
dreams, and fantasies associated with the traumatic event. As Cathy Caruth and others have noted, traumatic dreams and flashbacks that replay the repressed event or
image differ from other dreams and fantasies in their literalness, their seeming exemption from the distortive, encryptive operations of the dreamwork. In part because
of its literal and insistent return, the
traumatic past remains transgressively present as revenant, haunting, possession,
dominating the present rather than receding, as it should, into the past. The survivor who experiences this return
often acts out the trauma, repeating in the present scenes or behavior whose origins are in past instances of
unassimilated, and often unassimilable, violence.
According to this model, the proper work of mourning should at least partially restore the pastness of the past and
enable the survivor of trauma to reinvest in the present. Furthermore, the process and the stakes of working through are not solipsistic but
importantly social. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra asserts that "Through memory work, especially the socially engaged memory work
involved in working through, one is able to distinguish between past and present and to recognize something as having happened to one (or one's people) back then
which is related to, but not identical with, here and now" [66]. LaCapra later makes explicit that " ethically
responsible agency, including
consideration for others," is one of the high sociopolitical stakes of working through, insofar as the survivor trapped in acting out
past scenes of traumatic violence and ethical impossibility (for example, the survivors of death camps who were forced to expose, exploit, persecute, or kill fellow
prisoners on threat of their own deaths or the deaths of those they cherished) may be less capable of such agency in the present:
When the past becomes accessible to recall in memory, and when language functions to provide some measure of conscious control,
critical distance, and perspective, one has begun the arduous process of working over and through the trauma in a fashion that may never bring full transcendence of
but which may enable processes of judgment and at
acting out (or being haunted by revenants and reliving the past in its shattering intensity)
least limited liability and ethically responsible agency. These processes are crucial for laying ghosts to rest,
distancing oneself from haunting revenants, renewing an interest in life, and being able to engage memory in more
critically tested senses. [Writing 91, 90]
If a symptomatic effect can precede its traumatic cause, however, and if temporality and causality are reversed, then
what becomes of the goals of restoring the pastness of the past, reinvesting in the present, and reconstituting the
trauma survivor as ethically responsible agent? What becomes of the ethical stakes of working through traumatic symptoms [End Page 62] if we
imagine that at least some of those symptoms might precede trauma, traveling back through time as it were from the future, or even the merely possible future, to the
present? To be sure, such a hysteron proteron occurs with a marked frequency in fictional treatments of historical trauma. 3 Such anachronisms and time travels might
powerfully suggest, among other things, how the singularity of a traumatic event can manifest itself in a perceived leveling of past and future into identical
orientations of the symptom: time, for the survivor, is spatialized, such that the traumatic event can seem to scatter the shrapnel of its symptoms evenly across the past
and the future. But aren't such reversals and recursions either deliberate literary conceits or observations about the pathological temporality perceived by the trauma
survivor, rather than evidence that symptoms might "really" precede traumatic causes?
Zizek's account of traumatic symptoms in The Sublime Object of Ideology, interestingly, enacts just such a reversal of the conventional temporality in which
symptoms point back to their origins in unassimilated past traumas, and the repressed returns from a past to which it can be at least partially reaffixed through memory
work. Zizek's discussion of the time travel of the symptom begins with Lacan's reference to a Norbert Wiener parable in the first Seminar. There, Lacan asserts that the
unconscious is made of "imaginary fixations which could not have been assimilated to the symbolic development" of the subject's history; as a result, it is "something
which will be realized in the Symbolic, or, more precisely, something which, thanks to the symbolic progress which takes place in the analysis, will have been" [Lacan
158, qtd. in Zizek 55].The orientation of analysis, then, is not fundamentally toward the recuperation of a past traumatic event but rather toward a future in which the
islanded traumatic symptom will have been encompassed within a retrospective sense. If working through has a tense, in other words, it is the future anterior, the "will
have been" that proleptically crystallizes a view of the past as seen from the vantage of the future. Zizek continues:
The Lacanian answer to the question: From where does the repressed return? is therefore, paradoxically: From the
future. Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the
past, but constructed retroactively the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the
symptoms their symbolic place and meaning [...] the symptom as a "return of the repressed" is precisely such an
effect which precedes its cause (its hidden kernel, its meaning), and in working through the symptom we are
precisely "bringing about the past"we are producing the symbolic reality of the past, long-forgotten traumatic
events. [55-57]
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________________
**Alternative Blocks
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AT: No Alternative/Causes Nihilism 1/2

1. Our Friedland and Beres evidence warrants that the manifestations of the Affs
repression of death is a culture that desires to create meaningless action to prevent a
confrontation with death. This frenetic activity destroys the possibility for truly progressive
action.
2. The kritik does not preclude plan action were criticizing certain justifications for
action presented in the 1AC do NOT let the affirmative paint our kritik as a generic
statism or capitalism argument. Under the framework of the alternative, the plan could
still be advocated or passed, as long as the justification didnt utilize the survivalist
framework we critique.
3. Massumi and Zournazi say that only by separating hope from our fear of death and
calculability of life can we empower ourselves. Uncertainty about the future allows us to
embrace maneuverability of our future and bring a sense of potential to the situation.
Looking at the world as door that can close only boxes us in a world of horror and
disempowerment. They have conceded that our alternative embraces a different type of
politics, a politics of hope, rather than reject it.
4. Santos says the belief that there is no alternative forms the basis for genocidal fascism.
Cycles of violence and exploitation are perpetuated in the name of their inevitability the
ultimate conclusion to the affirmatives logic is the suicidal destruction of the world.
5. The affirmatives methodology alleviates specific symptoms with a treatment whose side
effects make the disease of capitalist bio-power even worse. It turns the everyday self into
an active nihilist, conditioned to respond to crisis again and again.
Brian Massumi; Associate Professor of Communications at the Universit de Montral; Everywhere You Want to
Be: An Introduction to Fear; 2002; http://www.textz.com
Power mechanisms can also be defined, perhaps more fundamentally, by the temporal mode in which they operate. They may
seize upon the futurity of the future-past, in which case they can be characterized as strategies of surveillance: on the look-out for
the event. Or they may seize upon its dimension of anteriority, in which case they are statistical and probabilistic: analyze and
quantify the event as it happened. The past tense in the Timex ad went along with a fixation on numbers: 85-foot fall, 2,500-foot
altitude, inches from the runway, 25-minute flight before landing, aged 52, 160-pound sled, 27 days and 345 miles, three
blizzards ... Mechanisms of surveillance and of statistical probabilization buckle into prediction. A power word for
prediction is deterrence. Deterrence is the perpetual co-functioning of the past and future of power: the empty
present of watching and weighing with an eye to avert. It is the avoidance of the accident on the basis of its past
occurrence. It is power turned toward the event: in other words, as it approaches the subject-form, the virtual. Power
under late capitalism is a two-sided coin. One side of it faces the subject-form. On that side, it is deterrence.
Deterrence by nature determines nothing (but potential: the potential for the multiform disaster of human existence).
On the other side, power is determining. There, discipline, biopower, and testing give disaster a face. They bring
specificity to the general condition of possibility of deterrence by applying it to a particular found body. They give a
life-form content. A self is selected (produced and consumed). The in-between of the subject-form and the self, of
the generic identity and specific identity--the come and go between deterrence and discipline/biopower/testing,
between the virtual and the actual--is the same intensive and extensive terrain saturated by the capitalist relation.
Power is coincident with capital as social selection and probabilistic control (Deleuze 1990). Power is capitalization
expressed as a destiny. But in this postequilibrium world of deterrence in which the accident is always about to
happen and already has, disorder is the motor of control. And destiny in the final analysis is only the necessity of
chance: the inevitability of the event, the evanescence of consumptive production, a life spent, death.
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AT: No Alternative/Causes Nihilism 2/2

6. Turn Interpassivity The plan doesnt actually get done if the judge votes Aff.
Claiming not to be nihilist merely because they speak out on behalf of action, the
Affirmative participates in interpassive action, constantly speaking about change and
progressive action as a replacement for actual action.
Slavoj Zizek, Prof Philosophy @ U. Ljubljana, Repeating Lenin, www.lacan.com/replenin, 1997
One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the
temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating
impossibility: "what can one do against the global capital?"), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates.
If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act WITHIN
the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in
(undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns,
which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic
territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child
labor) - they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity
provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from
something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the
formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!
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AT: Alternative Doesnt Solve Case

1. The kritik does not preclude plan action were criticizing certain justifications for
action presented in the 1AC do NOT let the affirmative paint our kritik as a generic
statism or capitalism argument. Under the framework of the alternative, the plan could
still be advocated or passed, as long as the justification didnt utilize the survivalist
2. Our argument is that by refusing to engage in calculability games and, rather, express
our unconditional hope for the future, we can prevent atrocities. Our ethic is a straight turn
to their case because fear calculates difference in attempts to destroy otherness, which is
impacted by our Santos, Zimmerman, and Foucault evidence. Our alternative of rejecting
these fear based calculations and embracing hope allows for an ethic of love and joy
towards difference, which restores value to life through freeing us of the shackles of the
ascetic ideal.
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AT: Radical Alternative Destroys the Movement

1. Our alternative isnt that radical... chilling out and having faith that we wont blow up if
we talk about something meaningful seems pretty damn easy to me. They havent proven
an internal link to this argument.
2. The kritik does not preclude action were criticizing certain justifications for action
presented in the 1AC do NOT let the affirmative paint our kritik as a generic statism or
capitalism argument. Under the framework of the alternative, action could still be
advocated or plans passed, as long as the justification didnt utilize the survivalist
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AT: Permutation 1/2

First, the text of your do both permutation still has the judge vote negative in addition to
advocating plan. Sticking teams to texts is key to check abusive rebuttal clarifications to
spike out of block responses, and increases good text writing, which makes the discussion
more educational.
Second- the Affirmatives presentation is dangerous PRECISELY because fantasies of

immortality have so much appeal. People, more than anything, want to believe they will
live forever. When presented with the choice, nearly anyone would choose the fantasmatic
construction over its transversal only the alternative alone can possibly cause change.
Third, a combination of psychic repression and confrontation can only deform the
disruptive aspects. The success of the alternative is dependent on its ability to avoid
fantasmatic politics.
Yannis Stavrakakis, Research Fellow at the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham, Lacan and the
Political, 1999
Since, however, Lacanian political
theory aims at bringing to the fore again and again, the lack in the Other, the same lack that utopian
fantasy attempts to mask, it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. Is
it really possible and consistent to point to the lack in the Other and, at the same time, to attempt to fill it in a quasi-utopian move? Such a question can also be posed in ethical or even strategic
terms. It could be argued of course that Homers vision of psychoanalytic politics does not foreclose the recognition of the impossibility of the social but that in his schema this recognition and
the promise to eliminate it (as part of a quasi-utopian regulative principle) go side by side, that in fact this political promise is legitimized by the conclusions of psychoanalytic political theory.
But this coexistence is nothing new. This recognition of the impossibility of society, of an antagonism that cross-cuts the social field, constitutes the starting point for almost every political
ideology. Only if presented against the background of this disorder the final harmonious order promised by a utopian fantasy acquires
hegemonic force. The problem is that all this schema is based on the elimination of the first moment, of the recognition of impossibility. The centrality of
political dislocation is always repressed in favor of the second moment, the utopian promise. Utopian fantasy can sound appealing
only if presented as the final solution to the problem that constitutes its starting point . In that sense, the moment of impossibility is only
acknowledged in order to be eliminated. <He Continues. . .> What I want to suggest is that in Homers schema psychoanalytic politics reoccupies the ground
of traditional fantasmatic politics. The result is that this fantasmatic conception of politics ends up imposing its demands on the
psychoanalytic part of the argumentation . Thus, the latter part is necessarily deformed: if it is not recognized in its radical constitutivity, the impossibility of
society, the irreducibility of the real within the social,-loses all its power. In that sense, the ultimate consequence of Homers argumentation is the following: the absorption of
Lacanian political theory by radical quasi-utopianism will offer left-wing radicalism the hegemonic appeal entailed in the
articulation of one more signifier (psychoanalysis) in this signifying chain, but psychoanalytic political theory has nothing to gain beyond
its own deformation. Well, it doesnt sound like a very good deal. In fact, articulating Lacanian theory with fantasmatic politics is equivalent to affirming the
irrelevance of lacanian theory for radical politics since this articulation presupposes the repression of all the political insights implicit in Lacans reading and highlighted in
this book. The alleged irrelevance of Lacan for radical politics is also the argument put forward by Collier in a recent article in Radical Philosophy. Colliers argument is that since It is capitalism that shatters our wholeness and
disempowers us (as if without capitalism we would be on the road to utopia; obviously, capitalism occupies the structural position of the antichrist in this sort of leftist preaching), then Lacans theory is, in fact, normalizing capitalist
damage, precisely because alienation is so deep for Lacan that nothing can be done to eliminate it (Lacan is deeply pessimistic, rejecting cure or happiness as possible goals, my emphasis). Thus Lacan has nothing to offer radical
politics. Something not entirely surprising since, according to Collier, psychological theory in general has no political implications whatsoever. The conclusion is predictable: ,Let us go to Freud and Klein for our psychotherapy
[Lacan is of course excluded] and to Marx and the environmental sciences for our politics, and not get out lines crossed (Collier, 1998 41-3). Surprisingly enough this is almost identical with Homers conclusion: Lacanian theory is
OK as an analytical tool but let us go back to Marx for our ideological seminar and our utopian catechism!
It is clear that from a Lacanian point of view it is necessary to resist all such reoccupations of traditional fantasmatic politics . At least this is the strategy that
Lacan follows on similar occasions. Faced with the alienating dimension of every identification, Lacan located the end of analysis beyond identification. Since utopian or quasi-utopian constructions function through identification it
is legitimate, I think, to draw the analogies with the social field. If analysis resists the reoccupation of the traditional strategy of identification although it recognizes its crucial, but alienating, role in the formation of subjectivity
why should psychoanalytic politics, after unmasking the crucial but alienating character of traditional, fantasmatic, identifactory politics, reoccupy their ground? This rationale underlying the Lacanian position is not far away from
what Beardsworth articulates as a political reading of Derrida. For Beardsworth, deconstruction also refuses to implicate itself in traditional politics, in the local sense of politics in Beardsworths terminology:
In its affirmative refusal to advocate a politics, deconstruction forms, firstly, an account of why all political projects fail. Since the projection of any decision has ethical implications, deconstruction in fact
generalizes what is meant by the political well beyond the local sense of politics. In this sense it becomes a radical critique of institutions.
(Beardsworth, 1996: 19)
Similarly, the radicality and political importance of the lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its distance from the fantasmatic
politics, from politics in the traditional sense, which is not the same as saying that psychoanalysis is apolitical: in fact, it becomes political
precisely by being critical of traditional politics, exactly because, as argued in the previous chapter, the political is located beyond the utopian or
quasi-utopian sedimentations of political reality.
Fourth, the perm severs, our alternative has the judge reject the affirmative to shatter the
silence surrounding death in order to tear down the taboo. Advocating the alternative in
any way stops them from advocating their discourse, making the affirmative a moving
target, allowing them to spike out of links, which is a voting issue for fairness and
education. They will make the argument that they can kick advantages, but thats only true
if we make a defensive link argument, which we didnt.
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Fifth- It doesnt solve-
A. Our friedland evidence- the permutation is essentially conservative politics as it
gives into the Wests current war on death. The permutations attempt to coopt
the radical potential of our alternative is just another piece of the road towards
immortality.
B. Both pieces of Beres evidence- the permutation inevitably collapses upon itself as
the same types of representations of violence and fear that promote the herd
mentality and state centric thought are advanced in the permutation- its
fundamentally a concession to demands on the state and the sacrilization of
mortality.
C. Stengers, Massumi, and Zournazi say predictability and the uncertainty of hope
are mutually exclusive. The permutation is incapable of transcending a politics
of fear because fear opposes difference. This means the permutation can never
engage in the act of affirmation of life because linking our hope and joy for the
present to a solution for the future based on our fear of death destroys the
disruptiveness of our ethic.
Sixth, extend the 1NC Havel evidence, theyre conceding our distinction and hierarchy
between ideology and action which means they cant win the permutation. The
thanatophobic mode of thought they subscribe to not only creates the reality we live in it
is also independently more important than the action taken itself.
Seventh- The Obsession Disad- The permutation is fundamentally a plea for just one
more try at representation, constituting the same neurotic pleas that undermine progress
away from current ideologies
Marc Weeks, and Frederic Maurel, Voyages Across the Web of Time; Angkarn, Nietzsche and Temporal
Colonization, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, September 1st, 1999
Angkarn is referring here to a repetition of sounds, a cyclicity which may or may not impede progression. When this structural metaphor is transferred to
contemporary social, political and economic domains, it is readily conceptualized as an inertia or resistance to change, particularly in a culture such as
Thailand's, acutely conscious of its dramatic shift from rural cycles to the linearity of "progressive" urban development. However, while we would not
defend the kind of nostalgia Angkarn does indeed occasionally indulge in, it appears that the question of time and its relationship to progress has, like
everything else, become peculiarly complex in the context of a globalizing free market that imposes a seemingly ineluctable momentum. [11] Recent
problematics of time and movement in the West, which has undergone the transition from agrarian to technological free market more gradually and yet no
less profoundly, increasingly force analysis outside the dichotomy of present versus past tense, the dynamic versus the static. Ben Agger, for example, in
elaborating his theory of "fast capitalism" observes that an
obsession, an intoxication with rapid movement and transformation
for its own sake may actually undermine progress by rendering considered resistance impossible: "My
problem is how the world stays the same. It does so by changing -- deepening ideology, moronizing everyday
life, suppressing critique." [12] The French philosopher of postmodemity Jean Baudrillard has likewise
discerned a paradoxically conservative effect in the culture of speed, of "movement for movement's sake".
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AT: Permutation 2NR

(ONLY IF YOU HAVE TIME) Extend our number 1, the theory argument. As per the text of their
permutation, youd do the plan and VOTE NEGATIVE to reject the affirmative to shatter the
silence surrounding death. This means we still win the round in the world of their permutation.
Extend the #3- The Stavrakakis evidence.

The obsessive action we criticize is most effective when combined with a disturbing kernel
of the Real that it can cover up. The perm allows the Aff to present a total lack of order,
exposing people to the holes in ideology, but at that crucial moment of confrontation and
anxiety, offers to fill in the holes with fantasmatic demands continuing the wests war
against mortality. The portrayal of our ability to avoid death makes the comfort of illusory
order all the more desirable.
The Number Four- Advocating the alternative in any way necessarily stops them from
advocating the plan- makes them a moving target, allowing them to spike out of all our
offense mid-round, which is unpredictable.
Its also infinitely regressive with no limit on how much we can sever- that is a voting issue
for fairness and education.
The Number Five- They conceded ALL of our reasons why the perm cant solve
a. Friedland says the perm co-opts our alternative. It only feeds into the Wests war on
death. For them to win the perm they gotta win they dont link.
b. Beres says the perm will collapse on it self. Their representations only promote the herd
mentality and state centric thought that is functionally a concession to demands for
immortality.
c. Stengers, Massumi, and Zournazi say predictability and hope are mutually exclusive.
The perm cant transcend fear because fear and hope are dichotomous by nature.
Linking hope and joy to our fear of death destroys the disruptiveness of our ethic.
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AT: Permutation Coalitions

1. Turn The attempt to unite different groups together into a harmonic coalition is
predicated on a set of fantasies. The ideas of harmony through difference and cooperation
through liberal-democratic structures not only ensure the structural failure of any coalition
they also are the supplement to an abandonment of the fight against liberal-democratic
consumerism itself.
Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, The Plague Of Fantasies. 1998
When one is dealing with a universal structuring principle, one always automatically assumes that in principle, precisely it is possible to apply
this principle to all its potential elements, so that the principles empirical non-realization is merely a matter of contingent circumstances. A
symptom, however, is an element which although the non-realization of the universal principle it appears to hinge on contingent
circumstances has to remain an exception, that is, the point of suspension of the universal principle: if the universal
principle were to apply also to this point, the universal system itself would disintegrate.
In the paragraphs on civil society in his Philosophy of Right, Hegel demonstrates how the growing class of rabble [Pobel] in modern civil society is not an accidental
result of social mismanagement , inadequate government measures, or simple economic bad luck: the inherent structural dynamic of civil society necessarily gives rise
to a class which is excluded from its benefits (work, personal dignity, etc.) a class deprived of elementary human rights, and therefore also exempt from the duties
toward society, an element within civil society that negates its universal principle, a kind of non-Reason inherent in Reason itself in short, its symptom. Do we not
witness the same phenomenon in todays growth of an underclass which is excluded, sometimes even for generations,f rom the benefits of liberal-democratic affluent
society? Todays exceptions (the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanent unemployed) are the symptom of the late capitalist universal system, the permanent
reminder of how the immanent logic of late capitalism works: the proper capitalist utopia is that through appropriate measures (affirmative action and other forms of
state intervention for progressive liberals; the return to self-care and family values for conservatives), this exception could be in the long term and in principle, at
least abolished. And is not an analogous utopianism at work in the notion of a rainbow coalition: in the idea that, at
some utopian moment to come, all progressive struggles (for gay and lesbian rights; for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities; the
ecological struggle; the feminist struggle; and so on) will be united in a common chain of equivalences?
The necessary failure here is structural: it is not simply that, because of the empirical complexity of the situation, all particular progressive fights will
never be united, that wrong chains of equivalences will always occur (say, the enchainment of the fight for African-American ethnic identity with patriarchal and
homophobic attitudes), but, rather, that occurrences
of wrong enchainments are grounded in the very structuring principle if
todays progressive politics of establishing chains of equivalences: the very domain of the multitude of particular
struggles, with their continuously shifting displacements and condensations, is sustained by the repression of the
key role of economic struggle. The Leftist politics of the chains of equivalences among the plurality of struggles is
strictly correlative to the abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system that is, to the tacit
acceptance of capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics as the unquestioned framework of our
social life.
2. Obviously those who oppose the fear of death arent going to be joining forces with those
who support it. . .We could have brought my dog in to tell you that. That, however, does
not mean we reject all Leftist politics different from ourselves.
3. There argument assumes a completely different forum. The purpose of a coalition is to

work through traditional structures of political power to influence legislation. However,
this form of political participation is obsolete in a post-modern world politicians will
ignore the demand, elites will create loopholes to bypass it, and the media will spin it as
anti-patriotic. Only by reconstructing debate as a site of micropolitical resistance, and
ignoring the supposed benefits of representative politics, can we reclaim the political
sphere, solving the rightist takeover their evidence refers to and avert extinction through
biopolitical control.
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________________
**Framework Blocks
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Framework 2nc
They have conceded our last piece of evidence in the 1nc, our Havel evidence, which damns
them. The affirmatives method of thought process, methodology and ideology is ripe with
implications all its own. Contemporary ideology has come to replace the power of the
sword as ideology provides power its legitimacy and coherence. In short, ideology IS reality,
more important then action itself.
This framework for the debate of evaluating claims based on representations serves to test
the affirmatives truth claims by subjecting them to both negative and positive claims,
serving to shape policy implications, not the other way around.
Frameworks Institute, 03, http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/strategicanalysis/index.shtml
Quite simply, framing refers to the subtle selection of certain aspects of an issue in order to cue a specific
response; as researchers have shown, the way an issue is framed explains who is responsible, and suggests
potential solutions conveyed by images, stereotypes, messengers, and metaphors. The advantage of strategic
frame analysis is that it allows the research to document and deconstruct the frames currently in the public
consciousness and to understand their impact on public policy preferences. Additionally, it allows us to test
and validate, through different disciplines, both the negative frames and the potential positive reframes that
can further an issue's salience. Finally, the effectiveness of the recommendations we make can be
demonstrated; while we hope we are "creative" in our approach to communications, our findings are rooted
in the social and cognitive sciences. We can explain what works and why it works, and demonstrate this
across the research.
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AT: Fiat Good 2NC 1/2

1. Not responsive- we are impact turning the fundamental justifications for the plan TO BE
passed. You would still vote neg as a policy maker because their policy has a bad impact
calculus.
2. Counter Interpretation- The affirmative should have to defend the justifications for the
1AC before we evaluate fiat.
A. This solves all their judge intervention arguments- our criticism interplays with the
1AC.
B. Its best for education, giving us all knowledge we can use in day-to-day operations
and is the only way to prevent government atrocities from being committed through
fantasmatic policymaking. Extend Stavrakakis
3. External predictability the word resolved is on the left side of the colon, means we the
debaters must stand resolved and the reasons why are to be justified. No reason it has to be
policymaking.
4. Education
A. They do not teach a THING about real policymaking. Congressional bills arent 2
sentences long without funding recommendations.
B. Policymaking skills can be learned under our interpretation equally well. The issues
pertinent now wont be pertinent by the time we might have positions in office.
However, the way we think, act, and align ourselves politically will have actual value
in terms of policy making and read world.
C. An unfair debate about important issues is still better than an absurd well-played
game. Well win the race to the middle.
5. Turn- Defending the Status Quo forces us to defend things like racism and sexism-
another predictable framework is necessary for negative ground.
6. Our interpretation increases affirmative ground equally to negative ground- affirmatives

can be run such that they have impacts in our framework.
7. Even if they win fiat is good

A. Still evaluate our impacts The plans result in a perpetuation of status quo harms.
If we win our link argument, well win their impacts replicate.
B. Still endorse our alternative even within the framework of policymaking you can
vote negative for your own symbolic death. We read solvency evidence saying that
allots space for hope.
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AT: Fiat Good 2NC 2/2

8. The framework links to our criticism The drive to save traditional debate from the
radicals who threaten it IS the logic of Western colonization and extermination of the
Other. Our Santos evidence indicates this logic lies at the root of the case harms and
negates the value to life.
(ONLY READ IF YOU HAVE TIME)

9. Turn Biopower
Utilizing fiat denies the possibility for debate to be used as an instrument of micro political
resistance, ensuring alienation of citizens from the political sphere and guaranteeing
biopolitical control, which is impacted by our Foucault evidence.
Jessica J. Kulynych, Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and postmodern participation, Polity, Winter,
1997
Performative resistance recognizes disciplinary power, enables action in the face of that power, enables innovation
in deliberation, and thus allows us to see the world of political action differently. Consequently, it is possible, and
more meaningful, to conceptualize contemporary participation as a performative rather than a representative action.
The failure to reconceptualize political participation as resistance furthers an illusion of democratic control that
obscures the techniques of disciplinary power and their role in global strategies of domination, fundamentally
missing the real, although much more humble opportunities for citizens to "take part" in their own "governance."
Accepting the idea of participation as resistance has two broad implications that fundamentally transform the
participation debate. First, it widens the parameters of participation to include a host of new actors, activities, and
locations for political action. A performative concept redirects our attention away from the normal apparatus of
government and economy, and therefore allows us to see a much broader range of political actions. Second, it
requires that we look anew at traditional participatory activities and evaluate their performative potential.
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AT: Fiat Good 2NR

Go to the bottom of the fiat debate first- even if we lose our counter interpretation- well
still win. Our kritik proves the plan is a perpetuation of the status quo harms and their
impacts will only replicate in the future. Absent our alternative, you can still vote negative
as an acceptance of your own symbolic death, which would open up space for hope and joy
in the present.
Go to the counter interpretation- the aff should defend their justifications. Our
interpretation is inclusive of theirs, so they have to win inclusion of anything else is bad to
win. They have no offense-
1. Our interpretation just fiat plus, solves policymaking because we allow for a world
of uniqueness based policy debate too.
2. Political issues change. Our criticism gives you knowledge you can use now and in
the future in terms of policymaking and real world.
3. Our interpretation is the most inclusive, so well win the race to the middle.
The only argument they can go for is fairness but they concede that our interpretation is
more externally predictable because the word resolved is on the left side of the colon, means
debaters must stand resolved and the reasons why are to be justified.
AND Our interpretation only forces you to defend your 1AC, solves narratives and judge
intervention arguments.
Additionally, we open equal ground for the affirmative and negative. They concede affs can
be run with impacts in our framework.
Heres our Offense-

1. The kritik proves that how we frame a policy proposal is as important as the policy
itself. The plan is useless without knowing how to achieve it without destroying
meaning.
2. Defending the Status Quo destroys negative ground- it forces us to defend racism
and sexism. Theres no speaker points to dock in out rounds.
3. Stavrakakis says that our inclusion is key to stand up against the government and
prevent governmental atrocities from being committed through fantasmic
policymaking.
4. Santos says the drive to save traditional debate from the radicals justifies
WESTERN COLONIZATION and EXTERMINATION of the other. This allows
ethical claims to be ignored and negates the value to life. Counterfeit existence
outweighs fairness and ground.
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______________
**Realism Blocks
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AT: Realism Good 2NC 1/2

1. The fear of death negates the value to life because we would constantly have to look
over our shoulders; every person and action could potentially do harm to us.
2. Their focus on structural violence wholly misses the point - if we reorient violence as a
behavior then it is quite likely that we can avert realism itself.
Susanne Kappeler, freelance writer, author, and teacher in England, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal
Behavior, 1995, pg. 2-3
Violence is perceived as a phenomenon for science to research and for politics to get a grip on. But violence
is not a
phenomenon: it is the behavior of people, human action which may be analysed. What is missing is an analysis of violence as action
not just as acts of violence, or the cause of its effects, but as the actions of people in relation to other people and beings or things. Feminist critique, as well
as other political critiques, has analysed the preconditions of violence, the unequal power relations which enable it to take place. However, under the
it is becoming standard to argue as
pressure of mainstream science and a sociological perspective which increasingly dominates our thinking,
if it were these power relations which cause the violence. Underlying is a behaviourist model which prefers to
see human action as the exclusive product of circumstances, ignoring the personal decision of the agent to
act, implying in turn that circumstances virtually dictate certain forms of behaviour. Even though we would probably not underwrite these propositions in their crass
form, there is nevertheless a growing tendency, not just in social science, to explain violent behavior by its circumstances. (Compare the question, Does pornography cause
violence?) The circumstances identified may differ according to the politics of the explainers, but the method of explanation remains the same. While consideration of
mitigating circumstances has its rightful place in a court of law trying (and defending) an offender, this does not automatically make it an adequate or
sufficient practice for political analysis. It begs the question, in particular, What is considered to be part of the circumstances (and by whom)? Thus in the
case of sexual offenders, there is a routine search on the part of the tabloid press or the professionals of violence for experiences of violence in the offenders own past, an
understanding which is rapidly solidifying in the scientific model of a cycle of violence. That is, the relevant factors are sought in the distant past and in other contexts of action,
while a crucial factor in the present context is ignored, namely the agents decision to act as he did. Even politically oppositional groups are not immune to this mainstream
sociologizing. Some left groups have tried to explain men s sexual violence as the result of class oppression, while some Black theoreticians have explained the violence of Black men
as the result of racist oppression. The ostensible aim of these arguments may be to draw attention to the pervasive and structural violence of classism and racism,
yet they not only fail to combat such inequality, they actively contribute to it . Although such oppression is a very real part of an agents life context,
these explanations ignore the fact that not everyone experiencing the same oppression uses violence , that
is, that these circumstances do not cause violent behavior. They overlook, in other words, that the perpetrator has
decided to violate, even if this decision was made in circumstances of limited choice.
3. Prefer the specificity of our evidence. Our Beres, Santos and Foucault evidence outline
that wars can ONLY be waged based on the process we are describing; all conflicts in the
20th century rely on this process. Our kritik takes out the ability to engage in these wars.
Consequently, the turn has no impact.
4. Our alternative solves realism and restors the value to life. This cards on fire.
Louis Rene Beres, Prof of I. Law at Purdue, Intl Journal on World Peace, No. 3, Volume 16, September 1st, 1999
How, then, do we end these terrible wars? Most important, we must first understand them as manifestations of humankind's
unwillingness to accept personal death. Death defines world politics because individuals wish to escape death. The ironies
are staggering, but the connections persist and remain unexamined. Freed from their unwillingness to accept the finitude of life, individuals could finally
agree upon a descralization of states, upon a covenant with all other individuals to treat the political as a secular realm of
unalterably mundane limits. With such an agreement, the passion for "victory" would be greatly abridged, and the rationale of war
between states severely impaired. Over time, every polis could become a cosmopolis, and the "realism" of power struggles
between states could be revealed for what it has always been, a "religious" myth. But we are back at the beginning. How
may we be instructed to accept our own personal mortality? Epicurus had an answer. In his letter to Menoeceus, he counsels: Become accustomed to the belief
that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation, And therefore a right understanding that
death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it
takes away the craving for immortality. More than two thousand years later, Santayana settled upon similar conclusions: In endowing us with memory, nature has
revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation... the truth of mortality....The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we
shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality. As it is memory that makes mortality
an incontestable truth, says Santayana, so it is also memory that opens to us all an ideal immortaliy, an "immortality in representation," an opportunity to accept the knowledge of natural death as
By accepting death, then, each moment of life becomes vastly more rich in joy, meaning and
an occasion to "live in the spirit."
potentiality. Detached from the falsehood that existence can conquer temporality, each individual may experience an authentic notion of immortality,
one that "quickens his numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, the truth of those moments and their inalienable values."
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AT: Realism Good 2NC 2/2

5. Santos says the belief that there is no alternative to realism forms the basis for genocidal
fascism. Cycles of violence and exploitation are perpetuated in the name of their
inevitability the ultimate conclusion to the negatives logic is the suicidal destruction of
the world.
6. Theres no link- their argument assumes some kind of political or policy action in
order to merit and impact. Our alternative is not to abandon the state. In a world of our
alternative, states would still exist and would be able to pursue their own interests. They
just wont wage wars. If we win the framework debate it become a non-issue because it
is not a representation we employ ie it requires policy level action to have an impact.
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AT: Realism Good 2NR

Our Kappeler evidence is DAMNING for them- it indicates that violence is personal
rather than institutional and realism and any other structural institution cannot force
people to fight. Reorienting behavior averts the bad parts of realism. YOU GOT
NOTHIN.
Extend our Beres evidence from the 2NC- here is where well win. Beres says that only
when we abandon our fear of death, can we build bridges of understanding that make the
realist power struggles between states unnecessary. The status quo realism makes life
meaningless. Our alternative transforms realism, they havent got a single answer to this
evidence.
Extend Santos-
a) Their argument is what allows for genocidal fascism to be perpetuated through the
belief in its inevitability.
b) Also realism forms the basis for neo-liberal violence; justifies state-sanctioned
cruelty and destruction of the other to save oneself. Negates the value to life.
(If you have time, read the rest)
Additionally, our evidence is more on point than theres. They concede wars can ONLY be
waged based on the process we are describing; all conflicts in the 20th century rely on this
process. Our kritik takes out the ability to engage in these wars.
They concede our alternative doesnt abandon the state. States can still exist and would
be able to pursue their own interests, just not wage wars.
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AT: Threats Are Real

1. This is interesting- but irrelevant. Were not running threat construction. Also well win
that even if threats were real, if you didnt fear them, they wouldnt be a threat.
2. There is no objective condition of danger

David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing
Security, 1998, pg. 1-2
Danger is not an objective condition. It [sic] is not a thing that exists independently of those to whom it may
become a threat. To illustrate this, consider the manner in which the insurance industry assesses risk. In
Francois Ewalds formulation, insurance is a technology of risk the principal function of which is not
compensation or reparation, but rather the operation of a schema of rationality distinguished by the calculus
of probabilities. In insurance, according to this logic, danger (or, more accurately, risk) is neither an event
nor a general kind of event occurring in reality.. . but a specific mode of treatment of certain events capable
of happening to a group of individuals. In other words, for the technology of risk in insurance, Nothing is a
risk in itself; there is no risk in reality But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all depends on how
one analyzes the danger, considers the event. As Kant might have put it, the category of risk is a category of
the understanding; it cannot be given in sensibility or intuition.2 In these terms, danger is an effect of
interpretation. Danger bears no essential, necessary, or unproblematic relation to the action or event from
which it is said to derive. Nothing is intrinsically more dangerous for insurance technology than anything
else, except when interpreted as such.
3. Danger is not an objective condition. No interpretation is universally true

Ronnie D Lipschutz, Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, After Authority 2000 p.51
That security might be, therefore, socially constructed does not mean that there are not to be found real,
material conditions that help to create particular interpretations of threats, or that such conditions are
irrelevant to either the creation or undermining of the assumptions underlying security policy. But enemies
often imagine their Others into being, via the projections of their worst fears onto the Other (as the United
States did with Japan in the late 1980s and with China in the 1990s). In this respect, their relationship is
intersubjective. To the extent that each acts on these projections, threats to each other acquire a material
character. In other words, nuclear-tipped ICBMs are not mere figments of our imagination, but their targeting
is a function of what we imagine their possessors might do to us (I return to this point in chapter 4).
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_____________
**Theory Blocks
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AT: Performative Contradiction Other Positions

1. No impact to contradiction- This is the definition of a gateway argument: the aff has to
prove their impact calculus is a good one before we can continue.
2. We only advocate ONE gateway argument off ONE link- we cant say that the affs impact
calculus is both death good and death bad and ctiticize both. This answers their multiple
contradictory worlds and strategic skew arguments.
3. These gateway arguments NEED to be conditional statementsotherwise these types of

arguments wouldnt be read because the time trade off isnt fair between the aff and the
neg. If we win the impact to the K we win its educational to debate it.
4. We arent performing anything, this is merely a critical disad with an alternative dont
hold us to a higher standard than you would a counterplan with politics net benefit. This
only means we cant go for both in the 2NR, there is zero impact to our performance being
tainted. Vote for the alternative, not for the team that read it.
5. If you think it is a double turn, concede one of the two and see if you win. If you grant
us the disad, then the kritik links to both equally and you vote negative on presumption. If
you grant us the kritik, then the judge rejects the disad along with the Aff case.
Unfortunately for you, rejecting the disad doesnt mean we lose, but rejecting the case
means you do lose.
6. There is no abuse you couldve just cross-applied our kritik to the position you think it
linked to, and then link turned the K, or conceded the other position didnt link to the
kritik and impact turned it. If your performative contradiction argument is true, it just
proves we gave you extra ground and you failed to use it strategically.
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AT: Performative Contradiction Kritiks Impact is Death

1. You obviously werent paying much attention to the 1NC. We dont think that death is a
good thing thatd be asinine. In the presentation of the 1AC, the Affirmative felt
compelled to speak out about the necessity of preserving life. Our Weeks and Maurel
evidence indicates that this desire occurs due to a phobic overreaction to deaths passivity.
The negative, on the other hand, accepts deaths inevitability and confronts the repression.
Our Harmon evidence indicates that this allows us to engage in a rational discourse about
death, where we can act to avoid nuclear war without repressing deaths inevitability.
2. Even if they win that both teams link to the Weeks and Maurel evidence equally, it isnt
a reason to reject us.
B. You wouldnt reject a counterplan with a politics net benefit because it linked to
federalism as much as the plan. We dont have to win that no evidence we read
links to our alternative just that it is preferable to the plan.
C. The Beres evidence is still a net benefit to the alternative, because it is specific to
state action in the name of preventing death. Using death prevention as a
justification for state action creates a framework that makes perpetual war
inevitable.
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AT: PIKs Bad
1. The alternative is not a PIK. We have a text that advocates NONE of your plan, and
well stick to it throughout the whole round. If you win your framework for the round,
which is fiat, then we can not possibly claim your plan as offense. Our framework for the
round is that only justifications are important. We arent advocating your plan we just
think its irrelevant. Under our framework for the round, the judge doesnt decide based
on whose plan is better, so obviously plan good arguments arent offense for you.
2. If you somehow let them pin us with this, PIKS are Sweet
A. Ground The aff gets the entirety of their defense of the 1AC advantages as offense
against us. You said preserving death was good for a reason, right? Defend it!
B. Education If the aff gets to use the plan as offense, critical questions will almost
never be examined, which makes all of our fiat good answers offense.
C. And it is legitimate- we dont rely on the PIC to win the round. We can concede the
endpoint of the plan but criticize the way that you get there. The net benefit i.e. our
criticism impact turns your affirmative. And theres literature on the net benefit,
which proves that its predictable and viable.
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EVAZON FEAR OF DEATH KRITIK

Death Kritik Index 1/3

Death Kritik Index 2/3

Death Kritik Index 3/3

Contention One: Thanataphobia

In a paradoxical attempt to rebel against death, humans turn to promises of immortality

Contention Two: Hope

The repression of mortality is sustained in political reality by a series of linguistic

Pure War 1NC

Pure War 1NC

2. Negates the Value to Life- In an attempt to create permanent meaning in a

3. Bioplitical Control- The panopticon is most applicable in this situation- just as

2NC Pure War Overview

Link- Nuclear War

Link- Nuclear Death/Extinction

AT: We Have Other Justifications

AT: Death Bad/Life Good

ImpactDestroys All Resistance

AT: Nuclear/War/Death Imagery Good 1/2

AT: Nuclear/War/Death Imagery Good 2/2

Finally, extend our Foucault evidence from the C subpoint- 2 arguments

AT: FoD Makes Life Meaningful

2. The fear of death makes us docile bodies, a field of premature corpses.

AT: Cold War Proves FoD Good

AT: Violence Good

AT: Fear Key to Prevent Nuke War (Futterman)

(IF THEY READ FUTTERMAN)

AT: Stopping Nuclear War Key 2 Solve FOD

AT: FoD Key 2 Treat AIDS

AT: FoD Fuel Peace Movements

3. The Nuclear Freeze proves your movements will fail.

AT: Denies Reality

AT: You Defend Extinction

AT: How Does the Alt Change the World?

Criticizing the production of the spectacle is good necessary prerequisite to

AT: How Does the Alt Change the World?

AT: You Ignore Suffering

Alternative- Transpersonal Solvency

Alternative- Nuclear War Solvency

Alternative- Mortality Solvency

AlternativeMove Beyond Nuclear War

AT: No Alternative/Causes Nihilism 1/2

AT: No Alternative/Causes Nihilism 2/2

AT: Alternative Doesnt Solve Case

AT: Radical Alternative Destroys the Movement

AT: Permutation 1/2

Second- the Affirmatives presentation is dangerous PRECISELY because fantasies of

AT: Permutation 2/2

AT: Permutation 2NR

Extend the #3- The Stavrakakis evidence.

AT: Permutation Coalitions

3. There argument assumes a completely different forum. The purpose of a coalition is to

AT: Fiat Good 2NC 1/2

6. Our interpretation increases affirmative ground equally to negative ground- affirmatives

7. Even if they win fiat is good

AT: Fiat Good 2NC 2/2

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